Chapter 334

What is he doing in front of someone else’s hospital room?

I seriously have no idea what’s going on right now.

I poked my head out into the hallway, and the young man in his twenties who had been crying flinched violently before freezing in place.

Heuk!

Even though I immediately suppressed my mana, it was already too late.

Back when I was still an F-rank, I could conceal my presence almost completely. Now, however, hiding myself that thoroughly had become difficult. Even while moving around with my aura restrained to roughly the level of an A-to-C-rank Hunter, I was discovered almost immediately.

Realizing that I had approached, Ahn Yoonseung hurriedly wiped his face.

“Hyung-nim.”

But despite his efforts, tears began spilling from his eyes again.

The moment he saw my face, he started crying as if someone had turned on a faucet.

It was completely unexpected.

The last time I had seen him, he had seemed a little depressed, but nothing particularly serious. From what I knew of him, that Hunter wasn’t the sort of person who cried easily.

Still, it wasn’t as though my face was so terrifying that suddenly seeing me would make someone sob until they could barely breathe.

Yeah.

At the very least, that wasn’t why he was crying now.

I absentmindedly rubbed my half-dry, rough cheek with my palm and stepped closer.

For some reason, the moment Ahn Yoonseung noticed me approaching, he looked mortified and immediately began apologizing through his tears.

“Are you calm now?”

It took a full two minutes and thirty seconds before his crying finally stopped.

“I’m sorry, Hyung-nim.”

Neither of us was the sort of person who carried around a handkerchief.

‘What material is that sweater made of?’

The fact that I could waste time thinking about something so irrelevant was proof enough.

After examining him both physically and magically, I could tell that Ahn Yoonseung wasn’t crying because he had been injured.

‘Well, he hasn’t even gone to work yet. How would he have gotten hurt?’

Then why was he acting like this when no one had even hit him?

I quietly led him to the nearby rooftop garden so we could talk.

There was a bench there large enough to seat at least four adults comfortably. I had Ahn Yoonseung sit down, then bought a canned coffee from the vending machine—Earthlings generally seemed to like coffee—and handed it to him.

Whew.

Only then was I finally able to hear the reason.

“First of all, I’m really sorry for causing such a scene this morning, Hyung-nim.”

“Sorry?”

“I shouldn’t have acted like that somewhere I might run into someone. I ended up bothering you and giving you something else to worry about, Hyung-nim.”

Ahn Yoonseung didn’t drink the canned coffee I had given him. He merely rolled it between his palms.

“But when I came all the way to your hospital room and saw the room number... I don’t know. Suddenly, I just couldn’t control it anymore....”

By “couldn’t control it,” he presumably meant his emotions.

Grief, frustration, or something along those lines.

But there was something else I was more curious about.

“Why did you come to my hospital room in the first place?”

That Earthling was still a member of the working population.

Unlike a certain alien who had finally become a proper mage again, Ahn Yoonseung should have been busy fulfilling his obligations under a guild contract.

So his sudden appearance here was puzzling.

On top of that, he had skipped the usual step of contacting me beforehand.

“That’s....”

As it turned out, the reason was far more trivial than I had expected.

“Hyung-nim was hospitalized this time, so... um....”

“So?”

“No matter how well they take care of you here... the people at the hospital are mostly medical staff, and things like everyday caregiving are a little different....”

“Try saying it louder.”

“I-I heard it’s difficult for S-rank Awakened people to find suitable assistants!”

Rustle.

After blurting that out, Ahn Yoonseung held out the paper shopping bag he had been carrying the entire time.

The bag bore the logo of a famous shoe brand, but its contents had nothing to do with footwear.

A toothbrush.

Toothpaste.

Slippers.

And several other things.

All of them were ordinary household necessities.

More precisely, they were the sort of things someone staying in a hospital might need.

In short, this Earthling had apparently come all the way here because he was worried I might be uncomfortable while bedridden.

“I already bought things like a toothbrush and slippers from the convenience store downstairs....”

“I-is that so?”

“But the charger is something I actually needed.”

I said that while lifting the fast charger lying in one corner of the bag.

“Hmm.”

There was also another plausible reason Ahn Yoonseung had come to visit me.

The fact that Kim Giryeo had grown up as an orphan had already been reported in the media.

So it wouldn’t have been strange for him to know that I had no family or relatives who could come and look after me.

Perhaps that was part of the reason.

At least now I could understand why an A-rank Hunter had suddenly appeared at the hospital.

But we were only just getting to the real issue.

“And the reason I was standing there pathetically in front of your room by myself... well, it’s just....”

