Chapter 3
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Translator: 8uhl
Chapter: 3
Chapter Title: Young Mandragora
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Young Mandragora
Mandragoras were famous for being difficult to obtain.
Their habitats were in places humans couldn't enter.
“Their habitats are... in the high mountains, weren't they?”
He scanned the area for high ground. A snow-covered mountain in the distance caught his eye.
An altitude high enough for snow meant there was a good chance of finding a habitat.
‘At that height, the concentration of demonic energy must be pretty dense.’
In the Demon World, the higher the altitude, the more condensed the demonic energy became.
Even for a Hunter, withstanding that concentrated energy was no easy feat.
Exceeding the body's limit meant death.
This was why there was a never-ending stream of Hunters who died trying to harvest Mandragoras.
‘I'll go and dig up a few roots.’
Cheon Doun's steps were light as he headed toward such a place.
There was one reason he could remain unharmed even at high altitudes.
The amount of demonic energy he possessed was greater than the dense energy of his surroundings. He could suppress the ambient energy with his own power.
That was why Cheon Doun was unaffected even in the high mountains.
‘Once I've finished the garden, maybe I'll get a pet. It'd be nice to have a dog to guard it.’
A house with a yard and a vegetable garden. A pet frolicking about. It was a picture-perfect dream home.
Cheon Doun smiled at the thought of having it all.
* * *
Climbing the mountain was easy.
Leaping dozens of meters with each jump, the ascent itself was no challenge.
However, an unexpected obstacle appeared.
“This snow is coming down pretty hard.”
He'd expected snow on a snowy mountain, but not a blizzard this severe. When the snowstorm began, his vision blurred to the point where he couldn't see ahead.
"I've come this far, so it feels like a waste to go back down. Should I wait for the snow to stop?"
Cheon Doun sat down on the snow-covered ground.
Though he was dressed in furs that left his arms and legs exposed, he didn't feel the cold.
‘Come to think of it, it was snowing like this when I was kidnapped.’
The swirling snowflakes reminded him of the day he was abducted and taken to the research institute.
He was nine years old, living in an orphanage in the slums.
The orphanage in the impoverished district was poorly equipped. The very existence of an orphanage there was a miracle in itself.
With resources scarce, fights between the children were frequent, and they usually ended with the older kids winning.
At the time, Cheon Doun was nine years old.
When winter began, the Room Leader who shared his room took Cheon Doun's blanket.
It wasn't just Cheon Doun. All the children in the same room had their blankets taken.
"Tell the teacher and you're dead. If you're curious what'll happen, go ahead and snitch tomorrow. I'll beat you to death."
The boy who took the blankets was sixteen, the oldest in the room. He was large for his age and ran with a group of older boys from other rooms.
It was survival of the fittest, in a way different from the Demon World.
The children smaller than the Room Leader had no choice but to hand over their blankets, shivering in the cold.
"It's cold. I'm really going to die at this rate."
Cheon Doun thought as he lay on his ice-cold bed. The Room Leader didn't just take blankets.
It had already been five days since his ration of bread was taken. Surviving by eating the snow outside was reaching its limit.
"Four kids died last winter because of that Room Leader."
Would I be next? Cheon Doun got out of bed. He staggered from starvation but steadied himself against the wall.
"I won't die alone."
He quietly approached the Room Leader. In his hand, he clutched a ballpoint pen from the table.
"You look so warm. It must be nice."
The boy looked cozy, sleeping under layers of blankets stolen from the other children.
There was no hesitation. Cheon Doun clamped a hand over the boy's mouth and climbed on top of him.
By the time the boy woke up, the hand gripping the pen was already plunging toward his throat.
"Did you hear? They say Cheon Doun killed the Room Leader."
The news spread through the orphanage immediately.
"Good riddance! That bastard deserved to die."
The children were ecstatic about what Cheon Doun had done.
"Four kids froze to death last winter because of him."
"Yeah. I've been eating nothing but roots for a week because of him. If Cheon Doun hadn't killed him, I might have."
The slums of the trash city. A gathering place for criminals.
Death was common here. So common that a nine-year-old like Cheon Doun killing someone wasn't considered unusual.
"But Cheon Doun, he killed someone. What's going to happen now? Will the police take him away?"
"No way. There are no police here. The orphanage teachers will handle it themselves."
A place where even murder was handled internally. That was the unspoken rule of the slums.
Cheon Doun didn't face the judgment of the law, but he received a punishment far worse.
"You know the orphanage rules. Murder between residents means expulsion. I'm sorry."
On a night of heavy snowfall, Cheon Doun was kicked out of the orphanage without even a coat.
The slums were a place where murder was common. There was only one reason to expel someone for something as trivial as killing.
It was an excuse to reduce the number of mouths to feed.
