Chapter 7
“You’re not going to answer?”
“Hmm. If I don’t, won’t she eventually give up?”
Do-hee was in Paris on business commissioned from France.
Since it was official guild work, she couldn’t just drop everything and fly back on a whim.
If I ignored her long enough, maybe it would be fine.
Maybe the whole thing would just fade out and go away.
Thinking that way, I ignored the incoming call.
“Aren’t you overreacting a little?”
“What, kid?”
“She’s probably calling because she’s worried. Do you really need to dodge her like that?”
“Yeah, if she were just calling because she was worried, I would’ve answered.”
“Then you should answer.”
“Do-hee isn’t calling because she’s worried. She’s calling because she wants to chew me out.”
“You did do something worth chewing out.”
“Even so, I have no intention of being chewed out.”
The moment I said that, the call cut off.
Oh, so she’d finally given up?
The thought that flashed through my head was far too naive.
What Do-hee had given up on was calling.
Now she started sending text messages.
Leaving my notifications on vibrate had been a mistake.
The phone kept buzzing and buzzing, with no intention of stopping no matter how much time passed.
“This little ghost….”
“What, what was that?”
I jumped and stared at Deputy Lee Seong-hun.
More precisely, I stared at the smartphone sitting in front of him.
Don’t tell me this bastard had come here in league with Do-hee…?
As if noticing what I was thinking, Deputy Lee lifted the phone.
His smartphone was clean.
It wasn’t on a call, and it wasn’t sending messages either.
Buzzzz, buzz.
The phone was still vibrating.
“What? No! Why are you coming back already!”
“Why does this keep turning into a conversation!”
She was supposed to be sending messages one-sidedly, and yet somehow it kept becoming a back-and-forth.
That was terrifying.
If I’d known it would turn into this sort of conversation-that-wasn’t-a-conversation, I should’ve just taken the call.
Instead, I’d only managed to make her more annoyed. I was starting to regret it.
But I still couldn’t answer now.
She’d probably be furious.
“Deputy Lee.”
“Yes?”
“Long ago, smartphones apparently had batteries.”
“Why are you suddenly talking about batteries?”
In truth, it had only been a short while since smartphones gained automatic charging.
In terms of time, maybe only thirty or forty years had passed.
Before that, there hadn’t been any technology for charging a smartphone with a person’s mana.
So in the old days, phones would die because people forgot to charge them.
It really was a deeply enviable thing.
“Would’ve been nice if they still had batteries.”
Then I could’ve said the phone had died, so I didn’t know she’d called.
I could’ve at least made some excuse for seeing her texts too late.
The fact that I was fleeing reality because my little sister scared me was pathetic, no matter how I looked at it.
“Then why does it keep turning into a conversation!”
By now I felt like I might cry from fear.
Could she have gained some kind of skill that let her hear me even from far away in France?
Please let it not be that.
Deputy Lee, who had been sighing deeply beside me, said, “See? I told you to just answer.”
“Shut up!”
Why did this infuriating bastard have to show up and keep poking at me like this?
＊＊＊
It took another thirty minutes before the phone finally stopped vibrating.
I carefully picked up the smartphone I’d turned face-down and checked the screen.
Do-hee’s last message was still there.
The nagging had stopped, and in its place came a message threaded with concern.
I’d survived.
Now I didn’t have to worry about anything until next week.
I let out a relieved breath and launched Grow the World Tree.
After confirming that the sapling had appeared on the screen, I tapped it again.
“Are you going to just sit there the whole time?”
“I only got here a little while ago. And you’re already kicking me out?”
“Why did you even come here in the first place?”
I threw the question back at Deputy Lee, and he opened his mouth as if to answer, then closed it again.
He drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly.
It was the kind of thing you did when trying to calm yourself after getting irritated out of your mind.
So why had he bothered coming to see me, especially after getting time off for last night’s business?
No, before that, how had he even known I was here?
“I came to confirm something and make a proposal.”
I hadn’t expected that answer.
That was actually pretty interesting.
Confirm something and make a proposal?
