Human Sleeping Pills
When was the last time I ate anything until I was this stuffed?
The soybean stew bowl sat completely empty.
Ju Ji-hye was still sitting there, savoring the lingering taste on her tongue.
Granted, she'd been blessed with a constitution that made dieting unnecessary for a hunter—but even in this day and age, she had never once eaten her fill like this. It felt as though the very concept of delicious had been carved anew into her memory.
But that wasn't all.
Once she finished and the other two followed suit, out came strawberries for dessert.
This can't be real... how can anything taste this good?
It surpassed every fruit she had ever tasted. Even the natural strawberries from Hankyung Department Store that had recently turned the world upside down couldn't hold a candle to these.
She burst out, brimming with excitement.
"Where did you get these? That stew earlier, and now strawberries this incredible—where does it all come from?"
"That's just how country food is. It's made with love and care."
"That doesn't make any sense—"
"Don't go digging where you shouldn't. Who knows, you might never get to eat any of it again."
Oh Hyeon-seong replied curtly, and her mouth snapped shut at once.
Wild fantasies began sprouting in her mind—was this some secret cultivar supplied only to people far above her station? Or was he receiving prototype food products from a corporation through some terrifying web of connections, the kind that had let him recognize Choi Jeong-il and Han Su-yeon?
"Mm. This really is delicious."
The way Han Su-yeon simply went on savoring hers, as if she'd known all along, only fanned the flames of her speculation.
But whichever theory was true, she couldn't bring herself to ask. Her instincts told her that prying would cost her the strawberries—and everything else besides.
Meanwhile, the heaping bowl of strawberries vanished in no time.
"Alright, up we get. Meal's over!"
"Where are we going?"
Ju Ji-hye was dragged outside under the pretense of the next item on the agenda. Their destination was the large vinyl greenhouse just below the house—strawberry country, in other words.
"Don't tell me those strawberries from earlier came from here?"
"Nope. Different variety from those."
"Th-then why are we here?"
"What kind of question is that? You work off what you eat."
Thump.
Oh Hyeon-seong answered as if it were the most obvious thing in the world and pressed a pair of work gloves into her hands.
Why on earth... am I doing this?
Ju Ji-hye crouched between the strawberry rows, wearing the expression of someone about to cry. Yesterday, this would have been beyond imagining. But when she glanced back, there was Han Su-yeon behind her, working away in silence.
The Deputy Director of the Bureau who walks in and out of the Blue House... picking strawberries in this backwater. Does that even make sense?
That was exactly why she kept harvesting with that tearful look on her face. Han Su-yeon herself, for her part, was filling her basket without the slightest fuss. She'd already held a hoe and broken virgin ground before, so this barely registered as work.
When her eyes met Oh Hyeon-seong's across the field, she shot a quick glance back at Ju Ji-hye and spoke up.
"Senpai, I'm all for us getting along and working together, but... why did you bring Ji-hye home with you?"
"I told you. She's here to convalesce. I brought her to make her better."
"Please tell me you're not thinking some fresh country air is going to fix her."
Han Su-yeon let out a short sigh.
"A year after prodromal symptoms set in, it wouldn't be strange for her psychosis to erupt tonight. She's a time bomb that could go off at any moment no matter how stable she looks—you know that better than anyone, senpai."
"Choi Jeong-il told me something. He said the kid ate a strawberry grown in my field. And remarkably, while she was eating it, her condition improved."
"What...? A strawberry? The ones we just ate?"
"No, not those. The ones we're picking right now."
Oh Hyeon-seong explained the whole chain of events to her—that what they grew in this field was a downgraded shipping-grade strawberry, and that Ju Ji-hye's condition had visibly improved after eating them.
"A few days of eating nothing but shipping-grade strawberries, and she showed marked improvement. If the spirits' crops really do have that kind of effect, then Ju Ji-hye must be someone unusually sensitive to it—someone it works on far better than most. So I brought her here to see for myself."
"Eating strawberries made her aftereffects improve..."
Han Su-yeon murmured, her expression grave. But lost in thought, she simply went quiet.
"What are you brooding about?"
"Nothing. Never mind."
Oh Hyeon-seong had expected her to scoff at such an absurd notion, but instead she just shook her head. She, too, had experienced something strange lately. That didn't mean she accepted it, though.
