Chapter 41. The Old Mercenary and Seaweed Soup (3)
“What do you want?”
Yukgap got straight to the point.
Sunhyeong looked at Victoria and replied,
“Isn’t it obvious what I want?”
Victoria immediately shouted in frustration.
“How many times do I have to tell you? There is no Philosopher’s Stone!”
“Not that.”
Sunhyeong stared at Victoria with bloodshot eyes, breathing heavily.
The moment she saw his expression, Victoria recoiled and screamed.
“You shameless old pervert! So even at your age, you’re still a man and you’re after my beautiful, perfect body! Men really are all the same, young or old!”
“I just want the seaweed soup you said you’d make.”
Sunhyeong answered calmly.
Yukgap apologized on her behalf.
“Try to understand. Victoria is a little too full of herself.”
“Seems that way.”
Sunhyeong let out a weary sigh.
“Anyway, I just want to taste my mother’s seaweed soup one more time. She abandoned her son, remarried, and wouldn’t even see me when I came back looking for her... but I still remember the taste of the seaweed soup she made.”
He smiled bitterly.
“Strange, isn’t it? As my dementia gets worse, I’m forgetting everything else, but I still can’t forget that taste. I can’t even remember my mother’s face anymore.”
At that moment, Sunhyeong looked especially small and frail.
Did everyone become like this when they grew old?
Or had his desperate longing for his mother reduced him to this?
“All right. Wait a little.”
Yukgap immediately agreed.
Sunhyeong looked doubtful.
“You’ll make it for me?”
“I already bought all kinds of ingredients. Since we’ve come this far, I’ll stake my pride as a chef and recreate your mother’s seaweed soup.”
Sunhyeong gave a quiet laugh.
“That’s unexpected. I thought one of Abraxas’s Twelve Archons would simply force the information out of me.”
“To be honest, I considered it for a moment.”
Yukgap admitted it without hesitation.
Sunhyeong asked,
“Then why did you change your mind?”
“Because I’m also someone who longs for a family I can’t remember. I can’t bring myself to do something cruel to someone like that.”
He could not remember them.
Yet the longing remained, burning like a deep wound in his chest.
It gnawed at him every moment.
Sunhyeong had forgotten his family’s faces because of dementia, yet still desperately yearned for them.
Yukgap could not help seeing himself in the old man.
“You really are human.”
Sunhyeong muttered, though Yukgap could not tell whether it was praise.
Yukgap grinned.
“I was always human.”
Before long, several steaming bowls of seaweed soup were arranged in front of Sunhyeong.
He stared at them in amazement.
“Oh, this many?”
Yukgap proudly explained,
“I made seaweed soup with every kind of seafood I could find. One of these has to match what you remember.”
“Hehehe. They smell good, at least.”
Sunhyeong lifted the first spoonful.
He slowly closed his eyes and sipped the soup.
Slurp.
“How is it?”
Yukgap asked cautiously.
Instead of answering, Sunhyeong began tasting the other bowls one after another.
Eventually, he weakly shook his head.
“No. None of these are right.”
Despair filled his voice.
“Not one of them tastes like the seaweed soup my mother made.”
“That doesn’t make sense. I used every kind of seafood I could find.”
Yukgap was just as discouraged.
He had gathered every seafood ingredient he could get and used them all to build different broths.
Yet none of them had recreated the taste Sunhyeong remembered.
As they struggled with the problem, Victoria suddenly spoke.
“Wait. Maybe we’ve been choosing the wrong ingredients from the beginning.”
“What?”
Yukgap tilted his head.
Victoria ignored him and suddenly asked Sunhyeong,
“When you were little and lived with your mother, was your family well-off?”
Sunhyeong shook his head.
“No. My father died early, so we were always poor. My mother barely kept us fed by taking whatever day labor she could find.”
Victoria’s voice suddenly rose.
“That’s it!”
Apparently, she had figured something out.
Yukgap quickly asked,
“You have an idea?”
Victoria nodded seriously.
“We approached this all wrong. A family that poor wouldn’t have been making seaweed soup packed with expensive seafood.”
“Then what?”
Victoria’s eyes gleamed.
“Trust me. I’ll recreate the taste of his mother’s cooking.”
“Here. I made it.”
A little while later, Victoria returned with a steaming bowl of seaweed soup.
Sunhyeong sniffed it a few times and showed some interest.
“The smell is close.”
He immediately scooped up a large spoonful.
Then carefully poured it into his mouth.
Slurp.
