Grandpa Becomes an Elf (2)
"Why the hell are these ears so long? Look like some damn ghost girl's."
Three days had passed since Kim Han-sung possessed Estelle's body.
At first, Estelle had half-convinced herself she was seeing things on her deathbed. Only after finishing her ninth meal in this body did she slowly begin to accept that the situation was real.
It was far too vivid to dismiss as a hallucination. And to call it a hidden camera, elaborate special effects, or some technological reconstruction of the body — as far as she knew, human technology still wasn't sophisticated enough to produce a simulation this precise.
She had already been a dead woman walking, after all. If she framed it as a second life, this whole affair might even turn out to be a blessing.
But still.
"Why did I have to end up in some little brat's body… This just doesn't cut it. No dignity at all."
Estelle had plenty of complaints about the reflection staring back at her from the mirror.
The solid, dependable build she'd earned through a lifetime of hard, dirty work. The deep, resonant voice. The beard. All of it — the rough, rugged figure of a real man — gone, replaced by a tiny little girl. Utterly, hopelessly undignified.
Hair like molten gold, skin soft and taut, delicate lashes and a finely sculpted nose. Estelle radiated the kind of Western beauty that wouldn't lose to any of the child actresses contracted under Hansung Group. No — when it came to looks alone, she was streets ahead of them.
Knock, knock—
"Your Highness. Breakfast is ready."
"Goddamn it…"
Estelle, still peering into the hand mirror on her bed, spat out a curse at the voice beyond the door.
As a member of the elven royal family, Estelle's mornings typically began with attendants bringing brunch directly to her chambers. She didn't particularly mind the arrangement. After more than three years of hospital food, eating in bed had become second nature.
But the reason a vein throbbed visibly across that small, adorable forehead was this:
"Listen here, young lady."
"Young…?"
"What kind of meal is this? It's nothing but weeds!"
What they called a meal was a pure, unadulterated vegan spread — not a scrap of meat to be found anywhere.
"At the age when a body ought to be growing, where's the meat? Did some ghost come and gobble it all up? What is this supposed to be—!"
After three years of bland hospital meals, the one thing she had looked forward to most upon entering a healthy, young — no, child's — body was food.
But elves were, at their core, a people of the forest. Those blessed by the World Tree could thrive perfectly well on nothing but the fruits and vegetables that grew among the trees. And the thicker the noble Elder blood ran in one's veins, the more one could, within the Great Forest at least, survive on dew alone.
As a result, elven culinary culture had barely developed at all. To make matters worse, the very first meal Estelle received after possessing this body had been nothing more than a single cup of water.
She had nearly keeled over from the shock, and from the next meal onward she had ordered them to bring something she could actually chew. What sat before her now was the result of that instruction.
Fruit that looked and tasted roughly like a modern apple, a few scraps of greenery, and that same damn cup of water.
Estelle, who had savored the rich taste of meat long before ever setting foot in a hospital room, finally lost her patience and took it out on the unfortunate attendant.
If there had at least been rice, she might have managed. But these pointy-eared folk hadn't so much as offered a single piece of kimchi to an old man who had spent his entire life declaring that a Korean lives on rice. How was she supposed to keep her temper?
"However, Your Highness, the consumption of meat is a practice enjoyed only by the lowly inferior races — quite unlike us noble elves."
"Still, even I got caught up in all sorts of silly things at Your Highness's age, you know? Hoho."
The attendant, catching the full force of Estelle's outburst, first wondered why the princess was suddenly complaining about meals that had never been a problem until a few days ago — then decided the girl must simply be hitting puberty, and resolved to be understanding about it.
Celebrian Estelle. Ninety-three years old this year — extraordinarily young for an elf, still very much a little girl. By some strange twist of fate, it was the exact same age Kim Han-sung had been.
In human terms, it was an age of complete mastery over life, a point at which a natural death would surprise no one. For an elf, it was barely past early childhood.
"Well then, please call for me when you've finished—"
"That'll be all. I've no appetite. Take it away."
"As you wish."
In the end, with no desire to lift a utensil, Estelle ordered the meal removed and watched in silence, her expression sour, as the attendant cleared away the food she had only just set down.
"Listen here, young lady."
"Ohoho! Your Highness is too kind~ I'm already one thousand one hundred and forty-two years old, you know? Flattery like that won't get you anywhere~"
"…Ahem. At any rate, there's something I need to look into."
Something had suddenly occurred to Estelle, and she put a request to the young lady (age 1,142).
"Where's the place they keep the books around here? Preferably something with history and the like."
When you encounter the unknown, the first order of business is to learn about it.
Estelle took her first step toward understanding her own race, the place she now found herself, and this other world entirely.
