Chapter 42
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 42
After a fantastic meal, Gio tossed a few sausages to the water birds and returned to his cabin to rest. The meal had been so hearty that he still felt full by the time evening arrived.
“Nurungji…”
“Kkurreuk?”
“It’s a bit much to eat right now, so let’s make nurungji soup tomorrow. It’s really good.”
“Kkururururuk.”
“…”
Lying in bed, Seo Gio poked Honey, who was—as always—curled up right beside him.
“Kkoong.”
“…”
“Kkoong, kkoong, kkoong.”
“So fluffy.”
“Kkoong!”
Honey resisted fiercely, but that only made him seem cuter.
“You harmless little thing.”
Gio mused that if Honey grew just a bit bigger, he could use him as a pillow.
Could I create a material with a similar feel?
Sleeping directly on a live water bird felt a little cruel, so he found himself wanting a squishy, non-living pillow instead.
Gio blinked, pulling himself from his idle fantasies.
“…”
He couldn’t fall asleep for the life of him.
“Whew…”
He had nights like this sometimes.
“Is this the fate of an artist?”
“…Kkoong?”
Honey’s reaction seemed to say, Stop talking nonsense and go to sleep, but it wasn’t that simple.
Gio rubbed his face against the fluffy, feather-filled blanket a few times before finally sitting up.
“Honey, Daddy’s leaving.”
“Kkureuk.”
“Cold-hearted little guy.”
Leaving the tired Honey behind, he headed to his studio, which was packed with all sorts of materials.
“…”
As was often the case, his terrible insomnia had been triggered by a sudden spark of curiosity.
“…I’ve grown curious about the scenery outside.”
If Gio chose a location with enough precision and pictured it, he could conjure its image in his mind.
At first, he’d assumed it was just his imagination. After all, even if he imagined the third floor of the Collector’s headquarters, wouldn’t it differ from the real thing?
But as he continued to paint based on these visions, he eventually realized something.
The scenery I imagine is nearly identical to reality.
He figured it was probably one of the perks of being a living portrait.
“Outside, it’s probably… a dark dawn,” Gio muttered.
It wasn’t a place he’d never seen before, and painting a location he had already visited once wasn’t difficult. Gio moved his brush, recalling the view from an alleyway he had once seen.
And just like that, a frame appeared in an alley somewhere in Seoul.
* * *
“Haaah…”
On a street barely lit by the approaching dawn, a woman ran her hands through her hair in frustration.
“Where am I supposed to crash now?”
The woman with short, pitch-black hair, Cha Ah-ra, couldn’t hold back her sighs.
Of course, no one wants to take in an F-Rank.
Even among the Awakened, F-Ranks were treated as nothing more than porters.
Ah-ra’s rank was F. Her primary skill was ‘Physical Enhancement.’ She couldn’t afford to learn any other skills, and naturally, she didn’t have a job class. It was the classic build for a porter.
“…”
Kicked out of her previous team, she now sat aimlessly on a bench.
“…Then again, who would want a porter with an injured leg?”
She had hurt her leg in a dungeon earlier that afternoon. With F-Ranks practically a dime a dozen and desperate for porter work, no one had any reason to hire someone who limped.
I liked that team. They all seemed pretty decent.
They weren’t kind, exactly, just a group of people who kept to themselves. They had ignored Cha Ah-ra, a mere F-Rank porter, as if she were invisible, but that was how they treated everyone on the team.
In this day and age, such indifference was a rare virtue.
Though it also meant I got cut just as easily.
Once she was deemed no longer useful, Ah-ra was kicked out with the simple explanation that they couldn’t employ her anymore.
Fortunately, she had at least received her full share of the payout before being dismissed. Ah-ra stared at the account balance on her phone for a long time.
A grand total of about 500,000 won.
“…”
This was nowhere near enough to pay rent and buy her youngest sibling’s priest robes.
“And the rent went up this month, too…”
Ugh.
Ah-ra let out a groan.
