Chapter 328
Chapter 328
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Translator: Ryuma
Chapter: 328
Chapter Title: Treasure Hunt (7)
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“What… what do you mean? You killed her, Grandpa?”
Ha-eun's voice was stiff as she continued.
“You said a bad person killed her...”
“Yeah. I'm the bad person.”
Baek Mu-gang looked down at the half-eaten dumpling in his hand and smiled sadly.
“I'm a fool. I can't do anything by myself.”
So.
“Because of me, my wife... she suffered a lot.”
It was hard, agonizing.
So painful she couldn't bear it.
“My wife got a bad sickness. And... she died.”
No one else.
“I killed her.”
As he said this, Baek Mu-gang gave a faint smile.
For some reason.
Ha-eun felt she could faintly understand the distant emotions held within that smile.
“...Grandpa.”
Because she had been the same.
Blind, with one leg severed, unable to even walk.
She had become a heavy burden, weighing down Oh-jin's life.
She still remembered it vividly.
The sight of Oh-jin desperately scraping together money for her.
The musty smell from his worn, scavenged clothes, and the sound of him unwrapping a 500-won calorie bar.
To watch that miserable life from the sidelines, unable to do anything, was a despair like falling into an endless abyss.
‘What if.’
What if Oh-jin had died in an accident while earning money for her?
What would have become of her?
Baek Mu-gang's figure was reflected in Ha-eun's eyes.
The shoulders of the old man who should have been revered as the Nokjonseong felt endlessly pitiful.
“...”
A curtain of silence fell.
Ha-eun's lips parted as if she didn't know what to say, then she bit them.
“That's... not your fault, Grandpa.”
“It is my fault.”
He cut her off firmly, shaking his head.
“If I hadn't been around, my wife could have lived happily.”
Hearing him state it so calmly, like reciting an answer from a textbook, Ha-eun clenched her fists.
“That's not...!”
“That's not true.”
Before Ha-eun could finish, Oh-jin spoke.
“Whether you're caring for someone or being cared for, simply having a precious person by your side is enough to bring happiness.”
Happiness isn't so far away.
Even beyond the darkest storm clouds where not a speck of light can be seen, the stars are still shining.
No matter how painful, no matter how agonizing.
It would be better than a life without Ha-eun.
“Hehe. I'm a fool, so I don't know such difficult words.”
Baek Mu-gang smiled brightly and began to wolf down the dumplings again.
Oh-jin watched Baek Mu-gang with a bitter gaze.
It wasn't that he couldn't understand.
It was that he wouldn't.
The guilt over his dead wife, the atonement for her.
It was likely the only way he could soothe his sorrow.
“...Is the treasure you're looking for related to your wife?”
“Hmm?”
Baek Mu-gang, his mouth stuffed with dumplings, tilted his head.
After munching and swallowing the dumplings, he smiled innocently.
“Treasure is treasure.”
For some reason.
His bright, childlike smile seemed fragile, as if he might shatter and scatter at any moment.
“Hoo. Let's start by finding Deimos.”
Whatever the treasure was.
To gain Baek Mu-gang's cooperation, they had no choice but to find this treasure.
“Yeah! Let's find the bad guy!”
Baek Mu-gang shot up from his seat as if ready to leap, nodding his head.
* * *
The next day.
The full-scale exploration of the Black Rock Mine began.
They pushed through the thick sulfur gas and scoured the mountain range covered in black granite, but...
“Hah. There's nothing around here.”
“I know.”
During a short break.
Ha-eun perched on a rock and sighed, her expression weary.
The surrounding heat wasn't an issue, but even she found the nauseating smell of the sulfur gas hard to endure.
“...I'm returning to the Sanctuary for a bit, whelp.”
“Yeah, thanks for your hard work.”
Liac looked even more exhausted than Ha-eun as he let out a deep sigh.
As the one with the most sensitive sense of smell in the group, he was suffering particularly from the thick stench of sulfur.
‘It must be hard to bear.’
Even Oh-jin felt a head-splitting pain whenever he used the Stigma of Canes Venatici.
The pain Liac felt, with his sense of smell even more sensitive than Oh-jin's when using the Stigma of Canes Venatici, must have been unimaginably great.
[This is truly the worst place for Liac.]
Vega, perched on Oh-jin's head, sighed softly as she watched Liac disappear into a silver halo of light.
“Are you sure you don't want to go back with him, Vega?”
[I can still endure it.]
Vega grabbed onto Oh-jin's hair and glanced away.
“Wow! A centipede! A centipede!”
Where her gaze fell, Baek Mu-gang was hopping up and down like a child, holding up an insect he had caught emerging from a crack in the rocks.
[...But is that man truly all right?]
Baek Mu-gang was so full of energy it was suspicious, as if inhaling too much sulfur gas had done something to his head.
“He'll be fine... probably.”
