3. Why Is This So Delicious?
The next morning, Oh Hyeon-seong woke up looking rumpled and disheveled.
When he lifted his head, the morning sun streamed brilliantly through the window.
Yaaawn.
He let out a long, drawn-out yawn and shuffled out of his room.
"Sleep well, everyone?"
Whee!
The spirits sprawled across the living room floor stirred and sat up.
Around a dozen of them yawned and waved their little arms — but they apparently hadn't slept enough, and before long they flopped right back down. Hyeon-seong gave an awkward laugh and looked away.
As expected, the house was spotless.
Since it had sat abandoned for so long, he'd assumed there would be plenty to fix up, but just as Gwon Gyeong-min had promised — that he'd taken care of everything before they arrived — the place was in perfect shape.
He'd even hired professionals to repair whatever needed repairing. Gyeong-min had once owed him a debt from the old days, but Hyeon-seong never imagined he'd go this far.
Either way, from his own perspective it was a win — one less thing to worry about.
He'd checked yesterday: the plumbing and heating were all in working order.
Feeling a bit peckish, he slipped on his shoes and stepped out into the yard before breakfast.
The spirits who were already awake were scattered everywhere. Some brimmed with energy, darting around from the crack of dawn, while others lay splayed out here and there in the grass.
Even so, the property was so vast that it never felt crowded.
The difference was stark when he remembered the time he'd let all of them loose in his old apartment — there hadn't been room to so much as set a foot down, and he'd had to summon them right back in.
"Hm... so what do I do now?"
Having nothing to do was an oddly uncomfortable feeling for him.
His life as a hunter had been nothing but an unrelenting cycle of brutal missions and training, with barely any time to sleep. Even in the hospital, he'd been forced to devote every ounce of effort to treatment and rehabilitation.
This was the first time since childhood that he'd been handed stretches of empty time with nothing to fill them.
Feeling awkward with a gift of free time... I'm an idiot. Might as well move around a bit.
Oh Hyeon-seong walked on, his leg with its slight limp.
His right leg, once completely shattered, was now only mildly inconvenient.
Thanks to a dozen-odd major surgeries that had all gone well, the loss of function had been kept far smaller than anyone had expected. If he accepted a little pain, he could even walk without limping at all.
Gyeong-min had ridden with him all the way from Seoul to this place without ever noticing anything off about his leg. Running at full tilt was out of the question, of course, but around here it didn't seem like he'd need to sprint anywhere very often.
Right. For now, I'll just empty my head and rest quietly.
Walking with the breeze drifting over him, he headed toward the vegetable garden. The lettuce he'd planted yesterday had suddenly come to mind.
Obviously a single day wouldn't change anything about lettuce seeds — he just wanted to make sure the spirits hadn't dug up the soil while playing, or caused some other problem.
But when he actually reached the garden, he was met with an astonishing sight.
"Wh... what is this?"
Oh Hyeon-seong stopped dead in his tracks and stared at the garden.
Fresh, vibrant lettuce had sprouted — the once-empty corner of the garden was now filled with lush green leaves.
He stared at the lettuce as if locked in a staring contest, but no answer came of it. The situation simply made no sense. Even drenching the seeds in growth accelerants — illegal ones, packed with side effects — could never have produced this kind of speed.
And I didn't plant seedlings, I planted seeds. So you're telling me they germinated and grew to harvestable size overnight?
Humanity had once stood at the cliff's edge of catastrophic famine. Even with unlimited use of growth accelerants back then, the best they'd managed was cutting the growing period to roughly a fifth or sixth of normal.
Yet this lettuce had needed a single day. No — not even a full twenty-four hours. It had grown to completion in a single night.
Could it be a mutation? I've heard that prolonged exposure to heavy miasma can cause serious mutations in crops... no, miasma that concentrated would show visible signs on the surface. There's nothing.
Wee! Wee!
Just then, the spirits of life emerged from among the lettuce.
The little ones looked positively delighted, bouncing up and down as they babbled something at him. Oh Hyeon-seong knelt down to listen closely — and was floored.
"This... you did this?"
The spirits nodded their heads.
Then came a brief silence. It was quite a hard story to believe, but there was no way the spirits would lie about something like this.
"Wow... you've been hiding quite a talent, haven't you? The ability to make crops grow faster — who knew."
Wee! Wee!
At his praise, the excited spirits hopped about gleefully. Hyeon-seong stroked the ones clustering around him, as if to say they'd done well, though somewhere in the back of his mind surprise and bewilderment mingled.
We've been together all this time, and I never dreamed they had an ability like this. Well... come to think of it, most of my memories with the spirits are from the battlefield.
As his exploits as a hunter drew attention and his standing rose, Oh Hyeon-seong had grown busier and busier. By the end, even ten bodies wouldn't have been enough.
But a hunter that busy racing across every frontline had no spare moment to stroll leisurely through rice paddies and fields. In a way, it was only natural he'd never known about this ability.
