He didn’t know the old man’s name or age, but it had already been four years since they’d started living together. Even without proper conversations, sharing meals and a living space day after day naturally built a bond. At first, it was out of a sense of moral duty to help the elderly, but now Satin truly cared for the old man.
As he carefully harvested a wild ginseng root, making sure not to damage it, Satin mulled over lunch ideas.
Maybe I’ll fry some mountain greens.
Or perhaps a seasoned greens salad served with noodles would be nice.
It’d be great if we had rice…
Unfortunately, no one in the area cultivated rice. Many didn’t even know what it was. According to someone knowledgeable about ingredients, rice could be found if you traveled to the southern countries—but even then, it wasn’t the kind they had in Korea. Long-grain, non-sticky varieties were better suited for fried rice.
I’d kill for just a bowl of fried rice…
In any case, with no rice available, Satin had no choice but to adapt to flour-based cooking. Back when he lived with his older sister, he had taken care of the housework, so it wasn’t too difficult—just a bit more tedious without ready-made ingredients.
Still, you can only eat so much bread. Every time he craved Korean food, he turned to kalguksu or sujebi, but even that was starting to wear thin. He needed a greater variety of cooking methods.
A couple of months after settling into the cabin, he had asked a local villager to teach him how to make noodles the traditional way. It was similar to the process of making fresh pasta dough. He’d only ever seen a video of it before, but it turned out to be easier than expected.
Now, Satin could knead dough with his eyes closed. Since everything started with kneading flour, he’d even developed some muscle in his arms.
Maybe it’s thanks to puberty too.
Satin figured he was probably around twenty-three or twenty-four years old. He was clearly younger than his real age, but his appearance was a little too peculiar to guess accurately. Not that it mattered—there was no way to know for sure, and no one would judge him for speculating.
Since I ended up in a fantasy world, it wouldn’t have been too much to ask for blond or red hair, right?
Instead, he had curly black hair like seaweed and dark eyes. Not bad, just… a bit plain. Considering more than half the villagers had brown hair, black hair seemed to be relatively rare around here too.
In fantasy novels, it wasn’t unusual to see characters with pink or blue hair. But his sister must not have had that kind of imagination, because everyone here had ordinary hair colors.
Brown was the most common, with occasional red, and rarer blond or black. Listing them like this made it seem like there weren’t many, but each had subtle differences in brightness and saturation, making them all distinct.
Whoa, this one’s huge.
Lost in thought, the work had gone by quickly.
Satin carefully lifted a large root. With something this big, he figured it could easily fetch over a hundred million won.
I wonder if people here even like wild ginseng?
Probably not.
Even though they picked other wild greens, they left this conspicuous ginseng alone. That had to mean they weren’t interested.
Satin gently placed the ginseng into his basket and stood up. It was about time to start preparing lunch.
Lunchtime is a major event.
In self-sufficiency novels, meals were as spotlight-worthy as farming or foraging. Especially meals that captured the essence of the season.
Satin had completely adapted to this novel now.
***
He made a thin batter of flour and starch, lightly seasoned with salt, then dipped the mountain greens into it. When he dropped them into the heated oil, a lively sizzle burst out like a sudden rainstorm.
As he waited for the right time to take them out, the old man wandered over, drawn by the sound. Satin quickly shooed him back into the room. Getting burned by hot oil could be a disaster.
“You’ll get hurt if you stay here, seriously.”
While Satin could handle meals and sleeping arrangements decently enough, he wasn’t confident in treating injuries.
After frying a generous batch of mountain greens and eating until he was full, he got started on the pile of overdue chores. The laundry he’d been putting off had become a mountain.
Someone once said that the washing machine was one of the inventions that changed the world. Standing ankle-deep in a wooden tub full of clothes, stomping them clean, Satin couldn’t help but miss that far-off technology.
“Saaa…tin……”
“Yeah, it’s such a nice day, isn’t it?”
Taking advantage of the good weather to tackle the laundry, he sat the old man by the garden so he could soak up some sunlight. Though his eyes were cloudy, he seemed to feel the warmth—his mouth hung open as he gazed up at the clouds.
“Grandpa.”
“Ugh…”
“Sometimes I think about stuff like this.”
“Saaa…”
“Characters like me usually follow one of two storylines.”
Satin knew the old man wasn’t really listening. Even if he were, he probably wouldn’t understand. Still, it felt better than just talking to himself, so he pretended to be speaking to the old man.
