Chapter 70
Ji Sang-wook’s face was a picture of stunned disbelief.
His mouth hung open stupidly as he stared at me in silence.
I didn’t think he’d expected me to say, “Nope.”
Given how badly we got along, he must have assumed I’d swallow the request without a fuss.
“What’s wrong? Wasn’t that guy friends with Lee Tae-cheon?”
“He was. Said they’d been close since they were kids.”
“Then why is he acting like that?”
I could feel the murmur rising behind me.
Apparently they’d all assumed I’d do Ji Sang-wook the favor.
From the sound of it, they thought I’d say yes for a different reason than he expected.
Maybe they figured I’d answer like Lee Tae-cheon would.
“All right, I’ll do as you wish.”
Or,
“Don’t worry. I’ll remember your end for you.”
I’m sure they expected some nonsense like that.
Well, it was natural enough for people to mistake me for that kind of man.
Tae-cheon and I were close friends, after all.
They probably thought I was the sort of person who valued chivalry, too.
I wasn’t, of course.
I was nothing like Tae-cheon, and certainly not the kind of person people would call a knight.
I spoke to the dazed idiot in front of me.
“I’ve got something to ask you. Think you can die that easily?”
“A-ask me something...?”
“Yeah, you moron.”
“What is it that you want to ask me...?”
“Cytop TV. The guy who uploaded that video, he’s your friend, right?”
I’d used Morning Dew of the World Tree just to ask that.
After all that trouble getting him back in his right mind, he wanted me to kill him?
What, did he think I was messing with him? There was no way I was going to indulge something that ridiculous.
“...Yeah. He’s my friend. But wait, you came all the way here just to ask that? From Seoul to Jeju?”
“Yeah, that’s right. So where is that bastard right now?”
“......”
“I said, where is he? Why aren’t you answering?”
I raised my right index finger to hurry him along.
Ji Sang-wook jerked and stared at it.
What a ridiculous sight.
The guy who’d just been begging to die, now scared of my index finger.
So he was fine with being killed, but not fine with getting hit?
Of course not.
What he wanted wasn’t death itself. It was to stop living in that shape.
He didn’t really want to die.
“Leave him be. He uploaded that video because of me.”
“That’s my problem, not yours. Just tell me where he is.”
“......”
“You don’t want to say?”
Ji Sang-wook shut his mouth.
Even turned into that, he still seemed to want to keep his loyalty to his friend.
“Fine. Then I’ll make you want to talk.”
“What? What are you gonna do—ngh!”
I reached out and clamped a hand over his face.
Because of his appearance, he looked exactly like a cat being grabbed by the muzzle.
Not that he was small enough to be called a cat.
Ji Sang-wook flailed in panic, raising his two forepaws and shoving at my arm.
So it wasn’t only his appearance that had turned into something monstrous. There was real strength in those forepaws pushing at me.
My arm was protected by the bark skill, so they couldn’t even get through to touch me.
Maybe before I dealt with the cursed-beast-human, that would have mattered. Not now.
After pruning, my physical ability had risen even further.
Even if Ji Sang-wook had transformed into a monster by the power of the demon race, I could still pin him down without much trouble.
I lowered the hand covering his face.
As I did, his whole body was forced down with it.
“Hey, hold still. You’re making my head hurt.”
“Mmph!”
I squeezed a little harder, and a pained groan leaked from Ji Sang-wook’s throat.
He kicked and thrashed harder from the pain.
But the struggle didn’t last long.
Soon he was just breathing through the discomfort, his forepaws braced against my arm.
Watching his face crumple from the effort to endure it, I activated the skill.
“World Tree Root.”
My right hand instantly transformed into the shape of tree roots.
The five roots shot outward and wound all over his body.
The hand coiled around him felt like the hide of some beast.
I hadn’t known that when I hunted the Red Manticore.
I’d never imagined that because it looked like roots, it would still feel exactly like a hand.
