Future Dreams (7)
Polygamy?” Francesca said.
At the sound of her voice, I snapped back to reality from the miserable past where I had awakened to machismo.
“That’s right. Ah… but maybe it wasn’t the best thing to say to a woman.”
Women in this world longed to become the wife of a handsome and capable man just as much as they dreamed of building their own reverse harems with husbands of their choosing. I knew that much from my accumulated knowledge. Still, saying it straight to someone’s face felt a little strange. The Confucian dragon inside me was still writhing and very much alive. Even though I had already lived in this other world for over three and a half years, it was still like this. The path of otherworldly machismo was so long and treacherous.
“Not at all. It’s a common dream for men, isn’t it? My mother was my father’s second wife, after all.”
Francesca’s voice was exactly the same as usual. I couldn’t tell whether she was simply unable to say she found it repulsive to my face, or if this really was an ordinary thing for people in this world.
“Thank you for saying that. …But a second wife? Does that mean you’re from a noble family? Should I be worried that one day she’ll come looking for me saying, ‘How dare you treat my daughter so rudely—off with his head’?”
I shuddered at the memory of throwing her into the sewer and asked the question. In these kinds of fantasy stories, wasn’t it a cliché that the person who ran away from home was actually the illegitimate child or the third son or daughter of some noble?
“Hehe. No, not at all. My father was an alchemist. He was already over sixty when I was born.”
It seemed there was no such drama. I breathed a sigh of relief and joked in a lighthearted tone.
“Sixty? Hahaha! Your parents must have had a very passionate marriage.”
“It wasn’t… exactly like that. My father passed away before I was old enough to really remember him. Honestly, I can barely recall his face.”
This time her voice had grown a little melancholy. Damn it, why did it feel like I’d been saying nothing but the wrong things since earlier? Nothing was going right today.
“Heh heh. Anyway, now that I’ve heard about your realistic goals, Francesca, my own dream feels incredibly far-fetched.”
The topic I hastily changed to was one Francesca willingly followed.
“What does it matter if it’s far-fetched? When I was little, I had dreams that were way more ridiculous and stupid.”
“If we start talking about childhood dreams, I win by a landslide. When I was a little kid, I wanted to become a dinosaur.”
“Pfft. A dinosaur? You’re quite the jokester.”
It was true, though. Oh, right. To the people of this world, dinosaurs were a type of monster. The kids here probably didn’t go around saying stuff like, “Whoa, T-Rex is so fucking badass!” It was a relief she took it as a joke.
I asked while rinsing the laundry, which had almost lost its smell, in fresh water.
“So what was your dream, Francesca?”
Francesca didn’t answer. I couldn’t tell if she hadn’t heard me or if she simply didn’t want to answer, so I didn’t press any further. After all, it already felt like I’d been accidentally flipping her trauma switches left and right.
But now that I thought about it, something felt off. She was the one who had first brought up the topic of dreams. Why had she deliberately brought up something like a story from the past—a subject so easy to become sensitive about?
The innkeeper auntie’s words came back to me.
Franc is only twenty-two. She may be an adult by age, but it’s still a difficult age to live alone in a strange land.
She has no one to lean on, must always feel lonely and exhausted, yet she works so, so hard. Do you understand?
Splash—
The sound of someone rising from the bathtub echoed, and the bathroom window opened just a crack. It was only wide enough to barely peek outside, but Francesca seemed to be looking out through it.
“The moon is beautiful tonight.”
It was the kind of line that poets would love. I felt like I’d heard it in some liberal arts class. I looked up at the sky. The chubby crescent moon I had seen yesterday on the way back from the ruins guard request had now become a perfect full moon.
“Yes, it really is a beautiful moonlit night. Come to think of it, in my hometown, autumn was also called the season of the moon.”
“Hehe. That’s an interesting way to put it.”
“Our biggest national holiday falls in autumn.”
Chuseok, along with the first full moon of the lunar new year, was a day of the full moon. It was also called the Full Moon of the Eighth Month. The most iconic images associated with Chuseok were the orange moon hanging in the sky and persimmons dangling from trees. Autumn was the season that made people sentimental. Maybe the moon looked even more beautiful because it was the perfect time to grow emotional. I was a science major, so I wouldn’t know. Anyway, even in this other world, the full moon was beloved by people. On bright moonlit nights, you could walk without any lights. Outside the designated roads, there were no lights from houses or taverns, making it terrifyingly dark to walk. In that sense, the bright light of a perfectly full moon was incredibly reliable when walking down an unfamiliar and frightening path. In this world, the full moon was a moon that gave courage.
