Oinoi and the Small Stationery Store # 3
Nymphs, it was said, loved nothing more than to sing.
The Song of Ditch Water, in particular, was supposed to be a favorite among their kind — the very song I had once sung to summon Keongkeongi the dog-squirrel.
"This Oinoi believes there is another nymph sister waiting somewhere in this world, and that is what this Oinoi declares…! Oh, how this Oinoi longs to meet a nymph sister soon…!"
Oinoi looked absolutely delighted at the thought of another nymph's existence, and that strange, irrepressible vitality of hers made me almost believe the moving company's madam was still out there somewhere, alive and well.
"Can a person really survive that long inside a rift? I was trapped for half a day and I got sick. That's how bad it was."
Lee Seona — the delinquent Jina's older sister — clearly couldn't bring herself to believe that her mother, missing in a rift for ten years now, could still be alive and unharmed.
And honestly, she had a point. A rift was a brutally harsh ecosystem for an ordinary person to survive in. The thick mana saturating a rift's interior was poison to anyone without an awakened constitution.
What surfaced in my mind then was something Yu Ari had once told me.
Awakeners' constitutions are hereditary.
That was why, back in the day, Yu Ari and Lee Jeonghun had traded talk of an arranged marriage — to produce the next generation of awakeners.
"There is a high probability that Jina's mana aptitude was passed down from her mother. Normally, mana awakening is only possible between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. But if her mother shares a similar constitution with her daughter—"
Even if she never became an awakener herself, might she have adapted to the rift's mana well enough to endure it? Whether that was possible or impossible, I couldn't say for certain.
But there was the nymph's song.
And there was the dream the boss kept having.
I believed those two things were the evidence.
"The madam has a high probability of being alive."
"Is that actually true!?"
The moving company's boss seized my arm in a fierce grip. The exhaustion in his eyes from just getting off work moments ago began to fill with light.
"Please — find my wife for me!"
How long had it been since anyone had clung to me this desperately? There was a time when situations like this were almost routine for me.
As those old days flickered through my mind, I nodded.
"I'll do everything in my power."
One problem remained, however.
The rift the madam had fallen into had sealed itself shut after a single day. Some rifts closed automatically, even without their rift core being destroyed.
The trouble was that when — and where — a rift like that might reopen was anyone's guess.
It might never open again at all.
Why do rifts open? Why do they come into being at all?
It was a mystery humanity had yet to solve.
I found myself wondering, anew, how on earth I could reach the rift where the madam was. What was a rift, really?
The question Oinoi had once asked — wondering why she had come to this world in the first place — flooded my mind all over again.
Naturally, I had no answer.
But I had a rough idea of who might.
"Seo Yerim, you busy?"
I stepped out into the yard for a moment and called her, intending to ask about rifts.
"Nothing major. Do you know what a rift actually is? To put it precisely — do you know how they form, and why they form in the first place?"
Seo Yerim was an S-rank awakener. And the daughter of a mega-corporation. By every measure, the odds were good that she knew more than the average person.
"─I don't know either."
Figured as much. Yerim had always been the type to move with her body rather than rack her brains. A field girl through and through.
"Then would Yu Ari happen to know?"
"─Yu Ari? If I don't know it, what chance does she have! Don't you dare hang up! I'm calling my dad. We have an advisory doctor in our 5th Industry division — if anyone knows rifts, it's him—"
And there Yerim's voice cut off clean.
I waited maybe five minutes.
"─Found it. This is a paper the doctor wrote on rifts. Fresh off the press, just published. I've sent you the text file by email, so go read it. Oh, and you owe me one for this. Got it?"
Click.
She hung up right there.
I dug through the email on my phone and opened the text file — and promptly felt my eyes spin in their sockets.
"It's all in English."
The paper was written entirely in English. Only now did I notice the author's name: A. N. Gate. So he was a foreigner.
"Dr. Gate, is it."
With "gate" right there in his name. Weren't rifts called "gates" overseas? Now that was a name worthy of a rift specialist.
The problem was that my English wasn't nearly good enough. Light conversation with foreigners had always been manageable, but deciphering a technical paper like this was beyond me.
I was about to call Seo Yerim back — then my hand froze mid-motion.
Because she would almost certainly file every one of these favors away as another debt.
"An English paper…"
And then Yu Ari's face came to mind.
In some drama or other I'd watched, medical doctors all wrote and read their papers in English. If so, Yu Ari could surely manage. Hadn't she even written that paper about mitochondria-something-or-other?
Would it be all right to hand Seo Yerim's paper over to her? I asked Yerim, and a reply came back: [It was published in the US yesterday anyway.]
Reassured, I sent the text file to Yu Ari.
The reply came in under ten seconds.
I called her straight away.
"You got the paper? Supposedly it's by some famous foreign authority on the 5th Industry, but it's all technical jargon in English. I can't make heads or tails of it."
"─Oh my. Shall I take a quick look? Give me ten minutes."
Ten minutes. More than enough time.
Just before she hung up, I added one more thing.
"If there's a section about why rifts occur, take notes and send it to me. And if there's a section about how they occur, note that down too."
Having said it out loud, I felt a little guilty. It felt awfully one-sided, laying it all on her like that.
"If this works out, dinner's on me. Now that I think about it, lately all I've done is eat your food, Ari. I'll buy you beef, so please — help me out."
"─Okay!"
Ah, how agreeable she was, with never a "no" to be heard.
Ten minutes later, Yu Ari called me.
"─It runs about twenty pages, so I gave it a quick skim. There's a lot of interesting material in there. I've translated the sections you asked for and sent them over."
I'd doubted it could really be done in ten minutes — and yet it was done. Ari was sharper than I gave her credit for. Which was exactly why she should be working as a doctor.
