Chapter 146: Twisted Love 4
Chapter 146: Twisted Love 4
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Just like a snowball rolling downhill, gathering mass until it becomes an avalanche—money, they said, begets money. Since this world's culture and language were so similar to mine, it surely had its own version of that proverb. I found myself thinking about it because magical power operated on much the same principle.
'My mana's compounding like interest.'
Ever since I confiscated Kim Ha-eun's stockpile, my mana regeneration had kicked into overdrive. I had no reason to sabotage my Incarnation's future, so I hadn't touched any of her mana-related talents—I'd only taken the reserves she'd secretly amassed. But where before I'd been working with a fist-sized lump of power, teasing it out thread by thread, now it felt like I had a fully loaded tanker truck at my back. My recovery speed, my control, my finesse with it—everything had increased exponentially.
'Is it because it's Dream Demon mana? Or is that stone to blame?'
That magic-crystal-like thing housing an entire dream city was the most likely culprit. As someone who could use mana to pull all kinds of tricks, I wasn't about to complain. I could reach into my dream-self and pull out more than just creatures now—ordinary supplies, even snacks.
— Violet Moon Fragment Brooch - Link [1,200,000 pt]
So I bought another one from the shop. The pendant I'd purchased before shared stamina. This time, I picked a brooch that would let my Incarnations tap into my overflowing mana reserves—between that and the pendant I'd already bought, they'd now have access to both the inexhaustible stamina of my dream-self and the dream city's colossal magical reserves. The stamina had served Han Ye-ji well out in the field; the mana would do the same for Lee Ha-rin and her relentless experiments. The scene unfolding before my eyes made that obvious enough.
"What is that?"
"Hm, a dream-probing tool, I suppose you could call it?"
A helmet was clamped onto the head of a murderer tied to a chair—a visor resembling VR goggles and a shell like a bicycle helmet, fixed over his crown and eyes, crackling with ominous current. They knew Dream Demons existed as a species, so it made sense that their science had branched in this direction. The tech couldn't let them reach into the unconscious mind and control it directly, but it could at least let them read what a person was thinking.
"It was originally a psychological testing tool for treating mental illness. But then I tweaked the output a little to adapt it for criminal applications, and, heheh."
Lee Ha-rin gave a sheepish little laugh, while the magic-officer instructor beside her helped operate the equipment with a perfectly blank expression. The woman wore her usual kindly, benevolent face, but her hands moved with a brisk, clinical efficiency. She looked like a grandmother who'd welcome her grandchildren with a warm chuckle—and she was using that same appearance to fry a criminal's brain.
'No physical pain involved, so I guess it's fine...?'
Outwardly, it looked like something out of a nightmare—a grotesque human experiment—but in practice it was just a machine that induced sleep. However much the device resembled an execution chair spitting sparks, the man strapped into it was merely unconscious, sedated. The only catch: his unconscious mind and his dreams were being broadcast to an audience without his consent. But then, when you're investigating a murderer, does it really matter if the investigators get a peek at his personal data? If I had to split hairs, I could call it a Nightmare-induction apparatus that forcibly resurrected unpleasant memories—from a human-rights standpoint, it was arguably unobjectionable. The locals certainly seemed to think so. Some of them, in fact, looked dissatisfied that it was too merciful.
I spotted a familiar head of blond hair among the guards—a striking man I knew.
"You are...?"
"His Majesty granted permission for me to be assigned to the prisoner's surveillance detail, Constellation."
The blond man dipped his head in a bow. His obsession with his younger sister appeared to have crossed well past the bounds of reason, but saying anything to a grieving family member only months after the death—that was tricky ground.
'What a circus.'
A criminal strapped into a chair with a VR-goggle contraption on his head. Mages clustered around him, running tests. Royal guards staring fixedly at the man's fingers, lounging as he was in his seat. And behind all of them, the man's memories splashed across a giant screen—a grainy, black-and-white film reel of a wretched life. Watching it began to scramble my head, so I slipped quietly out of the room.
I'd been rotating my attention between Kim Ha-eun and Han Ye-ji, meaning it was about time I looked in on Lee Ha-rin. But she was so busy—and so plainly enjoying herself—that I decided I'd come back in the evening.
※
I swung by the Loyal Fang encampment, knocked back a drink, confirmed that the white-furred werewolf was happily bounding across the grasslands, and before I knew it the afternoon had bled away into evening. I'd muttered something about dogs having the easiest life imaginable, and the man had let out a booming laugh, saying he wouldn't exactly call it an insult. Whenever he got hungry, he tore into meat. Whenever he got thirsty, he drank. Whenever his muscles itched for a run, he sprinted beneath the full moon across open plains—and then, without missing a beat, tumbled into the grass with the white she-wolf who'd become his wife. Truly, the man lived on pure instinct. I was still mulling that over when Lee Ha-rin burst into the quarters, fresh from the guards' inspection.
