Since an explanation was needed, Andrew didn't waste any time beating around the bush.
With his usual crisp efficiency, he ran through everything that had happened — a concise but complete account — and Belle, listening attentively, quickly pieced together the full picture of what had occurred while she and Wise had been sealed away in the H.D.D System grinding for the Rift.
Realization dawned across her face, and she spoke up with a nod.
"So Miyabi is planning to travel with Andrew on his way back, right?"
And once she received an affirmative answer from both Hoshimi Miyabi and Andrew —
Whether it was surprising or entirely predictable, Belle showed not even a flicker of displeasure at the news. Quite the opposite, in fact. She was visibly, genuinely energized by it.
She sighed in warm, heartfelt relief.
"Thank goodness. I've honestly been worrying this whole time about whether Andrew, acting alone, might run into some kind of accident out there — you know, with only so much energy and attention to go around. Knowing that someone as powerful as Miyabi will be with him puts my mind completely at ease."
Not a single thread of wariness at the idea of Andrew traveling alongside Hoshimi Miyabi. Only a clean, uncomplicated happiness that his safety would be better guaranteed.
Or perhaps — if she was being honest with herself — Belle was actually quite happy to see Andrew and Miyabi growing closer.
Because as far as Belle was concerned, the more ties Andrew had to New Eridu, the better. Especially now, when the path home had actually been found.
She still remembered what Andrew had been like when he'd first arrived in New Eridu.
Back then, Andrew had no attachment to this city whatsoever. The moment any lead presented itself, he would throw himself into the Hollows without hesitation to verify it — chasing every possible thread that might lead him home. She had always understood, deeply and clearly, just how much weight that desire to return had carried for him.
She knew exactly how deep his ties to that other world ran.
And though Andrew had since come to care for this world — because of her, because of Astra, because of Evelyn — that was still not enough for Belle.
Not nearly enough, if she was being frank with herself.
She had to keep thinking about it.
If the day ever came when the Rift connecting the two worlds was about to vanish for good — when Andrew truly had to choose between one world and the other — which way would the scales tip?
No matter what he chose, she would support him. She would follow, unconditionally.
But even so — she couldn't stop herself from wanting to add more weight to this side of the scale. To this city called New Eridu. To the soil she had grown up on, the only home she had ever known.
Of course, whether any of it actually worked in the end came down entirely to whether Andrew himself genuinely wanted to stay.
The thought drifted, then settled. Belle drew herself back to the present.
She looked at Miyabi standing before her — still cradling that single honeydew melon carefully in both hands — and found herself tilting her head with a small, curious furrow of her brow.
"Miyabi... is this the trail rations Andrew asked you to pick up? Have you finished that errand?"
Miyabi gave a small nod, confirming it.
Which only made Belle more puzzled, not less.
She looked at the honeydew melon that had been cradled with such meticulous, almost reverential care from the moment Miyabi had walked through the door — and couldn't help herself.
"Miyabi... you went out shopping on Andrew's behalf, and you came back with... just that one melon?"
"Of course not."
Miyabi shook her head immediately, dismissing the guess without a moment's hesitation.
Andrew had been perfectly clear — she was to buy as wide a variety of food as possible. The melon she was holding simply happened to be her all-time favorite variety, which was why she had been carrying it by hand.
She continued her explanation in the same composed, matter-of-fact tone.
"The delivery truck is parked by the roadside. I had it wait outside."
"I wasn't entirely certain what Andrew meant by 'more is more' in terms of actual quantity, so I simply purchased everything I had selected from the 141 General Store. All of it."
"Oh..."
Andrew and Belle both exhaled in simultaneous relief.
He had known it — with Miyabi's level of competence and methodical approach to everything she did, there was absolutely no way a simple shopping errand was going to produce any kind of bizarre, inexplicable outcome.
See? He'd been worrying over nothing.
As for whether a whole truckload of supplies would even fit in his storage — Andrew wasn't even slightly concerned about that part.
Anything that didn't fit in his Item Bag could just go straight into the Material Box!
Yes, that meant he wouldn't be able to retrieve any of it until he reached a major base camp like Seliana — but that was fine. His original intent had been to bring it back as a treat for Evelyn and the old man and the rest of the crew anyway. Being unable to pull it out en route didn't change anything.
The Material Box, whose only purpose up until now had been to save camp storage space by holding monster materials, had turned out to have an entirely new, never-before-imagined use the moment world-crossing became a reality.
The two of them followed Miyabi out of the shop together.
The moment they stepped outside, there it was — exactly as Miyabi had described. A medium-sized delivery truck, fully loaded, parked right in front of Andrew's smithy.
A cluster of Bangboo were already hard at work, ferrying crates down from the truck one by one in an endless, industrious stream — and with admirable initiative, they had taken it upon themselves to sort everything by category as they went, organizing each type into its own neat stack.
Andrew swept his gaze over the growing rows of crates and gave a quiet, approving nod.
