Chapter 148: Snake's Resolve 1
Chapter 148: Snake's Resolve 1
The continent's finest talents were passionately selling themselves.
Lee Ha-rin leaned in beside me, murmuring explanations of who everyone was as I watched the scene unfold.
'That witch is renowned in the Western Continent for her work in barrier studies.'
'Ah, and that gentleman over there is an elder of a faction specializing in anatomy.'
'Hmm, I know of that wizard—necromantic forensics, focused on violent crime response.'
It all had a distinctly grim ring to it, but what could I do about it?
Once I listened more closely, every one of them had a perfectly sensible reason for being there.
Barrier specialists and elementalists aside,
the anatomy and necromancy experts
were essentially magical forensic investigators.
The problem was that because they were wizards who spent their time examining the dead,
I got the uneasy feeling a still-living criminal might end up dead too.
Why are people talking about autopsying a living person?
'Should I just cancel the interrogation?'
Was this some kind of professional deformation?
Even though their heavy-lidded eyes flashed and gleamed while they pitched themselves to me,
I felt just unsettled enough that I couldn't quite bring myself to say, forget I asked.
Their eyes weren't gleaming out of sheer enthusiasm.
Some bizarre battle of pride had broken out,
and magical power thrummed and droned, making their eyes literally glint with light.
If we weren't in front of a Constellation, or inside the Academy,
this overheated conference was just a collar-grab away from an actual brawl.
"Hey, is that... okay?"
"Hm? Is there a problem?"
A man in a flowing shawl was swinging a crystal orb the size of a bowling ball
as if he meant to crack it into the head of the suited woman beside him, who'd been sneering at him.
No one was openly grabbing collars yet,
but the wizards were just starting to scrap under the surface.
Lee Ha-rin, however, took it all in stride.
Was this normal everyday life for mages?
"No, forget it..."
"Then, what shall we do?"
"...I'll ask for someone who doesn't touch the body. No brain extraction, no autopsy—that sort of thing."
"Mm, that makes sense. The research into the magical connection matters more than barrier analysis anyway."
Maybe because magic was actively circulating,
our conversation was overheard even through that quiet bedlam, and faces cycled through joy and despair.
The one who brightened into a beaming smile was the wizard who could examine a subject without extracting the brain.
The ones whose faces fell were the necromancy witches clutching crystal skulls.
Realizing they hadn't been chosen, those wizards naturally filed out of the room.
Fewer than ten people remained in the conference room.
They eyed each other and then, one by one, tentatively introduced themselves.
Three gave me pause.
A witch who claimed she could use hypnosis to force the unconscious mind to spill its secrets aloud.
A male psychometrist who could read even the emotions and memories stored in the flesh.
And a woman who could produce a powerful truth serum through alchemy.
These three, compared to the others, seemed most likely to handle the criminal without breaking her.
"To force out the deepest truth from the innermost heart—that is the essence of hypnosis."
"What truth could possibly lie in the words that roll off the tongue? To probe the deepest unconscious spaces, the mind's furthest-hidden corners—that is our true calling."
"Should they encounter fools who believe their own lies, these two can't tell the difference. Might I suggest thoroughly steeping the subject in a drug that casts off every restraint imposed on the flesh?"
Still, only one was getting chosen.
Knowing that perfectly well, all three pitched themselves with burning fervor.
Were they really that curious how someone slipped through a barrier?
I honestly didn't know which to pick.
I'm a complete layman when it comes to magic.
Beyond "punch more magic power in and the spell goes off," I knew basically nothing.
So I casually turned my gaze toward Lee Ha-rin.
"Which one do you think is best?"
"Hmm, the alchemist would be the right choice, wouldn't she?"
Even Lee Ha-rin's soft little voice didn't go unnoticed—
the three mages and witches cycled through rapidly shifting expressions.
Still, presumably because we were before a Constellation, no one argued.
Somber-faced, the two who'd lost bowed their heads low;
the hypnotist and the psychometrist began packing up.
"Care to tell me why you picked the alchemist?"
"Because hypnosis and psychometry end up overlapping a great deal with a Dream Demon's own abilities."
At that, the three mages rolled their eyes as if it all now made perfect sense.
Hard to stand before a Dream Demon Constellation and claim you're greater than a Dream Demon.
And the Dream Demon race genuinely has its unfair advantages.
No matter how much a track athlete trains at sprinting,
they can't compete against a leopard or a cheetah.
Thinking about it, that was exactly right.
The deepest truths of the heart?
Once I got a little better at the mind-reading trick that works by looking into people's eyes, I'd probably be better at that.
