NOVEL NEXT Chapter 10 - When the Begonias Bloom
Chapter 10 – When the Begonias Bloom
The night had passed like a typhoon.
“…fuck.”
It was only natural for a curse to escape my lips.
Wake up and every joint in my body is aching.
A quick glance at my arms and shoulders reveals kiss marks all over.
My back, rubbed against the hard floor, is covered in bruises.
After having my energy drained countless times last night,
and then being sent on an errand when I was dead tired before being allowed to sleep—
it wasn’t exactly a pleasant experience.
I clearly tried to coax her to be gentle,
but I’m not sure if it worked, or if it had the opposite effect.
Waking up with your entire body disgustingly sticky
is a truly shitty feeling.
Toes, ankles, thighs, lower abdomen, armpits—every part was covered with hardened vaginal fluids,
and semen that had turned from transparent to yellowish as it cooled,
painting my skin so thoroughly that no clean spot could be found.
Let’s think positively.
It’s clear she’s fallen for my body anyway.
This could even be seen as a medal of honor.
But why, when I think about yesterday, does my heart race,
my eyes sting, my throat heave,
and something hot rise and fall in my upper abdomen?
“Water…”
My throat was parched.
It felt as if my master’s fluids had congealed stickily in my throat.
I wanted to rip out my stomach and wash it whole.
Let’s erase what happened last night from my mind.
That wasn’t me. Fuck.
Being a man but lying beneath someone else, acting coy like a child.
What do you mean “be gentle”? This is just…
The more I thought about it, the more depressed I became.
Still, I survived.
Our lazy genius, no, sex genius—whatever you want to call her—
it was somewhat impressive that I could still open my eyes after mixing bodies with the energetic Leona.
“Master? Are you here?”
I called out, but the sound echoed emptily through the living room.
Seems she left first.
I’m glad to have a day off from the daily ordeal of having to wake up before her every morning.
First, let’s wash off all the sticky fluids clinging to my body.
And start the new day in a good mood.
Our lazy master wouldn’t have drawn a bath for me,
so I struggled to move the wooden tub by myself
and turned the water pump like crazy to draw water.
If you ask what a water pump is, I’d say it’s a machine you turn by hand to draw water.
There’s just one thing I need to say.
Life is painful.
You already know that?
Let me put it this way.
Try doing housework alone in a place without washing machines, air conditioning, gas, electricity, vacuum cleaners, or cars.
There is running water, they say, but this is no job for a human.
I’m definitely an amazing person for serving as a full-time, unpaid servant here.
Not the master, the apprentice I mean.
Or you could call me a graduate student or junior employee in my original world.
As I moved my aching arms, cursing every being in the world inwardly,
I was sweating profusely.
Why not just go to a public bath, you ask?
Leona would go ballistic and nail me to the house.
She says the baths here are places where men sell their bodies.
They need fresh water to extract semen, she says.
Don’t even think about setting foot in such places, she warns.
Instead, she tinkered with tools for a while
and made this device so we could draw water inside the house.
She says she doesn’t like other women seeing me working outside,
but honestly, I can’t understand why.
A man could sometimes strip and sweat outside.
Immersing my body in the ice-cold water made my whole body tingle.
Ugh. Cold.
The morning weather in this city in March was quite chilly.
The weather was perfectly clear without a cloud,
but there’s a reason Leona wore a coat last night.
Damn. If she’s so strong, she could at least heat the bathwater before leaving.
Since nobody cares about a man bathing anyway,
I finished a thorough bath with cold water and returned to the bed,
where I could tell for certain that Leona had left the house.
A strange note had been placed beside where I’d slept.
<.eejasid deevoleb yM
.emit emas eht ta worros dna yoj em evag edutita dna sdrow ruoy thgin tsaL
.gnippohs og esaelp os ,thginot gnimoc era stseug raed yM
.nemow rehto ot klat t’noD>
What kind of nonsense is this, pissing me off since earlier?
It’s our master’s habit when writing.
Usually she writes properly,
but being left-handed, she occasionally writes from right to left.
I’ve never met such a crazy lefty among those I know,
but if the master wrote a note like this, then she did.
