“Are you hungry?”
“N-no. I’m not hungry.”
As if.
Haram almost scoffed but caught himself with a dry cough instead. Come to think of it, he was hungry too.
Before the dimensional transfer, he had gone four days without eating a single thing — the hunger had hollowed him out mentally as well.
“Is there food at home?”
“Yeah, there’s ramen.”
Ramen? What on earth is that?
He had no idea what it was, but the moment he heard the name, his appetite vanished entirely. He wondered if this too was a physical reaction triggered by Pyo Haram’s memories.
It wasn’t particularly pleasant, so he was furrowing his brow — when a sweet, savory scent suddenly drifted past the tip of his nose. Haram sniffed the air.
“Let’s stop by over there for a moment.”
“Huh? H-hey, Samchon!”
Readjusting his grip on the child’s hand, he made his way toward the source of the smell — a side alley nearby.
Is it that?
At the end of the alley stood a small tent. The eye-watering, high-saturation orange tent was the source of that delicious smell.
“Hey, kid.”
“…Samchon, I’m Sua.”
The child’s expression turned peculiar. It seemed like she was slowly starting to find Haram strange. Haram felt a small pang of guilt but pretended not to notice.
“Right, right. Sua. What is that over there?”
No sooner had he finished speaking than he clicked his tongue. The smell of food had set his mouth watering.
The child tilted her head at Haram, who looked very much on the verge of drooling, and answered.
“Bungeoppang. That’s bungeoppang.”
“Bungeo… ppang?”
It was a food name he had never heard of in his life. Hearing the name, it seemed like some kind of bread.
So they put bream fish in bread. Something like a herring pie? But the smell is incredible.
Gulp. Haram swallowed his saliva. The child, who had been looking up at him, asked worriedly.
“Samchon, do you want some?”
“…Yeah. It smells like it’d be good.”
“Do you have money then?”
“Money? You mean this?”
He pulled out a flat piece of leather from his pocket. It was a card wallet that looked like it had been carried around by its owner for a long time.
“No no, that’s a card. Bungeoppang is cash only.”
“Cash…?”
Thud. Haram’s expression froze in shock. He had used this thing called a card to pay for the hospital and the taxi fare, so he had assumed it was this world’s currency — but apparently there was a separate thing called cash.
There’s something else called cash?
Then what is this? As a bewildered Haram stood there, the child let out a long sigh and held out her hand.
“Give me your phone, Samchon.”
“Phone, you mean this?”
“Yeah. Hand it over.”
The phone in Haram’s hand was passed to the child. The child paused briefly at the state of the phone — cracked all over — then moved her fingers deftly.
With her tiny little hands, she pulled off the case on the back of the phone, and from within it, a hidden slip of paper appeared.
“Here. Samchon’s emergency cash.”
“How much is this.”
“Five thousand won.”
How much is five thousand won worth?
Haram tilted his head. The child then pointed at the tent and said,
“With this, you can buy eight whole bungeoppang.”
“……!”
Eight pieces of that wonderful-smelling bread. Five thousand won had to be a lot of money. Haram clicked his tongue in satisfaction and ruffled the child’s head roughly.
“Alright. Let’s go, we’re buying bungeoppang.”
“Okay!”
A disheveled adult and a cute-faced child ran side by side up to the bungeoppang tent. The owner, who had been flipping the molds and greeting customers, nearly screamed at the bizarre combination.
“Give me bungeoppang. I have money right here.”
“I’m sorry. Our Samchon is a hunter. He came back from work looking like this. He’s a good Samchon.”
“Oh goodness, you startled me… A hunter, you say? I almost thought he was a kidnapper.”
“I would never stoop to something so low.”
Haram raised his chin with dignity. Thanks to the child’s quick-witted explanation, he had narrowly avoided being dragged off to a police station. On top of that, as a gesture of appreciation for his hard work, they were even given five extra bungeoppang as a bonus.
“At kindergarten they said grown-ups have to eat first.”
“Right. Well then, let me…”
Fresh out of the mold, the bungeoppang were piping hot. Haram took one out of the white paper bag and bit into it. A sweet and savory flavor spread across his entire mouth.
“……!”
This taste!
Haram’s eyes went wide. Looking at the cross-section where he had bitten, he caught a glimpse of something dark reddish-purple, like a cream he had never seen before in his life.
