Qualification
"…Peeping on a girl while she bathes? You've got terrible taste. One ration ticket. Want to do it here?"
I had nothing to say to the girl spouting such nonsense out of nowhere.
Of course I knew what she meant. In a situation like this, it was the only conclusion she could draw.
Smarter than I'd expected.
Most men, hearing something like that, would just dig out a ration ticket. They wouldn't force the issue.
But I'd never had any such intention — and she wasn't my type besides.
She was far too thin. And I could see her hands trembling. She was shaking so hard she couldn't even undo the buttons properly.
Halfway undone, maybe?
"Stop. It's not what you're thinking. Put your clothes back on. Patrolling this area is my job. This isn't your private bathhouse — it's our drinking water source. You can't just wash yourself in it."
That was a lie. I came here to wash all the time.
When I finished speaking, the girl pulled her clothes back on.
The clouds drifted past, and moonlight fell over us once more.
Her face came into view.
Round eyes. The faintest lift at the corners of her mouth.
An overall cute impression — the kind of face that made you think of a little cat.
Huh? Where were the scars? The burn marks?
The girl's name was Mao Mei. Looking at her, I thought I understood why there was a cat in her name.
Mao Mei.
Twenty years old this year.
Not that age meant much after the collapse, but that was the number, anyway.
Her father had been Korean, her mother Chinese. Whether he'd failed at being a father or something else entirely, she went by a Chinese name.
She hadn't been at this survival shelter long.
I'd wondered how someone so small had managed to stay alive — but it turned out she had clever hands. Her cooking was excellent, and she could knock together all sorts of everyday tools without breaking a sweat.
"Well? Not bad, right? MSG's impossible to find these days, so pulling off a flavor like this isn't easy."
The owner of Eclipse set down a bowl of Japanese-style ramen.
This place usually served nothing but preserved rations, and now this? Where had he even gotten flour?
"Looks handmade. You have flour?"
"Ah — when we picked up supplies this time, I took nothing but flour."
"That little kid?"
The owner just smiled as if to say yes. So it was her handiwork.
Slurp.
Spicy. Rich. The salt and the savory depth of the oil were perfectly balanced.
"Oh, right — if you've got the time, think you could manage a pig? Weather's warming up, so storage's getting hard. We're going to have to make jerky at this rate. No refrigerators, you know…"
When the rifts opened and their particles spread, every electronic device on earth went dead. Only things that still ran on analog principles were any use.
Under those conditions, the power had been out for a long time.
I'd considered building something like a Joseon-era ice house, but nowhere around here froze hard enough, and even if it had, hauling the ice would have been its own problem.
In the three years since, the population had fallen below thirty percent of what it once was.
Maybe that was why the mountains were overflowing with game. As long as you watched out for the occasional beast that had turned into a demonic creature…
"…Hunting, huh. Fine by me. Nowhere else around here is worth eating at anyway. Assign me some people."
"Hahaha. Folks lining up to hunt with you? You'll never run short. Don't you worry."
A head poked out from the kitchen — Mao Mei.
She had a habit of keeping her distance from me. Or more precisely, she seemed to wall herself off from every human being who wasn't herself. Even so, there were moments when the kid warmed up a little.
"…You're going hunting?"
Mao Mei's eyes went wide. The look she got whenever she needed something.
"Yeah. We need a lot of pork."
"Could you take me with you?"
I hadn't measured her properly, but she looked well under a hundred and sixty centimeters — a tiny frame. Sure, those clever hands of hers came in useful around a place like this, but on a hunt?
She'd only get in the way.
"No. There's nothing for a kid to do out there. I like your cooking, so I'll set some aside for you."
"…I don't particularly care for meat. Please — I'm asking again. Going into the mountains alone is dangerous, and…"
Why did this kid want to go up the mountain so badly? I was a little curious.
But she'd be a burden. Hunting was hard work. Even well-trained men came back half-wrecked after a trip with me.
"I-I won't get in the way."
That caught my interest, just a little. The same kid who usually stayed so cold, clinging and pleading like this?