Doctors truly were a different breed. They even pulled the dying back from the brink.
I gazed at the translated pages Yu Ari had sent. Even translated, the text was dense with difficult, unfamiliar terms — but the passages she had marked for emphasis were, surprisingly, crystal clear in meaning.
"Every phenomenon has its cause. A rift is not a sudden occurrence; there exists a logical, scientific explanation for it."
"Until now, the 'random theory' has dominated discussions of how rifts form and by what principle they arise. This author, however — in collaboration with the Telos corporation — has discovered an algorithm capable of generating a rift at any location one desires."
An algorithm that could create a rift wherever you wanted it?
Was something like that even possible?
The world was turning faster than I had ever realized. And this astonishing development was, for me, extraordinarily good news.
An algorithm for summoning rifts to a chosen place. Wondering what that could possibly mean, I read on — and the paper only grew stranger.
"A rift is drawn toward intense cause. The cause in question may take the form of a powerful awakener, an object, or even a place."
Rifts, pulled in by cause.
The wording was dense, but if I read it generously, it meant that in this world, a rift could be artificially drawn in — its entrance forced open by human hands.
And if that was true, then opening the rift where Jina's mother might be trapped was no longer a fantasy.
"Dr. Newgate wrote a paper like this? Apparently it hasn't gotten any attention domestically yet. Incredible. Forcing rifts open — how much money must that experiment have burned through?"
Clack.
Steel-armed Kang Cheolmin, reloading the machinery on his arm, clicked his tongue in a room so dark it had no windows at all.
It was Lee Jeonghun, listening in on the conversation, who answered.
"Astronomically. Our own Ohsa ran experiments in cooperation with the elves, you know. You open a rift, dump trash or industrial waste inside, close it again — environmental problem solved. Clean and simple."
"Really? Corporations have better technology than we give them credit for. So — Ari. What's your read? Think it's actually feasible with the tech we've got right now?"
"There's no foundation whatsoever. No budget, either."
Yu Ari shook her head, calm and composed.
At that moment, Lee Jeonghun slipped into the gap like a weasel darting through a fence.
"The money and the data — I can supply all of it! I just join Ohsa Group and quietly pull the documents out. Our files are better than Telos's anyway. Of course they are — we're the number one corporation! The frontrunner of the 5th Industry! Ohsa!"
Lee Jeonghun, once an S-rank awakener, was in visibly high spirits now that he had a role to play within the group.
Then Kang Cheolmin, working the controls of his steel arm, slapped Jeonghun square on the back with a mighty wham.
"Ha! Codename 'Prince.' Glad you finally get your chance to shine in the organization? Well — rift control technology is something we ought to be the ones holding. It's far too dangerous to leave in the hands of any single corporation."
Kang Cheolmin was picturing the worst catastrophe that a technology like this could unleash.
The early days of the rifts.
How many people had gone missing? How many had died?
As a first-generation survivor, he understood that horror better than anyone alive.
"And one more thing…"
His eyes moved slowly across the English text of the paper.
One of the causes said to draw rifts into being: an awakener bearing powerful mana.
"Strong awakeners give rise to strong rifts. That's why South Korea keeps only three S-ranks. It's why every nation on Earth deliberately controls the number of S-rank awakeners they allow to exist."
The higher the caliber of awakeners, the more dangerous the rifts they drew in became.
When an S-rank awakener had been born, the T-rank rifts that erupted in their wake had arrived like a great calamity upon the world.
Then what if an awakener surpassing even S-rank were to appear in this world… what on earth would happen?
Kang Cheolmin indulged in the idle thought and gave a small snort of laughter.
Because such a thing could not possibly exist. And of course — long before it ever did, they would already have moved to snuff it out.
"They say there's a way to open the rift. But apparently it costs quite a lot of money."
I told Jina's family the truth, plain and simple.
Money.
At that single word, the boss's expression shifted through a whole gallery of shades.
"Either way, there is a method — that's what matters! Money is something we can earn!"
Earn.
That was my own thought too, but I was certain this would be no ordinary sum. Machinery of the 5th Industry. It would surely be astronomically expensive. Perhaps a sum an ordinary person could work a lifetime and never lay eyes on.
"Money…"
Jina clicked her tongue and scrunched up her face. There was something ominous in that expression — something that made it look as though she might march out and shake down passersby at any moment.
That was when Oinoi began to shiver all over.
"This Oinoi has piles and piles of money, and that is what this Oinoi declares…! This Oinoi picked up a great many coins under the bed and out in the yard, and that is what this Oinoi declares…! There are heaps of them in the coin purse Grandmother gave, and that is what this Oinoi declares…!"
Jingle.
Oinoi fished a little red coin purse out of her tracksuit pocket and flipped it open. It was stuffed to bursting with coins — and the amount inside was honestly substantial.
When on earth had she saved up all this money?
"This Oinoi saved this money so that, upon meeting the nymph sisters, she might purchase 'land' and build a house for them, and that is what this Oinoi declares…! You may spend every last coin of it, and this Oinoi so declares…!"
With that, Oinoi thrust out her chest, brimming with pride.
There was, it turned out, a rather admirable reason behind her saving.
A reason.
And just then, the word cause brushed past the edge of my mind.
"They say rifts open because there is a reason for them to open. The rift didn't come looking for us. We were the ones who drew the rift in."
Ten years ago.
The village streets of that time. The people who had come and gone in front of the stationery store.
If we staged the scene again — recreated those circumstances exactly as they had been back then?
"Boss, you're still in touch with everyone who used to live in the neighborhood, right? Everyone who moved away, you helped carry their furniture too, didn't you? Am I right?"
"Well, sure, but… why all of a sudden?"
"Even without the money, we should try everything we can for now. Please get word around so that everyone can gather in front of Alpha Stationery Store within the next few days."