Chapter 137: Dreamland 2
Chapter 137: Dreamland 2
As I moved toward the city center, clusters of buildings resembling a rotund palace complex came into view.
I knew nothing about architecture or art, but they looked like things I had seen on TV or the internet.
People milled about between the quaint, pretty buildings.
Well, by now, it wasn't just people passing through.
Dragons flew outside the windows, and giants lumbered around.
Some office workers still couldn't let go of their paperwork, but most pedestrians were raising their cameras the moment they realized the creatures weren't dangerous.
Every so often, I even spotted women hanging from giants' ankles or riding on beasts' backs—whether drunk on alcohol, youth, or just the confidence of young Incarnations.
It reminded me of the bear country from my past life, where bears, bats, and vodka mingled together.
I walked on, letting scenes like that drift past the edge of my vision, until I arrived at a building.
"Hey! What is that?!"
A shrill cry greeted me.
Her screech welcomed me in—a high-strung, hysterical beauty in full form.
"You asked me to find it, didn't you?"
She snarled, baring her jagged fangs.
But her terrified emotions were so palpable—likely from sensing danger—that she came off as more pitiable and cute than scary.
'If I had to compare her to something, it'd be a chihuahua.'
And this was before I had even roused my magic power or used an Authority.
Her eyes couldn't fix on one spot, darting constantly to the sky, flinching at the mere shadow of a pterodactyl, a dragon, or a colossal pigeon.
Watching her neck retract into her shoulders every time a large shadow swept across the company lobby made her seem less like a chihuahua and more like a turtle.
Realizing what a state she was in, she quieted down the moment she heard my words.
"So, can you find it?"
"If they have memories of coming to this city?"
While the huge Nightmares drew everyone's attention, the smaller ones were diligently sorting through the people.
I found the small ones especially convenient to use because there were so many of them.
Some people were terrified of spiders as big as small buses or trucks, but others were more afraid of swarms of thumbnail-sized spiderlings.
Similarly, while some feared hordes of mice that could paint the ground pitch black, others were spooked by eerily massive flocks of birds.
With dragons and pterodactyls flying around, no one noticed the surging number of pigeons, and with fairies and goblins frolicking in the alleys, nobody went looking for mice.
Those tiny Nightmares acted as a sort of reconnaissance unit, scouring the city.
"Then, shall I extract some of that intel?" she asked.
The demonkin traced her sharp nails through the empty air.
As her fingers moved, a magic circle etched itself into the void.
As expected, demonkin are supposed to be skilled with magic.
It was a kind of prejudice I picked up from reading fantasy novels, but what could I do?
Even when fantasy became reality, elves were still elves and beastmen were still beastmen.
And it was entertaining to confirm that demonkin possessed exactly the kind of demonkin-ness I'd imagined.
I felt a strange sensation as she grabbed my wrist instead of the nape of my neck.
Following that came a hollow, bittersweet sense of loss.
I couldn't explain the theory behind it, but I could feel it instinctively, sensorily—the control over the Nightmares was being wrested away from me.
"That's a stupidly huge amount...."
"Well, it fills an entire city, doesn't it?"
To be honest, I was almost grateful she took over the control.
Just imagine how many people are in a single city.
And what if each person had more than one fear?
I could at least issue the command to find people with memories of this place, but processing millions of data points simultaneously was a whole different beast.
Why would I willingly go through that trouble?
'This is the way to go, just making her do the work.'
Her brows furrowed and climbed, and the magic circle spun and expanded at her fingertips.
We stood in the building lobby for several minutes like that, drawing so many stares it was starting to hurt.
Was a junkie Constellation really that famous, or was it because she was the CEO of this company?
"Are you going to just keep standing there?" I asked.
Hearing that, she retracted the magic circle.
The spinning formation in the air lost its light and fizzled out like a switched-off lightbulb.
Then she turned and started walking briskly to a specific spot.
Beyond that glass door would be the café situated on the building's first floor.
She plopped down at a table, waved her hand vaguely, and pressed hard on her glabella.
"...Thanks for the intel, anyway. There are quite a few people who've visited this city, so the investigation should be a bit easier."
"How are you going to find them?"
"I'm thinking of checking for people whose memories and records don't match. If the records show they came here but they have no memory of it, that person is either being used or cooperating. Conversely, if there's no record of their visit but they have the memory, that guy is the culprit."
She said this and immediately started crunching noisily on the ice from the iced coffee that had arrived.
She was investigating an entire city, which meant she was dealing with at least hundreds of thousands to millions of pieces of information.
Processing it all simultaneously probably felt like her brain was being cooked alive.
