Chapter 136: Dreamland 1
Chapter 136: Dreamland 1
The Unfading Giant Tree, her face flushed scarlet, unwound the vine from her wrist.
Probably the saintess time kicking in after being pushed over the edge again and again.
From her perspective, she'd been trying to take the lead,
but stripped of context, she'd basically just tied a man up out of nowhere.
"So, was it good?"
"...Ugh, look at that. You're not going to help her?"
Head bowed low with embarrassment, she turned the screen back on.
It felt like a desperate bid to change the subject.
[Hey, at least help with the search! There's no time!]
Had her danger sense triggered again?
A demonfolk was flailing desperately, her eyes stained black—pitiful enough to stir even the Unfading Giant Tree's sympathy.
Cold sweat streaming down, hair a tangled mess—she looked utterly wretched.
"Can you send a message with that?"
"Mm. You can talk through it."
She held out a wooden telephone.
An antique-looking thing you'd expect to see in a museum.
Come to think of it, my computer had only gotten the basic upgrade—
the filtering was still in place when I tried to send messages to anyone.
If I really needed to handle an emergency or deliver a clear message,
I could just send an avatar and say it face to face.
But the Unfading Giant Tree, being an elf, couldn't do that.
Was that why she'd spent the points she'd earned as a mid-tier Constellation on a convenience item like this?
last time I'd helped her out, she'd had dozens of farms alone.
Visiting each one to talk would take forever—better to just make a bunch of calls.
[So, what are you offering?]
[My blood!]
The demonfolk shouted from the screen.
At once, dozens—hundreds—of Incarnations began to move.
Not just Incarnations. Office workers, too.
A crowd in the thousands started swarming like ants before a rainstorm.
If I was a rising startup CEO among young entrepreneurs,
the Unfading Giant Tree was a small-to-medium enterprise president managing billions.
And that demonfolk had to be a major corporation president ranked in the national top 100.
Maybe that was why, when I zoomed the screen out to take in the city,
people were teeming everywhere like a beehive hit by a slingshot.
One phone call, and she could mobilize an entire city. That kind of influence.
Anyway—blood?
"Demonfolk blood has many uses."
Having shaken off her saintess time, she offered me a quiet bit of advice.
The demonfolk, who'd somehow caught it right through the receiver, launched into a supplemental explanation.
[You can make medicine with it! Use it as a magic reagent, too!]
The "medicine" she was talking about was probably drugs, not pharmaceuticals.
A Constellation who could endlessly churn out narcotic raw materials.
In a different sense, that was a terrifying kind of influence.
And the city was proving it right now.
Police were setting up checkpoints along the roads,
and Incarnations were quietly seizing the main thoroughfare out of town.
A man holding a toddler's hand was protesting at the police line,
a hot-blooded woman in a short skirt was shouting.
And the demonfolk didn't back down.
Take complaints from the citizens,
or get orbital-bombarded by the Incinerating Tyrant's space battleship?
Put that way, who'd choose the latter?
[Magic reagent, then. How much are you giving?]
[Three times!]
I tilted my head slightly, trying to parse that,
but this time she just shook her head—she didn't know either.
Still, given how desperate the situation looked, she probably wasn't bluffing.
It wasn't like I'd be snorting drugs myself.
I'd just hand it over to Lee Ha-rin as experimental magic reagents.
Whether "three times" meant three packets of drugs or three uses of magic, I had no idea,
but that much ought to be decent for testing.
And wasn't this unexpected side income?
The original objective was to freely unleash a massive amount of magic power.
In actual combat, of course—not in the Academy training grounds.
Even if I spread my magic power across the city as much as I pleased,
the Constellation managing this city had given her permission.
Was there a better setup than this?
[Fuck, five times! I can't draw any more than that!]
Apparently interpreting my silence as refusal, the demonfolk yelled.
[Fine. I'm on my way.]
At the same time, I set down the receiver and stirred my magic power.
The Unfading Giant Tree, who'd been pressed right up against my side, took the receiver and saw me off.
"Come back safe. I can help you find a person, at least."
I handed over the receiver and pulled the screen in.
From a view where human heads had looked like ants,
I zoomed out—out—until only the city's buildings were visible.
At this rate, how long would door-to-door searches even take?
Especially against an assassin who'd ignored every alarm the Academy had.
I moved my magic power.
In quantities beyond anything I'd ever handled.
The image I held was of the polar aurora I'd only seen in photos.
Let it settle over the city like a blanket, enveloping everyone.
I couldn't put every single person in the city to sleep.