“Confirm what, and propose what?”
“Let me confirm the first thing first.”
“Go ahead.”
“Team leader, your body’s back to normal, right?”
“Huh? That’s really out of nowhere. What’s with the body talk all of a sudden?”
“I saw everything last night.”
Everything?
I tilted my head and looked at Deputy Lee.
In the face looking back at me, I could see the face he’d worn when he’d been unconscious last night.
“You were the one who fainted.”
I could still vividly see him collapsing under the mana pressure that followed the shutdown of the mana generator.
Even in that busy situation, I’d at least checked that he’d fainted.
Deputy Lee lifted a hand and massaged the back of his neck.
“I woke up because my back hurt.”
“Your back? Why would your back suddenly hurt?”
I frowned and thought back to what had happened last night.
After the mana generator shut down, Deputy Lee had lost consciousness at the door from the pain.
Seeing that, I’d stepped on him and gone outside to check properly.
Wait… stepped on him?
“…….”
Ah.
It was me.
When I went outside the building, I’d stepped on Deputy Lee’s back.
And that was what woke him up.
“By the time I fully came to, Team Leader was already fighting the enemy.”
Fighting, huh.
Could that really be called fighting?
My heart had been pierced, my head smashed apart, and my intestines had spilled out.
I’d just been standing there, refusing to die.
“Maybe they were just disguised.”
I Jae-wook and Kim Sang-cheol had genuinely believed they were disguised.
Seo Ji-hyeok had also come to see me under that same misunderstanding.
Deputy Lee shook his head.
“I’ve known you for a year now, Team Leader. You don’t think I can tell the difference between a disguise and the real thing?”
“Hmm. Well, fine. So? Is the confirmation done?”
“No. There’s something else I need to confirm.”
Then what had been the point of asking whether my abilities had come back…?
Ah, I see.
I thought I knew what Deputy Lee was really trying to confirm.
It wasn’t common for someone who’d retired from hunting after a serious injury to have their abilities return.
Usually it only happened if they’d successfully rehabilitated through endless effort, or if they’d eaten some expensive, rare elixir.
Something like the Fruit of the Previous World Tree, for instance.
“You said it was a World Tree fruit, the thing you ate last night… That was real, right? No, even if it wasn’t real, it was an elixir… right?”
Hmm. What should I do? Was it okay to tell him the truth?
If I didn’t want trouble, I could always lie.
But… I decided to stop trying to skate by on a lie.
Deputy Lee looked too desperate.
“Didn’t I tell you? It was real.”
“I-I knew it! That thing! How did you get your hands on it?”
Deputy Lee asked in a frantic voice, with an expression I’d never seen on him before.
He was a former hunter like me, now stuck doing office work after retirement.
I could understand why he’d look like that.
He probably wanted his body restored, too.
“You can’t get it anymore.”
“Ah….”
His shoulders slumped in disappointment.
Even if he was someone I found annoying, seeing him like that made him a little pitiful.
“Hey, it’s okay-”
“Damn it! What a waste. I was planning to sell it.”
“…….”
“If you could keep getting those, I was going to sell them all over the place! Ahh, and I barely slept because I was trying to come up with a business plan….”
Hah. I’d forgotten.
This was the kind of man Lee Seong-hun was.
If it’s really a fruit, why are you eating it?
You sell it. Why would you eat something that valuable? If you sold it, we’d be talking trillions with a straight face.
The words Deputy Lee had said to me yesterday echoed in my ears.
I’d worried about him for nothing.
“You know Woo Chan-sung, chairman of the Ildae Group, right?”
Deputy Lee started talking in his own way.
“That man’s been buying up elixirs. He’s even assembled an expedition centered around his son.”
“What kind of elixir is he trying to get that he’d build an expedition? Is he sick or something?”
“Are you crazy? I’ve got a ton of stock in that company. No way. The elixir is for his daughter.”
“If she’s sick, he should be looking for a healer or a doctor. Why is he looking for elixirs? No, wait. If you got information like that, you should’ve reported it to me. At the executive meeting, we could’ve made a proposal to connect with Do-hee—”
“It’s useless. His daughter isn’t sick or cursed.”
