The Stew Thief
Ju Ji-hye was a city girl through and through.
She had been born on some of the most valuable land in Seoul and had never once set foot outside the city. Life beyond its limits simply didn't register as real to her.
Of course, hunters were sometimes sent out to the field, and drama shoots meant traveling to the provinces now and then. And every one of those experiences only hardened her convictions.
The countryside was abhorrent.
She hated the rough, unpaved dirt roads. She hated the disgusting bugs. She hated how pitch-black everything became the moment the sun went down. No matter how old she grew, no matter when she retired, her plan was to spend her days popping champagne corks between high-rise towers.
That was certainly, certainly how it was supposed to be.
"How on earth did it come to this..."
Having stepped out of the car, Ju Ji-hye stared blankly at her surroundings. Not a single tall building anywhere — just a tucked-away corner of the mountains. The village itself was one she'd never even heard of, and she was standing in front of a house shoved into its farthest reaches.
"Come on in. That's where you'll be staying. Sharing the main building would probably get uncomfortable, so just use the annex while you're here."
Oh Hyeon-seong, ushering her into the yard, gestured toward the annex. What a thoughtful landlord. Hyeon-seong found himself nodding along to his own consideration.
Ju Ji-hye, however, was still in shock.
"You said you'd *treat* me! I thought there'd be some kind of secret research facility, and instead you're telling me to stay *here*?"
"Nothing beats rest for hunter aftereffects. Recover out here in the clean country air, work up a sweat, and the illness will take care of itself."
"Th-that's complete nonsense!"
Ju Ji-hye plopped down on the spot. For someone who had arrived full of hope, it was a proper smack on the back of the head.
Choi Jeong-il, standing behind her, stole a glance at him and asked carefully.
"Sunbae-nim... is this really right?"
"It's only a few days. After that, I'll send her back to Seoul whether she likes it or not, so just leave her with me for now. Ah — do you want to stay here too, while we're at it? Doesn't matter to me."
"Ah, that is... I have some urgent business to attend to..."
"Right, you're a businessman. Busy man. Respect."
A thin trickle of sweat slid down Choi Jeong-il's face. He'd known his senior had gone farming, but never had he imagined that the great treatment plan would amount to dragging Ju Ji-hye out here.
"What, don't trust me?"
Oh Hyeon-seong asked with a faint smile. Choi Jeong-il, who had been studying his face, shook his head.
"Of course not."
Honestly, he couldn't begin to guess what the man was thinking. But not understanding something was an entirely different matter from trusting him.
The Oh Hyeon-seong he knew was not a man who would dream up something like this without purpose. And this was hardly the first incomprehensible decision he'd made. He would casually propose plans that made even his own teammates balk, and every time, the team would vent their not-quite-complaints at him.
Yet looking back, he had always been right. In the most extreme situations imaginable, those baffling calls had saved Choi Jeong-il's life more times than he could count. Knowing that, the team had always eventually nodded and followed his lead.
And so, as if out of old habit, Choi Jeong-il nodded once more.
"Then... we're in your care."
He bowed his head deeply toward his senior of so many years — carrying with it his unwavering respect.
"..."
Left all alone in the annex, Ju Ji-hye sat huddled in the corner, arms wrapped around her knees.
He said he'd cure the wretched insomnia... so I pushed back my entire schedule and followed him all the way out here, and for what?
Her usual self would never have believed it. Their first meeting at the department store had been a disaster from the start, and a non-doctor making wild medical claims out of nowhere deserved zero trust.
And yet she had believed him. Because Choi Jeong-il — Choi Jeong-il of all people — had personally vouched for the man. A first-generation senior of that caliber might genuinely have some method, she'd thought. If it meant shedding this miserable disease, she would have grasped at any straw, however thin.
What she'd found instead was despair.
I made one little mistake the first time we met, so this is him mocking me? Over an illness so painful I've genuinely wanted to die?
Ju Ji-hye chewed anxiously at the nails of her trembling hand. If he hadn't been acquainted with her CEO, she would have barged in and thrown hands already. At this point, she honestly wondered whether Choi Jeong-il himself had been swindled by some vicious con artist.
What do I do? Should I just run for it?
But she soon shook her head. He'd been threatened that if she caused trouble this time, it wouldn't end with words. Having racked up several strikes from past incidents, this was one warning she truly had to heed.
Fine. He said hold out one week. Just one week. But you'd better brace yourself, CEO. The moment this is over, I'm milking this whole ordeal for everything it's worth at contract renewal.
Ju Ji-hye huffed and stewed in her anger.
It was at that moment that a delicious smell drifted in from somewhere. Having already skipped every meal that day, her head whipped around.
What is that? There's no way something smells this good in the middle of nowhere.
Before she knew it, she was on her feet, drawn outside by the scent. Entering the main house, she came face to face with Oh Hyeon-seong standing in the living room.
"Oh, perfect timing. I was just about to call you. It's dinner — sit down and eat."
"...Eat? There's nothing to eat."
"There's a table right there, isn't there?"
Ju Ji-hye's gaze finally drifted to the table. What she found was a meal so sparse that at first glance, she hadn't even registered it as food.
"*This* is a meal?"
"What's missing? Soybean stew, rice, and a whole spread of side dishes."
"Who even eats soybean stew these days..."
Ju Ji-hye frowned down at the stew. Doenjang jjigae was one of the worst foods that modern civilization had degraded. Fair enough — among all the ruined products out there, mass-produced factory soybean paste was especially vile. It reeked, it tasted of nothing, and unless you were truly broke or had bizarre taste, there was no reason to eat it.
