Chapter 2: The First Contract
Chapter 2: The First Contract
I woke from a long, deep sleep to find the world on my screen cloaked in pitch-black night.
That didn't mean darkness had truly fallen.
The city blazed with brilliant lights, and people still hurried through its streets.
The sight of so many bodies walking a main thoroughfare without a care was so alien to me I could only stare blankly.
I know everyone carries their own private worries. But that thought was immediately followed by another.
At the very least, those people don't have to fret about a Scavenger or a Creature ambushing them from behind, burying a blade in their spine or tearing out their throat.
Monsters popping out of thin air didn't seem to be an everyday disaster, either.
Screams rang out here and there, but the streets never plunged into sheer pandemonium.
Citizens flinched at the sight of a monster, then simply went about their business.
Though when I panned the view, another kind of ugly scene showed itself with quiet regularity: human crime.
Men rifling through a drunk's pockets, schoolgirls in an alley slapping around a classmate and yanking away her wallet.
Then there were certain districts swathed in black fog, completely hidden from view.
"And what in the world is that?"
Click-click. I jabbed at it with the cursor, only for a notice to pop up: not observable with basic functions.
The Guide said there were others like me—other beings, I mean—so maybe they'd spent points to cover those areas?
Seeing as the fog-shrouded spots were mainly motel districts or private residences, it was probably something contracted Incarnations did to shield their personal lives.
That aside, I was curious how the contract itself even worked, so I bought the 0pt contract form.
"So I just... click it?"
The moment I bought the contract, every person I clicked inside the screen started triggering a prompt asking if I wanted to initiate a contract.
So that's it. Nothing fancy, then.
For now, let's do a little observing.
※
A cheap mattress, frozen fried rice, canned drinks. That was the sum of my new existence, and yet to me it felt more abundant than anything I'd ever known.
Being stuck indoors bothered me exactly zero percent. At the very least, the place was twice as spacious and comfortable as the underground cellar I used to hide in.
So I wasn't about to splurge on whiskey and wine that ran over 3,000 points a bottle, or dump tens of thousands of points into expanding my room.
The shop list was crammed with luxury furniture, designer outfits, and decorative knick-knacks worthy of the name "luxury goods"—
all of them tagged with eye-watering price tags.
The base monthly point income was 1,000pt.
If I bought and lived off hamburgers, pizza, and other sub-10-point food, I'd have points left over even if I binged every single day.
But anything the slightest bit more extravagant came with a price that jumped by factors of ten.
Swords and armor were especially egregious. A mass-produced steel sword started at 1,000 points and then rocketed straight up into the hundreds of thousands.
So this is how it works: build them from the very bottom.
I managed to pick up a fair amount of information just by studying the world beyond my screen.
Beings like me were called Constellations, and the people chosen by us through the screen were known as Incarnations.
That donut-shaped landmass was like a game map: the farther outward you went, the deadlier it became.
In the lake at the continent's center sat a single island, and chosen Incarnations were hauled off there for training before being dispatched all over the world.
It didn't seem like many Constellations started out raking in points from day one.
On the flip side, the ones who already commanded multiple Incarnations must have been flush with points—occasionally you'd spot one providing heavy support right out of the gate.
But mostly, their Incarnations didn't get a single item; they just got dragged off to the continent's center.
Even talking to an Incarnation cost points, so
a broke Constellation like me was effectively nothing more than their Incarnation's navigation system.
Well, just as the Guide had told me,
most of the contract-eligible types apparently really were the souls of geniuses whose talents never bloomed—they mostly figured out their first fights on the fly without breaking a sweat.
'Who do I pick?'
If I had my way, I'd just laze around here, squirrel away the monthly 1,000pt, and only then get started.
But as if to declare that such tricks wouldn't be tolerated, the free contract ticket had a purchase window and an expiration date of exactly one month.
Buying one with actual points cost a hundred thousand. That's a hundred months flushed down the drain.
Even so, this contractor would be remembered as the very first of my new life. I didn't want to pick at random.
I gravitated toward a more familiar look and kept scanning the continent's eastern side, but it was as if I'd developed choice paralysis—picking was agonizing.
Not because nobody caught my eye.
If anything, they all looked similarly impressive, and the sheer number of choices had me paralyzed by an embarrassment of riches.
First, I filtered for women—the ones accustomed to combat, the ones who, by this world's logic, would more readily follow a Constellation's orders and march onto battlefields.
On top of that, they'd need combat training, so I cut out anyone too young or too old and focused on late teens to mid-twenties.
I obviously weeded out obesity, being underweight, physical disabilities, poor eyesight—any minor flaw got them excluded.
Even with all that, the pool was still enormous, so I applied my own thoroughly selfish taste and narrowed it down to nothing but beautiful women—
and somehow, in this godforsaken world, even after being that ruthlessly picky, my cursor-highlighted candidates still numbered over a thousand.
With most souls apparently belonging to chosen geniuses, the ratio of stunning men and women was outright absurd.
I was supposed to painstakingly settle on a single person, but they all looked so extraordinary it was giving me a headache.
With this level of filtering, there was probably no dud in the bunch. My eyes were getting too tired from staring at the monitor anyway, and I was just starting to mull over the idea of picking one at random—
when someone caught my eye, scuttling through the neighborhood where my cursor rested.