Ahn Yoonseung’s expression grew serious.

“I guess you could say... I felt frustrated.”

A word you wouldn’t ordinarily hear in casual conversation appeared right from the start.

Thanks to that, I had absolutely no idea what he meant.

“Hyung-nim, while browsing the internet, have you ever come across any pictures of me from when I was in school?”

I hadn’t expected it, but apparently there was a personal story behind all this.

“No.”

Come to think of it—

Photos?

Why bring those up all of a sudden?

I had done plenty of browsing online myself, but I still had no idea what he was referring to.

By Earth standards, it had only been about a year since I first started using a smartphone.

So even though I had already become something of an internet addict, there were still far more things I didn’t know than things I did.

As I had said, I answered honestly that I had no idea.

In response, the A-rank Hunter sitting beside me began fiddling with his phone, apparently searching his own name online so he could show me a particular result.

[The Good Daily]

[Title: This Spring’s Awakening Institute Campaign—Number of ‘High-Ranked’ Middle & High School Students Rises Again]

[Attachment 1: Graduation photo of elite Awakened Hunter Ahn Yoonseung, from the prestigious OO Middle School]

The image displayed on the screen was a group photograph attached to an article.

“There are a lot of people.”

At first, I simply skimmed over the picture without bothering to read the accompanying text.

But when the person beside me pointed to one particular spot on the screen and spoke, I found myself startled before I even understood why.

“This is my middle school graduation photo. I’m the one sitting in the front row here.”

“Hmm?”

A neatly worn school uniform.

Black hair of an ordinary length.

Nothing about the person stood out compared to the students around him.

And yet the boy Ahn Yoonseung was pointing at was apparently Ahn Yoonseung himself.

Only then did I realize it.

“Huh? What is this? I never would’ve known.”

Apparently, the young man beside me had worn an ordinary hairstyle during middle school.

He looked nothing like he did now.

For quite some time, I struggled to distinguish Ahn Yoonseung from the many other graduates in the photograph.

Whether he failed to notice my difficulty or simply didn’t care, the man who had since become an A-rank Hunter continued speaking.

“As you can see, I didn’t dye my hair or do anything unusual throughout most of my school years. I only changed my hairstyle during my senior year of high school.”

His gaze dropped.

“To be exact... I shaved my head because of a friend.”

I couldn’t understand why that would be something worth becoming sad over.

But he soon explained.

“That friend... we lived in the same neighborhood, so we’d been playing together since we were little. But during our second year of high school, he suddenly became seriously ill.”

“Ah.”

“The same illness as Oryeo Hyung.”

_-

“But... while he was undergoing treatment, there eventually came a point—just like you see in TV dramas—when his hair really started falling out.”

_-

“Originally, he wasn’t the kind of person who cared much about what other people thought of him. Things like appearances never really bothered him. But one day, he suddenly started feeling embarrassed whenever he looked in the mirror. Embarrassed because he was losing his hair.”

“So you shaved your head too?”

“Yes.”

I quietly considered what Ahn Yoonseung had told me.

Putting everything together, it seemed he had once had a school friend who suffered from a tumor.

When that friend became self-conscious about the changes in his appearance, Ahn Yoonseung shaved his own head to match.

“Hey, what happened to your hair?”

“I just suddenly felt like shaving it. Plus, it saves time when I wash up in the morning. Isn’t that great?”

Of course, his friend had been forced to take a leave of absence from school because of the illness.

But on the off chance that he might return, even briefly, Ahn Yoonseung had apparently thought it would draw less attention if there were two shaved heads instead of one.

And so he had acted on that thought.

It was an origin story I never could have imagined.

Though apparently that had only been how it started.

Ahn Yoonseung added that he had ended up keeping the hairstyle because, surprisingly enough, it suited his personal taste.

“But in the end, the treatment didn’t go well, so I never got to graduate with that friend.”

What came next was, once again, something an Alpharin’s understanding of emotion could never have predicted.

“But you know what makes me really resentful?”

“What?”

“I’m not just saying this because we were close. That friend from high school was genuinely a good person. Objectively.”

_-

“He was so gentle that everyone around him used to worry he’d get scammed the moment he went out into society on his own.”

_-

“And that kid died young, without even getting to graduate with his friends.”

Ahn Yoonseung began crying again.

“And just when I’d finally started getting over that... I heard that you were sick with the same illness, Hyung-nim. Honestly, it felt like the whole world was spinning.”

“Aha.”

“You told me you were fine from the beginning, right, Hyung-nim? So I should’ve just trusted you and waited. That would’ve been the right thing to do, wouldn’t it? But... the more I thought about it, the more anxious I became because of what happened back then.”

