Chapter 166: Rain Shower 1
Chapter 166: Rain Shower 1
The world holds geniuses who defy common sense.
In my previous life, I used to see stories online about geniuses like John von Neumann—
supposedly mastering calculus at age nine.
I was still busy memorizing the alphabet at nine years old.
A child beginning to learn their letters and a child mastering calculus and digging into number theory.
A gap so wide it makes no sense on paper, yet every world has at least one such genius.
And a world where only those geniuses are gathered together.
I had been taking this world far too lightly.
'What is this.'
I shifted the Sanctum's screen a little, and instead of watching my Incarnations and Ellis at the Academy,
I zoomed the view farther and farther out until I was looking down at the Western Continent from the sky.
Rain had been falling over the Western Continent for four straight days.
"Hmm, not yet."
It wasn't the heavy seasonal monsoon with fat droplets hammering down one after another.
It was a fine drizzle, drifting down as softly as mist from a spray bottle.
This wasn't the Western Continent's natural rainy season arriving on its own.
Ellis was making it rain—only over the cities of the Western Continent.
"You're monitoring the whole Western Continent?"
"The entire continent is still too much, so I only cast it over the capital region where the entertainment districts are clustered and the major cities. I didn't conjure it from nothing—I pulled forward and stimulated rain clouds that were already meant to release later."
Ellis was talking with my Incarnations.
Maybe it was because I'd already started thinking of her as an Incarnation who'd be a huge help to me,
or maybe it was watching her cling to her family and sob her heart out—
but they were looking after Ellis like a younger sister, though she was only a little younger than them.
She'd graduated from the Academy early, around middle-school age.
From her middle-school years all the way until now, when she'd just turned an adult,
had she really been living with all her senses shut off?
Now it made sense why she'd cried in her parents' arms like that.
A talent for manipulating water magic and an adult-like composure were two separate realms entirely.
"Major cities? Wow, incredible."
Han Ye-ji, whose aptitude lay in sniping rather than magic, was watching in fascination,
but Lee Ha-rin, talented in ritual magic, and Kim Ha-eun, gifted with magic sensitivity,
stared at Ellis with blank incomprehension.
She might say, "I only stimulated the rain clouds~"
but the spot they were occupying right now was the Academy.
From the center of the world, she'd stimulated the Western Continent's rain clouds with her magic?
Even Constellations' Authorities probably didn't reach that kind of range.
At the same time, a touch of relief crept in.
Lee Ha-rin had worried that if some nobody managed to catch the target,
it could become a problem for The Incinerating Tyrant's reputation.
I hadn't fully grasped that at first, but once she explained it, I understood.
The target was a wanted criminal The Incinerating Tyrant himself had given the order to capture.
I was in the middle of it too, but my name carried next to no weight, so let's skip that part.
Nobody was going to post malicious comments directly or openly run their mouth,
but in the end, ordinary citizens could still think things like:
If some rural guild nobody—John Smith, age 38, never been touched—could nab her,
then why had The Incinerating Tyrant kicked up all this fuss instead of just catching her himself?
If some random guild auntie from the sticks could grab her, why all the noise?
But with Ellis stepping in, the story changed.
The girl who calls rain upon the Western Continent.
That was the caliber required to pull this off.
If she failed to catch the target, it'd turn into an embarrassing farce, but—
"Ah, I think I've found her?"
"Already?"
"It's not teleportation, but there's a woman who simply appeared—no magical reaction at all."
Apparently I hadn't been counting my chickens before they hatched.
On the screen, the girl beloved by water smiled, a sly curve on her lips.
She'd brought the rain down with her water magic,
and now she was reading every trace of magical power within those raindrops.
Just as I'd thought—a talent that defied all common sense.
※
A frail drizzle too fine to even dampen the hem of a skirt.
Inside the misty moisture that left skin dewy,
people burning through their youth moved in a loud, restless clamor.
Men in short shorts bounced their hips to the music,
and women draped in chains over ripped jeans swallowed hard, throats bobbing.
No prey in sight—only predators gathered, their eyes brimming with desire as they hunted in earnest for a partner.
'This place makes my head spin.'
The emotions tied to lust were so thick in the air
the atmosphere itself felt sticky, clinging inside my nostrils.
That was just the nature of this kind of place—nothing to be done about it.
A small city on the Western Continent where clubs and brothels clustered together.
In fact, just a few blocks past the red-light district, the slums began.
I could spot people who might be narcotics-dazed or dead drunk,
but to eyes drunk on lust, the bright lights of the clubs would show clearer than any dark alley.
The reason men flocked here in droves was simple.
The clubs themselves stood under a Constellation's patronage.
Something about an "unquenchable thirst," was it?
An entertainment district where seduction flourished in the Constellation's name but rape did not exist.
Men yearning for a taste of deviance came out of curiosity, drawn by its safety,
and women hungry for men were naturally pulled in as well.
