I Became A Married Man in Another World
Chapter 115
115 Traces of the Santa Village
When he scanned with his mana, he found that there wasn’t a single person in the village. There were only a few small animals inside the empty houses—likely mice or weasels. In one spot, a bird had even built a nest atop a chimney.
Juhwan opened the door of the nearest house. Dust fell and swirled through the air like a thick white fog. Coughing, he covered his nose and peered inside.
Just like the exterior, the interior didn’t look like a typical family home. The entire house resembled a workshop or a small-scale cottage industry factory.
Instead of dishes and sacks of flour, strange tools were strewn about. Implements and objects whose purposes were completely unknown lay scattered here and there.
It seemed that all the important equipment and items had been taken, leaving behind only broken or useless parts and consumables.
Beneath the chimney on the right wall sat a fireplace that looked as though it had never felt the heat of a fire. It was the kind often seen in movies.
Inside the brick fireplace, unburnt logs were laid out as if prepared to be lit. It looked exactly like a cabin on a ghost ship—everything in its place, yet the people gone.
Juhwan’s gaze drifted to the top of the fireplace. An involuntary sound escaped his lips.
Hanging on the wall above the protruding mantel was a large stocking, a sight common on Earth.
It was red and white, adorned with a bit of green decoration. It was the kind of oversized stocking children hung for Santa to fill with gifts while they slept.
“Why is something like this here?”
Beside the fireplace stood a small coniferous tree. Though it lacked decorations, it looked like a miniature Christmas tree.
Juhwan turned his gaze back to the rest of the house. After seeing the stocking and the tree, the objects whose meanings he hadn’t understood moments ago now appeared in a new light.
The small bells rolling haphazardly on the floor were likely ornaments for the tree.
They emitted a beautiful, brilliant light that made them look like jewels, but anyone who had seen a tree on Earth would recognize them as decorations.
As if to support his theory, a circular thread loop was attached to each bell.
What looked like withered cacti or processed branches might have been models of reindeer antlers—or perhaps the real thing.
As Juhwan walked toward the center of the room, his foot caught on something, sending it rolling. It made a clattering metallic sound.
Looking down, he saw something resembling the bells Salvation Army volunteers rang. The round mouth of the bell was slightly dented. When he picked it up and gave it a shake, it let out a pretty ting-a-ling.
Next, Juhwan’s eyes moved to a corner. There was a single bed that looked like a military cot. Beneath a rumpled blanket, a piece of red fabric peeked out.
He approached and lifted the blanket to find the triangular red hat that Santas wore.
“Is this… a Santa’s house?”
He muttered to himself, and suddenly, the memory of his first encounter with Santa on Earth flashed back to him. When he had been leaving as if fleeing after making his wish, Santa had shouted loudly at his back.
[Customer, please be happy! I will pour all of Santa’s power into making your wish come true. All the Santas are rooting for you!]
What? So there really was a village? I thought he was just talking.
“….”
I thought it was at the North Pole, but the Santa Village was actually in this other world. But if there were enough of them to form a village, didn’t that mean there were quite a lot of them, not just one or two?
‘Are there several of those eccentric Santas?’
The thought felt strangely horrifying. Surely, there weren’t countless people being whisked away to this world like he was.
When Juhwan stepped outside, he saw Yeonhwa poking her face into a nearby house. Her head was through a wide-open window while her body remained outside. Her tail flicked back and forth like a whip, as if she were excited.
“What on earth are you looking at?”
Yeonhwa didn’t seem to notice Juhwan even as he muttered and drew closer. She was staring intently into the mushroom-shaped house.
Usually, she was hyper-aware and focused on Juhwan’s every move, so this was unusual.
“Yeonhwa.”
When Juhwan called her name, Yeonhwa jerked her head, hitting it against the window frame. With a dull thud, a corner of the frame crumbled slightly.
Yeonhwa shifted her front hooves restlessly. She looked incredibly flustered. Her frantic behavior was odd.
“What’s wrong? What’s in there?”
Juhwan placed a hand on Yeonhwa’s body and sent a small amount of mana into her. Rudolphs accepted their master’s mana like nourishment. Juhwan knew from experience that whenever he did this, Oz or Yeonhwa would feel happy and comforted.
But Yeonhwa’s agitation didn’t subside at all. If anything, it seemed to worsen as he drew closer.
Calm down. It’s okay, just calm down.
He whispered the thought in his mind, but it was no use. She seemed even more urgent now. She began nudging Juhwan’s body with her head. It seemed she wanted him to go inside the house.
“Alright, I get it. The house isn’t going anywhere….”
Pushed by Yeonhwa, Juhwan stepped into the house, and his eyes widened.
“My god.”
Muttering under his breath, Juhwan stood frozen, staring at the interior. The house was covered in Zentangle drawings.
If the previous house was the home of a craftsman who made toys, the owner of this house was likely a Santa who drew or researched Zentangles. Various Zentangle drawings were depicted on every wall.
There were people standing, sitting, or lying down; men and women, children, the old and the young; there were even beasts, spears, swords, and arrows. Every single one of them was covered in Zentangles.
The walls weren’t the only things with Zentangles. They were on papers and objects scattered everywhere. Zentangle drawings were strewn across the floor as well.
Some were half-finished, likely failed sketches. Others featured unusually large Zentangle patterns. One or two large Zentangles were drawn on big sheets of paper, looking like unfinished designs.
“This one… is a circle.”
On one of the drawings on the wall, he found a circle similar to the ones Oz drew.
Oz’s pattern was for bending or breaking hard objects, but this symbol seemed to have a different meaning.
It was drawn on a human body, and vine-like plants were growing out of the mouth, nose, and eyes. It looked as if the person had become a vine. It was grotesque.
‘Even if they look almost identical, does the effect change depending on the Rudolph who uses it?’
