A Flower That Eats Humans 9

## Chapter 9 – Doubt

Bright sunlight streamed in through the window in the morning, shining on my eyes.

I looked at the clock; it was 7 AM. It felt like the first time in ages I’d slept for more than three hours.

Scratching my head, I got out of bed. Chaeyoon, who had been lying next to me until yesterday, had disappeared somewhere, and Seohee had vanished sometime last night, not to be seen since.

Seohee aside, where did Chaeyoon, who was sleeping next to me, go? I wondered, and I picked up my phone to contact her to find out.

But there was no need to contact her; she had already left me a message.

“What’s with this? Why go back to the dorm if you were going to do this?”

Anyway, today was the weekend.

There was no need to worry; she could have just slept here.

Could it be that she was embarrassed by the affection I showed her yesterday? I wondered, and I checked the message she left.

Her intense first words caught my eye in a single sentence.

‘Oppa! I’m pregnant!’

…Huh? What the fuck?

Chaeyoon and I were sitting facing each other in a cafe.
As the situation was what it was, I was going to call Seohee, who couldn’t be said to be unrelated, but she wasn’t answering her phone and didn’t seem to want to read the messages.

So, Chaeyoon and I gathered to talk about this.

Chaeyoon seemed to like coffee, as she had been sipping it since a while ago.

Perhaps it was because I was so surprised, but with a complicated feeling, I pressed my forehead with my fingers to relieve the headache. I hadn’t even thought about washing my hair, so I wore a hat and a mask. I had ordered coffee, but I had forgotten that I had ordered it, and I was out of it.

“…Oppa, if you’re not going to drink that, can I have it?”

“Drink it. Ugh, my head.”

Chaeyoon happily took my coffee and drank it.

“Can I talk when you’ve calmed down a bit?”

Chaeyoon put down her coffee cup and asked me.

Perhaps she wasn’t just drinking coffee while I sorted out my thoughts, but was waiting for me.

“Ah, yeah, sorry. Can you tell me?”

“If you want, I don’t have to have this baby.”

“Hey, wait a minute, if you say it like that…”

I don’t know where, but after Chaeyoon’s statement, I could feel stinging eyes from all over the cafe.

I tried to correct Chaeyoon’s words, but it seemed pointless to correct them since she had already become trash.

“…Did I say something wrong?”

“…No, you can keep talking. It’s already too late.
It’s not about abortion or anything like that, is it?”

“It’s true that I’m pregnant, but it doesn’t mean I’m pregnant with a human baby.”

Chaeyoon spoke in a quieter voice than before.
I had heard it from her before.

The bodies of the women who become their hosts can have children like ordinary humans, but they can also conceive a ‘seed’ solely to bloom their own flower.

They receive the nutrition of their male partner, that is, semen, and grow the ‘seed’ inside the womb.

“You should have told me that sooner…”

“I’m sorry.”

I felt relieved when I saw her face smiling playfully as she drank her coffee.
Becoming a dad at 20 was something I wanted to avoid.

“Still, someday, I’d like to have a human baby with you and live like a married couple.”

“……….”

She would be able to have a human baby if she wanted to.

They are beings who can freely transform the human bodies they parasitize, so how could they not be able to do something like that?

She could choose whether to have a baby or a seed, but she didn’t choose to have a baby.

It could be because she was thinking about her future.
Now, whether she likes it or not, she has to live as a human being called ‘Lee Chaeyoon’.

It could be that she was thinking about the burden of becoming a young mother in her early 20s, but I felt a small consideration for me, and I felt sorry and grateful to her.

“…Then how long does it take for the seed to come out?
Tell me if there’s anything wrong with your body.”

“Huh? There’s nothing like that.
It’ll probably come out tonight?”

“………..”

That’s right, these guys were like this, far beyond human common sense.
I thought that at least my stomach would be full due to the changes in my body, but she said there was no such thing.

I was dumbfounded and let out a hollow laugh.

“It’ll just come out without any problems in the evening.
Then you just plant it in a pot.”

“Simple.”

“There’s a saying that simple is best, right?”

I looked at her, who was saying it calmly as if there was nothing wrong, and let out another hollow laugh.

She smiled at me, put down her empty coffee cup, picked up her bag, and asked me.

“Oppa, you don’t have a flower pot at home, do you? Let’s go buy one together.”

