003 – Nymph Oinoi # 3
Back in the old days, before the rifts had ever torn the world open, there was a period when celebrities who claimed to be suffering from malicious comments kept appearing on TV.
The prescription their counselors gave them was simple.
Don't read the comments.
But that's just how the human heart works. If someone, somewhere, is talking about you, you can't help wanting to know exactly what they're saying.
It was in exactly that spirit that I clicked on a post titled “Saw D-Rank Hunter Ha Ildo Today lol”.
Click—.
After a brief loading screen, a fairly short post spread itself out before my eyes.
“……”
I hadn't expected anything pleasant to be written there.
But seeing it with my own eyes made the whole world tilt dizzily in front of me anyway.
I'd thought I was numb to this kind of thing—I'd read thousands of posts like it five years ago—but apparently not. Considering whoever wrote it knew about my core harvest mistake, it had clearly been posted by someone who was actually at the scene today.
Steadying myself, I checked the comments too.
“……”
Yeah, well.
That pretty much summed up what I was now.
Someone who used to be famous, once upon a time. These days, whenever my name came up, it was nothing but material for mockery.
And yet, strangely, the fact that anyone still remembered me at all put me in a slightly better mood. I'll admit it now—I'd always kind of liked being the center of attention.
Of course, being noticed for all the wrong reasons was, honestly, just depressing.
A has-been, slowly fading from people's memories.
Was that really the life I had to accept?
“Hold on a second.”
Just then I looked over at Oinoi the nymph, sound asleep on my bed, breathing soft and even.
Oinoi was quite possibly the first nymph ever to arrive in this world.
If I handed her over to the authorities, it stood to reason that I, as her discoverer, would get a brief moment in the spotlight. Thinking about it made my feelings tangle into a complicated knot.
But it wasn't as if I had a wealth of options.
“So where am I supposed to sleep, then.”
It was the night the boiler had broken down.
I spread a spare blanket on the floor, lay down, and closed my eyes. The next thing I knew, I woke up thirsty and it was morning.
“How is it this late already?”
“It is morning…!”
Oinoi the nymph cried out cheerfully.
She seemed in better shape than yesterday, probably from having slept inside a warm blanket. For a moment I wondered if all of this might have been a dream—no such luck.
This, it seemed, was an undeniable reality.
“Wait here.”
I decided the morning called for the cereal I'd been saving, and was heading for the kitchen by the front entrance when I saw it—a pair of red high heels sitting by the door.
Shoes worth a good ten million won and change.
“…Crap…”
Just thinking about having to reimburse those made the room spin before my eyes.
And here I was, with a broken boiler, sleeping on a cold floor to boot.
If I had a lifeline in this world, it was this nymph, Oinoi.
“Though, come to think of it… these might still be useful somehow…”
Squint—.
I tilted my head, studying the shoes ruined by the royal jelly of the Bashkir Queen Bee.
The queen bee's jelly wasn't toxic or harmful to humans in any way, but it was notorious for being nearly impossible to wash off once it got on something.
Because of that property, it was said to be used for marking things that absolutely must not be wiped away—self-defense paintballs, for instance.
“If it weren't for this one stain, I could sell them secondhand.”
S-Rank awakener Seo Yerim.
She was beautiful enough that even I, terrified of her as I was, could grudgingly admit it—anything she'd owned could probably resell for a decent price.
Heck, with the collector's premium added on, they might even fetch more than the original cost.
Glug-glug—.
After pouring milk over the cereal, I held out a bowl to Oinoi the nymph.
Only after handing it over did I belatedly wonder—can nymphs even eat this? Is there anything she won't…—but Oinoi dug into the cereal with gusto, spoonful after spoonful.
“It is delicious…! The taste of this grain…! I can feel the warmth of Lady Demeter, goddess of the harvest, in every bite…! You have provided a fine meal, master of the house…!”
Oinoi had surprisingly good manners.
After thanking me a number of times, she suddenly declared:
“Then this Oinoi, having been fed, shall now help the master of this house…! This Oinoi was once a helper nymph entrusted with the cleaning of temples…! I shall clean your home…!”
Splash-splash—.
Oinoi the nymph went scurrying every which way through my cramped little apartment.
Supposedly cleaning, she was spraying water from the showerhead into every corner, catching it in a basin and flinging it around. It was a cleaning method of staggering audacity.
Thanks to her, everything I owned—my blankets, my bed, the furniture—ended up soaked.
I was, in a word, in full panic mode.
“Hey! What do you think you're doing?!”
At my shout, Oinoi froze solid.
She looked at me and declared, with perfect confidence, “I was cleaning…!” Her whole attitude said she hadn't the faintest idea she'd done anything wrong.
This was the sort of thing that happened all the time when drifters tried to adapt to life in this world.
I'd laughed at that internet story about the elf who shot an arrow at a tiger on a TV screen, calling it idiotic.
Now that I was the one living it, laughing wasn't so easy.
“From now on, ask me before you do anything.”
“Understood….”
Droop—.
Oinoi wilted in the most transparent way possible.
Had being scolded really cowed her that much?
