What's Your Budget?
"What's your budget?!"
"P-please...! Please fix my sword, Master!"
...What is this now?
Dohyun looked down at the woman with bewildered eyes.
The woman who had clung to her sword earlier that afternoon, stubbornly refusing to let him even touch it, was now standing before him in her pajamas, begging.
"Money... I'll give you as much money as you want! No, whatever you want... I'll give you anything!"
...Anything.
She had knocked on his door in the dead of night only to suddenly offer him "anything."
Dohyun stared at her blankly for a moment.
If anyone else had heard that, it would have been incredibly easy to misunderstand.
In any case, they couldn't keep standing out in the hallway like this.
"...Come in."
"Y-yes!"
Clutching the sword tightly to her chest, the woman scurried into the room.
She sat down, barely hovering on the very edge of the sofa, and hesitated for a long time while fidgeting with her fingers.
"Well, you see... This is what happened..."
To summarize, the story went like this.
Her family was a prestigious lineage that had produced renowned spiritualists in Japan for generations.
Among them, her maternal grandfather was a legendary figure who had left a massive mark on the history of the Japanese spiritualist world.
"My grandfather was... Well, if you mention the Ishihara family, there's no one in Japan who doesn't know us."
Ishihara.
"...By the way, what did you say your name was again?"
"Kim Yu-ha."
"..."
"Ah, that's my Korean name. My father is Korean. My Japanese name is Ishihara Yua."
Ah.
Now that he thought about it, the butler had introduced her by her Korean name earlier that afternoon. So she was Japanese.
"So, this sword..."
"Yes. It's a family heirloom that my grandfather used. A cursed tool."
She gently stroked the katana cradled in her arms.
Despite inheriting such an illustrious bloodline, her mother had never awakened her spiritual sight.
She had waited and waited, hoping it would open one day.
But in the end, she married a Korean man and abandoned the path of a spiritualist entirely.
However, her daughter, Yu-ha, had possessed spiritual sight since she was a child.
"I've been able to see strange things since I was little. Things other people couldn't see..."
It seemed her spiritual sight had awakened early.
Upon hearing the news, her mother had practically jumped for joy.
"Our Yua will definitely become a great spiritualist. Someone wonderful who protects people from evil spirits!"
If only she could learn to wield her grandfather's sword.
She would surely become a top-tier spiritualist, just like her grandfather.
The sword would be the proof.
"...So I inherited it."
The problem started after she received the sword.
"The sword... wouldn't activate."
Whether it was because it had been kept in storage for too long or for some other reason.
No matter how much spiritual power she channeled into it, the katana remained as still as a corpse.
"Originally, there was a family of blacksmiths who had been close with ours for generations and maintained this sword."
But as luck would have it, that family had gone bankrupt around her mother's generation.
...And once that family went under, there was no one left to maintain it.
Well, the situation was easy enough to guess.
Hearing this much, he could picture the rest of the story without even needing to hear it.
Still, she must have believed she could make it work.
After all, she had the bloodline.
So, she had confidently stepped into the Japanese spiritualist world.
Everywhere she went, she was introduced as "the granddaughter of the great Ishihara."
At first, everyone welcomed her.
They rolled out the red carpet, and agencies practically fought to recruit her.
...But that was as far as it went.
When the sword failed to activate, the granddaughter was nothing more than a granddaughter.
A novice with a fancy lineage but mediocre skills, unable to live up to her family name.
The warm welcome she initially received quickly soured into cold neglect.
"...That's when I realized. Ah, I can't do anything without my grandfather's sword."
So she had searched everywhere.
Famous workshops, hidden masters living in seclusion.
She visited every single place in Japan that claimed they could repair swords.
"But none of them... could fix it."
Some places even charged her exorbitant inspection fees.
Only to give vague, evasive excuses about this or that being the problem.
No one could give her a straight answer.
Even when she begged them to fix it, promising to pay whatever they wanted.
"They would just..."
They all trailed off and repeatedly told her to go see someone else.
The amount of money she had been scammed out of up to that point was astronomical.
"...I felt so humiliated I wanted to die."
Yu-ha bit her lip hard.
After briefly flashing in the Japanese spiritualist rankings, she slowly slid down.
In the end, she hit rock bottom without ever experiencing a true prime.
Unable to endure the Japanese spiritualist community any longer, she fled to Korea, her father's homeland.
But Korea was no walk in the park either.
"Here, everything revolves around the workshops of famous families... It's like they have their own unspoken rules."
They all refused to repair anything they hadn't made themselves.
Or if they did, they demanded astronomical fees.
She had even shown the sword to a Byeong-grade artisan at a workshop famous in the industry.
"...But he just told me he didn't know how to fix it and sent me away."
The woman hung her head in dejection.
Her mother had insisted that with this sword, she could become just like her grandfather!
That it had always been that way for generations!