After buying a flower pot and soil at a suitable flower shop,
I parted ways with Chaeyoon and arrived at my place.

She told me that she would bring the seed later, so I should rest at home.
She seemed to be embarrassed.

I don’t know why, but my mood was also strange.
In a way, isn’t it my child?
I was a little confused.

In the meantime, the thought that I had been thinking about before suddenly came to my mind when I saw the flower pot.

“…It’s a flower, for sure.”

What blooms in such a small pot is definitely a single flower.
That’s what I know.

I don’t know what that flower will look like when it blooms, but among the flowers I’ve seen in my life, even dandelions, which reproduce by scattering seeds, have only dozens of petals.

But that day,
The amount of petals that fell from the sky was at least several thousand, and if there were many, it was tens of thousands.

And what Chaeyoon said,
She doesn’t scatter that many petals.

“…No matter how I think about it…”

No matter how I think about it, there was a third party involved.
I can’t help but think that.

I want to ask Chaeyoon, but she can’t even remember what happened before she got her body, let alone her intelligence, so I can’t ask her.

Moreover, there’s no point in asking Seohee, who wasn’t there.

Who scattered the flowers and for what purpose?
In the first place, is it a human who knows the identity of that flower?
How did they scatter so many petals?
I had so many questions.

My mind is racing.

It could be a matter of my life, so I’m desperately racking my brains.
I’m already at the center of this incident.

But there are too few clues.
The only clues I had, the petals, have already been cleaned up by the janitor.

“…The opponent is a group of at least dozens of people.”

At least that’s what I think now.
There’s no way one person could scatter that many petals.

It was a planned event carried out by dozens of people.

I don’t think they would have handled such a dangerous flower without any countermeasures.
They know more about this flower than I do, at the very least.

I’ve been living comfortably until now, but it’s not a situation where I can afford to be so relaxed.

“I was complacent, damn it.”

If they have even grasped my identity or Chaeyoon’s identity, things will get even more complicated.
I don’t have any information about their strength or information.

Such thoughts continue to chase each other in my head.

While I was lost in thought like that,
Chaeyoon rang the doorbell outside the door.

“Oppa, I’m here.”

Hearing her voice, I came back to reality and regained my senses.
Looking at my state, it seemed that I had come home and was lost in thought without even taking off my clothes.

“Oh, wait a minute.”

First, I let Chaeyoon, who was waiting outside the door, into the house.
She came into the house and handed me the seed.

“…Hmm, it looks just like a normal seed.”

“What did you think it would look like?”

Chaeyoon, who asked back in disbelief, took off her coat and sat on the floor.

“Now, just plant it in the pot and water it like you’re feeding it.”

“The way to bloom a flower is also normal.”

I looked at Chaeyoon, who shrugged her shoulders, brought the flower pot, dug out a space for the small seed with my finger, put the seed in, and covered it with soil again.

“Is this it?”

“Yes, now just water it steadily and the flower will bloom in a week.”

“The time it takes to grow up is not normal.”

I’m not surprised now, but I’m a little surprised that it only takes a week for the flower to bloom completely.

Chaeyoon and I were silent with the flower pot in the middle.
I was going to tell her what I had been thinking about by myself, but she opened her mouth first.

“Oppa.”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t you think what happened at school that day was strange?”

Chaeyoon, who usually seems like a playful and endlessly cute woman, can be surprisingly sharp at times.

I admired Chaeyoon’s quick wit and nodded to her.

“I’ve been thinking it’s strange too.
One flower has 10 petals.
But the amount of petals scattered at school that day was at least tens of thousands, right?”

“It’s probably the work of some group.”

“Yes, but don’t worry.
I don’t think they know about us.”

“Why?”

“If we were being followed or watched, I would be able to tell,
But I don’t feel any such signs.”

She can sense people’s presence. Sometimes I think,
If they set their minds to harm humanity, would humans be able to protect themselves?

“We don’t have any information, but they don’t have any information about us either, for sure.”

“They’ll look for us.”

It’s not that the group is leaving us alone, but that they haven’t found us.
If that’s the case, then we’re in a more advantageous situation.

If they want to find us, they’ll definitely come here.

Chaeyoon asks me seriously.

“Oppa, if, just if, can you kill someone?”