Do You Desire Power?
Do you desire power?
At last. It had appeared. Hell yeah! The being who would become my very first contractor.
A full ten thousand years and then some had crawled past since I began living alone on a planet with nobody else on it. The moment I felt, out on the utterly barren surface of this world, a presence that was not my own, it was as if a heart I did not even possess had started to pound.
They're here. They're here!
It was a feeling much like the day I first discovered the Gallery — a vast spiritual high. And because this was the first real success wrung out of countless trials and errors, the weight of it landed all the heavier.
Wow. It really did take forever, though.
How long had it taken just to lure a sapient being all the way to the planet where I sat? Golgotha, the world I occupied, was a small celestial body poised at the common center of mass of a triple star system. The astronomy alone was hostile to anything with a mind, and the nearest system that had managed to grow an advanced civilization lay light-years off.
Practically the textbook definition of far.
Stack enough miserable conditions and a place has no choice but to become the middle of nowhere. Leave it alone, and unless you were a castaway who had botched the coordinates in the middle of a faster-than-light run, you were never going to find it.
Ugh. These Empire bastards, I swear.
On top of all that, the Galactic Empire — the single greatest power in the material universe — had designated the place a Class 1 Forbidden Zone. Merely approaching a Class 1 Forbidden Zone was treated as treason against the Empire. Break that rule, and in all this wide cosmos you became a felon who could not even stretch both legs out and sleep.
I had wondered why they would go that far. Thinking it over, though, the reason was not hard to guess. The atrocity they had committed against me had never been carried out with anything like good intentions.
Insane fanatic thugs. Unlikable to the bone.
Use your head. Would anyone turn a perfectly intact sapient being into a brain in a jar and run a simulation on them out of the kindness of their hearts? More than ten thousand years on, the memory of the moment I swallowed the Red Pill still set my teeth on edge. Of course I hated the Empire that had toyed with my fate. I hated them very, very much.
…The story had wandered.
Anyway. My base was a place whose accessibility to outsiders was that catastrophically bad, which meant that inducing a contractor to approach Golgotha by any ordinary method was effectively impossible. I had needed to change the approach itself from the very start. The answer was to draw in anti-imperialists — people who loathed the Empire the way I did.
Right on cue, I heard my first contractor candidate muttering to himself.
"…Well. Doesn't matter either way."
Someone might wonder how I heard that when I don't have ears. There are ways. Think about it: this planet is basically my house. Even frail mortals turn as omnipotent as a transcendent in front of their mother and the corner of their room. I will simply say that, at least inside my own house, I am not entirely incompetent.
"So long as I can take my revenge on the Empire, I'll offer up this wretched body, or this soul. As much as you want."
Hell yeah!
How could every single word out of his mouth be so endearing? I had no idea where he was from, but he was a friend with an extremely correct worldview.
"The air here is foul from the first breath. Whatever nested in a dump like this couldn't possibly be a proper god. Still… for one last struggle, it may be a perfectly suitable place."
…I was going to pretend I hadn't heard that one.
I couldn't enjoy a historic moment like this by myself. Before I made contact with my first contractor, I logged into the Gallery and sent a DM to one particular Galler.
Yes. The newbie who, the instant his Shut Up and Lurk for 300 Years sentence ended, had boldly tried to launch a Gorosi against me.
The Gallery had never been the sort of over-fermented community where a newbie got parade-shamed merely for daring to Gorosi a major permanent handle. His own screw-up had simply hit so hard that the backlash landed square on him. And, not to brag, I am not your ordinary Gallery addict. I don't spend every day dumping nothing but shitposts; I contribute directly to keeping the place running, so I will say my standing is decent enough.
Anyway, thanks to all of that, the moment Baekgu began posting in earnest he was branded unlikeable. His personal information was stripped bare, his archived ancient posts were dug out of the grave, and he ate a reverse Gorosi on top of it. A truly glamorous debut.
It wasn't as if he had cursed anyone, or said something you aren't allowed to say. He was just taking such a vicious dogpile that I threw a shield up from my side — partly, I'll admit, to mind my own image.
Baekgu declared defeat as if he had been waiting for the chance. And as is always the way with this sort of incident, the parties themselves held no real grudge. They chatted, they did each other favors, and somewhere along the line they got close. From then on he acted as if the Gorosi had never happened, calling me Hyung and turning meek as anything. Political instincts worthy of a lord of a hundred worlds.
He was especially useful in all sorts of ways, as you'd expect from a transcendent who had come up as a conqueror. On this project in particular, Lord of 100 Worlds — Baekgu, for short — had done more than anyone. He was the one who had first suggested gathering anti-imperialists and making followers of them. He was more than qualified to enjoy this moment with me.
I used the Gallery's mind-net share and watched the surface of Golgotha together with Baekgu.
Right. I saw him.
The hidden perk of the Gallery's mind-net share was that, while a screen was shared, your sensory organs synchronized with the other being. That was why I had gone out of my way to share this moment with another Galler.
Baekgu's got good eyes. Tauros-born, maybe?
The other Gallers probably didn't even know the function existed. No one who had made it to transcendent would be so pitiful as to lack sensation entirely. Even the mental-entity transcendents, the ones whose true bodies lingered in the Astral Realm, usually kept a few avatars ready in the material universe. Maybe it was a kind of bug. Well. If it works, it works. Thanks to it, I could see my first contractor candidate with perfect clarity.
A thick visor hid the face. The ink-dark exosuit was scored with scratches from collar to boot. A firearm that looked like an optical weapon rode at his side, and the belt carried grenades, a melee blade, and an assortment of other sidearms. He had lived a pretty hard-boiled life.
KWAANG!
We had barely traded a line when an explosion went off out of nowhere, far in the distance. I cast a mental net to look, and it was the ship this friend had come in, blowing apart. It had already looked unwell from the moment it hit orbit, and now it had finally given up the ghost. And this guy didn't have a single flinch in him. His own ship was exploding, and he didn't so much as glance at it. The talk of coming for one last struggle had not been empty words. Even Baekgu whistled, impressed by how thick the testosterone was running.
Baekgu gauged my mood and whispered.
Anyone could see he didn't want to give up the show, and was only offering to step aside out of consideration for me. It wasn't anything I needed to hide, and Baekgu's disposition ran close to mine, so I let him stay. Surprisingly enough, the guy was an anti-imperialist too. It was also the long-awaited historic moment of meeting my first contractor, and I wanted to feel at least the sight of it directly, without running it through a synesthetic filter.
Goooo…!
I slowly extended a mental net and approached my contractor candidate. As gently and delicately as I could, so I wouldn't startle him. Brimming with goodwill.
"Ngh…?"
The mortal, catching an unfamiliar spiritual presence, let out a small sound of surprise. He had noticed that easily. He seemed to have some spiritual aptitude of his own.
"This feeling… what is it? Don't tell me you are the being they call a god?"
Vaguely perceiving me, the mortal shouted into empty air. A very smooth first meeting. A truly thrilling moment. If I had a heart, it would have been hammering by now.
But what line was I supposed to open with? I had definitely prepared several excellent ones, and now that the moment had arrived I couldn't remember how any of them started. After a brief hesitation, I tuned my mental wave until it would sound as mysterious as possible, and I whispered.
"Kh—!"
Faced with my telepathy directly, the mortal groaned and clutched his head. Baekgu, watching the whole thing live, whispered a low note of admiration.