I Became A Married Man in Another World
Chapter 36
036 Dorothy, Oz, and Toto
Juhwan, who had fallen into a death-like sleep, woke up while the sky was still pitch black. It was so early that even Riji hadn’t stirred yet.
Dorothy, who usually slept by the hearth, had somehow crawled in between Juhwan and Riji’s legs during the night.
She was curled up like a snail under the covers. Seeing her head buried deep beneath the blankets made him worry before he could even smile. He wondered if she could breathe properly.
Thanks to the straw he had bought, the bed was piled high and plush. For Juhwan, who knew the comfort of modern mattresses, the stalks poking through the fabric were quite uncomfortable, but Riji and Dorothy loved it. Dorothy kept rolling around on the bed, exclaiming how soft it was.
Juhwan quietly slipped out of bed. The only sound was the crackling of the firewood. Dressing himself in the dark, he stepped outside as silently as possible so as not to wake Riji.
Gus had said he wouldn’t be able to visit for a few days. He seemed busy with something, though Juhwan didn’t know what.
Stepping outside, Juhwan stoked the bonfire a little and began working on the gate for the fence, a task he hadn’t finished yesterday.
It was harder than he expected. Since he was trying to make it move smoothly enough for Riji and Dorothy to open easily, his lack of skill was glaringly apparent.
Just before the sky began to brighten, Riji woke up. Sleep still clung to his wife’s face as she stepped outside to check on him.
He paused his work for a moment to go fetch water from the spring.
In the meantime, Riji began the laundry.
In this world without washing machines, doing the laundry was a major ordeal.
Laundry that had been soaking in lye overnight had to be rinsed in clean water from the early morning and hung out to dry by sunrise.
Small clothes were manageable, but for large items like bedding, it was a grueling task for a woman alone to wring out the water and hang them over bamboo poles.
Without a spin cycle, wet fabric was much heavier than one would think.
Juhwan helped whenever he was around, but for some reason, Riji tended to try and handle things without his assistance. Every time she did, Dorothy would jump in to “help,” which only made the job bigger and more difficult in various ways.
Fortunately, today was a light load: one of Dorothy’s dresses and Juhwan’s clothes.
Juhwan returned to working on the gate. By the time he finally managed to get it hung, the sun was high in the sky.
He hadn’t checked the snares yesterday. Since not a single rabbit had been caught the day before, he figured there was no need to go every day.
Dorothy had been very disappointed. In the child’s mind, she had expected two or three rabbits to be caught every single day.
To be honest, Juhwan was also disappointed deep down. He, too, had thought he would catch at least one a day. He hoped there would be at least one today.
Before heading out, Juhwan cast healing magic on the baby rabbit, which had woken up and was wiggling around. Fur hadn’t started growing over the wound yet, but the flesh had filled in considerably. Its internal organs had likely healed as well.
Just as he felt he had poured enough mana into it, he thought he saw a faint light permeating the baby rabbit’s forehead. It was right where the horn was.
The light didn’t seem to be coming from the surface; rather, it felt as if a light bulb had been turned on inside the fabric.
But when he blinked and looked again, it was back to being an ordinary rabbit. The rabbit stared up at Juhwan with its clear, black eyes.
‘Gus didn’t mention anything like this.’
It was strange. While learning the bow yesterday, Juhwan had asked Gus about the horned rabbits—whether they were dangerous, if they could be kept as pets, and so on.
Though he hadn’t understood everything, according to Gus, the horned rabbit was a creature known as a “Magical Beast” that lived in forests and fields. From what he could gather, they were similar to what people on Earth called monsters or magical beasts.
Summing up Gus’s words, wild horned rabbits seemed dangerous. Apparently, they could bite and even kill someone as small as a child if they got too close.
However, he said they were fine if raised from a very young age. Gus had used hand gestures to explain that there were actually people who kept Magical Beasts as pets.
Still, searching his memory, there had been no mention of them glowing. If Gus had known, he surely would have said something. Perhaps there were different types of horned rabbits?
Juhwan spoke to the baby rabbit staring blankly at him.
