Selling a Pain Patch to My First Customer
“Phew—”
I let out a long breath and refreshed the comments section.
“Hing…”
The reactions were not good.
I still managed to reply to the few halfway-normal comments.
“Ugh… typing is so hard…”
I had wanted to write something more detailed, but the phone was simply too big. Aunt had insisted that bigger was always better and bought me the latest model as a graduation present. Every time I poked at the keys, periods kept appearing by accident; I would delete them only for more to show up. It was exhausting.
That was why I only ever talked to Aunt on the phone.
“Hing hing…”
I had been staring at the comments without blinking, and now my eyes stung.
Half the comments were pure trash, and not a single person actually said they were coming.
The blue light made my eyes water, or maybe I was just getting sad. A body stuck at nine years old felt every emotional swing twice as hard.
That was when it happened.
Ding—
“Uwah!!”
I scrambled to type a reply.
Night?
“Mmm……”
My original plan had been to close the shop at night and brew Red Potion and Blue Potion—my red medicine and blue medicine—in the compounding room. But if a customer was coming, I could keep the lights on.
I can just wake up two hours earlier at dawn and make them then.
After a moment of thought I made my decision.
A reply arrived almost immediately.
Time slipped by until it was nine in the evening.
After standing diligently behind the counter for so long, I finally saw it.
Ding-a-ling—
“Hello—”
At last, a proper first customer was walking through the door…!
“Is anyone here……”
“Don’t leave!”
Ding-a-ling—
The moment our eyes met, the customer tried to reverse the door he had just opened. I lunged forward in a panic.
“Wait! Don’t go— uh-oh,”
The counter was so high that I had been standing on a footstool on tiptoe. The sudden shift in weight sent me tipping over the edge.
“Uwaaah—”
I tried to catch myself, but my body kept falling!
“Ako!”
Thud!
Hweeng… My forehead and knees throbbed, but I hurriedly lifted my head.
“……”
Ding-a-ling—
The customer, who had apparently opened the door again to help, locked eyes with me.
My face felt hot. So embarrassing… but that wasn’t important right now!
Miss Sia, a pharmacist is ultimately in the service industry. I’m not looking down on neighborhood pharmacies, but talent like yours really belongs in research…
A pharmacist was in the service industry, and so was a Drug Master. Even if you were hurt or exhausted, you never let it show!
I swallowed the tears that wanted to spill out and beamed a bright smile at the customer.
Then I asked,
“Customer… you came for the pain patch, right?”
Ding-a-ling—
A little girl about the same age as his own daughter, wearing a perfectly tailored pharmacist’s gown, came toddling toward him with a bright red mark blooming on her forehead and a goofy smile on her face. Her tiny hands opened the pharmacy door for him herself.
Then she toddled back under the counter, ducked down, and reappeared lugging a box almost as big as she was. She climbed up onto the counter.
Heave-ho. Even standing on a footstool half her height, her eyes still didn’t reach his shoulder.
Whether she noticed his stare or not, the child wiped her still-red forehead with a proud little look and set the pain-patch box down on the counter.
“Hee— I probably shouldn’t say this myself, but the patches I make are hunter-exclusive, so they really work great.”
C-class hunter Park Sang-jin, better known on the Hunter Gallery by the fixed nickname GateGrindIsHell, had spent the entire day on gate-nogada—grinding gates—and had come to the pharmacy clutching his lower back. He found himself completely at a loss for words.
He had hesitated at the Chinese characters on the shop sign, hesitated again at how tiny the place looked from outside, and had been about to leave the second he saw a little kid standing behind the pharmacy counter.
Then she fell, teared up at the corners of her eyes, and still welcomed him like a real customer. He missed his chance to escape and ended up walking inside.
He still didn’t understand the situation.
Why the hell is a little kid selling medicine in a pharmacy?
His back hurt, and the pharmacy that had popped up on the Hunter Gallery happened to be on the way to his lodging, so he had stopped by.
The whole thing felt like a hidden-camera prank; before irritation could even set in, pure bewilderment took over.
“Uh… did your mom just step out to the bathroom?”
“No! I’m the pharmacist!”
“…Part-timer?”
“No! Look!”
The child pointed at the wall.
“See! I have a pharmacist license, and an alchemy bachelor’s degree, and an Association awakener registration certificate too!”
Name: Han Sia
Name: Han Sia
Name: Han Sia
Following the tip of an index finger shorter than his own pinky, he saw official documents stamped with institutional seals hanging in a neat row, each bearing the child’s young face.
Her finger then pointed to her own chest, to the name embroidered on the custom gown.
Pharmacist Han Sia
“Haha… you’ve got the role-play props down pretty thoroughly…”
Sang-jin had been on the Hunter Gallery since before he even awakened, and he had years of hunter experience under his belt. He knew that while diplomas and licenses could be faked, an awakener registration certificate carried a unique mana pattern that any awakener could instantly verify.
I should teach her that forgery is a bad idea before she gets into real trouble.
To put a stop to the child’s game, Sang-jin drew mana around his eyes.