He wondered if the manifested ability might be different even if Oz and Yeonhwa drew the same pattern.
Or perhaps it only felt similar to him, and the patterns were actually slightly different in their finer details.
Even if it was the same circular pattern, differences in size, line thickness, or the way lines connected might give it a completely different meaning….
‘Ah, it could be that the order of the Zentangle strokes is different. Or maybe the amount of mana infused into it has an effect.’
It was possible that the nature of the user’s mana, the amount infused, the order of the strokes—all of these factors combined to manifest the ability.
Juhwan tried infusing a little mana into a nearby piece of paper. He had wondered if a normal human, not a Rudolph, could use Zentangles as long as they had mana, but it didn’t seem so. There was no response.
Nothing happened.
It was the same when he drew directly on the paper. He tried drawing the simplest pattern on a blank sheet, but still, nothing happened.
‘Does it only gain meaning when a Rudolph uses it?’
Suddenly, a question occurred to him.
Juhwan turned around and asked, “Now that I think about it, how do you all know about Zentangles? It’s not like someone taught you.”
It wasn’t as if he could get an answer by asking. But at this moment, it was what he was most curious about.
Maybe not Yeonhwa, but Oz had certainly never met a Santa. Juhwan hadn’t taught him, and he hadn’t appeared to have met anyone else.
So how did he know the Zentangle patterns?
But Juhwan’s question received no response, not even a reaction.
“…Yeonhwa?”
Yeonhwa seemed to have frozen. With her neck bent low and her head inside the window, she was staring fixedly at a single spot in the house.
Following Yeonhwa’s gaze, Juhwan’s eyes landed on a drawing on a corner wall.
“Is that… Sleeping Beauty?”
It was a drawing of a beautiful woman with long hair lying in a room within a castle filled with briars. It seemed to be modeled after the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty. Or perhaps what a Santa’s Rudolph had done had become the basis for the fairy tale. The only difference from the story was that the woman’s skin was covered in Zentangles.
He couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a slightly different pattern from the one Yeonhwa had drawn on the bandits last time. It might be somewhat similar, but it was probably different.
“Yeonhwa, what’s wrong? What about that drawing?”
When Juhwan asked, Yeonhwa started as if waking from a dream and looked at him.
Then, in a state of excitement, she began to whinny, tugging frantically at Juhwan’s hair and clothes. She seemed frustrated that she wanted to say something but couldn’t.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”
At Juhwan’s words, Yeonhwa suddenly tried to get him onto her back. She tugged at his wrist so hard it hurt.
“Hey, hey, calm down. What’s gotten into you all of a sudden?”
Juhwan tried to soothe her by patting her neck in his confusion, but it was no use. She bit and tugged at his clothes as if she had to take him somewhere no matter what.
“Wait a minute. There are still more places to look. In the other houses….”
As he spoke, Juhwan suddenly looked back. He felt a prickle at the back of his neck. The drawing he had seen moments ago suddenly took on a weight of meaning and grew in his mind.
He stared intently at the woman in the drawing Yeonhwa had been looking at.
The woman lying still amidst the briars looked like a living corpse.
“No way.”
Yeonhwa was said to have occasionally drawn mysterious patterns on her mother and father. Her mother had thought it was to extend her life, but Yeonhwa herself hadn’t known the meaning of what she was drawing. Until Juhwan had asked her recently, Yeonhwa definitely hadn’t known.
“Could it be that pattern…?”
As Juhwan muttered, Yeonhwa’s tugging stopped. Juhwan stared blankly at the drawing before turning his head. He looked straight into Yeonhwa’s eyes.
“The pattern you drew for your parents… the one you said you didn’t know the meaning of… was it that one?”
Neigh. Neigh. Yeonhwa shook her head vigorously. Dust clinging to her body flew into the air.
Juhwan stepped outside and climbed onto Yeonhwa’s back. Before he could even give a command, Yeonhwa began to bolt.
The surrounding scenery blurred past at a speed incomparable to before. The wind felt like it was stinging his skin. Juhwan immediately cast a barrier of wind.
His heart was racing, thumping at a strange, frantic pace.
My god… My god. Perhaps, like the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, his parents were still alive. Maybe they were just lying there as if asleep. He had to hurry, hurry and dig them up. Fortunately, they hadn’t been cremated. Beneath the large burial mound, they were likely lying with their bodies intact.
But was such a thing truly possible? Doubt crept in. No matter how mysterious Santa’s power was, there were things that were possible and things that were not. If one could control human life itself, that would already be the realm of the gods.
‘….’
Juhwan’s body, pressed flat, swayed with Yeonhwa’s movements.
His heart felt tight with anxiety, hope, excitement, and impatience.
Was what he was about to do right? To desecrate a grave—was it okay to commit such an act of filial impiety?
The image of his parents remaining in Juhwan’s mind was of their faces when they were young and healthy. His memories of them ended there.
But if he dug up the grave, the final image he held of them would change.
If he were to see his parents rotted away, Juhwan would be forced to remember that sight in regret until the day he died. Was he okay with that?
Countless thoughts clamored in his head. And yet, the option of just passing by without checking never once crossed his mind.
Even if there was only a one-in-a-million chance, even if he had to spend every night blaming himself as an unfilial son, there was no choice but to confirm it.
Even when he was loaded onto a slave carriage and his wishes seemed completely out of reach, Juhwan had met Riji and Dorothy and found such happiness.
The process was arduous and strange, but Santa kept his promises.
It might be the same for his parents. If he had been given the hope that he could meet them, Santa might have arranged things so that it would come true. The fact that Yeonhwa had continued to draw that pattern on his parents’ bodies without even knowing why might have been a divine arrangement.
‘Please….’
His heart filled with a desperate prayer.