As if to prove my guess right, a tired voice came from behind me.
"I got the passport info from the municipal offices."
I turned around from browsing the menu to see another demonkin who looked exactly like her.
They were so identical that I instantly thought they were twins.
But they were too identical, and that's when it clicked—they weren't even twins.
What kind of twins share the exact same emotional and psychological state?
As I was thinking that, other voices cut in immediately.
"This looks like data on unregistered Incarnations. I explained the situation and forced them to hand over the files."
"I've also spoken with the investigation unit, so we can form a pursuit team right away."
As expected, they weren't twins but Clones.
Demonkin with pointed teeth and black-stained eyes appeared one by one, each carrying documents, USBs, and smartphones.
The café part-timer seemed so used to this sight that she didn't spare a single glance at the identical demonkin.
Instead, she just kept glancing at me—the blond pretty boy.
The demonkin's Clones each took their iced Americanos from her, crunched on the ice, and let out deep sighs.
"Even after weeding them out, we're still looking at nearly a hundred."
"So, what are we going to do with this?"
"What if we just round them up for now?"
"What about all the innocent people who'd get locked up?"
"Still, wouldn't paying reparations to civilians be better than making an enemy out of The Incinerating Tyrant?"
"That's true. I'd rather bow my head to innocent people than have a space battleship hovering over my head."
It was a meeting of five identical figures around a large table.
Their looks, voices, and speech patterns matched so perfectly that if I closed my eyes and listened, it felt like one person talking to herself.
As I sank into the plush chair and savored the coffee aroma, a sharp voice cut through.
"No, no matter how you look at it, aren't you being a little too relaxed?"
"What more can I do here?" I replied.
"Like it's someone else's problem...?"
The demonkin spoke with a mix of disapproval and incomprehension.
It was only then that I realized I was still in the form of a North Continent-style blond pretty boy.
I wondered why she was acting that way when, to me, anything The Incinerating Tyrant got involved with was indeed someone else's problem.
So I immediately wrapped the avatar in magic power and changed it back to my original appearance: a black-haired man with a decent build.
"It is someone else's problem, actually. I live in this city."
"No, that's not what I... ugh, forget it."
At a loss for words in the face of my childish rebuttal, the demonkin just gaped before gulping down her coffee.
It was a strange sight, watching five identical people—including the Clones—drink their coffee simultaneously.
Strictly speaking, I was a Constellation based in the Eastern Continent, now settled in this city.
Whatever happened in the Northern Continent, whatever The Incinerating Tyrant got up to, it didn't concern me.
Whether the Tyrant bulldozed a wasteland or burned a city to the ground, my job was simply to interrogate the criminal he would capture.
Thus, my task was to trace the magical link between Incarnation and Constellation, capture the Heart of the Exiled Serpent, and hand them over to The Incinerating Tyrant.
'Still, he's really something else.'
The Heart of the Exiled Serpent probably thought this was just a matter between Incarnations.
Honestly, his thinking wasn't illogical; I could fully understand it.
It was only natural that an Incarnation's business should be settled at the Incarnation's level.
For example, if a Samsung employee murders an LG employee, the chairman of Samsung isn't punished or made to apologize to the chairman of LG.
An employee is an employee, an Incarnation is an Incarnation—it has nothing to do with the Constellation.
Even if one got angry, the Incarnation would just be 'dealt with,' and that would be that.
Well, that was probably the kind of light touch he thought he was applying—
But his opponent wasn't a modern society; he was an emperor established by the divine right of kings and imperialism.
An emperor who ruled colony planets and was worshipped by humanity roaming the universe.
A Samsung employee committing murder wouldn't get the chairman punished.
But when a vassal commits a crime, the monarch certainly gets censured.
If he had understood why his opponent was called 'The Incinerating Tyrant,' he would never have laid a hand on him.
'Well, he got exiled into space because his thinking was that short-sighted, I suppose.'
Stupid bastards always exist.
And so do the people who profit from them.
I didn't know the exact reason, but The Incinerating Tyrant wanted me to grow.
Maybe because a Dream Demon, a Dream Walker, was a highly useful entity in his empire?
The knowledge he had passed down to me on multiple occasions had established me, a college student about to graduate, as a Dream Demon Constellation.
To be frank, there wasn't a single downside in it for me.
"Still, now that we've narrowed it down, it's under a hundred."
"This one's a bit suspicious. Does he have a reason to go to the airport?"
"I think I've filtered out a few from this batch, too."
So, I just wanted to wrap this up quickly, return to the Sanctum, and lounge around and relax with my Incarnations.