At a glance, the selection looked genuinely comprehensive — cakes and pastries, chips and puddings, juice boxes and carbonated drinks — it had, at first look, essentially covered every category of convenience food you could think of.
And the 141 General Store on Sixth Street was renowned across all of New Eridu for the sheer breadth and completeness of its stock.
If anything — perhaps a little too comprehensive.
Not that that was a bad thing. Quite the opposite.
Most importantly, every single item Miyabi had selected came in no fewer than a dozen crates each. There was a staggering volume of it.
The Bangboo worked fast. Within minutes, the space in front of Andrew's shop had gone from empty to packed — crate after crate piling up in rows that rapidly grew into a dense, impenetrable wall of cardboard.
With an appetite like a Hunter's, even this much would keep them going for a good long while.
But then Andrew, satisfied enough to step forward and start looking more closely —
His expression, which had been sitting at a pleasant, quietly gratified tilt at the mouth, froze.
The variety was undeniable. The sheer breadth of product types was real.
But as Andrew moved closer and actually looked at the packaging —
All the wrappers were different colors. All the font designs were wildly different.
The flavor labeling, however, was not.
On every single box, on every single bag, in every single font — big, small, rounded, angular, serif, sans-serif, printed, stylized — the flavor indicator in the corner said the same three words.
Honeydew melon.
"..."
Everywhere Andrew looked — an endless parade of honeydew melons. Realistic depictions. Cartoon renditions. Minimalist icons. Mascot characters. Large. Small. Grinning. Cute. All of them some shade of that same unmistakable jade green.
For a brief, genuinely disorienting moment, Andrew wondered if he'd somehow encountered a bug in reality. What other explanation was there for why every single box, without exception, featured that same particular shade of green?
Unfortunately.
No matter how many times he blinked and looked again, the honeydew melons — in all their various sizes and smiling faces — refused to disappear.
He started digging through the stacks with mounting disbelief.
And in doing so, he witnessed firsthand the sheer, almost artistic diversity of honeydew melon-flavored products that apparently existed in this world.
Honeydew melon juice. Honeydew melon soda. Honeydew melon cake. And so on, and so on, and so on — the list showed no signs of ending.
In the very back of the pile, stacked separately and with obvious care, were no fewer than twenty crates of the actual fruit itself — pristine, premium-packaged, clearly high-end honeydew melons. The kind where the box alone communicated expensive.
And then there was the stack that had at first glance looked perfectly normal.
Once the flavor had been identified, it was anything but.
Andrew's eyes landed on a package of instant noodles.
Honeydew melon flavor.
Was that even something a human being could eat?!
For a long moment, Andrew stood there with the very real sensation that the phrase "honeydew melon" was being physically engraved into his brain through sheer repetition — and stared at the towering rows of crates with the hollow, distant expression of a man quietly questioning his life choices.
How had it come to this?
He turned to look at Miyabi, who was standing nearby looking faintly — faintly — pleased with herself, entirely untroubled by any of this.
"Miyabi," Andrew said, his voice carrying the particular careful restraint of someone choosing their words very deliberately. "Why is it that every single food item I asked you to buy is... exclusively honeydew melon flavor?"
"Hmm?"
Miyabi tilted her head slightly, as though the question had genuinely caught her off guard — and then answered with complete, earnest sincerity.
"Because... it's the best flavor?"
Looking at that expression — utterly unbothered, entirely convinced this was simply the natural and obvious conclusion any reasonable person would arrive at — Andrew pressed his palm to his forehead and turned to her with an exhausted, borderline despairing look.
"Even granting that it's your absolute favorite flavor in existence — you still can't just buy one flavor and nothing else, can you?"
"But I didn't only buy one flavor."
Miyabi straightened slightly, her tone carrying a calm but unmistakable note of confidence.
"What?"
Andrew's automatic response escaped before he could stop it. Miyabi, entirely unruffled, repeated herself with full sincerity.
"I did not buy only one flavor. Furthermore, everything I purchased was something I had personally tasted beforehand and found to be genuinely good."
Was this... was this a reversal?
Andrew wasn't fully convinced — the proportions were catastrophically off and he knew it — but the bare, desperate logic of as long as there's something else in there it counts as a success seized him before he could think it through properly, and he immediately looked in the direction Miyabi was indicating.
And there, a single flash of red amid an infinite ocean of green...
Red bean buns.
Tucked within the surrounding fortress of honeydew, roughly a dozen crates of neatly packaged red bean buns sat patiently — small, modest, almost entirely invisible against the sheer scale of what surrounded them.
If Miyabi hadn't pointed them out directly, Andrew genuinely might not have spotted them.
And beyond that?
Nothing.
"..."
Andrew fell silent again.
He held back — with considerable effort — the volcanic torrent of commentary that was surging up from somewhere deep inside him, and for the second time that day, raised a hand and covered his own face.
Trusting her again for a moment there had been the mistake. The single, catastrophic, entirely foreseeable mistake.