Then Francesca spoke.
“My dream… was to become an explorer.”
I quietly listened to Francesca so I wouldn’t make any more verbal slip-ups.
“I wanted to explore ruins or new worlds and find ancient treasures that no one else knew about. I must have fallen in love with the cool adventure stories and treasures from the books I read. And then I would show the treasures I found to my mother. It was such a naïve dream.”
The events at the ruins came to mind. So that was why she had shown such interest in the inscription on the stone tablet.
“But now… I can’t even remember what it felt like to have that dream.”
Splash.
It was the sound of water being kicked with a foot.
“Hehe. I guess I forgot while remembering how to pick locks, how to make traps, and how to reuse firewood that other people had thrown away.”
“…When you become an adult, life gets so hard that you end up forgetting your dreams. It happens.”
People live trapped in inertia. When I looked back at myself, the reason one corner of my heart ached and felt like shit was because living was equally shitty whether you were an Earthling or someone from this world.
‘Life is shit because life is shit.’
What a fucking brilliant saying. I should write it in huge letters on the back cover of my autobiography once I become a professor. Then I’ll make my graduate student slaves read it and write ten-page book reports. While piling more work on them, of course. It’ll probably feel like getting stabbed with a knife a hundred times, but by then I’ll have become the invincible Grand Master Nord—a professor that no blade can pierce. Or maybe not.
“But I think that’s not so bad either. Dreams and goals are different things, after all.”
I said while wringing out the laundry by twisting it left and right.
“There’s no meaning in living only thinking about the future. It’s much more comfortable and better to live with both things you have to do and things you want to do, while holding onto appropriate goals.”
“Things you want to do?”
“Yeah. Life isn’t something where you can only do what you like, but living while only doing things you hate is ridiculous too. No matter how hard you work blindly, you never know what tomorrow will bring. Like you said, both of us nearly died in the sewers and the ruins, didn’t we?”
This was my version of YOLO-ism. If you live in the 21st century where saving a million won every month for ten years still won’t get you a jeonse apartment, this is what happens. You end up caring more about the new convenience store kimbap than worrying about the future. It was the same now. Who could have predicted that the Korean veterinary student Kang Buk-ho would one day be washing the poncho worn by a half-dwarf girl in another world? If I had known this would happen, back on Earth I would have confessed to my first love, aggressively pursued my ex-girlfriend even after we broke up without even kissing, asked my parents if I could change my name to something less Bucanistan-style, and I definitely wouldn’t have gone to the military. After graduating from veterinary school, I would have done alternative military service as a military doctor. I don’t know why I hated the idea of being treated like a guy who didn’t go to the military so much. I regretted enlisting after just three days and kept regretting it until I was discharged with that skinny squad leader senior.
“Hehehe. That’s true. But if you only live doing what you want, won’t you regret it later?”
Francesca said with an awkward laugh. As far as I knew, this was the first time she had ever forced a laugh. Since I could roughly guess how she was feeling, I asked in a way that I hoped would sound as casual as possible.
“What about right now?”
“Huh?”
“Are you living without regrets right now?”
The sound of splashing water stopped. There were no annoying insect cries in this inn. Damn it, I should have stayed here too.
“People always say you should make choices you won’t regret, but how many people actually live their entire lives without any regrets?”
If I couldn’t even properly do the things I wanted while filming this shitty otherworld survival story, then I wouldn’t even want to live anymore. I’d probably just drop dead like a rabbit left alone at home.
“Even if it looks stupid to others, isn’t it fine as long as you think it’s enjoyable?”
At least, that’s what I thought. Even though I still hadn’t found a way to enjoy life in this other world myself.
Creak—
It was then. Francesca, who had been silent, fully opened the window and stuck her head outside.
“Hey. Nord.”
Francesca laughed with steam rising from her head.
“Want to drop the formalities?”
Seeing the same smile I had seen that day in the sewer, I finished vector-style laundry drying and answered.
“If you call me Oppa.”
—And so, the otherworldly master’s-degree-holding Nord made one more new connection in the rural city of Sargadis.
A twenty-one-year-old half-dwarf who was still unbalanced in both body and mind.
…Oh, and for the record, I didn’t actually make her call me Oppa.
“Brother!”
“I’m sorry. Please just call me Nord.”
This fucking shitty Britannia language. What the hell is “brother”?
