Newlywed Home in Sargadis (2)

The so-called explorers—tomb raiders, more like—took about ten minutes to chew over my proposal. The representatives who stepped forward were Selena, me, and Nathan. We sat down to hash things out.

“Even if we’re all exploring the same site, our goals are different. If we can compromise and meet somewhere in the middle, this could be a solid offer,” Nathan said, drumming his fingers on his scabbard.

“Our team, Viridian, came here for training. Finding treasure to upgrade our gear would be ideal, but even if we don’t, we want to sharpen our skills in actual combat.”

“I see.”

I almost blurted out Whoa, that’s badass! and tossed him some half-assed praise, but I caught myself and kept my mouth shut. They were probably still reeling from being reduced to side characters in the last fight. Coming from me—the noob who somehow hard-carried the whole thing—it wouldn’t have been comforting at all.

“Of course! I came here to find artifacts!” Selena spoke next. No matter how many times I heard it, her voice was still obnoxiously loud. She had roughly three times the energy of Larilura.

“What I want is, first, money. Second, more money. Third, even more money!! I’ll sweep up anything that can turn a profit, sell it all off, and use that capital to prepare for the next ruin!! That is the path to succeeding my father!! However!!!”

Clap clap clap clap—!!

That butler, Dismuke, was wringing emotional tears from his very soul as he applauded. It was genuinely touching, like proud parents watching their daughter grow up, but she spoke so fast I only caught half of it. I roughly interpreted the whole thing as her offering to work on passion pay and called it good.

“R-right. In that case, we’ll divide the artifact value with Mr. Nathan according to standard escort request rates, and Miss Selena’s team can consider this expedition as settling your debt.”

“Perfect!! ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Only then can we become true partners who can negotiate on equal footing!”

“Haha, Miss Selena is correct.”

It was honestly impressive that she could talk at that machine-gun pace without spraying spit everywhere. It reminded me of Tirsi back in her prime—pure rap-god energy.

“You must all be hungry. Let’s eat first. I brought plenty of supplies since I figured we might end up traveling to another world.”

Tirsi set her bag down as she spoke. It was comically oversized; if I curled up tight, I could probably fit inside it.

“This is the perfect time to be grateful!! Dismuke!! Mark it in the ledger!! When we return to the surface, I will repay these supplies with a fifty-percent premium!!”

One-point-five times? That’s such a weirdly stingy multiplier. The way she framed spending big money in percentages instantly reminded me of 21st-century megamarts. Classic Selena.

—Chatter, chatter.

Anyway, our newly formed alliance team found a safe spot and started eating.

“Yep, my husband is a hopelessly greedy bastard. Falling for a guy like this must be my original sin. Yep, no doubt about it.”

“……Nord. I thought we could have just come back for the exploration later.”

My two wives’ glares were razor sharp, ladies and gentlemen. I avoided their eyes, unsure whether the jerky was going into my mouth or my nose.

What the hell went wrong? It was a perfect plan!

—Married men of the world, it is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. I’d committed to this with that sage advice in mind, but forgiveness turned out to be fucking impossible. The difficulty gap was like trying to get into a SKY university versus just getting into any old Seoul school. And I was the pathetic bottom-tier student who scored 8th-grade across every subject.

“It is a reckless operation right after returning from another world. If possible, I wanted to oppose it too. Though we barely had any chance to voice our opinions.”

Even Tirsi, elegantly swallowing her jerky, took a polite stab at me while pretending to stay neutral. Everyone, I’m in pain here. These verbal jabs hurt so much.

“Ehh~ What’s the big deal☆! Let’s look on the bright side!”

The only one who took my side in that interrogation-room atmosphere was Larilura. She clapped her hands with sky-high energy and said,

“It would’ve been reckless if we tried it alone, but with everyone helping, it’ll be easy, right? Plus, wouldn’t it be better for Sister Dana to fully map out the ruins~♡?”

