Chapter 12

The Painter Who Draws Dungeons — Episode 12

Gio picked up the mangdung berries he had been drying in the cabin yard.

“...And on top of that, it isn’t even yellow...”

The glossy shimmer with a metallic sheen gave off a color truly like gold.

In size, in weight, in shape, it looked exactly like ugly placer gold.

“When did I even start walking the path of an alchemist?”

It was fascinating that the plump, juicy red berries had changed like this.

“Is the color similar to sunlight, too.”

The berries, hardened enough to be ground into powder, didn’t look like food.

But Gio, knowing he could make medicine with them, tilted his head and still put all the dried berries into a glass bottle.

Back inside the cabin, Gio sought the system’s help for the first time in a while.

“Looking for an erudite friend who can tell me how to make blood rice cakes.”

Elixir Method: Grind thoroughly dried berries into powder and mix with rurupu juice to make dough; shape into rice cakes and dry in a dark place for at least a week, and it becomes a medicine good for bleeding and recovery from it.

“Right, that erudite friend was here.

That confidence had evidence behind it.”

Today’s content.

Making blood rice cakes that are good for recovering from bleeding.

“Ta-da.”

Wasting time on productive work was a very enjoyable thing.

For Gio, who loved making and raising things, tasks like this were not troublesome at all.

‘Kneading and shaping rice cakes at leisure in a cabin filled with sunlight.’

It hit his tastes dead-on.

Gio took the ingredients and headed for the studio.

“I’m not going to draw, but there’s no better place to work.”

Since the studio was so spacious, as long as he avoided the paints, he could use the worktable more than enough.

Gio placed all the ingredients on the worktable he had cleaned in advance.

“...”

Gio, who had gone to wash his hands, hesitated.

“...Do I just make powder first, like when I made pigments?

Is this the narrow way of thinking of an art teacher who’s only handled art materials?

But they call it ‘dried fruit,’ and it’s almost as hard as a mineral...”

Caught in a suitable panic, Gio fiddled with the dried berries without realizing it.

Surprisingly, calm came over his mind and body.

“Warm.”

The forest, with day after day of clear weather, always had plenty of sunlight.

Just as you could tell from its cozy color, even the well-dried mangdung berries still held the warmth of sunlight.

It didn’t just make his skin warm—there was a faint heat that seemed to seep all the way into the blood vessels inside.

“This is the power of sun-dried fruit...

Impressive.”

His heart, filled with that energy, began to beat lazily yet clearly, as if it were a languid afternoon when he’d been napping.

“...”

Bang—!!

Gio brought the hammer down.

“It’s harder than I thought.”

Bang, crack!

“Next time, instead of drying them whole like this...”

Crack...

“Should I grind them first, then dry them.”

Snap, thud.

“But then it’ll be hard to trap all the juice like this.”

With a dull sound, the berries—hard as minerals—crumbled.

“...”

This should be enough, right.

‘Put them in a bowl and grind them.’

Gio nodded.

Gio was someone who made pigments using jewels, shells, all sorts of hard things.

Naturally, that meant bowls got scratched or cracked, and to prepare for that, he had made several bowls in advance.

Among them, he brought an especially clean glass bowl and began to grind the berries.

Grind, grind.

“No, what is this hardness...”

Even though he’d broken them into pieces, the sound was the kind that made him wonder, ‘Is this right?’

No matter how he thought about it, it seemed Gio really had awakened as an alchemist.

‘Should I make a millstone later.’

Judging from this insane hardness, maybe he had dried them too long.

“I might’ve gotten careless because the forest’s ingredients don’t spoil.”

One of this forest’s characteristics was that ingredients and crops never withered or spoiled.

It was the same even if you cooked.

A world where food never molded—wasn’t that every cook’s dream?

But through these berries, he learned for sure that the state wasn’t maintained infinitely.

The mangdung berries left alone for a long time hadn’t spoiled, but they kept drying in that state until they became excessively hard.

“...”

Was that why they ended up holding even more warmth?

‘...I need to think about this more.

I won’t know what results come from insisting on what method unless I try it myself.’

A warmth you couldn’t feel from ordinary fruit was coming from the dried berries.

Considering that just a week ago they were only ordinarily dried, these berries definitely seemed to have their own unique trait.

Anyway, it was funny and nice.

Now Gio could go around and say he’d transmuted gold.

“This should be enough.”

Fluff...

It’s a powder with moisture in it.

“It’s just like snow.”

Snow that clumps well, at that.

It had been dried so hard it felt like it couldn’t get any more so, so where was this subtle moisture coming from?

Maybe there wasn’t any moisture at all, and Gio was simply mistaking that strange sticky fluffiness for it.