"Constellation!"
She was beaming like a child who'd found a gift inside a Christmas stocking. Her usual demure composure had vanished, replaced by this buoyant, giddy excitement—the difference was plain in her voice alone, pitched noticeably higher than her normal soft-spoken cadence.
"Yes, what is it?"
"So—"
She was so beside herself with delight that her hands fluttered as she talked, like a kid showing off her first-ever trophy to her parents. I knew next to nothing about the theory behind her magic, and I felt a pang of guilt just nodding along as if I understood. Still, I kept patting the back of her hand and her shoulder—good job, well done—and that alone was enough to make her face flush bright pink. Not out of arousal or bashfulness, but sheer joy, her cheeks glowing and her eyes sparkling. The contrast with her usual demeanor only made her look more endearing. Then again, considering her age, maybe "young" was just the right word. All three of my Incarnations were in their early twenties—young women who, in this gender-flipped world's terms, hadn't even done their mandatory military service yet. Unless Lee Ha-rin's time at the officer academy, training to become an Incarnation, counted as active duty.
"—so I think the research will progress much faster than expected!"
Was it her otaku streak? Even when I could only manage the vaguest responses—'Mm,' 'I see,' 'Good job'—my obvious cluelessness written all over my face, she kept chattering away purely because I was responding at all. The gist of it was this: my mana support had yielded major results. Once the long, long boast finally wound down, she grabbed the cold tea from the sofa table and gulped it down, parched. I noticed then that even in the middle of rushing in, practically vibrating with excitement, she'd still had the presence of mind to bring in tea and snacks for me.
I watched her catch her breath over the cold tea and decided to roll out the exact same script I'd used with Han Ye-ji. I wasn't some professional Casanova—no point polishing my lines.
"So. Is there something you'd like as a reward?"
I sat close, stroking her hand, and murmured the question. That one line was usually enough to make her melt.
But Lee Ha-rin's reaction landed nowhere near what I expected.
"A... a reward?"
The words tripped on her tongue—not from shyness, but confusion. She was happy to be pressed against my side, but the offer of a reward had genuinely startled her. She'd produced results on a task I'd assigned and accelerated the timeline. I was offering compensation to match the achievement—whether in points or in a more intimate form of recompense. She'd done plenty of lewd things under a Dream Demon Constellation by now. Why did the word "reward" throw her at this stage?
"?"
"...?"
Her round, uncomprehending eyes turned toward me. Looking into them, I felt the impulse—it had been a while—to read her thoughts. Something small but important had gone askew here, I could feel it. I needed to see what was running through her head.
Our gazes locked, and I pushed a thread of mana outward.
'What did I do to deserve a reward?'
Her heart, laid bare, was puzzling over the question in genuine bewilderment. The purity of that confusion left me speechless. She was being offered a prize and couldn't figure out why. Hadn't she just said, with her own lips, that her research had borne fruit? That she'd finish the task I gave her ahead of schedule?
I'd assigned her a job; she'd exceeded expectations. Praise was the natural outcome. That was how things worked.
'Ah. I see. For her, doing what I tell her is so utterly a given that she can't process the idea of a reward.'
Lee Ha-rin's mental framework was built a little differently.
That a Constellation would assign a task to an Incarnation—that was to be expected. That the Incarnation would pour her full strength into accomplishing it—expected. That she might deliver results beyond what was forecast—also expected. And that her Constellation, having contributed to that success himself, would then offer her a prize—the notion left her happy but flustered. It felt like being overpraised for nothing. A child who brings home a perfect score on a test expects praise. But a child who simply walks to school in the morning with her mother, and is then told, "You walked to school with Mommy! Amazing! I'm buying you a game console!"—that child is naturally going to stare back, baffled, with no idea what just happened.
I was still trying to work out how to handle this when Lee Ha-rin, having sorted through her confusion with visible effort, finally spoke.
"In that case, if you are offering a reward... may I make a request?"
Her face was flushed with anticipation as she looked at me. There was a saying—all roads lead to Rome, or however they put it here. If this was where we'd landed, it didn't really matter how we'd gotten here.
"Of course. Ask me anything."
Her eyes glittered.
...
......
Given that Lee Ha-rin was an unrepentant Constellation otaku, and that this world was overflowing with its own subculture, I probably should have known better than to say "anything." Tell a girl who hangs on her Constellation's every word that she can ask for anything—and she'll take you at your word, stripping it down to the bone.