Chapter 131: The Constellation's Power 3
Chapter 131: The Constellation's Power 3
Golden hair against stark white skin.
Eyes like carved sapphires, bright as cut stone.
A body built of solid muscle — neither too bulky nor too wiry.
"Whoa... This look is amazing too!"
"Huh? Uh, thanks?"
My Western Continent avatar, put together with a little help from the Unfading Giant Tree.
I had exactly one reason for taking on this appearance.
I was going down into the screen myself.
"You're really going in directly? Are you sure that's safe?"
"It's just an avatar. Relax."
The screen showed a teeming crowd milling around.
Not hundreds — dozens, but plenty.
They were holding shovels and hand hoes, clearing away the flowers.
Worried about leaving traces of an Extraordinary Ability behind, the bigger women crouched low and dug up the deep-rooted flowers by hand.
The sight was equal parts ridiculous and chilling.
Just how many of them were down here?
The bright side was that the crowd was larger than I'd expected, so no one seemed to know anyone else.
If it had been a small, handpicked crew where every face was familiar, I would've had to skip the sneaking around and just report them to another Constellation or the Academy.
I hadn't done that. The reason I was going in myself was simple.
Padding my point total.
This was a world where fame translated directly into points.
My Incarnations' exploits brought in points, sure, but a Constellation's own actions raked them in too.
Why else would the Sword That Severs the Yoke go out and earn points in person?
'I just managed to scrape together one piece of the set. At this rate, how many years is the full set going to take?'
One piece a month was far too slow.
Even though my point income had gotten a lot healthier, it was still a fraction of what a mid-tier figure like the Unfading Giant Tree pulled in.
If I had to rank myself, I was probably just beginning to build a foundation. Maybe around eightieth out of a hundred.
Sure, I was a Dream Demon running around the human world, getting tangled up with famous Constellations, and growing at an unusual pace — but that didn't compare to decades of accumulated recognition.
I couldn't afford to pass up an opportunity like this.
"Alright. I'm heading out."
"Okay, travel safe. If things get dangerous, I'll be watching, and I'll jump in to help."
She'd been staring at my Western-style blond hair. She gave a small smile and a wave.
This body was a lot leaner than my black-haired form. A little less raw strength, but it felt light.
I finished checking the body over and smoothly sent the clone up to the surface.
'Seeing it in person like this really puts it in perspective.'
A wasteland thick with the smell of dirt.
And an endless field of flowers stretching past the horizon.
On the screen, it had just been a "wow, that's big" kind of view, but standing here on my own two feet, the flowers swallowed my entire field of vision.
The place was so choked with them it looked impossible to even find the entrance.
I'd watched them tearing up the ground with hoes and shovels right before I came down, but in that short time, everything had been restored to its original state.
I glanced up at the sky out of habit and caught a few flower buds swelling in an unnatural way.
A closer look showed the white flowers squirming, wriggling into a square. A green-screen situation.
Over my eyes, hands, feet — my whole body.
I wrapped myself in magic power and pressed at the entrance. A sensation like sliding down a long, slick chute.
'Not a physical door. A magic circle, maybe?'
It felt a little different, but similar to entering a lucid dream.
Made sense. Carving a magic circle into the ground and concealing it is a lot easier than tunneling through dirt.
The moment I opened my eyes, a guard would be waiting at the entrance —
Thankfully, nothing like that happened.
'Is this incompetence, or just negligence?'
A dimly lit basement corridor.
Not the kind of filthy, damp tunnel I'd been picturing, though.
Hell, if I'd teleported in, maybe this wasn't even underground.
Clean green and gray paint.
At a glance, the place looked like an underground parking garage. The gleaming, dust-free floors and pillars only reinforced the image.
Which way should I go?
What kind of building was this?
Before I could make that call, a boisterous, rowdy noise drifted from up ahead.
"Ah, this batch is really choice."
"For real. That's the kind of quality that makes you want to salute."
"You sick freak, you sound like absolute gutter trash."
A pack of men, giggling and swapping lewd jokes.
They were staggering around clutching bottles, clearly not in their right minds.
Good-looking guys, but the glassy, unfocused eyes made it obvious they were high on more than just booze.
'The hell? Who are these idiots?'
This was supposed to be a secret hideout built to elude the gaze of the Constellations.
A quiet, strict, heavily guarded place. Like an underground black market straight out of a fantasy novel. That's what I'd expected.
So why did it suddenly feel like a back alley behind a nightclub?
I stood there, stunned by the absurdity of it, when one of the stumbling figures looked my way.
Should I kill him? Knock him out?
While I was still weighing my options —
"Eyyy — you came too?"
"What? Who's this guy?"
"Y'know, from, uh, last time, we shared a table...?"
"Whatever, means we partied together, right?"
The doped-up guy walked right up to me and started acting like we knew each other.
Did he just assume anyone with blond hair and blue eyes was a friend? Or were these guys too brainless to possess any sense of danger?
All five of them shuffled off together, chattering away without a single suspicious glance among them.
My plan had been to slip in, pull off a quiet assassination, gather intel, and track down the Academy infiltrator.
Things were going so smoothly it was almost suspicious.
Why was this happening?
The answer came to me with a little too much ease.
The mana reserve I'd ripped from Kim Ha-eun.
