Chapter 15: The Ice Queen and the New Chief

Thud.

I closed the dictionary without reading even a single page. With a deep sigh, I returned it to its place. On the small chest of drawers, cluttered with various items, only two books rested: a dictionary and a children’s fairy tale.

When I went to the bookstore to buy the dictionary, the familiar cover of the fairy tale had caught my eye. Perhaps it was the only book I truly knew, so I bought it as a first gift to myself.

After purchasing it as if in a trance, I had merely kept it stored away. Now, feeling restless, my hand instinctively reached for it. I stared intently at the cover, which depicted a cold-faced queen.

It was peculiar how the man came to mind, perhaps due to the shared characteristic of ‘ice.’

I leaned against the wall and began turning the pages. The text was sparse, with illustrations filling most of the pages.

Once upon a time, in a snow-covered plain, there lived an Ice Queen.

A traveler ventured into her land, where she spent her days conjuring snow and crafting moving ice sculptures. As the Queen conversed with him, she realized something profound: loneliness. A feeling she hadn’t known existed while alone, yet it melted her frozen heart.

In a world entirely made of ice, her solitary, melted heart began to feel the biting cold and pain. While the traveler’s presence offered some solace, returning to her perpetually solitary domain left her in agony, barely able to compose herself.

Terrified, the Queen cast a powerful curse upon her entire castle. She sought to prevent the traveler from ever leaving.

My gaze remained fixed on one particular illustration.

It depicted a grand ballroom. On a wide dais, a few steps up from the front, two chairs stood prominently. In one sat the traveler, transformed into an ice statue, adorned in lavish clothes as if merely asleep. Next to him sat the Queen.

The Queen wept silently, her face devoid of expression.

That image, strangely vivid, lingered in my mind, flickering beneath my eyelids as I tried to sleep that night.

It was the third day after my discharge from the hospital.

The unsettling feeling from the fairy tale, coupled with lingering unease about the man who was practically a monstrous being, had yet to subside. Nevertheless, I contacted Park Myeong-seok, informing him I would return to work.

It had been almost ten days since the incident at the site.

Though I desperately wanted to hole up at home until I was certain the man’s interest in me had completely waned, it simply wasn’t an option. I needed money. And a substantial amount at that.

The atmosphere on site, after my long absence, felt strangely tense.

Park Myeong-seok greeted me with his usual welcoming smile, asking if Kim Cheol-su had arrived. However, the shadow lingering around his cheeks betrayed his true feelings.

“Is something wrong?”

Park Myeong-seok didn’t answer immediately, instead staring at me blankly with a somewhat surprised expression. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ I questioned, my eyes conveying my bewilderment. He merely scratched the back of his head.

“I know you can speak,” he admitted, “but I just can’t get used to it. It feels… awkward.”

He cleared his throat, then belatedly answered my question.

“It hasn’t even been half a month since that incident. You went to the brink of death, and even if you survived, most of us were close to those who died. It would be stranger if everyone had already shaken it off.”

I tilted my head. Despite his words, few people seemed genuinely changed.

“Because no one here isn’t desperate for money,” he said, a wry smile gracing his lips as he surveyed the site. Though they pretended otherwise, chatting boisterously as usual, a subtle unease, like crumbling plaster, seemed to flake from them.

Even temporary workers like Yongsik were rare these days. No matter how precious money was, it wasn’t more precious than life itself. Accidents were not uncommon in this line of work, and given its nature, any incident inevitably resulted in fatalities.

Park Myeong-seok, who had been on this site longer than anyone, his eyes growing dim, a place where a low death toll was considered fortunate.

No one was free from desperation. That statement included Park Myeong-seok himself.

His wife suffered from Miasma addiction. He was a man who considered it his life’s mission to raise his young daughter and support his family in place of his ailing wife.

“You stood in front of me that day. I’ll probably never forget it. If I wasn’t there, my wife’s life would end. Then… my daughter would be left alone in the world.”

Myeong-seok’s heartfelt words, delivered in a parched voice, made the Miasma Stone I had secretly taken feel all the more prominent. Inside the inner pocket of my old jumper, a slightly torn seam revealing the contents, lay a Miasma Stone.

It was an indispensable component for life-sustaining Miasma addiction treatment, easily worth over five million credits.

I finally managed to speak, the words coming with difficulty.

“You received help… in time, didn’t you?”

My implication was that he would have been safe even if I hadn’t intervened.

“That’s something we can’t know. It’s an event that didn’t happen. Perhaps I would have been injured, and the outcome would have been the same. Aren’t we hunters who can’t fight?”

I immediately understood what Park Myeong-seok was trying to convey. The epithet for F-ranks varied from city to city, yet its meaning remained consistently similar.

Hunters who cannot hunt.

F-ranks were easily made scapegoats, blamed and expelled whenever problems arose. Unlike other ranks, F-ranks had no hope of recovery once branded.

Legally, it was difficult for them to find work typically done by ordinary citizens, and permits were rarely granted. In this day and age, who would believe that people could starve to death within a city?

