For Your Failed Unrequited Love

“I’m crazy.”

Lucy shook her head. And yet her hands moved non stop.

It was clear that Lucy had turned her back firmly, saying she would no longer care about Felix. Then she went straight to the dormitory.

She went up to her room, and came out with a basket and collecting tools then headed to the flower bed. Then, without hesitation, she started collecting dandelions which poked a little above the ground.

She couldn’t understand why she was doing this and laughed at the ridiculousness. Her head and body were moving separately as if they had different minds.

As she crouched down, some of the students looked at Lucy, who was tearing off a dandelion, with a strange look. Lucy, who was as red as a tomato, hurriedly finished collecting the dandelions and left the flower bed.

She went to the third floor of the Academy, taking the rest of the materials that were easy to get in the herbalist classroom. At the end of the corridor was an old herbalist classroom. It was used more as a storage room now.

In a classroom where desks and chairs were piled up, Lucy opened a wooden cupboard. She put the ingredients in it and took out a black pot and a small furnace for boiling. These were used by students when they had herbal medicine classes.

“What am I doing?”

Lucy murmured as she took the materials out and put it on the desk. If she had studied for the exam, she might have already read half of the book.

But it had already been done. In desperation, Lucy set the pot on fire. Then, when the water boiled, she put in the ingredients one by one.

As she expected, the limosium potion was completed in a short time.

She poured the potion into a medicine bottle the size of a thumb. Then, she wrote “Limosium” on a piece of paper and tagged the bottle.

Bottle in hand, she went to the hallway on the second floor, where the lockers of the senior students were. After confirming that there was no one there, Lucy found Felix’s locker and carefully put the small bottle of medicine into the letter-box.

Clink~

She heard the medicine bottle landed safely on the bottom of the locker.

This concluded her mission. Of course, she wouldn’t know whether Felix would hand in the bottle and complete his task. He might even suspect the medicine and throw it in the trash. Wasting all of Lucy’s time and effort in making it.

However, Lucy left the locker in a hurry, not regretting her decision.

Felix had unintentionally helped her a lot, so she just wanted to do something useful for him at least once.

She kept thinking about him because she has so much to be grateful for. Of course.

With renewed determination of not thinking about Felix or interfering in his affairs, she went up to the empty classroom on the third floor. It was to tidy up the desk she had used to make her potion.

As soon as she opened the door, she was shocked to see light purple smoke rising from the table. It was flowing out of the pot and onto the table.

Light purple smoke…

Frustrated, Lucy pulled her sleeves quickly to cover her nose and mouth. She ran to the smoke-filled pot and looked inside, and saw a thick purple liquid melting down the wall of the pot.

Lucy put a lid on the pot immediately. However, the purple smoke that had already risen was covering the ceiling of the classroom. She quickly opened the window and let the smoke out.

The liquid in the pot was clearly pus tree sap since it’s the only sap that has a purple color.

Pus tree sap is a substance that causes temporary hallucinations when drunk or smelled. In particular,When heated, it emits its distinctive purple smoke and spreads in all directions, necessitating the use of protective equipment.

Unfortunately, the pot she found in the empty classroom was not thoroughly cleaned, and the pus tree sap that was used before seemed to have remained intact. Lucy couldn’t detect it because it hardened in the pot after a long time and turned black.

“Oh!”

Lucy was instantly reminded of the limosium medicine in Felix’s locker.

She had used the pot to make medicine, melting the hardened sap. It seemed that only a small amount had permeated, but it was still a problem. Lucy didn’t know what kind of medicine it would be if the limosium was mixed with pus tree sap.

She hurried out of the empty classroom and ran down the hallway. She had to retrieve the medicine before Felix found it in his locker.

Lucy stopped when she arrived at the floor. A group of boys were gathering and buzzing around the locker not far away.

Don’t tell me…

Lucy felt a chill run down her spine.

She slowly approached them and saw a boy carrying an empty crystal bottle among the crowd. It was Adrian. He frowned, and with one hand he rubbed his chin, peering at the name tag on the medicine bottle.

There was no sign of Felix.

“Adrian-sunbae…”

Adrian looked up at Lucy’s call.

“Oh, Lucy,” he said with an apologetic look on his face. “I’m sorry, but something just came up. If it’s about the book club, can we talk about it later?”