“...Mm.”

When he tasted the powder, he felt his body soften and sweetness spread over his tongue.

“...”

Gio blinked twice.

“...It would be good if I added it when baking.”

Long ago, when sugar was precious, commoners said they made powder from chestnuts found along the roadside and used it instead of expensive sugar or strongly scented honey.

They said that savory flavor and faint sweetness went well with many foods, so people even made crepes with it.

“There’s nothing I can’t do either.”

The powder of mangdung berries, fully ripened under sunlight, had lost almost all of its original tartness, leaving only the thick sweetness unique to dried fruit.

That sweetness was very strong, but he could also taste a plainness like grains or eggs.

It was a part he hadn’t felt when eating freshly picked mangdung berries, enough to make him think, ‘Is this the taste of sunlight?’

“It might be hard to use for a meal since the fruit flavor is strong, but it would suit sweet pastries like crepes or madeleines topped with whipped cream or ricotta cheese.

It’ll go well with the cool lemon scent of mangdung berries, too.”

Only when you think about food while washing, eating, and sleeping can you be called a true pig.

In that sense, Gio really was a pig.

“I should dry a lot in advance.”

Mangdung berries, packed full with fruit flesh, were that much more full of moisture.

Should he say it felt like drying jelly as big as a big Kyoho grape.

‘If I want to use this powder in cooking too...’

It seemed wise to dry a large amount in advance.

‘It’ll take quite a while.’

After turning all the berries into powder, Gio lifted the glass bottle.

“Since it might fail, let’s store most of it and try.

You should always live with failure in mind.

That’s the shortcut to longevity.”

He left only enough powder to make balls even smaller than the marbles sold at stationery stores.

After organizing all the mangdung berry powder, Gio lifted the bottle next to it.

Inside, something deep and clear sloshed like a transparent Milky Way.

“...”

It was rurupu juice—the juice of the spring’s flower—he had made before.

“...Of course it wouldn’t have spoiled...”

The rurupu juice in the glass bottle resembled, somehow, the springwater where it had grown.

Should he say it was like water holding sunlight.

Or like water holding slightly warm moonlight.

Rurupu juice, which had materialized the light it had held for its whole life and made it into its own blood, couldn’t be described as merely water with glitter in it.

‘...It really looks like the Milky Way.

Would it feel like this if the Milky Way reflected on the shallow water of the white-tree spring.’

Maybe because it was such a feast for the eyes.

Gio stared at it for a long while, then soon murmured.

“Cool.”

Gio dripped the rurupu juice over the muslin cloth filled with well-ground powder.

He hadn’t even dropped many drops, but the powder was already thoroughly wet and had taken on a deep golden color.

The powder, mixed with the cool greenery that carried rurupu’s unique moist feeling, had a strangely chilly part to it.

“...It’s like gold powder wet with water.”

After thinking a bit, Gio pressed and kneaded the powder, then soon brought it into his hands and gently rolled it.

Because his attempt was timid, it was very small, but anyway, a rice cake was completed.

“...”

It looked like a bead made of real gold.

“...?”

At this point, shouldn’t it be called a gold rice cake, not a blood rice cake.

“Well, anyway.”

Having gotten a feel for the powder’s moisture and the juice’s dampness, Gio began making the rice cakes one after another.

Perhaps thanks to experience making sujebi at home and shaping honey rice cakes, the rice cakes came out quite nicely.

Gio was able to make a total of fifteen rice cakes.

“...”

Seeing that all the mangdung berry powder he had carefully ground was used up, Gio felt an emptiness for a moment.

Life was bitter.

There was the subtle truth of life in this.

“...Still, there’s juice left.”

Since the powder itself was so moist, he couldn’t use up the rurupu juice, which spread ridiculously well.

In the end, he consumed not even half a bottle, only about a third.

“What do I do with this.”

He was wondering that, at that very moment.

“...”

“...”

“Uh...”

Gio made eye contact with one waterfowl sitting by the studio window.

“Hey, wait.”

Clack clack clack!!

“No.”

Splash—!!

His rurupu juice got stolen.

“...”

What is this.

The sight of the waterfowl swelling its body as much as it could and wrapping its whole body around the big glass bottle, blocking it.

“...??”

At that greedy shape that looked like something out of a game—like a slime—Gio was flustered.

“What are you even going to use that for.”

It was funny that with that stubby little body, it had swallowed a bottle three times its own size, but he was truly curious why it was doing this.

“You can’t even swallow it all, so what is this proactive attitude for.”

Clack...

“It’s not something you can do just by being stubborn—what I’m saying is, the glass bottle is bigger than your body.”

Clack!

“Do you see the bottle sticking out?

See it?