A Constellation's Authority, a Dream Demon's pheromones, plus a massive stockpile of mana gathered by a once-in-a-century genius.
It was proving devastatingly effective on guys already pickled in booze and drugs.
The goodwill of a bunch of men in tank tops and baggy shorts, staggering around high, spewing filthy stories about getting passively railed by women.
It was a little — no, deeply goddamn aggravating, but I had to make use of it in a situation like this.
Still, every time they cracked a joke that wasn't even remotely funny and slapped me on the shoulder, cackling, I caught myself debating whether to stab them in the lung or the windpipe just to shut them up.
"Ah, is it this way today?"
"Nah, definitely not the Alchemy District."
"Why would they call us to a place that's nothing but labs, you idiot."
"Is this moron already too wrecked to get it up?"
"If we leave him here, he's gonna end up face-down in a car exhaust."
Even so, standing at an unmarked fork in the road, listening to their drunken mouths spit out that the Alchemy District was on the right, along with all sorts of other intel... it was damn convenient.
Whether it was a habit of theirs to blab when drunk, or if this world's drugs had some kind of truth-serum side effect, these five never shut up, and I ended up learning a lot more than I'd expected.
One: this place was a building on the Northern Continent.
Two: there were other Incarnations in this building, creating a legal black fog.
Three: they'd exploited that blind spot to build several secret rooms inside the building.
Rooms made by altering wall thicknesses and inscribing magic.
Downstairs, office workers shuffled paperwork. Upstairs, Incarnations waited for mission assignments. And in the hidden spaces between them, drug-fueled orgies were in full swing.
Exactly like the scene unfolding in front of me.
'What a shitshow.'
We took a freight elevator, and it started moving even though no one had pressed a button.
Ding — the doors slid open.
A blast of hot air hit my face, and a rank, sour smell pricked at my nose.
"Ah, a-ahh, more, give me more —"
"I said get it up, you fucking prick!"
"The guys from yesterday aren't coming?"
"You're the one who screwed up the needle and you're giving me shit."
The room itself looked elegant at a glance. Solid wood tables, sofas with gentle curves, liquor bottles displayed beautifully on the walls, and a bartender positioned perfectly in the corner.
Except for the woman on the sofa with her skirt hiked up, getting serviced by two men, and the girls watching with amusement while some guy put on a masturbation show on the wooden table, burying his face in a pile of white powder.
It wasn't just lewd. It was repulsive.
Maybe it was the way spilled booze and food had turned the floor into a sticky mess.
I'm not exactly horrified by drugs and orgies, but looking at this scene put me in a foul mood.
I channeled my magic power, letting my disgust bleed into it.
Ever since I'd ripped it from Kim Ha-eun, my magic reserve had gone past massive and straight into bloated. The threads of magic moved like strands of silk, but each one was nearly as thick as a rubber hose.
Too clumsy for fine, needle-thread precision work, but that suited what I was about to do just fine.
"Mmm, new guy?"
A woman with a wine glass wobbled toward me.
The men I'd shared the elevator with had already scattered to the tables, buried between women.
"Huh, fresh face. I like it."
She was plastered. Her hand was dripping with wine she didn't seem to notice as she sidled up next to me, casually linking her arm through mine and groping my thigh.
"I'll have you know, sis here gets around pretty good."
Every time she smirked, a foul reek wafted from her mouth.
Had she been chewing tobacco, or just stuffing drugs straight down her gullet? Her breath was so bad the wine on her hand smelled fragrant by comparison.
'Face is decent, though...'
I'd heard about the black fog. I'd figured there'd be a bunch of drunk beauties. I'd even planned on enjoying myself a little, but that stench made my interested equipment wilt and bow its head in defeat.
Between the Westerners' natural body odor, the mingled smell of male and female fluids, and the spilled food and drug-laced leaves, the scene in front of me was a hardcore porno — but I couldn't get any strength going down below to save my life.
"Yeah, ah, sensitive nose, huh?"
The woman at least had some self-awareness. She waved her hand around.
Her bright red dress was already askew, leaving her chest and back fully exposed, and when a gust of wind swept through the room, everything below got flipped wide open too.
'That's some seriously precise mana control.'
Even drugged out of her mind, she had the skill to isolate only the stench and force it out of the room. Her abilities as an Incarnation seemed impressive.
If things had been just a bit cleaner, I might've laid her down on the sofa right then, but —
'Let's start with her.'
The body odor I'd smelled earlier had been too much of a shock to the system, so I just blasted her with magic power. Aimed right at her pale chest, with one nipple already peeking out from the slipping fabric.
More precisely: straight toward her heart.
"Hhyueeek...?"
The woman, who'd been using her ability just fine a second ago, suddenly clamped her legs together and dug her fingers into my shoulder.
Under the fluttering hem of her dress, I could see her juices dripping down.
"Wha-what is thiiis —"
A bizarre sight: an orgasm washing over her while she was still standing upright, moaning like a fool.
And yet, no one even glanced this way.
Yeah, that figured.
I'd just driven a dose of dream-drugs directly into her heart.
A concentrated hit of the kind of pleasure you can only taste in a dream, with no side effects. Literally a dream narcotic.
The air, which had just been cleared, instantly grew hot and thick again.