Chapter 6
The place I headed after leaving Namsan Gate was a nearby smithy.
It was my first time here, and yet my steps didn’t hesitate in the least.
It was common for a strip of shops to spring up around a gate.
Hunters and dismantlers came and went all day long, so businesses related to them popped up like weeds.
Before the gate appeared, this area had apparently been a dating route because of Namsan Tower....
It had nothing to do with me, a man who had never once had a girlfriend.
With a strangely gloomy feeling lodged in my chest, I opened the smithy door.
"Welcome!"
A large man greeted me in a booming voice as I stepped inside.
He had thick arms that practically announced he was the owner here.
I set the knotted goblin hides I’d been carrying over my shoulder down on the counter.
The smithy owner, as if used to this sort of thing, began inspecting the hides at once.
He was appraising the quality.
I waited silently for him to finish.
"Selling, or commissioning work?"
"I’m here to have something made."
The smithy owner finished his appraisal and asked, and I answered right away.
He scratched at his thick beard and said, "Make sure you keep hold of the dismantler who processed these hides."
"Pardon?"
"He’s excellent. So good that you’d wonder why he was even dismantling goblin hides in the first place."
"...Really?"
I asked back, unable to believe what I was hearing.
Was my skill really good enough to draw praise from a smithy owner?
The dismantlers I’d worked with had always just scolded me.
Every complaint they could think of, I’d heard it.
Couldn’t I even do that much?
"At the very least, he seems like a B-rank dismantler."
"That high?"
"If what you dismantled hadn’t been goblin hides, I might have been able to judge his skill more accurately.... Still, he’s clearly very capable."
"...."
"If a hunter wants to make serious money, he has to work with a dismantler who’s good at his job... Hmm? Ah. You did it yourself?"
"Does it show?"
"Were you trying to hide it?"
I shook my head.
Of course I’d intended to hide it.
I just couldn’t do anything about the corners of my mouth trying to climb up on their own.
I lifted a hand and covered the grin that kept threatening to show.
The smithy owner chuckled and went on. "A pity. If your appraisal skill were better, you’d make a name for yourself as a dismantler."
If my appraisal skill had been better.
That was a hypothetical.
The reason he said that was easy enough to guess.
The goblin hides were in pretty poor condition.
No matter how skilled the dismantler, if the leather itself was bad to begin with, there was nothing to be done.
I think I understood why the smithy owner had assumed I wasn’t a dismantler.
If you were a proper dismantler, you wouldn’t have much reason to process low-grade hides unless they’d come in as a commission.
"Then can’t you make equipment from this?"
"Most of it has to be thrown away. We could use the rest for equipment making, but...."
The smithy owner let the sentence trail off.
I could roughly infer what he was trying to say.
If you try to make equipment with low-grade materials, all you’ll get is low-grade equipment.
That was probably what he meant.
I understood.
Didn’t even cooks look for fresh ingredients if they wanted to bring out a good flavor?
For a blacksmith to discard poor materials and seek higher-quality ones in order to make better equipment was only natural.
"With what’s left... I could make one forearm guard, I suppose."
One? So not even a pair.
For a moment I wondered if he was gouging me, but then I shook my head.
The smithy owner had said most of what I brought would have to be thrown away.
There just wasn’t much material to work with.
"Then please make the forearm guard."
"Yes, understood. That’ll be 300,000 won."
"That’s cheap. Do you take card?"
"Of course."
"Much appreciated."
After paying in one installment by card, I left the smithy.
Just before I went out, the smithy owner added that I should come by tomorrow morning to pick it up.
After that, I headed to the small cafe that was right there in plain sight.
Habit was a terrifying thing.
I hadn’t come in thinking, I should go to a cafe.
After seeing the sign, I’d wandered in without even realizing it and ordered an Americano.
"This is scary...."
I muttered around the straw in my iced Americano.
Once the caffeine entered my body, everything in me seemed to sag.
The sense of tension melting away was, admittedly, not bad at all.
Over a little more than a year of office work, I had become completely enslaved to caffeine.
Like anyone whose job involved staring at a monitor, I’d become one of those bodies that couldn’t function without coffee.
But that wasn’t the only terrifying part.
There was one more thing.
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap....
I took my smartphone out onto the table and launched World Tree Growing.
With my left index finger, I kept tapping the screen.
If I hadn’t been able to feel mana flowing out of my hand, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed I was doing it.
The mana that left the tip of my finger went into the sprout on the screen.
Each time I tapped, the sprout shivered and accepted the mana.
"I had no idea I was doing this much...."
Right now, I could understand the grumbling Tae-cheon had given me about playing games too much.
I could even understand why Assistant Manager Lee had always tried to connect everything to games with me.
Apparently I’d been playing this game with absurd enthusiasm without even realizing it.
To the point that I hadn’t even known my own hand was tapping away like this....
"Hmm. So that’s what the help message meant."
Only now was I beginning to understand the help message a little.
When I tapped the screen, mana was delivered to the World Tree sprout.
The sprout absorbed that mana and grew, and when the sprout grew, I would grow too.
I still wasn’t entirely sure what it meant for me to grow as the sprout grew.
Though I could imagine a few things.
As a reward for making the World Tree grow, I had received the Fruit of the Previous World Tree.
Something like that, or maybe a new skill, would probably be given to me.
