Chapter 20

Chapter 20 : Free Event to Celebrate the Grand Opening (6)

When I pulled over a blanket and carefully laid Konu down, he started trembling violently and even convulsing.

When I took his hand, it was ice-cold. His face quickly turned white and bloodless, and my mind descended into panic.

“What was I supposed to do in a case like this?”

I flipped through the papers his parents had left behind, but there was no way symptoms like this would be written there.

I crumpled the papers in my hands and tried to think.

Fortunately, the terrifying convulsions gradually began to settle.

He should have been taken to a doctor, of course, but I knew nothing about this place. I had no idea what to do, how to contact anyone, or even where to go.

On top of that, I could not exactly leave Chiru home alone and go.

The nearest neighboring houses were too far away to easily ask for help, and it was already quite late.

“No, what am I supposed to do when a child is sick?”

But even after I ran outside and knocked on the doors of the house next door, the house beyond that, and the one across from it, no one so much as looked outside.

I had overlooked my own reputation.

There was no one who would open the door to an Underfolk.

When I hurried back, worried about Konu’s condition, I found Chiru awake and sitting beside him, tears dripping down his face.

“You’re awake?”

“Why’s hyung like this? Is hyung dead? Hic, snff.”

Seeing Chiru clutching Konu’s hand tightly, even with snot running down his face, I decided I just had to act first and think later.

If I went to the ruler’s castle, surely there would be someone there who could solve anything.

“Chiru, you can walk by yourself, right?”

“Chiru’s not hungry. I can walk.”

I put a coat on Chiru and hoisted Konu onto my back.

It was a fair distance, and the only paths there were treacherous ones, but I was too tense to even think about that.

All I could do was keep repeating to myself that Konu had to be all right, even as his condition grew colder and colder against me.

---

I had no idea what state of mind I’d even been in when I made it all the way to the ruler’s castle.

Once I had brought the children there safely, I had no strength left to go looking for anyone.

More than rational thought, all that remained in me was the desperate urge to shout for anyone at all to help me with the child, and I stood there gasping dry breaths.

Fortunately, this was a place where some people were often still awake and working late.

Anyone would do. I just needed someone to see us.

“Anyone, someone—”

“—Riwin?”

I jerked my head up and looked toward the source of the voice.

It was Ru.

“Konu, the child is sick.”

At once, Ru grasped the situation from my words and came over with an urgency wholly unlike her usual self to examine Konu on my back.

Something in Ru’s serious expression made me feel slightly relieved. Only then did I notice that Chiru’s hand, still clenched tightly in my clothes as he followed behind me, had gone pale and bloodless too.

He must have been even more frightened than I was.

“Come this way.”

“Is the child going to be all right?”

“Yes. So calm down, and let’s move him somewhere quiet.”

Somewhat unexpectedly, the place Ru led us to was her own quarters.

Since it was close to the Record Archive and not far from the castle entrance, it was better than most places we could have gone.

After laying Konu down on the wide bed, I widened my eyes in shock at the sight of something I had not been able to see before.

“A tree…….”

A sprout was growing from Konu’s small head.

Two leaves emerged, then in an instant they grew into branches, and those branches stretched farther and farther, tangling together as they thickened and took firm hold.

It did not take long at all.

It looked no different from the branches of a stag’s antlers.

“Is a tree growing out of his head right now?”

“Hyung grew horns.”

It was strange and unfamiliar, and I could not understand why this was happening to Konu now.

I wondered whether it was because I was Underfolk, and whether I had somehow affected him badly.

I forced myself not to look toward his face and kept rubbing his hand instead.

Ru watched Konu’s condition in silence, and once he seemed to have entered a stable stage, she covered him with a blanket and pushed Chiru and me outside.

“Should Chiru sleep over there? Hyung will be fine.”

“Hyung isn’t dead?”

“You don’t kill someone who’s already alive.”

“Then it’s fine.”