“What’s the clothing you wanted me to fix?”
Franc asked while drying her hair with a towel. After finishing the laundry and bath, we had come to the room where Franc was staying. The washed poncho was hung on a drying rack in the corner of the room. Leaving it outside to dry would obviously get it stolen. The clothes Franc wore after her bath looked like pajamas. There was zero skin exposure, yet her two breasts, freed from all restraints, displayed a majestic presence like lions that had escaped from a zoo. I tried my best not to stare at her chest as I took out the robe and mask from my bag.
“This… to be honest, it might be a bit too difficult to call it simple mending.”
Now that I had taken the robe out again, that thought suddenly occurred to me. Asking her to repair it to the point where you couldn’t even tell where I bought it? Upon serious reflection, wouldn’t it be better to just buy some fabric and ask her to make a new one?
“What are you going to use it for?”
“I’m planning to stop by the Mage Guild for a bit. I want to ask what kind of magic I obtained this time, but it’d be better to hide my identity to avoid any trouble later.”
“Ah~ right. Paragon said that too, didn’t he? That asking a mage would be faster.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Let me take a look.”
Franc, who had put down the towel, touched my robe and said,
“The robe is almost at the level of raw fabric, so just a little touch-up should do. But the mask would be faster if I carved it from scratch.”
“Ah, I thought so.”
“Yeah. How do you want the overall design?”
At those words, I took out my notebook. It seemed easier to show a drawing than to explain it with words. Scratch— scratch—.
The drawing I poured my heart into was completed in just a few minutes. Franc looked at the picture I drew, lowered her head, and laughed.
“Hehehe. Nord, you really have no talent for drawing, do you?”
“Leave me alone.”
Fuck. Was it that bad? I looked at the picture I had drawn. It didn’t seem that weird. Then Franc also picked up my pen and drew a new one on the back of my drawing. Swish swish swish—.
“Is something like this okay?”
I saw the sketch completed in less than a minute and immediately shut my mouth, which had been making excuses. My scribble looked like summer vacation homework done by elementary school kids. “Maybe I was actually born missing one finger on my right hand.”
Was this really drawn by the same person as me? I ended up understanding the feelings of ordinary artists who felt suicidal impulses upon seeing golden hands.
“Nord’s drawing had clear characteristics, so it was easy to draw from. The picture itself was a bit strange, but the design was cool.”
Franc said with a slight smile. The sincere comfort made my heart feel warm. It felt like the heart that had suffered so much pain and hardship today was gently melting.
“What did I draw well? You’re the one who retouched it beautifully, Franc. …But can you really make it like this? Won’t it be difficult?”
“No, it’s not that hard. For the robe, you just need to fold the fabric and sew it. See, like this.”
When Franc folded the shoulder part of the robe and pulled it tight, the exact design from the drawing was reproduced. Just as she said, with only a little adjustment, the impression had completely changed. Wow, she could visualize this from my terrible drawing? Dwarves really are an overpowered race. If I was going to come to this other world anyway, they should have let me reincarnate or possess a dwarf. Anyway, I was extremely satisfied with the now properly shaped robe.
“Amazing. Then I’ll leave it to you. How much should the payment be?”
“I’ll do it for free. I owe you a lot, Nord.”
Wow! Free!
“Ah, seriously, wow. Thank you so much.”
I said while desperately holding back tears of joy. Who in the world hated getting things for free? And this wasn’t just one-sided receiving—it was receiving repayment from someone I had helped. This was the Korean spirit of mutual aid, the true “pumasi.” I never thought I’d see our traditional culture in this other world.
“Ah, but is it okay with your work, Franc? I’m worried I might be interrupting since you’re resting after a request.”
“Pfft, you worry too much. Don’t worry. This much isn’t even worth calling work.”
Franc said while clenching her cute little fist. It was nice to see her so full of motivation.
“Good. Then drinks are on me today. Come on, let’s go drink.”
When I said that and stood up, Franc widened her eyes for some reason.
“Huh? Wasn’t fixing the robe urgent? I was planning to start working on it right away today.”
“…It is a bit urgent. But it feels wrong to make someone who just came back from work start working again. Just finish it within a few days.”
I couldn’t exactly say, “Franc!! I’m scared my dick is going to evaporate!! Please hurry!!”
“Hmm. Then I’ll just set up the basic frame. When you get that ‘ping!’ feeling, you have to set the frame right away, or later you’ll forget what you were trying to do.”