Oh-jin gave a wry smile and stood up.
“Let's get moving again.”
“Ugh. Already?”
“Resting here won't make the sulfur gas disappear.”
Ha-eun sighed and pushed herself to her feet.
Following Ha-eun, Isabella stood up, adjusted her vest, and clicked her tongue lightly.
“I never thought the sulfur gas would be more of a problem than the heat.”
“Tell me about it.”
If they had known, it would have been better to bring oxygen tanks instead of vests enchanted with fire resistance.
Of course, it was unlikely that the Dragonian Kingdom had anything like oxygen tanks.
“But isn't this Deimos's territory?”
Ha-eun looked around, craning her neck.
All she could see were billowing clouds of sulfur gas and black granite.
There were no signs of civilization, like maintained roads or buildings, that would mark it as a 'territory'.
‘Is this why the old man couldn't find Deimos's location and just kept wandering around here?’
It would be one thing if there were patrolling Mine-kin like last time.
But this time, not even the Mine-kin were in sight.
“If he's a guy obsessed with precious treasures, he wouldn't just leave his territory as a barren wasteland like this...”
A guy so greedy for treasure that he'd go crazy for it would leave his territory like this?
‘It doesn't add up.’
Aren't treasures usually used for showing off to others?
As Oh-jin frowned, lost in thought.
“Perhaps the territory is beneath this mountain.”
Isabella, who had been calmly surveying their surroundings, spoke up.
“Beneath the mountain?”
“Inside the mountain, to be precise.”
“You mean it was carved out from inside the mountain?”
Isabella nodded and continued.
“Treasures are meant for show, but you don't just leave them out in the open, do you?”
“Ah.”
Now that he heard it, it made sense.
“True, things like gold bars are usually kept in a vault.”
“Of course, as you said, Oh-jin, the desire to show off isn't entirely absent. Treasures are inherently contradictory, after all.”
Just as she said.
The concept of 'treasure' inherently contained a duality.
The desire to show it off to others, and the desire to prevent others from taking it.
To satisfy the desire to show off, one must display the treasure, but that increases the risk of it being stolen.
A tightrope walk between the desire to display and the desire to protect.
Treasure, by its very existence, was bound to be contradictory.
‘Well, it's not like I've ever owned anything expensive.’
Having never owned anything that could be called a treasure, Oh-jin hadn't considered it.
“So we just have to dig?!”
Baek Mu-gang's eyes sparkled as he brandished a rusty iron sword.
He plunged the sword into the hard granite and began digging through it as if it were soft earth.
“I'm good at digging!”
“Ah, no. You can't just start digging.”
Isabella stopped Baek Mu-gang with a flustered expression.
Baek Mu-gang sucked on his finger and tilted his head.
“Why? You said it's down there.”
“We're not even certain it's under the mountain, and if we just drill straight down, we won't know what's below.”
In the worst-case scenario, they could fall right into the middle of a gathering of Deimos and his knights.
‘We need to find the mine entrance.’
If they carved out the inside of the mountain to create an underground city.
There must be an entrance on the outside.
“So where should we go?”
“If a domain truly exists beneath the mountain, they would have to enter and exit through a mine entrance.”
“Really?”
The problem was that even the mine entrance was hard to find.
‘Should I use the Hound of Vega?’
A skill that indiscriminately absorbs all surrounding information into his mind.
It was like a CT scan, allowing him to see the interior that was invisible to the naked eye, but...
‘The problem is that it absorbs information indiscriminately.’
Using it in an empty field already brought on a splitting headache.
To use the Hound of Vega here, where the sulfur gas was so foul that even Liac couldn't stand it, he honestly wasn't confident he could handle the aftermath.
‘It'd be a relief if it just ended with me throwing up.’
He had an ominous feeling the side effects would be much worse than that.
“Hah.”
As he was mulling over this unsolvable problem.
“If it's the mine entrance, I know where it is.”
The bombshell dropped from Baek Mu-gang's lips.
“...Excuse me?”
He knew?
“Yeah! I've even been inside before! There was nothing there, so I came back out!”
“Why on earth are you only telling us this now?”
Didn't that mean they had been wasting their time until now?
“Hmm?”
Baek Mu-gang tilted his head, as if he didn't understand.
“You didn't ask.”
“...Ah, right.”
They hadn't asked.
‘I really want to smack him on the back of the head.’
A surge of anger rose up in him, but seeing Baek Mu-gang staring back with bright, innocent eyes, as if he had no idea what he'd done wrong, the boiling rage quickly cooled.
“Let's go to the mine entrance.”
“Okay! I remember the entrance! I did good, right?”
Baek Mu-gang grinned, his smile wide as if asking for praise.
“...Hah.”
Was trying to get his cooperation really a good idea?
Recalling the doubt he had felt several times before, Oh-jin followed Baek Mu-gang toward the mine entrance.