Chiru lay down obediently on the bed in the empty room deeper inside and fell asleep.

He had woken in the middle of the night and gone through all that chaos, so it made sense that he would fall asleep as if fainting.

“Riwin, what exactly did you do?”

As she closed the bedroom door behind us, Ru frowned and pressed me for answers.

“I didn’t do anything. More importantly, what is that strange thing on his head? Are you sure he’s really all right? Why is a tree growing out of a person’s head?”

Cutting off my agitated string of questions, Ru handed me a cup of tea.

It was the same tea I had sold off to Pol.

“Drink this and calm down. I told you, didn’t I? He’ll be all right.”

“He hasn’t even woken up yet, so how is this supposed to be all ri—”

“—It’s a Frame.”

“A Frame?”

That strange stag-antler-like branching thing was a Frame?

Compared to things like Hwipone’s snowy white wings, the Mist domain’s markings, or Ariti’s fairy wings—

if you only looked at that bundle of branches as though they had simply snapped twigs and woven them together, of course you would never guess it was a Frame.

How had I failed to anticipate that, since he was a member of the forest, his traits could manifest in a form like this?

How shackled was I by fixed ideas, exactly……?

“Riwin?”

Ru tapped me on the shoulder, pointed at the chair behind me, and then indicated the teacup I was still holding.

“Let’s talk while you drink.”

Ru settled herself first into the most comfortable-looking and widest sofa, then crooked her finger at me.

“This is the moment of first manifestation. It always hurts then.”

After letting out a sigh, Ru downed her tea in a single gulp and leaned back deep into the sofa.

“It is a little early, though. It shouldn’t have manifested for at least a few more years……”

Ru broke off in the middle of the sentence and stared at me steadily.

There was something meaningful in that look, as if she were suggesting it had happened because of me.

“Were the conditions all met at once?”

“Because I’m Underfolk?”

“It may not have had no effect, but this isn’t anyone’s fault.”

For some reason, the way she said that sounded as though she were trying to ease my guilt, and the realization only made me feel pathetic.

Right now, there was nothing I could do but wait. My helplessness kept driving my yearning for a Frame into sharper relief.

I tossed back the rest of the tea in one swallow and sat down across from Ru.

“If it’s a natural phenomenon, then that’s enough. That’s a relief.”

“If you’re going to stay here, would you at least like to do some copying?”

“No? Absolutely not. Never. I’m not doing it.”

I refused with complete seriousness.

I had no desire to repeat that hundred-volume copying hell ever again.

Still, I could not deny that the suggestion had soothed my anxious mind considerably.

---

I wanted to crawl into a hole somewhere and vanish while Konu and Chiru’s parents thanked me.

“Truly, thanks to you, everything turned out all right. We should have prepared for it in advance, but because we got swept up in the excitement of taking a trip for the first time in ages, we let our attention drift and ended up doing something that makes us unworthy as par—”

“—No! No, it’s just, the Archivist said this was an unpredictable occurrence. The timing wasn’t right either.”

“That doesn’t excuse us. It was our duty as parents. If you’d simply left him like that, something terrible might have happened. The only reason everything turned out all right is because Riwin handled it so well.”

“He’s stable now and everything’s fine, so you really don’t have to say things like that……”

“This won’t do. We ought to treat you properly.”

“That’s right. Please come visit our home.”

No matter what I said, they were too busy saying what they wanted to say. And most of it was just praise directed at me, which only made it all the more awkward to see Pering standing off to the side snickering.

Pering had apparently come by just to check whether the fixer’s office was being run properly, and it very much looked as though he was about to carry all this fresh blackmail material home in his eyes.

The fact that this report was bound to travel beyond Pering and reach Pan eventually only made me feel more desolate.

“I’ll visit sometime later. Please give my regards to Konu and Chiru as well.”

After finally seeing off the people who kept finding fresh variations of “thank you,” I was at last able to breathe.

Apparently, the source of the children’s endless chatter and behavior was the mystery of heredity.