Winter was a season of cold and starvation. A season not everyone survived to see the spring.
If someone had to be abandoned, wasn't it better to abandon a child who had sinned? That was how the orphanage rule against murder between residents came to be.
"I guess I was fated to die today."
Kicked out of the orphanage, Cheon Doun walked through the snow-covered streets.
He no longer felt cold. He no longer felt hungry. His body, standing on the threshold of the afterlife, was losing its senses one by one.
Staggering, he collapsed in the middle of the road.
At that moment, a black van stopped in front of Cheon Doun. Two men got out, picked him up, and threw him inside.
"Grabbed another one. Let's go!"
"Wow, you come to the slums and kids are literally rolling around on the ground. How much is all this worth?"
Inside the van were a dozen or so children around Cheon Doun's age.
"Hey, is it okay to just grab them like this? Someone saw us. What if they report it?"
"It's fine. Nobody reports this stuff in the slums. Even the cops here are just gang puppets."
The kidnappers cackled as they stepped on the gas.
That day, Cheon Doun was kicked out of the orphanage and kidnapped by the Chimera Research Institute. Only one thought crossed his mind.
‘It's warm.’
The warm air from the car's heater felt so incredibly warm.
At least I won't die right now. With that thought, Cheon Doun fell asleep.
“When I think about it, there are some good things about being a Chimera.”
Recalling his childhood, he let out a faint smile.
Thanks to becoming a Chimera Hunter, he no longer had to worry about freezing to death in winter. Nor did he have to worry about starving, even after months without food.
What did it matter if he was human or a monster? He was alive, able to watch the snow like this.
Cheon Doun watched the swirling blizzard, waiting for the heavy snow to stop.
* * *
The blizzard subsided an hour later.
Once the snow stopped, he resumed his climb and found a Mandragora habitat near the summit.
“Good, this wasn't a wasted trip.”
He smiled at the sight before him. Leaves that had pushed through the snow showed off their vibrant green under the sunlight.
‘I'll just dig up about three roots for now.’
Mandragoras were the sunfish of monsters. They would die from the slightest environmental change, so he needed to test them before transplanting them properly.
‘If I'm going to move them, young ones with good adaptability would be best, right?’
He pulled up one with small leaves. At that, the Mandragora opened its eyes.
-Huuung?
The Mandragora made a sound like it was talking in its sleep. There was none of the commonly known "Mandragora's Scream."
Only Mandragoras artificially cultivated in the human world screamed when pulled.
‘They said it was a scream they let out under extreme stress.’
They were originally creatures from the high mountains where demonic energy was dense.
When cultivated in the human world, they couldn't absorb enough demonic energy and became extremely stressed.
Pulling them up in that state caused them to scream and die.
"So this is what they're like when they grow normally."
It was barely ten centimeters tall. The Mandragora wiggled its roots and fell back asleep.
Its pleasantly plump root was reminiscent of a teddy bear.
‘It's different from the one I saw at the institute. That one was all shriveled up.’
Was it because it was wild? Cheon Doun dug up two more of a similar size.
Each time, the Mandragora shifted its body and made a sound.
-Huuung.
-Huung, huung!
It was like they were grumbling about being woken up.
They made strange noises, but there was no resistance. Cheon Doun found this odd.
‘Why aren't any of the three resisting?’
The lack of a scream was one thing. But it was strange that they didn't even try to escape.
As he observed their defenseless state, a hypothesis came to mind.
“Are they recognizing me as one of their own?”
His body contained a mixture of all sorts of monster cells. Plant-type monster cells were no exception.
As he suspected, Cheon Doun had Mandragora cells mixed in him. They had detected that unique aura and recognized him as their kin.
“Perfect.”
Cheon Doun grinned. If he could move them without causing any stress, nothing could be better.
He tied the Mandragoras to the end of his belt.
Despite being hung in a row like dried fish, the Mandragoras didn't wake up.
‘This is going more smoothly than I thought. Maybe I'll raise them for a bit and then ask for a few rootlets to make tea.’
If any alchemists who desired Mandragoras heard that, they would faint from shock.
‘And their fruits would make a nice snack.’
This, too, was something people would beg him not to do, pleading with him to sell them instead.
Mandragoras, a challenge to both raise and obtain.
The sunfish of monsters that died from the slightest environmental change.
And Cheon Doun was treating this precious, rare thing like a cabbage leaf.
'Wait. I think I remember hearing that if you forcibly pick the fruit, its components turn poisonous.'
Then there was only one way. I'll have to raise their affection so they'll offer me the fruit themselves.
Cheon Doun gently stroked the Mandragoras.
-Huuung.
As if tickled, the Mandragora mumbled in its sleep and shifted.
All that was left was to plant them in his garden. He descended the mountain with a cheerful spring in his step.