“This is one of the hideouts of the Flower organization.”
His hardened expression didn’t soften.
“What did you say? I didn’t hear you well.”
The place was no different from a landfill, reeking of waste scattered everywhere.
Although there were no starved corpses, hungry children watched us silently from nearby.
A figure, seemingly an adult, stared at from beneath a hood before turning away without a word.
The ntion of Flower made stretch out my hand before even any emotional reaction.
“Let’s avoid unnecessary disputes.”
At the Sage’s intervention, the hand stopped.
The blue mana swirling around my arm flickered, almost ready to shoot.
Stopping myself from casting the magic was difficult, even for .
“…What is this?”
“Lee Shiheon, the children are scared. Please ease your expression a bit.”
Was I too agitated?
When I followed the Sage’s gaze, I saw children who looked freshly weaned. There was a girl who seed to be in middle school, and a boy who looked like he’d cause trouble.
Most had faces filled with fear, though a few glared at with pure hatred, as if I were an intruder.
They were children struggling to survive.
At an age when they should be carefree and playful, their cheeks were sunken.
Their expressions, filled with anxiety and worry, were too much to bear.
I withdrew my mana from my arm.
“Are you saying that Flower is protecting these children?”
My thoughts were already in disarray due to what Guseul and Taeyang had told .
My voice twisted with irritation.
“Is that really what the great Sage believes?”
I couldn’t show them a pleasant face, so I pulled out a mask from my cloak and put it on.
The Sage’s expression didn’t change, calm and unbothered.
I couldn’t help but find it irritating how she looked at with pity.
Only after taking a deep breath could I regain composure.
“When did I ever say I was defending them?”
She spoke calmly.
“Good and evil, beauty and ugliness shift with ti. I neither condemn nor defend anyone.”
“Anyone can say such obvious things.”
There were positive aspects to this group too.
But could she truly expect to listen to such rhetoric calmly? Even tearing it to shreds wouldn’t be enough to express my frustration.
If we accepted and understood everything, then no evil group would ever exist.
Go ahead, justify racial supremacist groups or environntal extremists who killed in the na of protection.
“Don’t cover up the problem with platitudes. Flower is Flower, and bringing here is nothing short of betrayal from the World Tree’s perspective.”
Although I kept formal speech, my words were far from kind.
I had no intention of criticizing the Sage’s humanitarian actions.
In a narrow sense, they were good deeds.
But the weight of nas matters. It’s different when an ordinary person helps children here versus a Sage doing the sa.
Even just the presence of a Sage repeatedly visiting Flower’s dwellings was enough to raise significant issues.
“If Flower exposes this, things won’t end well for you either.”
“Do you really think I’d fall for such a move, Shiheon?”
“Probably not.”
“Please calm yourself a bit more and listen to .”
I stopped talking and looked down at her.
Her expression remained composed, exuding a sense of ease.
“Shall we move on to the next place?”
She raised her hand, ready to cast spatial magic.
As I watched her, Guseul’s words echoed in my mind.
-There are those in Flower who engage in terrorism, and others who only do humanitarian work. We are not that bad. We haven’t killed innocent people.
Nonsense.
Even if I ignored the blatant lie that no innocents were killed, as long as Flower operated as a unified entity, they were in the sa boat.
Regardless of internal conflicts or differences in thods, as long as the faction remained intact, they benefited from each other’s functions and turned a blind eye to it. �
It was amusing if you think about it.
In a way, it implied that factional divisions within Flower were routine.
A terrorist was a terrorist.
Unless soone turned it all upside down.
And even if they did, they wouldn’t escape the stigma.
……
This was a world I couldn’t help but despise.
“Lee Shiheon.”
“Yes.”
“The place we’re going next isn’t a Flower base, so you don’t have to worry.”
My face flushed with heat.
I cooled my mind and put the mask back on.
The next destination was another slum.
The difference from the previous place was the abundance of broken building debris.
Elderly people and children were scavenging scrap tal from the rubble.
The scene made it easy to grasp what had happened here.
“This place was the site of a terrorist attack long ago.”
It was a battlefield where the forces of Flower and the World Tree once clashed.
This place was no better than the neglected Flower residences.
The Sage also carried out relief efforts here.
To my surprise, most of the children knew her and followed her like she was a savior.
Yet, I couldn’t figure out what she wanted to say to .
Dust and stone powder clung to the hem of her white skirt as she interacted with the children. At tis, she seed like their mother.
“Have you morized the coordinates?”
“Yes, roughly. But it might take so ti.”
“Stick with for now. Let’s move to the next place. We should also grab breakfast.”
The other places were similar.
While the atmosphere and directions varied slightly, the Sage mostly visited places where people lived.
Following her around brought back old mories.
I couldn’t recall clearly—it was too long ago. Was it kindergarten? I used to follow a disaster relief group with my father, helping people.
There was even a ti when my face was on the front page of the newspaper. In hindsight, that too was part of the image my father cultivated.
“How long have you been in this world, Lee Shiheon?”
“Don’t you know?”
As she handed out food, the Sage asked the question.
No one around us could understand our language anyway.
“Don’t assu I know everything. Heh. I only know what’s necessary.”
“It hasn’t been a year yet.”
“Then you probably don’t know much about Korea either.”
“True.”
I handed bread to the children as well.
A scruffy little boy hesitated to approach .
Was my bread so unappealing because it wasn’t from the Sage? Feeling a bit disheartened, I handed him the bread, which he snatched and stuffed into his mouth.
Worried he might choke, I gave him a small carton of milk.
