"Alright…" Sun Jiao said, his excitement dampened somewhat, though we got our first 'real' customers soon enough - who were here to buy some of the fish.

As I had expected, they were two lizardmen, though once again - so long as you could make even a mediocre meal with fish, you would have more than enough business even if you were a human.

Our profit margins weren't that high, but I couldn't exactly raise our prices any higher than they were right now.

The thing was that there was a ceiling to how much we could raise prices given we were just a roadside stall - we were basically kind of like food trucks in some places back home. If we wanted to raise prices, we needed to give people a better dining experience than a few tables in the great outdoors. We would need to have a proper venue and staff to make an actual restaurant.

Perhaps if I stayed in the city a while longer, or if I wanted to settle down in Libraria for whatever reason, I might one day end up opening up my own restaurant. I would need seed money, which I could easily get from selling a Rank Three grimoire - though of course, my goal was still to return home so this was just fanciful dreaming on my end.

I hadn't given much thought to what I would do after graduating from college back home. With all the experience I had gotten- would I want to establish a restaurant back home?

The thing was that any insight I had gotten from living in this world might not carry over to back on Earth, not to mention that the main thing that gave me an advantage with things, the [Poissonnier] skill might not work back on Earth.

As I was thinking this, the two lizardmen sat down at one of the tables. We served the fish on plates made of leaves, which also made up the cups that we were using.

Yeah, not the plates or glasses you'd expect of a fine dining establishment - but I wasn't going to invest much money into this endeavor given I intended to hightail it to Hitutsa very soon. I just wanted to make sure that Sun Jiao was able to stand on his own feet with the business, and I would be satisfied enough with that.

Who knows where he would take it from there? Maybe in a few years he would own his own restaurant chain or whatever.

Although I was trying to focus on my grimoire, I couldn't help but distract myself by constantly glancing at what the response of the two lizardmen would be.

The fish must've tasted fine, because they didn't give any indication that they didn't like it as they paid and left.

On the other hand, they hadn't said anything positive either, but that was also fine. This meant that Sun Jiao's cooking was at the very least, passable.

"Good work," I said to him. I thought that his fish was alright, but I couldn't really know how the lizardmen would react to it. And to his credit, even if he was slightly apprehensive of the lizardmen, he did not let it show as he served them.

"Thank you, Teacher," he said. There was a trace of nervousness in his voice. "But… do you really think I'm ready for this? I nearly messed up the recipe this time around though it was so simple…"

"You can study how to swim for hours on end, but sooner or later, you're going to have to put your foot in the water," I explained to him, trying to sound wise and profound. "After all, until you don't go into the water, you'll never be able to actually swim or not." He didn't seem to be fully convinced. "Look, one thing I realized through my experience cooking is that for places like this - you know, so long as you're not a gourmet chef, 'good enough' is all you need to aim for. You might always be able to improve, but so long as it meets a certain standard, it's fine. The main thing is to be able to make large amounts of it repeatedly in a certain amount of time while maintaining a consistent quality. And anyway, I was always here, watching you in case you messed up things too badly."

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There was also my own reputation on the line, of course, if we sold bad merchandise. If Sun Jiao had messed up too badly, I'd have fully taken over for him. I knew I was right about one thing though - he had to learn how to start doing this, or he'd never get far, no matter how many times we practiced in my kitchen back at my apartment.

Sun Jiao seemed to buy this explanation and went back to work. He didn't mess up the next batch that he made, and business was not exactly thriving right now, but he was still being kept reasonably busy.

That was good - if he kept this up, I could easily believe that he had a promising future in this business.

We continued to work until what I thought was around nine or ten in the morning - again, it was a bit hard to tell without widespread availability of clocks in this world, but traffic had somewhat slowed, though I knew that it would pick up once more when it was lunch time.

"Let's pack up for now," I said to Sun Jiao. "Get some rest, you'll need some energy for the incoming lunch rush."

He wiped away the sweat from his brow as he sat down. He had clearly been working very hard - I had to hand it to him.

"I have a question though," I said.

"I still don't know whether or not lizardmen lay eggs or give birth, Teacher."

"No, not that- though now that I think about it I thought that someone like you'd be able to figure that out by now."

"What do you mean 'someone like me?'"

"I didn't want to ask anyone because I was afraid of offending someone, but what reputation do you have to lose? Just ask random lizardmen for the answer. Just not our customers."

"I really don't know how you came to that conclusion."

"Anyway, that's not what I wanted to say," I said. I frowned. What was I going to ask? He had distracted me with that off questioning, which meant that I had forgotten what I was originally going to ask about. "Right - you had asked those two people earlier about if they were from Arconia, part of small talk, good job by the way- how did you figure that out?" I hadn't been able to tell the difference between them and people from the capital, but Sun Jiao had been able to. What had he seen that gave them away?

"Sorry, but couldn't you hear the difference in their accents? They had Arconian accents," Sun Jiao said, as if it were obvious.

Right - regional accents would be far more varied in this time before television and radio. Only thing was that I couldn't hear any of it because the translation magic of this world seemed to iron out anything that stood out regarding accents and gave nearly everyone the same flat tone and enunciation. At least, unless you happened to know the language naturally.

Words were also difficult to parse, as some of them did not have equivalent translations in all languages. An easy example was how Sun Jiao called me 'Teacher' though I knew this was just an approximation of an honorific that was said around Chipker that was probably closer to 'Master' or 'Chief', but the translation magic seemed to want to go with 'Teacher' for whatever reason.

"You can't tell with me though," I remarked.

"Yeah, but you're a foreigner right? You have that odd sound to your voice that I don't usually hear," Sun Jiao said.

So my voice likely sounded mechanical to him as well. "Alright, next, for lunch, let's see just how good your stew is."

Lunch was far busier than breakfast, and now even the humans were fine with having fish.

It had gotten to the point that even a stall like ours, which had only been running for that day, was so busy that I put my grimoire down and had to help Sun Jiao out, otherwise he'd be overrun by how many people there were. There were not nearly enough tables or seats for all the guests, many of whom simply stood and sipped on what we were giving out.

To his credit, there were no complaints up till that point - and at least the increased flow of business meant that I could get some of the money I had put in back.

Although the license had not cost me anything, I still had had to pay for the ingredients, the stall itself, as well as the tables and chairs. All of that notwithstanding whatever money I had given to Sun Jiao.

"Alright, this is a good start," I said to him, as it was early afternoon and the crowd had largely dispersed. "Let's pack up for the day."

"Aren't we going to stay for the dinner rush?"

"Can you handle working till then?" I asked. Sun Jiao looked exhausted, and I couldn't blame him.

"Ah, not really, but…" he trailed off.

What was he going to say?

That he wanted more practice?

That he needed to make more money?

"There's no use in pushing yourself too much," I told him. "You did well today, and as you keep practicing, we'll move onto some harder recipes, alright? But for now, you should pack up, clean this, and go home. We won't set up for breakfast tomorrow, but we'll do the lunch shift again. Sounds good?" I had wanted to start out with breakfast because I'd been slightly worried we wouldn't be able to compete with the other, more well-established places for lunch, but it looked like there was nothing to worry about on that front.

"Yes, Teacher," he said.

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