I Am Trash
Once every examination of the lifeform they called Hana was finished, Research Department Head Park Chung-won looked over the results, and his face went grave.
The report read as follows.
"This is..."
Park Chung-won could already pass judgment. From the chart alone, admittedly, but the lifeform was truly... truly... about as useful as a specimen as zero. Flat zero. Her stats sat lower than those of a porter who had only just stepped through a Gate, and she had no growth potential whatsoever.
Show up to a Gate with grades like these and you could slap the applicant across the face and declare, "You're useless! We don't need you!"—a line straight out of a trashy melodrama—and no one would call it too far. To put it bluntly, Hana's abilities were trash. Trash itself.
She might have possessed some special ability, but the tests just now had turned up nothing of the kind. At least in the examinations run by this institute, no special power had been found. Another lab might tease out something different, but by any ordinary standard she had been ruled a completely useless existence.
All she really had was a dainty, adorable face. Perhaps even that face existed for survival. Maybe their way of living was to advertise cuteness, dull an enemy's aggression, and slip through alive.
Of course, back when the guild had nothing but a lone research institute, lifeforms this useless that came out of other Gates were either abandoned or quietly "disposed of." Cruel, yes. But there had been no reason to keep pouring money into a money-guzzling hippo that devoured astronomical sums just to stay alive and returned nothing in exchange.
The times, however, had changed. Monsters inside the Gates now appeared neatly standardized by rank. Monster compendiums, finished as thoroughly as game strategy guides, sat on bookstore shelves where anyone could buy them. Making money off a lifeform like this one was entirely possible.
In the old days, disposal had been mandatory no matter the danger. After a long, drawn-out tug-of-war with the government, though, it had been acknowledged that creatures which could be kept under a reasonable degree of control were fair game for profitable models inside the guild.
"An anomaly was found in the blood test."
Other reports were streaming in one after another. Finishing an examination like this in a single day was only possible because the institute ran like a millstone, grinding its engineers down without pause.
"What is this?"
"It wasn't ordinary human blood. We don't yet know how it functions, but the blood is red, and chloroplasts were found in it."
Chloroplasts? Those were cells that belonged to plants, weren't they? Curious despite himself, Department Head Park turned to the researcher who had brought the results.
"Does that even make sense?"
"It doesn't... but judging by the test results, it appears to be fact."
"Hmm..."
Turn it over as he might, he couldn't find a use for it. He wasn't Dracula. There was no reason to drink the blood, and an anomaly in a sample still didn't give him anywhere to spend it. The most he could say was that it was rare, and that he could sell it to whatever institution wanted it. In his head he was already planning to draw this lifeform—Hana's—blood on a two-month cycle. As the only blood sample of its kind in existence, he was certain it would sell for a fortune.
"And a special ability was discovered as well..."
Before the researcher could finish, Park Chung-won seized him by the shoulder and shook him.
"What? You should have led with that!"
The browbeating from the bosses upstairs had left him desperate for anything that might actually profit the company, and he seized on the words at once. He hadn't entirely lost a researcher's heart, though. He kept rattling the senior researcher, all but ordering him to spit it out.
"It seems to clean the indoor air. Put simply... an air-purifier ability."
"Huh?"
"When a human breathes, they inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. In Hana's case, she breathes the same way a plant does."
"And?"
"That seems to be all of it. Oh—and the air Hana exhales is remarkably clean."
"Aish... just go."
At that, the researcher bowed and slipped out of the room. A lifeform whose ability was being an air purifier? Park had never heard of such a result anywhere. Should he stick her in a factory spewing exhaust? He brooded over how to make use of this useless creature. There were plenty of options. He simply had to find the most suitable one among them.
I was whaling on the poor, innocent crystal orb—hi-yah, hi-yah—when Kim Bora, standing beside me, scooped me up. I could no longer reach the orb. All I could do was dangle.
"Tsk! Do you have any idea what this costs? A hundred of you couldn't buy it."
Was I really worth that little...? The words were brutal enough that I went limp in her arms. We waited in the mana examination room, and before long an all-clear came through and we were allowed back out.
Maybe it was the F-rank mana result, but I couldn't help sagging. Hunters with mana this low simply didn't exist. Numbers like these showed up on porters, the bottom of the barrel; any halfway decent hunter had clawed their way out of F-rank mana before they even graduated.
Seeing me so gloomy, Kim Bora stroked my head.
"It's okay, it's okay. You're cute, aren't you, Hana?"
Hearing her talk as if cute solved everything only drained me further. All I had left was a packaged, cutesy kind of adorable. If my body was going to change like this, wasn't I supposed to get some ability that actually helped humanity?
I shouted status window in my heart, but it betrayed me and refused to appear. If it had popped up I might have rallied. Instead, no matter how many times I screamed it into my chest, I got dead silence. Useless status window. Honestly.
We sat in the hallway to wait, and Kim Bora, anticipating my results, couldn't stay still. She paced this way and that, for all the world like a mother who had brought a small child to the hospital.
The imaging from earlier must have come back, because someone opened the door and stepped out. iPad in one hand, they held up the CT and MRI scans. I was too short to see, so I tried jumping for a look.
Kim Bora, though, wore an unexpectedly grave expression. Was my body really that astonishing? The look on her face only made me want to see more.
"This is... incredible. Truly."
I kept tugging at Kim Bora's clothes, begging her to show me. After a moment she turned the pad my way and let me look.
"Would you even understand it if you saw it?"
She assumed I couldn't make sense of any of it. I didn't know human anatomy inside out, but I had a rough idea of which organs sat where. I'd learned that much in science class. The pancreas and the other small organs, I couldn't have placed. Still, the cross-section on the pad was wildly different from the body I'd had as a human.
It felt similar to a human body and yet not. Awkward as it was to admit, I found myself wondering how I was even alive. What stood out most was the missing heart. Something large occupied the place where a heart should have been, but the shape was all wrong. I stared with my mouth hanging open until Kim Bora took the pad back and returned it to the researcher who had brought it.
"It really is one of those lifeforms... The body structure is completely different."
"Yes. If it were up to me, I'd be dying to dissect her, you know? Wouldn't every single one of Hana's internal organs be a Nobel Prize-level discovery? There have been humanoid lifeforms before, but each one's traits are drastically different."
The moment I heard that researcher talk about cutting my belly open, the shock hit me. Terrified, I darted behind Kim Bora's legs and hid. The eyes looking down at me were anything but ordinary. Follow that researcher and I'd be dissected in some secret lab, helpless as an alien on a table.
"Oh my. Did Hana pick up on that look? She almost never hides behind me like this..."
Kim Bora seemed to read my mood without my saying a word. It had been the same when we first met. I still couldn't speak, but with her around, I could manage a kind of communication through my body.
The researcher was still watching me over the pad with that strange, hungry look, and it frightened me so badly that I stayed hidden behind Kim Bora. I didn't come out until he opened the door again and went back into the lab. Not for a second.