“Discrimination between humans and treefolk still runs deep. Even when children die like this, proper aid rarely reaches these places. There’s simply no room for it, and corruption is rampant.”
“Of course.”
“What do you think will happen if Flower and the World Tree start a war?”
How could I know?
War wasn’t sothing to speak of lightly.
Even scholars who devoted decades to their studies couldn’t predict its consequences.
“I promised to teach you about the world, didn’t I?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think would happen if civil war broke out in the Federation?”
The Federation—she ant the United States.
It seed like an out-of-the-blue remark, but since she had just ntioned Flower, I couldn’t ignore it.
Now that I thought about it, I had never seen the Federation’s National Tree.
If I recall, each state elected a different National Tree.
Were they on the brink of division?
“A second civil war?”
I emphasized “second,” considering my knowledge might differ from this world’s.
The Sage nodded, indicating that it aligned with the history I knew.
“If that happens, everything will collapse.”
Markets would freeze, and stock prices would plumt.
“If it ends there, we might actually be relieved.”
Even the collapse of a single small country could trigger unpredictable events. So what if one of the world’s most powerful nations were to fall?
“What if we’re on the brink of that?”
“There are many corporations working with Flower. I’d say there are at least hundreds. And even nations, too.”
“…You must be joking.”
At first, I thought Flower was just a large terrorist group.
But over ti, I realized how much Flower was gradually extending its influence.
The situation had beco so dire that their roots intertwined like tree roots, making it impossible to separate them.
Even knowing that, I still felt the Sage’s words were an exaggeration.
It seed impossible for a nation to cooperate with Flower.
There’s no way the World Tree would allow that to happen unnoticed.
“Hu-hu.”
The Sage smiled faintly.
“When voices grow louder and power accumulates, an unavoidable war will always follow. I’ve seen it too many tis. While the causes of global wars may vary, they ultimately stem from national interests and personal ambitions.”
“…And your point is?”
“Flower stands at the heart of it. Compared to humans, the treefolk are few, and those ideals they proclaim carve rifling into guns even as we speak.”
Corporations chased profit.
If they supported Flower, it must an they saw a reason to do so.
The Sage’s words could be interpreted as a warning: a global civil war might be looming.
We had seen it before—regis overturned by gaining public support through propaganda, ideologies twisting until people fought one another.
Even in this world, with its many superhumans, who knew how a war would unfold?
With science and magic advanced to such a degree, the very foundation of this world could crumble.
It might even beco uninhabitable for humans.
“Sigh… Who could possibly resolve this situation?”
No one.
That was the truth, no matter how you looked at it.
The Sage glanced at , her gaze steady.
“A king, perhaps?”
“Wha—?! ? Geez, you scared .”
“It seems you’re the only one with such potential, though many decisions lie ahead.”
I scoffed.
If the Sage were truly wise, she wouldn’t say such things to .
“Soone like can’t do such things.”
It was nonsense.
Of course, I wasn’t cut out for a role like that.
“I’m more suited to being a drifter. I’d help if war breaks out, but…”
I wasn’t the kind of person who could take on such responsibilities.
When she woke up, Lee Shiheon and the Sage were gone.
Maronnie stepped out of the shower that morning, her indifferent gaze falling on the empty beds.
Sansuyu had holed herself up in the library for a while, apparently after resolving sothing the day before.
It seed she had discussed sothing with the Sage.
“There are many books to read.”
In the end, Maronnie was left alone in the room.
Under normal circumstances, she too would be reading a book. But these days…
Nothing seed to hold her attention anymore.
She felt lethargic, her thoughts constantly haunted by the image of that infuriating man.
Gathering her damp hair into a towel, Maronnie gazed quietly at Lee Shiheon’s bed.
Thump. Thump.
The blanket, still warm with his sweat from the night, and the pillow where his face had rested…
“…No one’s here.”
She brought her hands together and placed them over her chest.
Her face flushed in rhythm with her heartbeat.
…Brainwashing. Lee Shiheon had called it brainwashing.
So this feeling she was experiencing—it was all a lie.
The pounding of her heart, the way his voice kept echoing in her mind, it was all fabricated.
It was because of this that she couldn’t focus on reading.
Maronnie clenched her eyes shut.
Step.
Her feet moved hesitantly toward the bed.
With the utmost caution, as if handling precious silk, she knelt and gently gathered the blanket into her arms.
She buried it in her chest.
“…I’m not doing anything wrong.”
“Blanche, the bad one is that man, the one who looks like your lazy brother. You know that, right?”
‘Yes.’
Maronnie’s thoughts seed to agree with that.
And then, another part of her, the voice that always offered sharp criticisms, joined in.
“…Yeah. He’s the one at fault.”
‘Right?’
This ti, there was no disagreent.
She brought the blanket to her nose and inhaled deeply.
Sniff.
The scent filled her nostrils and seed to lt into her bloodstream.
Her eyes fluttered.
“Sigh…”
She lay down on the bed, clutching the blanket.
Rubbing her cheek against the pillow, she rolled the blanket between her thighs and squeezed it tightly.
A tickling sensation spread through her.
“…”
She pressed her hips forward in small spasms.
Her clean, freshly showered body absorbed his lingering scent as she squird, spreading it across her skin.
It was as if she was reliving that night. Maronnie shut her eyes tightly, muffling the whimper that escaped her lips against the pillow.
“
Saliva trailed onto the pillow’s surface.
Her dazed eyes shifted back toward the bed sheets.
“He said it would fade soon…”
This was a drug—a temporary way to calm her excitent.
It didn’t take long for the bed to beco damp with her body’s fluids.
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