Now I understood completely.

He had already gone through a situation similar to mine once before.

Naturally, that meant he would worry more than most people.

“So today, I brought some hospital necessities with me just in case you needed them. And then, back in the hallway earlier....”

“Huh.”

“Why is it that good people around me always seem to die so young? Then I started thinking... what if something bad happened to you too, Hyung-nim? And before I knew it, the tears just started coming out on their own... sniff.”

But exhausting yourself over something that would ultimately amount to nothing wasn’t good either.

Until now, he had followed my words almost excessively well.

And yet, of all times, he had suddenly decided to doubt me now.

Only the Earthlings were unaware.

The tumor Kim Giryeo had suffered from during his lifetime no longer posed much of a threat to me.

‘How am I supposed to explain this?’

A moment later, Ahn Yoonseung, sitting at the edge of the bench, confessed that he felt like running off immediately to search for an elixir.

Meanwhile, thanks to all the web browsing I had done in my spare time, I now knew exactly what that word referred to.

Elixir.

A legendary item whose existence had yet to be confirmed.

At this point, it would be better to tell him the truth.

No one should waste their life chasing after some fantastical treasure that might not even exist.

“Ahn Yoonseung.”

I spent a moment arranging my words in my head before speaking.

“First of all, I owe you an apology.”

“Yes?”

“To be honest, I didn’t realize you were this worried about the issue. So even though I told you last time that I’d prepare an explanation to make things clearer, I didn’t consider it particularly urgent and more or less forgot about it.”

By the way, the easiest way to receive a lighter scolding after making a mistake in this world was simple.

People who apologized without making excuses were often treated more leniently.

But I said I had almost forgotten.

Not that I had forgotten completely.

So after openly admitting my mistake first, I continued.

Originally, I had considered doing what I had done with Seonwoo Yeon—revealing that I was an alien so he could understand the situation.

Now that I had regained my strength, the likelihood of being abducted by some aerospace agency was considerably lower.

And even if something like that happened, it wasn’t as though I couldn’t deal with it.

‘But is there really any need to give this human that much information?’

This time was different.

If I revealed that I was an alien, I would be taking an unnecessarily long and convoluted path just to explain the present condition of this body.

Besides, I wasn’t even certain Ahn Yoonseung would believe something so close to science fiction.

Seonwoo Yeon had been placed in a situation where she had no choice but to believe me because of [Justitia].

But what about an ordinary Earthling living an ordinary life, with no reason to expect anything so absurd?

A-rank Hunter Ahn Yoonseung of Korea.

So far, he had proven himself to be a reasonably trustworthy and surprisingly considerate extraterrestrial mammal.

“Hmm.”

But being kind didn’t mean I had to be impractical.

And so—

After finishing my assessment of the situation, I spoke.

I had already prepared an explanation for situations like this while lying in the hospital room.

“Let me explain in detail why there’s essentially no way I won’t be fine.”

“Yes?”

Though I wasn’t sure whether someone who ordinarily had no interest in magical theory would actually pay attention to what came next.

‘Let’s make the analogy as simple as possible.’

What I brought up next could, in short, be described as antagonism.

“Let’s start with something basic. It’s well known that a person’s body becomes stronger from the moment they awaken. Earthlings don’t seem to have identified the exact mechanism yet, but in truth, this is the result of a survival instinct shared by many living creatures.”

The desire to avoid injury and pain was universal.

That was why most Awakened individuals developed some degree of physical reinforcement capable of protecting them from external blows.

“But think about it. Would a body tough enough to survive being hit by a truck necessarily be any better at defending itself against a virus?”

And yet, eventually, even microorganisms inside such a body would be affected by magic.

A mage, by nature, was a being that constantly generated countless variables.

That was why even when one fell ill, the symptoms could differ dramatically from those of an ordinary patient.

It might understandably seem unfair to those without power.

Just as there was an enormous difference in destructive capability between ranks, the greater an Awakened individual’s mana reserves, the greater the disparity tended to become in the way those variables manifested.

According to my own reasoning, even when afflicted with the same type of tumor, an S-rank Awakened on Earth would likely have a far greater chance of surviving for an extended period than someone of a lower rank.

Was that because they possessed some special survival skill?

No.

It was closer to being sustained by the endlessly generous fairy godmother known as mana.

Their abundant magical power somehow interfered with the process, allowing their organs to stubbornly continue performing their functions.

And as if to prove that an archmage’s skills hadn’t gone anywhere, I had recently found an Earth paper supporting exactly that line of reasoning.