Chapter 1 – Secret Friends.

Usher murmured, feeling the golden hair tickling his forehead in the slow wind.

“Oh, I want to leave this town quickly.”

He had just entered adulthood and lived in a quiet rural village. If there was one thing that could be said as a characteristic, would it be the short stature among peers? His strength and stamina were not too far behind those of his age, but oddly enough, he was short. To anyone who sees him, he looks like a boy, not a young man who has just entered adulthood. Perhaps it was normal for him to mutter these words, but another boy next to him said scoldingly.

“Are you still thinking about travel or adventure? Wake up dream. Except for a few, the men in our village are woodcutters.”
“Oh no! Robert! That’s why I don’t want to be that lumberjack!”

He shouted at his bad friend who taught him the reality again. This boy, Robert, was one of the tallest of the village boys, and Usher would involuntarily become annoyed when he approached him. After shouting that, he walked with a lot of strength as if he was stamping the ground.

“Hey! Where are you going?”
“Going home!”

He responded nervously to the boy’s voice behind him and accelerated his steps. It was a village he had lived in since he was a child, but he felt very sorry for it. From the fact that it is a secluded place where no one except those in the know can find it, he really hated this village where children who grew up naturally become woodcutter, saying that if you live by digging trees, the whole village can survive. It may be a childish idea, but he had a dream since he was young. To be honest, going out of town is simply a secondary part of that dream. His dream was to leave this stuffy and closed town and become an adventurer.

I’m sorry if you expected something like a hero or a knight who can defeat the devil or dragon, but it wasn’t particularly grandiose to be an adventurer. It’s just traveling around the world, traveling around the world. Rumors say that there are many dangerous things, but I was confident in my physical strength. I think there is no problem. The place I arrived at was in front of a shabby old wooden door. Profit. As soon as he opened the shabby door that made unpleasant noises and entered, it seemed that the loathsome silence was choking Usher’s throat. Just one step at a time. Even though you have just entered your own home, you feel as if you are immersing yourself in a completely different world from outside the gate.

There was no one inside. Because he doesn’t even have a family in the first place. It wasn’t like it wasn’t there from the beginning. He had at least one person he could call family. But she is no longer here. He moved his steps while gritting his teeth at the emerald eyes that seemed to pass by. However, he was not headed to the small house inside the gate. A bit further back than that. It was a small space that you couldn’t even see if you didn’t look closely. It was a very small and dark space, but it didn’t matter much to Usher.

It was rather fortunate that I did not notice what was inside. It’s a cramped space for adults to enter, but there’s no problem for Usher, who is on the small side, because there was a secret that others shouldn’t know. Just in case there were any regrets. “Keah! It’s a centipede again!” Because it was dark and damp, there were quite a lot of unpleasant things, such as various bugs and spiders. After passing through those uneasy things, a large hole appeared. The hole was neither too big nor too small, just the right size for Usher to crawl through.

In fact, he, too, had a lot of trouble when he first discovered this hole. Aside from anything else, the huge hole where no light could be seen no matter how much I looked into it was enough to give me fear instinctively. However, he began to use this hole consistently from sometime on. As I slowly climbed up this sloped upward, I could see that the light was coming in at some point. And when you reach the end Big trees greeted him. Looking back for a moment, there is a wall with a hole the same size as before. In fact, the hole led to a forest where giant trees grew.

Hearing the chirping of an unknown bird, he made his way through the grass. At first, it was tight and difficult to even enter, but as he often goes in and out, he opens the way with ease now. And the traces of the road that the person who appeared were made by Usher walking alone here. It’s hard to believe that it was a difficult place to walk at first. Even so, this densely wooded and sloping road is not an easy road for people to walk. If you care a little bit.

“Kek?!”

I used to slip and hurt my feet like this. No matter how excited you were, moving carefully was essential.

“Oh, it’s a bridge.”

It was a slightly cracked knee that was bleeding, but it was too much to stop Usher’s unstoppable steps. As I walked like that, I could feel the dim light that was hidden by the big tree brightening at some point. The light meant that he would soon reach the place he was aiming for and where she was. And when he finally arrives beyond the light, the first thing he sees is a taller and thicker zelkova tree among the tall trees.