Yet there was no one who could repair it.
It seemed she hadn't been able to make any waves in Korea either, having been pushed to the margins.
...What a tragic story.
Yet, despite her dejection, her eyes gleamed with a strange intensity.
If only this sword is fixed, I can be recognized just like Grandfather one day.
She had clung desperately to the spiritualist world, driven by that single, obsessive thought.
Well, it was understandable.
"You don't have to worry about the repair fee," the woman added hastily.
Her grandfather's inheritance was substantial, and once the sword was restored, she would make far more money anyway.
A mere repair fee was nothing to her.
"I'll give you absolutely anything you want! So please...!"
Anything, huh?
The world didn't work quite so easily, though.
Well, that was a problem for later.
"...First, let me take a look at the sword."
He had been quite curious about the structure of that katana since earlier anyway.
He took the katana from the woman.
First, he examined the exterior.
It was immediately obvious that many hands had worked on it.
Here and there, he could see clumsy reinforcements made with bizarre materials.
...She really didn't care whether they were skilled or not.
She must have shoved the sword at anyone and everyone, letting them do whatever they wanted.
Whether in Japan or Korea, incompetent hacks had likely done all sorts of useless things just to squeeze money out of her.
...Well, I can just strip all of this off.
The real meat of the issue lay inside.
Now, let's take a look.
Closing his eyes, he placed his hand on the hilt of the sword.
And channeled a Mana Wave.
Mana Wave
Whirrr—
...Well, look at this.
The surface was coated with a specific material to prevent the mana circuits from being read.
It was designed to bounce spiritual power right back.
Oh... So this kind of thing exists in reality too.
It was a trick he had often used in games to prevent others from copying the circuits he designed.
Though they probably couldn't have copied them even if they looked.
They had likely blended various materials that repelled spiritual power, configuring it so that only a specific wavelength of energy could pass through.
Hmph. I can crack this in three seconds.
He injected a tiny thread of spiritual power into the surface material.
He read the wavelength of the reflected energy.
He reverse-engineered the flow to see how it changed.
Then, adjusting the intensity...
He searched for a wavelength where the reflected strength gradually weakened, and aligned his spiritual power to it.
It was basically like a lockpicking minigame.
Send a wave.
Read the altered flow.
Adjust, and send the next wave.
Hmm. It was right after he had changed the wave frequency for the third time.
Whoosh—
I'm in.
This is it.
Heh. Three tries. Not bad.
I haven't rusted yet.
Haha.
As the spiritual power spreading from his fingertips permeated the sword...
The circuits engraved within the katana flooded into his mind, leaving nothing out.
At that moment.
Ha...
Haha!
To think something like this is engraved here.
A grin spread across his face.
The corners of his mouth curled up on their own.
Interesting.
Very interesting.
The handsome young artisan closed his eyes, keeping his hand resting on her sword.
Yu-ha watched him anxiously.
...Honestly, she didn't have high expectations.
She had taken the sword to countless places in both Japan and Korea.
But the response was always the same.
They didn't know what to do, so she should go somewhere else.
After being turned away at the door time and time again, any shred of hope eventually crumbled to dust.
...Is it not going to work here either?
Yet, there was a reason she had cast aside her shame to knock on his door in the middle of the night.
Earlier that afternoon, she had seen him engraving something onto a dagger inside the painting.
If she had seen correctly, that was undoubtedly a spell engraving.
And he had done it with his bare hands.
Though she had frequented countless blacksmith workshops in her life...
Engraving with bare hands was something she had never even heard of.
That was why.
Perhaps... if it was this man.
She had come all this way clinging to that single sliver of hope.
As she waited with bated breath...
...Did he just smile?
The corners of his mouth had twitched upward slightly.
And soon, he opened his eyes.
...What? Already?
Yu-ha's heart sank.
Sigh... I knew it.
Most of them had been like this.
They would look doubtful, declare they couldn't even read the spell formula, and give up immediately.
He was surely about to do the same.
"I've finished checking it."
"...Ah, as I thought, it's too difficult to fix—"
"I can do it."
"...What?"
"R-really?!"
Yu-ha's eyes widened.
It was a sword that no one had been able to fix, despite her spending years trying.
And yet, he said it was possible.
Yu-ha leaped up from the sofa.
Without realizing it, she leaned in close to Dohyun.
"Before that, hold on a second."
Dohyun raised a hand to stop her.
Then, he began dialing a number.
...Why is he calling someone all of a sudden?
Yu-ha blinked, completely bewildered.
"Here, take this."
Dohyun slid his phone toward her.
Taking it in a daze, Yu-ha spoke cautiously.
"H-hello...?"
"Hello! This is Seo Ji-an, Master Dohyun's broker!"
A booming voice erupted from the receiver.
"I hear you're commissioning a repair from the master? I've already checked all the details via text. Now then—"
"What's your budget?!"