[Ugh, you money-obsessed fiend.]
'What is it now?'
Having left the operations meeting room, Garam was sitting in a cafe in Seoul.
Carmilla sat on the table nibbling away at a slice of cake.
[I'm talking about that bet you made with the guy called Kim Tae-hyeon.]
The bet he had proposed to Kim Tae-hyeon after agreeing to go into the Deep Crystal Cave.
If Garam came out of the Deep Crystal Cave without taking a single wound, Kim Tae-hyeon would hand over every mana stone he obtained on this mission.
And conversely, if Garam took even the slightest wound, the condition was that he would leave the Holy Knights.
[You can erase every wound with your Regeneration skill.]
'That's why I proposed the bet. Otherwise, would I have suggested an insane bet like that?'
Bets like that were only made when you could win, or when losing carried no penalty at all.
And the ones who accepted bets like that were, as a rule, nothing but stupid suckers.
'And here comes one now. A sucker.'
The sucker, no, Yang Jin-hak, shoved the cafe door open and came in.
He strode over, sat down in front of Garam, and set down a small wooden case.
"Here's the spirit medicine I promised, you son of a bitch."
"A lower-tier spirit medicine, is it?"
When he opened the case, inside was a small pill with a yellowish sheen.
"You son of a bitch, what kind of trickery did you pull that day?"
Yang Jin-hak slammed the table and fumed, but Garam ignored him and focused on the spirit medicine in front of him.
The spirit medicine Yang Jin-hak had produced was a lower-tier spirit medicine.
The kind that cost about a million won.
For losing a single bet, it was a fairly expensive spirit medicine.
'I figured he'd bring the lowest of the lowest-tier stuff, worth maybe a hundred thousand won.'
Maybe this guy was better than he'd thought?
Sensing Garam's look, Yang Jin-hak cleared his throat and turned his head away.
"That includes hush money. The moment word of that day reaches the Saryeon Society's ears, I will absolutely kill you."
He threatened with a savage glare.
He'd been the one to pick the fight and the one to propose the bet, and yet he was taking his anger out on Garam.
"Even if I told anyone, who'd believe it?"
It was a spar between a B-Grade and a D-Grade, of all things.
However much Yang Jin-hak hadn't used mana or skills, nobody would believe that he had been defeated one-sidedly in a spar.
[Which is exactly why it's so impressive, kid.]
He had bridged the gap between B-Grade and D-Grade with technique alone.
And this from someone who hadn't known how to swing a weapon properly before the spar.
[My eye for people is truly exceptional. Same as with how you handled the True Progenitor's power the other day. Your talent is outstanding.]
Carmilla floated in the air, chest puffed out proudly.
The praise was cringeworthy enough to curl his hands and feet just listening to it, but it didn't feel entirely bad.
Wasn't there a saying that praise makes even a whale dance?
"Hey, what are you looking at?"
Apparently finding it strange that Garam was staring blankly into empty air, Yang Jin-hak waved a hand in front of his eyes.
"Ahem. Well, I've handed over the spirit medicine and the money, so I'm going. Let's meet again sometime."
Yang Jin-hak's eyes glinted bleakly as he started to get up from his seat, but,
"Oh? Mr. Garam. Fancy seeing you here again."
"Ah, Miss Hae-rang."
He flinched.
At the voice from behind him, Yang Jin-hak's body went stiff.
Hae-rang, coffee in hand, sat down naturally beside Garam.
At her sudden appearance, not only Yang Jin-hak but the other people in the cafe froze all at once.
"Hm? And who's this?"
Hae-rang took a sip of coffee and asked Yang Jin-hak.
Nervous, Yang Jin-hak's hands trembled as he barely managed to wipe the cold sweat running down his forehead.
"Ah, I'm, um... Mr. Garam's friend..."
Perhaps because he looked closer to Hae-rang than expected,
Yang Jin-hak was signaling Garam desperately.
[The bastard's desperate. Heh heh.]
'Right?'
It was just as Carmilla said.
There was something close to pleading in Yang Jin-hak's eyes as they moved between Garam and Hae-rang, begging to be let off just this once.
Was even a Saryeon Society member frightened of an S-Grade hunter?
"I came by to give this guy a decent spirit medicine I happened to obtain. Haha."
