Chapter 123: Self-Esteem 3
Chapter 123: Self-Esteem 3
The school life I observed while tagging along with Kim Ha-eun was utterly peaceful.
Unlike Han Ye-ji's memories, no monster popped up out of nowhere. Just tranquil days.
In gym class, they swung bamboo swords.
The hot-blooded girls placed bets on the matches.
The introverted boys quietly retreated to the corners, absorbed in their own worlds.
The rest of Ha-eun's typical school life unspooled the same way.
Horsing around at the faucets, half-wiping off sweat.
In the lunch line, pestering the cafeteria uncle with aegyo for extra meat.
Getting drowsy and nodding off from a full stomach after sweating and running wild.
That went on until someone flicked her forehead—right on the pale skin showing through her soft purple hair—and snapped her awake.
'What the hell am I supposed to be seeing here?'
Every unconscious mind and dream I'd experienced until now had followed a logic I could grasp.
Dreams of someone starved for affection fantasizing about being welcomed.
Dreams of a Constellation otaku terrified that Constellations might vanish.
Dreams of leading an army to slaughter monsters and becoming a great figure.
Or else the unconscious would get scrambled into something else:
getting chased by a muscle-woman straight out of a gag horror game,
the horror game's background bleeding into the dream,
or conjuring up the lewd fantasies she actually craved.
So what was driving this dream?
"Class president—"
"Thank you!!"
Rows of small heads bowed,
and the school filled with a wash of murmuring noise.
The dismissal bell rang, and the young students scattered in groups of threes and fives.
Desire, unconscious—nothing here clicked with either.
If I had to reach, maybe: she became an Incarnation so young, so she longed for an ordinary school life?
I remember hearing about celebrities in my past life—the ones who made it big while still students—
how they sometimes wished they could've just gone to school like everyone else.
But that couldn't be it.
She was the world's greatest swordswoman, with a talent acknowledged even by a Constellation.
Someone with that kind of gift loses her mind because she just wants to go to school?
She feels the weight of her Constellation's greatness,
feels lost and unsure which way to go and sinks into despair,
and the feeling that follows is: 'I want to go to middle school'?
No matter how I looked at it, that didn't track.
As that thought crossed my mind, the surroundings darkened abruptly.
I glanced up, half-expecting clouds or rain,
but what I saw was the sun plummeting downward.
"Now what?"
The sun set at fast-forward speed.
Then the moon rose and immediately dropped away again.
It felt like less than five minutes,
but afternoon raced into midnight, midnight into morning.
I stared blankly, and the gates opened. Students poured in.
And among the wave of dark-haired heads, my eyes went straight to that one standout patch of soft purple.
There she was, swinging her indoor-shoe pouch as she fooled around with a friend.
Maybe it was the hair and skin tone, but she didn't look like a middle schooler—
she looked more like a foreign kid model. Hard to miss.
Even in this gender-role-reversed world, middle schoolers were still kids.
The girls ran around shrieking, oblivious to skirts flipping up.
The boys watched, grimaced, and turned away muttering "gross."
They yanked each other's uniform ties to stretch them out,
waxed the hallway floor and tried skating on it and wiped out,
bet on who could jump more stairs, and the one who broke an arm and got carted off to the nurse's office came back a hero.
Honestly, the girls were so rowdy they might as well have been boys with long hair.
And right at the center of every incident: that little soft-purple head.
'What the hell kind of dream is this...?'
Regret over a school life where she never got to be the popular kid?
Or a wish to drop the crushing weight of being an Incarnation and just play?
Watching a middle schooler run around without a care in the world was, if anything, giving me a headache.
I almost wished a monster would burst in, the kids would panic,
and the Incarnation would appear like a hero to save them all. That would at least make sense.
The dismissal bell rang again.
The moment the last student passed through the gates,
time started racing forward once more.
※
No monster appeared at the school.
The playground didn't split open to deploy robots.
None of the students turned out to be the Chosen Ones.
Just like the disciple's memories: three cycles of the routine, and then I drifted back out naturally.
'No bamboo sword, it's the Eastern-style mansion. Bamboo sword, it's the school.'
Lay a hand on the sleeping disciple and enter her dream: the Eastern-style mansion appeared.
Lay a hand on the bamboo sword and think about entering: the middle school appeared.
The only common thread was that the experience ended after three days.
Word had come that the psychology experts had arrived for this baffling situation,
but there was a problem I never saw coming.
"I, I'm sorry. I can't read anything."
"Is that so?"
"Yes. All I can pick up is... she's sleepy, and she wants to go back somewhere safe."
The mental image I had of psychology experts
was people who understood and healed through actions, speech patterns, counseling.
But this world had Constellations and Incarnations and magic and superpowers.
A psychologist renowned enough to be invited by the Academy meant they were an Incarnation.
Behavioral correction? Speech-pattern analysis? Talk therapy?
In this world, Authorities handled all that.
"More than that—there seems to be something she's deeply terrified of... are you certain that's all right?"
"Ah, that's fine."
The middle-aged man who'd introduced himself as the Incarnation of the Sleep-Inducing Music Box dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief.
His spinning magic power radiated in a dizzying mess, but he'd gotten nothing for it.
