Chapter 413

"Hmm."

A funeral hall, huh. Now that the thought had crossed his mind, Kim decided this was as good a time as any to sort something out.

The blonde man lowered his head. Having already delved into the deceased's mind, he knew where the electronic device he had been wondering about had ended up.

"I was wondering where Ahn Yoonseung's phone had gone..."

The ones who had attacked Ahn Yoonseung with items were low-rank Awakened. They weren't trained professionals like the criminals you saw in movies. They had first incapacitated the defensive hunter, then struck the victim in the head hard enough to leave fresh bruises. The problem was that, despite all the blood he had lost, their target still hadn't died.

"They probably weren't as used to violent crime as I thought..."

The money-hungry drifters seemed to have been completely thrown off by the gate's exit coordinates. Portals to other dimensions often opened in remote places, after all. They hadn't even thought of the simple solution of returning to the scene of the crime, and had likely convinced themselves that everything had gone according to plan as they fled far away.

Meanwhile, Ahn Yoonseung, who had barely regained consciousness inside the subspace, made his way toward a nearby entrance. The moment the magical passage began transmitting a signal, he hurriedly opened the contacts on his phone and firmly pressed "2."

"-_-"

Who would've thought there was a way to call someone immediately without having to tap through the dial pad ten times?

"If I'm number 2, then who's number 1?"

After that, his memories were broken and fragmented like an old wooden bridge, making them difficult to piece together.

"His parents?"

In any case, he had already seen through magic the moment when the victim himself had called Kim Giryeo, so the rest wasn't difficult to infer. Ahn Yoonseung must have dropped his belongings while fleeing, overwhelmed and disoriented. To make matters worse, the emergency supplies he had been carrying—potions—had already been taken...

"What on earth is the point of all this?"

No matter the species, the end of a life was always a sorrowful thing.

Soon, the recollection came to an end, and a sentence with more than one meaning slipped from his lips. Kim Giryeo. No, more precisely, the alien occupying that body had held a certain conviction from the very beginning.

A life could not move forward if one remained forever trapped in the glories of the past.

For someone who believed that, though, he certainly liked to boast with phrases such as, "Back in my day, I did this and that..."

Until now, that had merely been a mild manifestation of his innate arrogance. The foreign mage had never hesitated to embrace a new culture—as long as it was efficient.

"What's the point of something like a funeral anyway?"

But when news of a funeral reached this miser with time and space, who was practically obsessed with progress...

#############

O Will holding such a ceremony bring my friend back to life?

No.

#############

Dressing in a full suit for the sake of the deceased—fine. He could accept that much.

"After all, he's an alien with no sense of fashion. Even if he just follows the body's former owner's taste, there's nothing to lose."

But carefully cremating an A-rank hunter like this was utterly incomprehensible to him. Funeral expenses in this country had risen dramatically, with the average cost now easily exceeding ten million won. On top of that, because Ahn Yoonseung had awakened as an A-rank, his cremation required special patented techniques. In the end, every stage of that complicated process became another major expense.

"Doing all this isn't going to make some spirit in heaven thank you."

"Excuse me?"

"Come to think of it, did I really need to attend an event that's only meant to comfort the living...?"

Once he had finished thinking, Kim Giryeo quietly spoke his mind. Of course, his own act of rushing overseas to avenge an injured friend had, in a sense, come from much the same impulse. And yet the alien still regarded attending a funeral and observing proper etiquette as little more than a waste.

"Now that I've experienced it once myself, I'm even more certain."

What others regarded as proof of a species' accumulated cultural development—the custom of cremating the dead—received an even harsher judgment from him.

"W-what did you just say?"

This series of remarks sounded thoroughly alien to the locals. Seonwoo Yeon, who had approached them, was so startled that her voice nearly rose. The short, black-haired woman standing in front of Kim Giryeo did not react much differently.

"-_-"

For reference, Seonwoo Yeon knew that the blonde man was an outsider, which was why she had refrained from criticizing him too harshly. But if he said something like this directly to the bereaved family, wasn't the outcome obvious?