“Samchon, is it good?”
“Yeah. What is this? Is this cream made from bream fish?”
“That’s red bean paste. Samchon, you’ve been acting strange for a while now.”
“It’s from going to the dungeon. Here, you eat too.”
To deflect the child’s suspicion, he stuffed a bungeoppang into her mouth and promptly finished off the rest himself.
“Mmm! Mmmm…!”
Delicious. It was so delicious. He devoured the bungeoppang like a starved man, and the bungeoppang owner, who had been watching, looked at the child with a slightly baffled expression.
“It’s okay. My Samchon is a good person.”
“…Y-yeah.”
A dimwitted but good-natured Samchon, huh? The owner tilted their head.
“Samchon, sleep well.”
“Alright. Get some rest.”
Some time later, Haram had taken the edge off his hunger with the bungeoppang, put the child to bed, and finally had some time to himself.
“Hoo…”
Even with the child’s help, something as simple as washing up and changing clothes at home felt a little difficult in someone else’s body.
I want to just collapse and sleep like this, but…
Letting out a pained groan, he cast a displeased eye around the interior of the home. A shoebox-sized entryway and a cramped kitchen. A single-room space that looked like it would be a tight fit with both himself and the child lying down.
This is on the level of the slum shacks I lived in as a child.
The hillside running along the mountain’s edge was layered with structures too flimsy to be called homes, stacked one on top of another.
The home where Pyo Haram and his niece lived was no different. It looked like bricks had been patched onto a shack. Nearby, narrow alleyways barely wide enough for one person threaded together like stitches.
The closer Haram had gotten to the house, the more speechless the scenery had left him. And the inside was, if anything, even worse.
The circumstances seem extremely poor. I’d want to do something about this house first.
Layering a subspace onto an existing space to expand it was a little tricky but not impossible. The problem, however, was the limitation of this body he was currently inhabiting.
“Ugh…”
He exhaled deeply and closed his eyes, settling into a cross-legged position. With every deep breath in and out, the natural mana dispersed in the atmosphere flowed into his body through his airways and began to accumulate near his heart.
“Hoooo.”
Haram gathered mana up to the maximum the body could hold, then regulated his breathing and opened his eyes. The mana he could use right now was an ant’s eyelash worth.
He wouldn’t even be able to cast Fireball, a foundational spell, with this.
It’d be lucky if I can even light a match…
Thinking about it based on what was written in the will and the body’s brief memories, it wasn’t strange. Pyo Haram was said to be only an E-rank healer, so the mana he could hold would amount to no more than that.
If I train through breathing to build up mana… No, no. That won’t work either.
The mana vessel Pyo Haram’s body possessed was the size of a soy sauce dish. To replace this vessel with a larger one, he would need to shatter the already-formed mana core and reforge it.
But even this was impossible unless the body was at the level of a Sword Master. Attempting it by force could endanger his life from the very process of shattering the mana core, or could trigger mana runaway.
“Ugggh… If only I’d known this a little sooner…!”
Haram’s upper body flopped backward. He rubbed his face with both hands and writhed in agony. His mind had gone to the Dragon Heart he had shoved into the body of that nameless man earlier in the day.
My magic stone! My abilities as the archmage…!
The magic stone of a dragon — a creature known as a mana lifeform. If he had absorbed it himself, it would have more than expanded the soy-sauce-dish-sized mana vessel dozens of times over.
If he could use magic freely as before, he could have sealed away Pyo Haram’s memories to buy himself time and tried some viable method — whether that meant reclaiming his original body or forging a new one.
I have to find some way to do something.
He had to do something before Pyo Haram’s memories swallowed him whole. But right now, he couldn’t think of anything.
The best he could manage would be to put his life into writing to prepare for the moment he lost himself.
Of course, even if he wrote it all down and left a trace, there was no certainty that the self he had lost would see it and come back.
“Ughhh…”
I really should have eaten the Dragon Heart myself.
He beat himself up with regret, but what was done was done. For a good while, Haram couldn’t shake himself free from his regrets over the past, rolling around on the sticky yellow linoleum floor.
If I ever meet that guy someday, I’ll take my Dragon Heart back!
He clenched his fist and swore on it — but whether it would ever truly come to pass was anyone’s guess.
