*
(Web message)
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“Hmph.”
Looks like they’re selling well.
Do people use them even though they’re F-rank?
Geuru ignored the text and stuffed the kids’ phone into her bag.
‘The potatoes are growing well!’
But the moment she thought that, as if on cue, a crisis arrived.
“Muuuuuuu!”
After tying Beilak to a cross, Geuru drove her fork into the ground and wiped away her sweat.
‘I never knew farming was this hard.’
Squirm, squirm.
Looking at the forsythia garden bed, now ragged with earthworm corpses, Geuru let out a groan.
‘There are too many worms…….’
In truth, the problem wasn’t so much that there were many earthworms, but that the earthworms, having consumed the organic matter in the soil that had drunk deeply of the potatoes’ mana, were swelling up like balloons and beginning to turn into slimes.
Because the mana generated by the Critato was too powerful, the soil itself was changing, and it seemed to be affecting the earthworms as well.
Geuru once again stabbed a worm slime with her fork and popped it.
‘The forsythia garden won’t do.’
The forsythia garden was on school grounds.
If slimes appeared at this special school, where there were especially many Awakened, there was no way Geuru’s secret potato-growing would remain hidden.
“Muuuuuuuuut—!”
And the scarecrow was noisy too…….
“Pip-pip!”
The vicious tenant manager Mephisto pecked Beilak on the head, telling him to be quiet.
She had hung Beilak, an SSS-rank, on the cross to make him serve as a scarecrow, using his threatening aura to drive away the earthworms.
But there was nothing to be done about the worms growing right beside the potatoes; they were bound to swell into slimes.
‘I need different land…….’
Nngh, Geuru tilted her head.
‘Should I buy land?’
If she bought a big plot of land to grow potatoes……
She wouldn’t have to worry about being found out because slimes appeared, and since she could grow more potatoes, the chances of harvesting higher-rank potatoes would increase too.
‘But it might become a really big deal…….’
Just imagining tiny Geuru running around a huge piece of land farming made her feel out of breath.
‘Geuru is busy enough just going to kindergarten.’
She had to do ballet, and horseback riding, and raise the elixir too…….
The moment she thought of a system that would grow potatoes automatically, a light bulb flashed above her head.
‘Could I make it into a tap-tap filial piety factory?’
If she automated a farm as small as a miniature, cultivating would be much less difficult.
‘Maybe if I draw the blueprint well somehow?’
Geuru was thinking up all sorts of ideas when—
“Geuru.”
For some reason, the sitter, who should have been in the parking lot, suddenly came all the way to the forsythia garden.
“Muuuuu!!”
“……!”
The sitter flinched when she discovered the hamster shrieking strangely, but only for a moment.
“Yesh?”
At Geuru’s question, she lowered her gaze.
“Ah, well……”
While the sitter hesitated, glancing at Beilak, Geuru hurriedly harvested all the potatoes.
If the sitter saw worms turning into slimes in Geuru’s garden bed, she’d be horrified, and word would reach Dad’s ears too.
All of the seed potatoes harvested today were E+-rank.
The fact that F+-rank ones no longer appeared could be called an achievement.
“Well, you see. Geuru, how about we stop here for today and go straight to your dad?”
“Huh? Why?”
“The guild master told me to bring you right away. Maybe he’s planning to take you somewhere fun?”
The sitter, who knew nothing, said this with a smile, but Geuru, who had diligently retrieved even Beilak from the cross, sucked in a breath and made a walnut on her chin.
‘Maybe…… he found out?’
Hiding her nervousness, she obediently followed behind, when the sitter suddenly asked,
“But Geuru, why did you hang up your hamster friend……?”
“Beii was acting as a scarecrow.”
“Aha, I see. But I don’t think your hamster friend liked it. He was screaming, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. But, you know, Dad said there are things you have to do even if you don’t like them.”
“……Ah, your dad said that, did he?”
The sitter laughed hoho as she wondered how on earth she should explain this to Jurim.
