Kang Jiesu reached over to grab my left hand.

  I watched him with a great of suspicion as he took out a stamp-like item, which he then firmly pressed to the back of my hand. It left behind a faint silver mark in the pattern of 康 (Kang), which is how his surname is written.

  “Magic seal. Can show others.” He expined in broken Galuterican.

  Fortunately, I was familiar with this type of item, as the royal maids also used a simir type of seal.

  In Japan, there was a custom that people often used a personal seal (hanko) instead of a signature. When receiving packages from the mailman, you were expected to use your stamp to indicate that you received the item. In the Kingdom of Galuterica, there was a slightly more advanced version of this concept that was typically used by masters with their household staff. For example, if a servant were to go shopping for fish for their master’s dinner, they could show the shopkeeper the seal as proof of their master’s approval, and transaction could even be pced on the lord’s tab without any physical exchange of money.

  The magic seal was dynamic, meaning that it would instantly turn bck if the master whimsically took away permission or if it was used on something that that the servant did not have approval for. For instance, a servant could not try to buy an entire house if they had only been given approval for a pound of chicken.

  Generally speaking, sves were chased out of shops in the Kingdom of Galuterica unless they presented a silver-colored seal at the cash register. In fact, some business owners had exterior barriers configured so that anyone with an Obedience Crest couldn’t enter the building without a corresponding seal. It didn’t matter if they were carrying enough money to buy the item; a valid seal was always required for a sve.

  The rationale behind this custom was that a sve’s money was not their own, and a sve who didn’t have a valid magic seal surely either stole the cash or they were spending it on something inappropriate. It was society’s method of ensuring that everyone’s sves carried out their masters’ instructions precisely as originally intended, and it kept idle sves from being an unpleasant eyesore wandering around where free citizens liked to shop.

  + + +

  I looked at the silver mark on my hand after Kang Jiesu removed the stamp.

  Given what I knew, this type of symbol would wash away after I took a bath or a shower. At that point, I would effectively have no rights again, and I would need Kang Jiesu to reapply the seal if I wanted to be able to go to the bank, visit a store, pass through a public barrier, or do anything that ordinarily required ‘permission’.

  I felt ambivalent.

  Even though Kang Jiesu had said that he wanted to ‘simute’ a regur life with me, the reality was that I essentially needed him to put a stamp on my hand every other day.

  Moreover, I didn’t know how much I could trust him. I wasn’t naive enough of a girl to genuinely believe that a boy’s verbal promise was worth anything substantive. I had watched more than enough television dramas and josei manga to know that simple words were as fickle as the wind, and plenty of men said nice-sounding things in order to get the pleasurable experience that they really wanted. I even knew from my own personal experience that Kang Jiesu wasn’t a reliable person who I could ever trust.

  My cssmate could randomly change his mind about me one day and then I’d be completely fucked.

  It was impossible to ignore the asymmetrical power dynamic no matter what he said.

  + + +

  “Feel better now?” Kang Jiesu asked, with a gentle smile on his face.

  As a matter of fact, my true feelings were a complicated mixture of both ’yes’ and ‘no’.

  But no matter how much I disliked him, I wasn’t so stupid to bite the hand that fed me. My childhood friend had a sort of white knight hero complex, and while that may seem superficially altruistic, I knew him well enough to know that he was seeking affection and self-validation. Rather than being rewarded with prizes or money, he wanted the girls that he saved to fawn over him and tell him how much we loved him and how wonderful of a person he was.

  He did this over and over and over again — it must had been an addiction — since it certainly made him feel good, and I lost track of the number of ‘I can fix her’ projects that he pursued over the years whether it was on Discord or in real life.

  I knew exactly the kind of girl that Kang Jiesu liked.

  After all, I hadn’t been his childhood friend for all those years for nothing.

  Right now, I needed him to like me, but also not like me too much.

  It was all a game of maintaining his interest until he inevitably got bored and moved onto the next girl who tragically happened to catch his eye. At the end of the day, I was surely isekai waifu #1 in his brain, and he’d surely switch to the next avaible character after he captured the first love interest in a dating sim and exhausted all the dialogue options.

  A generic NPC like me was expendable.

  He only treated me well because it was the beginning of our time together.

  + + +

  “I feel sick,” I said. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

  I clutched my stomach and pretended to curl over on the ground in discomfort.

  At this point, I had already decided on the type of waifu character that I should py for my ex-childhood friend. Considering the circumstances, I carefully chose my lines and prepared a mental script for my behavior. Kang Jiesu could basically get an erection over any weak girl who was physically and emotionally vulnerable, and this was the probably the simplest way to milk his sympathy.

  More importantly, I also knew I couldn’t make it too easy for him.

  Enthusiastic girls who melted immediately into his arms were promptly discarded and thrown away, and he’d quickly grow tired of any predictable woman who behaved exactly the way that he expected.

  Kang Jiesu’s eyes fshed with surprise and concern.

  He searched around us, flustered, looking for something that could be used as a paper bag in case I needed to vomit.

  “L-Let me get a trash can,” he stammered, pushing himself to his feet. “I saw one earlier. I can help.”

  He was about to run off on his own, but I stopped him by grabbing the legs of his pants.

  “Please,” I whispered weakly.

  I clutched my stomach, feigning like it was in pain.

  “Don’t leave me alone.”

  + + +

  He sat with me for a long while.

  I mumbled a whole lot of nauseous capricious gibberish — stuff that I made up on the spot about how my life had been ruined and a rant on how much I hated him because of how irresponsible he had been. He definitely did not understand more than 50% of what I said, but really the only important part was that he had the impression that I was spilling my uncensored heart fully naked in front of him.

  This was the type of hardcore porn that he liked, after all.

  He could figure out the nguage barrier ter.

  Kang Jiesu gently pced his disgusting hand on my back as I flip-flopped between shing out at him like an injured wolf and bawling my eyes out like I was isoted and helpless and alone, all while suffering from a terribly upset stomach.

  To be honest, the dramatic act wasn’t entirely fake; it was more like I exaggerated certain aspects.

  Perhaps there was some small amount of truth to the things that I said.

  “…I won’t forgive you.” I told him with a face full of tears.

  + + +

  He stayed with me until I was completely exhausted and had nothing else to say.

  We both sat on the ground for a few long moments.

  I took some time to recover my breath.

  I faked my upset stomach so well that my abdomen actually started to cramp.

  Ultimately, I flipped over the wrinkled paper that he had given me and began to scribble a small list of demands on the back of it. I was sure that he understood very little of the performative emotional tirade that I had gone on, so the written component was the only thing that would be consequential in the very end.

  I made sure to include a bullet point that I needed my own bathroom.

  Also, I needed access to the kitchen, undry facilities, and magical equipment in the royal pace. Otherwise, I needed space to store supplies for anything that I bought in the market, as well as a reserved slot in the royal stables in case I decided to purchase an animal or a transportation vehicle.

  I was not employed by the Royal Family anymore, so all of those technical arrangements needed to be formally hammered out. Officially, I was part of a different household now, so it wasn’t like I could use the same cleaning supplies or continue to grab things from the royal pantry without explicit permission from our host. Realistically, my cssmates would not remain guests at the capital forever, so I needed to duplicate all of the basic living essentials sooner or ter.

  Money shouldn’t be an issue.

  I just needed to thread the needle through a narrow path between countless hazardous possibilities.

  Right now, my own cssmates were a bigger threat to me than anything else.

  ?