The Spirit of the Earth
Shovel!
Oh Hyeon-seong's mouth filled to the brim with rice.
Pearl-white grains glistened as they spread across his tongue, their soft, silky texture gliding over his palate. Each bite carried a satisfying chewiness and springy resistance, and though he'd barely chewed at all, a delicate sweetness bloomed on his tongue.
What... is this?
This was rice? Even digging through his oldest memories, back before the gates tore the world open, he had never tasted anything this sublime. It was as if every possible attribute of what a grain of rice could be had been maxed out to its absolute limit. The moment it hit his tongue, the shock was like a halo erupting behind his back.
It's delicious!
He shoveled down spoonful after spoonful with nothing to accompany them, and with every bite, happiness swelled up inside him.
But all the while, someone was staring at him intently.
"..."
"Ah, sorry."
Only then did Oh Hyeon-seong notice Alisa's pleading eyes. Judging by her expression alone, she looked about ready to start drooling, so he quickly scooped out a portion for her.
Whoosh!
Alisa snatched it up with remarkable dexterity. She chewed through her overflowing mouthful carefully, savoring every grain with evident delight. At the sight of an expression he'd never seen on her before, Oh Hyeon-seong couldn't help but chuckle.
"Eat as much as you want. There's plenty."
He scooped out an entire extra bowl for her, then gently stroked her head. Sitting there side by side, the two of them shared the humblest — and most satisfying — meal either of them had ever known.
When his bowl was empty, Oh Hyeon-seong lingered at the table, letting the afterglow wash over him. To think a single bowl of rice could move him this deeply.
Just then, having demolished her own towering mound of rice, Alisa plopped her head down on his lap and curled up.
"..."
Her face wore an utterly blissful look, her eyes half-closed. Between the way she got drowsy when full and everything else, the far more exalted being looked for all the world like one of the lower spirits of a completely different temperament.
After sitting there a while, Oh Hyeon-seong carefully shifted her aside and draped a blanket over her.
"You should clean up after every meal."
He lifted the whole tray and rose from his seat.
But the moment he did, a powerful sense of wrongness washed over him. All he'd done was stand up, and yet there was a subtle but unmistakable difference in the way his lower body felt.
"My leg... it's healed?"
Oh Hyeon-seong's left leg was perfectly fine. And not merely in the sense that the lingering damage had eased — his leg was completely healed. Not even the faintest creak remained.
"Gah!"
Lee Gil-sang thrashed awake in a flurry of commotion. He grimaced at the ringing in his skull, then flinched at the sight of the unfamiliar room around him. He was sprawled face-down with his head pressed to the floor, and when he tried to brace himself on his arms, he found his limbs bound tight — he couldn't move an inch.
"You've got to be kidding me..."
Only then did Lee Gil-sang take stock of himself. His arms and legs were shackled by rings of bluish mana, and no matter how hard he strained, they wouldn't give. Racking his memory, he finally grasped the situation he was in.
R-right... those were made by Han Su-yeon herself. There's no way a nobody like me could break them.
Yesterday's events were burned vividly into his mind. He remembered being dragged back from the very threshold of death. It was a miracle his life had been spared at all — the problem was that he was now trapped in what might well be the most terrifying place in all of Korea.
"Eep!"
At a sudden sound behind him, he jolted and whipped his head around. There was the otter, arms crossed, looking down at him from atop a chest of drawers.
"An ot— otter?"
While he was still gaping at the creature in disbelief, the door burst open.
"Awake at last? You slept a long time."
Oh Hyeon-seong looked down at him as he spoke. He'd expected the backlash from such a potent curse to take a while, but the man had been out cold for over a day. He'd been out through the barbecue last night, the morning walk, the midday nap, and the entire rice harvest.
The moment Lee Gil-sang laid eyes on him, however, he bowed his head to the floor and shouted.
"O Absolute Being!"
"What on earth is all that, on top of everything from yesterday..."
"You saved the life of a worthless worm like me...! I am in your debt!"
Lee Gil-sang bowed his head deep, his face full of emotion. A colossal hidden hand that gripped the entire nation of Korea in its fist — and that very being had stepped forward personally to save his life, even severing the curse that had bound his neck. That fact alone filled him with profound awe for the enormous presence before him.
Oh Hyeon-seong could only stare at him, dumbfounded, but the man had read the room well enough, so he simply nodded.
"Well then, since your mouth works again — talk. Who carved that curse into you?"
"It is a curse bestowed by the master of our underworld. Not the bosses of the four syndicates known to the public, but the true ruler reigning above them all. I have never seen him myself, and no one alive knows his true face."
Lee Gil-sang recited everything he knew. Even as a senior executive of the Samjeonghoe, one of the four major crime syndicates, he knew nothing about the man. Not even three syllables of a name — merely the awareness that he existed at all. The ordinary rank-and-file members couldn't even imagine that anyone sat above the bosses; that was the stuff of cheap conspiracy theories. And yet it was all true — and as far as Lee Gil-sang was concerned, the hidden mastermind he was facing now was something far greater still.
Hm. I haven't the faintest clue who it could be.
Oh Hyeon-seong let out a thoughtful hum. But he didn't press any further. Quite simply, he had no desire to know. He was a retired man now — the affairs of the sunlit world weren't his concern, let alone the shadow world squirming underneath it. There was only one thing he cared about.
