Chapter 169: Afterstory 1
Chapter 169: Afterstory 1
Heart of the Exiled Serpent pressed her forehead to the floor.
A full prostration, face flat against the ground.
Every Incarnation watching the bow went wide-eyed.
"Um—what is this?"
My Incarnations—Han Ye-ji, Lee Ha-rin, Kim Ha-eun, the rest of them—startled hard, obviously, and the blond Imperial Guardsman who had been with me jolted in surprise as well.
Well, yeah. One moment she was gone, supposedly absorbed into an Origin, and the next an entire Constellation is on the ground submitting. Anyone would be shocked.
A Constellation kowtowing in full view of all these watching eyes.
Curious stares swarmed in fast.
But explaining it person by person sounded like a pain in the ass.
"It's a delivery for The Incinerating Tyrant. Not a Constellation, but it's a Dream Walker, so it should serve."
"A delivery... you say?"
If I told them I had carved up and minced an Origin, kneaded it, eaten part of it myself, and used the rest as raw material to craft a Dream Demon the same way I had created the werewolf—who would even understand that?
Heart of the Exiled Serpent had been dismantled alive.
More precisely, her Origin had been dismantled.
What counted as torture, really?
You take the thing your target genuinely hates most and force them to endure it. That's torture.
Inside her Origin, limbs woven from magic power were torn off, and while she watched, those severed arms and legs were kneaded like dough and sculpted into a new version of herself. Heart of the Exiled Serpent had been made to witness it directly.
The Ship of Theseus drifted through my mind.
If you extracted an Origin, kneaded it with magic power, and built a new Dream Demon, was the thing that resulted still Heart of the Exiled Serpent? Or wasn't it?
'Doesn't look like it's Heart of the Exiled Serpent anymore, anyway.'
I had worried she might somehow take up residence in the new Dream Demon, but whether her mind had shattered completely or her broken Origin was to blame, she never possessed the new body.
Inside the Origin, all it did was follow orders like an android.
"So the issue is how we handle distributing the warehouse contents..."
That didn't mean every problem had been tidied away.
The continent was in chaos—I still had to quell the aftermath, didn't I?
The most talked-about topic was, naturally, splitting up my warehouse's contents.
Two people covertly turned their heads and locked eyes.
The Imperial Guardsman who had tried to grab the Dream Demon by the hair when I told him to take it, and Ellis, clutching snacks in both hands, savoring her newly human senses.
These two were, in my opinion, the single biggest contributors to the Constellation's capture.
The problem was how to divide the spoils.
"You two want to work it out between yourselves?"
If this were prize money, I would just slice it down the middle and hand it over. But the warehouse was crammed with random loot you could not put a price tag on. A steel sword hammered by dwarves, ornamental plant seeds from another world—how was I supposed to apportion that into clean ratios?
Normally I, as the Constellation handing this stuff out, should be the one to decide, but since it was a chore, I shoved it onto them.
The negotiation I had expected to drag on, however, ended cleanly thanks to the blond Imperial Guardsman's concession.
"No. What I will take—this is enough. All I did in the first place was secretly follow you, my Constellation."
He said it and promptly seized the blankly standing clone, tugging her along.
While I had been dealing with the Origin inside the unconscious mind, he must have worked off an enormous amount of stress, because he led the Dream Demon away wearing a beaming smile.
I had suspected The Incinerating Tyrant's interest in me arose because he needed a Dream Walker, so taking that thing off his hands should spare me future headaches.
Whether he conducted live experiments or tortured it, I did not care—I just hoped no more irritating business came my way.
'Honestly, does it make any sense to bomb a city just to catch one suspect?'
Better not to get tangled up with lunatics who operate outside common sense. Hadn't The Incinerating Tyrant already driven that lesson home painfully?
The blond Imperial Guardsman would finish his revenge and return to his post. The warehouse goods would be granted to Ellis, who had tracked the clone. The captured Incarnation would be handed over to the wizards as a test subject, just as planned. Then a tranquil daily life free of all annoyances would return.
※
A cozy room, charmingly furnished in warm brown wood.
The carpet and such were not the Eastern Continent-style inner chambers I was used to seeing. Of course they were not. The woman blushing pink-cheeked in front of me was not one of my three Incarnations—it was Ellis, in the human body she had possessed in her younger years.
"Are you really all right with this?"
"Y-yes, absolutely!"
Long brown curls that reached her shoulders. A light scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. I had not noticed when she was a liquid, but now that we were inside a lucid dream like this, I could see her features were quite lovely.
The reason she and I were here together in a lucid dream, in front of a bedroom bed no less, was simple. She had requested the prize I had put on the line last time.
"If it were not you, my Constellation, I do not know how many more years it would have taken...."
She had become an adult, but her body had stayed in that liquefied state. She could not feel sensation, let alone share sweet love with a partner. In that situation, I was the only one who could let her experience physical sensation again.
