I Became A Married Man in Another World
Chapter 116
116. Santa Always Leaves the Job Half-Done
Perhaps unicorns were never meant to live in the human world to begin with. Maybe they were beasts that fell here from the realm of the gods….
Despite being a living creature, its speed was incredible. Unlike the journey toward Santa Village, they arrived home in the blink of an eye. It was truly fast.
Coming from the direction of Santa Village toward the house, the grave appeared first.
Juhwan didn’t stop at the house; he practically tumbled off the mount in front of the grave.
The large burial mound looked exactly as it always did. Then again, there was no reason for it to look different. It was always the same—just a large mound of earth.
Yet, to Juhwan’s eyes, the mound looked different today. The grave, covered in dry grass, felt as though it were alive.
“Dad, Mom.”
He placed a hand on the rounded mound, softly calling out to them, then leaned forward to rest his forehead against the earth.
“I’m sorry. I have to dig up the coffin. If I’m wrong about this, I am truly sorry. But if I’m right, you’ll be able to see each other again just as you wanted… but if I’m wrong, I’m so sorry.”
No matter how much he believed his parents were alive, he felt a deep resistance to desecrating their grave. Suppressing his rising anxiety, Juhwan whispered his apologies over and over.
Whinny! Standing beside him, Yeonhwa stomped her hooves impatiently. She looked ready to dig into the ground herself.
The creature likely didn’t fully understand what a grave was. She might know it was a place where people were buried, but she didn’t understand the profound significance it held for humans, or the reverence a child felt for their parents’ resting place.
“….”
Nevertheless, Juhwan felt a surge of affection for the creature who had made the mound so large and offered grass instead of flowers, showing her own brand of devotion to his parents.
Moreover, during the long years of despair while they waited for Juhwan, his parents must have found great solace in her. He could catch glimpses of that truth in the letter his mother had written.
With a heart full of gratitude, Juhwan patted Yeonhwa’s chest and spoke to her.
“Calm down. I haven’t forgotten that we need to hurry. I was just asking for my parents’ understanding.”
Yeonhwa shook her mane, which glittered in the sunlight. As expected, she didn’t seem to understand what he meant at all. She just looked like she wanted him to get on with it.
Nudged by Yeonhwa’s urging, Juhwan began to dig.
He didn’t use any tools. Juhwan was already exceptionally strong. He feared he might accidentally damage the coffin or the bodies without realizing it. If his parents were indeed alive, no amount of caution would be enough.
Coating his hands in a thin layer of mana, he began to slowly excavate from the base of the mound.
Suppressing his frantic heart, he checked everything he touched with slow, careful movements.
The outer layer of the grave was ordinary soil, packed down hard.
However, once he reached a few centimeters down, the soil changed completely. It was warm and fluffy, the earth becoming as soft as cotton candy. It was soft enough to dig with his bare hands even without mana. It reminded him of the ground near Santa Village.
As he went deeper, he saw tree stalks. They weren’t roots. They looked like vine stems, buried in the soil and intricately intertwined.
Stalks like these didn’t belong underground. In a normal grave, this would have been clearly bizarre.
But since he had already seen coiled vine patterns everywhere, he wasn’t particularly surprised. He had anticipated this to some extent since seeing the drawings.
Juhwan continued to dig, unbothered. The vines blocked his hands and got in the way. However, he felt no desire to cut them.
These were the patterns Yeonhwa had drawn for his parents. He had suspected they held some meaning, but after seeing the Sleeping Beauty drawing in Santa Village, he was certain.
In the drawing, vines tightly surrounded the beauty who lay like a corpse, preventing anyone from approaching. He figured these were likely serving the same purpose. There was no way he could bring himself to cut them.
Suddenly, words escaped his lips.
“Thank you.”
Juhwan stopped his hands and looked at the vines. For some reason, it felt as though the vines had twitched.
“….”
But that was impossible. No matter how much a plant possessed a will through special powers, it shouldn’t be able to move at will. Even if it did move, it would likely be at the incredibly slow pace of plant growth.
