Mind, and Manipulation (4)
"Still nothing from Dr. Woo Mingu, though."
I pressed the call button in front of the elevator, glanced back at the two labs, and let the thought out. Hwayeon studied my profile for a moment, then turned her eyes to the floor display and spoke.
"Maybe... no. Branch Director Kang Hyunwoo might be keeping him from getting in touch."
"Huh?"
The moment I recalled how he'd acted when I went to poach Dr. Oh Soeun, suspicion hardened into certainty. That bastard. Just—! A nameless sense of being wronged set my teeth on edge, and I was about to Space Leap straight to the Ability Users Association building, still under construction, when Hwayeon shot out a hand and stopped me.
"There's a good chance he went to headquarters to handle the aftermath of the collapsed facility. I'll have a word sent to General Affairs Director Lee Hyeryeong, so don't rush."
"Tch. Fine."
I was grumbling, sour about the whole thing, and Franc must have found the sight funny. She let out a little giggle and linked her arm through mine.
...Wait. He hadn't been caught in the collapse and died, had he? And Researcher Kim Eunha, Researcher Min Nayoung—were they even still alive?
Come to think of it, Dr. Oh Soeun had been lucky. Whether she was a little moved that I'd come to scout her in person or not, she contacted me exactly one week after I made the offer. She was sick, she said, of a life shut in a back room doing nothing but run identification machines. If I would let her research both her major and her minor, she would join the Grand Blue Institute. I immediately drove her favorability sky-high with Mana Vision, and we signed—four times the annual salary she'd been drawing from the Ability Users Association, a signing bonus of ten times that salary, and an incentive equal to a set percentage of every bit of revenue her research brought in.
A lifetime contract. Every last clause of it.
Kehehe. It was only a fraction of a percent, but the moment I told her the cut would come from gross revenue, not net profit, her eyes turned into dollar signs and she signed on the spot.
I meant to put former Director Oh Soeun in charge of the phase-properties research that would be stood up later. For now we hadn't filled out the staff and had no space for it, so I'd set her to helping Dwight in her minor, phase physics. A woman who had taken a directorship at a world-class institution at barely thirty. The reports said that the moment she walked into the temporary lab she had locked into a rivalry with Dwight and thrown herself at the work, and a warm satisfaction settled in me. I hadn't chosen wrong.
If I could just haul Dr. Woo Mingu in and seat him as director of the Grand Blue Institute, it would be perfect.
I was waiting for the elevator out of the institute, Franc on one side and Hwayeon on the other, when my sister came out of the aberrant biology lab, spotted us, and hurried over.
"You haven't gone yet. I thought you'd already headed back."
"We stopped by the physics lab, too. Meldios seemed like the type who only hears what he wants to hear. Did you actually get through to him?"
"He was a bit of a blockhead, but once I hammered it in, he got it."
Then she side-eyed me and went on.
"Meldios is human, so speak to him and he understands, doesn't he? The problem is Hiarid. She won't hear a thing unless he said it. They say it's causing no end of trouble."
"Even so, we can't hand over every authority. If it were us, it wouldn't matter—but give power like that to someone else, and it could blow up into a serious accident."
"That's true. The power, of course. And the byproducts that come off that body are incredibly useful, too."
Hiarid's byproducts... her wings? My sister and Hwayeon traded a few more words, then the talk slid into ordinary chatter.
The elevator crawled its way down. We boarded and rode it up, Franc joining in, and the subject pinballed without mercy—clothes, how pretty the new pieces were at some jewelry shop, private life, company business, the Phase World. Just listening made my head spin.
I couldn't keep up, so I stayed out of it, standing behind them and only listening, and in the meantime I turned Spatial Perception over my sister's body. Phase Power, unchanged: 800,000. Still C-Class. And her chest—had it gotten a little bigger? She was nearly a C-cup. Even standing between Hwayeon, a Physical Reinforcement type, and Franc, a goddess by birth, her figure didn't lose. If anything, she seemed to have them both beat in looks.
Beyond that I couldn't find much that had changed, or any real anomaly. And yet, looking at the attitude she'd been showing lately, I just couldn't make sense of it. I wondered if some singularity had settled into her head and changed her this way, but watching her laugh and gossip with Franc and Hwayeon, she didn't look any different at all.
