# 4
“Hello.”
A small flower petal collided with the back of the man’s head as he whispered a greeting to someone who couldn’t hear him due to being unconscious. Annoyed at having his pleasant moment disturbed, the man turned around irritably.
A tiny fairy in armor was puffing her cheeks in anger.
“Fine. I’ll give it to you.”
Clicking his tongue, the man took a few gems from his pocket and tossed them. The fairy skillfully caught the gems, which were about the size of her body, and held them up to the light as if assessing their value, then suspiciously looked the man over.
“Go show them to your queen, and if she says it’s not enough, come back. That’s all I have right now.”
The man waved his hand dismissively. The fairy shrugged as if she had no choice, opened a portal in mid-air, and returned to her queen’s palace.
She would surely find it insufficient. The man, holding the sleeping person tighter in his arms, thought about what else he would need to give in exchange for this affair.
He was occasionally plagued by incomprehensible urges. Strange compulsions to desperately want something, to touch something, and sometimes even to destroy something. Each time, what he wanted was different: a turtle doll, a lamb, a sea anemone… At first, it had been a small pebble that he desperately wanted.
It couldn’t be any other pebble. He wanted exactly that stone.
Then at some point, he wanted something but couldn’t identify what it was. The man had to roam the entire continent without any clues to find what he desired.
This time was no different. Once again, he had come to want something, and he searched and searched and searched for this unidentified object…
He knew it was a mental illness. To want a doll, a sheep, a sea anemone, or a pebble so badly that he felt like he would die—it couldn’t be anything but an illness.
But what did it matter if it was an illness or a curse? Since he couldn’t escape it, he had to obtain what he wanted, even if it cost him everything he had.
That’s why when the Fairy Queen had brought him the pebble he had been craving to the point of madness, he had agreed to the deal without measuring the cost. He didn’t know how she detected his desire or how she found the object, but what mattered wasn’t that—it was clutching and embracing the pebble.
Of course, this time too, he had asked the Fairy Queen to find the object. But strangely, no matter how long he waited, there was no news. Then, to his surprise…
“To think what I wanted was a human from another world…”
It seemed he would have to pay a greater price than expected.
Still, if he could continue to enjoy this peaceful feeling, money meant nothing. The man slowly exhaled, holding the warmth in his arms tightly.
Suddenly, drowsiness overcame him.
Thinking back, it had been more than two weeks since he had properly slept. His reason told him it would be better to return to the tower to sleep, but as soon as he became aware of his sleepiness, he couldn’t control it anymore.
The man slid down, leaning against the tree, still tightly embracing the warmth in his arms.
* * *
He couldn’t breathe.
Something was pressing down on him. Jin-ha tried to turn his body but couldn’t move at all. He could barely bend one leg.
“Ugh…”
Groaning, Jin-ha opened his eyes and finally realized what position he was in. He was lying underneath some man.
Startled, he tried to sit up, causing the man who was crushing him to slide down. The man’s face was about to plant into his groin, so Jin-ha frantically grabbed the man’s face.
The man, who had been frowning as if annoyed, slowly opened his eyes.
“…Not yet, just a little more…”
The man tightly hugged Jin-ha’s waist and crawled up to bury his face in Jin-ha’s stomach.
“W-what are you doing?!”
Jin-ha was startled and tried to push the man away, but the man stubbornly clung to him. With the large man pressing his full weight against him, there was no way to resist.
Pushed back down to the ground, Jin-ha belatedly looked around and couldn’t believe his eyes.
They were in a forest. And definitely not a forest that could be in Korea. He was certain because trees this large—where five or six adults with outstretched arms could barely encircle the trunk—couldn’t possibly grow in Korea.
Perplexed, Jin-ha habitually activated his Information Eyes to examine his surroundings. His vision filled with the names of plants and trees commonly found near fairy realm gates.
“Fairy trees…?”
Fairy trees weren’t simply trees that grew in the fairy realm. They grew from the bodies of dead high-ranking fairies and normally remained dormant, awakening only when fairies were in danger to protect their companions—they were the fairies’ guardians.