Hae-rang's gaze moved to the table.
She looked at the wooden case on it and the spirit medicine inside, and nodded.
"A lower-tier spirit medicine, is it?"
"Yes, yes, that's right. It's a fairly useful spirit medicine for Garam here, so I brought it over. Right?"
The bright smile as he spoke to Garam showed this was hardly his first time doing this.
The vibration of a schoolyard punk shaking down a classmate came through loud and clear.
"By the way, what exactly is your relationship with him, Admiral of Ruin......"
"Ah, you didn't know? Mr. Garam is the youngest member of our First Subjugation Team."
"H-huh! The First Subjugation Team?"
Yang Jin-hak recoiled hard enough to nearly tip his chair over backward.
Understandable, really.
To think the worm he had until now taken for a D-Grade who used things like mana amplifiers belonged to the First Subjugation Team, the dream of every hunter alive.
'But since when was I on the First Subjugation Team?'
The problem was that this was news to Garam as well.
In the middle of a situation neither of them could make sense of, Yang Jin-hak was the first to move.
"I-I'll be taking my leave then. Garam, call me often."
Yang Jin-hak smiled awkwardly and rose quickly from his seat, vanishing.
Even so, a bleak light lingered in his eyes as he went.
'Haah. This is going to become a nuisance.'
The premonition lasted only a moment.
Once she'd confirmed Yang Jin-hak was gone, Hae-rang sighed and moved to the seat across from Garam.
"Haah. Mr. Garam, do you owe anyone money?"
"Sorry?"
An out-of-nowhere question from Hae-rang.
It wasn't that he'd had no debts, but thanks to becoming a hunter recently he'd paid them all off.
"I don't."
"Then why were you meeting someone from the Saryeon Society?"
Ah, so that was it.
Being the gathering of punks that they were, the Saryeon Society ran a loan-sharking business too.
"It wasn't that kind of meeting, nothing you need to worry about. We just had something personal to exchange."
Such as the spirit medicine right in front of him, or the money sitting safely in his account.
"Well, that's a relief then. Don't get friendly with that lot. They've got a bad reputation."
He knew that perfectly well himself.
If anything, he probably knew it better than she did.
Given how much he'd picked up at the very bottom of the hunter industry as a porter.
Anyway.
"That aside, what's this about me being on the First Subjugation Team?"
This was the first he was hearing of it.
"Did I not tell you? The Holy Knights are the First Subjugation Team. It's a kind of, what do you call it, paper company?"
"A paper company?"
That wasn't the phrase for a situation like this.
"Anyway, you're going to take this spirit medicine, right?"
"I am."
It was a lower-tier spirit medicine, so he had no idea how much stronger it would make him.
"Then how about I give you a present too?"
VWOOM
Hae-rang laid her hand over the spirit medicine and poured mana into it.
The spirit medicine, which had given off a yellowish light, absorbed her mana and its color grew very slightly paler.
'Did she just pour mana directly into a spirit medicine?'
Spirit medicines were normally made using mana stones with a high mana content.
Which meant their mana content was fixed.
Adding mana to one on top of that might be possible during production, but doing it to a finished spirit medicine was impossible.
'Not enough to raise its grade, but it's no lower-tier spirit medicine anymore either.'
If he had to name it, call it about a mid-lower-tier pill.
A one-million-won item had just become one and a half million won's worth.
"Take it and eat it quickly. Otherwise the mana I planted in it will all disperse."
Having done something extraordinary, Hae-rang simply smiled at ease and drank her coffee.
Garam rose from his seat to leave and absorb the spirit medicine as soon as possible, when,
"Mr. Garam."
"Yes?"
"I hope you won't take our knights' rudeness too much to heart. Every one of them lost something precious to Vampirs, so they're a bit twisted, that's all."
She murmured it as though it left a bitter taste.
"It's fine. It doesn't bother me."
Their needling was at a level he could laugh off.
And taking their bait had been entirely his own choice as well.
"I see. Off you go, then."
Garam left Hae-rang behind and walked out of the cafe.
***
"Now then, shall I take the spirit medicine?"
Back home, Garam sat down on the floor and took the spirit medicine out of the wooden case.