I poked her in the side, through the ivory suit of the sister who was laughing.
"Eek!"
The instant my finger hit her side she let out a bizarre shriek and leapt into Hwayeon's arms. Hwayeon stared, startled, at the sister who had suddenly thrown herself against her.
Faced with a reaction I hadn't imagined at all, I stood there blankly, finger still out, looking at her. She took a moment to grasp the situation, dazed, then flushed and reached over to pinch my cheek and pull it long.
"You—! What do you think you're doing all of a sudden?!"
"Heh-ho."
I meant to answer nothing much, but my mouth was hauled open and nothing came out but a leaking sound. Her hand was squashing my cheek like rice cake, and it didn't even hurt, so I lifted one eyebrow a fraction—and she shoved her index finger into my mouth and started prying it side to side.
"Just because you got a little stronger, you think your sister's a joke? You're really gonna get it!"
Hmm. A reaction like this was exactly the same as usual. Which only made it stranger. She was stretching my mouth out with both hands, so I set my fingers on the unguarded weak spot she'd left open and ran them along her side as if I were playing a piano. She burst into shrieking laughter, clutched her ribs with both hands, and scrambled back.
Trust someone weak to tickling to give you a reaction that clear. She put distance between us, covered her sides with an angry face, and thumped me with a little fist—and even then, afraid I might come closer, hid behind Hwayeon. I watched her, and my resolve set.
Right. The next time I had a free moment, I was pinning my sister down and unleashing a tickle storm. I couldn't bear not knowing why her attitude had changed so suddenly.
We headed down toward the parking garage to go home, but my sister and Hwayeon had classes, so we parted halfway.
Good. I'd confirmed the matter of communicating with Hiarid, so I'd go home and finish practicing mental manipulation...
Hmm.
Hmmm? The moment I thought back on the experiment in communicating with Hiarid, a bulb tied to mental manipulation flickered as if it might light, then died... Hmmmm...
Ah, forget it. An idea had nearly come and then hadn't, but that enlightenment simply wasn't fated to be mine.
I was walking down the maple path, dyed a brilliant red, Franc's hand in mine and no one else with us, when I noticed she kept stealing glances at me. Two steps, a glance. Three steps, a glance.
Then she looked ahead and said, in a bright voice:
"If we walk this path together, from its very beginning all the way to its end, do you think we could truly live happily side by side for a long, long time?"
I turned my gaze forward as well and answered.
"This isn't even a hidden realm. There's no way something like that would work. Still, walking with you through a view this beautiful puts me in a good mood. If we keep building our love like this, we'll be able to live happily together for a long time."
"Ehehe..."
Whether that had been the right answer, Franc laughed as if delighted and rested her head on my shoulder.
The maple path sloped gently away, a carpet of crimson leaves unrolled far below us, and it looked like a bridal aisle spread to bless the road ahead.
Mm. I'd walked it with Hwayeon and Franc, so later I'd have to walk it once more with Yeongeun. Then again, the look on Franc's face when she'd been watching me earlier didn't seem like she'd been about to say that.
"So. Did you pick up on something from my sister?"
Franc pouted, just a little, then stuck her tongue out at me.
"From tonight... am I to be left out of your bed?"
Ugh. Had she seen me coaxing Hwayeon? I tried to slide past it with a little smile, and Franc smiled back, shy and soft, linked her arm through mine, and said:
"Neither I nor Yeongeun have a single word to give you, Seoha. Not one. So won't you give up on hearing it from us?"
"Ngh. That means Yeongeun knows too. The three of you plotted this and left me out?"
Franc went silent, and her face said oh no—she'd slipped. I grinned, tugged her arm so she leaned into me, and whispered into her small ear.
"If I bury my face in Yeongeun's chest and act spoiled, I have a feeling she'd tell me everything."
"Ah—honestly! You mustn't. Promise me!"
She thrust out her pinky, pressing me to swear it, and I asked with a suggestive little smile.
"And if I promise, what do I get?"
Franc smiled with her eyes and whispered in my ear.
