Chapter 35
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Translator: 8uhl
Chapter: 35
Chapter Title: A Reliable Ally
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Reliable when on your side.
The three Hunters had come at the request of the Hanbit Research Institute.
Now bound, they broke out in a cold sweat. They had fainted, and when they came to, they found themselves tied up and hanging from a tree.
That much was fine. They were just relieved to have opened their eyes, to be alive.
But the scene before them was anything but reassuring.
“What in the world… Where is this? Why is a place like this inside a Gate?”
Before they lost consciousness, they had been so fixated on the Mandragora that they hadn't bothered to look around.
Now, as captives, they could calmly survey their surroundings.
The first thing they saw was a log cabin covered in white threads.
“I can feel an immense amount of magical energy. What is that? Some kind of trap?”
It was the territorial marking of an S+-rank monster, the Silk Thread Caterpillar. Added to that was the magical energy radiating from the glowing stones embedded within.
The combined aura was enough to make one’s knees weak.
“But… it smells nice. What is it?”
It was terrifying, yet it calmed the mind and body. What was this confusion? The Hunters stared at Cheon Doun’s house with wavering eyes.
Next, their gazes turned to the vegetable garden.
The Mandragora leaves planted in the garden boasted a vibrant freshness.
For some reason, the metallic Mandragora they had brought was also buried in the garden, its silver leaves swaying.
*What are you doing there?* The Hunters resisted the urge to say it out loud.
“A garden full of Mandragoras. No one would believe this even if I told them.”
One of the Hunters muttered, staring at the garden. Under his intense gaze, a Mandragora poked its head out. It slammed its rootlets on the ground once.
-Hmph!
*Do not look, invaders. Your gaze is profane.* After issuing the warning, it burrowed back into the ground.
“Ugh…”
The Hunters groaned. They didn't know much, but they knew this place was strange. Just then, the bushes rustled, and the Yu siblings returned.
The Hunters quickly pretended to be unconscious again, peeking through slitted eyes to assess the situation.
Yu Jia was carrying Nam Giseok on her shoulder.
He had passed out from exhaustion during physical training with the siblings. To the Hunters, however, it looked very different.
‘They’ve returned from a hunt!’
As proof, the face of the man lowered to the ground was gaunt. It had to be a sign of a desperate escape.
More importantly, the fur pelt wrapped around his body was concerning.
‘What have they dressed him in? Why is the poison energy so strong?’
They recoiled at the toxic energy they could feel from the fur, even from a distance.
‘That’s… that’s it. It must be a monster’s recipe for preserving prey by pickling it in poison.’
They might soon be wrapped in poisonous hides and turned into preserved food themselves. The Hunters’ faces turned white.
At that moment, a massive shadow fell over them. Forgetting they were supposed to be unconscious, they looked up.
“That… that’s…!”
“A Poison Parrot!”
A giant bird, eight meters tall, was flying toward them.
A species always mentioned when listing ferocious monsters. The sight of it approaching filled the Hunters with despair.
*Thud.* With a heavy sound, the giant bird landed in front of the house.
The Hunters’ jaws dropped. They had never seen a Poison Parrot this close before.
*So this is the dreaded bird of terror I’ve only heard about.*
Their faces grew pale, but soon they tilted their heads with a strange sense of dissonance.
“Is that… the bird of terror?”
Contrary to its fearsome moniker, the bird looked somewhat haggard. Its feathers were patchy and missing in places, giving it a shabby appearance.
Its eyes held a depth that seemed to have experienced both hardship and enlightenment at once. It was like the gaze of an enlightened monk.
-Chiiirp…
The Poison Parrot cried out as if in pain and lowered its head to the ground. Someone jumped down from on top of it.
“You’re back?”
The siblings, who had already seen Cheon Doun riding it from the sky, approached without surprise.
“What’s with the bird?”
“I found it nearby and caught it. We’re going to be expanding the house, so I figured having one around would be useful for moving things.”
Cheon Doun’s words left the siblings speechless. They were dumbfounded that he had so casually ridden a bird they hadn't been able to tame in their decades of life.
They let out a hollow laugh at him treating the notoriously ferocious bird like a mere delivery truck.
*How on earth did you tame it?* They started to ask, but stopped. Seeing the bird's haggard state, they felt they already knew the answer.