"Any normal person would obviously get angry if they heard that."

Just as Seonwoo Yeon looked at him anxiously, Choi Jin, who had been slumped over like a half-dead person, slowly raised her head.

"-_-"

What the bereaved family member said next was rather unexpected, even from the perspective of someone who shared Kim Giryeo's secret.

"Now I know you're not a bad person."

She didn't get angry. She didn't even curse at him. She merely spoke a few heartfelt words.

"But you really shouldn't say things like that."

It seemed she had occasionally spoken with her relative Yoonseung about Kim Giryeo in the past. That much was clear from how she showed at least some understanding of his temperament. Once the A-rank Dragon Hunter fell silent, the conversation ended there.

"-_-"

"-_-"

After that, everything moved incredibly quickly. They went to the Ahn family's funeral hall and completed the various formalities. Then they withdrew cash from a nearby ATM and, following the local custom, placed the money in envelopes...

As time passed, the reality of what had happened finally began to sink in for Seonwoo Yeon. The days spent searching for the people who had harmed Ahn Yoonseung had served as a kind of grace period, delaying her acceptance of the tragedy. Now, at last, tears streamed freely down her face.

"Oh, my... my grandson."

And toward the end of the funeral proceedings, he was finally able to meet the elderly woman he had only heard about before.

"If I'd known things would end this way, I would've stopped you from doing whatever you wanted at least once."

"You're here?"

"The poor boy must have worked so hard all this time. I shouldn't have made him repeat a year of school. I should've taken him out and shown him the world instead."

She was an elder of the family who had cherished her grandson since childhood. The white-haired old woman, dressed in a funeral hanbok, carefully held a porcelain urn against her chest.

"Mother, are you really planning to keep the urn at home?"

The old woman cradled the object—which the archmage had regarded with such distaste—as though it were a jewelry box, and answered.

"How many years do you think I have left?"

"Mother..."

"People usually say it's better to forget these things quickly, but I don't think I have the strength to spend what little life I have left pretending I don't care. I'd rather keep his memorial close so I can see him often."

"-_-"

"Then, my grandchild, you've really been through so much. Now, let's go home with Grandma..."

That was the end of it. The members of the Ahn family, all dressed in black, soon dispersed, while even Choi Jin returned to her hometown to recover both physically and emotionally. All that remained were outsiders—the officials, the unemployed, and others like them.

"Hunter Kim Giryeo didn't shed another tear."

At that moment, the long-haired black-haired woman paused in thought.

"I'd heard he could control his expressions at will, but he was speaking so calmly the whole time."

More precisely, she was thinking about the alien standing beside her.

"I couldn't sense any emotional disturbance from his magic either. Could it be that he's actually doing better than I thought?"

Neutral. Unremarkable. One glance at the outsider was enough to interpret his demeanor that way.

"Come to think of it, we're much less saddened by the deaths of animals from other species, aren't we...?"

Seeing his composure, as still as the surface of a lake, Seonwoo Yeon arrived at that conclusion.

But only a few hours later, she would realize that her assumption had been wrong.

Two months later.

More precisely, by the time summer arrived in their country, someone had suddenly disappeared.

***

[Ding-dong. Ding-dong ]

Somewhere, the clear sound of a door chime rang out.

"E-excuse me..."

Perhaps thanks to reduced environmental pollution, the cicadas were still properly dormant in the very early days of summer.

An outsider stepped onto an unkempt road somewhere.

"Hunter Kim Giryeo... Ah, right. Come to think of it, you're not a hunter anymore."

She was a government employee working for the Hunter Association, and she had sacrificed her precious weekend to drive all the way out to this remote location.

Why?

Because someone she knew hadn't contacted her for a full sixty days.

"Anyway, Kim Giryeo, I already know you're inside."

Perhaps out of habit from her work, a tone resembling that of an investigator questioning a suspect slipped out almost unconsciously.

"Gasp."

By the time she realized what she had just said, her eyes widened.

"I-I used [Searcher]. So I really do know the homeowner isn't away, but... excuse me, could you at least let me hear your voice once?"