And there it was—the Association’s distinctive “X” mark.
“…Huh?”
A mana seal that only Association exclusive hunters could create.
This is real?
Half-doubting, Sang-jin asked,
“You’re really the pharmacist of this place?”
“Yes!”
“How old are you?”
“I’m nineteen!”
Sang-jin thought it over carefully.
No matter how generously he looked at her, the child appeared to be about a first-grader, standing there in a custom-fit (yet still slightly long-sleeved) pharmacist’s gown doing actual pharmacist work.
But the Association registration seal was genuine, the photos on the registration, license, and degree all matched, and when he counted the birth year it really did make her nineteen this year.
She still looked far too young to have graduated from two universities, and he had never heard of an awakening class called Drug Master, so plenty of questions remained.
But this is a world where dwarves and spirit folk live beyond the gates.
She must have her reasons.
Sang-jin accepted it and nodded.
“Mm. Fair enough.”
Of course, that didn’t mean he was going to buy a pain patch.
Even so, it was just ordinary back pain.
“Uh… sorry, but I wasn’t planning on using any actual drugs…”
“It’s not that kind of drug!!”
Sia hurriedly protested.
“Ahh. So the ‘ma’ in Drug Master isn’t the ‘ma’ for demon…”
After a long, chattering explanation, Sang-jin roughly understood.
A Drug Master wasn’t someone who dealt in narcotics; it was a class that handled magic potions.
Even a D-class awakener already had physical abilities far beyond an ordinary person, so regular medicine had to be taken in massive doses, or else you were stuck buying the ridiculously expensive yet barely effective potions made by ordinary alchemists.
And she’s saying Drug Master is a higher class specialized in making magic potions…
Expectation rising, Sang-jin asked,
“Then would you mind telling me what your crafting rank is?”
For crafting classes especially, job and skills alone never fully measured ability. The Association graded people only after buyers authenticated receipts and left half-anonymous star ratings and reviews on the official Association app, followed by an official review.
“Ah… no. I don’t have a rank yet…”
The child looked dejected as she spoke.
No rank meant she had never even received a single star, let alone a review.
“I haven’t sold anything yet… …but the products are really good! The way I make them is—”
In the end, after talking with the child, Sang-jin decided to buy the pain patch she claimed to have made herself.
“Bedtime already?”
“Neng. I usually go to sleep at nine…”
“So you don’t actually do night hours? Then why did you say you—”
“Because a customer said they were coming…”
The child rubbed her slowly drooping eyes, tipped her head back, covered her mouth with both hands, and yawned. Hearing that tiny, muffled little breeze of a sound with his enhanced hearing, there was simply no way he could refuse to buy.
Well. Even if the patch has side effects, how bad could they be?
For hunters, the real worry with medicine was whether it would work at all before you even got to side effects.
How expensive could a pain patch be, anyway? Even if his body felt a little off for a day, he could just chalk it up as pocket money spent watching a small, adorable child’s antics.
Sang-jin pulled out his wallet.
“How much?”
“A set of five lower-back patches is one hundred thousand won!”
“That expensive?”
It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford it; the hunter-grade five-pack he usually bought cost six thousand nine hundred won.
“—but we’re running a grand-opening special! Buy one get one free! Wow! I’m not even covering material costs!”
“…Alright. Give me one set.”
“Thank you!”
The child slotted his card into the reader and handed over a box as big as she was.
“Just wrap it around your waist to use it.”
Wrap it?
The odd choice of words evaporated the moment the child shyly held something out.
A receipt.
“Um… and could you maybe leave a star rating?”
He would give her the highest score he could.
And so the lights of the pharmacy went out, and the midnight story came to an end.
“It’s late… how far is your house… why are you closing the shutter from the inside?”
“I… ah, I sleep in the compounding room!”
“Mm… alright. Sleep well.”
“Yes! You too, customer!”
Sang-jin raised a hand in answer to her send-off and quickened his steps.
“Yaaawn—”
Maybe it was watching that tiny child yawn, or maybe the gate-nogada had just been that brutal, but he felt like he could fall asleep the second his head hit the pillow.
Half-asleep, Sang-jin made it home, showered, and was about to collapse onto the bed when a twinge of pain jogged his memory.
“Ah, the patch.”
Almost forgot.
He opened the box and his mouth fell open in surprise.
“This is a pain patch?”
A piece of cloth the size of a dog blanket, coated in green medicinal paste.
His build was on the large side, so normally he needed ten regular patches just to cover his back properly. This single one was big enough to wrap all the way around.
So that’s why she said to wrap it.
She had chattered about using this or that gate-sourced ingredient while explaining, and with the buy-one-get-one-free deal on top of it, he felt a little guilty that she probably wasn’t even covering costs.
I really should write a review.
For someone who barely posted on the Hunter Gallery because of endless gate-nogada, it was a major decision.
And so Sang-jin wrapped the pleasantly cool patch around his waist and drifted off to sleep.
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The next morning.
“Huh?”
When Sang-jin woke, his body felt light as air.