No Receipt Needed
"No receipt needed." "I got it! Damn it, what the hell are you gonna do with this?!" BAM! The counter rattled with a furious thud. What Baek Seol had slammed down was a 1.8L soybean cooking oil bottle and a 1kg bag of all-purpose flour she'd swept off a nearby shelf. Her breathing came in harsh gasps. Rain-soaked silver hair clung to her pale neck, and through the tear in her suit, her chest rose and fell precariously with each ragged breath.
Killing intent. The pressure from an S-rank hunter ready to slit the clerk's throat for one wrong word crushed the air inside the convenience store. And yet, at the eye of this storm, Han Siu's reaction was utterly dry. Just a steady, focused expression without a flicker.
"...Don't make a scene. If I mess up the molecular weight calculation, it's on you."
Siu dismissed Baek Seol's murderous glare as mere annoying background noise and pulled the items she'd brought toward himself. Without hesitation, he tore open the flour bag and dumped it onto his notebook. White powder billowed up, blanketing the paper scarred with black ink marks from his pen. Then he uncapped the cooking oil and poured it on top in a glug-glug stream.
It looked insane to anyone watching. He was supposed to be crafting a noble magic scroll, but instead of mana stone dust or parchment that hunters used, he was mixing up frying batter.
"Are you... cooking right now?"
Baek Seol's hand drifted to the dagger at her waist. Her patience had hit its limit. Every ragged breath from her subordinate Yuri was snapping her rationality thread by thread.
"Wait."
Siu's voice dropped low, carrying the firm authority of an expert—far from his usual hesitant stutter.
"The poison spreading through that hunter's abdomen is hydrophobic. It doesn't mix with water, only clings to fatty tissues and causes necrosis. That's why regular water-based potions cause a backlash and explode."
A ballpoint pen had appeared in Siu's hand. He pointed it at the doughy mess of oil and flour, explaining rapidly.
"To draw out the poison, you need a stronger lipophilic agent to lure it. The gluten structure in the flour acts as a prison to trap the toxin, and the oil film coats the wound to prevent secondary infection. This combination... it's the optimal algorithm."
Material: Flour (Gluten) + Oil (Lipid)
Command: Extract & Isolate
Scratch, scratch, scratch. As he explained, Siu's hand danced across the oil-smeared notebook. What appeared wasn't some common magic incantation. It was an engineering blueprint that forcibly twisted the laws of magical formulas.
The moment Siu closed the final equation, something bizarre happened.
Vrrr—!
The messy pile of flour dough and oil clumps broke down into golden particles, then—like a lie—sucked straight into the paper. Physical mass converting into information data, compressed onto a single sheet. Even Baek Seol, an S-rank hunter, gaped in stunned silence at the sight she'd never witnessed before.
Right before her eyes, the damp sheet of paper transformed, exuding a heavy aura of mana.
"It's done. I should've used high-gluten flour for better viscosity, but... this'll do in a pinch."
Siu pushed up his glasses and stood. He approached the limp, injured Yuri.
Up close, Yuri's condition was gruesome. She was a famous beauty hunter, but now her face twisted in agony, her abdomen blackened and rotting beyond recognition. Through her torn combat suit, pale skin bulged with grotesque purple veins from the virulent corrosion.
"It's gonna sting—a lot."
Without hesitation, Siu slapped the finished scroll onto her festering wound.
"Absorb."
Fwosh—!
The scroll melted away in a burst of light. The paper vanished, replaced by a transparent, sticky golden jelly mass that enveloped the wound—like a giant slime devouring it.
"Nngh...!"
Yuri, who'd lost consciousness, arched her back with a short groan. Baek Seol screamed and lunged forward, but froze at the sight that followed.
Sizzle—.
A whirlpool churned inside the jelly. The dark purple toxin burrowed deep in Yuri's body was yanked out like iron filings to a magnet, surging into the jelly. Siu's designed 'gluten prison' precisely capturing and extracting only the toxic substances.
As the black poison drained away, healing oil—transformed from the cooking oil—seeped in. Necrotic skin sloughed off, revealing fresh crimson blood and healthy new flesh underneath. Yuri's death-rattle breaths steadied. The furrow of pain in her brow eased, her natural beauty returning.
"Haa..."
A sigh of relief escaped Baek Seol. Her legs buckled; she gripped the counter to keep from collapsing.
Chimera poison... cured with this?!
Her trembling eyes fixed on the man before her. A miracle. A chimera's mixed venom, deemed untreatable even with multimillion-won elixirs, cured with convenience store oil and flour. By an F-rank clerk with zero mana.
With the crisis over, Siu returned to his spot as if nothing happened, wiping oil from his hands with wet wipes.
"Ugh, so slippery."
He rubbed his hands with a grimace, lost in old memories for a moment.
Three years ago. At the Awakener High School entrance ceremony, when he'd placed his hand on the measurement orb. The teachers' and classmates' sneers flashed back.
'Mana output 5? Pfft! Dude, forget being a hunter. You couldn't even haul luggage.'
'Class... Recorder? What's that? No combat skills? Production jobs don't even pay... tsk tsk.'
While peers launched fireworks and swung sword auras, Siu could only scribble in his notebook from the corner. Everyone ignored him. Useless talent. F-rank trash.
So what?
But Siu didn't give up. Or rather, he never cared about hunters' ways. It started the day he found an old tome, Principles of Ether Dynamics, being used as a ramen bowl stand in a dusty antique shop.
For him, awakening tech was just another fun 'discipline.' He'd realized: this world's magic wasn't emotional miracles, but rigorous results of 'logic' and 'equations.'
While others dumped mana brute-force, Siu alone mastered amplifying efficiency hundreds-fold with a single formula. Just like now.
"Phew."
Hands clean, Siu tapped the POS machine.
"Treatment's done. Cooking oil 6,500 won, flour 2,000 won. Plus the bandages and antiseptic you spilled earlier... "
Beep.
"Total 15,400 won. Need a bag?"
Silence. Only the rain pattered loudly inside the store.
Baek Seol stared up at Siu in a daze. He'd saved her subordinate—no, Yuri like family. And what she'd seen of his ability went beyond mere poison treatment. Perfect understanding of material properties. Dominating phenomena without mana.
As an S-rank hunter, she'd seen countless geniuses: grand mages, alchemy masters, saintesses. But she'd never encountered a shaggy-haired youth like this.
This man... he's a revolution.
Baek Seol's red eyes gleamed with fascination. The earlier killing intent was gone, replaced by pure awe—and the vicious 'possessiveness' unique to S-ranks.
How could such talent rot in a convenience store corner? No—perfect. She'd found him before other guilds could snag him.
"Uh, miss? Checkout?"
Siu asked, puzzled. Baek Seol was staring holes through him without a word. The gaze felt too sticky, too obsessive; a chill crawled up his spine on instinct.
Baek Seol rose slowly. Her blood-soaked suit clung transparently to her glamorous figure, but her focus was solely on the 'treasure' before her.
She pulled a soaked checkbook from her bosom and tore out a sheet, slamming it on the counter with a BAM!
[One Billion Won (₩1,000,000,000)]
"...Keep the change."
"Pardon? No, miss—this is way too much. We don't have that kind of change..."
"I'll buy everything in this store."
Baek Seol's lips curled in a seductive yet dangerous smile.
"The near-expired bentos, the rotting ingredients, and..."
Her gaze locked onto Siu's indifferent eyes behind his glasses.
"...the clerk behind the counter, too."
"...Pardon?"
Siu pushed up his glasses, blurting dumbly. Outside, red lightning signaling an S-rank gate outbreak cracked down right on cue.