Forced Acquisition

Dong-hui had tried her hardest not to look pathetic, but there was no asking a question like that without sounding pathetic.

“It is no doubt money that means nothing to my lady, but countless commoners live on five bron a month.”

Just how much is one bron in Korean money?

She racked her brain, but nothing came of it. Left with no choice, she settled for making herself look stupid one more time.

“What can you buy with one bron?”
“Mmm… three pieces of bread, a pail of goat’s milk, half a sack of coarse wheat, thereabouts?”

Three pieces of bread to a bron put it at somewhere around 10,000 won.

Then they live a whole month on 50,000 won?

Dong-hui was startled for a moment, then looked back over her own life and came around to it fast. She had lived on a food budget of 40,000 won a month herself. Boiling one packet of ramyeon to eat in the morning, then saving the broth to reheat that evening with rice stirred in, had been an everyday thing for her, and it made the hard lives of the estate’s residents that much more real.

When Chloe said nothing, Scrooge carried on with his account, the frustration never leaving his face.

“But with the long drought, even that much has become difficult. It will have been a long while since they last held so much as one bron in their hands, let alone five.”

Dong-hui’s eyes moved back to the carriage window. Great coniferous forest crowded the land, and across the broad fields there was not a scrap of green, nothing growing but dry weeds. Neither the weather nor the soil looked fit for farming.

Ah! That’s right! The knowledge about the Grace terrain!

Staring helplessly out over the wide land, she remembered the knowledge she had bought with Hidden Points not long ago. She stole a glance at Scrooge, who had fallen silent, and called up the status window in her mind.

As though it had read her mind, the status window asked exactly the question she needed. Dong-hui nodded quickly.

— Frrrrrrrrip!

Square panels came unrolling downward with a great clattering racket, one compartment at a time. Dong-hui studied the little squares, and the writing packed tight inside them gave her a shock.

Don’t tell me I have to read all of this and memorize it?

No matter how I look at it, that sounds like a dig at me for being stupid.

Since it was not exactly wrong, Dong-hui clamped her mouth shut and glared at the busily working status window.

The status window went on unrolling squares for a good while, and only after some ten minutes did it stop moving. The ones that had spilled down in the meantime more than covered the carriage floor. Piled layer on layer, they buried the tops of Scrooge’s feet. Like the window itself, none of it seemed to be visible to anyone but Dong-hui.

There was no reason to think it over.

Yes.

What? Forced Acquisition?

The word the status window had thrown out left her uneasy. A nasty picture came to her all on its own: a skull cracked open and knowledge crammed inside by force. She fretted, helpless against the anxiety rising fast in her, while the window’s explanation went on.

Better side effects than she had expected, she thought, and took a deep breath. When it came to enduring pain she had more confidence than anybody. The thing Dong-hui was best at in all the world was pretending nothing hurt, a bitter little talent she had picked up over all the times she had to force a smile through the pain to keep from being fired from a part-time job.

A moment later the letters sprawled across the floor began to squirm along like ants. Then, with a long whooshing sound, they came flying up and were sucked in between Dong-hui’s brows, like dust drawn into a vacuum cleaner.

Huh? Huh!

The first letters to touch her felt nothing but cool and pleasant. So the side effects must not apply to her, she thought, and let herself relax. And then, all at once, a single letter jammed hard, right between her brows.

“Uuuurgh!”

In that instant an unbearable wave of nausea surged up.

“My lady! Stop the carriage!”

Scrooge shot to his feet in alarm, checked Chloe over, and rapped fast on the carriage wall.

— Bang! Bang! Bang!

Every time Scrooge struck the carriage, her head hurt as though it were splitting apart. Somebody was hacking at the crown of her skull with a hatchet, clang, clang.

This is a slight headache?

“Why you lowlife, you swindling little bastard! Uuuurgh!”
“M— my lady?”

Dong-hui clutched her head and cried out, and Scrooge, who had been holding her up, was so startled that he dropped down hard onto the carriage floor.

The headache stopped exactly ten minutes later. For those ten minutes she retched without pause like a woman with morning sickness, clutched her head in agony, then went back to retching, over and over. Scrooge said they should turn back and have a physician look at her, but Dong-hui refused flatly.

“My lady, are you all right?”

Scrooge asked it in a worried voice, his eyes on Chloe slumped against the carriage seat like someone drained to the last drop.

“I’m fine. It’s nothing at all.”

Her face had gone pale and beads of sweat stood out on her forehead, but the lord seemed in decidedly better shape than a moment ago.

“Might I suggest we turn back even now?”

Looking in on the estate’s residents mattered, but there was no forcing the thing through when the lord’s health was poor.

“I really am fine.”

Dong-hui answered, and put on a broad grin for good measure.

Scrooge’s eyes were still full of worry, but with the lord saying she was fine there was nothing else for it. He nodded as he spoke.

“Very well. Then you must have a physician examine you afterward, without fail. On this I cannot give way.”

Scrooge said it firmly.

“Mm. I’ll do that.”

How long had it been since she had heard anyone say a word out of concern for her? Her body still had no strength in it at all, but Scrooge was watching over her with a worried face, as though he were family, and at the sight of it the last dregs of the headache vanished in an instant.

Only Level 1 knowledge, and yet the sheer amount of it that had gone into her head was staggering. And the status window had fudged agony on this scale into a slight headache, which was thoroughly infuriating.

But there was no helping it, so Dong-hui took a deep breath and called up the knowledge she had bought with all that suffering. Digging hard for the terrain knowledge she could put to best use right now, she turned up several things.

There was a great deal of knowledge in there,¹ but what drew Dong-hui’s eye most of all was a plant called ‘Dural’.

You can eat it?

The name was a peculiar one, though.

“Dural? What is this thing? Is it shaped like a pair of b*lls or something? Because then I don’t think I’d want to eat it.”

For Level 1 knowledge, there was a fair amount of genuinely usable information in it. While she mulled happily over which of it to put to work first, the carriage carried her, before she knew it, to the entrance of the village of Morta.

The moment the lord’s carriage came to a stop, the villagers came swarming toward it as though they had been waiting.

“Her ladyship has come!”
“My lady!”

Even with the knights holding them back, the people called out their glad greetings at the top of their voices. Dong-hui gazed at them with blank eyes.

It was the first time anyone had ever welcomed her like this.