The Second Logout
Time flew.
The logout cooldown had come back around, and I went right back to farming the Corrupted Forest from morning until night. Day after day, I came to understand why a department store has no windows and burns its lights around the clock, and why a casino stays dim no matter the hour. The fog in that forest wears a person thin. Skip checking the time now and then, and you can't even guess what hour it is.
If I hadn't spent ten years in Farming World, any user stuck farming here would have quit halfway through, or started itching to just kill the ogre and get out.
No. I was no different.
I'm human too. Shut inside a place this dull and stifling, farming all day long, even I get the shakes. I can't sit still.
"God... the more I think about it, the more of a waste this is."
In practice, corrupted resources weren't much use yet. Feed them into a craft that consumed basic materials and a corrupted aura seeped in, changing the result a little, but nothing got dramatically better. They just took up space. Even so, my gut said they'd be good for something eventually—and more than that, farming them came with a ridiculous amount of side loot from the Corrupted Forest.
Chop a tree or mine a rock and monsters came running at the noise. Maybe the things living in this forest had their territories carved up, because gray wolves kept cycling through the spot I'd entered the day before. Wild herbs and plants, fruit and berries, corrupted seeds—all of it turned up in surprising quantity. I needed to see how they grew once they were in the ground. I didn't know whether they'd take anywhere but corrupted soil, so I'd had just a few planted in a corner of the vegetable patch. If the seeds grew even without corrupted earth, that would go a long way toward the steady seed supply we needed to keep up.
On top of that, the resources here were simply high grade. An A− dungeon meant most of them started at B to A. Even if the corrupted stock turned out to be nothing but a fancy name squatting in the warehouse, B+ wood, weeds, and stone could still be used in crafting at least through a level-3 biome. In a sense, I was putting in tomorrow's labor today.
Part of me wanted to strip the whole Corrupted Forest down until it was open plain. After about four days of farming, though, I could feel even that window closing. The monsters were showing up faster and faster. At first the gray wolves only appeared when they heard noise nearby. Then they came more and more often, and from the third day the wolves seemed to have been wiped out. Other monsters, every kind of them, poured in almost like a wave.
That wasn't a good sign. Nothing said a corrupted ogre couldn't walk out of a rush like that.
It was a forest, but strictly speaking it was a dungeon. There's a boss at the end of a dungeon, and no pack welcomes an intruder who skips the fight and just strips the place for resources. I wasn't going to get to mine forever just because I felt like it. A fight with the ogre was coming soon, so I decided to step out and come back.
"You all packed?"
"There's so much... I got it all, though."
Same as last time, we used the plastic bins we'd carried in to haul everything out. Most of it was crops Kim Sujeong had planted, plus the resources I'd pulled from the Corrupted Forest. Even setting the basic corrupted materials aside, what I'd dug out of the forest alone was so much that just sorting what was worth selling took a good while.
It didn't hit like the first logout. That was normal. Breaking absurd odds for a Glass Stone had already gone past beginner's luck. This time there was no jackpot on that scale, but there were plenty of solid mid-tier scores.
"Jihyun unni is going to be so happy."
I'd promised Lee Jihyun a steady supply of Recovery Herbs. This time, though, I had no way to get the seeds—the village still hadn't been restored—so I'd farmed the Corrupted Forest hard just to make up a little of the difference. I'd asked Ruru whether the previous master had squirreled away any more Recovery Herb seeds. She said there weren't any, so I had to dig even harder.
Seeds turned up in bulk, and some of them were Recovery Herb seeds. Add up four days of gathering and it came to maybe twenty or thirty. Not the first haul, but enough, I'd figured, to save face.
Then came the day before we were set to log out.
Figuring it wouldn't be strange if the ogre showed up any moment, I pushed deeper while I farmed—and found it. Even from a distance, something about the place looked special. A little stream ran there, something I'd never seen in the Corrupted Forest, and beyond it a tended plot glowed faintly, clear of wild weeds, trees, and stone. Between them, a red that had no business in that forest set my heart hammering.