Maybe I could put her on mushroom duty. Then again, I doubted she could even keep up.
"You sure you can follow? Fall behind even a little and I'm leaving you. That okay?"
"Yes! If I can't keep up, I'll turn around right there. Please take me. I'll be useful."
Useful?
I doubted it. Still, I was curious what kind of help she thought she could offer.
I decided we'd hunt somewhere with gentler terrain. Wild boar were plentiful in the mountains either way.
Qinggong.
Light-body technique.
Call it whatever you like — stripped down, it was just running powered by internal energy.
Soaring over rooftops, stepping on empty air — I'd never seen any of that myself. Sure, people who could do it probably existed. I'd seen Sword Gang with my own eyes, after all.
Masters at the Peak realm and above were rare even within each sect, and Transcendence-level grandmasters were generally limited to the elders and sect leaders.
The famous sects of the Central Plains amounted to the Nine Great Sects and the Five Great Clans, give or take — and if you counted every minor outfit, there were hundreds. Throw in the unorthodox sects, the Blood Cult, and the Demonic Cult, and the Murim population had to have been at least fifty thousand.
Even in a world like that, I'd never once seen a person fly.
Still, at my level, qinggong alone looked like flying to modern eyes.
Today I was climbing as slowly as I could, matching the stride of the people trailing behind me. On a normal day they'd have thrown up several times by now — but today they were sticking close.
All except one.
In the beginning I'd gone alone. But killing a boar and hauling the carcass back intact was a bad idea. At first I just dropped them dead and dragged them home — and the meat reeked.
Boar already has a strong smell; once the blood starts to spoil, the gaminess turns unbearable.
In other words, I'd once brought one back without bleeding it and couldn't even eat the meat. This being the apocalypse, people still fought over that foul-smelling flesh — but I spat mine right back out.
The people gasping and scrambling along behind me were there for the bleeding and the butchering. That much, they could handle.
"Hahh — hahh —"
Mao Mei's ragged breathing carried all the way up to me. Nothing for it, I supposed.
I wanted to be cold about it, but being harsh to a kid who'd barely turned twenty felt awkward.
I slowed a little more. From here on, moving alone would be more comfortable anyway.
"Wait here and keep watch on the area. It shouldn't happen, but if a boar or anything else shows up, don't engage — just signal me."
"…Hoo… Yes, sir. Understood, Captain."
"Hey! I told you not to call me Captain! It's 'Understood, hyung-nim!'"
Captain? Hyung-nim? What was with these people?
They were local thugs who'd thrown their weight around in this area. Used to shake Eclipse down for a living, until their old boss picked a fight with me and took a one-way trip to the afterlife that same day.
"…I'm not your captain, and I'm certainly not your hyung-nim. You're all older than I am…"
"Come on~ If your fists are stronger, you're the hyung-nim and the captain, right?"
"Exactly. Who's counting age in a world like this? Ah — but this young lady here…"
They'd calmed down thanks to me, but nature doesn't change that easily. If I didn't spell things out clearly, there was no telling what kind of trouble they'd cause.
"…She's an Eclipse employee. And…"
Mao Mei's ears pricked up the moment she heard herself mentioned; she was paying close attention.
And these thugs needed a warning. I let out just enough killing intent to startle them.
"Ah? Uh-hahahaha~ The madam? Ah, so she's the madam! We'll protect her well."
"Don't you worry. Though bringing the madam all the way out here…"
Madam?
If the kid heard that, she'd only turn colder.
But putting it this way was the safer option.
It had been three years since the collapse.
In the apocalypse, survival excused any act. Murder was no longer a crime. That little kid and these thugs alike were no newcomers to this world.
The two thugs found it strange that Seo-woo's pace was unusually slow today.
"Hey, what's with the Captain taking it this easy?"
"Huh. You're right. Normally we'd have puked a few times by now."
And he kept glancing back over his shoulder. In all the hunts they'd done, that had never happened.
Usually he tore ahead like a madman, and their job was to sprint after him like madmen themselves and butcher whatever boar he'd already dropped.
