Dreamlike Reality
Ring-ring.
“Mmmph… Ah.”
And then I opened my eyes to morning.
I was pretty sure I’d been staring up at the dark ceiling, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened, but I must have been so exhausted that I’d simply passed out.
The reservation book was still clutched in my hand.
I lifted it and took a look.
“Whoa…”
It was a little crumpled—maybe I’d mumbled in my sleep—but the contents hadn’t changed one bit.
Pinch.
I pinched my cheek, just to make sure this was real.
…Huh? That barely hurt.
So I pinched harder.
“Ow!”
Okay, that hurt.
Reality came flooding back all at once.
Uncle Sang-jin was fine, so there shouldn’t have been any reason to use a potion…
I still couldn’t quite guess why, but—
“Wooooah!!”
Anyway, our pharmacy had hit the jackpot!
My mind was floating around like a cloud made of cotton candy, but reality was still reality.
Jingle.
“Um, I’d like to buy some potions— …Huh? Is anyone here?”
“Please write your name, phone number, item, and quantity in the reservation book on the counter! If the quantity’s too high, I’ll cut it down!”
Unlike usual, when I kept watch at the counter during the day, I was now buried in the compounding room, answering customers with nothing but my voice. The only time I stepped out was to guide female customers toward menstrual pain medicine; the rest of my hours were spent furiously making potions.
Thankfully, I’d already finished filtering impurities from a whole cauldron of Red Potion yesterday, and the patches only needed herbs ground in a blender and kneaded with pure water, so those went quickly.
The bottleneck was the Blue Potion, but luckily, orders outside of the Red Flame Guild weren’t that heavy.
Did some huge gate open somewhere and they need every hand they can get? I haven’t had time to watch the news…
The real problem was that Red Potion orders were so massive I needed more materials.
“Hello, Uncle Valan? It’s Sia!”
“Oho, you just came by a few days ago—what’s with the late-night call? There shouldn’t be any problem with what you bought.”
“I’m sorry, it’s an additional order! My Red Potion—er, no, Red Potion orders suddenly exploded and I need more stock!”
“Today’s not market day, so I can’t check the quality for you myself.”
“I’ll trust you, Uncle.”
“Keh-heh-heh. That’s right—you’ve got to trust a merchant. Red Potion means troll blood, yeah? Last time you bought ten liters… how much more do you need? Five?”
“Um… I think I’ll need about fifty… a hundred liters… But will it all fit in the fridge? Can you do split deliveries?”
“…Look, I’m not looking down on you or anything, but… you did get the payment settled properly, right?”
“The customer who ordered left their card and told me to charge the material costs first if I ran short! Oh, and five large mid-grade mana cauldrons for now, too.”
“I’ll bring it right over, customer. H-Area, you said?”
“Yep!”
Thankfully, Uncle Valan personally delivered everything in the middle of the night, so I never had to hop around fretting over missing materials.
The next time I saw Uncle Valan was four days later, when I ordered a second round of extra stock.
“What in the world…”
“Heehee… People started lining up yesterday.”
He’d come for a morning delivery before opening instead of at night, and the look on his face when he saw the long line was both hilarious and deeply satisfying.
Here’s how that line came to be.
The Blue Sea Guild had ordered two hundred bottles of Red Potion, thirty-three bottles of Blue Potion, and thirty million won’s worth of patches.
The Red Flame Guild had ordered one hundred bottles of Red Potion, three hundred bottles of Blue Potion, and another thirty million won’s worth of patches.
The two of them had carefully covered their writing with their hands so the other wouldn’t see, ordering only a portion of the Red Potion and patches from the limited stock. Two days later, first thing in the morning, Hunters Han Ye-na and Han Mi-na had come in person to pick everything up.
Whether they’d spread the word somehow or not, starting from lunch that day people didn’t just trickle in—they formed an actual line.
Hieeeek…!
I peeked out and saw so many people the end of the line wasn’t even visible. I limited everyone to one bottle each of Red Potion and Blue Potion, but some of the people who’d already bought simply got back in line, so the queue never shrank.
And then the next day—day three. I learned that when there are too many reservations, even texting people to come pick up takes forever.
So I limited Red Potion to one hundred bottles a day after subtracting what I could actually make and what the guilds had already ordered, and Blue Potion to ten bottles a day. That was when someone pitched a tent.
The Tendon and Peppermint patches sold out completely too, so the moment the reservation book filled up I dropped the shutter—and nearly had a heart attack when I saw the person camping right in front of the door.
“Customer, today’s three hundred spots are full. Waiting won’t get you anything more.”
“Uh… I know that. But if I wait from now, I’ll be first tomorrow, right?”
And when I woke up this morning, there were even more tents.
The line beyond the tents, glimpsed through the shutter gaps, stretched so far I couldn’t see the end.
Because of the nature of pharmaceuticals, proxy purchases weren’t allowed, so every single person in line was a sturdy hunter. Thanks to that, the drug addicts who used to hang around every morning for their fix were nowhere to be seen.
What is this… it’s scary…
This was terrifying in its own way.
“At least everyone follows the instructions really well, and the Red Flame and Blue Sea Guilds each sent a few people to keep order, so there hasn’t been any trouble…”
“Hmm… Red Flame and Blue Sea, huh… If the faces of both guilds stepped in personally, that would do it. Well. I’m just glad nothing’s happened to you.”
