“Get up.”
Yu Jitae’s voice made Yeorum shoot her eyes open.
“…”
But her crimson eyes were out of focus.
“Have some food.”
“…Huh?”
“Food.”
“Ah, food…”
She raised her body. Her body that had been covered with wounds was almost fully cured already thanks to the authority of a dragon. Although there were still hook-shaped water molecules sticking to her leg, even those were slowly being cleansed thanks to the ‘dragon’s mana’.
Pulverised bones and wounds filled with filth – a human would have had to rest for a full week at the best medical institution in the world at the very least, and yet she recovered from such wounds just by lying down for a few hours. It truly was an efficient body.
“Here.”
Yu Jitae handed her a plastic plate.
“…What’s this?”
“Meat and some other stuff. Eat it.”
“Ahh, meat…”
“You did great.”
“Yah.”
Yeorum probably wasn’t feeling like eating anything. He therefore expected her to reject it but she received the plate with trembling hands, picked up a piece of meat with her bare hands and shoved it down her mouth.
Her eyes were still drenched with fatigue.
That was when Gyeoul came closer to the tent. She crouched on the ground and ate her share of meat while observing Yeorum.
Yeorum had trouble eating seemingly because she couldn’t swallow anything. She constantly shoved food into her mouth and yet couldn’t swallow it so her cheeks soon swelled like a balloon. Even then, she continued pushing food into her mouth.
Gyeoul grinned. What’s wrong with her? That seemed to be what her smile suggested.
“What you laughing at, you idiot.”
“…None of your business.”
“Stop laughing. You freaking,”
Pork belly, chicken skewers, mushrooms and sausage. They were all cooked until brown with the smell of charcoal in them. Yeorum continued shoving all those into her mouth.
“…How was itt?”
“How was what.”
“…Was it hard?”
“Was doable.”
“…Did somessing, bite your leg?”
“No, I told you I bumped into something on the way out.”
Yu Jitae followed suit with a question.
“Are you alright?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be alright? It’s nothing much.”
Yeorum softly smiled and continued devouring the meat.
By the time she was almost done with the food, Yu Jitae handed her the jacket along with her pack of cigarettes. Yeorum took the clothes, cursorily tossed it over her shoulders and glared at him for a while. She then snatched the pack of cigarettes away from his hand, placed one in her mouth and lit in on fire.
Meanwhile, Gyeoul ran away from the smoke with a frown.
“Are you gonna smoke by yourself?”
“Yep. Just me.”
She exhaled out as dense smoke filled the tent.
“By the way, I have a question,” she said.
“What is it.”
“Going down and coming back up. It wasn’t hard or anything but it did test my patience.”
“I’m sure it would have.”
“Did you see what I was doing?”
“Only when it seemed dangerous.”
“Yeah. Well, it wasn’t hard but there was pain that I had never felt before. So I could understand why you told me to not run away, but…”
“So, was it difficult?”
“No? It wasn’t difficult, alright? I’m not trying to say the training is too hard or anything like that.”
Yeorum continued with a frown.
“It was nothing but suffering and I didn’t earn anything. That was my question throughout the training; like, what kind of training is this?”
“…”
“Is there no change because it’s only 200 metres so far? Or what? Am I doing something wrong?”
Yu Jitae looked at her with a gaze filled with doubt.
“Nothing changed?”
“Yeah. Nothing at all. Both going down and coming up. To be honest, it just felt like being tortured you know?”
“Oh… really?”
He felt slightly amused.
It must have been really hard for her. How exhausted must she be to be so disoriented? Even after taking a rest, she appeared to be clueless about the change that had happened to her.
Yu Jitae pondered on how he should explain the whole thing but soon changed his line of thought. A picture tells a thousand words and seeing with her own eyes would be a thousand-fold better.
“Come out once you’re done smoking.”
*
Mana resided in the mana hall (dantian). The specificalities of these ‘dantians’ differed according to the race.
Humans had one; dragons had three.
Out of the three dantians that dragons had, the one at the very top – the ‘upper dantian’ was known as the ‘dragon heart’. And hatchlings on their Amusements all had Origin Fragment next to their dragon heart.
Since hatchlings were immature, they generally wouldn’t even be able to handle this dragon heart properly.
Mana and organisms had a complementary relationship. Mana might visit first and stay in the organism’s dantian, but on the flip side, the organism might instead be the one that pulls mana in.
The easiest way to confirm the state of mana was to simply feel it, but there were methods to check from the outside in case one wasn’t in the right state of mind to do so.
Yu Jitae took out a small lens from the [Shallows of the Abyss (S)].