“…What do I do now?”
Looking up at the sky as snow began to gently fall, Ah-ra clicked her tongue.
“This is bullshit.”
It was already freezing; why did it have to snow on top of everything?
…The terminal shut down ages ago. Well, my brother is still at home, so the kid should be fine. As long as he isn’t playing the pushover again and giving his stuff away.
Sniffling at a sudden wave of loneliness, Ah-ra stood up from the bench.
“I need to find somewhere to get out of the snow.”
Ah-ra wrapped the scarf her youngest sibling had hand-knitted tighter around her neck and started walking. She had planned on just sleeping on the bench, but if it snowed, she might never wake up.
It would be great if I could sleep near a station or a corporate headquarters.
Public facilities with heavy foot traffic and the areas around wealthy companies usually had warming magic cast on them. She wouldn’t have to worry about freezing if she slept near one, but getting caught risked the worst-case scenario: being demoted to a 4th-Grade Citizen.
I used my Hunter ID to get a temporary residence permit for a few days, but that doesn’t mean I can just sleep anywhere. If a security guard catches me, it’ll be a huge pain…
At times like this, she envied her older brother, Cha Eun-hyeok.
“That guy can at least sleep in his bungeoppang cart.”
Her brother sold bungeoppang and lived on the move, hauling his cart between the provinces and the city. He couldn’t leave it unattended, or it would be stolen or confiscated, so he always slept inside it.
“Ugh…”
So, Ah-ra couldn’t expect to sleep in his cart, either.
After walking aimlessly for a long while, her steps led her into a dark alleyway.
“…”
…What is that?
…A portrait?
It was a portrait of a man, hanging on the alley wall.
“…What’s with this? Creepy…”
The man in the portrait was as handsome as a sculpture, but it wasn’t his looks that sent a chill down her spine—it was the stillness of his quietly closed eyes. The gloomy aura, as if someone had painted a corpse, made Ah-ra hesitate and back away.
What kind of lunatic hangs a painting here?
It was probably the work of some weirdo with eccentric tastes or a Hunter with a bizarre skill. Ah-ra decided to ignore it. Besides, she had no intention of sleeping here, where the snow would fall right on her.
Walking a bit further, Ah-ra soon spotted a woman.
“…”
She must have been exposed to the freezing snow for some time, as a thick layer had already accumulated on her. Judging by the way she was curled into a ball, she was clearly a 4th-Grade Citizen illegally residing in the city.
“…”
“…”
Her slender body rose and fell slightly, indicating she was still breathing.
She’s pretty far out.
Usually, the slum residents lived much deeper in the alleys.
Ah-ra tried to ignore the woman and walk past, but after only a few steps, she turned back with a deeply conflicted expression and stood before her again.
“…”
Whether she was asleep or had fainted from the cold, the woman remained unconscious, showing no sign of noticing Ah-ra standing right in front of her.
“…Ah, dammit.”
Ah-ra unwrapped her scarf, gently draped it around the woman’s neck, and quickly walked away. Hearing a faint rustle as the woman stirred, she quickened her pace.
Fuck, this is so embarrassing. Fuck, fuck…
With her neck now bare to the cold, Ah-ra felt a sudden wave of self-pity.
“Why the hell did she have to look so pitiful?!”
A lump rose in her throat.
The woman looked about her age, maybe even younger. That meant she couldn’t be older than twenty. She couldn’t just walk past someone her own age who looked like they were on the verge of death.
“Ah, seriously, my little brother knitted that for me… Yi-sol…”
It was a scarf her brother had painstakingly knitted with wool gathered from livestock and monsters back in their village. Her little brother was actually quite skilled, so it was a really nice scarf. She had been wearing it happily all winter, only to lose it in such a stupid way.
Fuck… I have no right to nag my older brother or Cha Yi-sol anymore…
As Ah-ra trudged along, something strange caught her eye.
“…”
A portrait of a man.
“…Huh?”