When I poured all this out, Uncle patted me on the head.
See? Even in the middle of the night he found stock and brought it over, carried the packages inside himself—he really was a good guy, totally different from how he’d handled inventory at first.
“…By the way, Sia.”
While I was thinking that, Uncle suddenly beckoned me closer with a serious look on his face.
Figuring he had something important to say, I went up on tiptoe and put my ear near his.
Then he whispered:
“Sia. Last time you said if I came and bought medicine you’d throw in freebies. You didn’t forget, did you?”
“……”
“…You’re not going to make me stand in that line, are you? We Koreans have warmth and affection for each other, Sia…”
“……”
“Ah, shit, my period—”
At the same time, on one of the upper floors of a residential-commercial complex in A-Area, a string of curses completely at odds with a feminine voice rang out.
Han Ye-na, who had thoroughly wrecked her husband every night for four days straight after he’d come home without sending a single message until they finally met, jolted awake in the early hours from the pain slowly blooming in her abdomen and left the bedroom.
Right. I’m not usually like that—both the libido and the complete loss of rational judgment…
PMS must have hit her hard…
“Uuugh—”
Mid-thought, Ye-na clutched her lower back.
Female hunter period special:
“Ughrrgh—”
It fucking hurts. It fucking hurts. It fucking hurts.
During menstruation the uterus expands by about 10–15% of its normal size.
That seemingly insignificant number made an enormous difference when the woman in question was a hunter.
Pain.
Pain.
Pain!
As the uterus expanded, the lower abdominal muscles were supposed to stretch naturally and create a little space—
but a female hunter’s rectus abdominis was not soft enough to yield just because a squishy uterus had gotten a bit bigger.
“Fuck—”
Ye-na hurried toward the cupboard where the medicine was kept as the pain that had started while she was still half-asleep fully kicked in.
If she tried to tough this out sober, she’d end up putting another hole in the floor and playing peekaboo with the downstairs neighbors. She needed to chug the curse-series sleep potion that could knock out an elephant and get into the dedicated menstrual-cycle sleep room as fast as possible.
On her way to the potion, though—
“…Ah.”
Her eyes snagged on the green potion sitting in the corner of the kitchen.
“Um… reservations… are possible, but I can’t sell any more of the Blue Potion I have right now.”
“Why not?”
“Well… it already has an owner.”
“……”
“I-instead, if you make a reservation I’ll brew it right away… Ah! And I’ll give you this as a freebie!”
When both her and Mi-na’s expressions had turned grim upon learning someone had already ordered ten bottles of Blue Potion, young Sia had soothed them with this complimentary potion.
It was an analgesic and antispasmodic for female hunters’ menstrual periods—she’d watched the entire brewing process on video and the finishing steps right beside her.
Emotion.
An antispasmodic crafted by the Drug Master. Relieves female hunters’ menstrual pain.
Having watched the process herself, she of course knew it was non-narcotic.
But whether it actually worked was another matter entirely.
“Ugh…”
Should she choose the sleep potion whose effects were already guaranteed, or take a gamble that might do nothing at all?
The pain was so intense the deliberation was short.
“Shit. I’m not Mi-na—if I’d wanted something safe I never would’ve founded the Red Flame Guild or jumped into a dragon’s maw.”
Gulp.
Praying the pain would drop to something she could actually endure, Ye-na downed an entire bottle in one go.
Tick.
Time passed, and a late morning closer to noon than dawn arrived.
Sang-jin emerged from the bedroom with steps even more unsteady than before he’d entered the gate.
Scrape, scrape—
He flinched and stepped back at the sound of a knife peeling something.
“Oh my, honey. You’re up?”
Noona, didn’t you say your period started and leave?
On a normal period, Ye-na would have drunk a sleep potion, gone into the sleep room, and left him to an empty living room with no human presence whatsoever—
Scrape-scrape—
Instead of going in, she had her hair neatly tied to one side, was sitting with her legs demurely together under a flowing gray H-line house dress, and was peeling an apple.
And that apple was shaped like a rabbit with perky ears.
“Hehe, I figured my husband would be out soon so I was peeling this. Here, say ah—”
“Ah…”
Chew, chew.
Mm, tasty. Good buy.
No, wait, that wasn’t the point.
He’d accepted and eaten it, but the situation still made no sense, so Sang-jin swallowed the apple and asked:
“Noona, you said your period started. Was that wrong?”
“No, it did start.”
And yet she looked this peaceful?
Female hunter menstrual pain was no joke. Sang-jin began to seriously worry that the beaming Ye-na had simply snapped under the agony and lost her mind.
“Does it hurt a lot? Did you run out of the potions we stocked up on? I’ll go to the hospital—no, the workshop—and buy more. You said that sleep-curse potion worked really well last time.”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Noona…”
“Aww, so cute. It’s been ages since you worried about your noona, huh?”
But Ye-na’s expression was as clear as a still lake. She even poked his cheek as if his concern were adorable, then smiled as peacefully as if she were out on a sunny picnic in a meadow.
And then she said:
“Sang-jin, I really mean it. It doesn’t hurt at all.”
“???”
There wasn’t a single speck of falsehood on her face as she spoke.
Sang-jin began to suspect he was dreaming.