Milo wasn’t crying, or even really frowning that much.
But in all the time Arthur had known his sparrow-friend, Milo had never once been without a slight smile and looked generally happy. He didn’t even deviate from that expression when he needed to maintain laser-focus on some kind of smithing task. Arthur knew tha...
2024-04-24 17:42:52 +0000 UTC View PostAuthor's Note: 40% longer chapter today. Enjoy!
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It only took a few minutes for Karbo to get everyone down off the cliff, and a few minutes after that for Spiky and Arthur to get the fear-induced wobbles out of their legs and start the long walk back. Since the combat parts of their crew were back in the city, K...
2024-04-23 13:20:54 +0000 UTC View Post“Don’t worry so much, Arthur,” Mizu said. He had been doing his best to not look concerned, and thought he had been doing a pretty good job until she broke the illusion.
“I’m trying not to. But if they don’t make it through, or if something else goes wrong… it just feels like all of this is my fault.” 2024-04-22 17:10:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Arthur and Mizu sat up for a while, as did some others. Lily tried valiantly to stay awake, but once again proved not-quite-owl-enough-to-actually-be-nocturnal by nodding off almost immediately after the stories died down. The single people went to bed first, mostly, which left the couples to couple business. In Arthur’s an...
2024-04-21 14:38:33 +0000 UTC View PostIt was a feast. Everyone brought food from their own homes, and they built a few more fires just to have room for everyone to cook. There were several kinds of bread, sausages, a kind of spiced grits with little pieces of meat in it that someone cooked into a creamy consistency over the fire, and even several desserts.
...
2024-04-20 12:37:23 +0000 UTC View Post“That, Lily, is a cliff,” Arthur said.
“I know. I mean on top of it.”
The middle of the mountain was gone. Through some freak occurrence, it was like a gigantic knife had come down and cut a square out of the mountain. From the distance, they were looking at a flat cliff that ended with a table-flat sectio...
2024-04-19 14:36:31 +0000 UTC View PostBetween Milo’s friendliness, Rhodia’s quasi-pushiness, and Onna’s near limitless ability to generate low-grade fear-based authority, several other people signed on to the camping trip experiment. Spiky came, saying that observing other-world customs first hand meant a good chance for knowledge-gain that would push his c...
2024-04-18 20:17:13 +0000 UTC View PostAuthor's Note: This one's slightly longer than average chapter. Let me know if you guys prefer longer chapters. No promises but if enough people like them, we'll try to squeeze a bit of extra content into each one.
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“Oh, gods,” Ella said, as soon as she saw Lily’s new outfit. “She looks like a little puf...
2024-04-17 20:43:23 +0000 UTC View PostIn all honesty, Arthur was cheating a bit with the new menu.
With so many permutations, the average customer to the boba shop would probably get confused. Some would still sniff out their favorite drink, and that would be helpful in identifying various combinations he should offer regularly.
But by making such a b...
2024-04-17 12:28:35 +0000 UTC View PostThe next morning, it was shopping time. They needed their own spices, for one, and also to replace what he had taken from Ella. A trip to a tea supplier took another chunk of time, but provided Arthur with several blends of tea that the merchant assured him were popular wintertime choices.
There was also the matter of g...
2024-04-16 13:33:42 +0000 UTC View PostAuthor's Note: We went on a mini-rewrite earlier this weekend. Will add a couple extra chapters to the Patreon to make up for things soon.
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The hard part about festivals was deciding when to leave. There was still plenty of food and fun to have, and once Arthur and Mizu managed to reclaim their winter-offering ...
2024-04-15 18:31:42 +0000 UTC View PostArthur left the painting to dry and went downstairs.
“Any luck?”
“I hope so. I’m not much of a painter, really.”
“I’m sure she’ll still love it.”
“Well, if we even get that far. I’m probably showing up in these, or something like them. Not exactly the right clothes for the occasio...
2024-04-13 20:56:41 +0000 UTC View PostOn the way home, Arthur pulled Lily aside and asked for advice. After the whole surprise with seasons, he wanted to make sure that dates in the Demon World were the same thing as Earth ones.
“For starters, today’s a festival day. Think of it as a big party. You don’t prepare anything at all unless you want to run ...
2024-04-13 12:42:58 +0000 UTC View PostArthur jogged back to the shop, pausing at the door to appreciate his beautiful sign.
In the demon world, signs were usually just simple logos, carved or painted as a one-off for individual stores. A produce market might have a wood representation of a single piece of fruit, while the location of a cutlery store would b...
2024-04-12 20:02:33 +0000 UTC View PostPeople liked Arthur’s menu and made do with the options he had, but it hadn’t changed much since his days of running a food cart in the city square. There were a few choices of tea in both pepped and unpepped varieties, some crushed-fruit-and-milk options, and several flavored and unflavored variations on his boba. People...
2024-04-12 12:52:12 +0000 UTC View PostAuthor's Note: Start of book 2!