And now old memories are resurfacing for no reason.
Brushing the dirt from his knees, Hyeon-seong rose to his feet.
The lettuce in the garden flaunted its freshness to the fullest, but he decided not to harvest it right away, leaving it be for now. The reason was simple — the thought of eating it just yet made him uneasy.
It's not that I don't trust the spirits... but I can't help feeling a little weird about it.
A plant that should have needed at least several weeks of nutrients to grow had grown to full maturity in a single night. It was transcendent, almost unnatural growth.
Remembering the painful measles society had suffered in the early days of the Gate crisis — the brutal side effects of growth accelerants — he hesitated to shove this mystery lettuce straight into his mouth.
"Well, for now... I'll keep an eye on it."
After finishing breakfast, Oh Hyeon-seong went down into the village and met up with Gwon Gyeong-min. As promised, Gyeong-min dragged him all over the place introducing him to the villagers.
Thanks to that, Hyeon-seong ended up meeting nearly everyone in town. His first impression of all of them was good.
Gyeong-min apparently held some real clout in the village, because knowing he was his close friend made people welcome Hyeon-seong all the more warmly. All that big talk on the drive over hadn't been empty bravado after all.
In any case, Hyeon-seong greeted the residents with all due sincerity. He wasn't some outsider planning to stay a few years and leave — he intended to put down roots here for good, so getting along with the villagers mattered. He'd even brought gifts along, racking up goodwill points.
He'd heard that in farming communities like this, newcomers were sometimes required to pay a village development fund, but this village asked for nothing of the kind. According to Gyeong-min, that was a fairly rare arrangement.
Welcoming a neighbor this warmly with nothing to gain from it... you really wouldn't see that in the cities these days.
Oh Hyeon-seong returned home in a rather good mood — and then, stepping into the yard, he came face to face with the garden he'd forgotten about.
"Oh, right. You."
The lettuce sat there, quietly maintaining its appearance.
It hadn't rotted. It hadn't given off toxic fumes. It hadn't overgrown to the size of a house. It simply went on flaunting its fresh green allure, as if deliberately tempting him.
"...I'll just go eat."
Hyeon-seong swept right past the garden and into the kitchen.
It was a slightly awkward hour, but wandering all over the village had worked up an appetite, so he decided to have dinner a bit early.
A heaping mound of dull gray-white rice, a stew, and a few simple side dishes arrived on the table. He laid out a mat and set the meal on top. As a single meal went, there was nothing wrong with the spread.
And yet, hungry as he was, no particular anticipation lit Oh Hyeon-seong's face.
He took his first spoonful of rice. As he chewed, feeling the grains against his teeth, his brow gradually creased.
Yep. Like chewing a lump of clay.
Despite being freshly cooked, the rice was hopelessly dry and crumbly. No matter how many times he chewed, no sweetness came through — it just clung to the inside of his mouth, gritty and pasty, like playing with modeling clay.
Even from the look of it in the bowl, the telltale sheen of factory-made synthetic rice was enough to kill his appetite.
You'd think I'd be used to it by now... but getting out of the city somehow makes it hit harder.
Escaping the cutthroat chaos of city life to enjoy simple, delicious meals in a quiet countryside setting — that was the dream of returning to the farm he'd seen on TV as a kid.
Good scenery and a leisurely pace had worked out fine. The problem was that the joy of eating on the other end of it was missing, and it left him feeling a little hollow.
In my old life I never even had time to savor food, so maybe that's why the loss stings more now.
Hyeon-seong clicked his tongue and smacked his lips. But there was no real alternative. What chance did a washed-up hunter holed up in the countryside have of enjoying luxuries even a nation's president couldn't touch?
He simply forced the side dishes and rice down, spoonful by reluctant spoonful.
Wee!
Just then, a spirit of life came tripping over the threshold, babbling as it approached. And behind its back, it was carrying a lettuce leaf bigger than its own body.
The little one had plucked a leaf straight from the garden and hauled it all the way here, and now it held the leaf out toward Hyeon-seong with all its might.
"Y-you want me to eat it?"
Wee!
The spirit nodded vigorously. It was panting hard, chest heaving — having carried a leaf larger than itself all this way alone, it was practically dripping with sweat.
Thrown off by the spirit's sudden behavior, Hyeon-seong found himself unable to shake his head. If he refused here, the little thing would probably take it hard. It might sulk for ages afterward, hiding itself away beneath a dresser drawer.
Fine. If it weren't safe to eat, they wouldn't have brought it to me.
He accepted the offered lettuce. If there were toxins or dangerous mutations in it, the spirit of life would never have failed to notice.
He did turn the leaf over this way and that with a wary eye, but finding nothing wrong with its appearance, he cautiously placed it in his mouth.
Crunch.
"...?!"
But in that instant, an entire new world unfolded before his eyes.