It couldn’t move instantaneously like that. Juhwan resumed his work.
“Juhwan?”
He heard Riji’s voice from behind. When Juhwan turned around, Riji and Dorothy were standing there.
Riji’s eyes were wide with shock. She probably thought Juhwan had gone mad, suddenly digging up a grave.
“Riji.”
Laughter and tears came to him at the same time.
“I found Santa Village.”
I found evidence that the one who brought you and Dorothy to me might have kept my mother and father alive this time, too. When he said that, Riji’s face softened with relief, and she ran toward him.
But as she neared Juhwan, the vines from the excavated earth shot up into the air.
Ssssss. The sound of the vine stems pushing through the soil was eerie.
Swaying like snakes, the tips of the vines rose into the air and slowly turned toward Riji’s face.
Even on the ground, thin vine stems were crawling along the earth. They moved everywhere, avoiding only the spot where Juhwan stood.
“Stop! She isn’t an enemy.”
Panicked, Juhwan let his mana flow around Riji. He hoped the vines would stop if they sensed his power.
The vines hesitated for a moment upon sensing Juhwan’s mana, but then began to crawl forward again. This was bad. They were moving slowly, but they were clearly trying to attack. He could just tell.
“Uh, Daddy! These things are crawling toward us.”
Standing behind Riji, Dorothy cried out in alarm.
Oz, perched atop the girl’s head, let out a series of squeaks and began to glow from his horn. It seemed he was preparing to use his power to protect Riji and Dorothy.
Clicking his tongue, Juhwan also gathered mana in his hands. He didn’t want to touch the vines protecting the grave, but he felt he had no choice if they threatened his family.
Whinny! Yeonhwa stomped her hooves and let out a cry, then leaped forward.
In a single bound, she cleared the distance and stood before Riji.
She used her head to gently push Riji and Dorothy back, seemingly telling them to move away from the grave.
“….”
Juhwan doubted that would be enough to stop the attack, so he immediately scooped up Riji and Dorothy in each arm and leaped back.
Once Riji and Dorothy were more than a meter away, the vines stopped their slow movement and stood still for a moment.
A moment later, with a rustling sound, they crawled back into the grave.
‘Did they feel threatened because the ground was dug up?’
Normally, the vines never blocked Riji or Dorothy, even when they came close to the grave. But that was before the grave had been disturbed.
It seemed that if someone touched the grave, the vines would prevent anyone from approaching within a one-meter radius.
And once a person retreated beyond that set range, the vines judged the situation to be safe.
At any rate, it was a relief. He didn’t have to kill these vines.
When he stroked Yeonhwa’s head and praised her for a job well done, her long face tilted upward as if she were boasting.
‘She’s so easy to read.’
After warning Riji and Dorothy not to get too close, Juhwan began digging again.
The vines remained perfectly still, as if their movement moments ago had been an optical illusion.
‘Maybe this plant is a magic beast.’
An ordinary plant wouldn’t move like that. A Mana Stone must have formed somewhere within it. He suspected it was due to the mana and the Zentangles drawn on his parents’ bodies.
The vines, having become a magic beast, had been protecting his parents in this dark earth, keeping both monsters and humans away.
‘Is that how the vines spread throughout this forest were created too?’
Perhaps when the number of vines growing in the grave became too many, they branched off from the nest.
But even the vines that spread around the grave—did they live as parasites on the nearby trees without forgetting why they were born? To Juhwan, it felt as though they were all guarding the grave.
“….”
He was grateful.
However, the vines were certainly a hindrance to his digging. There were more vines than soil, so progress was slow.
After spending a long time slowly digging out the earth and clearing away the vines, he finally saw a glimpse of the coffin through the tangled mess. The vines near the coffin were even more densely covered in coiled patterns.
Juhwan peeled away the vines near the coffin or used small gusts of wind to brush off the dirt. He finally managed to expose the coffin to the air, but he couldn’t open the lid because the vines were clinging to it like leeches, encircling the entire thing.