And there weren’t just one or two such trees…
At that moment, the branches of light filling his vision suddenly began to flicker. After flashing a few times, his vision was suddenly filled with light.
Jin-ha reflexively closed his Information Eyes and checked his status window. For a Hunter, his status window was unusually simple, with only one skill:
Information Eyes.
But next to that skill was a red “unavailable” indicator. The reason soon became clear. His mana level was displayed as 127(153). This meant that while his mana capacity limit was only 127, it was currently filled to 153. As he sighed, the number in parentheses changed to 154.
It was mana oversaturation. When mana exceeds the body’s limits, the flow becomes unstable, making it impossible to use mana safely. If he forced the use of mana in this state, he could explode or his mana could drop into negative numbers, causing his body to collapse.
It seemed the mana concentration in this land was far higher than on Earth, affecting his body.
If he had been conscious, he wouldn’t have allowed external mana to affect his body like this, but having fainted, he had been helplessly affected.
Now his Information Eyes were effectively sealed until his mana normalized.
‘For the time being, I’m no different from a civilian carrying lots of artifacts.’
Jin-ha sighed and began searching his foggy memory to figure out what had happened to him.
He had heard about a gate that wasn’t detected by radar and had urgently flown by helicopter to Mount Yonghwa in Gangwon Province. Then he met Dr. Jo Sung-hyun, heard his story, confirmed the gate, and was reading its information when…
‘What happened next?’
Clearly, a large hand…
As Jin-ha tried to remember, he suddenly touched his neck. A hand from beyond the gate had grabbed his neck and pulled him through.
Jin-ha instinctively looked down at the man’s hand wrapped around his waist. It did seem similar to the hand he had seen when being dragged here.
The shape of the large, firm hand…
“Do you like my hand?”
Startled by the sudden whisper, Jin-ha half raised his upper body. The man embracing his waist had opened his sleepy eyes.
“You, if you’re awake…”
“You can touch it.”
“No need.”
Jin-ha reflexively declined and looked down in bewilderment at the man who showed no intention of moving away.
Who could this person be? The most likely possibility was that he was a civilian who had gone to the mountain to gather food and fallen into the gate, but his attire was too simple for that—just a light shirt and leather pants. Nobody would go food gathering dressed like that.
Moreover, clinging to someone while sleeping, and even after waking, blinking slowly as if intoxicated with sleep—this wasn’t behavior a normal adult man would show. Their current position could make anyone think they were in an intimate relationship.
It was extremely suspicious.
“…”
As Jin-ha, with heightened wariness, was about to question the man’s identity, the man crawled up Jin-ha’s body, resting his cheek on Jin-ha’s chest, and said:
“I wish you would touch me.”
His shameless demeanor, as if complaining that such a small request wasn’t being granted after reaching out to a stranger—all while climbing on top of the person’s body—was quite brazen.
Recalling a possibility from this unusual behavior, Jin-ha asked with a pale face:
“You… how many days have you been here?”
“Probably about four days…?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve been with fairies all this time?”
The man’s eyes widened.
“How did you know?”
Looking down at the man whose eyes were shining with curiosity, Jin-ha groaned softly.
“Did you see it? I thought you were unconscious.”
“No, I didn’t see anything, but there are ways to tell.”
Jin-ha replied with a grim expression, then asked again:
“Don’t you remember how you fell into this gate?”
Asked with some hope that his current suspicion might be wrong, the man frowned as if he didn’t understand the question.
Jin-ha asked again:
“Was it you who pulled me to this side?”
“That’s right. The fairy opened the path, and I brought you here.”
“When did the fairy leave?”
“Just a little while ago, after seeing you arrive.”
A normal person, even if they had done such a thing, would have hidden the fact that they had harmed someone as much as possible.
“Anything else you want to know?”
But this man not only disclosed everything without hesitation but seemed compliant, as if willing to answer anything more.
This was exactly the attitude a fairy would show.
Confident, composed, utterly relaxed, and seemingly fearless.
Jin-ha sat up, grabbed the man’s shoulders, and said in a serious tone:
“…It’s going to be alright.”
This man was clearly suffering from fairy sickness.
