032 – My Lime Golden Apple Tree # 3
People from the same neighborhood inevitably shared a lot of the same past.
It went something like this.
"You know the Euljeum Stationery Store? The one with that machine out front where you'd drop in 100 won and gamble on rock-paper-scissors. Win, and a card popped out that you could use to buy junk food."
The stationery store held my childhood memories exactly as they'd been.
I loved thinking back on the place and talking about it. After all, my entire elementary school years lived there.
But lately I hadn't really had anyone to share those stories with.
Yet Lee Jina understood exactly where I was talking about, and immediately at that.
"Wasn't it 100 won per card? We'd buy things like sausages and hotteok with them and roast them over a burner. Stuffed the sausage inside the hotteok and ate it like that."
"Yes! You sandwich a sausage between two hotteok and call it a hamburger. That was actually a trend I started in our neighborhood, you know. So you've had it too, huh. You'd better be grateful."
"What are you even saying."
Lee Jina and I had a decent gap in our ages. But it wasn't so large that we couldn't call it a shared generational memory.
She didn't seem to dislike this kind of talk either, since she was chattier than usual.
"I played a ton of that 'Mechanical Snail' game they had in front of the stationery store. You'd put in 100 won and could work your way up to round 4."
Mechanical Snail.
I knew that game well too.
And I realized that Lee Jina and I had more shared memories than I'd expected.
"The stationery store had Mechanical Snail around... probably my fifth grade year? Back then there wasn't a single kid hammering away at that arcade cabinet that I didn't know."
Could Lee Jina and I have actually met as children?
Nothing came to mind. With a presence as striking as hers, there was no way I would have forgotten.
But then, memories of childhood are like words written in the sand—waves of time erode them little by little until they fade.
Anyway.
Today I sat in the passenger seat and traded quite a few stories about the neighborhood with Lee Jina.
There were occasional silences that swallowed the two of us whole, but that was still far better than sitting in the passenger seat with my mouth clamped shut.
"Ha Ildo, didn't your mom hang up a banner about you placing second in your whole elementary school? At the intersection in front of the mart. Your name showed up every time I drove past, and I kept wondering who the hell you were."
That was when I was in sixth grade.
I'd thought it would become a fond memory in hindsight, but it turned out that embarrassing memories never get polished up, no matter how much time passes.
Another brief silence.
It was always me who broke the awkward silences first, and while I was racking my brain for something to say this time, she spoke.
"The Euljeum Stationery Store is still there."
"Really?"
"The couple who run it have gotten pretty old, but still."
No way.
That place, stuffed to the brim with the dreams of my childhood. The place that shared half of my elementary school days—it still existed?
I found myself getting emotional in all sorts of ways.
"We should go together sometime. We've got a date to fake anyway."
Lee Jina's proposal was radical.
A date. The words snagged somewhere in my head like a lagging game frame, and while I was still sputtering, Lee Jina smoothly began backing the truck into a parking spot and opened her mouth.
"My dad's touchy about his daughters' boyfriends because of my older sister, so there's a whole checklist of things I have to do. Just act like we're on a normal date, snap some photos, and show him. That's all."
I see.
I could understand that.
And honestly, it wasn't a bad arrangement for me either. My own mom and dad had started a family group chat lately and kept peppering me with messages like Is the date going well?
Sending them a single photo would keep them quiet for a good while.
"Get out first and get in line. I'll finish parking and join you."
"Got it."
At Lee Jina's words, I climbed out of the truck.
And there in front of me, awakeners who'd come to explore the Fixed Rift stood in a line. They gave me a quick once-over as I stepped down from the old truck, then brightened.
Soon a man asked me, "Are you here alone? There are two of us. Care to join up? This Fixed Rift allows parties of three, after all."
Beside the man stood a woman with her arms crossed. Her gear was better than his.
An awakener couple, then.
I'd heard that couples working rifts together tended to fight a lot.
In fact, I'd personally witnessed plenty of couples brawling mid-dungeon, or breaking up on the spot and ruining both the party mood and the mission, so I wasn't fond of couples.
That's the only reason. Truly.
"I have a companion as well. My apologies, but I'll have to decline the party invite. There she is now."
Thud—
Having fully finished parking, Lee Jina climbed down from the truck and hauled the cargo out of the bed.