"Haa. Now I get why you're going this far for her. The truth is... it's not Ju Ji-hye you're worried about, it's Choi Jeong-il, isn't it?"
"Consider it a test—and a good deed while we're at it."
"Let me be clear: the Disposal of high-tier hunters isn't our jurisdiction. That's the National Security Bureau's job."
Han Su-yeon's face was dead serious now.
"If the treatment doesn't look like it's working, don't keep her around too long. You could get dragged into real trouble, senpai—that's one thing even I can't cover for."
"Relax. It's exactly one week."
Oh Hyeon-seong replied. If even constant exposure to this place's harvest produced no effect within a week, then her earlier improvement from eating shipping-grade strawberries would turn out to be nothing but her imagination. Still, there was always the chance of some other variable. He intended to give Ju Ji-hye a push so she could feel the real effect in short order—not just keep feeding her.
"In exchange, you're going to help me out."
"We're doing rehabilitation training. Come out front."
"Excuse me? It's barely been any time since I finished picking strawberries. And who does rehab in a place like this...?"
Ju Ji-hye sprang up from where she'd been lying in her room. Oh Hyeon-seong brushed her objection aside without a second thought.
"I brought you here to cure what ails you in the first place. And you agreed to follow my instructions quietly while you're here, didn't you? Come out."
He closed the door behind him. At his unbearably curt tone, Ju Ji-hye grumbled her way out of bed. But even as she moved, doubts churned inside her.
Rehabilitation training? As if that could fix what even the CEO couldn't.
Choi Jeong-il was the head of a world-class hunter management agency. In an era when the hunter industry had grown this massive, it was no stretch to say he raked in money by the wheelbarrowful. And yet he had poured a substantial portion of that enormous worldwide revenue into running a single nonprofit—a research and treatment institution dedicated to easing the burden on hunters who crossed through gates and helping them recover their lost resilience. Its direct treatment facilities were famous for rivaling hospitals under the Management Bureau.
Yet for all that money, Choi Jeong-il had found no answer at all to the question of hunters' mental damage. Nothing had worked across the many avenues of treatment they'd tried for Ju Ji-hye. There was no way that rehab training in some village that probably lacked even basic equipment would do any good.
"Huh?"
But when she stepped outside, it wasn't Oh Hyeon-seong standing there—it was Han Su-yeon, waiting for her on the empty expanse of bare ground.
"Don't tell me you're the one doing the rehabilitation training..."
"I am. Senpai asked me for advice on how to handle your mana."
"Advice?"
Ju Ji-hye swallowed hard. She was a hunter whose specialty was mana rather than physical prowess. If anyone had come up to her offering to teach her how to handle mana, she would have bristled hard—this was her own field of expertise, one she'd walked as a Grade 10 high-tier hunter. Her pride couldn't be anything but ironclad, and it had no business being otherwise. Unlike the hacks who coasted on freak constitutions and flimsy experience, she had talent plus rock-solid fundamentals—she'd even taken one-on-one instruction from her own CEO, Choi Jeong-il, more times than she could count.
But right now, she felt not the slightest resistance. If anything, her heart was pounding.
"Before we get into it properly, why don't you use your ability once?"
"Yes...!"
After a deep breath, Ju Ji-hye activated her telekinesis. There was nothing around to manipulate on the empty ground, but for an instant the space around her brimmed with mana so dense it felt ready to burst. Han Su-yeon nodded at the intensity of a command far beyond her expectations.
At this level, she's already at the absolute top tier when it comes to handling mana. A realm that would've been impossible without both talent and effort... but that much is a given at this rank. What separates them is what happens within it.
Unlike ordinary hunters, whose levels were all roughly the same, the world of top-tier hunters above Grade 10 operated on a different scale. Even within the same grade, the gap could split so sharply that you'd wonder if they truly belonged in the same category at all. When the base pool itself was that vast, the gulf that could open up was necessarily vast as well.
"The unit and scale of mana you're commanding is remarkably large. But for all the raw firepower you can put out, you're lacking in finesse."
"The CEO advised me to accept that trade-off, to play to my ability's strengths."
"For efficiency, that's the right call. But since we're here, let's refine it a bit further. Once you grasp the knack, it's simpler than you'd think."
Han Su-yeon approached and corrected the pathways of Ju Ji-hye's mana flow.
