035 – Who Gets the Golden Apple? # 2
Ding-dong-.
The message chime rang out from the phone of Yu Ari, who had been checking over her equipment in her workshop.
It was a TelTalk message from Ha Ildo.
"Sunbaenim is contacting me?"
Yu Ari's mood lifted at once.
Then, the moment she opened her phone, she couldn't help but be thoroughly startled.
A strange group chat had been created.
And her sunbae Ha Ildo was talking about something called a Golden Apple.
'It raises the amount of mana your body can hold?'
An extraordinarily powerful effect.
If something like this were ever announced to the world, it would no doubt sell for an astronomical price.
It would also be a prime research material for the 5th Industry.
And as a doctor, Yu Ari saw another angle entirely.
"Humanity hasn't known only progress since the rifts opened. A whole host of exotic diseases came pouring in with them. Who knows — this might help cure some of them."
No.
All those noble thoughts were drowned out almost instantly by a single emotion.
"I want it."
An apple Ha Ildo had raised with his own hands.
She found herself wanting to add it to her collection.
Especially considering her position — competing against all those other women.
'And here I thought I had no competitive streak at all.'
The reason Yu Ari had never updated her rank beyond B was that it had simply been enough. While Seo Yerim — the woman people kept lumping together with her as some manufactured "rival" — rode a wave of success ever upward, Yu Ari had stopped updating her record, retired from the active roster, and quietly faded from memory. That had been enough for her too.
And yet once again, Yu Ari had discovered something about herself that even she hadn't known.
"So it turns out I'm competitive after all."
She was quite surprised to have unearthed a side of herself she'd never noticed. And with it, a wave of nostalgia rose up — a memory of long ago, when she'd been nothing but a young, timid girl still learning what she was capable of.
Back then—.
She could still see it: someone striding brilliantly toward his goal. How magnificent he'd looked. He had already been a hero in Yu Ari's heart, and he would remain one forever after.
"All you have to do is stay exactly as you are, Sunbaenim. Because you're the kind of person who can push forward again, no matter how hard it gets, no matter how stuck you become. The dirty work, the painful work, the thankless work — I'll do all of that for you."
Swipe-.
So saying, Yu Ari opened her phone and posted an anonymous thread on Blinder, the SNS for awakeners.
It was work she'd done countless times before, and her hands moved with practiced ease.
She'd been posting about dog-squirrels a lot lately too, so typing it out on her phone was easier than eating cold porridge.
'If I raise the profile of dog-squirrels in general, then naturally word about Ha Ildo sunbaenim — who's raising Keongkeongi, the prime of all dog-squirrels — will spread far and wide on its own.'
Yu Ari was already feeling giddy about it.
It felt like the old days, back when Yu Ari was still in high school — the days when any post with "Ha Ildo" in the title would get flooded with upvotes and comments.
Sure enough, the comments began to arrive.
"Self-promotion, they say."
The pleasant mood curdled instantly, and her brows knitted into a scowl.
To not know Ha Ildo — one of the most famous awakeners on the planet, and a first-generation graduate no less.
Could there really be anyone this ignorant left in the world?
Yu Ari logged into her other accounts and began hammering the post with upvotes, firing off comments in rapid succession.
Only after posting about four comments did her mood finally begin to recover.
Under normal circumstances she would have kept flooding it with comments and upvotes from a dozen more accounts to push the post onto the front page, but there was no time today.
She could hardly get so absorbed in her hobby that she missed out on the apple.
Swipe-.
Yu Ari pulled her car keys from the charger and climbed in.
"I should probably park out in front of the village and walk the rest of the way, right? Sunbaenim doesn't have a car yet, so I imagine the people who come on foot make the better impression."
"Urgh. Someone's talking trash about me."
Lee Jina's older sister, Lee Seona, clutched her chest and shuddered violently.
It was the pain.
Lee Seona felt it often enough these days.
"Hey, you okay?"
Lee Jina asked from the sink, where she'd been doing the dishes.
Lee Seona let out a long breath before answering.
"No, it hurts like hell. I really gotta quit the cigarettes."
And then she burst out laughing — pahahaha.
Lee Jina knew perfectly well that her sister's chest pain had nothing to do with smoking.
It had been going on for roughly ten years, after all.
Ever since that rift accident long ago swept her up in it, and she'd fallen ill with Mana Sickness.
Ding-dong-.
Just then, the doorbell rang.
When she opened the door, there stood a man in a business suit, shuffling nervously in place.
"Ah, hello. This is Seon-a's place, right?"
And who could this one be—.
'Probably her boyfriend again.'
Lee Jina's sister had cycled through boyfriend after boyfriend from middle school all the way until her late twenties — the present day.
They'd mostly been low-grade punks and deadbeats, and a few of them had even dared to flirt with Lee Jina, the little sister, while they were dating her sister.
Of course, ever since Lee Jina had awakened, nobody had the nerve to try that anymore—.
'But her boyfriends were always all the same: unreliable men who couldn't commit to anything.'
This one, though, was dressed in a crisp, clean suit. Of course, since her sister had brought him home, he was obviously not going to turn out to be a decent person, so Lee Jina scowled at him from the moment she laid eyes on him.