*
“No. You’re mistaken. This thing called the Critato Reactor or whatever has nothing to do with Hyeonak.”
Jurim answered the call while swallowing his irritation.
Because the director of some university’s magical engineering research institute had been pelting him with a question Jurim had already heard over a hundred times.
—The person who made Critato. It’s Hunter Jjapso, isn’t it?
And it wasn’t only the research institute director. The calls he’d received since morning had already exceeded thirty.
All of it had begun two days ago, when a new material called Critato had gone up on Hunter Market.
A substance more magical than magic itself, capable of producing more than fifteen times the output of existing mana stones.
Because of that, despite being F-rank, every production-type Awakened was searching for its researcher with fire in their eyes, but no one had come forward to identify themselves.
Moreover, the bizarre course of action—posting such an incredible research result anonymously on Hunter Market instead of officially announcing it—was more than enough to make people suspect Jjapso.
However.
—Ah, perhaps you think it’s still too early to announce? Our research institute handles a great deal of confidential information as well, so you don’t need to worry about information leaks……
Jurim let the director’s words go in one ear and out the other.
In his mind, Geuru was nothing more than a five-year-old baby who was good at making syrup potions.
She had somehow made a drone, but Jurim knew better than anyone how much effort Geuru had put into that.
There was no way she could have suddenly whipped up something this tremendous without the slightest sign……
And yet, no matter how many times Jurim said it wasn’t true, no one believed him.
Worried that someone might even approach the child, he had already told the sitter to bring her to the company immediately today.
Jurim was checking beyond the blinds to see if Geuru was coming when he saw Kazuki getting out of the limousine and pressed a hand to his forehead.
One mountain after another.
Brr— brr—
In the middle of that, another call was coming in on the second line.
“I’m a bit busy, so I’ll be hanging up now.”
Jurim wearily swept back his hair and answered the next call.
“Yes…… Chairman Kim. I know. We’ve met a few times……”
He was in the middle of mechanically denying it yet again when—
Bang!
It wasn’t surprising that the place Kazuki came running to as soon as he finished his naturalization process was here, but—
“Geuru-chan really did it? The rumor’s spread all the way to Japan, and it’s total chaos!”
—this was a little surprising.
Jurim furrowed his brow, ended the call, and asked back in a puzzled tone.
“What did Geuru do?”
“The thing she said she wanted to make. The new mana stone that grows in clusters like potatoes. I was surprised because the Critato components included potato…… Wait……. On-chan, you didn’t know?”
“……Potato?”
The moment he heard the word potato, the countless potatoes Geuru had been fiddling with flashed before his eyes like a revolving lantern.
A chill settled in one corner of Jurim’s chest, and he immediately turned around.
In front of the wide window of the guild master’s office stood a long line of flowerpots Geuru had brought in one by one, saying she would grow them.
Jurim strode over and pulled up one potato stem.
Rustle—
And just then.
“Daddyyy—?”
Jurim, holding a plant from which pitch-black potatoes dangled in clusters, and Geuru, who had trotted in without knowing anything, met eyes.
Jurim stared at Geuru for a long moment, then snapped a potato in half.
A Critato Reactor rolled out onto his gloved palm.
“……”
“……”
After studying Jurim’s expression, Geuru tapped the knee of Kazuki, who was greeting her happily.
Then, when she spread both arms to gesture for him to pick her up, Kazuki lifted her with ease.
“Master, put me down here. Right heere.”
“Uh-huh.”
Geuru climbed onto Jurim’s desk and knelt down.
It was a voluntary surrender.
Kazuki bit down hard on his lip so he wouldn’t laugh, and Jurim stared intently at Geuru as she knelt on top of the desk with her head lowered.
“On Geuru, are you telling me you were growing those well-done potatoes you made not long ago in the guild master’s office?”
“Mm-hmm…… They said potatoes needed all kinds of different environments……”
“……”
So it really was our kid.
His vision swam.
Judging from the looks of it, the skill that had turned the potatoes black back then hadn’t been a failure, but a success.