Keeping the Broth Warm
It was 1:40 in the afternoon.
A little past lunch, I made for the open-air market on the northern edge of Hyeondeok City.
Tak—!
Not on foot, of course. By spatial teleportation. A few people stared when I popped out of empty air, then turned their eyes away just as fast. At Hyeondeok's level, a short-range teleport was nothing worth gawking at.
"......Nice."
Even so, I couldn't help studying the ring on my finger with a peculiar look. The distance from my lodging to this market was considerable, and on my own power I couldn't leap a space that wide. All of it, then, was this little thing's doing. Even if one's authority over space had never reached the proper tier, the ring let that power manifest according to the user's own capability. Which meant that right now I was as good as standing at the very peak of the spatial magic a five-star could achieve.
Even looking at myself alone, magic of the Glass Star school ran at up to eight times the efficiency of any other systematic art. To put it bluntly, the thing was a cheat item.
......The part that sat a little sour was that I'd taken that cheat item off a never-married transcendent with a romance scam.
"No, fuck that. Did I ask him for it?"
The problem was the one who'd flung it at me out of nowhere, trying to buy my favor. Of course, in arriving at that conclusion, I had deleted the part where I could have told the truth or simply refused. The one who'd gone and stirred up a man's greed was the one in the wrong......
Anyway. I stepped into the market.
Having seen what I'd just done, most of the merchants didn't bother speaking to me. If anything, they looked ready to avoid me, and that was only natural. What business would a mage who could teleport have in a flea market strewn with nothing but junk? And so I reached the depths of the place without a single interruption.
An alley where anything resembling an ordinary stall had vanished long ago.
"Open up already. I'm a little busy."
I shouted it from the middle of that alley. Anyone watching would have called me a lunatic, but before long an answer came.
> Prove your identity.
"Winter Tree Magic Tower. You already know that."
> Please wait a moment.
A crackle of static, and then a brief quiet.
Krrrrrk—!
Not long after, the grind of something scraping rose from one corner of the alley.
......If you're going to open it, you could just open it faster.
Grumbling under my breath, I stepped inside.
"What brings you here?"
Darkness so complete I couldn't see an inch ahead. A single clear voice reached me through it.
"To sell."
"Go straight in, and enter the room with the blue sign."
"......Thanks for the directions."
I walked into that dark without hesitation. My eyes showed me nothing of the interior, but anyone with a decent measure of ability could feel its shape through ki sense. Fail to manage even that much, and the meaning was simple: turn around and leave.
"Hm."
Several rooms lay inside. Blue signs and red signs — blue for selling, red for buying — and three rooms on each side. The reason for the threes was simple enough. A second sieve, sorting a guest's grade in that order. Had I come here before raising my realm, I might barely have noticed the second room. To eyes of a low realm, all three simply weren't there.
Knock, knock, knock—
So when I rapped on the door of the third room, it was no great stretch that the catfolk attendant's eyes flew perfectly round. Those fluffy rabbit ears pricked straight up, and a moment later he sent a communication off somewhere. The contents were obviously about me, but there was no need to care. The true master of this suspicious space was aloof, and so long as I didn't cause an incident, they had no intention of doing me harm.
The moment I stepped into the room, lighting so bright it was excessive welcomed me, nothing like the dark outside. There was, of course, no such thing as letting one's eyes adjust. A truly ridiculous piece of design.
"Welcome. It's been quite a while since we've had a guest of the first rank."
"Which would explain why they made every step of it a nuisance."
"Procedure, I'm afraid. Of course, everyone who makes it this far is irritated. I'm the only one who suffers for it."
The man who let out a low heh-heh and offered me a seat was half machine. Two sofas faced each other across a table. I planted myself first, and he took the one opposite.
"Well then. What have you come to sell?"
Rather than small talk, he went straight to the point, and I liked that. I drew a single glass bottle from my spatial pouch. Showing it was faster than explaining.
"A spirit elixir? It doesn't look like a natural product."
"It's been through quite a bit of processing. I don't know the details, of course. I didn't make it."
A lie slid out without so much as a flicker of my expression. Seemed I'd become a mage in full.
"Oho...... Would you wait just a moment?"