Originally, she’d write like this for text she didn’t want others to see,
could it be she doesn’t want to show this note to anyone but me?
Anyway, if you hold the writing up to a glass mirror,
it looks like this:
Last night your words and attitude gave me joy and sorrow at the same time.
My dear guests are coming tonight, so please go shopping.
Don’t talk to other women.>
In the end, it’s just another errand.
But a smile automatically spread across my face.
Being told to shop means I’m allowed to go outside!
Good thing I gave it to her.
Who cares if it’s an errand—it’s undoubtedly the happiest shuttle service in the world.
My body trembled at the sight of results appearing so quickly.
Wow. Women in this world are so simple.
See how things get easier after having sex once.
…Don’t think it worked out? Being able to go outside is enough.
There’s no way she’d have someone watching me.
Why her writing style differs so much from her usual speech isn’t an important issue.
The fact that I’ve got reddened kiss marks all over below my neck isn’t worth mentioning either.
And that damn “don’t talk to other women” at the end…
She says it every day, so I’ll ignore it.
What should I do outside? Visit the cathedral.
See the sculptures outside the palace. Check out the bell tower.
Visit our Michaela too.
…Though she’ll probably be angry about why I was late for our promise.
I almost twisted my ankle while hurriedly getting dressed.
Looking at my current physical state,
my master must have either rubbed my body with her vagina all night
or erected my penis while I was sleeping and thoroughly fucked my unconscious self.
“Ugghhh….”
Strange groans involuntarily escaped my mouth.
But whatever.
Now I can leave this hopeless house.
Fully dressed, I took one step outside the antique wooden door
with my trembling feet.
Last night was just one fucking, but today is a great leap forward.
If this is rape, I could endure it hundreds more times… actually, no I couldn’t.
As the thought occurred to me, my whole body shuddered,
and I forcibly shook my head around.
Exiting the stone building, the world’s fresh air, without a speck of fine dust, refreshingly pierced my nose.
The weather, which had only felt cold, had somehow become warm.
No, that’s not it. The sun was already high in the sky.
I thought it was morning, but I woke up extremely late.
This is all the harmful effect of sex.
It drains a person’s energy.
This is why they tell you to save masturbation time for sculpture practice.
Inwardly chiding our master who only touches people’s bodies,
I walked out of the yard full of begonias.
To tell you now, our studio rents a three-story building in a monastery in the northern part of the city.
It’s spacious enough for two people to move around in all directions and have sex,
but too small for another person to move in.
Instead, from the basement to the third floor, it has everything, so there’s no inconvenience for working.
By my standards, it’s a strange building with an extremely classic arch design
but appears to have been built not too long ago.
Who knows, maybe in a few hundred years it will become a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Whatever I endured at night, it’s pleasant to have the curfew lifted.
A great progress as a real man.
Whatever. People get raped sometimes. Get their semen sucked out sometimes.
Right? It happens. What’s important is achieving the goal, not the means.
After all, a man doing something important…
Wondering what’s so important about going outside,
I wiped the corner of my eye with my finger while thinking such thoughts.
There’s actually an embarrassing reason behind this unfitting bravado.
I’m on my way to meet a friend who’s the only one who’s treated me like a person since I fell into this world.
If there’s one thing to do when coming out of imprisonment,
it would naturally be to at least greet such a friend.
Hmm, the note said not to meet women…
But she’s just a friend.
There’s no way I’d have sex with a friend who talks about hobbies, right?
This isn’t some adult novel.
Anyway, if you look directly south after leaving the studio,
there’s this city’s landmark,
an insanely magnificent and spine-tinglingly beautiful cathedral.
The large red dome placed at the very top boasts an enormous presence.
Leona said it’s the largest dome in the world and used 4 million bricks,
which sounds applicable to our world too.
Among brick domes, that is.
The exterior is exquisitely arranged with three types of marble—white, pink, and green—
and the sight of it gleaming in the sunlight is simply breathtaking.
The outer walls have hollows larger than people
with statues, also larger than people, densely inserted,
numbering exactly 3,159.
I remember Leona’s smirking face as she watched my despairing expression
when I realized I’d only make thirty-something in my lifetime even if I worked until death.
Every morning when I wake up in the studio, I see the building whether I want to or not.