“No, it’s…” Lucy’s eyes turned to the bottle Adrian was holding. “Well… “

“Oh, this,” Adrian lifted the empty medicine bottle. The bottom of the bottle was broken.

“Somebody put a broken bottle of medicine in Felix’s locker, with the name Limosium on it, but I don’t think it’s Limosium. Felix smelled the locker and said it smelled like some pus.”

“Did you smell…?” Lucy’s face turned pale. “…where is he now?”

“He said he was dizzy, so he went to the nurse’s office.”

“Did he stumble?” Lucy asked, her face pale.

However, Adrian shook his head. “No, he walked away without any trouble.”

“Isn’t he just making an excuse because he didn’t want to attend classes?”

“Yeah, he was walking perfectly fine.”

The boys next to her spoke one after another.

“Well, he better see a doctor, just in case,” Adrian said, turning toward the bottle once more.

Lucy stepped back from the crowd of boys who began to chatter noisily.

Lucy, you idiot!

How the hell are you going to deal with this?

Things took an unexpected turn, and Lucy’s eyes were dimmed. She turned back and hurried to the nurse’s office.

* * *

Lucy arrived in front of the nurse’s office, and she pushed the door open softly. She peeped inside, and found Chester, the nurse, sitting at his table.

Lucy went into the nurse’s office and walked toward her.

“1st year?”

“Uhh… Yes.”

“Where does it hurt?”

“Oh, my head.” Lucy lied automatically. Then she glanced around, searching for Felix.

“There are a lot of people who have a headache today. Just lie there for now.”

He pointed to a bed with an open curtain. Come to think of it, there was another bed that was covered with curtains right next to it.

“Did you smell the sap of the pus tree?”

“What?”

At Chester’s words Lucy turned her head and looked at him. He looked puzzled by her reaction, and then nodded at the bed with the drawn curtain.

“There’s another student who just smelled the sour smell of light purple smoke and said he had a headache. I think it’s a sap from a pus tree.”

“Oh, no. Mine’s just a normal headache.”

“Really?” Chester took the headache medicine out of the drawer and handed it to Lucy. “When you recover from it, go back to the classroom.”

“Yes… but, sir, how dangerous is the smell of pus sap?”

“How dangerous?” Chester scratched the back of his head by the sudden question. “Well, you’ll only get temporary hallucinations.”

It was as though he was reminded of something, Chester’s casual tone shifted into a more serious one. “No, it’s quite dangerous… Yes, there can be pain that makes you want to die.”

Then he suddenly burst into laughter.

“When I was a student, a friend smelled the sap of a pus tree and took off his clothes inside the classroom. He must have thought he was in a bathroom because he was hallucinating. When you wake up and hear what you’ve done, you would want to die.”

Chester rose from his seat and headed to the medicine cabinet. He took out various medicine bottles and tea leaves from the cupboard and displayed them.

“The sap itself is not dangerous to the human body, but you can die if you are unlucky. You might have thought it was a road, so you continued walking, but it was actually a cliff, and you fell to your death… Well, there are cases like that.”

Lucy shuddered as she imagined Felix falling from the Academy building because of a hallucination. She felt as if she had committed a serious accident the harder she thought about it.

I shouldn’t have tried to help him!

She was only going to do Felix’s task for him, but she almost sent him to death. It was fortunate that Felix had come to the nurse’s office.

Lucy’s mind went blank just thinking about what would have happened if he had gone to a dangerous place she didn’t know.

Chester went out of the nurse’s office for a while; he was looking for something.

After confirming that his footsteps were moving away, Lucy slipped out of bed. There was no sign of movement in the bed right next to the curtain.

“…Felix-sunbae,” Lucy called him quietly.

There was no reply.

After hesitating, she opened the white curtain. Felix laid on the bed with his eyes closed; he appeared to be sleeping.

Lucy approached the bed and sat down.

“Sunbae.” She tried to call him louder than before, but Felix still didn’t move.

“Are you asleep?”

Feeling uneasy, Lucy put her finger under his nose and checked if he was breathing. She looked at him and saw that Felix’s chest was slowly going up and down.

“I’m sorry, sunbae,” Lucy said tearfully. “It’s my fault. I didn’t check the pot properly… I shouldn’t have used just any pot…”

“Hmmmm…”

Lucy, who had been pulling her hair with her head down, suddenly raised her head. Felix was looking up at the ceiling with his eyes half-closed.