Chapter 109:

Chapter 109:

Chapter 109

I know it’s a bit late to say this, but Celine is not a ‘real’ teller.

She must have tried hard to hide that fact, but I knew it.

I knew it all from the moment I met her.

Celine, the teller, left such a big mark on my life that I couldn’t easily forget her.

“How did you know? Did the rumor spread? Or did another teller...”

“You hit the nail on the head. You know you’re too excited right now, right?”

Celine’s eyes were shaking with shock, unlike when I first saw her.

She frowned and glared at me more intensely.

She must have vowed not to cross the line, but now there was no time to worry about that.

“Do I look like I’m not excited...!”

“No one knows this. Only I do.”

I said indirectly, ‘The thing you’re worried about didn’t happen.’

“Do you expect me to believe that?”

“It’s true. I’m the only one who knows your identity. You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to. Anyone can see what they want to see.”

I saw Celine biting her lips. This chapter was first shared on the Ñøv€lß1n platform.

In the end, she had no choice but to believe me, whether she liked it or not.

I had her weakness in my hand.

“What do you want from me?”

“What?”

“What do you want from me, since you’re saying this?”

“Me? You don’t think I’m going to use this as a weakness and do something to you, do you?”

“Isn’t that what you were doing?”

I was speechless at Celine’s question, as if she really didn’t know.

What does she think of me?

“Well, I get that you don’t like me. But do you know what? I asked you a question first.”

“A question... Oh.”

She seemed to remember it now.

I asked her how to show a story as a teller in the storytelling room.

Celine looked at me with a disbelief in her eyes and pondered over the question seriously.

As if she had no choice because I had her weakness.

“I don’t know.”

That was all she could say after thinking hard.

I didn’t blame her.

In fact, I wouldn’t have been able to answer properly if I had been asked the same question.

“It’s natural that you don’t know. This is not a problem with a fixed answer.”

“There is no answer...”

She muttered after me without realizing it.

Seeing her attitude, I chuckled.

“You finally feel like having a real conversation with me, huh? Miss Celine.”

She came to her senses and returned to her poker face, but there was still a trace of her flustered emotion on her flushed face.

She bit her lips slightly and gave me a resentful look.

Geez, scary.

“How did you know that I’m not a real teller?”

“Is that important?”

“It is important.”

“I see.”

She was not a ‘real’ teller.

Her words might sound strange, but they were not wrong.

‘What is a teller?’

A teller is a created race.

They travel around the mixed world and select the beings of the lower world and show them to the spirits of the upper world.

Their lives and their stories.

Storytelling.

That was their role and their reason for existence.

‘But does a teller have to be created? Does storytelling have to be done by a teller?’

I couldn’t answer that question for sure.

Everyone knows that storytelling is done by tellers, but storytelling is not their privilege.

Just look at our company.

The tellers who do storytelling belong to the storytelling room, and the tellers in other rooms do different things.

In other words, one can show a story even if they are not a teller.

Yeah. Among them, there was also ‘she’...

“...”

As I recalled ‘her’ faint smile in my blurry memory, my heart sank without me knowing. I

tried not to show it and smiled at Celine.

“Don’t worry too much.”

Celine didn’t answer for a while.

She was trying to sort out her complicated feelings.

After hesitating for a long time, she asked me cautiously.

“What is your reason for helping me?”

Is that all you have to say?

“What if I like you? What if this is pure kindness?”

“I don’t believe in pure kindness. Especially from a teller.”

You’re a teller yourself and you talk like that.

Of course, she was in a different position from the other innate ones.

In the end, by saying that, she was treating herself and the other tellers as strangers.

“Is the reason that important?”

“It is important. To me.”

“I see.”

She gave me a look that urged me to answer.

I couldn’t feel any respect for her boss, but that was her personality.

She was stubborn and unyielding.

If I wanted to earn her respect, I had to show her my achievements and actions that matched her.

In the end, I had one more task.

I shrugged lightly and pointed at her face with my finger.

“Your eyes.”

“What?”

“Your eyes.”

At my words, Celine raised her hand and touched her eyes without knowing it.

She didn’t know what her eyes looked like, nor could she change them.

“It’s because of your eyes. I like them, so I decided to help you.”

“What was wrong with my eyes?”

“Stubbornness.”

“Stub...bornness?”

She made a ridiculous expression when an unexpected word came out.

She tried to suppress her expression, but that’s what happened.

“Stubbornness. Or conviction. You keep your mouth shut and treat everything around you with a cold attitude. But your eyes are different. Inside that cold behavior, there is a burning core that is more than anything else.”

“Me...really?”

“Yeah. That’s why I’m helping you. Not you, but something that’s raging in your heart. I’m curious what it will turn out to be, the thing you’re hiding right now. That’s all.”

“Is that really true?”

“What do you expect from a weirdo?”

I chuckled and approached her.

Celine flinched for a moment, but soon straightened her waist and neck.

Anyone would think I was trying to eat her.

I handed her a book I picked from my library.

It was the first volume of the story when I gave up my protection for the first time and Kang Hye-rim awakened as a swordmaster for the first time.

[The Story of the Fighting Teller and the Swordmaster].

“Read it. If you read it, you might get a clue on how to do storytelling when you want to do it later.”

She took the book I handed her without a word.

She returned to her original expressionless face and looked at the book.

I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

But one thing for sure was that her eyes were burning vividly unlike before.

She lifted her head from the book and looked up at me.

“I, um...”

“I don’t know how well you’ll do in the future.”

I didn’t bother to listen to what she had to say.

It was just a word that came out of her emotion at the moment.

There was no sincerity in it.

So.

“Just watch me closely and try your best to steal my skills. I’ll listen to what you have to say later.”

Tell me again when you can speak with sincerity.

I left my library after leaving those words.