Then again, it was moving according to my will.
Even if its shape had changed, it was still my hand.
I decided to think of what I was holding not as a human man’s body, but as the body of some beast.
Because that was what it was, in a sense.
“Mmph, mmph-mmph!”
“What?”
“Mmph! Mmph mmph!”
His eyes rolled wildly.
Because my hand had him pinned, he couldn’t even turn his face; all he could do was roll his eyes and babble through the mouth I’d covered.
I couldn’t make out a single word.
If I had to guess, he was probably telling me to let go of the thing wrapping around his body.
I ignored him. I had no intention of being considerate.
I drew the energy out of his body.
“Huh? His body?”
“It’s getting smaller!”
“Energy Drain?”
“Idiot, that skill doesn’t shrink your body!”
“Fair point. Then what skill is that?”
Shouts of surprise rose from behind me.
Ji Sang-wook’s body, trapped in my hand, was shrinking little by little.
Energy Drain?
Not a bad guess.
“Huh?”
Black smoke started leaking out of his shrinking body.
Wait. Could that be?
Saessak the young World Tree says it can sense the aura of the demon race.
It sends a warning to the Manager not to let it escape no matter what.
My hunch was right.
The black smoke was the demon-race aura that had been lodged inside his body, now leaking out.
It was obviously trying to run so it wouldn’t get absorbed by me.
“As if.”
I snorted and tightened my grip.
Blue mana flowed into the tree roots.
It was like turning a vacuum cleaner from low to medium to high; the amount it drew in jumped dramatically.
The black smoke drifting upward through the air reversed course as if rewinding and flowed back into his body.
Then it poured into my right hand.
I could feel the demon-race aura.
It was like picking up something thick and sticky that kept trying to cling to me.
It wasn’t the pleasant feel of a slime toy or some liquid monster.
This was disgusting, like holding liquid tar in my hand.
“Huh, there’s quite a lot of it.”
Thinking about it, that made sense.
The Crowd bastards got at least twice as strong when they transformed.
Ji Sang-wook, too, had gained power beyond the level of a B-class hunter when he turned into a monster.
That power was now gathered in my right hand.
That vile, tar-like energy.
“It’s going to take some time to purify this.”
“H-hah... hah...”
Stripped of his strength, Ji Sang-wook panted.
He had shrunk, but he was still a beast’s body.
He looked up at my right hand.
It was still in the shape of roots, purifying the demon-race aura.
“My, my power...”
“Don’t worry. Once you rest a bit, it’ll come back.”
I had absorbed all the energy, but I hadn’t taken everything in his heart.
If I had, he’d have been dried up and dead by now, just like that Red Manticore.
When he heard me, Ji Sang-wook let out a hollow laugh.
“Even if you took it all, I wouldn’t care. I just asked you to kill me a minute ago.”
“Hearing that does make me feel a little better.”
“What?”
“World Tree Root.”
I used the skill again.
My right hand was still purifying the demon-race aura.
This time, my left hand became roots too.
When he saw that, Ji Sang-wook panicked and asked, “What are you doing no—”
“It’ll hurt more than before.”
“What?”
“Don’t worry about it. You won’t die. I’ve already done this once.”
“What the hell are you talgghk—Aaaaargh!”
I shoved the left hand, now shaped like roots, into Ji Sang-wook’s forehead.
He stopped asking questions and started howling in pain instead.
I wasn’t using World Tree Root again to absorb the rest of the energy.
It was the opposite.
I was injecting my mana, the World Tree’s mana, into him.
Like I had done with the cursed-beast-human, I was going to keep feeding him World Tree mana until the monster body peeled away and his human body grew back underneath.
In other words, I was trying to turn Ji Sang-wook back into a human.
“Ugh! Uuugh!”
“What is that man doing now?”
“Huff! Why is he torturing him now?”
“At that point, he should just kill him!”
But no one knew that.