Ellis had been too embarrassed to say it directly, but translated plainly: she had reached adulthood and wanted to lose her virginity.
She had definitely talked around it and phrased it as indirectly as possible to me, a Constellation, though.
Maybe it was because she had recovered a human body, if only within a dream. Her blushing gaze flickered back and forth between my body and the mirror. A man's body was a curiosity, sure, but regaining her own physical form after so many years probably made her curious about herself as well.
I gave her a generous stretch of time, watching her at my leisure.
"Ah, um, I am sorry...."
She had been examining herself in the mirror, stroking her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, twisting and fiddling with her hair. Only when she caught sight of me lounging diagonally on the bed over her own shoulder in the reflection did she finally turn around.
The priestess who had gently closed her eyes and rained mercy upon the Western Continent was nowhere to be found. The person here was not the genius beloved by water—just a fresh-faced young woman who had secretly sent a message to the Dream Demon Constellation.
Naturally, I was not annoyed.
If anything, I was pleased; it felt like tranquil daily life had returned.
Eating my fill and lounging in warmth without a thought, spending joyful nights with my Incarnations and journeying through dreams—where could a Dream Demon find a more enjoyable life than this?
"Um, well then—"
"It's a dream. Do whatever you want."
A girl blushing with embarrassment. I could not call her as beautiful as my Incarnations, but she held onto that fresh, just-barely-an-adult charm. Her faintly trembling hand moved toward my chest.
Come to think of it, Han Ye-ji had done the same. Did women in this world all reach for a man's chest first? Had men in my previous life all reached for women's chests first too?
"Whoa, this is—"
And amid all that, focusing harder on unbuttoning my shirt than on my chest was kind of funny. Slender fingers fidgeted, undoing the shirt buttons one by one. Maybe the sensation of plastic meeting her fingertips felt wondrous. Her round eyes focused not on the skin being bared, but on the shirt gradually opening up.
'Why is my pride taking a hit here, of all places?'
Was it the Origin I had consumed earlier? My way of thinking appeared to be tilting a little further toward the Dream Demon side. I am not a bodybuilder working on my pectorals, and yet a woman ignoring my chest gave me an odd pang.
I shook off the pointless thought and looked at the girl before me.
What had it felt like to spend years without any sensation at all, that the texture of a dress-shirt button made her mouth gape open like that? Maybe it was because of my openly staring gaze. The fingers that had been fiddling with the button screwed up their courage.
"Wow, it is so firm...."
They prodded around my solar plexus, traced down over my abs, and descended straight below the waistline. Possessing even less sexual knowledge than my three Incarnations, she grabbed my equipment like she was snatching up some fascinating object.
If I had been a man in reality, would she not have gotten her ear cuffed immediately? It did not matter here, inside a dream. Scolding something like that would just wreck the mood.
So when her hands caught my waistband and tugged at my pants, I lifted my hips just slightly to help.
"You are not planning to just strip me and window-shop, are you?"
"Of course not."
Ellis forced a facade of calm with a trembling voice. She slowly shifted her body, straddling me, and aligned my shaft with the pale gap between her thighs, then lowered herself straight down—
"Aren't you rushing things a bit?"
I reached out and caught her before she could sink onto me.
"Um, did I do something wrong?"
Shoving it straight in without even a minimum of foreplay. That does not just hurt the woman—it hurts the man too. Did she have basically zero sexual knowledge? She should at least know about foreplay and natural lubrication.
No—her body had liquefied when she was in middle school. Had her libido vanished then as well? I was not in a situation where I could just lie back and lazily enjoy pleasure.
I subtly sat up. She glanced at me, reading my expression. So much for a sweet night. Looked like sex ed had to come first.
"Come here."
I caught Ellis's wrist while she hovered awkwardly, gauging my reaction. A girl with a small frame even among women, with slender wrists. Not bulky with muscle, but with a man's broad-shouldered build, her soft body was light enough to lift into my arms with ease.
"Have you ever masturbated?"
Here I was, holding a small woman in my arms and asking her something like that. I felt an odd pang, like I had turned into a sexual harasser. In reality, she had just become an adult—a college freshman. Mm, but framing it that way made me sound like some returning student creeping at orientation.
"N-no."
A staggering answer reached my ears. In a gender-reversed world, I had naturally assumed she would have tried it. But her body had liquefied around middle school—had her form been snatched away before she could awaken to sexuality? And in that state, sensation had returned, so now she was fixated on the sensations themselves?
I had nearly rammed straight into a woman who did not even know what pleasure was, with zero foreplay. Painful sex like that is not my thing at all.
"Really? Then I will have to teach you from the start."
Keeping her small body enclosed in my arms, I discreetly sent my fingers downward. The pubic hair, the same shade as her brown curls, rustled softly in a pleasant tangle against my fingertips.