The Firmament
—Grrrnnn… creak-creak…
The alien noise that reached my ears as I sat in the café with my coffee was less loud than it was deeply, creepily unpleasant.
No one else seemed to hear it. I was the only one stirred by it.
"But on the news, they mentioned the Mage's name…"
"Ma'am, just a second."
"Excuse me? Ma'am?"
I shut the mouth of the middle-aged woman who had sidled up beside me and started chattering, and strained my ears toward the sound.
—Screee. Screeeee. Hmmm…
"…"
The moment I began to focus on it, the hair-raising noise grew quieter and quieter, then vanished altogether.
What the hell… A nauseating sensation was rising from somewhere deep inside me.
"I don't know where you get off calling me ma'am—!"
"Uurp!"
I shoved aside the woman whose voice had risen into a shrill rant and bolted for the restroom.
"Urgh. Ugh."
I didn't throw up. I just let out a long, satisfying belch.
I'd run to the bathroom because I felt like I was going to puke, but it turned out to be a wasted trip. Or was it? Still — a mage belching in front of people. Not exactly a good look for the image.
"Uh… uhh…"
"No comment."
I shook my head at the woman who clearly had a lot more to say, sat back down, and went back to my coffee.
—Slurp.
"Ahh, so sweet. Needs more syrup, though."
"Hah! Well, I never…"
Thankfully, the woman cleared out soon enough. The other gawkers averted their eyes or drifted back to their own seats.
…Honestly, it had been pretty annoying. I already had enough to think about regarding what came next, and having someone constantly talking next to me had been a real pain.
And this body of mine is an introvert, you know?
—Ding!
A notification chimed as if to tell me to shut up with the nonsense and check my messages.
—Ding! Ding!
"Oh."
Three messages in a row from an unknown number.
"What the hell is this."
It was a cosmic microwave background image I vaguely remembered from a high school science textbook — a field of rainbow-colored noise, grainy and dense.
But in the upper-right corner of the image, there was a small black blotch.
—Ding!
—Tap. Tap.
A hole in space?
I looked up at the sky through the café's floor-to-ceiling windows, but all I could see was the pitch-black winter sky where the sun had already set early.
Ugh. Light pollution meant not a single star was properly visible.
"I don't really know…"
Or was it connected to that strange queasiness and the hair-raising noise I'd felt just a moment ago?
—Ding!
"Hmm."
My head was only getting worse. This was exactly the kind of moment that called for more sugar.
—Sluuurp. Gulp.
I topped up the sugar, but nothing useful came to mind. Just a vague guess that it was probably the Outer Gods' handiwork.
—Tap-tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap.
It was true that I was currently drawing a hard line against the government, but that wasn't why I'd dodged the question. Anything involving the Outer Gods was a critical matter.
Keep a cool head and a hot heart. You don't let emotion lead and botch the greater cause. I simply didn't know anything.
"…Hmm."
I'd like to meet with a smile too, but…
The government was the one that screwed up first, and spectacularly. Mm-hmm. Not my fault.
I was sucking the last of my caramel macchiato dry for some peace of mind when—
—Murmur, murmur…
"…So it's real."
"End times, I tell you… how are we supposed to…"
For some reason, the murmuring of the crowd grew louder and louder, and then every pair of eyes in the place turned toward me.
"Mage? Hang in there."
"Huh? Oh. Uh. Thank you?"
"Honestly, it's always those hardcore Minjung Party voters who elect people like this. Am I right?"
"I will strive to maintain political neutrality…?"
What? What the hell is going on?
A little past seven in the evening.
A weekday evening in the last week of December, wrapping up the year 2035.
President Jeong Tae-san, on the verge of going bald, was busy dressing down his cabinet-level officials, while Yuria was receiving sympathy for reasons she couldn't fathom.
"Uh, Chairman… are we really running these articles as is?"
The news director, dripping cold sweat, had brought over a collection of special feature articles and their drafts that had not yet been published.
Headlines like these were already bad enough, but among them was a title so devastating that its impact was almost unimaginable — making the rest look like child's play by comparison.
