Handsome, Beauty And Cutie

“Yes. Is there something wrong with it…”

Something in Chloe’s reaction must have thrown him, because Handsome, who a breath earlier had looked so sure of himself, let the end of his sentence trail off.

“No, it is only that it suits you so very well. Handsome. It is exactly the right name for you.”

Dong-hui held her mouth firm, fighting down a laugh. Only then did a bright smile break over Handsome’s face, and he went on, delighted.

“It is the name my parents gave me, so that I should work hard and grow rich.”

Being praised for his name had clearly pleased him, and he reeled off its meaning as well, though nobody had asked. It meant something quite different from the Handsome Dong-hui knew, but she decided she did not much mind. It saved her the effort of memorizing names.

By now she could hardly help asking again.

“Do you happen to have a younger sibling?”
“Yes. I have a younger sister.”

Anticipation crept slowly up in her.

“Your sister’s name wouldn’t be Beauty, or Cutie, by any chance?”
“How did you know? The one just below me is Beauty, and my youngest sister is Cutie.”

Handsome’s eyes had gone perfectly round as he said it, and that settled it for Dong-hui once and for all. Whoever had built this place, god or system, had plainly named its cast by pure stream of consciousness. It hated inventing names so much that this was what it came up with, and for the characters where even that grew too much bother, it talked about quests and handed the job over to her.

Still, even so.
Handsome, Beauty and Cutie is going too far, surely?

Then Helsa, the name she had come up with herself, floated into her mind, and the scolding she had been handing out inside her head stopped where it was.

Dong-hui swallowed her laughter and answered gravely.

“Hand… some. I shall be relying on you from now on. If there is anything you do not know, ask the treasurer.”
“Yes, my lady. I shall do my utmost to serve my lady.”

Handsome, who was handsome, spoke very prettily too.

The work had not been going long before most of the houses in the village of Morta were reborn clean and trim. Walls the wind had whistled straight through and flimsy roofs that had streamed with rain gave way to solid walls sealed tight on every side, and to roofs that would not let a single drop through however hard the wind and the rain came on. People who had lost even their hope inside their collapsing houses cried their eyes out the day they moved into the new ones, and offered their thanks to the Grace lord over and over.

“Mom, there aren’t any holes in the wall now!”
“When you shut the window, the wind doesn’t come in!”
“And the roof is strong, and there’s a fireplace inside the house!”

The fireplaces had been Dong-hui’s own particular instruction to Builder. Not one of the houses the estate’s residents lived in before had had a fireplace of its own; on cold days they had huddled together to sleep on beds of straw, under quilts that were not even thick, and endured the cold.

“Are we rich now too?”
“With the fireplace we’ll be able to keep warm even in winter!”

By the lord’s special dispensation, every household was free to fetch the wood it needed from the forest at its own discretion before the winter season began. There were dangers out there that nobody could account for, naturally, so the wood-gathering was to be done in the company of the knights, and to prevent indiscriminate logging a limit was set on how much firewood each household might take free of charge. Beyond that, they had to buy it separately, or come to Grace Castle and purchase logging rights.

In the old days, without a coin between them, that would have been another matter; now, with the daily wages they had earned putting the village in order, they could at least manage the firewood and the food they needed to get through the coming winter. Word traveled fast, too, and peddlers with this and that to sell began turning up in Morta here and there.

Where Morta had been full of the weeping of grief and despair, it was full now of laughter brimming with hope. Streets that had stood deserted were busy with people going briskly back and forth about their work.

Once the repairs to the crumbling houses were finished, Dong-hui turned in earnest to paving the village roads. She did not lay a stone of it herself, of course; she only gave the order that the roads be put right. Builder drove the work along magnificently.

“The budget is ample, so do not worry on that score; make me a road strong enough to last a long while. And do not forget to dig drainage ditches down both sides so the water can run off.”
“Yes, my lady. The workers are already breaking the stone up small.”
“You mean to make a gravel road?”
“Yes. So that the stone does not wash away into the ditches we have dug, I mean to set a sturdy wooden curb along both sides of the road and fill the inside with gravel.”

The gravel would only be churned up again every time a carriage went over it, she thought, but for the present there was no better alternative. Concrete would have solved it, except that she had no idea where any was to be had, and hauling something that heavy was not a thing she could even contemplate.

