Chapter 478: Spring Cleaning (2)

“C-come in….”

“Excuse me.”

Arriving a bit early in the afternoon, I stepped into the 1st-floor commercial entrance of my Sunbae’s two-story commercial/residential building, offering a polite greeting.

“Ah, could you wait downstairs for just a moment? I’ll tidy up just a tiny bit and then call you.”

“No, it’s fine. If we’re cleaning anyway, it’ll be much faster if we just start together.”

“B-but really, I’m just tidying up a little…?”

“Just how serious is the situation that you’re acting like this?”

“If Sungchul Hubae saw it like this… he might be a little disappointed…”

Seeing as that shameless Sunbae brought up being disappointed, I wondered just how messy it must be. This was the moment I remembered the first day I visited Sunbae’s house. Like making me sit down anywhere in the messy house. The impression of her, in unguarded clothing and smoking a tar cigarette without hesitation with me, a man, right there, was something I could never forget. Conversely speaking, since I had already seen her in that state, the time to be disappointed by such things with Hwayoung Sunbae had long passed.

“Anyway, I won’t be disappointed by things like this now. After showing me your underwear and even smoking tar cigarettes since our first meeting,”

“…You still remember that?”

“How could I forget? At first, you were so confidently in your underwear in front of a man that I honestly thought you were a pervert trying to seduce me.”

“……”

Hwayoung Sunbae answered with silence, as if she had nothing to say to my logically coherent words. Then, Sunbae quietly turned her head forward and muttered in a slightly annoyed voice.

“…I don’t know, just don’t look and then say anything bad to me.”

“Okay.”

Emitting an aura of determination, Hwayoung Sunbae led me up to the upper floor. The bedroom I found upstairs, following her…

“……”

“……”

The scene was a little more horrific than I had expected.

“Wow, this is…”

“I-I told you to wait until I tidied up a bit and then come in!”

“This seems to have gone beyond the level of being fixed with a little tidying.”

At least there should be a space to step, shouldn’t there, for tidying up to have any meaning? All sorts of reagents piled on the table. Sunbae’s clothes draped over the bed and scattered on the floor. And the faint, acrid smell of tar cigarettes lingering throughout the room. No matter how I thought about it, the environment had long surpassed the level where Hwayoung Sunbae could have gone in first and cleaned it herself. Besides, knowing Hwayoung Sunbae’s tendencies, there was a high possibility she’d make the situation worse by randomly shoving things like clothes into corners while claiming to clean.

“I-I told you to just wait… Why did you have to follow me up here…”

“First, let’s get some ventilation.”

“…Huh?”

At my words about ventilating first, Hwayoung Sunbae stopped talking and tilted her head towards me. I responded appropriately to her attitude, opened the window wide, and let the outside air circulate into the house.

“If we’re doing a big cleaning, we have to open the windows first, right?”

“So, we’re cleaning after all…”

“Let’s organize it from the top, one by one. If we do it together, though, it won’t take long.”

Well, I owe Hwayoung Sunbae a debt in other ways, even if it’s not necessarily for the male aphrodisiac. Especially in the process of learning the basic concepts of magic, including fire magic, her knowledge was very helpful. If I don’t repay it little by little when opportunities like this arise, it would instead become a burden on my mind. In that sense, a situation where I had no choice but to repay her favor like this was welcome news to me too. More importantly, in this environment, it didn’t seem like it would be easy to even set the mood, let alone get intimate. First priority would be making a clean spot for Hwayoung Sunbae and me to lie down.

“…I knew it would turn out like this.”

Hwayoung Sunbae also started tidying the house with me, wearing an apologetic expression. It was time to transform Sunbae’s heavily cluttered house into something new.

“Please organize the reagents on the table yourself. If I touch them, they might accidentally mix strangely.”

“Ah, uh-huh…”

“Should I put all the clothes in the washing machine? I’ll start by running the white lab coat once.”

“D-do as you please… I won’t say anything if the color bleeds.”

Listening to my words verbatim, Hwayoung Sunbae started to tidy the messy house. She nodded endlessly to my questions while organizing the reagents on the table, presumed to have been used until just yesterday. It seems she felt ashamed of this situation, making me, the guest, clean her room. Still, I had to do what needed to be done, so I continued cleaning Sunbae’s house without hesitation. Just as I was about to put the laundry in my hands into the washing machine and start the main cleaning.

Clunk.

“Ah.”

As soon as I saw the laundry dried and stuck inside the washing machine after the spin cycle finished, a small sigh escaped my lips. …Really, every time I try to do something, new chores get added.

“…Sunbae. There’s already a lot of stuff inside the washing machine?”

“Ah, ah! Right! I should have run it and hung it out to dry!”

“……”

Putting aside whether there was space to hang it or not, she forgot even the fact that she had started the washing machine. How could someone like this have lived alone for over 100 years without a man… I picked out only the underwear and white clothes from the clumped laundry inside the washing machine and put them back in. The remaining laundry was temporarily placed in the laundry basket and put on top of the washing machine. …Including the bedding, I’ll have to run it at least three times without stopping.