Running articles like these… Beyond any question of sources, this was the kind of thing that could put the company in an all-out war with the government and the National Assembly.
But the chairman calmly looked over the documents and spoke.
"Listen, Director. This isn't something I get to approve or reject on my own. I got instructions from above myself, and you wouldn't believe what went through my mind…"
Joongwon Ilbo — one of the top three major newspapers in South Korea.
The chairman of Joongwon Ilbo, a giant of the media world, chided the news director and held up his smartphone screen.
The director pushed his thick reading glasses up his nose, checked the screen, and his mouth fell open wide enough to catch flies.
"The Director of the NIS—"
The chairman hastily clamped a hand over his mouth.
"Shhhh!"
Only after the director nodded did the chairman let go. The director still couldn't hide his shock.
It wasn't simply that an intelligence agency contact was feeding them a source. That wasn't particularly rare — even managing editors or ordinary reporters below the director level could build connections with intelligence personnel if they put in the legwork and the right lobbying.
But if the Director of the NIS himself was requesting articles targeting specific party lawmakers…
"Anyway. This isn't something we get to decide among ourselves — whether to write the articles or not. When they say jump, we jump."
"…Understood. I'll approve them immediately and publish the articles in sequence."
"Good."
The chairman waved him off with a flick of his hand. The moment the director left the room, he let out a deep sigh.
"I should just retire already and forget about the world's business… tsk."
Leaving the chairman's deepening stress-induced hair loss behind…
"Did you see the news?"
"Whoa."
Breaking stories that would deliver a satisfying kick to the government's stone-still backside began rolling out one after another like links of sausage.
"Call every media outlet. All of them."
And right on cue, fuel and firewood of unknown origin were supplied to fan the flames — and the fire showed no sign of dying out.
That tremendous heat eventually began to thoroughly roast the lawmakers who had been the subject of the articles.
—Rrring… rrring…
"Please. Please…"
Lee Chang-ik, Representative of the Minjung Party, was a man who had been struck by lightning out of a clear sky in his own home.
It had originally been a scheduled part of party diplomacy.
There had been meals with representatives of Korean companies operating locally — a few photo ops — and meetings with key ministerial-level figures from China's Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and so on.
Lee Chang-ik, the party leader, was confident he had never leaked any cutting-edge technology to China.
…He had mentioned that Korea had received advanced technology-related information from Yuria one step ahead of everyone else, but it had never even occurred to him that this might be a problem.
"Damn it, why won't anyone pick up…! Ah — hello?"
"Yes, I've received your call, Assemblyman."
"Hey, Reporter Park. Are you busy right now? It's nothing else — I just saw some strange articles…"
The reporter who answered was one of the journalists the assemblyman had been desperately hunting down to hear his side of the story. But all that came through the phone was a sigh.
"Haah…"
Undeterred, Lee Chang-ik begged desperately, pleading for the reporter to bury the whole mess.
"I'll give you money — anything! Or I'll hand you a massive exclusive! Anything! Just say the word and I'll…!"
A party leader of his stature begging a mere reporter to save him might have looked thoroughly ridiculous.
To the man himself, it was pure desperation.
"I'm sorry."
—Click.
No one was going to keep hanging onto a rotten rope when the fall was already clearly visible.
Every media outlet in the country was already treating the massive magic-information leak as a major exclusive. There was no way anyone would publish an article taking the side of the assemblyman at the center of it all.
Even if a celebrity or influencer scandal dropped right now, it wouldn't have diverted a single pair of eyes from this.
The assemblyman felt the sky turn yellow — and blacked out.
About twelve hours.
That was how long I'd spent in a PC Bang, scrolling through news and articles all day long, eating the free drinks and snacks they brought around as complimentary service.
There really was no better place to pull an all-nighter. The air was a bit stuffy, but there was plenty to do and a good variety of food…
Waiting until nine in the morning had my ass itching so badly I thought I was going to die.
Not because I hadn't showered — because there was an event I was looking forward to.
The President's public national confession show, standing by simultaneously across countless major video platforms and primary broadcast channels.
I waited for the broadcast to begin, grinning from ear to ear.