CH 3

Even people with eternal youth and immortality need money to live. Rather, I need it more because I can’t have a steady job. Considering that, the man was a very useful wallet.

“I told you it’s Dante.”

Ah, yeah. Dante.

A month after I picked up what was lying in the woods and stayed with him, Dante was steadily recovering his body. It’s not something to be said by a person whose wounds disappear from their body when they wake up from death, but his resilience was similar to that of a monster.

To think that he woke up within a week and lay down in bed for a few more days, and then he suddenly got up. I was also surprised at how long it takes for an ordinary person to recover. Anyway, I thought he’d lie down for a few more days.

He said his stomach was almost completely healed, but honestly, I can’t believe it.

Did my treatment work that well?

Anyway, there were a few things I learned from being with Dante for a month.

The first is that he’s annoyingly handsome.

Did I say this before? It’s important, so listen to it one more time. Dante is really handsome.

People who say they’re good-looking are going to get their cheeks slapped lightly, and those who are slapped will look like they’re going to get angry then back down when they see his face and admit it. I was surprised when I first saw it.

I’ve never seen purple eyes when I crossed dimensions, but I can assure you that if there were other purple eyes, they wouldn’t be the same as Dante’s.

You will understand when I say that there is a Milky Way in his eyes. Even though my aesthetic standards are very high.

The purple-black hair is irritatingly fine, and sometimes makes me wonder, who blessed his hairㅡalthough, obviously, there is no one who blesses one’s hair. Also, how does he know that earrings suit him well?

In the meantime, what’s absurd is that Dante doesn’t really care about his face.

“If you had said it was okay for you to go to the village, I would’ve just let you go.”

“Why?”

“Some of the villagers would have accepted you just by looking at your face. There are a few people who are crazy for a good-looking face.”

“My face?”

Then he asked with a puzzled face.

“What’s wrong my face?”

“…?”

I didn’t expect a response that said, “That’s right, my face is good-looking,” but I thought he would at least be embarrassed.

According to the story, he has been looking at other people’s reactions for a long time and thinks, “I think it’s just worth watching.” First of all, he’s not interested in his own face, so he has never thought deeply about it.

Does that make sense? There are people who will just look in the mirror all day if they live with such a face. I’m afraid he’ll go somewhere else and ask if he’s on the good-looking side.

If he asks such a naive question, there will be someone who will snatch him up and lock him up somewhere…

After nagging him to live with some awareness that he was handsome, Dante seemed confused, but at least he roughly understood.

I was asked whether I also think his face is good-looking, although the reason for my nagging went away. Well, I guess it doesn’t matter. I was proud because it seemed like I was teaching someone who didn’t know anything about the world.

Admittedly, I see a lot of faces when meeting people. It’s very likely that it was half the money and half the face that made Dante stay here.

The second is that his name is Dante.

The reason I’m saying this again is because it’s strange that Dante told me about it first, not me asking him first. One day, with a sullen expression on his face, he suddenly asked if I didn’t even ask his name.

Up until now, I had been calling Dante by ‘you’, ‘hey’, something like that, and there was no problem with calling him that way. After all, it was just the two of us in this house, so we knew that whatever the name was, we were calling each other.

Most of all, he’s leaving soon, so do I have to know his name? I don’t have to.

That’s why when I asked if I had to ask, he got pissed off and didn’t talk for a day. I was taken aback by his sudden refusal to talk, but the next day, he confessed his name to me.

However, his last name wasn’t disclosed. Seeing that he continued to frown and said, “I will only tell you my name,” it doesn’t look like he doesn’t have a surname, but since he didn’t say it, I had no way of knowing.

The third is that he’s a magician.

This is a very surprising fact, as first, I have never seen a magician. I’ve only heard that magicians are very rare, and most of those rare magicians use magic that isn’t much different from the ordinary ones.

Of course, as in world history, there are some geniuses in that field, but it is said that the more they are the less they appear in front of people. In the first place, everything I heard was just rumors, so it wasn’t accurate.

Where I used to live, there was no magic, even though science had advanced. So, to me, magic was a field in question from the start, and I had never actually seen it, so I lived thinking that magic might not actually exist.

Then, suddenly, out of the blue, after spending a week or a few days in bed, he got up and repaired the house. The house that was destroyed by Dante and left alone by me because I was lazy. Very easily.