“I don’t suppose you know why you’re glowing. I wonder if you’re even a horned rabbit at all. I hope you’re not something strange. You mustn’t put Riji and Dorothy in danger.”
“….”
The still baby rabbit twitched its mouth and let out a small sound.
“Pee-i.”
“….”
That was odd. Were rabbits animals that chirped like that? Perhaps a Magical Beast was a different kind of animal altogether that just happened to look like a rabbit.
Juhwan lowered his body and stared quietly into the horned rabbit’s eyes.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Pee-i.”
“You don’t understand?”
“Pee-i.”
It didn’t seem to understand. Just in case, he tried casting healing magic on the baby rabbit again, but it didn’t glow a second time. He wondered if it had been an optical illusion, but no. The light had definitely come from where the horn was.
‘I’ll have to ask Gus if there’s a Magical Beast like that when I see him.’
Juhwan grabbed his bow and arrows and headed out. He didn’t pack a lunch. Though the place where he first set the rabbit snares was far from the house, he now wandered around alone, looking for rabbit tracks nearby.
There was no need to go as far as he used to.
Out of the five snares he had set, rabbits were caught in three of them.
After processing them immediately and putting them in a cloth bag, Juhwan wandered the area for a bit, looking for tracks or droppings of other animals.
He didn’t recognize all animal tracks yet. He had learned to identify rabbits and roe deer from Gus, but the rest were still a mystery.
Still, it was important to see and familiarize himself with them often. That was how Gus taught him. Even if he didn’t know what they were right now, it was important to get used to seeing them.
Since there were still many snowy patches, he could occasionally find footprints. Most were small.
Strangely, some animal tracks looked exactly like human ones. Squirrel tracks, for instance, looked almost like tiny human skeletal remains. It was lucky they were small and the number of toes was different, otherwise, it would have been quite chilling.
There were no particularly noteworthy tracks. Most were traces of small animals.
Juhwan spent some time wandering the mountain, scanning the ground for anything else he could catch or eat. But aside from the rabbits, there was no harvest.
Around lunchtime, Juhwan headed back home.
The gate was locked from the inside. This was because Juhwan had instructed them to do so.
Arriving at the fence, Juhwan opened his mouth to call Riji’s name. But before he could make a sound, he heard Dorothy’s voice through the gap in the gate.
“Daddy!”
“Dorothy?”
Startled, he looked at the gate and saw the child’s eyes peering through a slight crack.
“Daddy, Dorothy is opening the door!”
With that shout, he heard the sound of the wooden latch being slid back from the inside. The gate swung open immediately, and the child came bursting out.
“Daddy, Dorothy opened the door!”
“Were you waiting for me?”
“Yes! Dorothy was waiting. I waited for Daddy. Lots and lots!”
Dorothy showed him ten fingers, then ten more. It seemed she had been pacing back and forth, watching the gap in the gate just so she could open it for him.
“Thank you, Dorothy.”
“Uh-huh! Dorothy is busy!”
The child gave a bright smile and ran back inside. This time, she called out to Riji at the top of her lungs.
“Mom! Daddy’s here! Daddy’s here!”
She really did seem busy. Juhwan latched the fence gate again and went inside.
Since Dorothy had opened the door, she now demanded names for the rabbit and the doll. He didn’t know how his promise to think of good names had suddenly turned into a bargaining chip.
He decided to name the rabbit Oz. If there was a Dorothy, there naturally had to be an Oz. The rabbit doll’s name became Toto, after the dog Dorothy owned in the novel.
“Dorothy, Oz, and Toto.”
Dorothy’s eyes sparkled. She seemed to like them.
“Dorothy, Oz, Toto!”
Dorothy put the baby rabbit and the doll in a basket and ran around the whole house, shouting the names over and over for a long while.
The village was buzzing with noise, both inside and out. Whenever even two people gathered, they were preoccupied with talk of Goblins, their faces filled with anxiety. Someone had heard Goblins were like this, someone’s grandfather had told a story about what happened long ago… Every time they met eyes or opened their mouths, that was all they talked about.
Ever since Gus had discovered the Goblins, everyone had been restless and uneasy. This atmosphere would likely persist until the adventurers arrived.
