Just Like Old Times
The meal Oh Hyeon-seong laid out was nothing fancy.
There was a fair variety, sure, but it was all made up of ordinary side dishes that didn't look like much on their own.
And yet Choi Jeong-il couldn't help letting out gasps of admiration.
Every single little dish was delicious.
No — he'd expected them to be tasty, but they far exceeded anything he could have imagined.
They even overwhelmed the pork barbecue he'd eaten that night at the farm.
Which was only natural.
Every crop making up this meal had been grown in a spirit-crafted environment, from the purest original strains of their species.
No matter how thoroughly Alisa purified things, it stood to reason that animal products raised in miasma-exposed environments couldn't compare.
Of course, the flavor and satisfaction meat offered belonged to a different category altogether, but judged purely on taste, this food was a dimension above.
Choi Jeong-il had encountered the spirits' crops many times before, and even Oh Hyeon-seong, who'd been eating these original-strain varieties for days now, still hadn't grown accustomed to this fresh shock.
"So? How is it? Good?"
"Yes. It's really delicious."
"Enough to make your eyes open wide?"
"Yes, enough that my eyes are—"
"Then take off your eyepatch."
"...I'm sorry, what?"
Choi Jeong-il, who'd been lost in savoring the flavors, flinched.
Take off his eyepatch, out of nowhere?
He wondered if it was some odd joke and whether he should laugh it off, but he quickly realized the man was serious.
In the end, Choi Jeong-il removed the eyepatch covering his eye.
A pale white pupil, robbed of focus, was revealed beneath it.
"Anything different? Any strange sensations, or a faint sense of something coming into view?"
"Well, naturally not."
"Ah, damn."
"But why would you suddenly ask about my eye...?"
Choi Jeong-il asked, a little taken aback, and Oh Hyeon-seong scratched his head before telling him about Baek Ji-soo.
About how she had lost her sense of taste to an injury sustained in the Queen Subjugation, and how recently, that sense had returned to her.
At the news, Choi Jeong-il was visibly stunned.
"Senior Baek... I never knew anything about that."
"She's not the type to go around advertising her weaknesses. Stubbornly so, actually."
"Still, I'm glad it came back to her."
"Is it really glad tidings, though? In this day and age, you could argue that getting her famously picky palate back is more of a curse."
"No, I don't think she'd see it that way. It was certainly inconvenient on operations at times, but the moments Senior Baek seemed happiest were always when she was eating something delicious."
At his words, Oh Hyeon-seong found himself recalling her face during that barbecue.
Baek Ji-soo was a woman now walled in by far harder stone than before, but on that day at least, she had laid her emotions completely bare.
Back in the Special Task Force days, too, good food was something they almost never got to eat — and yet whenever some slightly less terrible ration or rare decent dish came along, a smile would bloom across her face.
Ah, of course. Oh Hyeon-seong nodded to himself.
"Anyway... that's why I wondered if the same might apply to you."
"I understand what you were hoping for. But please don't trouble yourself. That ability is something I no longer need."
Choi Jeong-il said this quietly.
Between coming all the way out here to mooch meals and receiving some of the crops the man had sent home with him, he had already felt for himself that his body had improved.
The miasma that had accumulated inside him for years was being neutralized, and his overall physical condition had improved in ways impossible to miss.
Every hunter's recovery inevitably converged toward zero, their bodies wearing down with each passing day — and he had defied that current entirely.
That alone was a debt of gratitude beyond repayment. Hoping, at his age, to reclaim an eye he had long since made peace with and abandoned on his own — that would have been laughable.
"No."
But Oh Hyeon-seong was not satisfied with such a modest compromise.
If you started something, you saw it through to the end. That was the rule.
"You. Live here for a while."
"I... beg your pardon?"
As CEO of Aegis Entertainment, Choi Jeong-il canceled every scheduled engagement on his calendar and stayed in Changyeong-ri.
Part of it was that he couldn't bring himself to refuse his senior's strong insistence, but part of it was that what he himself wanted was here — so inwardly, the suggestion had been a welcome one.
There was, however, one unexpected ambush waiting for him.
Prepared!
There was Choi Jeong-il, crouched in the field, weeding with a hoe.