“Even if you’re busy, wouldn’t it be better to live while tidying up a bit?”

“O-only during this period is it a bit like this… Normally, I don’t procrastinate this much.”

“……”

“You saw it when you came last time! You know! Back then, it was still somewhat tidy!”

Was it…? As far as I remember, even then, it was still just as messy, only the degree was different. It seemed that, by Sunbae’s standards, that level of mess was considered tidy. During busy times like recently, it seems to have completely spread out into this state.

‘Well, from the end of the year to the beginning, Sunbae must have been busy with work.’ The number of recovery-type hunters active in the guild decreased significantly, and simultaneously, the order volume for wound recovery potions and the like increased. For Hwayoung Sunbae too, to meet the volume coming from everywhere, she must have been working through the night for quite a long period. As for me, since I lived a life far removed from potion making, I couldn’t empathize, but I could understand to some extent. More than anything, since she had reached the pinnacle of talent in both fire magic and potion crafting, being a little lacking in other areas wasn’t that big of a drawback. …Still, forgetting and leaving laundry in the washing machine seemed a bit much.

Besides that, finding fruit in the refrigerator so rotten it was unrecognizable, or dishes piled in the sink, hardened and stuck because they weren’t soaked in water. Except for those few minor(?) problems that occurred, Hwayoung Sunbae’s room cleaning proceeded quite quickly. The initial chaotic mess gradually began to change into a space fit for living as my touch reached it. Laundry, fridge organizing, dishwashing, trash disposal, bedding washing, wiping dust from tables and windows, storing clutter, and floor cleaning. After finishing everything from A to Z, like a housewife’s big cleaning, Hwayoung Sunbae’s house had, before I knew it, returned to the appearance of a tidy home. It took some time, but it was definitely a rewarding cleaning session.

“Somehow, we’ve managed to clean up almost everything.”

“Haaah, y-y-yeah…”

“Let’s put the bed cover back on once the dryer cycle finishes. Preferably, natural drying seems best, but we probably don’t have the time for that.”

“S-sorry…”

“If you’re sorry, then next time, try to live while tidying up a bit more regularly.”

Living in such a messy environment and smoking cigarettes would surely cause your health to rapidly deteriorate. Even amidst all that, seeing that things like reagents and medicinal herbs were individually packaged and sealed, it was fortunate that she was definitely competent in her field.

“You should clean up and live, at least the bare minimum. If it were me, I don’t think I could live even for a day in a place like this.”

“I really was busy… It’s because you don’t know how difficult potion making is. While adjusting the temperature and extracting ingredients from materials, I have to prepare other ingredients, and for plant-based materials like these, the difference between drying and grinding them versus using them as is is huge…”

“Yes, yes.”

I just listened vaguely to Sunbae’s story about why she couldn’t help but be messy. After the fire magic lesson and the big cleaning, I casually lay my slightly tired body down on the uncovered bed. Looking back, when I had my first experience with Hwayoung Sunbae, and the next time we met when she had her first anal sex experience, it was all on this bed. And the place where Sunbae secretly moved and secretly received my ejaculation while I was asleep was probably this place too.

“……”

With various thoughts, I quickly sat up on the bed, my body almost falling asleep. I almost ended up lying there, lost in old memories. Still, it’s our first date in a while, so I shouldn’t waste time sleeping.

“If you’re tired, you can sleep.”

“I’m not particularly tired. I just feel a bit drowsy.”

“…Aren’t those the same thing?”

Hwayoung Sunbae tilted her head slightly at my answer and asked. Since she didn’t get a clear reaction from me, she picked up a medicine box placed on the table and handed it directly to me.

“Sungchul Hubae, here.”

“Huh?”

“A male aphrodisiac. You asked me to make it.”

“Ah, now that I think about it, I originally came to your house to get this, wasn’t it?”

Because I was so focused on the big cleaning, I had accidentally forgotten the main purpose. Replenishing Hwayoung Sunbae’s aphrodisiac supply was, in its own way, quite an important factor in my life as a lust manager. Without this, it puts quite a strain on my body when having a three-person (3P) session. Especially with Jin-ah and Seon-ah, since both are beast-type hunters and twins, their estrus cycles are similar, so under normal circumstances, I inevitably face situations where I absolutely have to use it. Since I took care of them once in early January, it’s about time for their cycle to come around again.

After receiving the cute medicine box with “Sungchul Hubae’s” written on the outside and storing it in my subspace pocket. I sat on the edge of the bed, leaned forward, and asked Sunbae with a shameless expression.

“Sunbae.”

“Yeah?”

“After going to the trouble of cleaning your entire house, surely you don’t mean to settle for just this, do you?”

“……”

The biggest reason I came to Hwayoung Sunbae’s house in the first place was this. Now that the cleaning is done and the atmosphere is more relaxed, this time it was time for lust cleaning.