Chapter 7
The child had left this world in terrible pain.
Kim Sang-hyeon, who had handled the funeral arrangements in Shin Ha-gyeon's absence, still remembered the child's final appearance when he visited the morgue to confirm her identity.
There was no way anyone could have called her condition intact.
She had been caught in an Instant Gate.
Gates were divided into three types depending on whether they required entry and whether their appearance could be detected in advance.
The first was an Eruption-Type Gate, which released a small number of monsters outside before disappearing.
The second was an Assault-Type Gate, which had to be entered and cleared before it filled with monsters and caused a Gate Break.
And Gates that appeared without warning because of their weak energy fluctuations were called Sudden-Type Gates, regardless of whether they required entry.
An Instant Gate was one type of Assault-Type Gate.
Unlike ordinary Gates, which remained even after they were cleared, Instant Gates were one-time Gates that vanished immediately after completion.
The problem was that when an Instant Gate formed, there was a high chance it would suck in everything nearby.
The intensity varied greatly, but in extreme cases, it could create forces comparable to a hurricane.
These days, thanks to the invention of Gate Emergence Forecasting Devices, casualties from Instant Gates were almost nonexistent unless the Gate happened to be a Sudden-Type.
But things had been different when that child died.
There was simply no other way to explain it.
She had been terribly unlucky.
At least they were able to recover most of her body despite her being caught in the Gate's formation.
In that sense, there had been one small piece of fortune amid the tragedy.
They hadn't been forced to hold a funeral with an empty coffin.
...
Yet even while thinking about it rationally, Kim Sang-hyeon hadn't been able to take his eyes off the child.
He had seen her a few times before the funeral.
Even then, he'd simply stood there for a long time, staring at her closed eyes.
Was it because she was so young?
Or because she was someone he knew?
Since the Gates first appeared, he'd lost acquaintances in accidents several times.
Yet for some reason, he couldn't tear his gaze away from that child's face.
He had been struggling with the unfamiliar emotions for quite some time.
But the employee from the funeral company immediately realized that Kim Sang-hyeon wasn't family.
They asked when the child's parents would arrive.
Only later did he learn that most parents in situations like that couldn't look directly at their child.
Either their tears made it impossible to see, or they fainted altogether.
Usually, it was one of the two.
Kim Sang-hyeon still remembered exactly what he'd thought after hearing that.
It's a good thing Shin Ha-gyeon wasn't there at the time.
There had been several reasons.
The country still hadn't fully regained stability.
Media control had taken time.
If Shin Ha-gyeon had appeared at the funeral hall immediately, cameras undoubtedly would have captured his face.
At the time, Shin Ha-gyeon was practically one of the pillars holding South Korea together.
They couldn't allow the media to show him falling apart.
There was another reason.
The young Shin Ha-gyeon had been such a brilliant and conspicuous figure that he had accumulated plenty of allies and enemies alike.
If someone attacked him while he was emotionally vulnerable, would he have been able to respond as he normally did?
Kim Sang-hyeon had genuinely wondered about that.
"..."
And there had been another reason.
As both Shin Ha-gyeon's comrade and subordinate, he was relieved that Shin Ha-gyeon hadn't been forced to see the miserable remains of the child he'd raised like his own daughter.
I'm glad I didn't have to see Shin Ha-gyeon crying.
That would probably have been just as painful to witness as the child's final appearance.
Not that the face Shin Ha-gyeon wore when he arrived late at the funeral had been any easier to look at.
Anyway.
The expression sculptor Do Hwa-in had given the child drew Kim Sang-hyeon's eyes.
All the more because it was completely different from the child's face he'd seen in the morgue.
And especially because of the field of flowers surrounding her.
And that large, dependable frog beside her...
If only there had really been something as dependable as that frog to save her back then... No. What am I thinking at my age? Am I going senile? Imagining things like that doesn't help reality in any way.
And yet...
The sculpture naturally made him imagine a peaceful spring day.
