Can I Live Comfortably Even If the Genre Gets Flipped? 20

#3. Go back to the previous page.

A fever started coming on.

At first, I brushed it off as nothing. I thought I might be a little dizzy for a moment, but it passed quickly, and I figured the heaviness in my body was just from moving around more than usual. I hadn’t been out in the cold wind for long, and I hadn’t done anything that should have been particularly taxing.

But strangely, as time went on, it felt more and more like something was boiling inside me, from deep within my organs. My fingertips were faintly cold while my forehead burned hot, and even the slightest shortness of breath made my chest tighten uncomfortably.

The first one to notice something was wrong with me was Baek Hyunwoo. Unlike me, who had been brushing it off thinking I’d be fine soon enough, he pressed his hand to my forehead and let out a long sigh.

“You’ve got a fever.”

“Is it bad?”

“Yeah, it’ll probably get worse as time goes on. I thought something seemed off earlier.”

Baek Hyunwoo looked down at me with concern and called out to Moon Seyoung, who had been walking ahead. She didn’t ask why we had stopped, but nodded as if she understood what was happening and gestured for us to follow.

“If we go this way, I think there’s a place we can rest.”

“Come here.”

“I can still walk.”

“Don’t be stubborn.”

Even though I said I was fine, my eldest brother lightly ignored it and lifted me up without ceremony. Baek Hyunwoo generally listened to what I had to say, but when it came to health, he didn’t budge even an inch.

Knowing that, rather than resisting or grumbling any further, I let the tension drain out of my body and went limp against him.

“Why is this happening…… I can’t think of anything that would’ve caused it.”

“Your body has always been like this. Even if we figured out the cause, there’d be no way to fix it, so don’t bother stressing yourself out over it.”

“Mm-hmm.”

A large hand swept the hair damp with cold sweat away from my face and gently rubbed my cheek. Maybe because of the fever running through my body, the cool touch felt incredibly good.

“So needy.”

When I reflexively pressed my cheek into his palm, Baek Hyunwoo gave a small laugh but looked down at me with a worried expression.

“Every time this happens, I wish I could be sick in your place.”

“Come on, it’s just a bit of a fever.”

“Don’t say it like that. It hurts every time you let it slip how used to being in pain you are.”

When he said it like that, I had nothing to say back, so I just scrunched up my nose and let it go.

“It looks like rain is coming soon…… I think it’s better if we rest here.”

Moon Seyoung came back out of the house and looked up at the sky. Just as she said, the air was thick and damp with that distinct smell of rain, heavy enough that it wouldn’t have been strange if it started pouring any moment.

“Alright.”

“Can you wait in the living room for a bit? It’s dirty in here so I’ll need to clean up a little.”

Just as Moon Seyoung said, the inside was filthy. Starting from footprints stamped haphazardly all over the floor, to waste and food scraps scattered throughout — the stench of rot was overwhelming.

“Keep your nose covered.”

“Mm-hmm.”

Even catching just a faint whiff of it was enough to make my stomach heave and turn. I hastily pressed my sleeve over my nose, and Baek Hyunwoo gave the small side table in the corner of the living room a quick wipe before setting me down on top of it.

“Siri, you help too.”

Squeak-coo.

At that, the creature who had been sleeping in my pocket let out a sound somewhere between a complaint and an answer, and lazily hopped out. Asking something the size of a palm to help clean? I stared in bewilderment, but Baek Hyunwoo gave his instructions without batting an eye.

“Find something that’ll work as a rag and wash it.”

Finding a rag was one thing, but could she actually wring it out?

I couldn’t hold back my curiosity, and after keeping an eye on Baek Hyunwoo as he headed into one of the rooms, I quietly crept along behind Siri.

Squeak?

Siri let out a short cry as if asking why I was following her, but she didn’t try to stop me. She poked around the kitchen and bathroom for a little while, then before long pulled a slightly dusty towel out of a cabinet, dropped it into the sink, and used her tentacles to break a bar of soap into pieces and set them on top of it.

Then she turned on the water and started washing the towel — and honestly, her handiwork was more deft than expected. Whether it was her hands or her feet — whatever you called them — she was thorough. Not satisfied with just lathering it up carefully, she even bit the towel in half with her teeth.

And the part I had been most curious about — wringing it out — turned out to be nothing much. Siri draped the towel over the rack, grabbed both ends with her tentacles and twisted them together, then hung there and squeezed out all the water. She did end up completely soaked in the process, but she gave herself a shake and walked out of the bathroom.