In truth, adventurers weren’t all that special, but to the uneducated and powerless villagers, those who fought monsters seemed like magnificent beings.
The Village Chief looked at his wife’s face as she entered the house with a sullen expression.
Thump, thump. She stomped her feet intentionally and slammed the door shut. She was clearly very dissatisfied.
The Village Chief sighed and asked the back of her head.
“Is that so.”
The wife glanced back and answered. Her face was still full of discontent. Her voice was blunt, her mouth was pouting, and her lips were stuck out like a duck’s bill.
“What are you so unhappy about?”
When he asked out of annoyance, his wife opened her mouth as if she had been waiting for the chance.
“I’m already buried in work, so why are you suddenly telling me to clean that carriage we don’t even use? It’s not even ours, so why do I have to do it all by myself?”
“That’s because—”
The Village Chief tried to answer, but his wife cut him off sharply.
“Oh, what’s the point of being the Village Chief’s wife? No matter how carefully I’ve kept it, if the village tells me to give it up, I have to give it up. Something that should clearly be a communal village labor task, I have to do alone. Besides, that carriage hasn’t been used in decades. I don’t even know if it still rolls.”
It seemed she was still bitter about him taking the fabric away to give to the Forester’s wife. Truly, this woman was driving him mad with irritation.
The Village Chief sighed once more and spoke.
“I told you earlier. That carriage is…”
But he couldn’t finish his sentence again. His cursed wife started chirping like a magpie once more.
“I know. In case Goblins come toward the village or if there are more than we thought, we’ll use it to escape. But you said Gus said there were only about a dozen Goblins at most.”
“Listen to me!”
When the Village Chief barked at her, his wife flinched and fell silent.
Finally, some peace. Honestly, if a man stayed quiet, people started treating him like a doormat. The Village Chief took another deep breath.
“Of course Gus said that. But there might be ones Gus didn’t see. There could be multiple tribes. What are we going to do if they raid the village while we’re sitting here with no preparation?”
“The world doesn’t always go according to plan. Do you think I’ve only dealt with one or two things while living as the Village Chief? I’m doing this because I have a plan, so stop nagging me.”
“But honey, then we can just load things onto our cart. Why does it have to be that huge carriage we don’t even use?”
The wife seemed to really hate that she had to wipe down and clean that large carriage by herself. Even as her voice grew smaller, her complaints were endless.
The carriage she was talking about was the Communal Carriage the village had purchased and used together a long time ago.
In better times, they used it to travel to the big city to sell goods produced in the village. During hard seasons or years of famine, they used it when they had to sell people off.
On rare occasions, it was used for daughters coming from or going to distant regions for marriage, or to transport the village men when they were dragged off to war. It was truly a multi-purpose Communal Carriage.
However, as time passed, the carriage grew old, and as the village population dwindled and life became harder, there was almost no need for it.
Now, it stood abandoned in a secluded spot behind the Village Chief’s house.
Even though it was old, it was still communal property, so every few years, the villagers took turns cleaning or repairing it. It was a vehicle that could be used at any time, provided someone checked for broken parts and maintained it in their own way.
“Our cart is wide open without a roof or anything. If we suddenly load luggage onto a thing like that, what will people say? They’ll think the Village Chief is trying to run away alone.”
“….”
“Stop talking nonsense and start loading some food onto the carriage when people aren’t looking.”
“….”
“Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“Load plenty. If nothing happens, we can just take it back down, so don’t be stingy with the supplies.”
“…Fine, stop talking. I said I understood.”
His wife pouted deeply and stomped off toward the kitchen.
‘Honestly, she has no idea what’s going on.’
The Village Chief scowled.
Things hadn’t gone well when he went to the city to meet the information broker last time.
He heard that Healing Magicians were very rare these days, but the broker didn’t readily offer to connect him with nobles from other territories. Instead, they only asked which village it was, how strong the Magician’s power seemed to be, and things of that nature.
‘They said they’d contact me later, but I have a bad feeling about it.’
At least it was a small comfort that he received a bit of money after promising not to sell the information to other brokers. The thought that this might not be nearly as profitable as he had expected made a sigh escape him involuntarily. Truly, things in this world never flowed exactly as predicted.