Franc gave a sensory explanation, even using body language. Fortunately, since I had felt similar sensations when writing papers, I understood easily.
“Ah, I know that feeling well. If you put work off, you start thinking, ‘Wait, was this what I was trying to do?’ and the initial spark disappears.”
“Right? Right? You get it!”
At my words, Franc jumped around with a bright face. What the hell, she’s so cute. Now that we’ve gotten closer, she’s three times cuter than before. But her breasts were not cute. They were downright menacing. Did you know? Large breasts change not only a person’s behavior but even their way of thinking. They prevent people from crossing their arms and bring pain every time they run—that enormous volume and mass! It always bothers and torments women with big breasts. But not Franc. I’m not even sure if she’s properly aware of her own breast size. Is it because her body is so sturdy? Even with those massive breasts, she moves around just fine.
“Do you have a sewing kit? You know, needles and thread.”
I quickly changed the subject. Franc, apparently not noticing my rapid topic shift, nodded.
“Yeah. I bought some last time when I was making the mask.”
“Ah, right. That’s true.”
She had also made the mask I borrowed during the request.
“Then wait just a moment. I’ll just set up the frame and be done quickly.”
With that, Franc brought over her sewing kit and began mending the robe.
“…”
“…”
Once she started working, the room became quiet. We weren’t yet close enough to be comfortable with this kind of silence, so we both realized the other felt slightly awkward.
“…Would it bother you if I talked while you work?”
“No, I’d actually like it if you did… it’s a bit awkward. Hehe.”
As expected, our minds were in sync. I felt a little relieved and said,
“Now that I think about it, are you okay with alcohol? The innkeeper auntie told me that you pass out after just one drink.”
“W-what?!”
Startled! Franc jumped up in surprise at my words. Her intense reaction surprised me too.
“Ah! Ouch…!”
At that moment, Franc flinched, probably pricking herself with the needle from the surprise. Quite a bit of blood flowed from her index finger.
“Ah, damn… I’m sorry. I said something unnecessary.”
“N-no, I was the one who asked you to talk to me.”
Then Franc, who was holding her finger, suddenly frowned.
“But more importantly, what was that about earlier? That I can’t drink alcohol?”
Was that more concerning to her than the injury? But this seemed to be the first time I had seen Franc frown, so I flinched.
“I can drink well! There’s no way a half-dwarf and human hybrid couldn’t drink alcohol!”
“I get it, so stop the bleeding first. You’re bleeding a lot.”
Blood showed no sign of stopping from her finger. Either the wound was quite deep, or she was so worked up that it wouldn’t stop.
“Something like this will stop if you just leave it alone. More importantly—”
“Wait, don’t do that. If you get tetanus it’ll be a big problem. Do you have any disinfectant?”
“…No. I don’t.”
Seeing Franc pouting with a face full of dissatisfaction, I checked the contents of my bag and said,
“Wait a second. Rinse it with water first. Do you have any clean cloth?”
“There should be some left over from when I made the mask…”
“Where is it? Let me see.”
So I received clean cloth from Franc, held her injured finger, and poured water over it.
—Splash, splash.
—Drip.
I rinsed the wound once, but the blood showed no sign of stopping. I grew increasingly worried at the sight. Wasn’t there a scene in a famous Korean movie where the protagonist’s subordinate stepped on a rusty nail and ended up with tetanus, losing a leg? This was a world without tetanus shots. Besides tetanus, there was no telling what complications could arise, so even small wounds couldn’t be taken lightly. Maybe I should have carried potions around.
“…Wait here. I’ll go downstairs and get some bandages and disinfecting alcohol from the innkeeper auntie.”
“You’re making it sound like I’m being dramatic.”
“Just do me a favor and wait quietly.”
I said while staring directly into Franc’s blue eyes. She widened her eyes, moved her mouth as if to say something, then obediently nodded. Once I had Franc’s permission, I went downstairs. Disinfecting alcohol should have as few impurities as possible. In Korea, regular convenience store soju would have been enough, but in Britannia, distilled liquors were hard to find.
“Auntie. Among the drinks you sell here, do you have any distilled liquor?”
“…Distilled liquor?”
The innkeeper auntie, who had been working busily on the first floor, somehow looked intrigued by my question.
“Hehe. Alright. I’ll bring it. There happens to be one troublesome bottle.”
She spoke with open delight.
“A very strong one that made a certain good girl pass out after just one drink on her first day.”