This was a man who hadn't shed a single bead of sweat while slaughtering monsters inside gates, yet now droplets of it hung glistening on his brow.
"This is... not as easy as I expected."
"Yeah? And here I thought hunters didn't have anything hard in their lives."
"...To think I'd hit a wall doing physical labor of all things."
He knew absolutely nothing about farming, and this kind of work was entirely new to him.
Perhaps because of that — ever since he'd tried picking a few tomatoes and burst them all into juice — he approached every task with painstaking care.
He was more confident than anyone at smoothly slitting a monster's throat, but controlling his strength through assorted manual labor ate up a surprising amount of mental focus.
"Any tips, by any chance?"
"I'm not some veteran farmer — how would I know? You just do it. Han Su-yeon managed fine on her own from day one."
"W-well..."
At that single remark, Choi Jeong-il silently bent back to his work.
Granted, the fields were far larger now than in the old days when he'd first cleared a plot and grown little more than strawberries, and the variety of crops had grown far more diverse as well.
But it was all something familiarity would solve in time, so Oh Hyeon-seong didn't bother to correct or coach him.
And so days passed, with Choi Jeong-il lending a hand in the farm work.
I'm starting to see what needs doing now, I think.
Before he knew it, Choi Jeong-il had grown comfortable with the various chores.
Once his hands learned the motions, it was honestly rather fun, too.
As for the physical demands — that was never going to be an issue for a man who'd been a hunter from the start, and with the spirits pitching in to help, he settled in all the faster.
He sowed seeds with his own hands, picked the rapidly growing harvest himself, and those same crops appeared on the dinner table that very day.
And that the harvest boasted a flavor unobtainable anywhere else on earth was a magnificent bonus.
"Let's stop here for today. Food time."
"Yes, sir."
Choi Jeong-il sprang to his feet.
Once again, they finished a meal beyond compare, then lounged lazily on the wooden veranda, letting the hours slip by.
Oh Hyeon-seong, hoping to aid his digestion and loosen his body a little, settled into a formal cross-legged position.
He channeled his mana through his body, circulating it in a steady flow.
"As expected... your mana reserves are still absolutely staggering."
The admiration escaped Choi Jeong-il's lips reflexively.
Oh Hyeon-seong's mana, rooted in the power of the soul, normally registered not at all.
But the moment he began working it, a vast ocean of power came pouring off him, unmistakably present.
Ever since he'd first eaten the rice grown from the original seeds, not only had his legs healed completely — his cores had grown to three.
His body had recovered so dramatically that it could now withstand an entirely new core on top of the old ones.
Admittedly, the sixth core Alisa claimed for her own use was minuscule compared to the scale of his original cores, barely deserving to be counted as a number at all — but even setting it aside, one more enormous core had come into being where none had been before.
Thus were three great rings completed.
Even if every mana-type hunter on the planet were gathered together, virtually no one could match it — a mana capacity that stood alone at the very summit.
The wellspring that made contracts with three high-tier spirits possible.
"The more of the crops I eat, the better my body feels. Especially since the trip up north — it's been even more pronounced."
"I feel the difference too. Although... my eye is still exactly as it was."
Choi Jeong-il shrugged.
With the miasma receding, he too could feel his physical condition improving — just not to the same dramatic degree as Oh Hyeon-seong.
And above all, his eye remained as dead and unchanging as ever.
"Eh, it's fine. There's plenty of time."
"Clearing my schedule is no great hardship, I admit... but still, please don't set your hopes too high."
"Yeah, yeah."
Their next meal, after another leisurely stretch of days, was baeksuk — chicken gently boiled whole.
Choi Jeong-il's reaction to the freshness of the meat was immediate.
"Where on earth did you get this?"
"Hunted it myself. Like a proper hunter."
"Last time it was a wild boar, and now you're bringing in chickens too? What on earth is going on with the mountain behind this village?"
"This one's not from the back mountain — had to go a bit farther for her. Ah, right. Come to think of it, there was something I wanted your help with."
Oh Hyeon-seong had been feeling the need for eggs for some time now.
Meat he could substitute with other meats to a degree, but eggs had no ready replacement.
And there was nowhere else to source other kinds of eggs, either.