F-ranks, however, were alienated from the city. They could neither blend with hunters nor truly belong to the citizenry. While Park Myeong-seok always lamented this fact, I felt nothing in particular. To be precise, I was indifferent.

I had always been an outsider. From my earliest days as a bruised, emaciated child to my current status as a returnee, I had always been detached from life, floating through a world that was not truly mine.

I could not commit my heart anywhere, nor could I ever fully settle down. Whenever I felt that inch-wide gap, I would pose questions to which there was no one to answer.

‘Could I ever find peace if I personally confirmed the deaths of the Three Crescent Moons and the head of the Lee family? Would I be able to shake off the curse-like words that urged me to find the Three Crescent Moons Guild?’

The mere thought made my heart churn once more. If their graves existed, I felt I would need to spit on them just to quell this burning heat.

“I’ve been holding you up with my idle chatter. Apparently, a new section chief has been assigned to the Post-Processing Department today, and there’s a group dinner planned. Let’s finish work quickly and go get something delicious to eat.”

Whether it was a section chief or a department head, I had no interest, yet it strangely grated on my nerves. By the time I thought to ask for more details, Park Myeong-seok had already walked some distance away.

The nature of the uneasy premonition, which had pricked at me like a thorn hidden in my shoe, was revealed on my way home.

“Hello everyone. I am Sagyeol, the newly appointed section chief of the Post-Processing Department.”

The association’s regular employees, who usually strutted around with stiff necks whenever they came to the site, applauded enthusiastically. The laborers, with clouded eyes, alternated their gazes between the suit-clad officials and the young section chief.

Park Myeong-seok exhaled a sigh, as if a long-standing mystery had finally been solved.

“I thought it was odd for someone to just show up in such an outlying area,” he muttered, “but it turns out he’s the new section chief.”

I clenched my jaw in silence. Then, from amidst the murmuring laborers, someone raised a hand.

“Your name is the same as the Guild Master of the Credit Guild in Grisha, isn’t it?”

I flinched. The name Sagyeol was still unfamiliar, but I had certainly heard of the mega-city ‘Grisha’ and its undisputed number one guild, ‘Credit.’ Surely not….

I narrowed my eyes, observing his reaction intently. He replied without the slightest hint of perturbation.

“I changed my name. He is someone I personally admire greatly.”

That crazy son of a… No, ‘Who would actually believe that?’ I thought, glancing around. To my surprise, people were either nodding in bewildered acceptance or murmuring, ‘It could happen.’

More precisely, they took it as a joke, and the suit-clad officials seemed to have no intention of questioning it. Sagyeol, utterly shameless, merely shrugged his shoulders.

“Living in Baekdam, what reason would I have to be involved with him? He probably doesn’t even know I changed my name to his.”

His tone truly sounded like a joke. Thinking about it, it made sense. It was far more realistic that he had simply changed his name than for the leader of a mega-city’s top guild to become a section chief in a backwater town’s Post-Processing Department.

To be exact, it was just the kind of remark one might casually toss out as a joke. It wasn’t as if he was the only person in the world with that name.

‘Perhaps I’m just being overly sensitive. This is the Middle Realm, after all.’

“The introductions are done, so let’s go eat. I’ll treat everyone to a grand feast.”

“Ooh!”

For the first time, the association employees and the laborers united, surging out together. Only I remained, left conspicuously alone. More precisely, only Sagyeol and I were left in the area.

The association employees, mindful of their new section chief, cast furtive glances our way. The object of their attention smiled sweetly at me.

“Aren’t you coming?”

‘I’m not going. Why would I go there? Am I insane?’ When I simply gave him a cold, dead stare, the man merely shrugged.

“Then next time, I’ll be waiting at your doorstep.”

…You crazy bastard.

I glared at him fiercely. The man, showing no signs of intimidation, simply continued to grin.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“Hmm, should I really say why here? It doesn’t bother me, but I imagine Kim Cheol-su might not appreciate it.”

His words were quite loaded with meaning. I decided to clear my mind. Engaging seriously with a demon or a madman only ever led to trouble. I would simply ignore him.

‘I wouldn’t speak to him again. I wouldn’t even move until he left first.’ As I silently expressed this resolve, he sighed and approached me.

My expectation that he would stop at a respectable distance proved futile. He pressed closer, his lips brushing against my ear.

“I told you, didn’t I? I fell for you.”

…!

My eyes slowly widened. Over the man’s shoulder, my gaze met that of an association employee who had been watching us from a distance. Startled, he hastily spun around.

His reaction was akin to someone witnessing their direct superior in a compromising situation. The words “It’s not like that!” surged up to my throat.

But before I could even explain, the employee fled, rushing to join his colleagues. The misunderstanding couldn’t be corrected, and it was bound to spread throughout the entire Post-Processing Department before long.

As I despaired, the man abruptly thrust his face close to mine.

“Oh, now I can see your expression,” he remarked. “Perhaps I should have looked this closely from the start.”

In that moment, I resolved.

‘I’ll kill him.’