WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Haruto
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ A Gacha Addict's Life in Fusionpunk ◈
Chapter 63: The Old Sewers (5)
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1.
My consciousness was cast into a black sea.
A deep, black sea.
A place where I could do nothing but drift like a trash bag.
“Ah, I see...”
Cedric died again. CDA for short.
When I first came here, it was fucking awful, terrifying, and miserable.
But I came here so often now that it practically felt like my bedroom.
“Ha, I awakened a new technique... I cut Sunming...”
With Death Sentence, I could now cut not only living things, but objects too!
It might even be an S-rank spell capable of cutting lightning!
And the price of using such an insanely awesome spell was dying from the backlash!!!
The promising slush fund hiding place I had searched so desperately for was right in front of me.
Sunming had even finished the move-in cleaning, so all I had to do was rummage through it at my leisure.
But Sunming's punch had wrecked my side, so I was going to have to retry this.
“Fuck my life.”
Just as I lamented, I felt someone sucking me in with a pipette.
It was a strange feeling. I couldn't explain it.
It felt like my consciousness, which had only been sinking while pulled by a wire, was being forced back to the surface.
At the same time.
A hazy pain spread through my numb body.
Mostly around my elbows and, especially, my side.
At the same time, my previously clear consciousness became muddier than sludge.
“J-Just endure a little longer... Master... Urgh...! Why, why are you so heavy?!”
Someone grabbed my ankle and dragged me along.
My back scraped against the ground.
While both my sense of time and thoughts were a complete mess, I occasionally heard Shion's voice.
“Endure it, even if it hurts.”
Excuse me?
Craaaack!
Fuck!!!! What was that?! What did you just do?!
It hurts, it hurts! It hurts like hell!!!
I tried to grab Boksun[1] by the cheeks and make her stop this brutal act immediately.
But it felt like I was lying in a recovery room after surgery under full anesthesia.
I couldn't move even one finger as I wished.
My consciousness connected only in fragments before I fell into a deep, heavy sleep again.
I felt a warm aura of light envelop my body.
And amid that, I occasionally heard Shion's voice.
“Say ahh. That's it.”
“Wake up soon. Once you do, you must offer me glutinous rice cakes.”
“Personally, I prefer mochi that's been sitting for about three hours to freshly made mochi. I like that distinctive chewiness.”
I couldn't fully understand any of it.
“...Urgh. I don't want to be alone anymore.”
I recognized every sentence, but couldn't decipher them at all.
“...Your body temperature keeps...”
“Haah, only this once. Don't get any naughty ideas.”
“Urgh, you're cold.”
“...Hm? What's this? Something's getting in the way... Eek?!”
“Th-This... could it be...?”
Sometimes, I felt a warm presence beside me.
How much time passed like that?
Gasp!
My eyes snapped open.
An unfamiliar ceiling filled my vision.
A cramped little room.
A musty smell of mold.
Dim lighting from mushrooms picked at the Mushroom Factory and placed in lamps.
Ah.
The secret warehouse of that con artist couple.
I was lying in the center of it, covered by an old blanket.
My brilliant mind, rivaling Nietzsche's, immediately assessed the situation.
“Hmmmm!!! Cedric is back!”
Fake Progenitor! You admirable little thing!
You dragged me all the way here!
“Wow, that was seriously dangerous.”
I knew from dying a few times that I had practically gone to the River Jordan[2] for a footbath.
My body had been so wrecked that one wrong move would have killed me on the spot.
“Thank you, Burning Life.”
I thanked the relic whose secondary trait had pulled off a super save.
Then, as I brushed back my sweat-soaked hair, I noticed something strange.
“Hm?”
Nothing hurt.
This arm, which I moved as usual without thinking, had definitely crunched apart like a cookie...
But now, it moved perfectly at my command.
And what I felt against my side was not pain, but something warm and soft...
Flap.
I lifted the blanket.
Only then did I properly assess my condition.
I was completely naked.
And Shion, pressed tightly against my side and drooling onto my stomach, was naked too, as though that were only natural.
“Mmm... Turn off the light...”
Shion squinted as she opened her eyes, apparently blinded when I lifted the blanket.
“...Huh?”
Our eyes met, hers glowing red in the darkness like a vampire's.
“Eeeeeek!!!”
“Eeeeeek!!!”
We screamed together.
2.
