After leaving the house, the pair quickly pathed through the darkened streets of Rakuyo, soon reaching the gate. Riku patted his two pants pockets, looking for something. Bringing it out, he walked up to the guard on duty. The guard looked at the object Riku presented to him—the Shinosaki clan seal—and nodded.

Motioning to the other guard, the two security guards opened the heavy gates of the city.

The two teens walked through, leaving the cultivator’s city, Rakuyo, and entering the nation’s capital, Kyoto.

They entered a residential district close by, and realizing that they were going nowhere, Riku turned his attention to Chiaki. “Can you Googol the nearest print shop?”

Perhaps a symptom of his Eternal NEET Disease, Riku could not follow a map to save his life. Even though his grandmother had given him a phone before the meal, he was confident that if he were to lead the two, they would end up at a maid cafe in the opposite direction of whatever they wanted to find. This was based on a real experience that happened twice.

“I had a feeling you were going to ask that question. My phone’s already navigating there,” Chiaki replied. She knew how hopeless Riku was in this area.

“Nice. I’ll just follow you then.”

Riku stopped his steps and let Chiaki take the lead. Soon, and much sooner than if Riku was to take the lead, they were at a print shop. Riku held the door open; the bell rang, and Chiaki entered. He followed after.

A staff member quickly located them, “Welcome! What are you here for?”

Riku spoke up, “Posters. We need 317 different posters printed to be exact. If you can get them all done by midnight, we can pay double the asking price.”

The employee thought for a bit. “317… is a lot. What size do you want your posters to be in? We have two printers available, and it’ll take about a half-hour for standard-size posters.”

Riku deliberated. It was currently around six, so they could only print twenty-four posters; nowhere close to enough. “How about simple black and white posters with little detail? Most of the poster will be whitespace. It shouldn’t take too long.”

“Could you show an example?”

Riku took out his phone and spent half a minute tapping away. He then showed the employee his phone. On it was an outline sketch of an anime character.

“This…” the employee calculated, “We should be able to do about half your order if we can get a few extra hours. You’d have to look for another print shop for the rest. The normal price for a poster print is thirteen-hundred yen, but we can give a discounted price to you for a thousand yen each.”

Riku quickly agreed. “Yep, that’s totally fine. We’ll pay double, so two spirit stones for each poster. My partner here has the cash ready in her spatial ring.” He gestured at Chiaki’s ring.

“Alright, I’ll go to the back to get things started. You can send what you want printed to our email, written over there.” The employee pointed to a sign before heading off.

Once the employee had turned the corner, Riku said, “This is embarrassing to say, but I have no idea how to email people on this phone.” It was a new phone, and he was unfamiliar with it; he even didn’t know his phone’s email address. In the first place, email, something that replaced the function of texting in Japan, was not something one did without having friends to text to or without working at a job. And Riku didn’t exactly fulfill either criteria.

Chiaki rolled her eyes, but still went to Googol image search on her own phone. Under Riku’s guidance, she easily compiled an assortment of waifu sketches onto her phone.

Once they had downloaded ten images, Riku spoke out, “This should be enough to start off with. Let’s send them.”

She nodded, and with the expertise that only a female highschooler would have in texting, she quickly sent out the files to the email displayed on the sign.

A few moments later, the employee came back.

Riku asked, “Did you get the email?”

The staff member shook his head. “I’m deeply sorry. A few minutes before you two came here, an important customer placed an order. All our printers are full.”

“What?” Riku and Chiaki exclaimed at the same time. They both were equally as shocked. Riku continued, “Can’t they wait? We’re paying double, after all.”

The employee shook his head once again. “I’m sorry. Their order is very urgent. We unfortunately cannot help you at this time. We will be open tomorrow for business if you can wait a day.”

“Alright, let’s just try someone else. To the next print shop!”

After Riku’s enthusiastic reply, the pair headed off.

*

“This is the last print shop in the entire Keihanshin area, right?”

Chiaki nodded to Riku’s question.

“So why exactly does every single open print shop in three enormous cities need to fulfill an order from some secret important person at the same exact time? We’ve checked all the print shops in an area with thirty fucking million people, goddammit. It’s already past twelve. We spent six fucking hours getting nothing done. Fucking hell, I’m cursing as much as an American right now.”

The Sunk Cost Fallacy is a dangerous effect indeed. After spending two hours checking over all the print shops in Kyoto, the pair bought train tickets to Osaka. And when Osaka proved to be fruitless, they went to Kobe with an obvious lack of success.

Chiaki had wanted to give up after the third print shop all the way back in Kyoto, but Riku kept pressing on, saying “What if the next one ends up being ready?” She then said that she wanted to go back alone to catch up on sleep, but Riku kept her with him, saying “Sleep is for the weak.”

In all honesty, she didn’t mind going along with Riku for a bit longer; they were good friends. Why else would Chiaki agree to help him in the first place? Except that this “bit longer” ended up being six hours.