In general, when you think of fixing something, you usually think of a tool box, a wooden plank, or a ladder. But Dante didn’t need them. He just took a book out of the bag that contained the gold coin pocket.

“You were a magician?”

“Yeah.”

He held a book in one hand and stretched his other hand toward the wall, and the book turned over on its own. I wondered if the wind was blowing somewhere, and a magic circle that was shining softly emerged.

Looking at it, I thought that I could see magic circles being engraved on my house after living for a while. After all, it is said that people continue to live and see.

In the meantime, he’s also handsome when he uses magic. A magician with a handsome face is at the level of a natural monument.

“All fixed.”

“I didn’t know you were a magician. I heard they’re precious.”

“…Although we’re precious, it’s not like we don’t exist at all.”

While saying that, Dante stroked his bangs. The purple eyes were covered by the eyelids a few times and then revealed again, and his eyes turned around.

He seems uncomfortable somewhere, for him to strangely look away.

“…Don’t stare at me like that.”

“What? Ah, me?”

“Who else is here other than you.”

Who cares about what I’m looking at? I thought about it as I looked at Dante blankly, until I realized that it might have been a burden for him to be watched while he was using his magic.

So he feels burdened about everything…

“Alright, then I won’t stare at you.”

As I answered that, I turned my gaze to the repaired wall and heard Dante sigh. He tells me not to look in his direction, yet he sighs when I gaze at the wall. I don’t know what to do.

One last thing I’ve known after spending a month with Dante… Although he doesn’t look like that, he feels embarrassed a lot.

Look at the one before. He told me not to look at him like that because I watched him with a bit of curiosity. I don’t think he’s telling me not to watch him using magic from now on.

I don’t know how to keep up with the rhythm as he’s usually normal and only shy in strange places.

There was a day when I completely confessed. About how I can’t figure out the reason from where he’s being embarrassed, and that I didn’t know he was feeling embarrassed a lot.

However, the reply was a question of when he was embarrassed.

“Hey, if that’s not being embarrassed, then what is that? While you’re being all obvious that it’s too burdensome for you even if I only look at you for a bit.”

“When did I ever…No, I’ve really never thought it was a burden, though.”

Then why was he like that until now? I remembered the situations in which Dante had avoided my eyes and ran away out of the blue, and I thought that maybe even such a situation was shameful and made ridiculous excuses.

But no matter what I thought, Dante continued to explain what I had misunderstood. Of course, the part that ‘I had misunderstood’ here was only Dante’s claim.

“Are you surprised, or are you not surprised when someone does something that no one else has done?”

“Uh…”

I shouldn’t say that in most cases one doesn’t even realize that it’s ‘something people didn’t do’ in the first place, should I?

“Of course, surprised.”

“Yeah, it’s like that.”

What’s that? While I was about to threaten him to speak in an understandable way, Dante explained on his own.

“It’s not that I was embarrassed, but I was surprised because you pay attention to me after you usually didn’t pay attention to me… I meant that.”

“…”

What is he saying now?

I thought about what Dante had said once again, tilted my head to see if I understood it correctly, and then I looked at Dante again.

Meanwhile, Dante was grimacing as if he had thought about what he had said again. More specifically, he seemed to be trying to hide his embarrassment.

“You said I usually didn’t pay attention to you.”

“…Yeah.”

“So you said you wanted attention?”

“No, I didn’t mean that I wanted it. But what I mean is I was surprised every time I received it!”

“So, you were surprised by the sudden attention? Isn’t it shameful to care about whether you get any attention or not?”

“Not the attention itself, but ‘your’ attention… Why am I explaining this?”

That’s what I want to ask.

Standing crooked with arms crossed, I kept looking at Dante, but he pretended not to notice my gaze until the end and turned away from me.

It sounds like he’s talking about something, but I can’t ask more. It’s not just attention, it’s ‘my’ attention. What does that mean? They’re all the same attention, anyway, is there anything else?

It seemed like he knew something, but it felt like a subtle and mysterious feeling that I couldn’t dig further into. During that silence, Dante turned his body to the side and struggled to hide his expression.

I watched Dante’s ears grow red, and spoke cautiously.

“I’m sorry… You look very embarrassed right now.”

Dante let out a groan.

“Yeah, I know that too…”