I declare it—you have the qualifications of a pig.”

Clunk!!

Clack!!

“What a clear clunk-clack—what a novel performance art.

You really are my child.”

Mainly in that it casually did something utterly ridiculous.

Seems heredity works even through paint these days.

“What do you plan to do with it?”

He couldn’t imagine what use the waterfowl would have for that, but the waterfowl, as if to show off, slipped right into the glass bottle.

In the blink of an eye, the waterfowl crumpled into the bottle’s shape.

“Huh?”

And like that, the waterfowl fused with the rurupu juice.

“What the...”

“Gururuk.”

“You spoke?”

“Guruk.”

“You make sounds?”

Did you evolve?

“...”

As expected, you really are my child.

‘As expected, nothing ever goes the way you predict.’

When Gio held the bottle upside down and shook it, the waterfowl—trying to stick stubbornly for some reason that might have been pride—soon slid out.

Slurp, pop!

Splat—!

“...”

“...”

Falling with a cute sound like a stationery-store liquid monster, the little one had taken in a full measure of rurupu juice and was sparkling somehow.

“...”

“Guruk.”

It talks, and more than that.

“...It’s warm.”

He could feel warmth.

“What happened.”

“Gururuk.”

“It’s absurd and funny, but I don’t really know what kind of magic this is.

As expected, life is an endless stream of content.”

“Guruung.”

“Does drinking rurupu juice make animals evolve?

When I took a sip, nothing changed?

Is this discrimination?”

Maybe it was a change only possible because the waterfowl was a species born from Gio’s hands.

Common sense said it was impossible for a creature made entirely of water to go guruk-guruk as if it had vocal cords.

“It would be bad if you suddenly got bigger, so it isn’t some harmful change, right.”

“Gurururururur.”

“If that’s the case, it’s a relief, but...”

Life is—

after worrying about eggs for a moment, Gio soon affirmed all of this.

‘It’s fun, so it’s fine.’

That’s right.

In truth, Gio had no thoughts at all.

He successfully wrapped up every worry.

“Talking water that flies around—amazing.”

“Guruk?”

“Your body color seems a little different too...”

Its transparent body had turned a pale yellow, like water mixed with gold powder.

The waterfowl that drank rurupu juice was one that often carried jewels in its body; inside its sparkling body were many yellow, transparent-type jewels.

It suited rurupu’s unique sparkle, like sunlight and moonlight.

“Mm.”

This color, with visibility no different from a yellow road sign—you could probably see it even from a KTX speeding by.

A fellow filled with flashy, gentle colors.

This would definitely become a distinguishing point from the other individuals.

“If you stand out this much, I can give you a name.”

“Gurururuul?”

“Do you like it?

That’s a relief.”

Soon Gio said,

“Golden Child...”

“...”

“Even as I said it, I knew this wasn’t it.

This dad slips up sometimes.”

Gio had seen water frown for the first time.

He might be a parent now, but there are things you can and can’t say to your child.

Naming sense like Golden Child definitely fell into the latter.

“...”

The Seo family had never been talented at naming, generation after generation.

He put more strength into his brain and seriously thought it through.

“Then... how about Honey.”

“Guruk?”

“Because you’re a sweet color.”

The bird holding warm gold light resembled sunlight or moonlight, but it also resembled honey that felt like it would drip out with a deep fragrance.

Gio stroked the gold bird, now a little squishy and firm, and said,

“My naming sense ends here.”

“Gururuk.”

“That you don’t hate this—you’re really merciful.”

Honestly, he thought it would hate the name Honey.

‘Maybe the meaning doesn’t get across, so it doesn’t know what honey is.’

That thought crossed his mind for a moment, but anyway, if it liked it, what could he do.

Gio watched Honey wriggle back into the glass bottle.

“Cute.”

Watching it was healing.

“A cat crumpled inside a box...”

“Grrrng.”

“Does your sound get crumpled too when your body gets crumpled?

Even cuter.”

“Ggyurung.”

“This is the essence of cuteness.”

When Honey finally stuffed its body into the glass bottle, Gio lifted the bottle.

The strangely warm bottle was a suitable size, almost like a hot pack.

‘It even smells sweet.’

Like watching a crackling campfire, his mind grew blank.

“Hmm.”

As he quietly looked at the warm, pretty glass bottle that smelled sweet, a drowsiness came over him, like sitting through class after lunch on a spring day.

Eating and sleeping is a pig’s duty.

And Honey seemed to be the same.

“...”

Gio put the glass bottle into his outer clothes without blocking its mouth.

“I’ll take that as consent.”

“Ggrung.”

The two of them sprawled out like laundry tossed down and fell asleep.

Fantasy, modern,