Ding—

I leaned my forehead against the office door and tried to shake the voices still lingering in my ears far, far away.

I felt drained to the bone.

“You’re doing better than expected.”

When I turned my head with a creak, I saw Pering idly touching the display cabinet.

I wanted to throw him out too, of course, but there was no chance he would ever listen to me.

Waving a hand weakly, I staggered toward my life-giving tea like a zombie.

“I’m only doing it because I have no choice.”

“And yet you’ve already resolved two matters, haven’t you? From what I hear, you’re even winning people over.”

I had already heard enough empty flattery from the couple earlier to be sick of it, and I wanted to tell him to stop, but I held back.

After downing the cold tea in one swallow, I glared at Pering, who was lightly tapping the plant in the flowerpot Ochel had given me.

Because he clearly had some ulterior motive.

If Pering, who ought to have been busy away from the domain following Pan on some long-distance outing, had come here first, then—

“Was your watcher unsatisfactory?”

“Ochel was perfect.”

“Or perhaps Pan told you to check in?”

“My lord hasn’t returned yet.”

“Surely you’re not…… here to make a request or something?”

“Would I need to?”

“Then why are you standing there?”

Why did he keep glancing at me from the corner while nodding to himself, smiling, or frowning all on his own?

“Do I have any reason to make you uncomfortable?”

“Your existence itself?”

“What a hurtful thing to say. I’ll only stay until evening. I needed somewhere to hide because I also didn’t want to work.”

Did that mean he had run here because he wanted to loaf around on the clock?

Pering, the very same man who had been drowning in work under Pan and was the one who insisted on shoving towering piles of documents onto me?

The lie was so blatant that I was left speechless.

Losing even the will to argue, I collapsed into the rocking chair farther inside.

“What do you think about running this place as a lounge too?”

“Whose idea of a joke is that?”

Pering, who had poured himself the last of the tea and come to sit across from me, made the absurd suggestion with a straight face.

And thanks to that absurdly calm proposal, my plan to rest idly until closing time shattered on the spot.

“Isn’t this place located right through the center of all the main points? The square, the greenhouse, the playground, the library, the ruler’s castle, the immigration gate, the night market, even the Execution Ground.”

Once he listed them off one by one, he was right.

I had thought it was simply a decently convenient location with some good foot traffic, but clearly the placement had been chosen with everything in mind.

“Even so, I’m not turning it into a lounge.”

I liked this place precisely because it was quiet and free of people.

Aside from the occasional client, or curious people who came by because they wanted to see an Underfolk for themselves, it was a peaceful space.

Since he looked as though he still had not given up on the idea, I threw him an alternative.

“Pering, you can just stay here and rest like this.”

“Hm, I didn’t realize I’d be so welcome.”

I ignored the part where he muttered that there would be no need to make any official registration, then.

“Ah, I nearly forgot something important.”

Pering reached into his clothes and pulled out an envelope about the size of a postcard, holding it out to me.

So that was his real business, after all, while he’d been aimlessly wandering around and doing other things.

The envelope, sealed with an emblem in the shape of a lush tree, looked at a glance like exactly the sort of cursed something-or-other Pan would send.

I set it down on the table at once, frowning.

Whatever was inside, I had the strong premonition that if I opened it, invisible shackles would leap out and bind my hands and feet.

“What is it?”

“My lord’s official request. The specific information and the date are written inside.”

“I’m not accepting it.”

“It’s not an urgent schedule. You may take on other requests in the meantime if you wish.”

“I said I’m not accepting it.”

“Then I’ve delivered it, so I’ll be going.”

“I said I’m not doing it!”

Pering, shameless and calm to the last, set his untouched tea down on the table, covered his ears, and walked out as though he’d heard nothing.

Even after he left, I didn’t open the envelope for a long while.

It looked like a sinister invitation caked in such a heavy sense of ill omen that if I opened it, I’d be summoned on the spot.