Chapter 56
Averting misfortune.
It was an age-old Korean custom of paying off future calamity in advance with a minor misfortune.
It was also a wonderful custom that let you achieve a mental victory by telling yourself that, when you stepped in dog shit left behind by some dog-owner bastard who was lower than a dog, you had paid off the misfortune of getting hit by a car and dying today.
But the kindergarten student Kang Buk-ho, who had first learned this awesome-zero-sum way of thinking ten minutes earlier after tearing off dragonfly wings, came to have one great question.
─Teacher. Doesn’t averting misfortune happen with good things too?
Ah… what purity! What brutality!
The kindergarten student Kang Buk-ho’s words were a vicious opinion that was permitted to be spoken precisely because they were so pure!
A logic that brutally dismantled the adults’ theory of mental victory!
If averting misfortune really existed─ wouldn’t the opposite also be possible, where you wasted luck good enough to win the lottery on some minor matter?
The childcare-teacher noona who had soothed Vector-Man Eagle, age seven, after he slipped and fell from the slide had looked at me with an indescribable expression and said that.
Looking back now, it might have been the expression of someone thinking, This little bastard is acting up again, fuck.
She was already having a hard enough time soothing children every day, and then the bastard who had chased a child around with a dragonfly wing and made him fall was carrying on like this. The fact that she didn’t swear at me was proof that she was an excellent kindergarten teacher.
If that was so.
Then was I, a completely unimpressive kindergarten student,── paying the price for that time now?
Maybe the good luck I’d enjoyed over the past few days had led to today’s misfortune through a reverse-averting-misfortune phenomenon.
By wasting my destiny points on trivial good luck, I had brought about enormous misfortune.
We humans were merely slaves crushed beneath the enormous wheel of fate!
“Gyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!!!!!!”
─Whoosh, whoosh!
─Whoosh, whoosh!
After explaining the situation to Frang, I disguised myself as Arthur Wayne and ran across the rooftops of Sargadis, seized by frenzied rage! Using the parkour I had honed while watching Spider-Man as a youth, I sprinted at full speed toward my destination, the Transport Guild!!
It was all to punish the bastard sons of bitches who had ninja-stolen my paper!!
The Transport Guild had its reputation to think of, so now that things had come to this, they would obviously form a subjugation party and plant justice’s lead bullets in those bandits’ heads!!
Whiririririk─!!
─Pose!
“Haaah!!”
After dropping from the sky in a 720-degree spin and landing, I startled a traveling merchant who was coming out of the Transport Guild. I caught his sleeve and stopped him from falling.
“Ah, excuse me. I’m passing through. Could you move aside?”
“Hiiiiiiik!!!”
─Scurry-scurry!!
“Damn.”
I had spoken gently, so I had no idea why he ran away like that.
The world was full of things I couldn’t understand. This was why being a damn scholar was so difficult. A profession devoted to digging into the unknown was always destined to be a life full of suffering.
Were humans incapable of understanding one another for their entire lives?
At the very least, I felt like I would never be able to understand the thief bastards who would even steal their friends’ underwear and wear it.
“Huff, huff, huff──.”
─Step, step.
After calming the rage that felt capable of making my head explode, I entered the guild calmly.
The Transport Guild was already in utter chaos because of the customers who had arrived before me.
“You’re saying it’ll be difficult to recover the goods?! What the hell does that mean!!”
“You damn bastard! Do you even know how much that mana potion costs?!”
“That bowl was something my mother left me!!”
A dozen or so customers, men and women of every age!
They shouted like parents chasing after their child who had run after a mascot-suit worker at an amusement park. The Transport Guild had become a marketplace that was practically a lost-and-found center for parcels.
“P-please calm down and listen to us!!”
A bald merchant who appeared to be their representative spoke. His clothes were made of fairly expensive material. Was he responsible for this situation?
The half-bald merchant desperately gathered everyone’s attention and shouted.
“Compensation! We’ll compensate you!”
“……What?”
I rolled the merchant’s words around in my mind, like feeding raw meat to the beast named rage that lived inside my skull.
Compensation?
What kind of compensation? As far as I was concerned, the only possible compensation was recovering my paper. Pulling out those bandits’ guts, pumping helium into their bellies, and flying them like kites to raise the national flag was merely an additional option.
“We truly have no excuse, but even the Sargadis guards are having difficulty locating their base!!”
Sensing that the atmosphere had calmed down, the merchant hurriedly continued.
“Therefore, our trading company will prioritize compensating everyone whose goods were stolen! And once the bandits have been wiped out and the goods recovered, I promise we will return them to all of you without fail!”
Bullshit.
That was truly unbelievable bullshit. I belatedly joined the crowd and shouted at the top of my voice.
“Compensation? What exactly are you planning to give us!! There is no way to soothe our anger except by returning the things we lost!!”
“Hear, hear!! Hear, hear!!”
Those who sympathized with my anger shouted with one voice.
“Everyone!! We must not be deceived by their scheme!! They clearly intend to placate us with pocket change and let the matter fizzle out!!”
“Hear, hear!! Hear, hear!!”
“They need to form a subjugation party!! They need to hire people from the Adventurer Guild to track down the bandits and recover our goods!! That is the compensation properly owed by the people who took our goods after charging us a fee!!”
“Compensate us!! Compensate us!!”
With a few words, I seized control of public opinion. An excited crowd could easily run wild as long as someone gave it a direction.
They say madness is like gravity. As expected, the words of our predecessors were never wrong.
Just when it seemed that the bald boss would be pushed back by the rampaging citizens, he straightened his shoulders and shouted in a booming voice.
“One silver!!!!!”
─Halt.
