Otaku Translation: Lone Adventure V5C4

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Chapter 4: A Growing Affection (Part 2)

“Here, take this…” I said absentmindedly, tossing another freshly made lens into Elegant Strings’ hands. Inwardly, I couldn’t help but marvel at how thick it was—like a slab of slate. Light barely passed through the thing.

Elegant Strings closed his left eye and held the lens up to his right.

“Huh?” he exclaimed softly, a sound I’d never heard from him before.

“What? Still too thin?” I asked, oblivious to his reaction, already reaching out to reclaim the lens for further polishing.

“Wait…” He waved me off gently, then rose slowly to his feet, carefully navigating the cluttered room—a minefield of books, chairs, broken instruments, and other odds and ends. He made his way to the open window and gazed out at the vast expanse beyond.

A ripple of excitement stirred in my chest. “What is it?” I asked, my voice tinged with anticipation.

Elegant Strings switched the lens to his left eye, holding it steady while extending his other hand, palm open, fingers splayed. He studied them intently, shifting the lens back and forth.

“Jeff…” he murmured, calling my name softly, his voice trembling with joy. “…I can see clearly. Really see clearly. We’ve… we’ve done it.”

“We did it!” he shouted, abandoning all restraint as he flung his arms wide and lunged toward me for an enthusiastic embrace.

Crash! Thud! Oof!

Without the aid of the lens, Elegant Strings tripped over a table leg in his excitement, arms flailing wildly as he tumbled to the floor in an ungainly heap, rolling like a tumbleweed across the cluttered workspace.

With the first lens as a reference, crafting a second identical one wasn’t much of a challenge for me. After only three failed attempts, I handed the new lens to Elegant Strings.

The unexpected success ignited a spark of creativity in him. Determined to make the most of our discovery, he grabbed a scrap of paper torn from Edgeville’s notebook and began sketching furiously with a quill pen. Unfortunately, his design skills were inversely proportional to his enthusiasm. First, he tried—and failed miserably—to draw two perfect circles on the page. What resulted were two lopsided polygons that defied any known geometric description. Then, he connected them with a straight line and added two wavy curves around the edges for good measure.

“There! That’s it!” he declared triumphantly, leaning back with a satisfied sigh. “What do you think? Not bad, right?”

"You can find bras in plenty of general stores, and they're not particularly expensive. But if you're dead set on having one custom-made, why on earth would you ask an alchemist to do it? I happen to know a few tailors who are exceptionally skilled—and surprisingly affordable." I offered this advice with the best of intentions.

“Who said I want to make bras?!” Elegant Strings’ face flushed red, then purple, his earlier pride evaporating in an instant.

“Even a blind man could tell that’s supposed to be glasses!” he snapped, clearly offended.

Glasses? The unfamiliar term puzzled me, but that didn’t stop me from pressing the issue. “Not every blind man has vision as bad as yours,” I retorted, taking the crude sketch from him. I scrutinized it briefly before my eyes lit up with what I thought was a stroke of genius.

“Ah… Transparent bras? Bold design. I approve.”

“For the last time—” Elegant Strings snatched the paper back, looking ready to strangle me with his bowstring. “—this isn’t a bra. It’s glasses. Do you even know what glasses are?!”

It took some explaining, but eventually, I grasped his concept. The misshapen polygons represented the lenses I’d crafted, while the squiggly lines were meant to depict metal wires holding them together. His idea was simple yet ingenious: attach the lenses to a frame that could rest on his nose, allowing him to carry them wherever he went.

Despite the abysmal quality of his drawing, I found myself genuinely impressed by his ingenuity. His vision was remarkable—a masterstroke of practical design, assuming one ignored the disastrous blueprint.

While my alchemy wasn’t advanced enough to conjure objects out of thin air, reproducing something from a tangible model—even a poor one—was well within my capabilities. With a solid reference point, I could replicate almost anything. My talent lay in imitation and adaptation rather than raw creativity, a distinction that sometimes set me apart from my Planewalker companions.

Following Elegant Strings’ instructions, I embedded strips of metal into the lenses, securing them firmly in place. Then, I welded two sturdy alloy rods along the edges to form a rudimentary frame. Voilà—the world’s first pair of “glasses.”

If the thickness of the lenses was any indication, these weren’t exactly accessories; they were more akin to a helmet. Besides providing a meager +2 defense bonus, the contraption offered no additional attributes. As far as protective gear went, it was worse than the shabbiest cloth cap. For someone who prided himself on craftsmanship, this felt like a humiliating failure.

But to Elegant Strings, the significance of the glasses transcended their flaws. Thanks to them, he could finally see the world clearly again. His bow, once rendered nearly useless by his poor eyesight, would now become a deadly weapon once more. No amount of top-tier headgear could offer him such a transformative advantage.

Perhaps because I followed his rough design so faithfully, crafting the glasses earned me more experience than making the telescope had. My alchemy skill surged past level seven, nearing the threshold of eight—an unprecedented leap for someone whose progress had always been painfully slow.

“So… you can really see now?” I asked skeptically, eyeing him dubiously. With those thick lenses perched on his face, he looked like a startled frog trying to peer out of its swampy hideout. Combined with his forest-green ranger attire, the effect was downright comical.

“I’ve never seen so clearly in my life!” Elegant Strings exclaimed, swiveling his head excitedly as though trying to drink in the entire world at once.

“All right, then,” I challenged him, pointing to a nearby tauren named “One True Love.” “Can you read his name from here?”

Even with the glasses, the distance proved challenging. Elegant Strings leaned out the window, squinting intensely as he stared at the figure in the distance. After a long pause, he pronounced each syllable slowly and deliberately: “One… Pillar… Supporting… Heaven?”

“What?!” I choked, utterly baffled. Whether he was completely blind or possessed eagle-eyed precision, nothing could have prepared me for that answer. His error was so absurd that my brain struggled to process it.

“That’s right,” Elegant Strings confirmed, turning to face me with wide, innocent eyes. The lenses distorted his gaze into concentric ripples, like waves rippling across a pond. He picked up the quill again and wrote down what he saw.

It seemed the glasses had improved his vision—just not quite enough.

“You idiot! You illiterate fool!” I bellowed, grabbing his pointed ear and yanking it. “You got half the characters wrong! You might as well go back to being blind!”

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