Perhaps cowed by the delinquent aura radiating off her, the couple both muttered "Right, of course," and abruptly twisted their heads away.
"Oppa, let's not make eye contact with her."
"Agreed."
I guess looking like a tough-unni makes life easier all over the place.
Maybe I should try scowling a bit too.
"What's with the face? You're making me want to shake you down."
"......"
On second thought, no.
A smiling face invites good fortune, as they say.
Soon Lee Jina looked at an electronic display board set up nearby and spoke. "Each team gets ten minutes of exploration time, so it'll be about an hour until our turn. That's enough time to find our third member."
This Sejong City Fixed Rift admitted parties of three by regulation.
But we were only two.
Picking up a party member on the spot was common enough, so I was glancing around when someone cautiously approached me.
"Excuse me—are you looking for a party member? I came alone, so..."
It was a woman's voice somewhere between hesitant and warmly gentle.
The moment I turned to see her face, I jolted in surprise.
"What—Ari? It's you!"
"Huh? Sunbae?"
It was Yu Ari.
My junior, whom I hadn't laid eyes on in ages because she'd been buried in some busy work or other.
Yu Ari clapped her hands together—clap!—and was absolutely delighted.
"Sunbae! How on earth do we run into each other in a place like this? It's the kind of coincidence you'd hardly believe was real! I'm so happy to see you! I came here in such a rush that I don't know a single soul here and—"
Swoosh—
Yu Ari raised her open palm toward me.
A high-five request, obviously.
Swoosh, clap—
Feeling like a proper social butterfly, I smacked her palm with mine.
To think we'd meet here of all places. Korea really is a small country after all.
"Ari, weren't you done with fieldwork?"
"Fixed Rifts are safe, after all. And the paper I'm writing right now needs the Sun Stone—which only appears here in the Sejong City Fixed Rift."
"Really? What paper?"
I asked out of pure curiosity. It was the first time in my life I'd ever met someone actually writing an academic paper.
Yu Ari gave a smile, stood up straight, and rolled her eyes side to side for about two seconds.
"It's not a major journal, so it'll probably sound unfamiliar even to you, Sunbae. It's called 'A Brief Study on Measuring the Entropy Coefficient of How Fixed Rifts Affect Women's Mitochondria and Hemoglobin Production.'"
That was, indeed, an unfamiliar title.
All I could do was marvel at how awakener-physicians threw around such technical, difficult-sounding terms. The mere mention of "entropy" and I was completely lost.
Truly, I was built for the field.
Soon, Yu Ari's round, bright eyes turned toward Lee Jina.
"Um—pardon me, but who is this? I've been curious since earlier."
Lee Jina had a face that naturally summoned question marks from people. Time for me to step up and do the introductions, friend-of-a-friend style.
"This is Lee Jina. Same C-rank as me, and my rift partner. Jina, this is my junior, Yu Ari. She was pretty famous back in the day—maybe you've heard of her?"
"I have. Saw her on TV now and then. That was a while ago, though. Then she vanished one day and I wondered what happened to her—so she was working as a public health physician."
Lee Jina apparently had a pretty good memory.
I'd gotten a vague sense of it from how well she recalled the Euljeum Stationery Store and my banner, but to think she even knew Yu Ari had once been famous.
Well, it made sense—Yu Ari and Seo Yerim had been the twin pillars of their era, after all.
Anyway.
The three-person party was formed without a hitch.
# # #
"Ari, it's been a while since you did fieldwork. You'll be all right?"
"Sunbae, even if I look like this, I climbed all the way to B-rank! If anything, isn't this your first time entering a Fixed Rift, Sunbae? You're not secretly scared, are you?"
We traded idle banter as we prepared to enter the rift.
It was my first time ever entering a Fixed Rift, so I was both fairly nervous and faintly thrilled.
━Woof-woof…!
━Zzji…!
Keongkeongi and Ang-ang-i seemed to be stoking their fighting spirit too.
Not that I had any idea whether those two would actually get their moment to shine.
"All right, we're entering."
Lee Jina, an active C-rank with plenty of Fixed Rift experience, took the team lead and gave the order. We gathered our gear, entered the rift—and immediately, I came face to face with a remarkable sight.
"It's actual ruins."
