A Skilled Assistant

With her Activity Radius expanded and no time limit left on it, Dong-hui’s step had gone as light as if she had sprouted wings. She walked along turning over the list of everything she meant to fill her roomier Inventory with, and forgot she had been groaning with sickness only the day before.

Dong-hui spared no glance for anything else and made straight for the supermarket’s first floor. The hazy wall of fog still towered up out of sight along the way there, but it no longer felt, as it once had, as though something might come leaping out of it, and she was not afraid. Just now her head was busy enough with what she might be able to carry away from that first floor.

Reaching the supermarket, Dong-hui drew a slow, deep breath to settle her fluttering heart, and stepped in through the huge glass doors.

“Whoaaa.”

She had been inside this supermarket any number of times, and yet it felt like another world entirely.

What caught Dong-hui’s eye first was the counter selling fresh fruit and vegetables. From apples to grapes, tangerines to pineapples, there was nothing the place did not stock. The zucchini and the bell peppers, the tomatoes, the bean sprouts and the rest of it were all so green and so brightly colored and so fresh that they might have been picked only the day before.

But say what you will, nothing set Dong-hui’s heart beating like the meat counter. She charged for the butcher’s case at the point furthest from the entrance, and did not spare so much as a look for the dumpling counter that had been the first thing ever opened to her.

Behind the chilled glass of the display case, meat of a lustrous bright crimson was waiting to greet her.

“Hello, Hanwoo¹? Would it be all right if I ate you?”

Dong-hui smiled shyly at the Hanwoo showing off its splendid marbling, and then, without a moment’s hesitation, loaded the Inventory full of it. The Inventory ran to eight hundred slots now, and once a hundred of them were packed solid with Hanwoo she went on to pork of every kind, cuts for grilling and cuts for boiling.

“I’ll just have to grill some meat for them all, won’t I.”

The packaged meat was heavy enough to leave her arms aching, but when she thought of the people who would sit down and enjoy it, a little trouble on this scale was nothing she could not bear.

With half the Inventory filled by meat alone, Dong-hui headed for the egg counter.

“Now, where would the fertilized eggs be!”

Free-range organic fertilized eggs went into the Inventory in neat stacks. In ordinary life the price had never let her so much as think of buying them. There was no guarantee that every one would hatch, so she allowed for the failures and took plenty.

Merry with an Inventory full of protein of every description, Dong-hui was on her way out when she added a box of sweet potatoes as well. She had worried the things might go in one by one and take a slot apiece, but the box was well sealed, and to her relief the system read it as a single item, taking up just one.

“Let’s try planting sweet potatoes too.”

She put ten more boxes of sweet potatoes into the Inventory. That was no matter of one or two, and by the end of all the lifting her arms had gone stiff and sore.

“Wow, this is no joke either. What I wouldn’t give for an assistant at a time like this.”

Dong-hui was thumping her heavy, aching arms with a fist when the status window flashed into being in front of her.

“Don’t tell me! Taechang?”

“I can use him as an assistant?”

“How much?”

There was wariness all through Dong-hui’s voice as she asked. She hardly needed telling that she was about to be overcharged, and even so she could not quite let go of the hope that she might not be.

“That’s right.”

The status window scattered unreadable letters this way and that across its blue screen, and then, with a frivolous little ta-daa of a sound effect, flashed up a line of text.

“All right!”

The fee came cheaper than she had expected, and Dong-hui nodded hard. Her arms felt fit to drop off where she stood, and she was perfectly willing to hand over a mere ten points for it.

The thanks were no sooner spoken than the silver-haired man came shooting out of the blue screen as though somebody had shoved him.

The moment he was out he turned to go back in, but the status window had vanished in the blink of an eye. Having charged like a bull at a place where there was nothing at all, he scurried on a few steps by himself and then stood there blankly, like a child who has lost its mother.

Seen from behind, he looked somehow lonely.

“Hi, Taechang.”

He showed no sign of meaning to turn around, so Dong-hui greeted him first. Whatever it was that galled him, Taechang stood with his fists clenched and glared a long while at the place where the status window had vanished before he grudgingly turned his head.

The man’s face, pale as snow before, had flushed a hot red.

“The gall of it, to do this to me…”
“Would you put in twenty boxes of sweet potatoes and fifty boxes of tangerines first?”
“Do I look to you like a man who does trifling work of that sort?”

Taechang asked it shaking from head to foot, and took a step closer. Behind his back a blue, square-cut shard of light wavered like an aura.

He looked murderous enough that it would have been no surprise if he had taken her by the collar there and then. But Dong-hui had concluded a contract fair and square, and had nothing to feel small about.

“Yep.”
“What?”
“Look, if you want to argue about the minimum wage, you should be arguing with Blue over there, not with me. All I did was hire you the way the contract said. Was it me who said ten points first? It was not. So whose fault would that be?”
“That is—!”
“Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know! I have already paid. If you don’t want to do it, then hand back the points you took.”