While the trees that make up the forest he passed through usually stretched straight up to the sky, the zelkova tree’s thicker and thicker trunks were impressive as if they had grown windingly here and there. Nevertheless, it was amazing to see that it grew taller than other trees, stretched out its numerous arms to block the sky, protected the forest behind it with its thick waist, and tied the ground with its legs dug into the ground. Is it because of the toxic, tall trees? The area around the zelkova tree was full of shallow grass without other trees approaching. But it wasn’t the zelkova tree that Usher was looking for.

At the base of the large and thick zelkova tree, something conspicuous could be found on the dark bark. First impression is red. From a distance, you can see bright red hair like a red poppy flower thought to be a flower, and white skin like a white wild flower.

“Belka.”

When I called her name with a bit of a rough breath from traversing the rugged mountain road, those golden eyes like those of marigolds that looked into a book that I didn’t know what was written on it turned to Usher. As soon as I saw him in my eyes, the golden light filled with vivid affection and bloomed splendidly.

“Usher.”

The expressionless expression on the girl’s face as she called his name, as if answering his call, seemed expressionless, but Usher could tell. That a mysterious girl, like a witch who escaped from a fairy tale book, is welcoming her. That peerless girl was the reason Usher came here, refusing to go through those awkward holes and rough mountain roads. Usher had known this girl for quite some time. How old were you? While looking for a place to hide to play hide-and-seek with the village children, he found the back of a house he found, in a narrow crevice, and found the hole for the first time in the place where he entered thinking that no one would find it here.

It was true that the old dark hole was, frankly, intimidating to enter when he was young. He was confident that even if he did not go into the hole, he would not be noticed by the children if he stayed here. But that was a mistake.

“Usher! Where are you?”

I could hear the voices of the children coming this way. Embarrassed, he ducked down and put himself in the hole. He was surprisingly comfortable in a hole that was quite large for him when he was young. It was a bit dusty, but it was much better than being wet from running water.

“Usher, I found it…! What is it, isn’t it here too?”

And the voice of the chaser nearby made Usher know that if he had stayed there, he would have been caught. He thought he was the first to find it because it was his house, but it seems there was a kid who knew the place. Fortunately, the tagger didn’t find him, as if he hadn’t thought of going inside. Hearing footsteps walking away, he tried to get out of the hole, but his curiosity suddenly grew. How far does this strange hole lead? Even if it was the back of the house, I didn’t know the hole in this place.

If nobody really knows about this hole, maybe it leads to an unknown place at the end? When that thought came to mind, Usher was looking inside the hole. The hole was really dark, not a single light coming through. The sight was frightening, but it made his heart beat faster. In a place like this, even if people found it, no one would have wanted to enter. If so, the place at the end of the hole would become his own secret base. The fact that it was a secret base only he knew was enough to ignite a fire in the boy’s heart.

The special feeling of being in a place that no one knows and only you know is something that men have dreamed of at least once. Usher, who had seen many of the town’s children try to make them and be disappointed when they found out that everyone else knew them, so his heart swelled at the thought that the other children were secret bases that did not succeed. That swollen mind was enough to shake off the fear of the hole, and he began to climb up into the hole that sloped upwards. The inside of the hole, drawing a perfect circle, wasn’t wet with water and seemed like it would slide, but I liked that strange feeling more.

However, I hated things like spiders and creepy bugs inside, but there was nothing to be a problem except for the feeling of being caught in a spider’s web from time to time. How far did he climb through the hole? He soon realized that light was coming through the end of the hole. Seeing it, he was delighted. He had hoped at first, but the longer he climbed the hole, the more he felt anxious instead of anticipation that he might not be able to get out of this hole forever. Just in time, the light came on. The moment I finally reached the light, crawling vigorously toward the light, holding onto the wall that drew such a perfect circle.

“And.”

Usher looked blankly at the scene in front of him in admiration. There, as if to prove that it was untouched by humans, there was a dense forest of grass and tall trees around it that could not cover it for a long time even if he spread his arms wide. It tickled his nose, which smelled of fresh grass. He began to move forward as if possessed by the trees that made his existence infinitely smaller. Following the song of the birds he had never heard before and the sound of the wind shaking the leaves, he moved forward and forward. And at the end of it, he found a wide field where no trees grew, and a zelkova tree that was bigger than any other trees in the center.

