Side Story: Jini and the Constellation
A pure white expanse.
In a place once used by the Olympian gods of Earth's divine realm, a blonde woman stared blankly down at the floor.
About a hundred and eighty centimeters tall, with soft golden hair cascading to her waist and luminous ash-gray eyes. She lightly pinched the hem of her fluttering blue Grecian tunic between her fingertips and settled comfortably onto the floor.
With a sweep of her hand, a section of the floor rose and stood upright, like a television screen, projecting an image.
The scene inside the chairman's office at the Independent Gate High School Foundation on the surface world.
In the footage, a powerfully built man of about a hundred and eighty centimeters had two women who resembled each other stacked on a sofa, taking them in turn without pause. Watching it, her face flushed and her breathing grew ragged.
Kim Ian… soon, me too…
She was Jini, the homunculus who had received a physical body from the Constellation Lee Su-ho.
A homunculus who had abandoned her support duties and come to possess human emotions. Fortunately, her master Lee Su-ho had said nothing of it—had even granted her a body—but in truth it was a grave offense for which she could not have protested even if he had ordered her discarded.
Since then she had been carrying out the missions the Constellation assigned her, but they were simple enough that she spent nearly every hour like this, looking down on Kim Ian.
The Constellation hasn't said anything, but is it really all right to go on like this?
Ever since receiving a body, these personal feelings and thoughts kept springing up unbidden, complicating Jini's mind. Unfamiliar emotions, and an anxiety that she might be crossing some forbidden line. But more than any of that, what tormented her was still everything to do with Kim Ian.
A sense of dissonance.
Especially because she knew the information on Kim Ian from before the regression, that dissonance had been gnawing at her day after day. The Kim Ian of the future as she had registered him and the Kim Ian of the present were so different that it would not have been strange to call them completely separate people—in personality, in behavior, in everything.
It's frustrating… the villain Kim Ian at least acted without hesitation.
She even wondered whether his current, frustrating way of doing things was a dependent habit born from the Constellation's and her own support. The catalysts that should have roughened him had all been cut off now. Of course, as he kept adding women, his womanizing nature was still blossoming.
If it were the future him, Han Ju-ae, So Mi-jin, Lee Yun-hui, Kim Ji-yeon and the rest would have been treated wretchedly.
The habit of building a harem was the same, but the present him wanted something more familial, warmer in atmosphere, while the future him—or rather, the past him that no longer existed—had built a harem devoted purely to animalistic pleasure.
Images of miserable slaves flickered past. Especially the slaves who had been brought into the harem after 2008. Severing arms and legs had been routine. The men who came to arrest him he threw alive to the dogs for feed; the women he tore out arms, legs, tongues, even eyeballs, and put them on display. That kind of villain.
Of course, by her own standards, whether the world called him a villain or not made no difference. Saint or monster, he would still have been Kim Ian.
He had, in a milder form, taken bitches into the harem as well—but any woman who planted even a sliver of ill will in him was treated as nothing more and nothing less than a living onahole. And when he grew bored of handling them as bitches, he would mate them with the dogs he kept and drive them out of the harem…
Of course she did not wish for that side of him to bloom. Jini only wanted him to act a little more coldly, more ruthlessly. A woman like So Mi-jin, currently cresting on waves of ecstasy, should have had every last asset stripped from her and been kept for life inside the house, treated like a dog that could not even speak.
There's no chance of that now. He'll have to improve those frustrating parts of himself on his own.
He had escaped poverty, and his revenge was already half complete. Most of his complexes had been shed as well, so the odds of him turning dark in temperament were ninety-nine percent sealed off.
While she was lost in those stray thoughts, time raced by. Before she knew it he had tormented the mother and daughter for hours, and when she read So Mi-jin's emotions just now she could confirm the woman was completely subjugated.
Well, with So Mi-jin around, she can serve as his shield for the next two years and for several years after that.
So Mi-jin was a woman who held social power of a different order from the others. Assets in the hundreds of billions, connections… and so on. She had the capacity to provide the kind of protection Oh Jeong-mi and the rest could not. There was the weakness of a pro-Japanese family line; in an ordinary world that might have become a shackle on Kim Ian's ankle. But two years from now even that would no longer be a matter of controversy. And decisively, her father was fated to die at the end of February, which would only harden that power further. For the time being, then, she was a woman Kim Ian could not do without. Kwon Su-jeong, Seo A-jeong, Jeong Hye-yun—every one of his women was the kind men coveted, so all sorts of flies would start swarming.
He was hurrying out of the school, and Jini lowered the screen back into the floor, then briefly turned to the other missions the Constellation had given her.
Universal classification code: KLMA.
The classification code for the universe that contained Earth. It held no special meaning—only the discoverer's initials and a sequential number.