While other buildings are at most 3 or 4 stories,
this one soars to the size of a 50-story apartment building.
Next to it, a bell tower, also beautifully sculpted in marble, reaches endlessly toward the sky.
Whatever my master’s personality,
she found a place with a really nice view.
As I walked steadily through the crowded streets,
I felt a magical pull drawing me toward the cathedral.
A statue of an angel holding a sword
seemed to swing its sword down as if mocking me.
Well, it’s funny to feel inferior while looking alone at a cathedral
that reportedly took hundreds of people 200 years to build.
Still, as someone who calls himself a sculptor,
maybe I could get my name up there if I practice from now until I die.
Let’s hold onto that hope.
Along with the memories of last night that kept seeping into my mind,
the sunlight reflecting brilliantly off the outer walls tormented me, forcing me to cover my eyes with my palm.
Damn. It’s nice that there’s no fine dust, but why are my eyes so stinging in the daytime after being cold in the morning?
The weather here is really fickle.
Lost in all sorts of thoughts, I soon arrived in front of the cathedral.
With an absurdly large cathedral in the middle of the city, there’s no worry about getting lost here.
You just look up and follow it until you arrive.
Just a few minutes’ walk from here, there’s a market that locals frequently visit,
and if you turn left, you reach Michaela’s house.
But… she mentioned some work, so her house would be empty.
As I slowly moved toward the back of the cathedral, toward the workshop,
I saw the market across the bridge.
No, more precisely, on the bridge.
Uniquely in this city, the market consists of stalls filling the bridge.
The name of the river flowing through the middle of the city, like the Han River, is the Arno River.
It’s truly a beautiful place, worthy of being called the City of Flowers.
The water is plentiful, the plumbing is good, and the air, free of any exhaust, is even more refreshing.
Early spring markets are inherently lackluster—though the sun is still high, the stalls are already desolate, with only warm sunlight shining down on the sprawled tables. Throughout the bridge, women holding unsold meat are shouting hoarsely to entice customers, but people have already lost interest, and tanners are arguing about how to handle unsold leather goods. The occasional swarm of flies is annoying…
“Hey there, handsome young man, take some meat!”
I was startled out of my thoughts.
A rough-looking pockmarked woman holding a donkey with her left hand called out to me.
Why me? How annoying.
As I shook my head, the woman chased away some playful girls.
After the children scurried away from her uncomfortable movements,
she threw the dirty meat and intestines into the river with splashes.
Ah. So that’s why the market is on the bridge.
Come to think of it, there was something I needed to do here before meeting my friend, but what was it?
…Since I’ve forgotten, it probably wasn’t important.
I didn’t bring any money anyway, so there’s nothing to buy.
And I’m not hungry thanks to desperately swallowing someone’s fluids yesterday.
Passing the bridge and turning into the alley behind the cathedral,
I entered a dimly lit area despite it being midday, thanks to the tall buildings.
Perhaps because they were seeing a foreign-looking man for the first time, I felt women’s gazes from here and there.
To clarify any misunderstanding, just because it’s a dark back alley
doesn’t mean it’s a neighborhood full of ruffian women who rape people.
It’s just the shadows created by Gothic architecture with over three hundred high spires for one cathedral.
This cathedral and the palace are right next to each other,
equivalent to Myeongdong Cathedral and Seoul City Hall in Korea.
People don’t just get kidnapped in the middle of such streets.
So why are people looking at me like this?
Because it’s unusual for a man to frequent the workshop.
Anyway, standing in front of the firmly closed wooden back door,
I hesitated about what to say.
My friend had invited me to come, but how would she receive me?
Would she be annoyed that I came all the way to her workplace again?
After pondering for a while, I remembered that I was here to see a friend, not my master, and my mind calmed.
I’ve been through too much lately.
With a deep sigh, I knocked on the door handle. Bang, bang, bang.
“Is Michaela here?”
This door handle is disgustingly heavy.
After a brief silence,
a beautiful brown-haired girl about my height would emerge from there—
“Oh my. Who’s outside?”
No, instead, an old woman with white hair
opened just the eye part of the back door and met my gaze.
…Why is an old woman coming out from there?