“That’s true, but… why are you suddenly taking this idiot’s side?”

When Dana spoke in open surprise, Larilura’s eyes trembled with a tiny magnitude-2 earthquake. It was such a microscopic reaction that only I seemed to notice. Larilura quickly waved her hands at Dana.

“Ahaha♡! Did it seem that way~? Maybe I got carried away because I finally had a big moment after so long!”

“Really? Well, from what I’m hearing, it still sounds better than some noob spear-wielding lunatic.”

Dana took a hard turn and swung the verbal blade back at me. Was the violence of language always this merciless? Now I understood why a husband in a marital rut ends up shrinking into a corner at home. As a side note, the incident between Larilura and me had already been explained. She handled the explanation and left out the part where we’d pressed our bare skin together to share body heat. The occasional glances she kept shooting me suggested she wanted me to tell them myself later.

“……We definitely need to be careful with contraception.”

While I sat there squirming on pins and needles, Franc muttered as if her true feelings had slipped out.

“I’m in no position to complain this time, and I’m cheering for Nord’s efforts, but… at this rate I feel like I might drop a baby.”

I couldn’t say a word and just nibbled at my hardtack. I hadn’t eaten all day, yet for some reason the fruit biscuits tasted like absolute garbage. Let’s blame the damn raisins.

When was it? A long time ago, my father once dipped his toes into the stock market. Before he lost a million won for nothing and got chewed out by Mom, he lived with his face glued to his phone like a gambling addict.

Whenever the crashed stocks suddenly skyrocketed, he would lecture me with “This is what life is all about,” all smug. I remember it clearly because he’d order chicken whenever that happened. Actually, it wasn’t even that long ago—less than five years.

Every time he got like that, Mom would scold him to stop acting so high and mighty. But they say a boy eventually grows up to understand his father’s feelings. Earlier I had learned how Dad felt when Mom ripped into him. This time, I learned how it felt when the crashed stock made its miraculous comeback.

Because what stood before me was── a massive door sealed tight with powerful magic.

“──Gulp.”

Someone ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠in the party swallowed hard. I didn’t blame them. After fighting through monsters and reaching the fifth underground floor, the thing blocking our path was a door so obviously suspicious that even a snot-nosed kid would point and say, “There’s definitely something behind this, right?”

“Is it a password?” Selena asked, crossing her arms.

A stone tablet was embedded in the wall like a numeric keypad. The tablet contained only unique characters that no outsider could possibly decipher. It was a substitution cipher—replacing ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠A with ◆ and B with △. Solving something like this normally required first identifying the original language, then cross-referencing every single character against a dictionary in a painstaking process.

“Whoa. This is an extremely strict sealing spell.”

That was the assessment from the mage on the Gold Class adventurer team. He cast some arcane magic I didn’t recognize, then gave his opinion. True to his nerdy mage nature, he completely ignored the fucked-up atmosphere and started showing off his knowledge.

“It’s a Tulipir-style seal. A lock that requires reciting the phonetic incantation a precise number of times. Get it wrong and the mana inside the door will convert into defensive magic.”

“We don’t need a lecture. Just tell us how to open it.”

“I can’t. This is the kind of cipher that even so-called geniuses would spend days analyzing.”

At Nathan’s words, the mage raised both hands in surrender.

“My guess is that even once deciphered, the characters would be riddles or hints only the creators would understand. A book quote, a line of poetry, that sort of thing.”

“My colleague says that, but what will you do?”

“We’ll call our scholar!! He’s a talent who spent five years as a master’s degree holder at the university!!”

Selena, arms still crossed, called over a bespectacled man. He had the bearing of a warrior-priest. Was he also a field operative? He adjusted his glasses, studied the tablet, and let out a groan.

“……Ugh. I’m sorry. Solving this on the spot would be difficult. The number of people in the entire archaeological world—indeed, the entire world—who could interpret and solve this the moment they saw it could be counted on one hand.”