"In that case, you lot can sort out your own business. What I want to know is where those original rice seeds came from."
"We... purchased them from the Russian mafia and smuggled them into the country. We figured that if they were rice seeds, we could sell them at a far higher price on our end."
"What? Hold on — why would the Russians have seeds in the first place?"
"They claimed it was a sample that leaked out of a seed vault that had been sealed off long ago."
"A seed vault? Those would've been picked clean ages ago."
Seed vaults had existed as humanity's insurance against some unforeseeable catastrophe. By now, though, every one of them had long since been destroyed by monsters or looted down to the last shelf. Russia in particular had had its entire territory turned inside out once already — there was no way any vault could have survived.
"That's exactly why I did my own research before making the deal... and there was talk that the goods actually flowed out not from Russia, but from a neighboring country. A secret seed vault that had never been discovered before!"
A secret seed vault holding tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of original seed samples. Granted, it was nothing but rumor, and he had no way of verifying any of it — but if it were true, the value would be beyond calculation. In an age when crop varieties commanded astronomical worth, it would be no different from hundreds of shipwrecked treasure galleons, their holds bursting with gold, lying asleep somewhere in the world's waters.
Oh ho...
Even for Oh Hyeon-seong, it was a story impossible not to find tempting. After a moment lost in thought, he spoke again.
"Trespassing on my property, smashing my window on your way out. I already had someone come fix it, sure — but there's a price to pay."
"I— I'm terribly sorry. Name it, and it's yours."
"First, make sure your organization doesn't come sniffing around over this business. You can manage that much, I assume?"
"O— of course! I'll handle it within my own reach!"
Lee Gil-sang answered instantly. The loss of an original sample worth a fortune wouldn't be smoothed over easily. But he had no choice. Sample or no sample, if he failed to read the room and kept pushing his luck here, his entire organization would be wiped off the map by tomorrow.
"And one more thing. Look properly into that rumor just now. I'll consider your little stint hiding in my closet settled with this."
"You... you're entrusting a task to me?"
"...I just did, didn't I?"
Lee Gil-sang's face was a portrait of profound gratitude. Oh Hyeon-seong wondered, for the umpteenth time, what was wrong with this man — but the truth was that Lee Gil-sang was genuinely overjoyed. To receive a personal, individual mission from the untouchable hidden master of the nation. He saw it as a chance bestowed upon him by a being worthy of reverence. The Samjeonghoe, the organization itself — those had been erased from his mind long ago.
"...Understood! I will bring you good news if it costs me my life!"
Oh Hyeon-seong had released Lee Gil-sang without fuss. Would the man actually come back with a report? He wasn't holding his breath — but at the very least, he wouldn't come around causing trouble. The man seemed to have gotten some grand notion into his head, and having seen the others who had gathered here yesterday, there was no way he'd want to stir up this place.
More than any of that, though, Oh Hyeon-seong's attention was fixed entirely on his fully restored left leg.
"Hoo, hoo!"
Racing through the forest, he kicked off the ground with everything he had and exploded into instant acceleration. He crossed a distance of dozens of meters in a single blink, at a speed the eye could never have tracked — and his leg felt not the slightest strain.
And that wasn't all. Violent movements, full-force strikes — he came through them all without a scratch.
BOOOM!
The bedrock of the mountain behind his house split apart with a crack and came tumbling down. The result of swinging the very leg that had once been crippled. Had he tried such a stunt in the condition he'd been discharged in, he'd have been halfway to the grave in excruciating agony. Now, he didn't feel even a twinge of pain.
"It really is completely healed. Still, to think it'd just snap back like this... I never imagined it would come to this."
Oh Hyeon-seong stared down at his leg with a dazed expression. The lingering damage that had improved over the years but never fully vanished had been wiped clean away by a single bowl of rice that first day. The effect was on a completely different order from anything the improved hybrid strains he'd grown before could manage.
That said, the turbid energy lingering in his body hadn't vanished entirely. He'd accumulated so much of it over the years that it couldn't be purged in one go. Residual miasma clung to him stubbornly, like cancer cells refusing to die. Eliminating every last trace of it was no simple task, even for spirit crops with their potent neutralizing effect.
And so, in the days that followed, Oh Hyeon-seong made a point of pairing every single meal with a fresh bowl of the new rice. As a result, his body's recovery accelerated at a staggering pace. Despite doing no training whatsoever, he could feel himself advancing rapidly toward his prime.
About time for a meal.
Back at the house, Oh Hyeon-seong took his seat at the table. Once again, a wide bowl heaped full of rice. It was the most delicious thing he'd ever eaten and good for his body besides — there was no reason not to pile it in.
Shovel!
Ahh.
He'd been eating it for days now, but the taste had lost nothing. Every bite wrapped him in deep gratitude, and once again it felt as if a halo had burst alight behind him. Today especially, it seemed like the light before his eyes was flashing, bright and vivid, almost too real.
But after only a moment, he realized something was off.
FLASH!
"No way... it's real."
This was no figure of speech — actual light was erupting right before his eyes. The same overwhelming energy he'd felt when he'd reunited with Alvern long ago filled the room to bursting. And then, a colossal presence revealed itself before him.