However, what was found there was not only a large zelkova tree.

“What are you thinking about?”
“Just like when we first met.”

Asked by Belka, who placed his head on her soft lap and quietly looked down at the infinitely deep and beautiful golden light, Usher said as if it were nothing. Yes, under that zelkova tree he first met this girl. From the first time he saw it, Usher thought this girl might be a fairy or a witch. It is also very kind and beautiful. Because, as far as he knew, he had no memory of seeing such a beautiful girl anywhere in the countryside. Her red hair, tied in two ponytails, shimmered before her eyes as if it were gently flowing in the wind.

Usher never dared to forget his first meeting with the girl. He is smaller and more slender than the shortest boys in the village, but he has a body that doesn’t show any angular corners and a skin that looks like an unspoilt white wild flower. Her lips were as soft as biting off a balsam flower, her hair had the enchanting scent of red poppies, and the tips were adorned with golden eyes like marigolds. Yes, Belka was a girl who seemed to have been picked and picked out of the fine and delicate parts of a flower. A girl this beautiful would have been rumored, but since it had never been, it was clear that she was not a girl from the village he lived in.

Actually, the girl just pointed at the zelkova tree when asked where he lived, and shook her head excitedly when he asked if she lived in a village. And he thought he was lucky. It meant that only he could monopolize this secret space and the beautiful and mysterious girl who might have been confessed to by the boys in the village. The girl was always reading a book without a cover, sitting in a space bent inward at the rugged base of a zelkova tree, whenever he visited. Even if he arrived pretty soon or late, the girl was always there waiting for him with the same look.

“Ugh! Wait, can’t it hurt a little less?”
“Because Usher was hurt today. It can’t be helped.”

Currently, the girl was applying medicine to his bruised knee. Even though she firmly said it was his fault, the girl’s golden light was full of worries about him. The medicine the girl was using was a bit different from the ones Usher knew. The girl said that it was a medicine made by drying and grinding an herb called Mumiya, which she had never heard of before. When applied to the wound, it healed quickly. She put the dried grass-like mumiya in a white porcelain, turned a stick of the same material and ground it into powder, then gathered the powder with her fine lips and blew it hard and sprinkled it on his wounded knee.

“Ah! Follow me!!”

The wound hurt so much that I wanted to scrape it off, but it only took a few seconds.

“Okay, you’ll be fine now.”

As Belka said, if you look at his knee, you can see that the scars from the previous trip have disappeared like a lie.

“This Mumiya is really amazing. It would be nice if it was only that it hurts so much when applied.”

Before the wound was healed, the extremely stinging and sore sensation immediately after application was painful as if the wound was being forcibly dug out, but it was truly amazing to recover as if there were no wound in just a few seconds. If you look at the place where the wound was, only the bitter scent unique to the herb and the fine green powder will tell you that there was a wound there. The wounds that had vanished almost as if it had been a while since he had been sprayed with the medicine seemed to see magic that had only been heard about in rumors. The only flaw was that he couldn’t adapt to the unimaginable pain he felt before the wound was completely healed.

“If you don’t get hurt, there’s no need to apply medicine. Shouldn’t you be a little more careful?”

Then Belka’s voice came back, full of worries about him. Does the girl really know? I liked how he cared about him so much that he was able to avoid getting hurt, but he often gets hurt on purpose. More than anything.

“I always want to meet Belka quickly, so I can’t help it.”

Even if it sounded like word of mouth, it was his sincerity. At his words, because of her white skin and expressionless face, which were comparable to her pure white self, the girl’s face, which was just like a doll, was dyed a lively red color like her own hair.

“I like you, Belka.”

Usher couldn’t help whispering those words in the ear of such a lovely girl.

“…Me too.”

The girl’s answer, which was really small enough to be drowned out by the lightly blowing wind, barely reached his ears. Perhaps that was the best for this shy girl. A peaceful afternoon with the thin sunlight that managed to break through the dense foliage tickling your eyelids.

Under a zelkova tree no one knows, a boy and a girl are whispering affection to each other.