This was a Level 2 artifact, [Monocle of a Mage]. It was an extremely rare artifact for a Level 2 one, since only two of them existed in the entire world.
This monocle allowed the wearer to confirm the amount and shape of mana that belonged to an individual but it was a consumable that had limited usage, so he didn’t use it very often. It had been stored up for occasions like this.
“Use this.”
“Use it? How? It’s just a lens.”
“Put it in front of your eye.”
When Yeorum brought the lens to her eye, it fixed itself on the spot in mid-air, around 1 centimetre away from her eye.
“It’s locked there, yeah? Now put mana into it and look at your hand.”
Doubtfully, she flowed mana into the lens but that was when something mysterious happened.
“Huh?”
Her hand started to look strange over the lens. There was a red translucent layer resembling a stocking over her body. Yeorum deeply considered what it might be and realised that it was the blessing, [Tenacity] that existed for all dragons.
Lowering her head, she saw a sparkling gem around her heart. This was the [Dragon Heart].
“Wow. What the fuk…”
“It looks similar to the mana you usually feel in your body right?”
Compared to the legs, hands and arms, her neck and her stomach that had extra protection of tenacity had a thicker layer of translucent red over it.
“Yeah. Looks exactly the same.”
Although mana did not have a form, an existence with a will could comprehend mana, because despite its invisibility, it moved according to how they wanted it to move. After getting used to that process, they could even ‘see’ its movement by sensing the abilities and blessings that always cover their body.
Confirming the image that had always been in her imagination with her own eyes was an interesting experience for Yeorum.
“Then lift your eyes up and look around.”
“Nn? Ah…!”
She gasped after looking at her surroundings. Blue and red auras intertwined from far off and were revolving around Yeorum as if she was the sun. It was a tremendous amount of mana that reached roughly 20% of the mana she had in her dragon heart.
“What is all this?”
“They’re all mana that were pulled out from the sea by your will. You haven’t absorbed them yet though.”
Despite being put in various situations that might have killed her, she endured through it and survived. Pushing through it despite her ability to avoid it represented her strong will and that strong will for survival had the gravity to pull the surrounding mana towards her.
However, she still had yet to absorb them fully. If her will for survival was to bend here, those mana would eventually start to leave her.
She had to grab them before they could.
“Sit down. Close your eyes and breathe in. Rest your mind. You will now absorb those into your body.”
“Huh? Uh, okay.”
Collapsing on the spot, Yeorum closed her eyes and started to [pulse] her heart. Slowly, the fluctuating auras of crimson began to enter her body.
After three hours of meditation, Yeorum opened her eyes with a mutter.
“That’s crazy…”
The time it took from entering the water, all the way to fainting and meditation – the whole process took 9 hours.
In just 9 hours, the capacity of her mana increased by 1.2 times.
“…”
Yeorum was dumbfounded.
***
The next day, while Gyeoul with her feet in the water was explaining to Yu Jitae about expanding her business… so, while she was sharing stories about her school life, Yeorum continued the meditation by herself for a few hours.
Even superhumans had the same brain speed as a normal person, unless they had a blessing related to that but a dragon’s brain had a different volume compared to that of a human, and even hatchlings were the same.
She imagined all the possible ways in which she could use the newly-earned mana. Diving into her memories, she pulled out images of the monsters she understood almost perfectly and fought against them inside her head.
After she was done making herself more accustomed to the mana she now had, Yeorum realised once again how much stronger she had become and gave a smile.
The place she was sitting down for the meditation was near the waters. While standing up, she found her own reflection on the surface of the water.
Red hair. Red eyes.
Oh my, such beauty…
During that, Yeorum found a reddish-black bruise on her neck. She lowered the zip of her training jacket and saw the reflection of her body. She looked at the scars etched across her body, and soon lowered her gaze towards her red feet that were still covered with recovering wounds.
These were even more beautiful than her face.
Yeorum smiled once again.
She had become stronger. By trying hard, she became stronger. She became stronger through enduring the urge to run away.
That put her in a good mood and she continued laughing like a madman.
After a few hours at the break of dawn, before the sun even rose in this dimension – while Gyeoul was deep in her sleep as a thin layer of fog covered the surface of the water, Yu Jitae called Yeorum. He had to push her back into the water before her desperateness lost its inertial force.
“Today it will be a bit more dangerous.”
“Nn.”
“So let’s go together.”
“Huh?”
Yu Jitae started to undo the buttons of his business shirt.
“What you doing? Showing off your body?”
“…”
“Better to take off your pants then.”
