A Knight Plots His Growth (2)
Screeeech.
The rusted hinge scraped the ear worse than it had any right to. Worse than the hinge, though, was the stench — mold, dust, and filth braided together until they stabbed the nose. A knight several times more sensitive to foul smells than other men found his brow knitting before he could stop it.
Flinch!
Had the frown been taken for anger? The boy jerked, certain he had made the man furious.
"I-I'm sorry."
"Hm? Why are you apologizing all of a sudden? I'm not mad."
"B-but your face..."
"It reeks in here. And you don't so much as change expression in a place like this."
"I... I come here often, so... I suppose I've gotten used to it."
"That so."
"Y-yes..."
Only when he heard that Lee Han was not angry did Timid finally ease — though he still watched the man's mood, and that left Lee Han feeling oddly guilty. At the same time an uncharacteristic pity stirred.
Letting that become a habit won't do him any good.
What kind of life turned "I'm sorry" into a verbal tic, and reading the room into a passive? A bitter smile tugged at the knight.
Same as me.
He could see his younger self from the life before, the boy who had lost his grandfather and been knocked from place to place, and the sympathy came whether he wanted it or not. Which was probably why the boy weighed on him, and why the meddling followed.
"Of all the places to set up a workshop, you pick one that'll ruin your health..."
"Th-that's... ...I'm sorry."
"Quit apologizing. You're making me feel like the villain."
"......"
"...Right. Sorry. I'm the bad one. Damn it."
"...Haha."
The playful grumbling finally loosened him. Timid laughed, small, and watched Lee Han a little less carefully. Then, soon enough:
"Ah! H-here, Instructor."
"...Oh."
Where the boy stopped and pointed, there was nothing but a thick wall. A third party might have bristled, suspecting he had been dragged all the way into this stinking sewer just to be made a fool of. Lee Han was not that third party. Whether Timid knew it or not, his senses told him there was empty space beyond that wall.
"Do I just hit it as hard as I can?"
"N-normally a person would think about how to get in. They wouldn't think of smashing the wall, would they?"
"And leave a shortcut sitting right there?"
"...Mmm. An ordinary person can't break a wall a meter thick with their bare hands."
The boy scratched his cheek as he objected, then rapped the wall with an ease that said he had done it many times.
Tok. To-dok. Tok-tok.
A steady rhythm. This was not the hand of someone who had tried it once or twice, and an ordinary person likely would not even have known it was a pattern.
Four down, two light ones up, then one hard. After that, five sweeping down from the middle?
But that was only true of ordinary people. While Lee Han caught every difference too fine for anyone else to notice, and watched as if the trick delighted him—
Krrrrrk...
A noise that put the rusted hinge to shame, and the wall slowly sank.
What it revealed—
Derek shaped the words like a line he had wanted, just once, to say aloud, and still looked faintly embarrassed by them.
Even so.
Yeah. Worth showing off.
It was, without question, a space grand enough to pull a gasp out of a man. This deep in the sewers, where he never would have dreamed of finding such a thing, the Secret Workshop revealed itself.
The underground sewers. A work counted among the five great achievements of the Military God.
At first every noble had opposed it, harping on the budget, but after the Military God forced the matter through and the sewers were finished, there were even tales that the kingdom wailed his praises. Fair enough. Once, streets overflowing with filth, and muddy water breathing a rotten stench, had been ordinary life. After the sewers were completed, clean drinking water could be had cheaply, and public privies appeared, so people no longer dumped their waste along the roadside. As the streets grew cleaner, stomach sickness and fever declined as well. To call it a great achievement was no exaggeration.
"Since these sewers were built, it's hardly too much to say that people stopped dying of stomach sickness. It used to be thirty in every hundred, and they say it fell below three."
"A history lecture, out of nowhere?"
"I-I'm a student of the history faculty, in my own way."
"Hmm. And this distinguished history student had the nerve to plant a workshop right on top of a previous king's achievement."
"Th-the space itself was already here. ...Still, you have to keep the workshop a secret, all right? If I'm caught, I go straight to the block."
"Relax. Now that I've come this far, I'm an accomplice as of today."
"......That wasn't why I brought you."
Derek scratched his head, smiling as if he did not know where to put his face, and Lee Han left him to it, quietly taking in the workshop.
Money smeared over every inch of this place.
Lee Han clicked his tongue as he looked over what filled a space of little more than thirty square meters. He could not have priced any of it exactly, but an uncommon aura clung to every piece. A cabinet thick with the scent of medicinal herbs — packed denser than anything he had seen in an herbal clinic, and the scent breathing from each drawer was anything but ordinary. A decoction vessel larger than a cauldron made its presence felt, and the mortars and beakers, worn as they were, held a quality the wear could not hide. It looked like an alchemist's laboratory married to an herbal physician's study. East and West, set in the same room.
"When did you build this place?"
"Mmm, about a month? It's still quite lacking."
"......"
"W-why are you looking at me like that?"
"...Nothing. Forget it."
The System Window, of course. Other men would have needed decades of labor for a workshop like this, and he had raised it in a month? It was no different from some brat who had never set foot in a graduate school walking in with a laboratory professors would envy.
Anyway, how's a man without a System Window supposed to live without weeping.
He knew it was petty of him, but he was a little jealous. The jealousy vanished quickly. And why wouldn't it.
