Bryella tilted her head, thinking. From what she remembered after waking up, money was apparently what people used to trade.
Stones with value attached to them. She didn't fully get the reasoning behind it, but if it meant more food like this, that was reason enough.
Elara pulled out a water basin, setting it down in front of Bryella, her face full of expectation.
Seeing her squirm with anticipation, Bryella let out a slow breath.
"Mmm~ ptui."
She spat into the basin.
Immediately, the air turned frigid. The room's temperature dropped sharply. Even the flames in the hearth trembled, almost dying out as icy wind surged in like it had snuck in under the floorboards.
In seconds, the water in the basin froze solid, the surface glowing with a light blue hue that matched Bryella's hair. Despite preparing with thick clothes, Elara still shivered as the chill seeped in. But she was used to it by now.
She took a small hammer and broke the frozen block into pieces, chipping away until they formed smooth, palm-sized chunks. These were high-purity ice crystals, born from Bryella's elemental power, resistant to melting and perfect for trade.
"All done! I'll go exchange these for some cash. Be good while I'm gone, okay?"
Elara swung a backpack over her shoulder and wrapped herself in a dark cloak. She checked her stunt shoes, used to disguise her height, and adjusted her voice using a trick she picked up while messing around.
Fully prepared, she gave a firm nod. Time to sell frozen chunks of enchanted saliva.
Still, as she headed out, she muttered to herself in an old dialect, half out of habit, half out of annoyance. "Wait... aren't greater spirits supposed to heal on their own? How'd I forget that part...?"
Grumbling under her breath, Elara disappeared into the bustling crowd.
Elemental crystals usually form only in places overflowing with a single type of elemental energy, remote, untouched areas that are stable enough to let them grow slowly over time. Because of how rare and hard to reach these locations are, the crystals that come from them are incredibly valuable.
They're used in forging weapons, supporting spellcasting, and performing rituals. Their market price stays high thanks to their many uses, but at the end of the day, they're not actually that special.
They're just huge clumps of one kind of element, kind of like how stones form inside the body over time.
It sounds simple when you break it down, doesn't it? You'd think any halfway decent magician could just make a bunch by hand. And that's the thing, technically, they can.
Gathering elemental energy is basic mage work. It's like how most people know that diamonds are just compressed carbon.
Making one? Easy. All you need is a bit of carbon and pressure over a hundred thousand tons, plus the right heat. Simple, right?
Then why doesn't anyone do it? Is it just laziness?
"…If someone had that kind of ridiculous magic power, they probably wouldn't even care about making crystals to begin with," Syltra replied when Elara asked her that. It made sense.
If you had the strength to crush coal into diamonds with just your hands, why would you even care about something like diamonds? They'd be no more impressive than a shiny lump of wood.
Thinking back to what Ice really was, Syltra, who was flat broke, suddenly saw a business opportunity.
"This batch has more water than the last one and a few extra impurities. It should pass, right?" she muttered, clutching a cloth bag filled with crystals of various sizes. The cold seeped through her coat despite the thick layers.
Even half-broken, Ice Bryella could casually spit out ice crystals like they were candy. And Elara? She wasn't hiding it anymore, she was a real otherworlder.
In her past life, she was an overworked office drone who nearly drank herself unconscious during client dinners. One night, while staggering across a street, she got plowed over by some vehicle headed to a festival in a place called Aramisheia.
That's when she met a goddess, glowing, face hidden, who kicked her down from the sky. She blinked, and suddenly she was a teenage girl again, maybe fifteen or sixteen, in a stranger's body, with barely any memories, now the daughter of a merchant.
From what she pieced together from books and some awkward chats, Elara guessed she'd been dropped into an isekai light novel she once skimmed. One about a Hero and a Demon King.
That's how she found Ice Bryella, naked in the snow, unconscious, along with Syltra. Both were minor characters from the book. And so far, their powers matched the story.
Bryella had appeared in a later volume as a girl the Hero rescued from monsters in a frozen, ruined city. She rarely spoke and was the kind of spirit you'd only find in places overflowing with magic.
In the lore, she was the strongest of the ice spirits, an elemental being made of magic, not flesh.
In the past, she'd been split apart for some reason. Her body parts remained scattered and sealed, but active.
A spirit as powerful as her wouldn't die easily. According to the book, even if she was destroyed, she'd just come back. But something went wrong this time. She didn't die, exactly, so she got stuck in a weird half-alive state.
Then one day, thanks to some seal weakening, a sliver of her mind slipped free. That spark became the Bryella that Elara found.
Elara figured out the current year was 3,467 in this so-called "Continental General New Era." But something felt off. The actual story wasn't supposed to begin for another 500 years.
That's when the real heroine would arrive and find Ice Bryella freshly unsealed, just like in the book. But here they were, off script, with Ice Bryella waking up way too early. And this version of Bryella? She still had fragments of memory.
That wasn't in the novel. Syltra was another one. She was just a background character who stayed in the north and never did anything major. But now she was saying strange things.
From what Elara heard, it was possible another isekai traveler had already arrived in this world before her. That meant someone had already messed with the timeline, throwing butterfly effects all over the plot. And now, Elara was caught in the middle of it all.
The original novel was never finished, and over time, Elara's memory of it had gotten fuzzy. She'd mostly skimmed for the fun parts anyway, so she wasn't exactly confident about how the plot went.
Still, with Bryella by her side and a little bit of planning, she figured she could ride that advantage for the next few decades and make a decent life out of it. Survival shouldn't be too hard with that kind of backup, right?
"Yeah, once the demons and monsters start showing up to fight the Hero, I better be far, far away..." she muttered.
The prequel to the story had a bleak tone, full of mismatched power levels and tragic ends for side characters who seemed important but never got proper closure.