A Spread That Will Open His Eyes
After shaking off Kang Seok, Oh Hyeon-seong cut straight through the forest.
Thinking back on the man sprawled helplessly behind him, he couldn't help but chuckle.
"Good thing I packed extra. Never hurts to bring a couple dozen bottles of makgeolli."
When he'd left home, he had brought along a good dozen or so bottles of his homemade makgeolli.
If he'd been drinking alone, one or two would have been plenty — but he had stocked up precisely because he expected to run into Kang Seok.
The man couldn't resist alcohol to save his life.
And once he started, he had absolutely no idea when to stop — a complete contradiction to his usual iron discipline. That was exactly why, he'd heard, Kang Seok had kept off the drink for the past five years.
Now that he sat at the very top of an organization, there was probably no one left around him with the authority to tell him to stop.
He felt a little guilty about shattering a five-year sobriety streak so utterly, but it had at least made slipping away from the man this easy.
"Should be showing up around now..."
The information extracted from the mercenaries had checked out. They really had come on the orders of Disanto, the giant agri-food corporation, and once they'd confirmed the source of that intelligence, they had headed into North Korea.
They hadn't walked into a trap so much as they'd already swallowed bait — latched onto bad information from the start.
Still, having reached the region days before Oh Hyeon-seong, they had pressed forward with additional investigations, apparently.
Inside North Korea, several hundred hunters had combed the area while, from the outside, Disanto kept feeding them fresh intelligence to narrow the search radius.
As a result, the mercenaries had managed to whittle things down to the most likely location of the real Secret Seed Vault.
'And thanks to that, my job got a whole lot easier.'
Oh Hyeon-seong had shamelessly eaten their lunch — swooping in to reap the hard-won fruit of their labor.
The mercenaries hadn't pinpointed the exact location, but within the range they'd narrowed down, he could find it easily enough with the help of the spirit of earth.
If Disanto — even now throwing everything it had at gathering more intel and shrinking that radius — ever found out, it would grind its teeth in pure injustice.
'Still... the miasma concentration's gotten noticeably worse.'
As he drew near his destination, the density of the takgi thickened dramatically.
North Korea's average miasma levels were already far higher than South Korea's, but this was beyond even that.
The reason was obvious.
'Well, we are getting pretty close to Pyongyang.'
During the Queen Subjugation, the largest and bloodiest battle of the campaign had taken place on that ground.
Pyongyang was the city where, in the final fight, the Queen had finally fallen silent.
They had succeeded in bringing her down, but the staggering volume of miasma her corpse had spilled was still devouring the earth to this day.
Because of that, the entire Pyongyang area remained the most severely contaminated zone within North Korea even now.
The contamination was so extreme that even the military hunters holding the front line — even the high-rank hunters who cleared S-Rank gates like it was breakfast — couldn't set foot there.
If the miasma spiked this sharply even from this distance, he didn't want to imagine what the heart of Pyongyang looked like.
"Alisa, I need a favor."
Oh Hyeon-seong spoke to the glow floating gently at his side. The light bobbed up and down once, then wrapped itself around his body, cocooning him.
Shaaa—!
The light layered over him shielded him from exposure to the miasma.
The power of Alisa, spirit of light.
Purging takgi already entrenched deep in the body was beyond her — but protecting him from new exposure was well within her ability.
'I'm working hard to flush out the residual miasma already settled inside me, so having her cut off any further exposure is a godsend. No other ability comes close. Though as of now, she can't hold it longer than a few hours.'
Alisa, the spirit of light, could draw mana only from his sixth core.
Not one of the five rings he'd originally possessed, but the newborn core formed recently when he had absorbed the monsters.
To be fair, the mana it held was hardly small — he'd absorbed the souls of Batola, the Queen's spawn, and several bosses, after all.
But compared to the cores Oh Hyeon-seong had originally carried, its mana reserves were far smaller, and there was nothing to be done about that.
Complete protection from the miasma simply consumed a considerable amount of mana.
Krrrrch!
"...Found it."
Reading the earth itself, Oh Hyeon-seong located the suspicious facility buried deep in the ground and stepped through its entrance.
A massive installation unfolded before him.
The vaulted ceilings alone put it in a different dimension from the small seed storage he'd first discovered in the South Hamgyong region.
He had found the true Secret Seed Vault of legend.
'To think a place like this existed in North Korea...'
Oh Hyeon-seong stepped inside, marveling.
More seed vaults — large and small — quietly dotted the world than most people realized.
But a facility on this scale was anything but common.
Perhaps the dictators of the past had, surprisingly, kept this as a hobby. Either way, it was a gift he was profoundly grateful for.
He stopped in front of one of the dozens of storage chambers.
Krrk!
He smashed through the firmly sealed entrance and went in.
And there he faced an staggering abundance of seeds piled high on every side.
Wherever he turned his head, racks and sample containers were crammed to the ceiling.
Best of all, not a single seed had spoiled — everything was perfectly preserved.
"Whew... you're telling me there are dozens more of these vaults?"
Even this one room held original seeds numbering somewhere between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of varieties.
Considering that a single original seed of a major crop started at tens of billions of won, he had just taken possession of a fortune no private individual could ever hope to shoulder.
A space whose worth could buy out several mega-corporations whole.
'For now, the crops most important to me are all stored here. There's a fair amount of wild herbs and flowers too, come to think of it.'
He had no immediate use for wild herb seeds.