This was a business shirt the kids had chosen for him, and he didn’t want it to touch the dirty water here.
“Yu Yeorum. Up to 200 metres, it was okay for you to fail.”
“Huh?”
“Because you can undo your polymorph if need be.”
“True.”
“But now you can’t. If you fail 500 metres deep, your presence will be felt too vividly and will reach the depths. Things will get troublesome.”
“So it’s fine as long as I don’t dispel my polymorph right? That’s fine then ‘cuz I’m not gonna fail.”
“No. We can’t guarantee that this time.”
“It can’t be that difficult. Seriously, I won’t fail it for sure. Right now, I’m even more hyped up than when I dived for that 200-metre flag.”
“I know but let’s go together.”
“No no no. It’s fine. You don’t have to help me so much.”
Saying that, Yeorum walked up and started re-doing the buttons of his business shirt.
“Stay here. You didn’t tell me the details about the environment so that I’d be more desperate, right?”
“But difficulty should only be to some degree. 500 metres will be a lot more difficult than you think.”
“Ahh like I said, it’ll be fine.”
As if it was her first time buttoning up someone else’s shirt, her hands weren’t nimble. Yeorum slowly did the buttons but suddenly murmured, ‘Ah, someone’s not going to like this…’ and distanced herself.
“Hmm. Oh well, it’s fine since she didn’t see it.”
“…”
“Anyway, listen to me. I actually could have done the 200-metre dive a lot faster.”
“Then why didn’t you.”
“But I went a lot slower so that I could analyse the water. It was easy, and the 500-metre flag will be even easier.”
Why was Yeorum so adamant about refusing his help? Yu Jitae knew the answer.
Yeorum struggled for survival.
Before leaving on her Amusement, her life had always been dependent on others. Her unfortunate talent and late birth, her oldest sister who took lives and her fate that could have taken her life… Because of that, she wished to do everything by herself during her Amusement.
So for her, Yu Jitae’s goodwill was not something she could receive open-mindedly – it felt more like the sympathy of the strong to the weak. This was something that touched her pride.
That wasn’t his intention and Yeorum was probably aware of that as well. However, sometimes there was an emotional line that was even more important than the rational thoughts and right now, Yu Jitae was just outside her boundaries.
“It will be very dangerous. Mentally arm yourself.”
“Aigo, okay okay.”
“It will be physically exhausting as well as mentally.”
“I get it sirr. Okay.”
“…”
“If you were going to worry so much, then why did you even place a flag past 500 metres?”
Yeorum laughed while Yu Jitae turned silent. Before long, Yeorum took her jacket off and tossed it.
“I can do it by myself.”
Leaving those words behind, she jumped into the water.
This time, it really won’t be easy.
*
But after exactly 8 hours, Yeorum crawled outside with her body in tatters.
Her arms and her legs were broken. On top of that, her ribs were ripped out to the point that others could vaguely see the outline of her rib cages. Blood dripped from one of her eyes and travelled down her cheeks onto the ground.
Stopping all those wounds from bleeding with her mana, Yeorum crawled outside. She was even missing one of her fingers.
Yeorum was literally bloodstained, and was in tatters.
“Fishy… Yeowumm…”
Unable to continue her words, she wobbled.
Yu Jitae hurriedly ran up and supported her body. Her entire body was shaking and her skin was as cold as a sheet of ice. She had short breaths and her eyes twitched.
“Hu… ukk… Fuk…”
“Breathe, Yeorum. Breathe.”
“Ukk… kukk…”
“Now!”
Only then did she try to breathe properly.
He had been watching over her and several times he was about to go in and help her but didn’t. There were countless hazards and risks 500-metres deep and yet Yeorum withstood all those ordeals and endured it.
This came as an extreme surprise, even in the eyes of the Regressor.
Lifting his eyes, Yu Jitae looked around. Clumps of mana that were 3 times bigger than the ones she had after the 200-metre dive were revolving around Yeorum.
“Good work.”
“Did I do well…?”
“Yeah. You really did. It’s amazing.”
Despite her constantly short breaths, her lips curled up.
“What did I, say…”
She raised her hand with all the power she could manage.
“I said… I can do it by myself…”
In her hand was a transparent cloth that had been a part of the flag, that currently looked more like a rag. “I get it so don’t move,” said Yu Jitae while trying to take the flag but her fingers were rigid and were tightly clamping onto it.
“Hah, but fuck… so black wasn’t enough… A transparent flag… you can’t be human… kuk, kukukk…”
She powerlessly laughed,
“Yu Jitae, you, fucking devil…”
And fainted straight after her words.