The Constellation Lee Su-ho had been born on an Earth of a parallel universe different from Kim Ian's, but an Earth all the same. His hobby was seeking out humans who held the same soul as himself across thousands of parallel universes, granting them wishes or abilities, and watching what followed. Of course he did not stop at helping only those with identical souls. Through those same souls he also indirectly aided people with whom he had once been connected.
Jini's second-priority mission was to verify the people on the list the Constellation had given her, and, when the order came, prepare to forge their ties with Kim Ian.
She was checking the names on the list one by one when, suddenly, a presence stirred inside the temple.
Jini spun around in haste. There stood the Constellation Lee Su-ho, having opened a dimensional gate and descended, looking at her.
She hurried toward him and bowed her head.
"Lord Su-ho. Lady Felton. You have come."
And now she felt another presence—stronger even than the Constellation Lee Su-ho's—the presence of Felton, the Constellation's fourth wife. Jini felt wonder and fear at once and kept her head lowered.
"Yes. Jini… or shall I call you Beatrice?"
A deep, heavy voice reached her. Jini had not yet heard Felton's reply, so she answered without raising her head.
"Jini is still fine for now."
"Lift your head. And come closer."
A dry yet clear voice. At Felton's permission Jini raised her head and first looked toward the Constellation. She saw the ordinary face of the Constellation, confirmed his nod, and then approached Felton.
A rather small frame of a hundred and seventy centimeters, sky-blue hair, sky-blue eyes. A beauty whose hair could never have been born naturally on Earth without dye entered Jini's sight. A slender woman from whom no aura of force could be felt. Yet the Felton before her was a special-class mercenary of the Dimensional Mercenary Alliance—one of the five most influential organizations in the Outer Universe, where trillions of universes gathered.
The Constellation Lee Su-ho was himself the forty-ninth special-class mercenary of the Dimensional Mercenary Alliance, holding Numbering 49—but she was the thirty-first special-class mercenary, granted Numbering 3, one of the strongest beings in the entire Outer Universe.
"Oh. Real melodrama eyes, huh? Honey, you didn't mess with her, did you?"
Curiosity lightly colored Felton's previously blunt tone. She stepped over to Lee Su-ho beside her and tapped his shoulder as she spoke. He snorted a laugh and shook his head.
"No. Why would I?"
"Hmm… well, she does share a soul with you…"
The Constellation's soul… as a soul it is unusually unstable, and for that very reason it produces variables no one can predict…
Jini knew her inner thoughts were being read by them, but in that moment she could not help recalling the nature of the Constellation's—and Kim Ian's—soul. The trait of Soul Devour, which should not exist in the Ninth Realm, and the incomplete-feeling qualities of the soul… Perhaps because of that, the repercussions of the Constellation's or Kim Ian's actions so often led to results that defied common sense.
Scratch.
The habit of snorting a laugh, the way of scratching his head—it overlapped with Kim Ian's.
"I didn't set anything special, and yet a homunculus developed emotions… If that old hag Do-yeon saw this she'd demand to take her for research…"
"Tsk. Don't bring up that old hag."
Do-yeon.
Thirteenth of the Dimensional Mercenary Alliance, Numbering 9. Also Felton's master, and the origin of many of Lee Su-ho's and Felton's core techniques. For some reason, though, Lee Su-ho was currently keeping his distance from Do-yeon. And the method of homunculus refinement that had created Jini was one Do-yeon herself had devised.
Even as those scraps of information brushed past while the two conversed, Jini did not dare interject. She only wondered why they had descended all the way to this insignificant Ninth Realm.
"Come closer, Beatrice."
Felton's dry voice came again. Fear stirred in Jini, but she could not refuse a command, so she moved her heavy feet. Step by step she approached Felton, and the woman laid a hand on Jini's chest.
"Without a soul you aren't human. I'm going to plant a soul in you now and awaken it."
"…What? Th-thank you, Lady Felton."
Black dimensional force glowed from Felton's hand, and that light soon sank into Jini's chest. She felt energy spreading through her whole body, and without pain or exaltation she simply sensed something settling into place inside her mind.
A soul.
Creating a soul for an artificial life-form like a homunculus would be far too easy for the two beings before her. But Jini could not contain the joy that small kindness brought her. Until now she had been nothing more than a cyborg wearing a human body.
"For now, Jini. Because of Do-yeon's obstruction, we failed to secure the preemption rights."
The rapture lasted only a moment; at Lee Su-ho's words Jini stared blankly at him.
The Origin Race, whose combat patterns most closely resembled those of the Raid Race that the Aesis had parasitized. Preemption rights over a planet that held such an Origin Race were essential for Kim Ian's adaptation.
"What? Constellation… then…?"
"That's why we came in person. Felton went with me to persuade Do-yeon… and of course it failed… tsk."
Irritation clouded the Constellation's previously expressionless face. And Jini felt a slow ache in her chest, as if she could already see the hardships that would soon fall upon Kim Ian.