“I told you to stay put.”

The moment I followed her out of the bathroom, I was back in my eldest brother’s hands, returned to where I had been sitting. He took the rag from Siri and gave her the next assignment.

“Keep watch so she doesn’t wander around.”

Squawk!

……Siri made a strange sound she had never made before, then stretched her legs out and began surveilling me with sharp, piercing eyes. She was so strict about it that even the slightest shift of my body set her off — she’d cry out noisily and circle around the side table.

Even when I quietly protested I’m just sitting still, Siri did nothing but narrow her eyes at me. Fine, do whatever you want, you inflexible little thing.

“Come here.”

Only after Baek Hyunwoo spoke did Siri stand down obediently. And she didn’t stop there — she climbed up onto my brother’s shoulder and stretched her legs out with an air of triumph, which was so infuriating I couldn’t help but glare at her.

“The bed was just impossible to clean. It’ll be uncomfortable, but let’s sleep on the floor just for tonight.”

The room was spotless in a way that was hard to believe given how little time had passed. With everything that had been in the room moved out into the hallway, the emptiness of it felt just like the first day of moving somewhere new.

“Can you stay under a blanket for now? The boiler isn’t working so…… I laid out an electric blanket for you.”

“This is enough.”

“It’s not. I’ll go find proper blankets soon, so get some rest in the room. Moon Seyoung will be cleaning in the living room, so call out if anything happens.”

“You’re going out alone?”

It’s about to rain too……

I glanced at the blankets that had been moved out into the hallway. They were a little dusty, but I figured we could just shake them out and use them — but apparently even that was out of the question for Baek Hyunwoo.

“We can’t both leave. But I can’t trust Moon Seyoung to go either — she’d probably come back with something completely random.”

“Honestly, all you need is to find clean blankets, right?”

“See?”

As if he had expected exactly this, Baek Hyunwoo clicked his tongue and got up.

……But honestly I’m not sure either? I was rolling it around in my head and asked “Isn’t it fine as long as the blankets are clean?” and he smiled warmly and said “That’s right, our Sihyeon is so smart.”

“What! We said the exact same thing — why does she get treated differently?”

“How is it the same?”

“……It, it was the same thing, wasn’t it? I — I said clean blankets too!”

She had said it so confidently I even second-guessed myself for a moment. Moon Seyoung flushed with indignation and raised her voice, and Baek Hyunwoo raised an eyebrow without a trace of apology.

“The person who said it is different.”

“……”

“Are Moon Seyoung and Sihyeon the same?”

Even Moon Seyoung seemed to have run out of words this time. She opened and closed her mouth several times before quietly turning away and going back to cleaning the living room, while Baek Hyunwoo paid it no mind, checked the temperature of the electric blanket, and told me worriedly to lie down and rest.

He said he’d be back soon, and left the house. I lay down using another blanket as a pillow, then rolled over and buried my face into it. Moon Seyoung was in the living room, but with the door closed because of the smell, the feeling that settled over me was somehow strange.

Come to think of it, there’s no smell at all in here.

Was this room the cleaner one to begin with? That would explain why the cleaning finished so quickly — in under an hour.

I let out a long breath and blinked slowly, my eyelids growing heavy.

Honestly, up until a little while ago I had thought it was bearable. I had even wondered if I’d been too hasty agreeing to rest — whether I was fine enough to have kept going.

But the moment I lay down, the fever that had apparently been hiding somewhere came flooding out all at once, surging through me as if it had been waiting to explode.

Heat crept up slowly from where my back touched the floor, then quickly swept over my entire body, until even my breath felt scorching.

“Ngh……”

And just like that, it became a familiar kind of pain.

The dull, heavy weight of my arms and legs going slack as if they no longer belonged to me was expected, but even moving a single finger required what felt like a considerable expenditure of energy. God, this is going to drive me crazy. I let out a dry cough and furrowed my brow.

Squeak.

Siri, who had been nearby, came closer and pressed her body flat against my forehead. What is she doing? — but then I realized, maybe because she had gotten drenched in water earlier, her body temperature was lower than usual and felt wonderfully cool against my skin.

“I’ll probably get better faster thanks to you.”

I giggled and teased her at that, finding it too cute to resist, but as a little more time passed, even that much felt like too much effort.