“The first version goes like this—I take care of you as best I can until I get exhausted and run away. Then, time passes. I regret leaving and come back. I see you and the old cabin just as I left them, and I realize how empty the world outside really is…”
A few similar stories flashed through his mind in rapid succession.
“The other version? I just keep looking after you. Day after day. Then, one day, a stranger shows up. They can’t understand why I’m living like this, but in the end, they leave. After the storm, the lake always returns to calm.”
Which version had his sister imagined? He had no way of knowing now, so Satin would simply live as he pleased. Still, he’d probably always wonder.
“Honestly, I kind of like this life. You’d probably say I’m talking nonsense, but I’ve already lived a life out of a movie. It would’ve been nice if it were a melodrama or a romance—but nope, it was a psychological thriller.”
The weather had warmed past “pleasant” into a faint humidity, but his feet remained chilly. Satin looked down at them. After stomping laundry for so long, his ankles had turned pale. A cold tingle ran from his back up to his scalp.
His life before meeting his sister—the time that shaped the person once called ㅇㅇ. That person had grown used to fear and horror, become numb, and then returned to feeling scared again… realizing, once more, how terrifying it all was.
“A life where nothing happens is perfectly fine. You just live like this, and I’ll just live like this too. Do laundry, pick greens, soak in the sunlight…”
A life where nothing happens. Today, the same as yesterday. A peace that felt indistinguishable from boredom, a stability that felt like stasis. A life that couldn’t be called joyful, even as flattery. And yet, Satin really was okay with this life.
“But every time I say things like this, peace always ends up breaking.”
“Saa…tin.”
“You might not get it, but this is what they call a flag. The moment you say, ‘I want to keep living like this with Grandpa,’ something always happens… and then Grandpa…”
Without meaning to, the words were coming out a little too dark. Satin shook his head, recalling the old saying that words have power. The old man, meanwhile, just drooled slightly, eyes not even flicking toward Satin.
Looking at the side of his face, Satin chuckled softly.
“Nah, come on—what are the chances?”
It wasn’t like they’d only been together a day or two—it had been four years. He couldn’t imagine anything changing now. If some big incident were going to happen, it would’ve happened already.
Thinking leisurely, Satin returned to the laundry.
After he finished, he spent some time on housework until, before he knew it, the sun was beginning to set.
They weren’t kidding when they said, ‘You eat lunch, blink, and it’s dinner time.’
He stir-fried the leftover greens from lunch and tossed in some noodles. A touch of spice at the end made it just flavorful enough to be edible.
He led the old man, who had been sitting by the window watching shadows ripple across the forest, over to the table.
“I should’ve learned how to make soy sauce.”
Just adding a bit would’ve made this taste so much better. As he fed the old man a bite of noodles, Satin let out a small sigh of regret.
He’d managed to get his hands on red pepper flakes and fermented seafood with relative ease. He wasn’t sure if anything like jeotgal existed here, but there was something close. Then again, salting was one of the most basic preservation methods. It made sense that it’d be common even in this world.
The main difference between their fermented seafood and the kind Satin knew came down to ingredients. Being inland, they used freshwater shrimp, and whatever else they added made the smell and taste unbearable on its own. But when mixed into homemade kimchi, it added a deep umami flavor. Last winter, he’d eaten kalguksu with kimchi every other day.
“If I keep experimenting, maybe I can make something close someday.”
After all, it just involved soybeans and salt—if he kept at it through trial and error, he was bound to end up with something similar eventually.
Slurping up a bite of noodles, Satin spoke with a touch of hope.
“It’s not like I’m short on time or anything.”
***
As the weather grew steadily warmer, the stream of people picking mountain greens thinned out. When Satin went to help out in the village, someone mentioned that it looked like summer was arriving early this year. They didn’t divide the seasons into fine segments like in Korea, but as an agricultural society, people here were still highly sensitive to climate shifts.
Satin, who knew almost nothing about farming, simply listened quietly to the villagers as they predicted this year’s harvest. Then someone said:
“You should keep a closer eye on your grandpa.”
Satin, who prided himself on caring diligently for the old man, felt a little taken aback. But the villager hadn’t meant it as a rebuke.
“With it getting hot so suddenly, old folks can collapse outta nowhere.”
“Ah…”
“Make sure he’s drinking water regularly.”
Satin gave a quick nod, and after a while longer, the day’s work wrapped up.