"Hey. You swapped boyfriends again?"
Lee Jina asked her sister flatly.
And her sister replied:
"Not a boyfriend — your future brother-in-law! Sang-shik, this is the little sister I told you about."
"A pleasure to meet you. My name is Kim Sang-shik. I work at Osa Electronics, and back in my school days I used to work part-time at a moving company during every break. Oh, hold on, I have a business card somewhere—"
"Ohohoho, you don't need to give my little sister your business card! You're not here on business! Come inside, my room's this way! Jina, dear, he can be a bit prickly—"
Click-.
So saying, her sister and her meek, milk-toast boyfriend started to slip off toward the bedroom.
At that moment, Lee Jina posed a question to the man who had introduced himself as Kim Sang-shik.
"Sang-shik, was it? You're clearly well-educated, you work at a good company — so why on earth do you want to marry our sister? Do you actually like her?"
Then Lee Jina narrowed her eyes into slits and drew her mana up from deep within. Her mana had a peculiar affinity: it reacted keenly to the emotions of others.
'Any ordinary lie, and I'll catch it on the spot.'
The exploration of emotion.
You could call that the defining trait of Lee Jina as an awakener.
Soon enough, Kim Sang-shik stammered out his answer.
"Yes, I, I do… really like her! I want to marry her!"
"Sang-shik! What an embarrassing thing to say! Come on, let's get inside!"
Her sister seized the man's arm and yanked him off into the room.
Click. BANG-.
Lee Jina scowled hard at the door, which had been shut just a touch too forcefully.
'Doesn't seem like a lie, at least. If my sister could actually land a proper man for once, Dad could finally retire with an easy mind. That wretch. Has no idea how much trouble she puts people through, just for her own sake.'
Their old-fashioned father had originally intended to pass the family moving business down to his eldest daughter's husband.
But Lee Seona had recoiled from the moving-company work at all costs, and so the burden had fallen to Lee Jina instead.
Lee Jina liked driving, so she'd thrown herself into the work wholeheartedly.
And to pay for her sister's treatment, she'd grinded through rift after rift, earning money just as desperately.
Ding-dong-.
Then a message arrived from Ha Ildo.
"A golden apple?"
Its claimed effect was that it increased the mana capacity of the body.
Lee Jina closed her eyes and pictured her sister, Lee Seona, who had just disappeared behind that door with her boyfriend.
The golden apple.
There was no telling how effective it might be for ordinary people, but for Mana Sickness — a disease where the body rejected incoming mana and caused searing pain — it surely had to hold some promise.
"Must cost a fortune."
Foods and items that boosted mana capacity.
Every last one of them was ruinously expensive.
And the market was crawling with scams besides.
How much money had her family burned on them over the years?
"But this one's going to be the real thing."
An opportunity.
Lee Jina decided she could not let it slip past her.
Vroom-.
A car pulled up in front of my yard.
That made two already.
"Lee Jina. So you came too."
Cool, cynical Lee Jina.
Her showing up at my house with her eyes on the golden apple genuinely took me by surprise.
True, I was the one who'd sent the message — but Jina had always seemed pretty uninterested in awakener business, hadn't she?
Had she simply been unable to resist the temptation of this glittering golden lure?
"Come on in."
I invited Lee Jina inside the house.
Seo Yerim and Yu Ari, who had arrived a good five to ten minutes earlier, greeted her.
"It was Jina, right? I'm Seo Yerim."
"Jina, we met earlier, remember? Nice to see you again today."
Crackle-.
Somehow I could practically see sparks flying between their eyes.
Everyone's determination to claim the golden apple for herself was running white-hot.
Keongkeongi, who'd been orbiting around my feet, let out a low ━Grrrrl…! and slunk away into the yard at speed.
He simply didn't want to be anywhere near this, I supposed.
Well, fair enough. This room was about to become a fiercely contested battlefield.
Incidentally, Oinoi was already triple-locking her bedroom door.
Swipe-.
Just then, An Yeongeun came up to me.
She was, at a glance, the very picture of a "secretary."
"Ildo, everyone's here now, so could you show us the merchandise?"
The merchandise-.
At those words, I brought out a styrofoam box.
It was one of those boxes the village elders were forever loading up with fruit for people — and inside it sat the golden apple.
Slide-.
The moment I lifted the lid of the styrofoam box, An Yeongeun gasped, "Wooow—."
For a moment, her eyes were dyed in that gorgeous, gleaming gold—.
Then An Yeongeun asked:
"You won't sell it for money?"
"No. I honestly have no idea what the market price would even be. I was planning to just give them away for free, as a token of thanks — but the three of you are the ones who came to mind, so it felt like I should at least give everyone a fair shot and hear you out. So if you've got a good reason why you need one, speak up—."
Before I could even finish, Seo Yerim's hand shot up into the air.
"Give it to me! If you give it to me, I'll put you in a Telos ad campaign as my co-model. You know what happens to your Instagram followers when you become a Telos ad model, right? They explode. You said you wanted to get famous, didn't you! More followers means more sponsorships coming in — you'd be raking in the money in no time!"