“Let’s just give up. We can’t put up posters if we can’t get posters in the first place,” Chiaki said.

Riku scoffed, “And give up to that grandmother of ours? I think not! I swear in the name of Haruka-chan that Grandma was the person to place all those orders!”

“Oh, come on. You really think that Grandma went to every print shop in Keihanshin to make an order just to win this stupid game?” Chiaki dismissed.

“Of course!” Riku confidently dismissed Chiaki’s dismissal. “Pettiness runs in the blood.”

She rolled her eyes. “Alright then, let’s say you’re right. You’ve lost. What else can you do at this point but give up? There’s no way to get the posters anymore.”

Riku confidently smiled, pointing at a department store nearby. “Oh, we can just buy poster paper from there. I can’t draw, but I have thousands of pictures of each of my 317 waifus embedded deep in my head. I can recreate them much faster than printers can!” He spoke in a boastful tone, as if he was asking for praises.

Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect on the sleep-deprived Chiaki. She felt that Riku’s face just seemed so punchable at that moment; this person had been frolicking uselessly for six hours. She normally wouldn’t care, but he had to just be frolicking uselessly with her. And this girl normally slept at eight. It was already past twelve.

So, she simply gave in to her impulses and gifted Riku with a punch straight to the nose.

Chiaki took a deep breath, some of her anger dissipating after the punch. However, she was still quite incensed. In a quiet voice, oozing with her displeasure, she made good use of the oxygen she took in half a moment before to berate Riku in her native language of street American, “Why in the flying fuck did we just spend six fucking hours looking for a damn fucking print shop when we could fucking just fucking go to any damn department store! God fucking dammit, you owe me a day’s worth of sleep. Tell your parents to give me three extra vacation weeks. I should’ve fucking stayed in Okinawa. Holy fucking shit. Urghhh, fuck. I am so fucking pissed right now. Go buy your shitting posters by yourself,” Chiaki, remembering that Riku had no money on him, aggressively threw a few spirit stones at him. One was a headshot.

She took another breath. “My god, I just remembered it’s fucking midnight and the trains aren’t fucking running now. Jesus fucking christ. I’ll call a damn taxi. That’s what, an extra hour you owe me? Oh my fucking god. Just—just give me a break.”

Riku, even though he only half-understood the strange foreign language that only seemed to be somewhat related to English Chiaki was speaking, was slightly intimidated by Chiaki’s excessive use of the word “fuck.” Hearing her finish her scolding, he took the chance to scamper away to buy three-hundred-odd sheets of poster paper and a few packages of permanent markers.

When Riku came back, Chiaki was sitting, stone-faced, in a taxi. A door was left open for him, and he quickly got in.

Sunrise was around five hours from the current time, and there were 317 posters to draw. Riku couldn’t waste a single second, so he began to expound the contents of his brain onto the poor, abused poster paper, smearing the excretions of a soft-tipped hard rod-shaped object all over its previously unblemished snow-white body. After a few minutes, Riku realized that he was drawing too slowly; he only had two posters done. He thought for a bit before taking out another permanent marker. Using his divine sense to draw on one poster and his two hands to draw on another, he managed to multitask magnificently. He would finish a poster every minute; it was just barely fast enough to finish in time.

Chiaki was still vexed and refused to look at Riku, but she felt curious about Riku’s drawing skills. And barely a minute later, her curiosity overcame her anger.

She took a peek at his finished posters and her eyebrows shot up. She then rifled through them with a frown.

“Hey, Riku,” she started.

Riku replied without taking his attention away from his drawing, “Yes?”

“Could you please tell me why the fuck are all of these posters panty shots!?” Chiaki’s voice, while starting quiet, slowly raised to a crescendo at the end.

And of course, all the posters were indeed panty shots. Wind blowing up a skirt was the most common kind. Then there were the posters with the viewpoint slightly below the skirt, looking up. A few even had the anime girl pulling up her skirt herself.

Riku shrugged while still perfectly painting obscenities on two posters at the same time. “I only can draw images I’ve perfectly memorized. These are the tamest I have.”

Once Chiaki fully realized the ramifications of what Riku had just said, she looked at him in horror. “You said you have thousands of images memorized for each of your three-hundred-something waifus, right? That is to say, you have hundreds of thousands of rule thirty-four pictures embedded in your brain?”

He shrugged again. “Yep. That’s why I wanted to look for a print shop. I can only draw things I’ve memorized perfectly. Even I don’t want to have 317 not-safe-for-work images plastered on our home. But that old woman forced my hand.”

She felt like beating up this king of perverts. Only an obscenely lewd man would use the enhanced memory gained from cultivation to remember porn instead of something useful. And only Riku, out of all obscene, lewd men, would decide to publicly display his fetishes on his home. Even worse, the house Riku wanted to post these pictures all over was the one Chiaki was currently living in.

And so, for the second time this day, Chiaki gave in to her feelings and threw out a fat punch to Riku’s face.