Take Apart Every Dress

“That is the warding grass I spoke of earlier. Those grasses do a fair amount to drive the monsters off — they give off a smell the monsters dislike, you see.”

“So it’s something like mosquito repellent.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“No — there is such a thing. But can those grasses really hold off a monster attack on their own?”

“There is food enough for them in the forest, so as a rule they do not come down as far as the village. And most of them live in the north of the forest besides. But with the drought dragging on like this, I could not say what is to become of us.”

“Now that I look at it, the warding grass has all dried up. Is that all right?”
“The warding grass grows perfectly well without water. Around this time of year it always turns that yellow color, and the scent grows stronger with it.”

Dong-hui sniffed at the air, trying to catch it, and got nothing. Watching her, Scrooge smiled as though he found it endearing and went on.

“I have heard that humans cannot smell it very well.”
“Really? That would explain it.”

Embarrassed, Dong-hui gave her nose a pointless rub and made a show of being busy with something else.

It struck Dong-hui that she knew far too little about this place. She had come by information on the terrain, true, but only the smallest sliver of it. She needed to earn Hidden Points quickly and get hold of more information about the estate.

“Monsters, is it.”

In a world that keeps going on about stat values, it’d be a letdown if no monsters turned up.

After turning it over a moment, Dong-hui looked back at Scrooge and asked again.

“The monsters don’t come out during the day, is that right?”
“Yes. But night comes early inside the forest, so one cannot afford to let one’s guard down.”
“That’s fine. We just go in hard and get out fast.”
“Do what, my lady?”
“Logging.”

Repairing the village’s half-collapsed houses meant getting hold of materials before anything else.

“Do you mean to say you would have logging done in the Black Forest?”

Scrooge looked as though he wished he hadn’t heard that at all.

“Why? Can’t we? Monsters won’t come out in the part of the forest along the warding-grass line, will they.”
“It is dangerous, so nobody will be willing to go.”
“We just give them a generous bit of hazard pay.”
“Hazard pay?”

Thirty years and more as a butler, and Scrooge had never once heard the term.

“Mm. If they won’t go because it’s dangerous, tell them the daily wage is higher than for the other work. It has to run alongside the village cleanup we’ve got going now. For the logging work, set the daily wage at five bron.”
“Five bron?”

Dong-hui nodded slowly.

“Why, is that too little?”

It was dangerous work, after all, and she asked because she was worried the pay might be too small.

“No. It is far too much. There is very likely not one commoner alive who earns a daily wage of that size for a single day’s work.”
“There’ll be some now. On the Grace estate.”

The fatter the daily wage, the better; that was the rule. Dong-hui thought of the gold coins packed heavy in their chest and smiled to herself, well pleased.

To think that never being able to run out of money would feel this good!

Feeling rather as though she had become a creator god, Dong-hui looked around the bare, empty village.

The household staff had been briefed before they came out, and now they went among the villagers explaining what to watch for as they worked, and adding that anyone who did not do the job properly would get no daily wage.

The work moved along quickly. Their bellies were full, and there was a daily wage on offer for nothing more than tidying up in front of their own houses; nobody was going to complain about that. The grown-ups of every household turned out, and the children over ten with them, and between them they cleared the mired roads and the stinking filth out of the village.

She had worried that nobody at all would volunteer for the logging team going into the Black Forest. In the event, the moment the size of the daily wage got out they all came rushing forward to say they would do it, and Scrooge had no choice but to sort through them for the ones who looked sturdy and looked as though they worked well.

The moment she was back inside Grace Castle, Dong-hui went straight for the convenience store.

It really was a mercy that the amount she could put into the Inventory had gone up.

And on top of that, put a thing in the Inventory and you hardly feel the weight of it — what a convenient system!

Dong-hui took her time going around the empty convenience store, filling the Inventory to the brim, mostly with food she could hand out to people: drinks and snacks, bread, triangle kimbap and the like.¹ When she had been at it a good long while, she pulled a can of beer out of the refrigerator and dropped into a chair inside the store.

Perhaps because she kept coming and going, the place frightened her less than it had at first, but there were still moments when a chill ran down her spine.

— Crack!

Soothing her troubled mind, Dong-hui opened the cold can of beer.

Have people really all just vanished?
Or is it only me who’s become invisible to everyone else?

— Pssht!

As the can opened, white foam came bubbling up out of its small mouth. Dong-hui got her lips to the rim in a hurry and sucked the foam down, then tipped the can up and drank in long, greedy pulls. She tore open a packet of squid snacks from the shelf as well and set it down in front of her.

The moment the packet was open, that distinctive salty smell of squid crackers came wafting out. It was almost funny how hungry she still was, given everything going on.

“Aaah!”

The cold beer went down her throat in gulps. It felt as though her head were clearing.

“For now, the village of Morta. Let’s think about that one thing and nothing else.”

The next thing she had wanted out of the Hidden Shop was a Level 7 Inventory, with Storage all the way up to 800, and the points she had now would not stretch to it. Dong-hui half thought about buying something else instead, then made herself hold off and drained the beer can clean.

She had finished the whole can, and strangely enough her head seemed clearer than before.