“This beast... Taking such liberties while I was unconscious... Sob, sob. I've been defiled. I can't get married now...”
“...I feel a rage I have never experienced before rising within me.”
Shion, now dressed, put a hand on her side and stared at me in disbelief.
“Didn't I tell you it was to maintain your body temperature?!”
“Liar! You were touching me all over!”
“Don't be ridiculous! Do you think I did it because I wanted to?!”
“So you didn't touch me?!”
“............I merely brushed against you! Do you take me for some lecher like yourself?!”
What?
“You really did touch me?!”
“Quiet, quiet, quiet...!”
Fine.
I'll admit I was picking at her because I was embarrassed.
My chest felt all ticklish, and I'm really fucking weak to this sort of thing.
Anyway.
As you could see, I survived just fine. Thanks to Shion.
Shion had dragged my half-dead body from the sedimentation tank to this place.
Then she spent a full day healing me and barely managed to save me.
“But how?”
It wasn't as if this shitty sewer had an operating room.
I had been a step away from breathing my last.
Yet now I was completely healed, without even a bruise.
“I am a True Progenitor, after all. Even having lost my power, do you think I cannot manage something like this?”
Shion had sucked down the five blood packs she brought in a lunchbox, converted them into life force, and cast healing magic on half-dead Cedric.
Shion turned out to be one of those precious healers everyone wanted.
“Hey. Hold on.”
I tilted my head as I thought it over.
“Why do you have so many secrets?”
Come to think of it, she had brought up the slush fund rather late.
And she had never mentioned that she could use healing magic, either.
“...W-Women are naturally full of secrets.”
“What a sneaky little thing.”
Shion avoided my gaze.
Well, it was a little annoying, but I could cut her some slack.
Shion and I simply had not built that much trust yet.
From her perspective, it was only natural.
It wasn't as though I had told Shion everything about myself either.
“Is there anything else you're hiding?”
“No!”
“Really? Nothing at all?”
“No!”
Shion sharply turned her head away as she denied it.
When I poked her side, she huffed as though she was suddenly angry again.
“I should never have saved you! Had I known you would be this ungrateful, I would have left you behind! Give me glutinous rice cakes for my treatment! Give them to me!”
It almost seemed like an elaborate strategy to hide her mistake behind exaggerated anger.
She looked dumb, but she was surprisingly crafty.
Still, some things had to be cleared up.
“Hey, Boksun. If I hadn't had a Super Awakening, you would have died right there. I got hurt protecting you, didn't I?”
“Urk!”
“We each owe the other one life. So you can't just demand endless offerings of glutinous rice cakes. Got it?”
“Urghhh!!!”
Shion grumbled something about glutinous rice cakes, clearly sulking.
“I will never save you again!”
Shion's back was completely furious.
How could the back of someone's head look so angry?
It was amazing.
What a cute little thing.
I should buy her some rice cakes when we got out.
3.
Shion and I began searching the sedimentation tank.
Sunming had cleaned out every Cleaner, so we could enjoy a pleasant treasure hunt without any interruptions.
Still, it was an unbelievably vast underground space.
It felt like searching for treasure in a basketball arena, seating included.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
First, we rummaged through the piles of garbage to see whether there was anything there.
Then, using a metal crowbar we found nearby, we knocked against the walls and floor to check for hollow spaces.
“Hey, don't half-ass it! Be thorough!”
“I am already doing so!”
We repeated the process in four rounds of three hours of work and ten minutes of rest.
The result was...
“Don't fuck with me!!!! Fuck!!!”
A very, very disappointing bust.
There was nothing.
No useful items, no clues. It was such a clean waste of time that I did not even have any lingering regrets.
“Boksun, let's go back.”
“Should we not search a little longer?”
“I want to as well, but I don't think there's anything here.”
“Urgh...”
According to genre conventions, there should obviously be something here.
We had been through all that hell and even defeated the boss guarding the reward room.
But the world did not always follow genre conventions.
If it did, Cedric should have had a jealous imperial princess and a prickly saintess tucked under each arm by now, saying, “Ahh, what a problem I have.”
It was dangerous to think success was guaranteed just because you had paid a high opportunity cost.
That was the kind of thinking that ruined investments.
Grrrk, grrrk.
“M-Master, you're scary. Stop that... Weren't you the one who wanted to come here? I never recommended it!”
I ground my teeth hard enough to crack them as we headed home.