Victoria held her breath and waited for his reaction.
“How is it?”
The hand holding Sunhyeong’s spoon began to tremble.
Then an exclamation filled with countless emotions escaped his lips.
“Ah... this is it. My mother’s seaweed soup... I never thought I’d taste this again! It’s good. It’s so good!”
With those words, Sunhyeong began devouring the soup as though possessed.
Yukgap stared at him in disbelief.
“What did you do?”
Sunhyeong had rejected every bowl Yukgap had painstakingly prepared.
Yet he was now eating Victoria’s version like there was no tomorrow.
Victoria calmly explained,
“He said they were poor when he was young. Do you really think they could afford expensive seafood or premium beef?”
“Then?”
“They probably used this to make the soup taste better.”
Victoria held up a red seasoning packet.
Yukgap recognized it immediately.
“That’s...?”
“The secret of a mother’s touch, Dashi...”
Victoria almost finished the word.
Yukgap suddenly stopped her.
“Wait! If you say any more, that becomes product placement and could cause trouble for the novel’s serialization!”
Victoria clenched her fists in frustration.
“Damn it! I can’t call my father ‘Father,’ and I can’t even call Dashi... whatever it is by its name!”
Sunhyeong quietly offered a compromise.
“Calm down. Just call it MSG. The readers will understand.”
“Oh. That works.”
Victoria nodded and continued.
“Anyway, I didn’t put anything special in this seaweed soup. I just added plenty of MSG seasoning. Back when his family was poor, that may have been the only thing they could use to give the soup a richer taste.”
“So that was it.”
Sunhyeong nodded and kept eating.
There was no meat in the soup.
No seafood.
Just cheap seaweed that could be found anywhere and plenty of MSG seasoning.
But it tasted good.
It was the taste he had longed for all these years.
“It’s still delicious. It tastes just like my mother’s.”
Tears soaked both of his deeply wrinkled cheeks.
Yet his hand never stopped moving.
“I missed this taste my whole life.”
“I’ll leave this medicine here. If you take it regularly, it should slow down the deterioration of your body.”
Victoria placed the prepared medicine beside the bed.
After enjoying the seaweed soup, Sunhyeong lay back and weakly thanked her.
“Thank you.”
Perhaps because he had finally tasted his mother’s seaweed soup again, his expression looked strangely peaceful.
Victoria spoke bitterly.
“Sorry, but this is all I can do. Your body is too far gone for me to properly fix anymore.”
“That’s fine. Without the enhancement surgery, I would’ve died on some battlefield long ago. This is just the price finally catching up with me.”
His body should have died many times over already.
Without the modifications he had received in the underworld, he would never have survived until today.
Perhaps wanting even more life was simply greed.
“So can you finally tell me about Abraxas?”
Yukgap, who had been quiet until now, carefully asked.
The most important matter was still unresolved.
“That’s right. You treated me to a good bowl of seaweed soup, so I should settle the bill properly.”
Sunhyeong smiled faintly.
After coughing several times, he carefully began to speak.
“I once saw a mercenary on a battlefield who looked exactly like you.”
“What? Is that true?”
Yukgap’s eyes widened.
This was the first real story he had heard about his past.
“I remember it clearly because it was a battle where an Abraxas-affiliated mercenary unit was deployed. I participated as an adviser at the time. That was when I saw him.”
Sunhyeong searched his memories.
“We were assigned to different units, but he stood out because he was Korean like me. I vaguely remember hearing that he specialized in dagger combat.”
“D-Dagger combat?”
Yukgap raised his voice in shock.
The six daggers he always carried trembled slightly at his waist.
Everything Sunhyeong was saying pointed directly toward him.
“I heard that mercenary had been recruited by a famous mercenary commander. They said he was a veteran who had survived countless battlefields.”
“Who was the mercenary commander?”
“That was...”
Sunhyeong suddenly raised his eyes.
Yukgap anxiously waited for the answer.
Finally, Sunhyeong muttered,
“...Who was it again?”
His eyes had gone cloudy.
Yukgap immediately shouted,
“Remember! My past depends on this!”
“Right, right...”
Sunhyeong narrowed his eyes and searched through his fading memories.
Then an unfamiliar name finally came from his mouth.
“Kevin.”
Sunhyeong slowly nodded.
“Yes. That’s what everyone called him.”
He looked at Yukgap.
“Kevin, the Mercenary King. He had a reputation for recruiting every capable mercenary he could find, so everyone called him the ‘Mercenary King.’”