"Something Seoha likes?"
A sly smile, quick as a fox—and even a smile like that was so lovely I thought I might die.
When we got home, Miho was floating around the living room, flailing her arms and legs hap-hap as if she were swimming. That was the swim the protagonist's fox friend had done on Little Friend Porongi yesterday.
"Miho. Come here. It's study time, isn't it?"
"Nngh~ I don't wanna study."
Franc caught the fleeing Miho by the scruff, set her down in front of the low floor desk, and began the lesson in Ethics and Morals. I called the three puppies and three cats together and set my mind turning.
Something had flashed through my head for an instant on the way out from seeing Meldios's research team, and I strained to recall what it was. Judging by that feeling of an enlightenment arriving and then fleeing, it was definitely a solution to mental manipulation.
Hmm...
I settled my heart and chewed over the sensation from that moment, and the strange attitude of the dogs and cats snagged my eye. Why were they staring at Miho like that? Dog or cat, every last one of them sat in a perfect loaf, boring a hole straight through her.
...Huh?
Ah. I remembered. I remembered! The trigger for manifesting mental manipulation—I had it!
Good. Test it right now.
First I shaped the pattern of my Phase Power into a Klein bottle, and poured more into the stretch that flared from narrow to wide—the spout, if you thought of the thing as a kettle. At once the power began to circulate, rippling strangely along the walls of outside and inside.
Good. Very good.
Along the surface of that form, the Phase Power I had fed in twisted like a cruller and started flowing through the bottle's interior. What ran through the inside burst wide at the exit, blanketed the exterior, then gathered again at the spout and poured back in.
Hmm? Every time it completed a circuit of inside and outside, the nature of the Phase Power seemed to change, just a little... Wait. It really had split into seven. The colors were shifting, one after another.
Red. Orange. Yellow. Green. Blue. Indigo. Violet...
Could these be the colors of emotion?
A phrase from a book surfaced in my mind: the Five Desires and Seven Emotions. Set the five desires aside for the moment. The Seven Emotions were an expansion of joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure—joy, sorrow, anger, delight, love, hatred, and desire. Seven in all. The intuition that these seven colors were those Seven Emotions flashed through my head.
I closed my eyes and, through Spatial Perception, strained to feel the place where the seven colors spread like a rainbow.
Watching the TP shift through those seven colors as it passed between the inside and outside of the Klein bottle, I had to admit this looked more dangerous than I'd thought. What if I mixed all seven? What if I mixed two? What if I mixed four? The seven pure colors changed depending on what you mixed them with, but the more of them you mixed, the more they unified into a single color. Which meant the more you mixed, the more you'd be able to feel only one emotion.
The thought of testing something this dangerous on innocent animals made me uneasy. I'd meant to run the trial on them, then plant in Sophia something on the order of a blind loyalty toward me...
Even so, I couldn't not do it. I had to master this, if only to make the Dark Matter Slime trapped in the sky above Mount Iseong submit to me.
I'd found a hint that emotions could be manipulated. The problem was how to draw out the color I wanted and inject it into a chosen target. For now, leave out the dangerous ones and try green, blue, and violet—joy, delight, and love.
I drew a deep breath and looked inside my body with Spatial Perception.
Start with blue. Move. Blue. Move... Move...
With the same sense I used for Mana Sieve, I focused my mind on the lines of emotion—seven strands, seven colors, twisting like a cruller. Then, with a soft slide, the blue emotion slipped free of the twist and began, little by little, to fill the space around my chest.
Hm. Drawing out a single color was easier than I'd thought. Was that Mana Sieve's doing? ...Wait. All of a sudden my mood was getting—really cheerful...
Hah—!
My heart lurched, and before I knew it I'd snapped my focus into Mana Sieve, gathered the blue Phase Power into one place, and wrapped it in my own. The happy delight filling my chest vanished as if it had been washed clean, and a chill ran down my spine.
Th-this was affecting me too? Wow. A seriously dangerous ability.
I swallowed hard once more, focused through Mana Sieve, wrapped the blue thread, and slowly began to draw it up over my head. The way to inject this into a target was that, wasn't it? Like it said in the PDF Director Kang—hyung—had sent me. Out through the eyes?