"Is something wrong?"
Miyabi, who had picked up on the shift in his mood despite clearly having no idea what had caused it, spoke up with a faint note of concern.
"Is there a problem with how I bought things? I've always done my shopping this way when I put together the snack benefit lists for Section 6..."
Hearing that explanation, Andrew couldn't help himself.
"Wait — when you shop like this for Section 6, do Yanagi and the rest of the team not... say anything?"
"Hmm..."
Miyabi considered this briefly, then shook her head with calm certainty.
"Soukaku always eats everything with great enthusiasm. Yanagi did seem a bit put out at first, but she stopped complaining the moment I added the red bean buns."
She paused, as though a secondary detail had just surfaced.
"Actually, Asaba Harumasa never eats any of the snacks I provide as benefits, but when I asked him about it, he said it was because he was watching his weight."
"..."
Andrew kept his thoughts firmly to himself.
There was a possibility — a fairly reasonable, quite plausible possibility — that Harumasa didn't not want to eat them. It was just that as an ordinary team member who already spent his working hours doing the absolute minimum effort possible, he had never once worked up the nerve to complain about it the way Yanagi had.
Andrew looked at the mountain of crates before him. Then he looked at Miyabi — still wearing her mild expression of genuine, uncomprehending puzzlement throughout all of this — and gave a slow, defeated wave of his hand.
As for Belle?
The moment she had figured out what flavor all of it was, she had retreated to the side and had been physically biting down on her fist trying not to completely lose it — fighting a losing battle against laughter so hard she looked one breath away from passing out.
However one looked at it, Miyabi had, technically, fulfilled Andrew's commission. More or less.
After a fashion.
After all, every last item here had been personally selected and personally tasted by Miyabi herself — and the quality, by her standards at least, was genuinely impeccable.
The only problem — the singular, inescapable problem — was that it was all honeydew melon flavor, which was going to make things somewhat monotonous.
He couldn't hold it against her. Andrew didn't have even the faintest intention of blaming Miyabi for any of this.
He thanked her sincerely for her help, then gently but firmly told her to head home, get some proper rest, and start getting her personal belongings together for the departure tomorrow.
The day wasn't getting any younger.
And let's not forget — Wise and Belle, the two Proxies who had been burning on empty for the past two days, had finally reached their limits. Even if the route through the Hollow could theoretically be navigated as fast as possible, there was no way around the fact that they needed to sleep first.
Then there was the matter of everything still left to pack for field operations.
They agreed on an early departure time the following morning, and Andrew watched Miyabi go before turning back to the task at hand — loading the food into the Material Box one crate at a time, his phone already in his other hand.
Because he was absolutely, categorically not going back with nothing but honeydew melon-flavored food.
He dialed. The line connected almost instantly.
"What is it, Andrew? Are you calling to speak with the Young Miss?"
The voice on the other end was one that carried its usual cool composure — and yet, when it came to Andrew, something softer always managed to bleed through. A warmth that the voice's natural coldness couldn't quite contain.
"No, no — actually, I'm calling specifically for you, Evelyn."
And then, without missing a beat, Andrew pressed his palm together and raised his voice with the full, unabashed desperation of a man with no pride left to protect:
"Please help me — Evelyemon!"
Evelyn, who had been run ragged all day in her capacity as Astra Yao's manager and had already heard some variation of that exact phrasing approximately one too many times today, immediately groaned and pressed her fingers to her temple.
The PTSD was practically setting in at this point. She couldn't hold back the exasperated complaint that came out of her before she'd even finished sighing.
"Andrew, please, please stop picking that up from the Young Miss."
Her tone sharpened with a half-hearted threat.
"Next time you call me like that I'm hanging up on you immediately — don't think I won't."
Despite the absolute ruthlessness of both the words and the tone, Evelyn — who was, in practice, constitutionally incapable of turning down a request from either of the two people she cared most about — had already moved on before the threat could even land.
"Fine, fine. Tell me what you need."
Andrew explained the situation. By the time he finished, the corner of Evelyn's mouth had curved into a smile she couldn't quite suppress — and she gave a decisive nod.
"Understood. Tonight, I'll use Miyabi's original purchase list as a reference and buy the same quantities in all the other popular flavors — I'll have them delivered to you by this evening."
"But..."
Facing the person she loved, who was about to leave on a long journey — Evelyn found that, in the end, there were no extra words she needed to say. No fussing. No lectures.
Only a quiet, sincere promise, offered from the heart.
"The Young Miss and I will both be waiting for you when you come back. And when you do — you owe us a proper drinking night. Just the three of us."
"Deal," Andrew said without a moment's hesitation, his voice firm and warm all at once. "I'll make it happen. That's a promise."
____
👻🔥Read More: Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: Group chat of the Dead
Help us hit our community goals:
🎯 100 Powerstones = +1 Bonus Chapter for everyone
👻 P - Walnut-chan