His voice was fucking loud. Fuck, I thought my eardrums were going to burst. The people nearby who had thought the same grimaced. His voice, apparently trained in the market during his days as a traveling merchant, silenced the entire guild in an instant.
“One silver! We’ll compensate every customer who suffered losses with one silver per person!!! For goods worth thirty coppers or more, we’ll pay according to their market value!!!”
The bald merchant, his neck flushed bright red, shouted this and then panted heavily. I let out a low laugh at the sight.
“Heh heh. One silver.”
One silver.
At Nord’s won exchange rate, that was about one million won.
That wasn’t much money at all. If it came for free, of course it would be a fucking great deal and I’d gladly take it, but there was no way such a small amount of pocket change could calm an atmosphere this heated!
“One silver? That’s fair.”
“Buying my mana potion wasn’t enough, and now you’re giving me a silver on top of that? Thank you, valued customer!”
“Actually, my mother left home on my eighth birthday!”
…Fuck?
The atmosphere was strange. Were these people really going to turn on a dime at the first opportunity over a mere one silver? Did they have no pride?
“E-everyone! We must not fall for their scheme to cover up their mistake!”
I shouted before public opinion completely turned around.
“If we let this matter pass, things like this will keep happening! They’ll treat our precious belongings not as customers’ goods, but as cargo for making pocket change!!”
Even if I received compensation, my paper would not return. These merchants weren’t going to remember its contents and rewrite it for me, so if this ended in such a farce, I was the only one who would lose out!
“The merchants of the Transport Guild have no anger whatsoever toward the bandits who attacked the traveling merchants and stole their goods! This is nothing more than a despicable tactic to solve an annoying problem with money!”
“That is absolutely not true!!”
The bald merchant immediately countered. When I fixed him with an angry glare, he suddenly burst into tears. Oh, fuck? Was he using the crying-first, winning-first tactic here?
“We will pay the compensation immediately, right here! Please accept our apology!”
─Bow.
The merchant bent at the waist as he finished speaking. The surrounding mood grew solemn at the apology of a man who appeared to hold a high position. The otherworlders’ susceptibility to incitement was now working in the opposite direction.
“Ahem. If they’re properly compensating us, there’s no need to criticize them any further….”
“It’s not as if they wanted their goods to be stolen, either, right?”
“We should be broad-minded and understanding. We may do different work, but we’re all citizens living on the same land.”
Rumble─.
Though they spoke in lofty terms, the people left to collect their one silver. I was left standing alone, unable to keep up with public opinion as it lurched forward like a roller coaster.
‘Is this for real?’
Probably not. That’s right. There was no way this could be real.
Staring blankly up at the ceiling, I suddenly snapped and began raging!
“No, how can this happen!!!!!”
Was it really going to end like this? They’d had their goods stolen by bandits, and now they were going to pay us and call it even because it couldn’t be helped! That was the behavior of an evil conglomerate steeped in fucking capitalism!!
“Wait! I still have something to say!”
I wiped away my tears and grabbed the merchant who was about to leave. A few others besides me seemed to still have complaints and had remained behind.
So it wasn’t over yet! It wasn’t over yet!!
“What will you do about goods that cannot be compensated for with money? My property is an important document, so even if you paid me its monetary value, that would be meaningless.”
“That… I’m sorry.”
No, damn it, don’t apologize. Come up with a solution. I was furious at the bald man’s attitude, which was exactly like a civil servant repeating, ‘That’s outside our jurisdiction.’
But I couldn’t say anything against what he said next.
“The traveling merchant who was attacked and kidnapped this time is my son.”
“Pardon?”
“I mean that my son was kidnapped on the very day he left home to try living independently.”
The bald merchant wiped his tears with a handkerchief and spoke.
“But even after going from adventurer guild to adventurer guild, they kept saying, ‘It’s difficult to accept a request to find a bandit gang whose location is hard to determine.’ Even the guild that accepted our request told me it would be better to leave it to the guards.”
“Tss….”
The Transport Guild was ultimately just one branch, too.
The son probably wasn’t important enough to throw his weight around just because he was the branch manager’s son. That was why this man’s son had decided to become independent.
Part of me wondered if it might be a lie, but I wasn’t thick-skinned enough to press the issue right then.
Because I had a feeling that perhaps my own parents were doing something like this back home.
And damn, if all those tears were an act, I’d want to create an Academy Award in this otherworld just so I could give it to that bald man. Of course, I’d swing it as hard as I could and give that barren head a trophy hair transplant.
“Tsk….”
“Sigh….”
Perhaps they had the same thoughts as I did, because the others also grew gloomy, as if resigned. Whether his words were true or not, the Transport Guild was still a victim too.
How pathetic and laughable was it that the perpetrators lived in comfort while the victims quarreled among themselves?
“Fuck.”
With my momentum deflated, I turned around, intending to hunt down those damn bandits even if I had to do it alone.
Everyone else might have been unable to find the bandits’ hideout──but I had a way to find it.
But just then, amid the dispersing crowd, I spotted a familiar head of white hair and opened my eyes wide.
“Ms. Tirsi?”
“─Mr. Wayne?”
I was so surprised that I accidentally addressed her by her given name rather than her family name. Fortunately, Tirsi showed no sign of caring and merely stared at the mask I was wearing.
That look.
It was the look of someone who, after being rejected by everything in the world, had met the owner of a neighborhood corner store in an abandoned prison. Through that look, I understood the entire situation.
─Hey, you too?
─Yes, me too.
In barely a second of eye contact, we understood exactly what had brought each of us here.
They say first-rate ninjas can understand each other’s feelings just by bumping fists, but even third-rate scholars could do the same.
Because we, too, were living beings suffering under a chain of hatred.
The chain of hatred called ‘professor’ and ‘graduate student.’