Chapter 66
I came out to the vegetable garden behind the orphanage.
The plot was nearly five pyeong in size, but there weren’t many weeds.
Lettuce, sesame leaves, and the like were growing well, too.
Someone had definitely been taking care of it.
Since I hadn’t known the garden was in this condition, it probably wasn’t the lady.
One of the two nuns must have been maintaining it.
The World Tree sapling reports that the children were cute.
As I was pulling weeds, Saessak sent me a message.
The children were cute, huh...
I thought back to dinner a little earlier.
In the orphanage cafeteria, the nuns and the children alike had all been staring at me.
It hadn’t been that chilly look from yesterday; their eyes had been bright and sparkling.
Either way, it was just as uncomfortable, so I’d barely managed to eat before slipping out to the back of the orphanage and yanking up weeds like I was fleeing for my life.
But then...
“Hmm. Why is it coming out so easily?”
The weeds came out cleanly, roots and all.
It was enough to make me wonder if I’d used Warm Touch without realizing it.
Still crouched there, I brushed a hand over my chin and looked around.
The weeds I’d pulled were strewn about, every root intact.
They hadn’t come out this easily in the event dungeon.
It seemed the difficulty had been adjusted so they wouldn’t be easy to pull there.
Otherwise, there was no way the difference could be this drastic.
“Oh, did the orphanage head nun ask you to do this?”
I turned toward the voice.
A nun in a black habit was approaching me.
She was the nun I’d been introduced to by the lady in front of the orphanage yesterday.
Her name was...
“......”
“Sister Cecilia Jeong.”
The woman standing in front of me said with a gentle smile on her lips.
She had noticed that I couldn’t remember her name.
She seemed to have a kind nature to match that soft smile.
I lowered my head and apologized readily.
“Sorry. I’m Baek Do-woon.”
“It’s okay.”
Then she looked at the weeds scattered across the dirt.
“If the head nun asked you to do it, then you don’t have to. It’s my job anyway.”
So there really was someone managing the garden.
This nun in front of me seemed to be the one in charge of it.
I dusted my hands together and reached out again to pull more weeds.
“It’s fine. I want to do it.”
“Really?”
The nun smoothed out her habit and crouched down.
Then, just like me, she stretched out her hands and began gathering the weeds that had been tossed around in a messy heap.
I’d only been thinking about pulling them out, so I hadn’t even considered tidying them up. Pretty foolish of me.
When I looked over to thank her,
“......?”
she had already finished neatening the weeds and was staring at me intently.
Her hands were resting on her knees, and her chin was propped on the backs of those hands.
Unlike the gentle smile she’d worn before, this one looked playful.
“You don’t remember me, do you, oppa?”
“...Huh? What?”
Oppa? Why was I oppa?
I tilted my head to the side.
Was there anyone else besides Do-hee who would call me that?
Well, Woo Chae-yeon had started calling me oppa recently, so that made one more...
Sister Cecilia Jeong pointed at the orphanage.
“I’m an orphanage kid too.”
“You’re from Bangju Orphanage?”
“Yes.”
I slowly searched my memory.
As expected, nothing came to mind at all.
Back when I lived at the orphanage, my only interests had been Do-hee, Tae-cheon, and the lady.
I’d paid no attention to the other children whatsoever.
There was no way I’d remember her now if I couldn’t even think of her from back then.
“I see... Um, sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
Sister Cecilia Jeong shook her head.
She seemed to have expected that I wouldn’t remember.
That made me feel even worse.
“I figured as much. You only ever got close with Do-hee and Tae-cheon oppa, after all.”
“Those two too... ah, of course I’d remember. They were popular even back then...”
Do-hee and Tae-cheon were different from me.
They looked after the other children at the orphanage well.
By the time they were among the older kids, they had even played the part of the big brother and big sister properly.
On the other hand, I had shown absolutely no interest in the other children beyond those two.
In fact, I’d lumped them all together as annoying little brats and disliked them.
I could understand perfectly well why people like Han Jae-im, who had spent those years with me, hated me.
For the same reason, it made sense that the early members of Baekwooncheon Guild had hated me too.
I wouldn’t have liked someone like me either.
“But I liked you more from the start, oppa.”
“...Hic?”
That completely unexpected remark gave me the hiccups.
There was one more thing that popped out right after.
The sapling watches with a pounding heart!
Saessak sent over a message fueled entirely by curiosity.
I ignored it and just stared at Sister Cecilia Jeong.
She was still looking at me quietly.
“You liked me? Not Tae-cheon?”
“No. I wanted to be inside that group too.”
“......?”
Inside that group?
I had no idea what she was talking about.
Just then, my smartphone rang.
When I checked, it was a call from Kim Jae-sik.
The sapling wants to get rid of this clueless smartphone!
No, what are you even saying?
If I get rid of this, you disappear too, idiot.
I tore my eyes away from the phone and looked back at Sister Cecilia Jeong.
At some point, she had stood up and was clasping her hands behind her back.
With that playful smile still on her face, she looked down at me.
“I’m heading off now, so answer the call.”
“Huh, wait...”
Sister Cecilia Jeong left the garden without waiting for me to recover.
For some reason, her retreating back looked almost relieved.
By contrast, my head was a mess, all the present confusion and old memories tangled together without order.
“......”
Thinking about it any longer wasn’t going to clear this up.
So I decided to do what I was best at.
I calmly took the next action in the face of a problem.
“Yeah, Jae-sik. What’s up?”
That’s right.
I ran away.
＊＊＊
I got up at dawn and quietly left the orphanage.
The lady seemed to want to see me off, and I was avoiding that.
The first place I headed after leaving the orphanage was Crystal Workshop.