Essentially a declaration of surrender. Selena’s mouth fell open.

“It’s that hard?!”

“It’s less about raw difficulty and more about how cumbersome the interpretation is. It appears to be a cipher without any obvious regularity. A polyalphabetic system with code groups.”

He pushed his glasses up and shook his head.

“Normally these substitution ciphers from ancient civilizations are deciphered in a lab with one to two academic quarters of time. Without reference texts, it’s fair to call it impossible right now.”

“You can at least try!!”

“No. We’d only waste our limited attempts. Unless there’s a genius who knows nearly every character in existence, has memorized them perfectly like a walking dictionary, and can cross-reference them all inside his head to build a table… Is there such a person?”

His tone made it clear he’d bet his hand that no such person existed.

As I listened, my eyes darted around.

Fuck. This just got way too big.

While I was thinking, the whole thing had somehow escalated into “a puzzle impossible to solve on the spot unless you’re a once-in-a-century genius.” Actually, that was pretty accurate. Deciphering this was only slightly easier than trying to reconstruct pre-Hangul Joseon language using only Chinese characters. Even the archaeology department at Carmine University would need three months.

“Hey, husband.”

But for some reason Dana shot me a meaningful look. A gaze that seemed to ask, You know this, don’t you? At her cue, everyone gathered there slowly turned to stare at me. The pressure was fucking crushing. My poor stomach felt ready to spray acid like a hydra.

But.

“……Ahem.”

I could solve it. I could decipher those characters.

My translation ability worked on codes too. It wasn’t very helpful for scholars, though. Because it skipped the entire interpretation process and spat out only the conclusion, I had to personally find evidence to prove it. It was like trying to teach fermentation to someone who had never heard of kimchi. If they asked how they could trust eating something that rotten, I’d have to dig up the principles of fermentation—even though I didn’t fully understand them myself. That absurdity was exactly why I had never used this ability in my master’s thesis. Aside from the difficulty of finding proof, in an academic world drowning in toxic hierarchy, it wasn’t a topic a bottom-rung master’s student should dare touch.

But── if this was a place where I could prove my translation through direct results? A place where the only possible answers were YES or NO?

In a place like that, I could speak knowledge that could never be bound by academia.

“That’s what it says.”

I recited it in Britannian, but the moment I interpreted the phrase they had all declared impossible, both the Gold Class mage and the field-experienced master’s scholar gaped at me.

“Y-you deciphered this? You must be joking!”

“This is impossible! How?! How did you break the encryption?!”

“No, well… the explanation would be long, so let’s skip it. The important part is whether my interpretation is correct or not, right?”

I raised my hand like I was calming a rampaging bull and brushed off their questions. The pose that said You’re all correct.

“As expected of my husband. You’re cool even when you’re being modest.”

Of course, some people took my words as humility and believed me. Dana wore her usual knowing smile, as if she’d expected nothing less.

“Is it a riddle? The answer… is love, perhaps?”

“Aha! I understand! Money! The answer must be money! This tower researched potions, after all! It makes sense they would value money highly!”

Dana and Selena, both of whom understood Romanian, offered their guesses. Both interpretations made sense. That was exactly why this riddle couldn’t be solved even if you knew it. Because almost any answer could be twisted to fit, the phrase had been written specifically to make “the person who already knew the answer” recall it.

Of course, I had already figured out the true answer to this phrase. And that was precisely why I had hesitated even after deciphering the tablet.

Because this was a passage from a certain book that I── no, that we knew.

“Larilura.”

After calming the two excited scholars, I called her name. Larilura’s eyes widened so much they looked ready to pop out of their sockets. Then, in a half-doubting tone, she murmured.

—Kiiing. Rumble rumble—!!

The moment Larilura spoke the Clown’s Creed, the massive door began to open on its own. As if welcoming the visitor who had finally arrived after thousands of years.