What It Means To Be King

Chapter 28: Trip Into Town Whilst The Mind Stays In Business

We're honestly just getting to the good part, or basically the part where the story truly starts. Yeah, this chapter. 

____________________________________________________

At exactly 2 pm on Saturday, Shao Long set out to town. He absolutely did not question Shintarou's  lone presence in the living room, chatting with his robot, with no signs of Livio and Gion. All he knew was that today, he wouldn't let anyone disturb his shopping trip and if that meant violence, then why the fuck not? Explicitly remembering to charge his phone to full battery, Shao Long stepped outside the gates where a couple of students could also be seen with the same wish as his. 

The first place he graced himself with that day was, unfortunately, not the stationary store that sold the calculator model he wanted to buy, no. In the huge huge mall, Shao Long first went to walked through every aisle in the supermarket area, aka the food haven. There, he was going to buy every cheap snack he figured would taste decent enough to replace dinner in case he wanted to lock himself again. 

The European supermarket is absolutely inconvenient to him as an Asian, because everything looked good and he couldn't exactly decided which was going to worth his money more than the others. So in the end, he just bought a little bit of everything, perfectly minding himself from overspending. 

Do not question why there's a few batches of spice too, because it doesn't look like his dormmates could cook Chinese food, and he has cravings. Shut it. He was a patriotic little teenager who love almost everything about his country, people should follow his example lol. 

Next stop was the stationary store, which he spent lesser than 15 minutes in, because there wasn't even a semblance of hesitation in his movements when he pluck a pen set from the shelf, which contained at least 15 blue pens and 15 black pens. When he passed by the notebook section, all he did was grab two to three hardcover notebooks, each with the thickness of half a thumb. Those are for rough calculations and notes and lists and everything important. 

When he passed by the calculator area, he had a little hard time finding the model, but once he did, he swept it into the basket, and he was done for that part of shopping. 

And because he, as an international student, didn't bring that many clothes with him, he went to the clothes department and bought for winter clothes. Another reason to this was because he knew he would have to do a lot of fieldwork during the few months. 

Lets not ignore one thing, actually. Shao Long observed everything he could lay his eyes on, in town. He spoke with a few of the store owners, asking them where they got their stock, the shopping habits of locals, the frequency of them seeing foreigners, and most importantly, their general economy state. He was pretty good with his words, so it was natural that as he did this, almost 60% of the people in the streets of Momosu town and in the mall knew his name, or at the very least, knew his face. 

To say that he was famous would sound just about right, because while he did his unpaid survey, the store owner from across the street called out his name and invited him for a discount. Such was his popularity that could render every men and women jealous. While Shao Long didn't particularly care about his popularity in school, he still has it, but not many people could have the whole town, old and young, know him. 

The people of Momosu should be lucky Momosu didn't have a Chinatown, or Shao Long might've accidentally lead them all to overcome the economy of Momosu singlehandedly and cause the doom of Evan hehehe. 

There are a few Chinese locals though, of course there was. And there was where Shao Long got his supply of Asian domestic items for a not-so-bad price, which included a very specific kind of soy sauce that you could not get anywhere else in the world other than Shandong Province. It also included high quality wooden chopsticks. He traded his fan — not gonna use it for winter — for a whole jar of candies, specifically choosing gums and lollipops which would undoubtedly last longer.