‘Well, it’s Cheon Doun.’
*Let’s not try to understand.* The siblings let it go.
The watching Hunters could not. What in the world was this?
They had never heard of a monster being tamed by a person.
And yet, with a man who had ridden a monster standing right before them, they couldn't deny it.
‘He seems to know those humanoid monsters, too. Who is he?’
Their confusion had now turned to fear. They felt as if they had stepped into an unknown territory they were not meant to know.
When Cheon Doun’s gaze fell upon them, their shoulders flinched.
“What are those?”
“Intruders. They showed up out of nowhere and were after your garden, so we captured them.”
“My garden? Strange. They couldn’t have known about it. And for them to have stumbled upon it by chance… that makes no sense.”
Cheon Doun had been infusing the garden with magical energy every day for the Mandragoras. As a result, the density of magical energy in the area had increased.
A human would feel suffocated just by coming near. The area was clearly dangerous even from 300 meters away, so it was impossible for them to have entered by chance.
If they still came in, there could only be one reason.
“Kim Nari. Stay up there. Don’t answer.”
*They’re Hunters who came looking for the machine lifeform.* Cheon Doun, sensing this, instructed Kim Nari, who was still on the bird’s back.
Kim Nari discreetly crouched behind a mineral ore to hide.
“Oh, right. Those guys brought a strange metal plant with them. It’s in the garden with the plants you’re growing now.”
At Yu Beom’s words, Cheon Doun turned to look at the garden.
He saw the four clumps of plants he was raising. Among them, a silver, metallic plant was buried as well.
It was the same material as Kim Nari’s original form, which he had seen once before.
That alone was enough for Cheon Doun to grasp the general situation.
‘A Chimera created to track Kim Nari.’
Cheon Doun carefully pulled out the silver root.
-Hnngh…?
The sleeping root rubbed its eyes with its rootlets.
A pencil-thin, withered root. A cracked surface, despite being metal. A listless cry, uncharacteristic of a Mandragora.
It was a typical artificially cultivated Mandragora.
-Hnn… hnn…
The Mandragora looked at Cheon Doun, then closed its eyes again.
The half-asleep root mistook Cheon Doun for a giant of its own kind, its expression relaxing in relief.
It had already felt the warmth of its kin. The silver root no longer showed the ferocity of swinging its rootlets.
‘If the goal was location tracking… was it made to resonate with other machine lifeforms?’
But this small root had not searched for Kim Nari, but for the scent of its own kind.
As a result, it headed for the garden where the Mandragoras lived. The Hunters, unaware of this, had foolishly followed it in.
Cheon Doun looked back at the Hunters, holding the metal root. Upon seeing them, the Mandragora’s root stiffened. Its leaves trembled finely.
-Hnnngh…!
A liquid metal Mandragora. As a Chimera, its eyesight was better than a normal Mandragora’s.
Thanks to that, it clearly recognized the faces of the Hunters who had kicked it.
[Get up, you weed. Why’d you fall over again?]
[Just give it a kick. It gets up then.]
[To think something like this is worth billions. Hey, should we tear off a few rootlets when we return it? We can just say it happened while we were searching inside the Gate.]
[Ooh, should we? Rootlets are too small-time. Let’s pluck a few leaves. And we can cut off the tip of the root and keep it separately. How about that?]
It didn't understand all the words the Hunters had said. But it clearly recognized the killing intent directed at it.
-Hnn… Hnngh!
The metallic Mandragora whipped out its rootlets. The three-centimeter-long rootlets, unable to reach the Hunters, flailed in the air.
Cheon Doun watched this, then patted the root with his index finger.
“Mandragoras are a gentle species. It’s rare to see a reaction like this unless they’re attacked first.”
Cheon Doun’s gaze shifted to the Hunters.
“You hit it, didn’t you?”
The Hunters couldn't answer. Their teeth were chattering so hard that words wouldn't come out.
They wished he would just yell at them. They couldn't understand why his emotionless, blank expression felt so terrifying.
‘He’s angry.’
Yu Beom thought as he watched Cheon Doun.
Though it was only for four years during their childhood, as a former roommate, he knew when Cheon Doun made that face.
When he witnessed an injustice.
Inside the research institute, everything was unjust. But even among all that, there were things that particularly crossed the line.