In terms of raw output, maybe I could barely manage it,
but there was no reason to, and I didn't trust my control that far.
What if someone nodded off mid-drive on a road, or in a hospital?
Catching one assassin wasn't worth casualties on that scale.
So I wouldn't pull them into dreams.
I'd only draw the dreams out.
'It's not my neighborhood. They can handle the cleanup themselves.'
A little irresponsible, maybe, but what could I do?
The one who'd asked for help was the demonfolk herself. I'd simply accepted.
No other conditions were attached.
So I might as well do exactly what I wanted: pour out as much magic power as I could.
Like a snowstorm slowly blanketing the city,
the veil of magic power descended and seeped into the people.
※
The fears people felt weren't just one or two kinds.
From the common dread of ghosts and monsters
to abstract anxieties about death or the future—
even trivial phobias born from personal experience, like a fear of teddy bears or candy.
If all the information from those nightmares came flooding into me, I wouldn't be able to endure it.
No matter how much my magic reserves had grown,
swallowing an entire city whole was beyond me.
My talent, my control, hadn't grown just because my magic had.
'Total chaos.'
So I didn't take them in.
I put a single restriction on them—harm no one—and released them all into the city.
"Agh! What the—!"
"What is that thing?!"
"Just film it!"
People's reactions ran the gamut.
And that figured. Not every nightmare was disgusting.
Some certainly were.
Cockroaches the size of people, giant spiders, clowns with mouths ripped wide, rotting zombies,
stench-spewing sludge monsters and freaks.
But plenty of nightmares were no big deal to most people—like Han Ye-ji's old trauma.
Small dogs the size of chihuahuas, birds a little bigger than a crow,
walking teddy bears, music boxes playing eerie melodies.
Maybe because of that, the city was less chaotic than I'd expected.
Most people were buzzing around taking photos, fascinated—
nobody was panicking and stampeding for shelter.
Streets full of paving blocks in slightly off colors.
Buildings with architectural styles just a little different.
Buses and cars with unfamiliar designs.
And teeming crowds of blond-haired people.
"Now what's that?"
"Hey, get the camera!"
In the blue sky between the high-rises, a pterosaur shrieked,
and the shadow of a giant as tall as a building passed through the skyscrapers,
so no one's attention landed on the man who'd suddenly appeared at the roadside.
Of course it didn't.
"Holy shit, isn't that Ancalagon from King of the Rift?"
"Looks like it... exactly like the one I saw at the theater yesterday."
Right next to the road I was walking, on the roof of a museum built like a palace,
a massive dragon with wings and scales was coiling itself up.
If anyone's eyes went to some guy on the street instead of the dragon at a moment like this,
that person would have to be spectacularly strange.
'Should I group them up and issue commands?'
Nightmares swarmed thick as the city's population.
I had no confidence I could control that many individually.
What came to mind was the unit-control panel from an RTS game.
Like designating squads, I roughly bundled the nightmares together.
'Can't give them delicate orders, but I don't need to.'
The order I'd give was simple.
Find the man who'd recently visited the Academy.
The Academy sat at the center of this flat earth's inland sea.
Considering the tight security sweeping outward from the port,
the assassin probably hadn't swum or flown in.
She must have entered as an Academy visitor, done the job clean, and fled.
What if the real reason magic hadn't detected her was that she really had swum away?
'Honestly, what am I supposed to do about a thief who swam the Pacific to escape.'
At that level, I'd have no way to catch her.
I'd just have to sit back and watch the Incinerating Tyrant throw a tantrum up in the Northern Continent.
An Incarnation who crosses the sea by swimming just to dodge checkpoints and magic barriers?
At that point, wouldn't she be stronger than my half-baked clone?
The nightmare clones would handle the rest on their own.
With that thought, I walked on, taking in the uproarious city like a tourist.
A lot of the architecture looked vaguely like cathedrals or palaces, huh.
If I had to place it, the city resembled the Russian cities I'd seen in travel variety shows back in my past life.
A cold continent, blonde beauties, cathedral-like buildings—was the Northern Continent just fantasy Russia?
Just like the Eastern Continent appeared to be a blend of Korea, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia,
maybe the Northern Continent was a mix of Russia and various other cultures, too.
I just didn't know those cultures well enough, so I was glossing over it.
Apparently spooked by a flock of pterosaurs a bit larger than a big dog,
the hot-dog cart vendor abandoned his cart and bolted.
I picked up a warm hot dog, suddenly ownerless,
savored its slightly unusual sauce, and headed for the tallest building.
The demonfolk was probably in there.
Screaming something along the lines of what the hell I was doing.