Housekeeper in the dungeon

Episode 13

“Aha, so you unknowingly triggered the skill, but why is your score negative? Is it because you hit a snail instead of a bug? But when you get out of the house, aren’t they both similar after all?”

Hearing Hee-na’s mumbling, Oh Sae-yi was so excited that his body turned bright red, and he blurted out a message.

“Mmph! Myself ≠ simple snail!”

“Myself = Housing Manager! Housing Fairy!”

“Assaulting the housing manager, penalty factor!”

Hee-Na waved her antennae and apologized to the little snail for her outburst. She was out of breath.

“I’m sorry, little snail, I slurred, no, I rambled. I was so wrong to hit you in the first place, to think of blowing up the cutest little snail with the nicest shell in the world without even looking at it! That’s a big, big mistake that cost me a hundred points of skill, right?”

Hee-na put down the chicken she was eating and stuck to the ground, trying to calm him down.

He became very cheerful and shouted.

“Big mistake! You need to be punished!”

At the same time, the yellow wallpaper suddenly turned into a colorful rose pattern. Hee-Na was horrified by the near-eye terror of the wallpaper pattern.

“Oh no! My house! What are you doing!”

“Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.”

It sounded roughly like an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Hee-Na covered her eyes with her fingers and screamed.

“Will you stop using those weird abbreviated arrows?”

“∴Assault → Revenge! (*∴ Therefore)”

But there was nothing anyone could do to stop Oh Sahng-yi, who was already on the verge of a rage.

The wallpaper had turned into a faded rose pattern, and the sink was now covered in colorful florals.

One door was stamped with a smiling moon, stars, and dolphins instead of flowers. And next to the shoe rack was a wallpaper with an embossed brick pattern.

The interior was even more horrifying because I couldn’t figure out the intention.

Hee-na cried out in a half-crazed frenzy.

“Oops, Oops, violence is so bad, I won’t do it again. Please don’t ruin my house anymore!”

It wasn’t until a little more time passed that the little snail truly came to his senses. Fortunately, this vandalism (?) ended with a change of wallpaper and sink pattern.

If it had included the old cherry molding, Hee-Na might have cried.

“Ugh, I’m going to dream about being crushed to death by flowers in my sleep!”

I never thought I’d miss Nuri and the grayish moldy wallpaper. The current state of the house was beyond anything I could have imagined. That’s why every word mattered.

“Oh, Hua, can you give this back to me? I’m so sorry.”

Hee-na grabbed onto him and begged.

“…….

But Oh Sae-yi only typed an ellipsis in the air. She was silent.

“Oh-sake, huh?”

“…….

“Mr. Oh-saek, the great house manager and house fairy, please grant me a wish!”

At Hee-na’s request, Mr. Five Colors finally opened his mouth.

“……I can’t.”

“What? Do you think my apology is insincere? No, I mean it, I’m sorry.”

“……I can’t.”

A chill ran down my spine.

“What, what’s impossible with your abilities?”

The five-colored snail’s two antennae twitched. The snail was also trying to stab something.

Hee-Na asked as gently as she could, pretending to be unconcerned.

“Talk to me, Oh Sack, talk to me. What’s wrong?”

“ㅂㅂㅂㅂㅂㅂ…….”

Hee-Na’s mouth opened as she read the combination of consonants and vowels in Moorish.

For the first time in a long time, the system window worked.

“Interior?”

Hee-na’s question was followed by the quest description.

Essential Quest (0/3)

– Tear off unnecessary wallpaper (0/100%)

– Change the wall color (0/100%)

– Change the color of the sink (0/100%)

Time limit: None

Quest penalty: You will continue to live in an aesthetically unpleasant home.

Quest reward: Level up the ‘Home Sweet Home’ skill!

Side Quests (0/N)

Additional rewards upon completion based on user’s choice >>

It was a strangely specific yet free-form quest.

Quests were like homework that was randomly assigned to each Awakened. They were usually tailored to the Awakened’s abilities and had a time limit.

Many quests had significant penalties for failing to complete them, such as stat reductions and item loss.

