“Look at this, it's addressed to the esteemed Lee Geon.”
Lee Geon chuckled as he looked at the envelope he had snatched from Hugo.
He took the letter out of the envelope.
“Oh, your wife’s handwriting is pretty.”
At that sight, Hugo was furious.
“Hey, aren’t you going to hand that over?! Why are you reading a handwritten letter that I’ve barely ever received!”
Lee Geon paid him no mind.
“And it’s a whopping ten pages long.”
“What?! Ten pages for the likes of you? The most I ever got was three!”
Hugo reached out, threatening to burn it immediately, but he couldn’t even touch Lee Geon.
Then, Lee Geon turned away and nonchalantly read the contents.
“To Lee Geon-nim, always radiant as the sun and the most wonderful person in this world. Though I worry this may come as a sudden discourtesy, I simply had to express my gratitude.”
“Don’t read it! Who the hell are you to get a letter like that! Burn it right now!”
Enraged, Hugo even summoned flames, but Lee Geon promptly kicked him away.
“You wanna die? How dare you lay a hand on my fan letter.”
Lee Geon told someone of Hugo’s caliber not to interfere, and quickly skimmed the letter.
The contents were full of heartfelt thanks.
First, she was truly thankful for saving both her own life and Hugo’s sanctuary. Next, she expressed gratitude and apologized for protecting their daughter and son.
The latter part was concern for Lee Geon, and apologies and gratitude concerning her husband’s affairs.
She must have heard various things from their daughter and son.
They say you can gauge a person’s character to some degree through their writing.
It was hard to believe such a person was the wife of his friend—she felt so upright. He could see the neatly contained sincerity, careful not to become a burden.
But there is no way to hide a fangirl’s heart (?), after all.
Even in the polite and ordinary phrases, a sense of liking him so much she didn’t know what to do (?) was palpable.
If she’d had her way, it felt like she had just held back from writing I like Lee Geon-nim, I like, I like.
‘Well, I noticed ever since my museum popped up in that date picture.’
Though Hugo had stubbornly insisted his wife wasn’t Lee Geon’s fan.
But regardless, Hugo was fuming.
“You won’t hand it over? You bastard, give it here!”
Lee Geon, however, didn’t even pretend to hear him. Far from it, he held the letter high and shouted.
“Ah, Lee Geon-nim! Lee Geon-nim is my ideal type!”
Realizing that Lee Geon was shouting the actual contents of the letter, Hugo’s eyes flashed.
“Are you kidding me?! You’re making that up!”
Hugo fumed, claiming his wife would never say such a thing, but Lee Geon calmly said,
“Don’t worry though. There’s a part about you at the end. Quite a long one.”
At those words, Hugo’s face brightened.
“What? About me? Long?”
He straightened his jacket as if to say, ‘Of course.’ The corners of his mouth lifting was a bonus.
“Geez, Jiu, praising me again. I told her not to do that in front of others... What did she write? Well, obviously it’s something about a wonderful husband...”
“I apologize that my good-for-nothing husband always seems to be causing trouble for Lee Geon-nim.”
“……?!”
Hugo froze.
“He is an indecisive husband lacking in cultivation. Compared to the outstanding Lee Geon-nim, he is a husband with many shortcomings, but please do not cast him aside and continue to look after him. However, should he prove of no help, please discard him immediately. If you mess up, she says she’ll discard you and go.”
Stabbed by the sharp words, Hugo despaired.
“Discard... discard me...”
The damage must have been severe.
But that wasn’t the end. Reading the last page of the letter, Lee Geon smirked.
And he showed it to Hugo.
‘!’
Hugo wondered what this bastard was going to torment him with this time, but as soon as he saw the page Lee Geon held out, his eyes widened.
It couldn’t be helped.
[I love you♡]
“?!!”
Hugo let out a shriek.
Then he immediately started calling someone.
Watching this, Lee Geon snickered.
In truth, the original text was [Lee Geon-nim, I’ve been a long-time fan. I respect you. And I love you♡].
It was just that he’d covered the part before ‘I love you’ with his finger.
And the letter was actually filled with sincere love and concern for Hugo.
Plus, it was a heartwarming letter that even conveyed gratitude toward Lee Geon himself.
Well, whatever.
“S-Saint Lord! What are you doing at a time like this!”