"Though I have no idea how much use a spirit medicine is to a Vampir."
The reason hunters normally took spirit medicines was simple.
They could hammer mana into the body quickly and increase their total mana.
But Garam was, when it came down to it, a Vampir.
The blood his heart supplied was his mana.
For him, total mana was less a matter of storage capacity than of production volume.
[There's no downside to taking it, so just take it and see.]
Garam nodded at Carmilla's words and looked down at the spirit medicine in his grip.
Even after all this time, Hae-rang's mana still clung to it.
Just looking at it, you wouldn't think it was a lower-tier spirit medicine.
[So that Holy Knights girl is useful sometimes.]
Carmilla flew around the spirit medicine, breathing in the scent of mana rising from it.
A bracing freshness, as though he were standing before the ocean just from smelling it.
Garam didn't hesitate any longer; he tossed the spirit medicine into his mouth and settled into a cross-legged position on the floor.
[But why are you doing that? Is there some reason it has to be such an uncomfortable position?]
"I don't know either. Some Y-Tube video said this position is good."
He'd only ever bought spirit medicines in his life, never taken one, so how would he know?
"Anyway, don't talk to me. Absorbing this thing is hard enough on its own."
And at that, the energy of the spirit medicine began to rage inside his body.
It was a lower-tier spirit medicine, so it wasn't an enormous power, but at his current level it was a fullness of power that overflowed and then some.
'Absorbing even fifty percent of this is a gain, wasn't it?'
The energy of a spirit medicine was artificial mana, so there was a limit to how much a human could absorb.
And that limit was worse the lower the Grade, so
common knowledge held that a D-Grade broke even by absorbing about twenty percent of a spirit medicine.
'Then if I aim for around that much and absorb—'
[Lower skill: Absorb is used.]
'Huh?'
A message window appeared in his vision even with his eyes closed.
At the same time, the energy that had been thrashing wildly through his body began converging on his heart.
"Gu, hak!"
Pain like a strike to the solar plexus.
Garam breathed slowly and deeply and focused on the mana gathering toward his heart.
'Thanks to Absorb I won't lose any of the mana, but handling it is entirely down to my own capability.'
However it had happened, Absorb had activated on the spirit medicine's mana.
Thanks to that, not a scrap of mana would be lost, but with mana flowing in this fast, how stably he could absorb it was entirely in his own hands.
'The mana is being absorbed into my whole body.'
The mana seeping bit by bit into his body was being used to strengthen Garam's flesh rather than being stored.
'It's flowing into my heart most of all.'
As the spirit medicine's mana was absorbed into his heart, his blood production increased, if only a little.
'So when a Vampir absorbs a spirit medicine, blood production goes up.'
In a way it was even a reasonable effect.
'And the absorption rate is far better.'
Slowly, he took in only as much mana as wasn't dangerous.
An ordinary method, no different from other hunters'.
Because you could only absorb mana to the extent your body could bear it, a spirit medicine's mana was normally mana that evaporated quickly,
but thanks to Absorb, no matter how long he took, the spirit medicine's mana would never escape him.
'Vampirs are the best.'
And the more he got used to it, the faster his absorption became.
More than twice as fast as when he started.
The more of the spirit medicine he absorbed, the more he could feel his mana continuing to grow.
Absorbing the spirit medicine's mana, Garam reached the end of it without realizing.
And at that end, he could feel a mana different from the spirit medicine's.
A depth on an entirely different scale, as though he had entered a great sea.
He simply hadn't noticed, distracted by absorbing the spirit medicine's mana.
This mana, untouched by Absorb, was being absorbed into Garam's body of its own accord, as though it were alive.
'This is Hae-rang's mana. This is making my body stronger.'
Hae-rang's mana, absorbed into his body rather than his heart, was raising Garam's flesh a full stage.
And the blood channels that had been left in tatters, needing a good few weeks of recuperation, were returning to normal.
[You have absorbed the mana of the Great Sea.]
[Physical abilities rise across the board.]
[You have absorbed a lower-tier spirit medicine.]
[The body is strengthened.]
[Part of the conditions for the First Molting have been fulfilled.]
[When the remaining condition is fulfilled, the First Molting will begin.]
[Condition: Absorb a mid-tier or higher Blood Point Stone.]