However, the rewards for completing quests, such as items and stat increases, were often quite helpful. As such, many players secretly wanted to see this quest appear.

The first such quest was given to Hee-na. She was given the first such quest: to restore the horrible interior of her studio to something at least passable!

Luckily, there was no time limit.

Hee-Na looked around the shoddy room and muttered to herself.

“I can’t live in this place, not even for my mental health. It’s Quest, it’s Nabal, and I need to fix this room.”

Hee-na had been through a lot when she was younger, losing her parents. She was used to having a decent home.

“……, but not like this.”

Hee-Na shook her head. She’d never seen anything so tacky, cluttered, and headache-inducing in her life. She needed to do something about it.

“……Quest. Thanks to you.”

Beside him, Oh Sack took credit in small font, apologetically.

“Shut up, Oh Sack, I didn’t do anything good, but you know you didn’t do anything good either, right?”

“…….

But Hee-na’s words quickly quieted him. If the snail-like house elf had any sense of aesthetics, she was fully aware of what she had done.

“I start work next Monday, and I need to get this done before then, right?”

I muttered, counting the remaining days on my fingers. Today was Tuesday, so I had roughly a week to spare.

“I was going to get the wallpaper mold removed and do some basic cleaning anyway……. Let’s call it a double entendre.”

Hee-Na tried to think as positively as she could. The house was a mess, but at least it wasn’t gone.

“Well, let’s start with that wallpaper……?”

The colorful floral wallpaper was still covered in mold.

Hee-Na opened her inventory window and pulled out the Fungicide (A) she’d gotten for leveling up. She pretended to take it out as soon as she realized she needed it.

“I wish I could just keep normal items in my inventory,” I thought, “but that would be too much of a scam, wouldn’t it?

The inventory could only hold items that were given to you by the system, found in dungeons, or made from dungeon byproducts.

Since you couldn’t put things in there that people would use, the types of things you could store in your inventory were very limited.

Weapons, potions, magic scrolls, gems from monster carcasses, etc…….. Most of them were incredibly expensive.

Anyway, the fungicide was also something the system paid for, so I could store it in my inventory.

“Let’s try it while we’re up, shall we?”

Hee-Na put on an apron and a headband to give the fungicide a better chance of working. After all, the Fungicide seemed to be a passive skill anyway.

The system notified her of her equipped advantage.

She opened her cleaning toolbox, found a mask, and put it on. She didn’t want to smell the odor.

She wrapped him up in a towel and stuck him in the corner of the bathroom, worried that the disinfectant might harm him.

It wasn’t out of anger, I was worried. I was.

Wearing pink rubber gloves, Hee-na sprayed the moldy wall with ‘Mold Killing Solution (A)’.

A white mist sprayed out with a chirping sound.

※ Caution: It is harmful to the human body, so be sure to ventilate after 15 minutes>.

The friendly system window even gave me instructions on how to use the mold killer.

Hee-Na sprayed the rest of the walls with the mold killer and opened the front door to get out of the house.

Unlike her usual practice of opening the door thinking, “I need to go somewhere,” this time she didn’t have a specific place in mind.

As soon as I turned the iron doorknob, bright light streamed in through the cracks. It was sunlight that felt clearer than city sunlight.

“……?”

Stepping outside the door, Hee-Na stood there for a moment, unable to believe what she was seeing.

She rubbed her eyes again and again, but she couldn’t see anything.

“What is this?”

Yes, she was looking at a white sandy beach.

The only thing that was unusual about this beach was that it was covered with…….

Instead of seagulls in the sky, monsters are running around.

“This is…….”

Yes, this was a dungeon.

It was so ridiculous, that I even wanted to ask Knowledge Fang Fang.

Q. You can go anywhere you think, but the house you thought you found turned out to be a dungeon. What should you do?

But no matter how much I thought about it, there was only one answer.

A. You’ve been scammed by a real estate scam, but if that’s all you have, you have to live there. What do you do?

“What is this?”

Hee-na stared up at the flying monsters for a long time.