Seonwoo Yeon began by confessing to what was, in a sense, a criminal act. Of course, because [Searcher] was a skill whose results could be known only to its user, merely using it wasn't punishable in itself.

"Locating a complete stranger without their consent and then showing up uninvited?"

This was undeniably stalking.

The official, who had never once received a demerit in school and had lived an exemplary life even as an adult, briefly sank into self-reproach.

"I... I've committed a crime..."

But of course, there was a reason she had gone this far.

"But honestly, going completely silent for this long is serious. It's not like he's just been too tired to answer messages for a few days."

① Sent him a message through a messaging app.

② Kim Giryeo replied that he was tired and would talk later, then vanished completely for nearly two months. That had recently reminded her of the unfortunate incident involving Ahn Yoonseung.

③ Wondering whether his Wi-Fi might have been disconnected, she sent him another message through regular text.

④ When she still received no response, she decided to visit under the pretext of checking on his safety—and had even notified him three days in advance.

Seonwoo Yeon slowly went over all the precautions she had taken.

As the sequence of events showed, the official had plenty of grounds to justify her actions to herself. And having come all the way to this seaside mansion, she was fully prepared to accept whatever legal consequences might result from what she had done.

"Huh?"

But even if she had already made up her mind, did the world really have to push her forward this aggressively?

"Wait a second... I thought something seemed strange. The front gate isn't even locked..."

Clang!

She had only tried nudging it lightly, but the gate immediately swung open. In an age of automatic locks, it was almost difficult to imagine such a sight.

"They must've left it like this for so long that the batteries died."

And now that she thought about it, would someone who constantly boasted about being an archmage really leave his residence completely unprotected?

"Looks like he never replaced the [Infinite Power Core] after it ran out of energy!"

With the front gate standing wide open like this, what if burglars had already gotten inside?

Seonwoo Yeon stopped announcing her presence and entered the private property. The first thing she noticed was the wildly overgrown grass.

"The last time I came here, the front yard was definitely well maintained and looked great..."

Contrary to her fears, however, she didn't end up having to trespass inside someone else's house.

"Here."

The coordinates detected by her skill pointed outside, not inside the building.

And thinking back to the times she had come here for meals, she remembered that there was a structure in the shaded area behind Kim Giryeo's mansion.

"The swimming pool."

But the instant she reached it...

"Huh?"

A familiar silhouette could be seen beneath the water.

"H-huh?!"

At first glance, it looked as though someone had drowned.

Seonwoo Yeon turned pale and rushed toward the pool, but at the disturbance in the surrounding mana, the person who had apparently been sleeping finally rose to the surface.

"I was definitely going to... later..."

"Ah! You scared me!"

The only fortunate thing was that he wasn't an ordinary modern human.

The other person had been lying fully clothed underwater, and now the man surfaced at the edge of the pool right in front of Seonwoo Yeon.

"I said I'd reply later."

Judging from his words, the alien seemed to remember the visitor's last message.

"Ah! But you didn't contact me for weeks, so I got worried..."

"I understand. But I simply needed time to recover."

"I see. I'm truly sorry for disturbing your rest."

"Please leave me alone for another ten years or so."

"Excuse me?"

It was startling and absurd, and certainly not a situation anyone should have been laughing about. Yet somehow the conversation had taken such a comical turn that Seonwoo Yeon simply froze, unsure how to respond.

Then, as she stood there staring at him, something finally caught her attention.

"Um, excuse me... may I ask you just one question?"

"You don't need permission."

His cheeks were far too hollow, much too gaunt for it to be dismissed as simply losing baby fat.

Seeing this, Seonwoo Yeon asked with obvious suspicion.

"Kim Giryeo-ssi, why have you lost so much weight?"

For a moment, her first encounter with the alien flashed through her mind.

"Because I haven't eaten, perhaps?"

"How long?"

"Maybe..."

But the recollection didn't last long.

The strange figure, who had apparently spent so long underwater without showing the slightest sign of swelling, finally raised two fingers in front of her.