Deputy Lee waved his hands emphatically as he spoke.
She wasn’t sick. She wasn’t cursed either.
She needed an elixir instead of a healer or a doctor.
There weren’t many cases where that applied.
“Jeolmaek-jeung…?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
Jeolmaek-jeung was a disease caused by excessive yin energy, which blocked the circulation of mana.
It couldn’t be cured by healing skills or modern medicine.
The only treatment was to take an elixir like the Fruit of the World Tree and use it to subdue the yin energy.
But elixirs were as hard to come by as plucking a star from the sky.
There was a reason Deputy Lee had brushed off my claim that I’d eaten a World Tree fruit.
“Hold on, he’s putting together an expedition?”
If he was assembling an expedition, that meant he knew where the elixir was.
No one would organize an expedition without knowing the elixir’s location.
Had there been news recently about some elixir being discovered?
“You’ve probably heard of it too, Team Leader. The Udamhwa in Hongyureung Gate.”
“What the hell!”
So shocked that my tapping finger froze for a moment.
What Deputy Lee had said was completely beyond anything I’d expected.
Udamhwa in Hongyureung Gate?
Udamhwa was called a legendary flower for a reason. It was definitely an elixir.
If you consumed it, it would surely cure Jeolmaek-jeung.
The problem was the place called Hongyureung Gate.
It had been classified as A+ rank because the cold and toxic fog there were so severe.
And that was despite the monsters only being around B rank.
“Is Woo Chan-sung even sane? Is he out of his mind?”
“See? I knew you’d say that, Team Leader.”
“Of course I am!”
There was a reason it had been rated A+ just from the frost and poisonous fog.
Even an A-rank hunter couldn’t last an hour there unless they had resistance to those two forces.
And even if by some stroke of luck he assembled an expedition full of hunters with resistance, they’d still have to search that vast place for a Udamhwa whose location was unknown.
Then, if by even more luck they found it quickly, the biggest problem would still remain.
Udamhwa was a flower you couldn’t simply harvest.
“How are they supposed to dig that up?”
Nine years ago, there’d been an event that made Hongyureung Gate’s Udamhwa famous.
It had come from an expedition by the Bio Guild, one of Korea’s top ten guilds, and the farming-specialist Parmes Guild.
That expedition explored the gate while setting up barriers to drive out the cold and poison, and in the end they found the Udamhwa.
But even after discovering it with so much difficulty, they still couldn’t harvest it.
With an A-rank gathering skill, you couldn’t even touch it, let alone harvest it.
To harvest Udamhwa, you needed an S-rank gathering skill.
The only person in our country who possessed that skill was Granny Park Bok-ja.
The problem was that she’d died twenty years ago.
“That’s exactly what Woo Chan-sung is looking for: someone who can harvest it.”
In the end, calling it an expedition was just a nice way of putting it. They were basically leaving it to luck.
There was no way someone with an S-rank gathering skill would suddenly appear out of nowhere.
“That’s why I came looking for you, Team Leader. I thought maybe you could get me another fruit.”
“As if. The World Tree isn’t some roadside tree.”
It wasn’t a roadside tree, but it was in my smartphone.
The little companion on my screen trembled all over as it absorbed mana.
“Hm? A companion?”
“Huh? What’d you say?”
I immediately whispered, “Character window.”
“What are you mumbling about? I can’t hear you.”
“Ah, just be quiet for a second!”
“What?”
I ignored Deputy Lee’s disapproving stare.
I clicked the title that had floated up in a faint blue glow.
Right away, a message explaining the title appeared.
[Title: Companion of the World Tree - Awarded in recognition of the achievement of growing the World Tree for the first time in human history.]
[Held Effect - You never tire as long as you are on the earth. Increases the chance of gathering natural materials.]
[Equipped Effect - (Insufficient unlock conditions. The World Tree must grow further.)]
Title effect held.
Increases the chance of gathering natural materials.
“This is it…!”