So he'd been toying with the idea of raising chickens to secure a steady supply — but that was as far as it went. He had plenty of other work to do, and it was a hassle, so he kept putting it off. This seemed like as good a chance as any to knock it out.
He enlisted Choi Jeong-il, whose craftsmanship in carpentry and the like was exceptional.
The man knocked about at this and that, and before long had built a remarkably proper chicken coop outside the house, while Oh Hyeon-seong procured the birds from elsewhere.
Chickens raised in a healthy, miasma-free environment, fed on wholesome feed, laid eggs that were delicious and good for you in equal measure.
And as it turned out, eggs were astonishingly versatile in the kitchen — the satisfaction level soared right along with the utility.
Like atoning for years of going without, they cooked egg dishes every single day and passed the days in delicious contentment.
In the free moments in between, the two of them went down to the reservoir to fish.
True to its reputation as the legendary fishing spot of the century, enormous trophy-sized fish kept coming up.
But amid all that fishing, a species appeared that had never been there before.
"Well, if it isn't a snakehead."
"A trout just yesterday, too. The variety of fish has jumped all of a sudden."
"There shouldn't have been any of those... where did they drift in from?"
At the appearance of new species, Oh Hyeon-seong's eyes gleamed with interest.
Crucian carp purists might grumble if the trash fish multiplied too much, but a lake with genuine species diversity was a good thing.
This was, after all, the purest reservoir on earth, utterly free of miasma — and the only source of fish in Oh Hyeon-seong's life.
If he had his way, saltwater fish would come popping up in here too.
Though naturally, that was an impossible dream.
And so a month went by.
He'd fully intended to keep the man staying long-term, yet Oh Hyeon-seong had ended up spending even more time with Choi Jeong-il than he'd anticipated.
Now, however, he stood before the front gate wearing anything but a happy expression.
"So in the end... it didn't work."
"Haha, what did I tell you? Chin up, would you."
Choi Jeong-il said it with a smile.
He of all people — the one who should have been holding out the most hope — was the one offering such comfort.
"Haah. The second half of it, I was clinging on out of pure stubbornness. Sorry about that."
"Sorry for what? Thanks to you, I've rested better than I have in years. I can't remember the last time my body felt this good."
Choi Jeong-il clenched his fist tight.
It wasn't empty talk.
No systematic care, no structured training — he'd simply rested for a solid month, and yet he was in peak condition, better than anything he'd felt in recent memory.
Only his left eye remained, without the faintest sign of change, distant and dark as ever.
"I meant to give you a parting gift when I left, but it's not quite settled yet, so I'm sorry I can't hand it over here."
"A gift? What kind of gift?"
"I freeloaded off you for a whole month — I ought to repay the favor. Something will be showing up at your house before long."
"Hmm..."
What on earth could it be, for him to be this cryptic?
Knowing Choi Jeong-il's usual personality, it was if anything even harder to guess.
"Thank you for everything. I owe you a great deal."
With a deep bow, Choi Jeong-il departed.
Oh Hyeon-seong stared after his receding back and let out a quiet sigh.
What a shame. What a damn shame.
Apparently, a loss caused not by simple lingering injury but by the backlash of an ability belonged to an entirely different category.
Baek Ji-soo losing her taste to a wound, and this man losing his eye — the origins had been worlds apart, after all.
Even so, Oh Hyeon-seong couldn't hide his disappointment.
Brushing it off with a shrug and moving on would have been easier — if not for how much of a waste the man's ability and Special Constitution had been.
Wasteful even measured against Oh Hyeon-seong's own impossibly high standards and keen eye.
"Ah, the CEO is here!"
The Aegis hunters bowed their heads in greeting.
Every one of them was in the middle of gearing up.
And Choi Jeong-il, standing before them, was likewise dressed for combat.
"We only just heard the news, sir... you're really going in with us?"
"I've spent a whole month loafing around. Time to get my field instincts back."
Choi Jeong-il's gaze slid to the side.
There, at the heart of the cordoned-off site, an enormous gate shimmered, radiating a sullen crimson glow.
It was a great deal bigger than ideal for a comeback match meant to sharpen his instincts — but right now, that didn't trouble him in the slightest.
I feel especially good today. Almost... like it once was.
Recalling those old days, now nothing more than memory, Choi Jeong-il let a faint smile cross his face and gripped his sword.