Whatever else, I go with what I can get hold of here!

Dong-hui made up her mind to put the knowledge Hidden Points could buy to work and wring everything she could out of this world’s own resources. She could hardly go on feeding people forever on supplies carried back and forth through her front door.

“Make the road wide enough for one carriage to pass — no, for two. It does not matter what the work costs.”
“Yes. I understand.”

A road has to be wide.
Oh yes.

Dong-hui held it as an article of faith that a road needed two lanes at the very least.

That way a carriage or a cart coming the other way can pull aside.

Builder went off with another armful of work from Chloe, and far from being worn out by it he looked more excited than ever.

Only the road running past the front of the village was laid out as a broad two lanes; the alleyways cutting through the village itself were repaired at their original width. With the houses and the roads both seen to, Morta began to turn into something altogether new.

A few days later she came back to the village with the knights and Handsome, her butler, and found the work in full swing. With the roads too mended straight and true, Morta was nothing less than transformed root and branch. Where there had been a churn of mud, a firm gravel road ran broad and wide, and muddy water and slops were nowhere to be found.

“My lady!”
“It’s her ladyship!”
“Waaaah!”

One worker spotted Chloe first and let out a cheer, and at the sound of it the rest stopped what they were doing, threw both hands in the air, and cheered her welcome.

For estate residents who work this hard and are this loyal, I ought to lay on something special, no?

Dong-hui jerked her chin, and Handsome called out to the people who had gathered.

“Today’s midday meal has been specially provided by her ladyship. When the hour comes, everyone is asked to gather at the village dining hall!”

Handsome, the new butler, held up the ramyeon Dong-hui had been diligently carrying over from the convenience store.

“Waaaah! Thank you.”

Watching them shout their thanks without the least notion of what the food even was, Dong-hui made her promise over again. She would see the people of her estate eating white rice and meat soup without fail.

A temporary kitchen had gone up not far from the work site. Temporary though it was, walls had been raised and a roof laid over them, with respectable cooking hearths and tables besides, so that at a glance it might have passed for a great dining hall.

The head cook had charge of the workers’ special meal. Delma and the maids doled the finished ramyeon out, share and share alike. The bowls brought out for it came to several hundred on their own: most had belonged to the servants of Grace Castle, left lying unused as the hired staff dwindled away, and now hauled out here.

The workers carried several of the biggest pots over from the lord’s castle kitchen, set them on the makeshift hearths and poured in the water. The method of boiling ramyeon had been gone over with them several times already, so the head cook, the assistant, and the workers helping them set to it without a single hitch.

Off to one side, Dural fries and steamed Dural and even bread with Dural baked into it were coming off the fires, giving off a rich, nutty smell. The villagers had refused to eat at first, the moment they learned the main ingredient was Dural; then they watched the people of Grace Castle eat dishes made of it without the least hesitation, and came sidling up to take some food themselves. Before long their eyes went wide, exactly as Delma’s and the head cook’s had, and they were lining up for more.

The water had not been boiling long before there was ramyeon enough for a great many people to eat all at once. The great pots over the five large hearths held enough to feed fifty at a sitting.

Seated at the tables, the workers looked at the ramyeon in their wooden bowls and for some time could not get a word out. Not one of them had ever in their lives seen crinkled noodles lying in a clear red soup. Commoners had little enough chance at noodles of any kind, and in a place where spices were worth their weight in gold, a dish with a smell this sharp was hardly something they were ever likely to come across.

“What sort of food is this?”
“I know. I’ve never seen it before, but the smell of it is wonderful.”

The ramyeon was well boiled, and still the workers could not bring themselves to touch it. Dong-hui had been watching them steadily all the while, and now she took a bowl herself, as if to show them how it was done, and settled down across the table from them.

A noble was sitting down to eat with them, and not merely a noble but the lord herself, raised in nothing but comfort. The workers started violently and sprang to their feet.

“Sit, sit. It is quite all right.”

Dong-hui waved them down, hurried them back into their seats, and picked up the fork the head cook had handed her. Chopsticks would have been better, but there were none to be had just now, so the fork would have to do; if the chance came, she would ask Builder to make her a pair of wooden ones at least.

She lifted a tangle of steaming noodles out on her fork and blew on them. Then, plainly for the benefit of the workers staring hard at her, she put the noodles in her mouth and slurped them up.