I steadied myself and drew closer. It was a field of Recovery Herbs.
Like a wave dyed red. The crimson berries streaming with the wind were truly beautiful—a red light that didn't belong in this murky forest. The herbs themselves had drunk in the energy of chaos, so their red was a little clouded. That only made them more beautiful to me.
I picked them carefully, one by one. Not a single leaf bruised. Not a single berry spoiled. In the end I walked away with more than three times the berries and leaves the previous master had left behind on my first logout.
That alone meant farming the Corrupted Forest hadn't been a waste.
"Have a safe trip, Master! Sujeong!"
"Ruru... you really don't want to come?"
"I'm fine! I have to watch this place! You promised you'd take me later, Master."
Same as logging in, you can bring one person with you when you log out. I'd half wondered whether Ruru could leave too and thought about testing it, but she refused—or rather, she said there was no need to go right now.
"All right. Hold down the fort. Once things settle, I'll show you around."
Earth wasn't Ruru's home. She wanted to go because it was her master's dimension and there would probably be plenty to eat—a sightseeing trip, nothing more. For a reason like that, there was no need to empty the farm. While I was gone, someone had to manage the goblins and keep the work moving. Kim Sujeong had wanted to take that job herself so she could let Ruru, whom she'd grown close to, look around Earth. I'd worried the two of them would start some ridiculous back-and-forth of yielding to each other until it turned into a scene, but thankfully it never came to that.
"Then, Ruru—when I get back, I'll bring you something really delicious."
"Thank you!"
Kim Sujeong had plenty to do. She managed the farming here, but out in the real world she'd also be handing the sorted goods off to Dad and negotiating prices. We'd agreed she'd take all of that on from now on. A manager, plain and simple. She'd been to the Rift Dimension herself and seen how hard resources were to come by, so she'd probably handle it with a real sense of responsibility.
Which was why I made sure the motivation was solid.
"I'll give you ten percent. Don't screw it up."
"...For real? You're okay giving me that much?"
Ten percent was a lot. Last logout I'd cleared close to three hundred million won; her cut of that would be thirty million. One Glass Stone alone was basically a Seoul apartment. The look in Kim Sujeong's eyes—someone who understood exactly what that was worth—seemed trustworthy enough.
The eyes of a woman gone mad for money. Eyes that said she'd strip family and everything else bare if that's what it took.
I stowed the load in my belt and logged out.
"Be back soon."
Logout!
"Ugh. The air is seriously awful."
The moment Kim Sujeong logged out, she said the exact same thing I had last time. Couldn't be helped. It wasn't just me—the air really was different.
"The house feels weird."
And she was feeling the same thing I had. One week. Next to a house you'd lived in your whole life, it was nothing, and yet this place felt strangely unfamiliar. In my case, it had been just "Mom's house" for a long time already.
"Yeah, well. What's there to feel weird about? It's Mom's house."
"...You can't talk like that, you brat."
It's Mom's house for you too. The Rift Dimension isn't your house, you little shit.
"Mom! We're home!"
We came out through my bedroom door, not the front entrance, and Mom jumped.
"What? You two were home?"
"Huh? No. We just got here."
Thankfully she looked worried this time, but she said she hadn't filed a report.
"A whole week without a single word. Do you know how worried I was?"
"Mom. You don't have to worry about a thing anymore. Oppa's seriously hit the jackpot."
"Even so, you always have to be careful. And eat properly."
"Yeah, yeah. Where's Dad?"
"He's washing up. Said he's heading in to work."
When Dad came out to the living room, Kim Sujeong stopped him with a grave look on her face.
"Father. No—Boss."
"...What's gotten into this kid?"
"As CEO Kim Suhyun's agent, and as manager of Suhyun Company, I have a deal to conduct. You'll be coming in to work with me today."
I ignored the baffled look Dad shot my way.
Looked like I'd hired well.