Yeah, women.
'Is this bitch really—should I call it consistency?'
The rain was so fine it felt closer to mist than drizzle.
That damp sensation made the figure sweep a hand across her forehead,
brushing aside her bangs and baring her face at the same time.
Not the elf, not the muscular man—the idol-pretty avatar I'd prepared the time before.
Through the flashing lights and the pounding music, gazes swiveled toward her.
Lust and jealousy, crushed self-worth or contempt, slander and heat.
And cutting through it all with absolute clarity—a scorching stare.
'How does a Dream Demon not recognize another Dream Demon?'
The gaze belonged to Heart of the Exiled Serpent.
A man in beige shorts and a loose tank top stood beside her,
but he looked like some guy she'd snared halfheartedly with hypnosis—one wave of her hand and he melted back into the crowd.
Then she adjusted her clothes and strode right over to me, didn't she?
'Is this fucker trying to seduce me right now...?'
I'd come here imagining something out of an action movie—
a chase kicking off in a loud, chaotic nightlife strip
and spilling into the dark, silent back alleys of the slums.
Or, at worst, I'd figured the moment our eyes met she'd panic like last time,
piss herself in fright, and ditch the avatar immediately.
I had not expected her to try to put the moves on me.
Sure, among the men around here she was the best-looking and most fit,
but was the normal reaction to a sudden handsome face really spreading your legs at first sight?
'Then again, if she were normal, she wouldn't have touched The Incinerating Tyrant's reserve guard in the first place.'
A woman ruled by desire, acting on pure one-dimensional impulse.
Heart of the Exiled Serpent grinned at me.
"Hey there, young master. I don't recognize your face—here to play?"
The opposite of "young lady" must be "young master," then.
A face she didn't recognize—was she roleplaying some dead-eyed regular?
She'd come to a club to play, not to work, obviously.
Maybe because every word out of her mouth filled me with irritation,
she'd barely opened it once and I already wanted to snap.
All this chaos over one worthless scumbag like this.
And at the same time, I felt the alien magical power seeping from her.
Making conversation, was she? While lacing a man with Dream Demon magic.
A normal man would probably start feeling like he was dreaming from this moment on.
The club he'd visited for a brief escape,
where he meets the princess out of his dreams, falls into a blazing romance, shares a hot, romantic night—
that kind of story.
When he woke from the dream, there'd be no trace of the woman left,
and he'd go on with his life vaguely wondering if someone spiked his drink.
"Quiet. Follow me."
If I weren't a Dream Demon, she'd have enjoyed herself again tonight.
The arm snaking around my thigh was practiced to the point of expertise.
Filthy fingers creeping little by little along my waist and hips.
Hard to guess how many men she'd groped like this before.
'But seriously—she still doesn't recognize me even at this distance?'
Whether it was the gap in knowledge The Incinerating Tyrant had given me,
or the difference in how we'd each absorbed our Origin as Dream Demons,
even with her arm wrapped around my waist and her chest pressed against me,
Heart of the Exiled Serpent still hadn't caught on to who I was.
Looking at her, I thought of a cloaking unit from an old Korean folk-game.
A cloaking unit that turned everything into hell if you lacked detection,
but the moment a detector popped up, the thing turned pathetic and fell apart fast.
She must've been coasting along, convinced her magic was absolute.
If I lost her this time, would she burrow deep into a Sanctum and never come out?
"Yeees~"
"Good, that's a good boy."
I let myself be drawn into her arms while my mind wandered.
Since we were about the same height, it was less being held and more being locked arm-in-arm,
but she didn't care, strolling slowly while basking in the jealous stares from the women around us.
And all the while, her hands never stopped groping at my body.
I'd said it as a joke once,
but the situation really was no different from the protagonist of some hypnosis-porn doujinshi.
Not that I felt any disgust.
If she'd been some ugly hag with rolls of fat, maybe,
but she'd used cutting-edge tech to make sure her looks were sharply maintained.
You could argue taste over the cold, mean slant of her eyes, but a beauty was a beauty.
Besides, I had a reason for playing along with this absurd scenario.
'I need to store up her magical power, thoroughly.'
This bitch was leaking magic everywhere trying to hypnotize me.
If I shaped it into a container with my own power—just like I'd done with Ellis's Origin—
and absorbed it properly, it could prove useful down the line.
Research it to develop a sealing method,
maybe enable a one-way intrusion into her Sanctum,
or find a way to end a Constellation's existence entirely.
I could put it to work as research material.
'Three days ago the Northern Continent, two days ago the Eastern Continent, yesterday the Southern Continent, today the Western Continent. This bitch moves like a second hand on a clock.'
Ellis making it rain for four days straight was impressive in its own right,
but this piece of trash running an intercontinental pussy tour and landing on the Western Continent today was impressive too.