He had no memory of ever going on a spring outing with the child, yet looking at the scene somehow made him feel as though he had.
It was only a sketch drawn over partially carved stone.
But the peaceful expression on the child's face invited endless imagination.
"If my employees knew I could get this sentimental, they'd probably faint from shock."
Kim Sang-hyeon knew perfectly well how people saw him.
Cold.
Rational.
Straight-laced.
Bloodless.
All kinds of stiff, boring images like that.
Did Shin Ha-gyeon know he'd see something like this when he commissioned it?
Had he wanted to see some dreamlike illusion?
Shin Ha-gyeon was someone Kim Sang-hyeon normally believed he could read almost too easily.
Yet at this moment, even he felt impossibly distant.
By the time I was working on the texture with chisels and sandpaper, Vice Guild Master Kim Sang-hyeon came to visit again.
Lately, I had been seeing his face almost as often as Eom Seok-hwan's.
"You're here?"
Ironically, Shin Ha-gyeon, the person who had actually commissioned the sculpture, hadn't appeared even once since the day we exchanged contracts.
That remained true despite the fact that more than two months had passed and I hadn't even left the Yeonwoo Guild building during that time.
"Do you think he's upset? No, probably not. If he were, they would've kicked you out of this workshop a long time ago."
Eom Seok-hwan had once suggested that possibility.
But I didn't think that was the reason.
When Shin Ha-gyeon had confessed that even he didn't understand what he wanted from the sculpture, his voice had been filled with unmistakable pain and distress.
There had to be a reason he couldn't bring himself to say more.
Kim Sang-hyeon, on the other hand, seemed to visit purely because he wanted to watch the sculpture gradually take shape.
As a sculptor, I found that incredibly satisfying.
The only one I felt slightly guilty toward was Chaeri, who was becoming faster and faster at hiding.
I glanced toward my coat, where a small bulge had appeared.
"It's nearly finished."
"That's right. I've been working on it all day, every day, so progress has been pretty fast."
"...It feels warmer every time it gets closer to completion."
There was something else I'd learned thanks to Kim Sang-hyeon's frequent visits.
Aura didn't suddenly appear only at the moment a sculpture was completed.
Perhaps because I became too absorbed in my work, or perhaps because my stat was still too low, I'd never noticed it before.
But once the sculpture's overall shape had emerged, Kim Sang-hyeon repeatedly mentioned feeling a warm energy coming from it.
At first, I assumed he was merely commenting on the mood of the piece.
But after Eom Seok-hwan told me that Kim Sang-hyeon wasn't exactly an emotional person, and after hearing Kim Sang-hyeon himself call the sensation strange, I realized it probably wasn't just artistic appreciation.
"What's that?"
"Ah, that's something I've been making little by little before going to sleep."
"I don't remember any wood being brought in."
"I brought it from home."
Kim Sang-hyeon was pointing at a small frog sitting on the worktable.
Its head, torso, arms, and legs had each been carved separately, then threaded together through their centers using thick string.
I planned to use Pygmalion on it eventually.
If I'd carved it from one solid piece of wood, I had a feeling it might actually come to life and start moving.
So I'd deliberately made it in the form of a jointed doll.
"...It resembles Yeonwoo's doll. Come to think of it, so does the frog this sculpture is resting against."
"Yes. I used the frog doll from the photographs as reference for both. It looked like her comfort doll."
In truth, I hadn't exactly intended to use it as reference from the beginning.
I simply kept getting distracted by pointless thoughts before bed.
So one night, I started carving a random piece of wood.
Before I knew it, it had turned into this.
"A comfort doll?"
"Ah, it's what people call a toy that children become especially attached to when they're young."
"I see. Then yes, that was probably it. She always carried it around whenever I saw her. When she got a little older, she started wearing frog accessories that looked like the doll instead."
Kim Sang-hyeon walked over to the table and examined the unfinished frog doll.
He didn't touch it.
He simply leaned forward and stared at it closely.