“I’d best drop this lot off and make another run to Borimdang.”

Dong-hui tipped the food she had packed into the Inventory out into her room, went back in through the front door and ran for Borimdang. She did not forget to set the ten-minute timer either.

Dong-hui had been on her feet the whole evening, and the moment the goods were sorted away she pulled the bell-pull for Delma. She had left orders that nobody was to be let into the room while she rested after the trip out to Morta, so nobody had come to wake her.

Delma, she had learned only belatedly, was carrying the head maid’s duties on top of everything else.

No wonder she’s busy every single day.

Delma never had a moment to herself, and still she came panting up at once; watching her, Dong-hui felt grateful and guilty in the same breath. Going by age alone, it was no different from working a woman her own parents’ age half to death. Still, set against those first days, the last few had got a great deal easier.

People really could get used to anything.

“How many maids inside Grace Castle are good with a needle?”
“Most of them can sew, my lady.”

Delma had only just made it into the room, and she got her breath back under control before she answered. Her face, flushed pink from running, was as red as a tomato.

“Well enough to make clothes?”
“That well… let me see. About five of them, I should think?”

Delma groped back through her memory, counting them off on her fingers, and answered.

“Then gather all those maids together for me. It’s work on top of what they’ve already been given, of course, so tell them there’ll be special pay.”
“What… what sort of work do you mean to set them, my lady?”

Delma had watched over her lord from the day she was born, and even so she could not get the least sense of what was going on in that head now.

“Just gather them, first of all. As quickly as you can manage. I’ll explain once they’re all here. Oh — before that, would you bring out all the clothes in the dressing room?”
“All of those clothes, my lady?”

Whatever else might be said of her, Lord Chloe had an unusual attachment to dresses. Every one of them fluttered with lace or else ran to pink. No two pinks under heaven were the same, she used to say, and so she had gone on buying dresses for dear life, however little she had. Her taste never wavered, and the dressing room had filled up with dresses of much the same design, every last one.

Chloe had lost her parents at a tender age and never had love enough, and buying dresses was how she soothed the emptiness in her. To raise money she had sold jewels, paintings, ornaments, at the last even land; the one thing she never let go of, right to the very end, was the dresses.

The dresses came out of the dressing room one at a time until they filled the bedroom, and still they kept coming, piling up like a mountain as far as the drawing room. The sheer, staggering quantity of them was all she could see, and Dong-hui’s jaw dropped clean open.

“There really are far too many. And they’re all the same design!”

Dong-hui looked at the dresses strewn across the floor and recoiled as though she had had her fill of them. Delma, wearing the face of a woman who had seen a ghost, muttered.

“Why am I hearing my own inner voice?”

The five maids who came at Delma’s summons had no idea why they had been called; they only stood round-eyed, watching for some sign. Dong-hui looked over the rigid maids and spoke as though it were nothing worth mentioning.

“Take apart every dress here and make clothes for the children out of them.”
“I beg your paaardon?”
“Pardon?”

At Dong-hui’s words the blood drained from the maids’ faces, like people who had just been handed a death sentence.

“What is there to be so shocked about? I said to get these taken apart, quickly, and made into clothes the children can wear. If the cloth is too thin you may put two or three thicknesses together.”

The one most shocked of all was Delma herself. She burst into a flood of tears, dropped to her knees in front of Dong-hui and wailed.

“My lady, hoo-huuuh! Please, I beg you, do not let go of hope, not to the very last. Only now has everything begun to find its way back into place… hoo-huuuh.”
“What are you talking about, Delma. It’s nothing of the sort.”
“But my lady, these dresses are the things you have cherished like your own life. For you to give them up… it means you have set your mind on something dreadful!”
“Delma! I told you it isn’t.”

Only after she had said several times over that she was absolutely not thinking anything of the kind did Delma finally stop crying.

Hauling the dresses about was a nuisance, and finding a separate room big enough to work on so many at once was hardly practical, so for the time being it was settled that the children’s clothes would be made in the lord’s private drawing room.

“Are we truly to be allowed to take these dresses apart?”

The maids asked it with anxious eyes, holding dresses so expensive they would never in their lives get to wear the like. Not one of them would be first to put the scissors in.

With no help for it, Dong-hui picked up the nearest dress herself and shook it at them.

“You are, of course you are! I’ve sent people out for winter cloth, but it looks as though it will take far too long. By the time the merchant gets here winter will have started already. So take them apart, right now. Like this!”

Dong-hui took hold of the lace hanging off the dress and tore with all her strength.

— Rrrrrrip!

“Ack!”

The expensive dress came apart without mercy in Dong-hui’s hands.

“M— my lady! We shall do it! Please, put it down at once!”

Picked apart carefully with the scissors, one piece at a time, the dresses would have given up as much of their lace and cloth as could be saved. But done the way the lord was doing it, the cloth could not help being ruined.

“All right. Never mind about how the dresses come apart — just make the children’s clothes. In a range of sizes. Understood?”
“Yes!”
“Oh — did you hear that there’ll be special pay? Five bron for every three coats!”

For something merely called special pay, it was a good deal of money.