The sheer variety of ecosystems inside rifts was so famous it hardly needed explaining.
And among those ecosystems were not just natural environments, but artificial ones like this—man-made architecture. This Sejong City rift felt overwhelmingly like a 'temple' someone had built. Murals were painted on the walls, and the stonework was calm and orderly, pleasing to the eye.
Soon, the knowledgeable Yu Ari explained. "According to the elves, this place is the Temple of Baldr. It was a temple devoted to the light god Baldr, and apparently that's how it became a rift."
The Temple of Baldr, huh.
I looked at the pebbles scattered nearby. When I picked one up, I felt a warm energy in my palm.
"Is this the Sun Stone?"
"Yes, that's right. Every pebble scattered on the ground here carries the sun's mana. Take as many as you like—it all resets every ten minutes anyway. Just be careful with the time limit."
A rift that reset every ten minutes.
I'd heard about it, but experiencing it firsthand was another matter entirely.
"So in ten minutes, no matter how many pebbles we take, everything goes right back to looking like this? Like creation ex nihilo? Is that even possible? Incredible."
"Exactly. Because resources well up every ten minutes, the government deliberately left the rift open and restricted access instead of closing it. That's why they call it a Fixed Rift. And thanks to rifts like this one, the 5th Industry—"
Yu Ari was my junior.
I was supposed to be the one teaching her things, and now the roles had reversed. Part of me was proud of her; another part ached with regret and embarrassment at all the time I'd spent standing still.
Then Lee Jina asked, "I heard you left the field, but you know this stuff in detail. Most active hunters don't know this much. And by the look of it, that gear's fairly new too—"
Mid-sentence, Lee Jina snapped into a fighting stance.
The delinquent girl drew a sword from her hip and put on a ferocious expression.
And then, from the far end of that long corridor, scorpions came scuttling out, shrieking a horrific kaaaak—
Seizing the moment, I decided to play knowledgeable myself.
"So those are 'Assassin Scorpions.'"
Each one measured roughly fifty centimeters long and thirty tall. The carapace was rock-solid, and a single sting from the tail was said to paralyze a healthy full-grown cow within ten minutes.
One glance told you they looked terrifying—but their intelligence was that of an ordinary scorpion, and with C-rank weapons, they could apparently be handled without much trouble.
Then Yu Ari began steadying her breath with a long hoo—. Her shoulders trembled faintly, and her shaking hands stirred up old memories.
Back in the day, whenever Yu Ari was thrown into a sparring match or real combat, she'd often freeze up and fail to perform at even half her usual level.
She'd climbed to B-rank, so I'd assumed she'd broken that habit.
Was she nervous from being back in the field after so long?
"Yu Ari, get behind me."
"...I'm sorry, Sunbae."
"Talk later."
Vwooom—
I channeled C-rank mana into it and drew the beam saber.
A beam saber glowing bright as a fluorescent light. Its brilliant radiance made even Lee Jina do a double take.
"Isn't that an expensive weapon?"
"It is—and swinging it in actual combat has been my dream. I've chopped plenty of logs, but I've never cut a living thing before. Keongkeongi, you stay put this time, you hear me?"
━Woof-woof…!
A modified version of the weapon S-Rank Lee Jeonghun used.
The thought of wielding it in real combat made my body itch with excitement.
Itchy, itchy—
It really did itch! Like ants were crawling all over my back!
━Zzji—
Wait—now that I looked, the honey ant Ang-ang-i was actually crawling all over my back!
Pop—
He dropped from my shoulder to the ground and planted himself between the scorpions and us, raising and lowering his forelegs left and right.
━Zzzji—!
At that, the scorpions that had been surging toward us like a wave froze in place.
Then they each began chittering something at one another.
━Zzji?
━Zzzji?
━Jizji.
What could this be?
What on earth was happening right now?
I couldn't follow the details, but even I could tell the insects and arthropods were 'communicating' with each other in their own various languages!
━Zzji!
━Zzzji!
Rumble—
The scorpions vanished off somewhere.
Watching them go, Ang-ang-i, Emperor of the Honey Ants, waved his forelegs left and right at me.
━Zzji…!
"I might be saying something completely insane right now, but... I'm pretty sure Ang-ang-i is telling us to follow those scorpions?"