Gott, beside the raging Hugo, was aghast.
“Why are you suddenly ordering ten thousand flowers?!”
“I’m sending them to Jiu’s hospital room!”
“Huh? Ah, no, you have more important things right now! The discussion about rare species for world safety...”
“This is more important right now!”
“No, Saint Lord! Not ten thousand flowers! You have to leave some for this month’s living expenses...”
“I’ll starve!”
“Huh?!”
Gott was at his wit’s end trying to stop the frenzied Hugo.
Meanwhile, Lee Jae-won was calmly picking out flower types, saying this one was prettier.
That was when.
“So what about the thing I ordered?”
“!”
At Lee Geon’s question, both Gott, who had been stopping Hugo, and Lee Jae-won, their eyes changed.
Soon Lee Jae-won spoke.
“First, the neck portion of the red eye that had been displayed in the stadium appears to have already been stolen.”
Lee Geon smiled as if intrigued.
“Oh?”
“Yes. Of course, some part remained, so we retrieved it...”
After receiving something from Lee Jae-won, Lee Geon smiled.
[Scale of the Red Eye]
-A part of the red eye. A tiny amount of data remains. If there is a larger piece, it seems more data could be extracted.
The corners of Lee Geon’s mouth lifted.
Perhaps because a thief had tampered with it. Data that couldn’t normally be extracted from a corpse was surfacing.
It was a gain.
And though he didn’t know why it had been taken, Lee Geon became quite interested.
Naturally, data from that red eye wouldn’t be ordinary.
But for now, this was what mattered.
“What about the item I requested?”
“Yes. The item you mentioned was found and snuck out of the Leo Saint’s waiting room.”
The ones surprised by those words were none other than the Leo sanctuary members.
How dare they pilfer from the Saint’s waiting room!
And as if to answer that question, Lee Jae-won smiled sharply.
“As Lee Geon-nim expected, the Leo Saint brought an abundance of those items.”
“He brought an entire bundle packed to the stadium.”
Gott unfolded a wooden tablet.
[Wooden Tablet of the Genius Workshop (S)]
Simultaneously, with a flash of light, a bundle burst out of the tablet.
And the moment they saw that bundle, the Leo sanctuary members were horrified.
‘That’s...!’
Indeed.
The contents of the bundle were all items of Lee Geon that Leo had collected.
And they themselves were the ones who had transported that cargo.
So they also knew just how precious the items inside were.
Thanks to that, their faces turned pale.
‘Dammit, if that goes missing, all hell will break loose!’
So they wondered how it had been stolen, but then saw the culprits who had stolen it and realized.
‘Gott and Lee Jae-won...!’
Both were called top talents, so much so that it was a waste for them to belong to Sagittarius.
For the missionary sanctuaries, there’s the Missionary Top 50 list, and both of them were on it.
‘Well, Leo went to scout them too and only got humiliated.’
But these guys, who had been so stuck up, were now blatantly attached to Lee Geon?
They were about to say something, but that’s when it happened.
Crash! Crash!
“Ah! Lee Geon-nim!”
The Leo sanctuary members screamed. Lee Geon was checking his belongings in the bundle and throwing a fit.
“Ah, that bastard. He scraped together all sorts of crap.”
“?!”
Had he held onto a faint hope that with these items, he could even win a spar against him?
‘Well, he probably originally intended to use them as a bargaining chip.’
They must have been a last resort brought in case money didn’t work.
Whatever.
“That bastard, why does he have my chamber pot?”
Crash!
“Ah! That’s a hundred-million-dollar white porcelain!”
Those were items Stephen had painstakingly collected by visiting the wealthy.
Of course, there were precious items he ultimately had to give up on because they wouldn’t budge, but still, they were all expensive and rare.
Be that as it may, Lee Geon mercilessly smashed his own things.
Crash! Crash!
And that was when.
‘!’
As if embarrassed by items he made long ago, Lee Geon, who had been ruthlessly destroying his things, smiled.
“Ah, found it.”
What Lee Geon picked up was a bamboo container.
He roughly knew which items Kweng had won at auction, and hearing that the guy had schlepped something to the stadium, he had a hunch.
‘Bingo.’
When he shook the container, though much had evaporated, the liquid sloshed, showing the contents were still intact.
[Blood of the Great Demon That Cannot Lie]
‘With this, I can activate this fountain pen.’