He tried pulling on the vines by hand, but they wouldn’t budge. He had clearly seen them moving earlier, but now they were as motionless as actual plants. It seemed he wouldn’t be able to open the coffin without cutting them.
But he wanted to avoid killing them if possible. Juhwan channeled a bit of mana.
‘I hope this works.’
He injected a small amount of mana into the vines. It was certain that these vines reacted to his mana. He could tell by the fact that they did nothing even as he dug up the coffin. The question was whether the vines would move away from the coffin just because he wanted them to.
The first couple of times he injected mana, there was no reaction.
But when he injected mana for the third time and spoke to them, telling them to move back, there was finally a slight response.
The tips of the vine branches lifted slightly and reached toward Juhwan’s body.
Groping along, they climbed up Juhwan’s body, winding around his fingers and arms.
Oz, standing a short distance away, let out a puzzled squeak. But it didn’t seem dangerous. Both Oz and Yeonhwa simply watched with curious eyes.
‘I don’t mean any harm to this grave.’
As Juhwan whispered in his mind and let his mana flow again, the vines remained coiled around him for a moment before finally starting to slither away.
Once all the vines encircling the coffin had retreated, Juhwan quietly placed his hand on the lid.
Because it was built to hold two people, it was much larger than the coffins he had seen on Earth.
His father had likely made this coffin. It wasn’t mentioned in the letter, but the craftsmanship was clumsy. The lid and the box didn’t fit perfectly, leaving a slight gap on one side.
‘I hope no dirt got inside.’
His heart raced with anxiety.
With trembling hands, he lifted the heavy lid, revealing his parents lying side by side.
The inside of the coffin was clean. There was no sign of dirt or rotting flesh anywhere. Despite being buried underground for a long time, there wasn’t a single insect.
And his father’s and mother’s skin was covered in bizarre patterns.
“They’re alive.”
The patterns covered their skin so completely that their original complexion wasn’t clearly visible.
But the moment he saw them, he knew. They were alive. These were not corpses.
“….”
Both of them had faces etched with wrinkles. And they looked quite different from how he remembered them.
His mother, in particular, was different. Perhaps because of her vibrant and boisterous personality, he remembered her as being quite large, but she was small.
Very small. She seemed even smaller than his father.
No, was this how she had always looked, and his memory was just faulty?
Whenever his mother got angry or argued forcefully, his father would listen quietly and smile. Perhaps that was why he had thought his father was small. In reality, his father was about the same height as Juhwan, with a slightly thin build.
‘Memory really isn’t something to be trusted.’
Juhwan took a deep breath and gently placed his hand on his father’s forehead.
Their skin wasn’t blue or deathly pale, but their actual body temperature was cool to the touch. They weren’t dead, but it was a bit ambiguous to say they were alive.
There was no pulse. The same went for the heart. There was no breathing.
Their skin still had elasticity, but when he lifted a hand slightly and let go, it just thumped back down.
They looked as if they were simply asleep, but that was all. There wasn’t a single sign of life.
Juhwan’s heart, which had calmed for a moment, began to thud violently again. A corner of his chest felt chilled by an ominous premonition.
Juhwan first tried using healing magic. He let a tiny amount of mana flow. There was no particular reaction, but he didn’t feel any rejection of his mana. The sensation was similar to performing it on a living person.
He let more mana flow, increasing the intensity. Still, there was no reaction.
He used healing magic again and again, raising the level several times, but the result was the same.
There was no rejection of Juhwan’s mana, but he didn’t feel the sensation of a successful healing either. It felt like adding water to a river.
‘The healing magic isn’t working at all.’
He couldn’t ask Yeonhwa or Oz to manifest their powers. Their powers were meant to kill or neutralize, not to bring something to life.
The Zentangle Yeonhwa had used previously without knowing its meaning was one that put people into a state of suspended animation. That was exactly the state his parents were in now. Making her use it further would be meaningless.
What should he do? He had no idea what would bring his parents back to life.
Juhwan looked down at his parents blankly.
If someone was going to put people in this state, shouldn’t they have also explained how to wake them up? Truly, that man always left things half-done.
‘That damn bastard.’