They snuck a look behind them at the girl trailing along, pale as a sheet, barely keeping up.
They knew she was the new girl working at Eclipse, but why she'd come along was beyond them. And why Seo-woo had allowed it was another mystery.
"…She didn't look half bad in the daylight, huh?"
"Right? Face is a little off, but kill the lights and they're all the same."
Other thoughts started creeping in. They debated what to do, then figured they should at least ask what the relationship was. If there was nothing special between them and he wasn't particular about her…
Not right now, maybe — but opportunities had a way of turning up.
Seo-woo scared them, but they also knew that if someone wasn't anything to him, he didn't much care what happened.
One of them casually asked Seo-woo what he and Mao Mei were to each other.
At that, his gaze went ice-cold, and the words that came out were just as freezing.
"…She's an Eclipse employee. And…"
A chill ran down their spines.
That look.
The look of a man who could cut a person down where they stood.
"Ah? Uh-hahahaha~ The madam? Ah, so she's the madam! We'll protect her well."
"Don't you worry. Though bringing the madam all the way out here…"
They laughed it off and scrambled to make excuses, as if such a thing would never cross their minds.
Mao Mei had her reasons for forcing her way onto the hunt.
As a woman, coming this deep into the mountains alone was no small thing. She barely knew the paths — and beyond that, humans, zombies, demonic beasts, and wild animals were each a lethal threat in their own right.
Even so, she had followed Seo-woo because she needed a plant that grew wild in these mountains.
Aconite.
A plant of extreme toxicity. It grew at elevations of five hundred to fifteen hundred meters, so it couldn't be found in the fields or the city.
And that wasn't all.
From what she'd observed over the past few days, this survival shelter revolved entirely around the man called Seo-woo. She needed to catch his eye.
But as a person — not as a woman.
One life spent looking to a man had been enough. Her mother's.
She found aconite nearby.
There it is. Since I'm already here, I should take some.
She started digging up the aconite roots with the hand hoe she'd brought. Skin contact alone wasn't fatal, but it wasn't good for you either. She pulled on the gloves she'd prepared and wrapped a towel over her face, leaving only her eyes exposed.
The thugs saw Mao Mei digging up roots, figured she was after arrowroot or something, and lost interest.
Oh? Plenty of gomchwi here. Fatsia shoots too… Should I take some?
From her perspective, every man was dangerous. Seo-woo was no exception. She couldn't afford not to be wary. But she knew, at least, that he had shown her kindness.
She wanted to make him a side dish of something fresh.
She carefully kept the aconite roots in a separate space so they wouldn't mix. One careless moment and someone could die eating their wrap vegetables.
SQUEEEAL—
The unmistakable sound of a pig having its throat cut rang out.
"Oh? Looks like he got one. Seriously, hyung-nim is incredible. How does a guy take down a wild boar with nothing but an axe?"
"I know, right? If we just learned martial arts from the Captain, we could get into the Hounds…"
"Ah — I heard the Captain is real~~ tight with that crazy bitch from the Hounds?"
"S-so it's true what they say about heroes and beauties? But dating that psycho?"
"…She's a knockout, I'll give her that. Problem is she actually knocks people out. Permanently. Heh heh heh."
Mao Mei flinched at the words Hound, crazy bitch, and witch.
The Hounds.
One of the warlord factions that ruled this region. They managed and dominated every shelter in the area.
Thud.
At some point, Seo-woo had arrived.
He dropped a wild boar several times his own size onto the ground as if tossing aside a sack.
The pig was already dead.
The thugs stood up to begin the bloodletting, same as always.
"I'll do it. I know how."
Seo-woo looked at Mao Mei with mild surprise as she stepped forward.
In moments she was working with practiced hands — opening the pig's throat and catching the blood in a leather pouch she'd brought along. Until now they'd always just let it run into the dirt.
"…You can eat the blood too, you know. You two — help me hang the pig."
"Uh? R-right. Hey, hurry it up."
The thugs moved in and hoisted the carcass.
Seo-woo watched in silence as the girl desperately tried to prove she had a role to play.