A Secretly Capable Child Is Seeking For Her Dad (Novel) - Chapter 90

Chapter 90

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Translated by Sylph

Read it only at Novelbyu.com & Utoon.net

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“Ha, what medical fee is there for you to worry about, squirt?!”

Veil, overcome with emotion, shouted without realizing it.

When Basto immediately shot him a fierce look, Veil barely took a deep breath and then lowered his voice as if frustrated.

“When the old man was talking about buying a house, who was the most excited? You were. We are in a very different situation from the beginning. We have lots of money now, I am telling you?”

But Tie still looked utterly gloomy.

“…But everyone earned it with difficulty.”

“Earned what? It is all the cores you gathered by conquering magic stones, and the jewels your skeletons picked up from underground….!”

“A cold gets better if you endure it!”

Tie, having let go of the teddy bear from her hand, sniffed with her reddened nose.

“Even for something like a cold, even if Tie doesn’t get a shot, even if Tie doesn’t get hospitalized, if Tie just endures it, it all gets better!”

Though it was a long time ago, it still remained faintly in Tie’s memory.

The day he had gone with Daddy to the neighborhood hospital because his throat hurt badly and he was coughing.

On that day, Daddy spent all the money she had earned over several weeks just on Tie’s shot and emergency treatment.

Tie stayed clinging to Daddy’s back the whole time, watching Daddy count the money.

At the time, Tie felt so sad that she thought she should never have learned how to calculate money from the lady in Unit 203.

But that was not the end of it.

‘Just a moment, sir, your baby currently has a very high fever and a severe cough. This could be bronchiolitis. The way your baby keeps touching his ears also makes acute otitis media suspicious….’

‘What is that?’

‘To put it simply, right now the baby’s small airways leading to the lungs are swollen because of inflammation, so it is hard for him to breathe.’

‘Ah….’

‘At the same time, there is a possibility that inflammation has also developed in his ears. These kinds of complications happen when a cold gets severe. The baby is young, and right now he is having difficulty breathing, so I think someone needs to watch him from beside him… and that is a little difficult at home.’

The doctor had a very, very troubled expression.

‘If necessary, he may need oxygen treatment at the hospital. It would also be best for him to be hospitalized for about four to five days so medication can be administered right away. If the baby goes into respiratory distress, it could be dangerous.’

‘….’

‘Um, first of all, please do not worry too much. Bronchiolitis and otitis media are really common in babies this age. If he receives proper treatment, he will recover quickly, but, um, you said earlier that you are a foreigner, so the treatment costs may be a little burdensome for you…. First of all, the hospital does not share treatment records with immigration or anything like that, you know? So you can be at ease about that part….’

The amount the young doctor spoke after hesitating for so long was truly enormous.

Enough money to buy five hundred, no, more than six hundred Tanipang sticker books.

But Daddy paid that money to the hospital as if it were nothing.

And she kept telling the anxious Tie that Tie had heard wrong, that it was not that expensive.

Even though Tie had already heard it all.

Still, should one say that, anyway, it was fortunate?

After that, Tie was never seriously sick again.

At most, all he got were mild colds.

But the memory of the day he was hospitalized had already been engraved clearly in the child’s mind.

“If you endure it, it can all get better.”

“….”

“If you just endure it hard, it really stops hurting….”

Lucarion, sighing, tightly held the hand of Tie, whose sorrowful tears were dripping down.

Then Lucarion spoke soothingly.

“All right. We will not go to the hospital.”

Tie wiped at her eyes and looked at Lucarion.

“Really?”

“Yes, we will not go. For now, sleep a little more.”

Only then did Tie stop crying.

And he weakly crawled back into the blankets.

A little while ago he had been hot, but in that short time he was now feeling so cold that his body was trembling.

Raul and Enzo patted Tie’s dejected back.

Fortunately, Tie soon fell back into a deep sleep.

* * *

Fortunately, the rain that had been falling soon stopped.

The bright sun came up, and after confirming that the road had dried, Enzo took up the reins again.

Meanwhile, Tie was still asleep.

At the somewhat pitiful-looking sight, Veil, as always, ground his teeth.

“I have always been annoyed by physicians quoting patients absurd amounts.”

Basto, who had been looking out the window, nodded.

“Yes. I have seen a physician who charged ten gold just for wrapping a little bandage.”

Lucarion, who had been listening, roughly matched up Talochium’s currency units with Korean won in his head.

‘One gold had been around ten thousand won.’

If it was ten gold, that meant they took a hundred thousand won for wrapping a bandage.

“I am telling you, physicians are all trash. There was one like that in my hometown too. My fifth younger sibling got sick and went to the hospital, and he gave him one bottle of medicine that was hardly of any use and demanded thirty gold….”

After muttering a curse as he spoke, Veil added,

“No matter how you look at it, the doctor the squirt said he met was obvious too. Just how much did that quack fleece them for?”

Lucarion looked at Veil indifferently.

“That physician was not a quack.”

Veil furrowed his brow and looked back at Lucarion.

“What?”

“It is only that medical fees are expensive because that world has its own complicated rules. In the end, Astie was treated by that doctor and recovered cleanly.”

“What on earth are you talking about. No matter how complicated the rules are, how complicated could they be.”

Lucarion, who had been about to explain the Republic of Korea’s medical insurance, Tie’s hospital accessibility as someone who was, in effect, an illegal overstayer, and even the reasons why Tie could not receive even public healthcare support from a health center or private organizations….

“There are things like that.”

He simply closed his mouth.

That was because, even if he explained it, it seemed the Agabert members would not understand.

Veil, perhaps angry, clenched his fist tightly and then sighed.

“At this point, I kind of want to go there once too, damn it.”

“Where?”

“That damned country where you and the squirt lived. I want to see what kind of place it is, exactly.”

Lucarion let out a short laugh.

Unless dimensions overturned and timelines twisted, such a thing would never happen.

‘But if it did, it might be worth seeing.’

How Astie’s members would flounder amid the civilization of a completely different world.

Lucarion turned his head back to Tie.

The child’s condition was improving as time went on.

The coughing had lessened considerably, and the fever had gone down completely.

It seemed that waking the child now and then to feed her thin rice gruel had been effective.

Suddenly, Lucarion was seized by a strange feeling.

At one time, there had been moments when she disliked how Astie longed for that man.

‘That is because it was only four years.’

No matter that he was his father, they had only spent four years together.

Even if his memory was incomplete, Lucarion knew that he himself had existed in the world for a very long time.

So compared to his life, four years was truly a fleeting instant.

Thus, she had thought that once Astie grew just a little, she would be able to forget the time she had spent with that man.

Because four years were truly nothing more than a brief span of time.

But today.

Lucarion thought he could somehow understand Astie, who could not let go of that man.

The truth was that it was not Lucarion who had safely protected the feverish child last night, but that man.

Everything Lucarion had done had been nothing more than an imitation of that man from the past, who had desperately nursed Tie.

It was when Lucarion, his mind grown complicated, had quietly sunk into thought.

Knock knock.

There was a knock at the front window.

When Basto opened the window, Enzo, who was in the driver’s seat, pointed somewhere ahead and said,

“Look over there. It seems we have found a place to stay tonight.”

Lucarion lifted his gaze indifferently.

Between the enormous trees around them.

In the empty air in the middle of the road, a great sheet of cloth was tied to ropes and fluttering.

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