[Wooden Fountain Pen That Cannot Write Falsehoods]
- Can never write a lie.
Maybe because it was made early on and the monster’s energy wasn’t purified.
Or maybe because it was an evil monster.
Among his creations, it was an item where a risk had arisen like a mutation.
And because the risk was so severe, he rarely used it, but at this point, it was an item to use on the Saints.
Why?
[Don’t you know? The one who stabbed your back is that guy. Virgo.]
Simply put, it was a lie detector.
Well, it’s fine to deal with all the Saints, but it’s problematic if there’s information he doesn’t know.
Then Hugo, who knew the identity of that bamboo container, whispered to Kevin.
“You think that guy is the culprit, right?”
“No, the culprit is Libra.”
“What?”
Lee Geon smiled eerily.
“I said I was stabbed in the back, but I never once said I was stabbed in the waist.”
“……!!”
Indeed.
The area where Lee Geon was stabbed was exactly the lower back.
And who else but the culprit would know that precisely?
But it wasn’t something that could be seen as only Libra being involved.
Perhaps not just the Saints, but an unknown civilization might have been involved.
‘No, perhaps...’
Lee Geon glanced at the lion emblem engraved in the stadium.
And that mark was also the symbol of the Holy Gods.
Simultaneously, the snake’s eyes watching it flashed eerily.
And what was Lee Geon thinking?
‘First of all.’
Lee Geon took out the fountain pen and dipped the nib into the bamboo container.
Then surprisingly, the fountain pen absorbed the ink and glowed.
At the same time, a voice was heard.
[The dormant wooden pencil receives the energy of Ophiuchus and evolves.]
[The evil energy is purified by the energy of Ophiuchus.]
[The risk is greatly reduced.]
[It can be bestowed upon a scribe.]
Once charged, Lee Geon wrote something in his notebook. Then he tore out a page each and held them out to Hugo and Kevin.
“Take them.”
“??”
They looked at the papers they each received, nonplussed.
It was a questionnaire.
But the expressions of the two Saints who received the questionnaire were a sight to see.
Why?
[Q. What do you think of Lee Geon?]
[Q. What do you want to do with Lee Geon?]
“...What is this?”
“What do you mean? Answer it?”
They wondered why this bastard was suddenly handing out stuff like this, but Lee Geon smiled brightly and held out the fountain pen.
“Use this to answer.”
“……?”
They took the fountain pen Lee Geon held out, as if dumbfounded.
Watching that sight, the corners of Lee Geon’s mouth lifted.
‘After these guys, it’s Scorpio.’
By roughly asking what they thought of him, he could gauge whether they were friend or foe.
That was when. Soon, Cheon Yuha, having checked something on her phone, brightened.
Then Lee Geon dusted off his hands.
“Alright. Tonight, let’s head up from here. Directly north.”
At those words, Hugo tilted his head.
Naturally, because the original plan was to head west and enter Toronto.
Other than that, it was the Scorpion’s Forest, so it was dangerous.
But.
“If it’s north from here...”
As he gauged the location, Hugo’s face contorted.
He had caught onto Lee Geon’s ulterior motive.
Sure enough.
“Hey! That’s the direction of the hospital!”
“Why? The hospital is right in front of the Scorpio sanctuary anyway. And Seongjae is there.”
Besides, there was something he needed to do when he met Seongjae on the way.
It was due to a matter related to Ophiuchus.
[Sanctuary Mission]
- Grant official baptism to the sanctuary members.
- You may bestow baptismal names.
- Upon receiving a baptismal name, the sanctuary member will awaken a unique skill.
- If official baptism is not granted, the sanctuary member’s abilities will be limited.
At that sight, Lee Geon smiled.
‘I need to select Saints too, there’s a lot to do.’
Well, even if we say the kidnapped (?) Leo sanctuary members start with 100% faith right off the bat.
Anyway, it seemed he needed to head to the hospital first and give Seongjae his official awakening.
Of course, that wasn’t the real reason he was going to the hospital.
Sure enough.
“Your wife, what does she like?”
This bastard, for real!
But that very moment.
“!”
[Sanctuary Contribution has increased.]
[Sanctuary Experience has increased.]
[The existence of the scribe has manifested.]
[Danger has visited sanctuary member 1.]
(To be continued in the next episode)