Careful, careful... shift it to the optic nerve... The condition for mental manipulation was that we had to be aware of each other, right? All right. First target: you. The haughty flat-faced cat.
You, the one who won't even spare me a glance and looks away all high and mighty. The second you got here you ignored me and only swished your tail at my lovers, didn't you? Ugly as you are, who do you think you're looking down on?
"Meow?"
I reached out and lifted the peke-face Persian. She stared at me blankly for a moment, then twisted her whole body and started raking my hand with her claws.
You think those claws are going to scratch me? Not you. Not even if your ancestors showed up, you little brat. ...And would you stay still?! Hey. Look at my eyes.
She wouldn't look, yowling and thrashing to get free, so I twitched an eyebrow and let out a threatening sound.
"Hsst."
I laced it with the faintest thread of Mana Voice, and the Persian's eyes went perfectly round as she stiffened rigid. The others must have caught it too. They startled, bunched together, and started shivering. Miho and Franc seemed to have felt it as well; they glanced back at me. I shook my head to say it was nothing, and they turned back to the textbook and focused on the lesson.
Hoo. Now she's settled.
I adjusted my grip so she faced me, and met the eyes of the Persian gone stiff with fear. We locked gazes, and I released the blue Phase Power gathered in my optic nerve. For an instant, something—a feeling hard to describe—circled in my eyes, then vanished.
"Mra...ow. Meow, meow. Nyaoong!"
For a moment the cat's eyes washed blue and returned to normal. She started squirming, so I set her on the floor. Fear and haughtiness had been tossed somewhere else; she hopped and hopped like a little rascal, meowing nya, nya♪ without a pause.
Ooh. It worked. It worked! Am I actually a genius?
This time I caught another—the Siamese—and gently drew up violet, the emotion of love. I wrapped the feeling that had slipped free of the Klein bottle in Mana Sieve, moved it to my eyes the same way, and met her gaze. Her odd eyes, yellow and blue, washed violet once and cleared.
Her thick, sleek gray tail suddenly began to sway from side to side.
"Yaoong. Nyaooong. Iyaong."
I set her down, and instead of going anywhere she stuck right against me, purring, rubbing her whole body along my leg. I reached down and tickled under her chin, and she rumbled, breathing out in pleasure.
This was nice. Did the emotion point at me on its own?
After that, practicing on the cats and dogs with only the three energies—blue, green, and violet—I managed to work out several methods of control. Energy sent from the left eye set the target. Energy sent from the right eye set the target's target.
Suppose I used mental manipulation to move someone's love. I look at the one I mean to control with my left eye. For an instant their eyes wash violet, then return to their proper color. If I then meet someone else's eyes with my right, the one I saw on the left comes to love the one I saw on the right. That was the trick of it.
I checked whether the right eye could do the same thing alone. It couldn't. Whoever I looked at with only the right eye felt nothing at all. So how did I aim the feeling at myself? Simple. Look with both eyes. Then the one caught in the manipulation would come to like me.
The price of using something this important: fatigue of the mind. And that fatigue would scale with how much Phase Power the target held. On dim animals with no Phase Power at all, it rose so little I couldn't tell whether it had risen. But a being that possessed Phase Power—how high would it stack? How did you bring it down, and what made it climb?
At first I'd had trouble getting a grip on the concept of mental manipulation, but the moment I compared it to one thing, it locked into place. It was like this. Using the ability was no different from putting animals in a cage and taking them out again. The size of the cage was the strength of the mind. Widen the cage, and you could fit more in—but anything that outgrew the cage wouldn't go in, and you couldn't cram in too many besides.
Which is to say that bastard Ha Cheolsu had forced in animals past the cage's capacity. The cage blew apart, and his head went with it. Pathetic, when I thought about it. Didn't even know his own limits—cast mental manipulation on two Highest-Rank Variants and his skull burst. How stupid do you have to be to make that choice? Then again, if he hadn't been stupid, he never would have thrown that fit in the first place.
I stole a glance at Franc, busy disciplining Miho, and decided that this time I would try a different emotion.