"Th-then, from here on, I will proceed with the elixir refinement."
Was he not the one spending that tremendous System Window windfall? Now was the time to be grateful. A boy whose presumed class was rogue, and who held alchemist besides as a subclass, began to refine the heart of the Ghost King.
"I-I can do it. The... the part about handling medicine."
For once, and for the first time, Derek had put his skill forward without shrinking. And why not? Where else would a chance like this come from?
Jackpot. I never thought I'd get my hands on a material this obscenely rare!
For Derek, it was nothing short of luck. His main class was rogue. He had originally wanted a warrior class, but he knew his own temper. Valor was a country he would never reach, so he had chosen rogue instead. That was all right. A rogue class showed plenty of merits once you raised it, and it could even loose a monstrous skill like the Falling Flowers of Ten Thousand he had shown the day before.
The risk is still enormous, and I'm endlessly short of where I ought to be.
Even so, Derek had worked hard in his own way, and the subclass he had chosen for the sake of that growth was alchemist. A class that sharpened the hands and let you handle medicine and poison sat well with rogue. So he had given alchemy everything he had. He had even meant, when he entered the Academy, to go into an alchemy faculty, but...
...The standard was far too low.
Seeing that what they handled still amounted to two or three potions, he could not have said how baffled he was, or how disappointed. Afraid his handiwork would actually decline, Derek changed course for the history faculty. Better to swallow whatever hidden pieces that faculty had lying around. He had not, however, given up on raising the alchemist class. Fortune, ability, and even the hidden pieces he could spend at once — he used them all, and at last completed this secret workshop.
And the skill that opened once the workshop was complete was none other than Falling Flowers of Ten Thousand.
Falling Flowers of Ten Thousand
The methods for making the hidden weapons, the poisons, and the medicines the skill required had been carved into his mind. In the end, the alchemist class had been essential. When he had seen its power thrown against the monsters the day before, he had even felt proud of having raised it.
The part that still failed to satisfy him—
Falling Flowers of Ten Thousand... this thing is a monster that eats money.
Worthy of a finisher, the poison and medicinal ingredients for a single casting already devoured an enormous budget. If a day ever came when he had to unfold it twice in a row, he might go bankrupt. Anyway, if he meant to develop his class skills, the alchemist skill had to develop with them, and what that development required was difficult rare material to work. The rarer the material, the better his hands became. And then, in the middle of that need—
The Ghost King's heart...! This isn't merely rare material. This is the final boss walking in all at once.
A rare material of final-boss grade. The Ghost King had been weakened as far as a Ghost King could be weakened, so the quality of the material had fallen about five grades. Even so, it was the Ghost King's heart. Harder than anything he had handled before, and its worth was astronomical. Honestly, he hesitated over whether he could work it properly. Even so, Derek willingly raised his hand. Part of it was to raise the alchemist class, and within the kingdom there was probably no other craftsman capable of handling that material besides him. But more than anything, the reason he wanted to refine it was, when it came down to it—
To repay a kindness. If nothing else.
He had a debt to pay. It was still growing, even now.
......He transferred me on purpose, because I was in a bind.
The man said he had brought him along to make an Assistant Instructor of him, but Derek had eyes. He had drawn too much notice in the Ghost King subjugation, so Lee Han had deliberately pulled him into the sword faculty, knowing that if Derek attracted any more attention than he should, his freedom to act would be cut short.
......Just what kind of person is he?
Derek glanced at him. At the man touring the workshop without the slightest stir, even after entrusting him with a precious material. Was he not worried Derek might burn the treasure to ash? Impossible to tell whether his nerve was simply that large, or whether wealth did not stick to him. But the reason Derek kept glancing over now was not that boldness.
One Hundred and Eight Arhats. Plum Blossom Sword. He's teaching this far too openly.
He could tell from the other words the man let fall, one by one. Of course, it might have been Derek's own mistake. The one who had made this game, or the original, was Made in Korea, was he not? Eastern terms might have been mixed in here and there like errors. Derek did not think that was it. He looked for another reason, and the conclusion he reached was a single one. Even if the man was not a Player like himself—
Someone from home?
A countryman who had entered this game by one means or another. And if he truly was such a person—
I have to apologize.
As a developer who had made this damned game... should he not tell him he was sorry?
Fwoosh!
To repay even that thin thread of guilt, Derek gathered his whole mind and set to the reagents. Unfortunately, the zeal that showed itself along with the apology was plain to see.
That's the real thing?
He was going to have to judge exactly how dangerous this was.
...Ha. I'm not joking. I really do have to make him assistant instructor number two.
He had said it half in jest, but looking at the boy now, greed was unavoidable. The kid listened better than assistant instructor — slave — number one, and he was diligent besides. He could work alchemy, and he could even use Falling Flowers of Ten Thousand. Lee Han had the feeling there was still more in him waiting to come out. Which meant...
To think I'd meet someone who set my mouth watering worse than a man with an excavator license.
It was the sort of feeling a sergeant major got when a laborer with ten years in the dirt turned up in front of him. Nothing short of a talent he would have to pin down as a specialist sergeant, no two ways about it.
A genius swordsman back for a second life?
A mage heroine riding someone else's body?
He didn't need any of that.
A skilled hand like Taechang was the best there was.