The Frozen Dumpling Counter

For a moment she thought the reward was far too generous for a quest that difficult, but only for a moment. Once she was inside a supermarket, there would be so much to be had.

The first thing Dong-hui did was empty the Inventory out completely.

“Next time I get points, the first thing I do is expand the Inventory.”

If she was going to walk into a supermarket and come back with it packed to bursting, expanding the Inventory was the most urgent problem she had.

Heart fluttering, Dong-hui opened the front door and stepped through. The activated area she had earned from the Basic Quest came with no time limit of its own either, which settled her mind further.

“You know, when you really look at it, you wouldn’t think it to look at the status window, but it’s surprisingly openhanded. Two names, and it opens up a whole supermarket! Well, at this rate restoring the estate is child’s play!”

Full of big talk, Dong-hui passed the studio and went up the stairs. A hummed tune came out of her all on its own. She walked the road that ran between the murky walls of fog, her step lighter than it had ever been. Today she did not even have to stop at the convenience store.

“The supermarket has more kinds of ramyeon, and more dumplings, and more kinds of bread, so there!”

She muttered it with nobody there to hear and breezed straight past the front of the convenience store.

I’ve got plenty of jewels stockpiled, so Borimdang gets a pass today too!

The supermarket rose up on the far side of the convenience store from Borimdang.

“There’s really nothing like a big supermarket. Thank you, status window. To just plonk down a magnificent activated area like this as a reward. What a big heart it has!”

Dong-hui heaped praise on the status window and went inside the supermarket. A little while later the praise turned promptly into swearing.

“Hey! You con artist! Where do you get off doing this!”

The only spot in the whole supermarket Dong-hui could set foot in was the floor in front of the frozen dumpling counter, where she had once worked the sample job.

Huffing, Dong-hui filled the Inventory to the brim with frozen dumplings. She wondered for a moment whether to stop in at the convenience store or Borimdang and put other things in as well, but a strange stubbornness came over her.

“Flat dumplings, short-rib dumplings, chili dumplings, vegetable dumplings, boiled dumplings, king-size dumplings, shrimp dumplings.”

Dong-hui packed away every dumpling that called itself a dumpling, then walked out of the supermarket glaring at a status window that was nowhere in sight.

“Oh, come on, there’s so much on the other floors. Loads of clothes, loads of shoes! Loads of cosmetics too! And all you open up is one measly dumpling counter? Isn’t that really going too far?”

She grumbled loudly, as though she meant the status window to hear.

The status window was quiet as the grave.

Any other time it would have been needling her by now, calling her shameless, telling her she had no conscience, all the rest of it. The silence was strange. With nobody to take up her grumbling, Dong-hui soon went quiet. Getting angry on her own was a waste of energy and nothing else.

“I should go out and fry up some flat dumplings for our Delma. Ah! Should I have them try making dumplings out of Dural? Dural-skin dumplings! Du-skin dumplings for short!¹ The sound of it is a bit off, but even so! I’ve got a good feeling about this one!”

Her grumbling of a moment ago was clean forgotten. Dong-hui hurried out through the front door and back into her own room.

“Ray, I really do think Chloe must have come into a great deal of money.”

Irritated, Erma shook the shoulder of Ray, who was sprawled out drunk. He had been on the drink every single day since he got nothing at all out of Grace and Chloe threw him out. Even now the wrecked table was strewn with a half-filled glass, empty bottles, fruit scraps and the rest of it.

Everything had been going well. No, he had thought it was going well.

Chloe was no wealthy noble, but marrying her would raise his standing above the minor rank he held now, and it had looked as though his family’s viscount title, the one Viscount Patrasche had stripped from them, might come back to him along with it. On top of that, the business he meant to invest in had lain ahead of him like a paved road running dead straight.

That chance belonged to somebody else now. Ray felt like a man who had let a lump of gold slip through his fingers in plain sight. The more he thought about it the more it galled him, galled him half to death.

Ray hauled himself upright out of the slouch he had been lying in and tipped what was left of the drink down his throat all at once. He dragged the back of his hand roughly across the liquor running down his chin.

“This is all your fault.”

Ray’s face had gone red; he snapped his eyes wide open and glared at Erma. The stink of drink coming off him was foul enough to get a person standing beside him drunk as well.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Erma covered her nose and mouth with her hand and screwed up her face. The plan coming apart had left her irritated enough as it was, and having Ray blame her for it out of nowhere set her temper off.

Ray was in no state just then to spare a thought for how Erma might be feeling.

“It’s because you kept tagging along to Grace that even that idiot Chloe caught on!”
“Are you saying that’s my fault?”

Erma was dumbfounded.