"Try channeling your mana along the pathway I've just carved for you."
"Y-you can construct a spell this way? But it's so intricate, I'm not sure it'd be usable in the field..."
"It's a practice spell, for building the feel. In real combat you'd compress it far more simply, but that's beyond you right now, so let's start with a taste."
"I'll give it a try."
Ju Ji-hye swallowed and set her mana circulating. She even closed her eyes—a technique she'd graduated from in her first year after awakening, dismissing it as useless in real combat—and focused completely, yet it came together worse than she'd expected. A true ability-type hunter's skill lay in the compression of a spell, and if even this practice exercise was this punishing, the thought of compressing it later made her head swim.
"Don't rush the deployment just to chase speed—focus on building it steadier and denser. High-density mana delivers far greater power at the same output. And once you can do that, no one will strip control of the mana from you and leave you helpless like yesterday, no matter how big the difference in weight class."
Hunters sliding toward psychosis shared one thing in common: their mana grew aggressive and unstable in its expression. Mind and body influenced each other intimately, and mana could not escape that process. Conversely, though, learning to quiet it increased one's control over oneself—buying even a little time to slow the rate of collapse.
Tsts-tsts-tst!
"D-did I do it?"
"Well done. That's at least enough for a taste."
After more than a dozen attempts, she had done it. Sweat soaked her forehead, but an incomparable smile hung on Ju Ji-hye's lips. Without Han Su-yeon's instruction, she wouldn't even have conceived of this method of deployment, let alone succeeded or failed at it. It was far beyond her for now—but if she could digest it, the leap forward would be enormous.
"We'll cover the real theory tomorrow. For now, let's end with a taste of what happens when that spell you just practiced is deployed properly."
Vmmmmm!
Han Su-yeon pressed her palms together and unfurled her mana. The very same spell Ju Ji-hye had just been practicing. But the surrounding air began to tremble faintly as a brilliant blue light spread out and swallowed everything around them.
Whaaaash!
My... my God...
Ju Ji-hye stood rooted to the spot. It was as wide and deep as an ocean, its far shore invisible. Serene, yet holding annihilating force within it—it felt as though the mana itself were showing her, firsthand, what true power looked like. Without invoking her special constitution at all, Han Su-yeon's pure deployment of mana alone left Ju Ji-hye steeped in awe.
Pat!
Han Su-yeon withdrew her mana, and it was over. After standing in a daze for a while, Ju Ji-hye bowed her head deep.
"Th-thank you so much. I learned a great deal."
"Don't rush—take it slow. A week isn't a long time, but it'll be enough to stabilize you considerably."
"Sorry—a whole week?"
"Is that too long?"
"No! It's perfect!"
It was instruction on an entirely different plane. Even Choi Jeong-il, who had coached her several times, had only ever used mana as a support tool and never reached anything close to this realm. No—he couldn't even begin to compare. Who would have thought she'd witness something like this in a farming village out in the sticks?
Gratitude toward Oh Hyeon-seong, who had dragged her all the way out here, began quietly welling up inside her.
"My part's finished, but senpai will be along next for your training."
"Training? But... what could he possibly do for me? He retired ages ago, and I can't sense any mana from him at all?"
"You're joking, right? He has far more to teach you than I do."
Han Su-yeon said it with a laugh. It was no empty platitude. To her, even being placed in the same sentence as a comparison was laughable—because in the past, he hadn't only been the strongest hunter of his era, but its finest instructor as well. The only problem was that his infamy had risen to match.
Thud.
Right on cue, Oh Hyeon-seong appeared. The moment Ju Ji-hye laid eyes on him, her mouth fell wide open.
"Wh-what is that?! Those weird sunglasses?!"
"A strong body houses a strong spirit. Trainee Ju Ji-hye, you will undergo the rehabilitation and training program for the remainder of your stay. I expect your full cooperation."
"No! What even is this?!"
"You needn't worry about insomnia keeping you up anymore. The moment your head hits the pillow, I'll have you conked out in one second flat."
Oh Hyeon-seong declared in a voice hard as bedrock, sunglasses on and cap pulled low—a man who had arrived fully committed to the bit.
Hrk.
Han Su-yeon, watching from the side, shuddered involuntarily. Then she shook her head and hurried back toward the house.
If I keep watching that... I'm going to dream about boot camp tonight.