To celebrate, we're doing daily Demon World facts on our discord. Just look for the Daily Facts channel.
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Arthur felt strange about being excited to go to work.
He knew what the day would roughly bring. It was going to be busy, with lots of hard and sometimes sweaty la...
2024-04-11 18:04:05 +0000 UTC View PostNew book but the same old traditions.
After every novel, I try to write a quick note letting you know both the why and how of the novel. When I started doing this, I think my conception was that these notes were mainly a service to the writer and soon-to-be-writer types in the audience, to give them a perspective on how...
2024-04-10 14:17:30 +0000 UTC View PostThree days later, the boba shop was absolutely packed. It wouldn’t hold up like this, but for an opening night test run, the standing-room-only crowd was about as reassuring as it could be. Everyone had their tea in hand, having tested Arthur and Lily with a variety of choices that stretched the menu to its absolute limits....
2024-04-09 12:11:34 +0000 UTC View PostAuthor's note: Surprise second chapter for you guys today. This is one of the meatier chapters - roughly 3000 words. And it was a lot of fun.
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“It’s time to wake up, Arthur.”
Arthur didn’t have to be told twice. As deep as his sleep had been, the moment it was disturbed, his slumber state popped l...
2024-04-08 22:55:40 +0000 UTC View PostThe first person Arthur treated was not an anteater, although that was the closest thing he could analogize to her. She told him that she had taken a heavy blow to the back of the head when she was a little girl. The surface wound healed just fine. But the damage to her nerves was permanent. A few times a month, she got nause...
2024-04-08 14:12:01 +0000 UTC View PostAs soon as the door closed behind the doctor, Arthur‘s sixth sense yelled that there was an immediate threat just behind him. As he turned around, he saw Ella, armed with a wooden spoon that she seemed more than willing to thwack him with, should things go a certain way.
“Do not,” she said, brandishing her doom-sp...
2024-04-07 14:24:56 +0000 UTC View Post“Our wood and metal went not to building, but to craft implements meant to harm.”
“Hi, Mizu.”
“Arthur.” Mizu smiled, weakly. Arthur noticed that her blue skin was just a bit paler than normal. She was sitting up in bed, almost no different in appearance than she was the day before. It was terrifying, i...
2024-04-06 11:34:54 +0000 UTC View PostAuthor Note: Sometimes, you write a character who’s the stealthy type. And sometimes, that character is so good at fading into the background that people forget he’s there. And very rarely, you get a character that does that does both literally and figuratively.
When I wrote Corbin, the stea...
2024-04-05 12:00:45 +0000 UTC View Post“Is that true? The part about the feet and abdomen.”
“Yeah? At least for a lot of these monsters. Why?”
“Because if that’s true, this trip might not be a bust after all.”
Arthur went back over to the pile. He had checked all of them out earlier, getting not a single hit from Food Scientist<...
2024-04-05 11:59:39 +0000 UTC View PostThe walk down to the poison floor was much, much worse than Arthur thought it would be.
The rats that Karbo had found for him a long time were apparently the lowest of the bottom-barrel low when it came to monsters.
Of course, this was information that Karbo and Eito had told him, but their words severely understa...
2024-04-04 12:07:35 +0000 UTC View Post“As a general rule, We don’t let anybody into our storehouse. And we certainly don’t let non alchemists in. I’m sorry, sir. That’s something money won’t change.”
Arthur didn’t have a lot of funds, but he would have spent them all to get to the back of this shop, if only to expose Food Scientist ...
2024-04-03 15:20:00 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys,
Recently, we got a couple comments from y'all about how reading DWBS inspired you to start drinking tea again. We're the same. Ever since we started DWBS, our boba and tea consumption has increased by 1,000%.
Would you guys be interested if we started shipping a pack of tea to anyone who's subbed to a sp...
2024-04-02 18:19:28 +0000 UTC View Post“And she has potions? Clerics?” Ella frowned. “And it’s still… close? Who said that?”
“Itela.”
“Then it’s close. She knows her business.” Ella drummed her fingers on the countertop. “Which makes this next part hard, Arthur. I don’t know how it was where you came from, but here, we give si...
2024-04-02 16:57:36 +0000 UTC View Post“You get all of this?” Milo said. “That’s mental. Absolutely crazy. Not that you don’t deserve it, but…”
“No, you got it right. I’m not sure if I should take it.”
“Oh, you should take it.” Ella was stooped over examining the shelves built into the back side of the counter. “I was never mu...
2024-04-01 21:58:22 +0000 UTC View PostEito wasn’t lying about the toad’s tremendous lack of charisma.
It took five minutes for the toad to relate a single fact: that he was an alchemical research class, one who mostly provided alchemists with the information they needed to improve rather than making medicines himself.
He was undoubtedly the longes...
2024-04-01 11:39:06 +0000 UTC View Post