But even those samples would fetch a starting price in the hundreds of millions of won if he ever chose to sell.
Truly a place that could make even Oh Hyeon-seong — a man without a greedy bone in his body — feel his eyes spinning.
'Hmm... now what do I do with all this?'
Oh Hyeon-seong stood dumbfounded in the middle of the enormous chamber.
He'd intended to draw up a list of just the crops, but there were far, far too many. He needed to bring things home, yet he couldn't possibly transport it all, so in the end he narrowed it down to what he most wanted to eat and stuffed the necessary seeds into his bag until it bulged.
'I've been craving an ice-cold beer, so barley's a must. Better not leave out the five staple grains — I'd feel bad. Onions, chili peppers, radish... oh, right, I just ran out of grapes. Might as well grab some nuts too.'
He prioritized versatile staples like rice, then grabbed whatever caught his fancy, one after another.
It almost felt like shopping at some enormous mega-mart — though there was surely no more luxurious shopping trip to be found anywhere on Earth.
Thus shouldering a bag worth an estimated several trillion won, Oh Hyeon-seong left the seed vault behind.
"Ah, right. Almost forgot to lock up behind me."
Grrrrumble!
He reshaped the surrounding terrain with Merz's power.
He buried the Secret Seed Vault he'd just exited deep beneath the earth.
Strictly speaking, he hadn't sunk the facility down so much as dragged the surrounding land in and heaped it over everything.
Either way, it was now hidden to the point of being practically impossible to find.
Short of a high-rank hunter capable of wielding the spirit of earth's power, anyone wanting in would have to haul in excavators and mount a full-scale excavation.
'In a word: impossible.'
With a sly grin, Oh Hyeon-seong shouldered his bag and headed home.
Oh Hyeon-seong made it home safely.
He immediately planted the precious original seeds he'd brought back.
Were the seeds he'd carried all that way to spoil, it would be a catastrophe — so he rushed to grow the crops first and secure an additional stockpile of seeds.
Harvests came along with them, but for the moment, securing seeds had been the top priority.
The seeds he'd banked went straight to the underground warehouse he'd built beneath his house not long ago.
Then, together with Merz, he expanded the warehouse further, building entire chambers dedicated to seed storage — a proper seed vault of his own.
Each and every one of these seeds was a tremendous treasure, and they needed to be kept properly.
He even built double and triple layers of doors, taking extra care with security.
And so the planting and harvesting concluded in success, and the day came when he no longer had to worry about seeds.
"All that seed sprouting, and now the harvests have piled sky-high."
Oh Hyeon-seong gazed at the refrigerator packed to bursting with fresh ingredients.
Of course, what was in there was only the tiniest fraction — far more was stacked in the warehouse.
He'd brought back so many varieties from across the border this time that there were a great many crops to grow, and he'd also gone a bit overboard in his determination to secure a generous seed reserve.
"The spirits make storing the harvest easy enough... but I'm afraid eating it all myself just isn't going to happen."
He fell deep into thought for a moment.
Then a face came to mind, and he smacked his palm.
"That's it — I'll just call that guy over."
"You called for me, sir?"
At the gate of Oh Hyeon-seong's house stood Choi Jeong-il.
As CEO of Aegis, the man was busy beyond measure — yet the moment Oh Hyeon-seong summoned him, he'd come straight down. Oh Hyeon-seong had almost been touched.
But then he saw the fishing rod and the full assortment of fishing gear crammed into the man's arms, and that warmth went stone cold.
"So that's why you came scrambling down here in half a day?"
"W-well... about that... I'm not sure what you mean, sir..."
"I didn't call you here to go fishing."
"Ah, of course. I'm well aware."
"And yet I'm getting the distinct impression you have no idea at all?"
"Ha... haha..."
Choi Jeong-il slipped the fishing equipment sheepishly behind his back and let out an awkward laugh.
Clicking his tongue, Oh Hyeon-seong shook his head.
The man had shown an outright obsession over the crucian carp that had gotten away last time. How many times had he sworn he would absolutely feed his senior a 6-jja crucian carp, the holy grail of angling?
But since he hadn't come down at all since then and had kept to his own business, Oh Hyeon-seong had assumed he'd finally let it go. Apparently not.
"Just come inside. I've got something to discuss."
"Then I'll take you up on that."
He ushered Choi Jeong-il into the house.
After seating him in the living room, Oh Hyeon-seong headed to the kitchen alone.
The truth was, there was a very particular reason he'd summoned this man of all people to his home.
'Baek Ji-soo had lost her sense of taste — a lingering aftereffect of her injuries from the Queen Subjugation. But when I saw her again, it had come back.'
That had been an astonishing thing.
Not some minor lingering symptom, but the complete loss of her sense of taste.
Reviving a bodily function that had been lost entirely was a matter of an entirely different order.
Yet after that one meal, her senses had been restored.
And so he had glimpsed a new possibility.
The possibility that perhaps, just perhaps, Choi Jeong-il's lost left eye could be restored as well.
'Granted, he's eaten here several times since, and there's been no sign of it recovering... but this time is different. Just like how the stubborn aftereffects in my own leg vanished without a trace after a single bowl of rice.'
Thud!
Oh Hyeon-seong set a lavish spread down in the living room.
A full table made, of course, from ingredients newly harvested from the original seeds he'd carried back from across the border.
"Sir, this is...?"
"Go on and eat. Your eyes are about to be opened — in more ways than one."