The royal archives of the elven kingdom, to which the attendant guided her, were vast beyond measure.
Elves lived extraordinarily long lives, and the documents recording their history and culture — accumulated across generations of predecessors — could never have fit inside an ordinary library.
Even Estelle, who had strode in with full confidence, couldn't help but be a little stunned by the sheer scale of it.
"It's been a long time since I last saw your face, Third Princess. Some… fifty-two years, is it? And somehow you've grown into such a fine young lady…"
A man seated at a reception desk in the center of the archives offered a warm smile and a friendly greeting.
"And you are…?"
"Nothing more than a humble librarian charged with overseeing the royal archives."
"So, what brings Your Highness to the archives?"
"Came to find a few books."
"What sort of volumes are you looking for?"
"Hmm… well now, what sort of volumes…"
Estelle paused at the librarian's question, considering.
"This planet… er, no. For now, pull me whatever covers this kingdom's history, myths, legends, and culture in thorough detail."
There was an old saying: if you want to understand a nation, start with its founding myth. Estelle knew that even after centuries, the stories told in a founding myth continued to shape a country. To grasp this elven kingdom, she had decided to begin with the classical passages, the founding legends, and the culture itself.
"Hmm, hmm… Understood. Would you wait just a moment?"
"Fine. I'll wait. Be quick about it."
The librarian nodded at once, then closed his eyes, clasped his hands, and seemed to concentrate on something.
And then—
—Books! —Books!
—Let's find the books! Everyone gather!!
"Huh…? What in the…?"
Empty air that had held nothing at all began to shimmer as though cracked open, and something emerged into view.
They glowed with a translucent blue light — tiny, fairy-like figures draped in something soft and fluttering like winged garments, darting freely through the air.
"…Princess? Is something the matter?"
"Th-those things — what are they? Some kind of ghosts? Fairies…?"
Estelle was thoroughly rattled by what had just unfolded before her eyes. The librarian, for his part, only tilted his head at her reaction.
"They're sylphs, of course. Our royal archives are so vast that we often rely on the help of spirits like these."
Spirits.
As friends of the forest and of nature, elves naturally shared an especially high affinity with spirits — nature itself given form. A proper elf might form a contract with spirits around the age of two hundred, and it was for this very reason that elves made up the largest share of spirit mages.
"Syl… what?"
"Haha! These little ones can be quite the mischievous bunch, but when it comes to finding books, they're absolutely brilliant."
"Ah, is that so… Right. Understood. Carry on, then."
Estelle was still unsettled by the magical spectacle unfolding before her, but she cut her questions short and pressed him to continue with the task she'd requested.
Arguing further would get her nowhere. The man in front of her had lived through a completely different span of time, a completely different set of days. Better to spend that energy getting familiar with this kingdom and her own race as quickly as possible. Having made that calculation, Estelle settled at a table along the edge of the archives and watched the sylphs ferry books through the air.
Fairies no bigger than the span of her hand soared freely through empty space, lifting volume after volume as if they weighed nothing. Even watching it happen in real life, it felt like a scene from a movie.
Time passed.
"This is… all of them?"
"Oh, hardly. I've only brought the condensed volumes that cover the topics Your Highness mentioned in a more accessible form."
Estelle muttered in disbelief at the books laid out before her.
Volumes that looked twice her own height had been stacked into a tower, and the sight alone was enough to make her vision swim for a moment. And this wasn't even everything — just the summaries. She couldn't help wondering how this kingdom even functioned.
But of course it made sense. Elven lifespans were extraordinarily long, and the history steeped in all those years of living was bound to dwarf anything produced by short-lived humans.
"Well then, should you need anything further, please don't hesitate to call."
Having piled a mountain of books before her eyes, the librarian turned and left to attend to his own work. Before long, only Estelle and the towering heap of volumes remained.
It was a thoroughly overwhelming situation — no idea where even to begin.
And yet.
"Hooh… now this is peculiar. The writing system is completely different from any language I know, and yet I can read it without the slightest trouble. Feels just like reading a book written in Hangul."
Even faced with that crushing quantity of books, Estelle didn't flinch in the slightest. Instead, she marveled at the uncanny fact that the meaning of elven script came to her naturally, despite never having learned a single character of it.
They said learning never ends, didn't they?
Back when she couldn't read a word, she had studied writing with desperate hunger just to get through a single book. Later, wanting to broaden her horizons, she had learned English by the light of a full moon, dictionary open under the glow. That same woman was now thoroughly hooked on the simple pleasure of discovering a world she had never known.
"Well then. Shall we read?"
Estelle opened the first book that came to hand and began carefully working through its opening page.
And so her reading continued — without sleep, through night after night, eyes strained to the brink — until at last she finished.