She had just seen this.
…W-what is this? I didn’t see it here before. Did I misremember? Or are there more of them?
Although the frame was half-shrouded in shadow, obscuring the face, she could tell instantly that it was the exact same portrait.
Goosebumps broke out all over her body, just like in a horror movie.
“U-uh…”
Even as an F-Rank, an Awakened was still an Awakened. She possessed enough instinct to sense danger.
“Am I fucked?”
At her vulgar words, the portrait half-hidden in the shadows opened its eyes.
“…”
“…”
The mouth of the portrait, untouched by the darkness, parted gently.
“My apologies.”
The tone was aristocratic.
As Ah-ra blinked, her mind struggling to process the sheer impossibility of it all…
“…”
The frame was gone.
“…”
What… wait, what?
What the hell was that?
Ah-ra only then realized she had collapsed to the ground.
“…F-fuck…”
Somebody save me.
Her hands, pressed against the snow-covered ground, trembled violently. She knew with absolute certainty that it wasn’t just the cold.
She had to babble some nonsense to herself, anything to keep from losing her mind.
“Crazy…”
An instinctual realization hit her.
I almost died.
In truth, the situation hadn’t been quite that perilous, but she knew that the bizarre portrait was an incredibly dangerous entity. If that being hadn’t been polite enough to apologize, would she even be alive right now?
“…W-what was that? Seriously, what was that? What did I just see?”
As Ah-ra fumbled to push herself up and escape, her hand brushed against something cold and hard.
The small, solid sensation sent goosebumps straight to the crown of her head. She couldn’t even scream, her mouth merely opening and closing soundlessly.
“…”
Trembling, she fumbled in the snow again, and a cold, pebble-like object slipped into her hand.
Peering at it with a terrified heart…
“…A-a gem?”
It was a black, translucent gemstone.
“…What is this…”
This, too, was an instinctive realization.
Ah-ra knew it was a gift from the portrait.
“…”
Before they passed away, her parents had always told her that good deeds bring good fortune.
This whole situation felt like a creepy fairy tale.
* * *
Meanwhile, another person had just managed to creep himself out.
“Stalking is wrong.”
Gio was utterly mortified by his own rudeness.
Painting the dawn alleyway had been fine. But once the painting was finished, he saw a woman moving inside the frame and had worried for a moment if she would be safe so late at night.
Because of that, his gaze had unconsciously followed her…
“And in the end, I stalked her.”
He had ended up observing her without her consent.
“She must have been terrified.”
Usually, he only observed the interior of the Collector’s building or traveled through the frames, so he hadn’t known. But this time, Gio realized it for certain.
If I lock my gaze on something that’s moving, the physical frame in reality moves along with it.
That explained the “living portrait chasing Cha Ah-ra” incident.
“I hope my apology got through to her…”
Because he had been blankly staring at the short-haired woman, he had witnessed everything: her giving the scarf to the person in the alley, her terror upon seeing his frame again. It was only when she turned pale and collapsed that Gio snapped out of it.
He felt admiration for the young woman, who still looked like a high schooler; worry for her being alone so late; and guilt for scaring her with his rudeness.
“…”
These intense emotions were recognized as a trade item, and Gio gifted Ah-ra a gem.
“…?”
Wait, hold on.
“Did that just make it scarier?”
He hadn’t thought of that, too distracted by his own blunder. If you suddenly gave a silent gift to a girl who was already terrified out of her wits by a living portrait, who on earth would pick it up and think, Oh, wow, a gem!?
“Ah…”
He should have given her a cookie or something.
Since I didn’t have any baked cookies on hand, I ended up painting a gem without thinking.
If he had given her a trivial snack, she might have been less frightened. Watching the young woman’s back as she fled in sheer panic through the frame, Gio felt a pang of regret.
“I’m so sorry…”
At that moment, Gio realized something.
“…”
Does my personality change sometimes?
It was the moment he finally gained self-awareness as the ‘Black Cloak.’