Yu Jae-i had sent me a message saying both types of potions were finished.
For that reason, I had Jae-sik, whom I was supposed to meet today, come to Crystal Workshop instead.
“Huh?”
Coming here after so long, I noticed several things had changed.
First, the rusty front door had been painted cleanly.
Thanks to that, the door that had once looked ugly with rust now looked brand new.
They’d also installed a new doorbell.
[Please ring the bell! - Owner Baek]
A sheet of A4 paper with those words on it was taped to the door.
When I pressed the camera doorbell, a chime sounded from inside.
The bell was loud enough that I could clearly hear the ding-dong ring.
Then Hong Su-jeong’s voice came through the speaker.
- Finally! You’re finally here! Do you have any idea how long I’ve been waiting?
“Haha, long time no see.”
A beep sounded, and the door opened automatically.
So the door opened by itself, too.
Had a week really been that long?
Crystal Workshop had changed a great deal.
Not just the door, but the inside of the workshop as well.
All the clutter piled up everywhere, from books to tools and who knew what else, had been tidied away neatly.
The narrow hallway I’d once had to walk through carefully now felt spacious.
“Did something happen?”
“I took on a commission, and as payment I asked them to clean the place up.”
“...The person who commissioned it had no money?”
“Huh? No? It was a guild with plenty of money.”
Then why ask for this instead of payment?
The guild idiots who made the request were just as ridiculous.
They should have simply paid and left. Why did they clean the place for her too?
I opened my mouth to ask, but Hong Su-jeong abruptly turned her head.
“You said you’d be back soon, and then you just collapsed like that. Do you have any idea how worried I was?”
“Ah...”
“And when you said you were going to throw that thing, I had no idea what on earth you meant.”
That thing?
Ah, she meant the pine cone.
She must have seen me firing it up into the sky.
“Pine cone.”
I took the pine cone out of my inventory.
She’d probably brought it up because she wanted to see it.
My guess proved correct, because Hong Su-jeong let out a shriek and hugged the pine cone with both arms spread wide.
She even rubbed her cheek against it.
There seemed to be some kind of technique to that rubbing, too.
Even though the rough surface should have scraped her skin, not a single mark appeared on her cheek.
“You’ve finally come back to my arms!”
“Ha...”
I was too flustered to do anything but laugh.
How could she possibly not care what anyone around her thought?
On the matter of not caring what other people thought, she might have been worse than me.
I was curious about the finished potions, but I figured I should let her have her moment for a bit, since I had made her worry.
I didn’t have to wait long.
About thirty seconds later, she collected herself.
“Right, you came for the potion. Come this way.”
Hong Su-jeong led me to the cold storage room.
Inside the cool storage space, the various potions were sorted by type.
Healing potions, mana potions, buff potions, antidotes, and more.
As I waited, enjoying the chill, she soon brought out one ice box each from the healing potion section and the mana potion section.
On the top of each box, it said, respectively, “Baek Do-woon, Healing Potion (Superior)” and “Baek Do-woon, Mana Potion (Superior).”
She had clearly written that to distinguish them from the others.
Superior potions were strong enough that, if a body part had been severed, they could reattach it as long as the missing portion was still present.
An official quality certificate from the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety was laid beside them as well.
“Can I open them?”
“Of course. They’re yours, Do-woon.”
I opened the ice box right away.
When I unzipped it, neatly arranged glass bottles came into view.
Each bottle held a transparent liquid, and inside each one was a tiny pine needle.
What was with the pine needle?
“There are fifty bottles of each. As for effectiveness, they’re superior-grade potions, just like you saw when you opened them. Ah, and that pine needle is just a jelly. I tried putting it in once as a trademark of sorts.”
“Cute. It looks nice, too.”
“The taste... I kept it exactly the way you described, Do-woon.”
Hong Su-jeong’s expression didn’t look great when she talked about the taste.
So she really must have hated it.
I then opened the ice box containing the mana potions.
Neatly arranged mana potions filled with teal liquid were lined up inside.
One glass bottle had been set apart on the top.
It was only about a quarter the size of the other bottles.
“What’s this?”
“I set that one aside on purpose so you could sample it.”
“Ah, thanks.”
“The lid is-”
She was about to explain something, but my hand was faster.
As I opened the glass bottle, something attached to the inside of the lid dropped with a soft plop.
It looked like whatever had been affixed inside the cap had come loose.
It was quickly swallowed up by the green liquid, so I couldn’t tell exactly what it was.
All I remembered was that it had been brown and oval-shaped.
The pine needle from the healing potion flashed through my mind.
“The thing that just fell out is one of those trademarks too? Like the healing potion?”
“...Yes, that’s right.”
Was this what creative power looked like in a potion maker?
Coming up with a trademark like that was impressive.
If it had been me, I definitely never would have thought of something like that.
“But is this just for me?”
“Of course I tried some before making it.”
“Ah, that makes sense. Then I’ll drink it.”
“Yes!”
Ignoring her brisk reply, I looked back at the mana potion.
Maybe it was because of the teal color?
Just from its appearance, it looked less like a mana potion and more like poison.
It was the kind of color people could easily misunderstand.
Still, that wasn’t really important.
As long as the mana potion restored mana properly, what did the color matter?
I tipped the liquid in the small glass bottle back in one gulp.
“...Oh.”
The mana potion tasted cool and fragrant, like mint.
It had a refreshing quality that was different from Solxnote.
But then...
Somewhere in the middle of that sharp, distinctly minty flavor, a sweet taste slipped in.
The softness of it was all too familiar.
Brown and oval-shaped.
That was right.
The mana potion I had just drunk tasted like mint chocolate.