To them, it must have looked as if I were torturing Ji Sang-wook.
It looked even more like that because he was screaming in pain.
I was at least glad I could use World Tree Root.
If I hadn’t learned this skill, I’d probably have had to prune him and hand him mana that way.
That’s right.
It meant I would have ripped off one of my own arms and shoved it into some part of Ji Sang-wook’s body.
Blue light burst out of Ji Sang-wook’s body.
When the light faded a few seconds later,
“Hey! Wait a second, Ji Sang-wook’s body changed!”
“Ugh, I already said it’s shrinking.”
“No, not that, you idiot! Look carefully!”
“What am I supposed to look at... huh?”
Shouts of surprise rose from behind me.
They’d been watching Ji Sang-wook’s body transform.
He was gaunt now, but he was fully human.
There wasn’t a trace left of that Black Manticore body, no matter how hard you looked.
Fortunately, he was lying face-down, so the important parts were covered.
“All right, now...”
I was about to ask Ji Sang-wook a question.
I trailed off because he’d fainted.
Apparently it was hard to endure the pain of changing shape while conscious.
That cursed-beast-human had held out to the end without passing out, though.
He’d looked like a lunatic, begging me to kill him, but still.
“No, come to think of it, this pisses me off.”
I was the one who’d gone through all the trouble, so why was he the one passing out and acting like this?
Somebody had already done that twice and was still perfectly fine.
By my guess, I might have to do it again.
It was because of mana overload.
When Saessak grew from a sprout into a young tree, it suffered mana overload, and I had to prune it to solve the problem.
If Saessak grew out of the young-tree stage and gained more leaves, it would be only natural for mana overload to strike again.
Then I’d have to prune it once more to get rid of it.
“Hey, wake up.”
That feeling of irritation welled up in me.
To let it out, I stomped on Ji Sang-wook’s head.
He soon came to.
Still half out of it, he saw me and jerked upright.
And that revealed something terrible.
“Aw, damn it.”
I almost swore out loud.
I hurriedly raised a hand and covered it.
“...Huh?”
Ji Sang-wook made a strange sound.
He’d reflexively sat up when he saw me, but his eyes were still vacant.
He didn’t seem to understand his situation yet.
That made sense, since he’d just woken up after fainting.
I pointed downward and said, “Get your head straight and cover that thing already.”
“Cover what, exactly—”
He followed my hand and looked down.
After a moment, he lifted his head again.
His eyes had gone round as fists as he stared at me.
“My body... my body’s back to normal!”
“Yeah. It’s back to the way it was. Now, let’s—”
“Baek Do-woon!”
He suddenly shouted my name.
Then he slammed his head to the ground.
“Thank you! Thank you so much!”
“Forget the thanks. I had something I wanted from you, too.”
He snapped his head up and looked at me.
His face looked as if he might cry, and as if he’d agree to anything I asked.
Now we could actually talk.
“W-what is it? I’ll do anything!”
“Cytop TV.”
“Huh? What did you just say?”
“Cytop TV. Where is that guy right now?”
“......”
“I’ve been asking you that from the start. Why do you keep refusing to answer?”
Ji Sang-wook stared at me with his mouth hanging open.
No, don’t just stare. Say something, damn it.
Quest alert!
You defeated a follower of the demon race. (5/10)
Current completion reward: 2 leaves of the previous World Tree, sap from the previous World Tree.
A dumbfounded Ji Sang-wook was still staring at me when the notification window appeared.
All the vile demon-race energy in my right hand had been purified.
Which meant Ji Sang-wook was being treated as one of the demon race’s followers, too.
If I was going to clear the quest, maybe hunting people like Ji Sang-wook would be a good idea.
Thinking that, I dismissed the quest window.
Then a bluish message immediately popped up.
You obtained a total of 221,020 mana from World Tree Root this time.
Duration: 90% remaining until the first Fruit.
Fruit? Ninety percent?
What the hell was that supposed to mean?