At the mention of handing them back, Taechang hurriedly covered his mouth and took a step backward.

Seeing him so appalled, Dong-hui gathered how very badly he must hate the thought of giving the points back, and she grinned and stepped a pace closer.

“You hate giving them back that much?”
“What is it you know, that you would do this…”

Dong-hui gazed steadily at him, at the red that had come up in his earlobes, then pointed toward where the boxes of sweet potatoes stood and said it out clearly, one word at a time.

“Oh, I know. I know it all.”

Taechang clapped his palm over his mouth again. Dong-hui watched him do it and let out a small snort of a laugh, as though he were beneath her notice.

“So if you don’t want the points taken back off you, get carrying. Sweet potatoes. Tangerines. Oh! And green onions, if you would. Not the trimmed ones — the ones with the roots still on. If I plant those and pull one up whenever I cook, I can have them fresh without going back and forth. I’ll put them in when I boil ramyeon. The head cook will like them too. What are you doing? Why aren’t you carrying?”

The man shook from head to foot as though he had been humiliated, but the only way out of it was to give the points back, and so, having no choice, he dragged his feet grudgingly over to the boxes of sweet potatoes.

“For this humiliation, I swear I will—”
“What was that? You’ll give the points back?”
“I may put in five boxes at a time, I take it?”

He was already lifting five boxes of sweet potatoes at once as he asked.

“I’d like you to be careful not to bruise them.”

A little while later, the leveled-up Inventory was full to the brim with one thing and another.

Taechang filled the Inventory’s last slot with a jumbo bottle of cooking oil and then vanished as abruptly as he had appeared. His fine hair, so like moonlight, seemed to have something forlorn about it today.

In the space of a few days more than half the wasteland had been reclaimed. Dong-hui had gone out beyond the castle with Helsa and Farmer to look over the ground where the reclamation was finished, and she could not hide her astonishment at the color of the soil, changed out of all recognition.

“That land is really the same wasteland?”

The ground had thrown up clouds of dust at the least breath of wind, and it had been frozen hard as ice, so that no farm tool would go into it. Now it was moist and crumbling and soft as velvet.

Down from the carriage, Dong-hui stared at the earth turned chocolate-brown as though she could not believe her own eyes, and marveled. Away in the distance she could see the crews working the still-unreclaimed ground with Dural fertilizer. They all looked elated at the change they had brought about themselves, and their boisterous laughter came riding on the wind as far as the spot where Dong-hui stood.

“So this really does work.”
“It is all of it my lady’s doing. Every one of the estate’s residents marvels at it and calls it a miracle each time they touch this soil.”

Helsa said it looking out over the broad stretch of land, her face no less moved than Dong-hui’s own. Beside her, Farmer’s nose had already gone red at the tip and he was sniffling. He had been born a farming man, and never in his life had he begun a day and ended it with a feeling as full as he did these days.

“Anything at all could be planted in this ground.”
“Yes. Sob, sob, once the winter is past and the spring comes, hu-huuuk! This place will be filled from end to end with green.”

Farmer wiped his tears away, and Dong-hui nodded at what he had said. Perhaps it was because he was crying, but the tip of her own nose stung for no reason at all.

“Butler, bring what was made ready.”

The words were hardly out of Dong-hui’s mouth before Handsome carried a box over and set it down on the ground. Helsa’s eyes and Farmer’s followed it of their own accord. Inside lay a heap of crops that looked familiar and yet like nothing they had ever seen.

“Do you know what these are?”

Dong-hui asked it with a small flicker of expectation.

“This looks like a pumpkin, but why is it so small?”

The first thing Helsa recognized was the sweet pumpkin.

So they grow pumpkins here too!

Dong-hui, glad of it, picked up one of the sweet pumpkins and held it out to Helsa as she asked.

“Do you think this could be grown here as well?”
“Pumpkins do grow well in a cool, dry place, but this pumpkin looks a little different, so I could not say. I have never seen a pumpkin as small as this.”
“It is a sweet pumpkin.”

Helsa tilted her head as though the word were new to her, and turned over in her fingers the sweet pumpkin the lord had handed her. It had filled Dong-hui’s hand; in Helsa’s it looked no bigger than a tangerine.

“A sweet pumpkin, you say?”
“Yes. Steamed, it is very sweet and very good to eat. And it can be used in a great many dishes. Will you try cultivating it?”
“Yes, my lady. I will make the attempt.”
“Good. There are other things in here as well, so the two of you talk it over between you and see if you can raise them properly. I have had the Grace Castle storehouse filled with them, so cook with these today and eat, and plant the rest come next spring.”
“Yes! We shall do our very best.”
“The future of our estate rests on the two of you. Do your very best for me.”

At that the two of them seemed to tense for a moment, but they soon bowed low and respectfully to the lord who put such trust in them.