My steps felt both heavy and light.
Including the time I had spent unconscious all day, I had rotted in these old sewers for around fifty hours.
My disappointment mixed with the joy of finally escaping this tiresome shithole.
Once I got home, I would give Arbel her medicine, boil some hot water, and take a shower.
“Boksun, do you like alcohol?”
“Alcohol? Of course! I do!”
“Then shall we have a drink when we get home?”
“What brought this on? You have been rushing about as though the world would end tomorrow.”
“Everyone needs to recharge sometimes. My treat.”
“I would like glutinous rice cakes as snacks.”
Those damn rice cakes.
She only liked absurdly expensive things.
“Then do you want to play a drinking game too? If you win, I'll give you rice cakes.”
“What? What is a drinking game?”
“A game you play while drinking. There are lots of fun ones. I'll teach you.”
“Very well, I accept your challenge! I enjoy revelry as well!”
Then.
Splash. Splash.
I narrowed my eyes at the strange sound coming from somewhere.
When I quietly leaned around the corner, I saw a Cleaner casually dog-paddling through the wastewater beyond the thick iron bars.
It was collecting garbage with a trident and sorting it with a net.
“What are you looking at? Gasp...! R-Run...!”
“It's fine. It's beyond the bars anyway.”
One of the old sewers' rules was, “What sinks belongs to the sewers.”
Did that rule simply not affect the Cleaners?
“Master, let us go home quickly.”
As she said, it was beyond thick iron bars anyway.
We could just pretend we had not seen it and head home.
“Time out. Let me think.”
But something kept bothering me.
I desperately racked my brain to see whether I had missed something.
The sedimentation tank. The True Progenitor's slush fund.
The Cleaner corpses scattered across the sedimentation tank.
“Wait. Let's go back.”
I turned around and entered the sedimentation tank again.
Rooooar!!!
A stream of wastewater still crashed down with a thunderous roar.
A black lake formed from wastewater in every color.
First, I picked up Sunming's lower body, which was lying nearby.
“Hup.”
Then I threw it into the black lake.
Splash!
The instant his lower body entered the shitty water.
Whirr!
Black tentacles wrapped around Sunming's lower body and dragged it into the abyss in an instant.
Even the blood that rose to the surface quickly diluted and vanished.
Clean predation.
The first rule of this place, “What sinks belongs to the sewers,” was still in effect.
“......”
I stared at the sight and rubbed my chin.
Something was strange.
The rule was absolute.
If something sank, it got devoured.
Then what had I seen earlier?
The Cleaner casually dog-paddling beyond the bars had neither been wrapped in tentacles nor digested.
“Why is that one an exception?”
Was it simply because it was a native monster here?
“Fake Progenitor, look through the Cleaner corpses.”
“What strange thing are you suddenly doing?”
“I'll buy you glutinous rice cakes as snacks. Focus on the ones with less damage.”
“Leave it to me!”
Having come up with a hypothesis, I carried out a few more experiments.
Splash! Splash! Splash!
I put the Cleaner corpses Sunming had killed into the black lake one by one.
Starting with the ones whose diving suits were badly damaged, then less damaged, then barely damaged at all.
The results were clear.
The more damaged the diving suit, the faster the tentacles reacted and devoured the Cleaner corpse.
On the other hand, the less damaged the suit was, the slower the reaction became.
Finally, I threw in a corpse that had died from ruptured organs, leaving its diving suit outwardly intact.
“...Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine. One hundred.”
The wastewater did not react.
“Oho. So that was the gimmick?”
Now I got it.
The diving suits that the couple of Fixers had stored in their treasure vault.
There was a reason they treated them like sacred relics!
“Take a breath and Love Dive!!!”[3]
Bring the diving suits, now!
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Footnotes:
[1] Boksun: A cutesy traditional name for a female dog, used teasingly for Shion.
[2] River Jordan: In Korean usage, crossing the River Jordan is a euphemism for dying.
[3] “Take a breath and Love Dive”: A reversal of “Hold your breath and Love Dive,” a lyric from IVE’s “LOVE DIVE.”
- Boksun is a traditional, cutesy name commonly given to female dogs, which is why Cedric uses it teasingly for Shion.
- “Take a breath and Love Dive” reverses the lyric “Hold your breath and Love Dive” from IVE's song “LOVE DIVE.”
- The River Jordan is used in Korean as a euphemism for death.
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