He'd already poured it on until his reserves ran out, several times over.
Repeating failure after failure in front of two Constellations, his face had gone paper-white, like he was about to keel over.
The way he kept gagging, he looked one second away from clutching a toilet and throwing up.
He was the Western Continent's top consultant, able to read memories, emotions, and psychology and offer counsel,
but he couldn't make sense of the qi-deviated disciple or the worn-out bamboo sword.
Supposedly the highest authority among Incarnations in this field.
"To be precise, it's not that I can't read it—there's simply nothing to read."
"Nothing to read?"
"Yes. It's difficult to explain my Authority precisely... but to put it simply, think of it as tasting a dish. Much like a chef tastes a dish and identifies the ingredients. The dish has to enter your mouth and you have to eat it before you can taste it, no? The patient's current state is: there is no dish. So there is nothing to taste."
He was rambling a little, the situation clearly unprecedented for him.
He'd burned his magic down to near exhaustion—check. The Sword That Severs the Yoke kept glaring at him—check.
He'd come all this way at the Academy's invitation, puffing his chest about his Ph.D., and he had nothing to show for it.
And the whole time he had to keep saying "I can't, I can't," which was tangling his words further. Or so it seemed.
But something felt off.
"So, to confirm—you're saying your magic can't even get near her memories and emotions?"
"Yes, you could say that."
The handkerchief kept dabbing at his forehead, but the sweat only came faster. It was painful to watch.
But what could I do? He showed up waving a doctorate and had accomplished exactly nothing.
His voice was trembling—from nerves or mana exhaustion, it was hard to tell—and he looked about to drop.
The psychology Ph.D. Incarnation, wilting under The Sword That Severs the Yoke's glare, was helped out of the room.
The Sword That Severs the Yoke gave me a deep bow, asked me to just keep trying, and left as well.
Which meant: like it or not, I was the one who had to figure this out.
'That cat did seem to drop some hints.'
The worn bamboo sword the Retriever had suddenly brought me.
My avatar, warped by the cat's sudden interference.
The disciple, distorting her own memories and left alone in the mansion.
Kim Ha-eun, who'd taken the protagonist's place in the disciple's memories.
And now an Incarnation psychologist waving his hands saying 'I can't access her memories.'
'Can't access her memories. Why?'
It wasn't a lack of ability.
This wasn't my old Earth. There was no such thing as a fake Ph.D. here.
This man had been chosen by a Constellation and vetted by the Academy.
My brain started to burn through its sugar reserves, so I kept pulling out sweet sodas at random and chugging them to keep thinking.
Maybe my bigger body came with a bigger stomach, because three cans went down one after another and I didn't feel bloated at all.
After chewing on it a while longer, a hypothesis popped out.
Sure, it didn't explain everything—it was more like forcing pieces to fit, but I'd take what I could get.
I set aside the bamboo sword the Retriever had brought and the cat's remodeling job on my appearance for now.
There's a concept called the deep mind and the surface mind.
The Incarnation of the Sleep-Inducing Music Box had mentioned those terms in passing earlier.
Literally the outer and inner whatsit of the psyche—but that wasn't the point.
I considered the idea that the mind itself has depth.
'What if everything I'd been watching wasn't the unconscious mind at all, but just the surface layer?'
What if the qi-deviated disciple's consciousness had sunk way down deep,
and I'd arrived right up to the doorstep of her consciousness via dream magic,
while the Incarnation of the Sleep-Inducing Music Box hadn't even gotten close?
What if the same day kept repeating because what I was experiencing wasn't a true dream—
just the outermost surface, fragments of the surface, like skimming the rind of a watermelon?
It didn't resolve the other mysteries, but it was a hypothesis worth testing.
Right away, I laid a hand on the head of the disciple, who was still curled up hiding behind the sofa.
What spread before my eyes was the Eastern-style mansion—familiar past the point of nausea by now.
Standing around staring at nothing accomplished zero, and eventually even the glimpse of pale breasts stopped registering.
Every time I went through this, three days passed. This was already my seventh entry.
...If this failed, that meant I'd have spent a total of twenty-one days doing nothing but zonking out.
I pushed off from the wooden veranda and strode into the wide practice yard.
Toward the disciple, who was swinging a wooden sword at straw dummies, logs, and wooden training dolls.
I moved past the upper garment she'd shrugged off from sweat and stood squarely in front of her.
Fwoosh—the wooden sword cut through me with a vicious whistle and passed straight through.
My hand, reaching toward her modest chest where sweat-beads trickled down, passed through her too.
The mansion's furniture I could touch at will. Only the disciple herself remained untouchable.
'So this really is the answer?'
I gathered dream magic at my fingertips and took hold of the disciple's shoulder.
This time, what I pictured wasn't an exit—it was an entrance.
I felt myself yanked somewhere, like someone had grabbed me by the hair.
Two voices reached me before my vision even cleared.
"Haaah!"
"Too slow!"
"Ack!"
My eyes opened to the sound of vicious, whooshing strikes.
I saw Kim Ha-eun being beaten like a dog by the disciple's wooden sword, rolling on the ground.
...What the hell is this?