And who was it holding my hand and kissing me on the sly with Chloe sitting right in front of us!

“Then is it mine? I told you to stop following me. I said Chloe might catch on!”
“When did you ever! Who was it laughing that the idiot would never notice a thing!”
“I don’t know, I don’t care! It’s all your fault, so you take responsibility for it. I only barely managed to put the payment date for the investment off until tomorrow. Do whatever you have to and get me the money! Sell that fine body of yours if that’s what it takes and get me the money! Who knows? Throw yourself at that old man once and he might sink a fortune into it.”

Ray bellowed it, thinking of the old noble who kept pestering Erma.

“Are you quite finished?”

Erma glared at him as though she would kill him. Left to herself she would have thrown Ray out of the house that very moment, but the last hope she had left would walk out the door with him.

After all, this is Chloe Grace, who could not live without Ray.

However much her feelings had changed, love could not go that cold in a single morning.

There’s definitely something behind this.

Giving up here would waste far too much of the effort and the time she had put in. And going somewhere else to find another soft touch like Chloe would be no easy matter.

Erma got her agitation quickly under control and made herself look at the matter calmly. Then, as she always did, she produced a self-serving interpretation of it.

“Ray! Do you suppose Chloe did it because she’s jealous of what there is between the two of us?”
“Jealous?”

Ray heard her out, nodded, and turned it over in all seriousness.

And who is Chloe Grace?

She was a woman who had used every method there was to get him.

And a woman like that gives me up as easily as this?

Ray knew perfectly well how handsome he was, and he knew far too well what a face like that was good for. He smoothed his disheveled hair and picked the scrap of apple peel off his face. All he had done was put a few strands back where they belonged, and yet he looked many times better than he had a moment before.

Erma was satisfied all over again that her judgment had not been wrong.

“That’s it. Jealousy. Nothing else explains it. Who is Chloe Grace? A woman who’s mad about you, Ray. There isn’t a soul even here in Fran who doesn’t know it. And she’s supposed to have changed like that all of a sudden? Do you think that makes any sense?”

Ray’s face had been screwed up tight, but the color came back into it little by little as he listened to Erma. The more he heard, the more sense it made.

“That’s right. Chloe was so mad about me. No — she is. She never once turned down a single thing I asked of her.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Still, just in case, why don’t we get rid of that villa you were given, and quickly?”
“Ah! There was that villa! I can sell it and raise the investment money with that!”

Only now did Ray remember that he still had the villa Chloe had given him, and he broke into a broad smile.

“And change your clothes, quickly. See to your hair as well.”

Erma urged him on, hauling him up onto his feet now that he had come to his senses.

But Ray was well and truly drunk and could not hold himself upright. He staggered and dropped limply back down into the chair. Perhaps from getting up so suddenly, he retched as well.

“Urp! I can’t do anything right now.”

Ray said it in a thick, slurred voice, and Erma let out a heavy sigh. Then she clapped her hands together with a sharp smack, as though a good idea had come to her.

“Ray! There’s no need to change your clothes. Let’s go to Grace exactly as you are!”
“As I am?”

Ray knew perfectly well what a state he was in just then. He lived and died by how he looked, so the idea was out of the question, and he shook his head hard. His head swam.

“Urgh! I’m dizzy. I think I’m going to be sick. Urgh!”

Erma had been watching him dry-heave with contempt on her face. She hauled him up off the chair again.

“Right now is exactly right. Ray, who loves Chloe so very much, comes to her having drunk himself senseless on liquor he can’t hold, all because of a wound to his love.”
“Hm?”

Even heard in a state well short of sober, it sounded like a rather good idea. Ray felt as though the drink had gone clean out of him all at once.

“Go on.”

Ray looked to be falling in with her idea, and Erma carried on with her explanation in high spirits.

“You cry, sadly, right in front of Chloe. You used to do theater, darling, didn’t you. The one thing you were ever any good at was crying on cue. You remember?”
“Of course. When I cried, every fine lady in the place cried right along with me.”

Only a few years before, Ray had been a stage actor of considerable promise. He had been thrown out before he ever made his name, though, on account of not being able to keep his trousers on.

“So set off for Grace this minute. Get there and cry, cling to her, do whatever it takes, but get money out of that idiot. How long are we going to go on living as shabbily as this? You promised me. That you’d pull off one big score and keep me in comfort. Keep that promise.”

Erma said it with tears actually welling in her eyes.

“Mm. I can do it. I can cry. Because Chloe Grace has never got over me.”

Ray, who could not even stand up straight, muttered it like a man reciting an incantation.

“I’ll call a carriage. Do it well.”

Erma pressed it on him, her face grim and set.