But... why does soybean stew smell like *that*?
Despite her prejudice, the aroma that had been drifting over since earlier was striking her starved senses with full force. It smelled like an entirely different dish from the stew she'd tasted by accident once or twice. Her arm twitched — and then she shot to her feet.
"Enjoy it alone. This kind of thing turns my stomach. I can't possibly."
"You do realize there are no ten-million-won tasting-menu restaurants in this village, right? Starve to death for all I care."
"As if skipping a meal kills anyone. Honestly, if I just dropped dead, my CEO would finally have to apologize."
Ju Ji-hye spun around sharply. At her thumping, retreating back, Oh Hyeon-seong scratched his head.
"Hmm... I need to feed her, but this is tricky."
The reason he'd brought her here in the first place was to run a clinical trial of sorts — a test of the spirits' crops. If even the downgraded batch had produced those effects in Ju Ji-hye, then the genuine crops grown here should work that much more powerfully.
But if she wouldn't eat, there was no progress to observe.
Well, she'll eat on her own once she's hungry enough.
He'd promised her a week. Pride alone, he figured, would drive her to endure the week without touching a bite before making her exit.
Which was, in truth, a foolish plan. Modern hunters might not know it, but hunger shows no mercy to hunters either. You could gain superhuman strength, become some extraordinary being — and yet the moment you felt it most keenly that you were still an ordinary human was when you went hungry for hours in an operational zone. It was an experience that let you stare straight down into the depths of your own humanity.
Come to think of it, that's probably why training camp always had a starvation phase built in.
He paid it no further mind and finished setting the table, then gazed with satisfaction at the generously laid-out spread. Back at the start, even making white rice with gochujang stew had taken tremendous effort — doing everything from scratch without outside ingredients meant every single step fell on his own hands. But now the range of dishes he could make had widened, and the lineup of basic side dishes had grown. The system had settled in, and the variety of crops had multiplied.
Normally I'd be preparing the spirits' snacks around now... but with a stranger here, they're hiding and won't come out.
Giving thanks once more for the meal before him, Oh Hyeon-seong picked up his spoon.
"Thank you for the food!"
The room was dark. In the quiet stillness, a rustling sound.
"...Haah."
The torment of insomnia wasn't merely the inability to sleep. The real problem was that even as body and mind screamed with exhaustion, sleep refused to come. Severe insomnia was, in effect, an endless flailing in a state where you could do neither one thing nor the other.
"I'm losing my mind."
Ju Ji-hye pressed a hand to her forehead. Her body was spent, sleep wouldn't come, and her stomach was growling. And God, her stomach — was skipping a single day of meals really supposed to hurt this much?
It's all that smell's fault.
The scent of that stew had been seeping through her door ever since dinner. Her senses were already sharper than an ordinary person's, and with hunger sharpening them further, everything stood on end. Smells no one else could possibly detect were amplified tenfold in her nose, driving her to the brink of madness.
"Ugh... I can't take this anymore!"
At last she threw off her covers. Left like this, she wouldn't sleep even if she died and came back to life.
Not that her pride didn't matter too.
Just one bite. I don't know what smells this good, but once I taste the disgusting soybean paste, my appetite will die on the spot.
Moving on silent feet, she slipped out and scanned the main house, suppressing every trace of her presence. Through the crack of a door, she could see Oh Hyeon-seong fast asleep.
Sleeping like a baby. No chance of getting caught.
A slight smile crossed Ju Ji-hye's lips. Back when she'd received special training from Choi Jeong-il at Aegis, she had learned stealth techniques for killing her presence. Granted, it had been surface-level at best — laughable next to a professional's — but it was more than enough to fool ordinary people and middling hunters.
Besides, Oh Hyeon-seong was a retired hunter, and he was sound asleep besides. She was confident she could deceive him easily.
Click.
She lifted the lid of the kitchen pot, and there it was — leftover soybean stew, just as hoped. The fragrance that billowed up nearly turned her brain to mush. Spoon in hand, she carefully scooped up broth and solids together.
Ju Ji-hye's eyes went round as saucers.
Someone once said that midnight snacks eaten behind your mother's back were the most delicious food in the world. But could cold stew really taste this good? Her original plan of a single cautious bite vanished without a trace, and the spoon began working overtime.
It's delicious! It's delicious!
The savory broth, the tofu, the onions, the tender zucchini. The violently good flavor of ingredients so vividly alive, harmonizing all at once in her mouth — she didn't even stop to think about the evidence she'd leave behind by morning.
And it was in the middle of that frantic, senseless eating that it happened.
"...A thief?"
A voice came from directly behind her. Ju Ji-hye whirled around, heart slamming.
Wh-who—?
Not Oh Hyeon-seong. A woman was watching her from the darkness, and something was very wrong — this was no ordinary presence.
...Danger!
Sensing the threat on pure instinct, Ju Ji-hye raised her arm and immediately unleashed her telekinesis, seizing the surrounding space in an instant to crush the woman's entire body where she stood.
But in that very moment—
Astonishingly, Ju Ji-hye's vision flipped end over end.
CRASH!
"Hahk...!"
Slammed flat into the floor, Ju Ji-hye gulped for air. Her vision swam, her breath caught, and for a moment she couldn't draw a single proper lungful.
Th-that's impossible.
She had struck first — and been utterly overwhelmed in return. It lasted only an instant, yet she had felt it clearly: her control of her own mana had been ripped away. That was something that couldn't even be mimicked without an absolute gulf in power.
"...Who are you?"
The woman who had approached through the darkness — Han Su-yeon — stared down at her in silence.