Shooting someone in the leg because they didn't like their gaze, threatening to kill someone by opening a Gate and pushing them in, or having a heated discussion about dissecting them.
When things became suffocating, Cheon Doun would wear that expression.
The Cheon Doun that Yu Beom remembered was an individualist who cared for nothing but his own affairs.
But occasionally, if a fellow subject suffered a particularly egregious injustice, he would silently find the researcher responsible and beat them down.
There was never any evidence, so the institute couldn't do anything about it.
Even him chasing after them when they escaped to hand over a return stone was part of that.
Very rarely, a switch for a kind of empathy for fellow chimeras—one that you never knew what would trigger—would flip. That switch had just been flipped.
‘They’re not going back in one piece.’
Yu Jia, standing beside him, thought to herself.
He wouldn't kill them. Cheon Doun didn't kill people carelessly.
However, he had a personality that would pay them back to the point where a clean death might seem preferable.
“A small root like this wouldn't even be treated as a Chimera Hunter. Once the job is done, it’ll be melted down and used for new research. That's how it ends, right?”
The Hunters couldn't answer. If they made a single wrong sound here, they would really die. They were frozen in fear, unable to move.
“Don’t worry. I won’t kill you. Looking at the root’s condition, it doesn’t seem like you caused any physical trauma. So I’ll stick to just that much.”
*What in the world is ‘just that much’?* The Hunters managed to swallow the question.
Cheon Doun flicked his hand. A thread shot from his fingertip and snapped the Hunters’ bonds.
They fell to the ground, staring at Cheon Doun with shocked faces.
They hadn't even seen what he did properly. They were also stunned that he had severed the rope that bound them.
‘Wasn’t this rope made from braided monster sinew?’
It was the rope the Yu siblings carried for hunting. A shiver went down their spines that he had cut what they couldn't break, no matter how hard they tried, with a single gesture.
“Wh-who are you…?”
“Shut your mouth. I’m not taking questions. Instead, I’ll give you a choice.”
“A ch-choice?”
“If you do what I say, you’ll be able to go home.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I’ll let you live.”
*I’ll let you live.* The answer was strangely unsettling. But thinking it was better than dying, the Hunters nodded their heads.
“I’ll do it.”
“Me too.”
“I’ll do anything if you just let me live.”
In a world where Hunters who served the greater good had vanished, even A-rank Hunters were ultimately just merchants hell-bent on making money.
No one cared about honor. The prevailing attitude in the Hunter industry was that if you could save your life by begging, you should naturally get on your knees.
Cheon Doun looked at them and flicked his hand again. With that single gesture, the Hunters’ eyes rolled back, and they fainted.
“What are you going to do?”
Yu Beom asked.
“Well, it’s you, so I’m sure you’ll handle it. But if you send them back as they are, it’ll definitely become a hassle.”
“I know. That’s why I have to use a method that won’t leave any loose ends.”
“A method that won’t leave loose ends?”
“It’s a method I used on an instructor at the institute. It’s pretty effective.”
“What did you do?”
Yu Beom asked. Instead of answering, Cheon Doun dredged up an old memory.
The instructor, looking up at him with a hollow expression.
[Just… just kill me, you bastard! This is too much!]
That's what he had screamed. He just had to use the same method as back then.
He would deal with them in a way that they wouldn't remember him or this place, let alone cause any repercussions.
“Don’t worry. It’s a clean method that won’t leave a single thing behind.”
Cheon Doun smiled, looking at the unconscious Hunters. He scanned their bodies with mana and nodded.
“As expected. I didn't think they'd entrust the request to just any riffraff. All three are A-rank Hunters.”
Cheon Doun looked at the yellow mineral ore he had brought on the bird’s back.
If they were A-rank Hunters, there were plenty of uses for them before sending them back. They were excellent workers, so he should put them to good use before letting them go.
Having acquired free labor, he smiled with satisfaction. Seeing this, the siblings took a step back.
They didn't know what he was planning. But they had a feeling it was best not to get involved.
‘I’m glad I’m not his enemy.’
The most reliable guy in the world if he was on your side. A complete psycho if he was your enemy.
*Let's stay friends with Cheon Doun for life.* The siblings thought, breaking into a cold sweat.