Interest on his face, he extended a hand made of metal, and a blue light radiated from it.
"Well now, hmm...... ha."
As the moments passed, surprise gradually settled over his face. His brow went through a remarkably athletic series of twitches.
"......This is astonishing. It may be a rude question, but might there be more of these besides this one?"
"Three bottles in total. I'm willing to sell two. There's hardly any difference in purity between them."
"Two, then. Would you wait a moment?"
I nodded, and his movements stopped. He looked as if he were simply staring into space and doing nothing, but he was almost certainly contacting a superior.
......Roughly two minutes later, he opened his mouth.
"Thank you for waiting. We can purchase a quantity of two bottles. How would you like to receive payment?"
"In mid-grade demon stones. And five billion hwan a bottle."
"Thirty mid-grade demon stones and five billion hwan per bottle. Would that be acceptable?"
"Fine. Can I take it right away?"
"Of course."
He nodded, eyes glittering. Thirty demon stones and five billion hwan — a touch below a fair price, but in Hyeondeok City there were few places that could pay a sum like this under proper security.
"I've transferred the ten billion hwan first. Please confirm."
"......Confirmed."
Staring at a balance whose digits had turned grotesque, I could only let out a hollow laugh on the inside. That squad leader, Lee Yeonghyeon — the money he made sucking the marrow from people's backs came to about a million hwan a month. That a gulf between rich and poor this dizzying refused to settle easily was only natural.
There is a code of conduct for the moment you win the lottery jackpot. It branches into all sorts of clauses, but it boils down to this: don't let it show, and don't blow the money.
"Oh my, it suits you so well—!"
"Does it."
But that code exists only because a mere lottery jackpot is a trivial thing.
"Jet-black quail confit and heavenly-thunder beef liver. The garnish is a purée of moonlight mushroom, and the sauce is a reduction of red wine from the Garein range."
"Mm."
Ten billion hwan didn't even take a scratch. The moment I stepped out of Under Veil, the black market hidden inside that flea market, I indulged in a brief spell of playing the nouveau riche.
"......Not much fun."
For someone saying so, I must have looked like I was enjoying it plenty. Luxury goods from head to toe, and between my lips a high-end cigarette that ran seventy thousand hwan a pack. I was a walking swamp of extravagance.
Still, the part about it not being fun was sincere. There was never any value to be found in crap like this anyway. Call it blowing off steam. I'd wanted, just once, to try looking like this kind of upstart.
"Well. That's enough of that."
I ground the butt out under my heel and let out a sigh. The time had come to deal with the reason I'd come to Hyeondeok City ahead of anywhere else.
Two things, broadly. One concerned the Winter Tree of the magic tower. The other concerned the original protagonist.
......It probably hasn't hatched.
The period when the protagonist would actually be active lay quite a bit later than now. But he definitely existed somewhere within this Kingdom of Haedong. That was a hidden truth, revealed only quite late in the original, and I already knew it. The protagonist was no ordinary orphan brat.
......For the record, when that reveal landed, I'd been a little annoyed. Part of why I'd immersed myself in him more than usual was the common ground we shared: a parentless, dirt-poor nobody.
Anyway.
"I can raise my realm soon enough."
Of course, I'd built up a certain resistance to the elixir made from Okrosil, so unless I sharply raised its purity, it would do nothing for my advancement. Raise the purity, and my body wouldn't withstand it yet. Still, there was no reason to fixate on Okrosil. Elixirs, and other means of climbing a realm besides, I could get my hands on soon enough.
I had the gallery's countless—
A romantic.
No...... because there are transcendents.
"Ghk..."
Faced with that vivid karma hanging right before my eyes, I had no choice but to clamp a hand over my mouth. The owner of the message that had flown in out of nowhere was, of course, the transcendent who'd gifted me this ring. Everyone else's DMs, I ignored. But because I'd taken something from this one, I had to at least answer the notes that arrived now and then. What you might call keeping the broth warm.
......And that was the last twitch of whatever conscience I had left.
"Next time, let's earn it honestly."
Whenever I could, I'd get what I needed the proper way — with points earned by diligently stirring up aggro on the tier list. One lesson this tragedy had taught me.