In other words, I could become stronger than I was now just by tapping my smartphone screen.
"If I’d known from the start, I’d have been tapping away at home like crazy...."
I let out a sigh and muttered to myself.
And yet I kept tapping diligently.
I’d gotten excited over a new skill and then immediately run straight into a gate....
There was no difference from the day I became a hunter and went clattering into gates with Tae-cheon.
If you wanted to say it nicely, maybe I was just keeping my beginner’s spirit alive.
"Character window."
A pale blue window rose before my eyes.
Now that I knew tapping was the trick, that was enough.
What I needed to do now wasn’t blame my own stupidity.
It was to check what else I’d missed.
Like before, the character window showed HP, MP, and SP.
But then...
"How did I miss this?"
There had been something I’d overlooked.
The HP, MP, and SP values were absurdly, unrealistically strange.
It was so bizarre I couldn’t understand how I’d failed to notice it.
"Infinite...?"
SP usually meant stamina points in games.
On the character window, that stamina was listed as infinite.
If that was true, then I had become a body that never got tired.
No wonder I’d stayed awake all night and not felt tired; that must have been why.
Maybe I was stunned by the absurdity of it all?
The maximum MP of 100,260 didn’t shock me all that much.
I’d always had little mana, and had to rest regularly every time I went hunting.
That 260 number was probably my maximum mana before I ate the fruit.
And now my mana was 100,000?
It had definitely increased thanks to the Fruit of the Previous World Tree.
Simply becoming able to use mana properly again and having my regenerative ability improved had already made me want to jump for joy, and now there was another gift on top of that.
Still, maybe because I saw the SP ∞ line, I wasn’t quite as shocked as I should have been.
"...I guess this is what it means to be spoiled by good fortune."
As I muttered, I checked the title and status fields.
First, the status field below.
Pressing it did nothing at all.
The status probably referred to my current condition.
Since I was just sitting there, naturally nothing appeared.
Then I pressed the title field.
I’d expected it to be empty, but that guess was wrong.
There was exactly one title listed there.
It was the title Companion of the World Tree.
"Companion...?"
When I clicked it, a message appeared.
Reading it, I found an explanation of how it had been obtained and what effects it carried.
[Companion of the World Tree - Obtained in recognition of being the first human in history to make the World Tree grow.]
[Held Effect - You never tire while on the ground. You receive a bonus to the gathering rate of natural materials.]
[Equipped Effect - (Unlock conditions insufficient. The World Tree must grow further.)]
Now I understood why my stamina was infinite.
It was because of the held effect that prevented me from tiring so long as I remained on the ground.
"Unlock conditions insufficient, huh...."
Still, human desire really did seem endless.
Just looking at the fact that I felt disappointed the equipped effect was still locked was enough proof of that.
If the World Tree grew, the condition would be met, so from here on out I’d have to keep tapping diligently.
Of course, that was something I’d been doing all along, so it wasn’t exactly difficult.
I was the sort of guy who got told by people around me, "Quit playing games already!"
"Who’s the gaming addict that nobody’s arrested yet?"
"Gaming addict. Yeah, that’s me... Huh? Assistant Manager Lee?"
"...You’re admitting it for once?"
Assistant Manager Lee sat down across from me, frowning.
His face held the same look it had yesterday, as if to say, Has this bastard finally lost it?
There was still no hint of respect in his eyes.
And here I was, unable to tell him thanks in words for saving my life last night....
I wasn’t about to say it out loud anyway, since that would make me sound cheap.
"How’d you know I was here?"
"When my boss suddenly quits work, of course I’m going to come looking for him."
That wasn’t answering the question.
"Wait, how’d you know I quit in the first place?"
"Two hours ago, someone posted on the guild board that Team Leader Baek had handed in his resignation."
Saying that, Assistant Manager Lee casually held out his smartphone to me.
On the screen was a post titled, "Baek Do-woon Quit His Job."
This was the content of the post:
The post was short, but it had already racked up 92 views.
Ninety-two people.
Which meant most of the Baekwooncheon Guild members had seen it.
I let out a long sigh and shook my head.
"Ugh. What if Do-hee sees this?"
"Huh? What are you talking about all of a sudden?"
"Tae-cheon doesn’t check websites and stuff, so he’s fine."
That was right.
Tae-cheon was not a problem at all.
If other people didn’t tell him, it would be a while before he noticed.
And the early members, including Han Jae-im, weren’t going to spread it around.
They’d been hoping to see me kicked out, so they’d probably think this was great news.
The problem was Do-hee.
"Do-hee’s different. She checks this kind of thing one by one. Says keeping track of what the guild members want is part of her job."
"As expected of the deputy guild master. Unlike someone else, she really is outstanding."
"Shut up! Whose side are you on?"
Assistant Manager Lee didn’t answer, only shrugged.
Ugh. That infuriating bastard.
He’d been irritating from the first time we met.
He acted in a way that made me want to keep him around, but....
"Oh."
With that infuriating little exclamation, my thoughts stopped.
My phone had started ringing.
The game screen slid down, and the caller ID appeared.
When I saw the caller, I dragged both hands down my face.
My left index finger, which had been tapping the screen ever since I sat down at the cafe, came to a halt for the first time.
On the black screen, the caller ID said,
HP: [x] / [max]
One and only, precious and adorable little sister.
It was Do-hee calling.
"...I’m screwed."
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