Probe the unconscious spaces and explore the brain's hidden depths?
I could walk directly into a person's unconscious and touch the very root of their being.
That settled it: the assistant I needed here was the alchemist.
She'd be able to brew me something like the truth serum I had in mind.
Lee Ha-rin likely saw it the same way I did.
"And if a magical restriction has been placed on her," she added, "we'll need an alchemist's help to lift it."
"Right. They'd definitely have taken precautions."
I found myself nodding along at her next words without thinking.
Don't novel assassins always carry poison capsules in their back teeth?
Traitors who ally with black mages get slapped with a geas the moment they try to say the wrong thing.
Something like that would of course exist in this world too.
This was someone who'd openly picked a fight with the Incinerating Tyrant.
As if she wouldn't have placed at least one restriction on her own Incarnation.
Unlike the alchemist, who was smiling sunnily,
I turned away from the Tyrant's grim-faced personal guards as they filed out of the room.
Seemed I'd only fried my brain by sitting in on a meeting I couldn't follow.
I'd just leave the rest to her.
※
Honestly, I don't know much about what happened after that.
You could call it a bit irresponsible, but what can I do?
They didn't work magic with flashy zaps and whooshes like wizards in comics or novels—
there were dozens of mathematical graphs and specialized terms being thrown around that I didn't understand at all.
'I made the right call leaving it to Lee Ha-rin.'
Rather than wedge myself into that technical conversation, I'd rather be talking with Kim Ha-eun.
That thought in mind, I slipped quietly out of the alchemist's debate with the other mages.
Kim Ha-eun, who'd briefly appeared to help with Lee Ha-rin's fashion show,
had apparently finished her obligations in the real world and gone straight back to the dream city.
Was there something more interesting in there than robots popping out?
I'd assumed she'd duck out once she had nothing to do,
but she was lingering in the dream city a lot longer than I'd expected.
Back in my room, I stared at the glow-stone glinting in the cluttered corner of my room.
For a precious item, it sure looked like an unimpressive lump just rolling around,
but there was no place safer than beside the bed in a Constellation's Academy quarters.
I sent a pulse of magical power into the stone
and felt my mind get sucked somewhere,
exactly like walking through a gate with a key card.
What appeared before me was a forking path.
'The hell?'
I'd thought if I slipped in here, the dream city would just pop up.
I was as startled as opening a wardrobe and finding Narnia.
Anyone would be surprised, floating along as a semi-transparent ghost
staring at a pathway that glittered with golden light.
I knew instinctively that the right path would lead to the dream city.
So what about the left?
My Dream Demon instincts didn't warn me of danger.
But I couldn't even begin to guess what lay ahead.
And so, I headed left without a moment's hesitation.
If it wasn't dangerous, then satisfying my curiosity came first.
Applying the tricks I'd learned in dreams, I moved my body leftward—
not quite a Dream Demon, just bobbing along weightlessly like a ghost.
At the end of a path longer than expected sat a large wooden door.
Not "large" in the ten-meter-tall giant-monument sense—
it was a double door of antique make, with an ornate handle.
I placed my hand on the handle, which was etched with a dense, intricate relief pattern.
'An office?'
The first thing I saw was a massive desk.
A CEO's desk, you'd have to call it—a dark chestnut-brown wood desk loomed before me.
It was so absurdly large
that you could've fit not just one but probably two secretaries behind it.
The room had its fair share of other things, too.
A plush carpet stretched across the floor;
a guest table sat near the desk;
and on the wall hung a bookcase in the same wood tone as the desk.
If I had to sum up the whole effect, it was a CEO's office straight out of a TV drama—
the kind of place where the chairman in that enormous chair, face red,
leaps to his feet the moment the poor guy walks in carrying documents and screams his head off while throwing an ashtray at him.
That is—if I hadn't spotted that huge portrait.
'Isn't this embarrassing for her?'
On the vast wall across from the bookcase hung a single large portrait.
If not for that, I'd have just stood around confused about why I'd walked into a CEO's office
and then slipped right back out again.
'It's kind of... oppressively big.'
What kind of self-portrait is bigger than I am?
My height's hovering around 190 centimeters,
which meant that portrait must have been an absurd 2 meters by 2 meters at minimum.
Sharp, piercing eyes, lips drawn in a slightly crooked smile—
a woman who looked like a villainess from a drama.
And a face I'd been thoroughly sick of seeing before I ever set foot in this place.
The subject of the portrait—and the owner of this office—was the Heart of the Exiled Serpent.
How had I ended up in here?
No, before that—why the hell was this stone connected to that bastard's Sanctum?