No—looking closer, she seemed less sorry than disappointed that she couldn't spray water everywhere!
“This Oinoi loves wet-cleaning…! I am curious whether I may spray water upon the blankets and bed…!”
“……”
She was a deeply strange creature.
I shook my head, obviously.
“No.”
“Then I am curious whether I may spray water upon the shoe rack…!”
“No.”
“Then I am curious whether I may wipe clean the shoes stained with the royal jelly of the Bashkir Queen Bee…!”
“You can… clean them? You can actually get that off?”
I asked.
Whereupon Oinoi thrust her broad chest out proudly and said:
“This Oinoi was friends with Vitriol, nymph of honeyed water…! The honey-water nymphs are friends of the Bashkir bees…! They knew well how to cleanse the bees' secretions, and taught the method to me…!”
“Oh!?”
We set out to walk downtown first.
The goal was to find a big flower shop.
The reason was simple.
“To erase the royal jelly of the Bashkir Queen Bee, one must wash it with water in which hyacinth flowers have been rinsed…!”
According to Oinoi, we needed to get our hands on a flower called 'hyacinth'.
I had no idea whether she could actually clean the shoes—but if it worked, more than ten million won would be coming my way.
There was nothing I couldn't invest a day or two into.
So I was searching the internet and walking toward a large flower shop when Oinoi suddenly started trembling, glaring at a wall-mounted advertisement featuring elf models.
“Wicked long-eared elves, everywhere I look…!”
Wicked long-eared elves?
Now what was that supposed to mean?
As I was puzzling over it, Oinoi the nymph explained.
“Nymphs were always kind…! But the long-eared fairies appeared from distant lands and began seducing humans and making life miserable for nymphs…! The fairies of ancient lore were nymphs, in the beginning…!”
It was a strange story.
Still, one thing was clear: Oinoi disliked elves. From what I knew, drifter elves had never even mentioned nymphs before.
Anyway.
In that fashion, I managed to reach the flower shop.
It seemed to specialize in bouquets and corsages for couples—a world entirely foreign to me. But it was the only place nearby selling hyacinths in the middle of winter.
Oinoi let out a delighted wow.
“Flowers blooming in a winter this cold… how marvelous…!”
Oinoi was wearing the padded coat I'd lent her like an oversized long parka, hood pulled up over her head. She looked like nothing more than an ordinary elementary-school girl, and the shop's owner—a woman who could have been pushing thirty—smiled warmly at the sight.
“Looking for anything in particular?”
“Uh… do you have hyacinths?”
“Ah. One moment.”
Swiftly—.
Before long, the shop owner returned carrying a flower potted in a container no bigger than her palm.
The moment the nymph Oinoi laid eyes on it, she smirked—muhuhu.
“The hyacinth is the flower into which Hyacinthus, beloved of Apollo, was transformed…! In other words, a flower that bloomed from the love of a man and a man…!”
“What the—”
That was knowledge I could have done without.
A flower that bloomed from the love between two men.
It made me not want to take the pot into my hands.
But take it I did.
What choice did I have?
This might get the queen bee's jelly off those shoes.
If things went well, I could even fix the boiler with the money from selling them.
And beyond that—accepting hunters' ruined equipment, cleaning off the jelly for them… buying up stained goods cheap and reselling them….
“Heh heh.”
Scheming up ways to make money put me in an excellent mood.
Swiftly—.
Just as the wrapped flowers were being handed over to Oinoi—
She sniffed—sniff sniff—at the blossoms and said:
“This hyacinth has a most wondrous fragrance… and… if the oil of the flower can be obtained, then just as I said last night, it may be possible to dispel the curse that has taken root within your body…!”
“…Curse?”
Come to think of it, I remembered Oinoi trying to say something about a curse right before she fell asleep yesterday. A curse lodged in my body.
What in the world was she talking about?
“A flower shop?”
Seo Yerim was receiving a report from her secretary and partner, C-rank hunter Ahn Young-eun. Apparently, D-rank hunter Ha Ildo—the man responsible for ruining her shoes yesterday—had been spotted downtown, stopping by a flower shop of all places.
“A flower shop? Talk about a mismatch.”
Yerim gave a disdainful snort.
As she gazed out the office window, Young-eun ran her fingers through her short-cropped bob and asked, ever so casually:
“Maybe he's buying flowers for a girl? I mean, there's no reason for a man to buy flowers other than to give them to a woman.”
“Ha Ildo? Having a woman?”
“…Who knows? Hey, Yerim, you love flowers, remember? Maybe they're for you. Could be his way of apologizing for wrecking your shoes.”
Trying to pay off a ten-million-won pair of shoes with flowers?
That was how Yerim chose to take Young-eun's words.
It stung a little, her pride being what it was—but receiving an apology did sound like it might feel rather nice.
And so Seo Yerim waited in her office for the man to appear.
Except lunch came and went, and then evening arrived, and the D-rank hunter still hadn't shown his face at Seo Yerim's office.
Yerim's mind kept circling back to what Young-eun had said—“There's no reason for a man to buy flowers other than to give them to a woman.”—the words replaying over and over in her head.