The way she bolted out of a worn-down apartment building was utterly unremarkable, but my gaze kept snagging on her anyway.
She wasn't more strikingly attractive than the others, but I couldn't look away.
I kept observing her as if I were watching a documentary, and I soon got a rough idea of why she'd held my attention.
Because she looked so much like a comrade from before I'd locked myself away in that underground closet.
There'd been a guy who lost both his parents and joined our survivor band with his little sister's hand clutched tight in his.
A guy who'd rummage through books fit for nothing but kindling and read whatever torn scraps of a novel he could find to kill time.
Whether it was a psychological defense mechanism or genuine optimism, he'd insist that all true novel protagonists had a sickly little sister to push them through their trials—
and even in an apocalypse world hurtling toward annihilation, he'd doted on his sister with absurd devotion.
In the end, his sister, already frail, died from contaminated water.
Even as he watched his own body slowly mutate, the guy kept forcing a smile and shooting his mouth off about becoming humanity's first Creature to hold onto its humanity,
doing everything he could to boost morale.
A futile effort.
Eventually, the siblings who'd been the glue holding our community together died senselessly, and when the group collapsed, I slipped out alone.
A man and a woman, a survivor of a ruined world and an ordinary high school girl.
The only thing they had in common was living alone with one frail sibling,
but the more I looked down at her, the more that guy surfaced in my mind.
The smile of a man whose name I couldn't even remember anymore.
A contractor in difficult circumstances would fight more desperately and treat me with utmost devotion.
And she's my first Incarnation—I ought to follow my gut on this one.
Hiding behind an excuse that bordered on self-rationalization, I selected her.
[Initiating first contract. Probing Origin of the Constellation.]
[Constellation, Lethargic Nightmare, presents the contract to you.]
Lethargic Nightmare. So that was supposed to be my name?
At the same instant, the point shop list unfurled in a rush, splashing a blinding wave of N markers across the screen.
"Ah—a c-contract!"
That last line must have been visible not just to me but to the woman on the screen too,
because the one scanning barcodes at the convenience store jolted in shock and dropped her merchandise.
A can of coffee clattered across the floor, but the customer didn't look the slightest bit annoyed.
"Seriously? Whoa! You're getting contacted by a Constellation right now?"
"Y-yes? I mean, there's some kind of message floating in front of me..."
"What's the Constellation's name?"
The two customers inside the store and the one at the counter all forgot they were even shopping.
Instead, they started gabbing away, making a huge fuss.
More importantly—Lethargic Nightmare?
'Lethargic' because I never actively stood and fought against the apocalypse.
'Nightmare' because I spent most of my hours asleep to conserve energy.
Felt like the title was taking a personal shot at me...
While the three of them chattered and frantically searched things on their phones, I read through the information about Constantine names that had popped up on my display.
The system didn't have a search function, but apparently it'd occasionally serve you up tidbits of info like this.
A knight who'd fought monsters to her last breath in a fantasy kingdom received the name "Eternal Light,"
and a scientist who'd researched the virus that annihilated humanity right up until her death was given "Unfaltering Explorer."
A whole slew of other examples scrolled by, though almost none of them described the Constellations directly.
'Is the rule that they have to use metaphorical expressions?'
One peculiar thing stuck out: just like the Incarnations, the gender roles for most Constellations were flipped from what I'd consider the norm.
I mean, the last prince of a fallen kingdom had been saddled with a name like "The Unfading Flower."
"Uh, Lethargic Nightmare... no search results. Your first Incarnation, huh? That's not bad at all, you know."
"You think so?"
"Yeah, definitely. Unless you get some ultra-famous Constellation with crazy heavy support, it's actually better to start fresh together. If you're, like, a middling 4th or 10th Incarnation, the support isn't huge, and the attention's all split up anyway. You know the saying—better an only one than a best one."
So there's a whole database on Constellations, huh? And people actually say stuff like that? I looked down at them,
taking in the oddball scene: a convenience store part-timer, an office worker with deep dark circles, and a delinquent guy in a cropped school uniform, all huddled together.
"Oh right, hurry up and accept it already. You're not crazy enough to refuse, are you?"
The three must have known each other. When the male student smacked her on the back, she made a pained face but still flailed her fingers in the air.
At least I had a mouse. She had to poke at letters floating in thin air with her bare hands—no wonder she looked awkward.
[The contract between Constellation, Lethargic Nightmare, and Incarnation, Han Ye-ji, has been established.]
As the text materialized on the screen, Han Ye-ji's body wrapped itself in light on the other side.
"Whoa, insane, insane. I'm actually watching this happen right in front of me."
Setting aside the dramatic reactions, I went back to scanning the shop list.
The N obviously stood for New. A whole mess of things I'd never seen before had sprouted up in fine print.
What really jumped out was a line about Constellation Authorities.
So it's not just about shipping items to my Incarnation—I could spend my points to exert direct influence.
Which explained the price tag. They were a solid digit more expensive than even the flashiest-sounding weapons.
"Thank you, Constellation! I'll work hard!"
The sight of her bowing her head deeply into empty air pulled a genuine laugh out of me.
A hint of superiority stirred in my chest at the image of her practically offering up her liver and gallbladder to me,
and alongside it, a flutter of anticipation at the thought of finally talking to a normal person who laughed and chattered.
Blink, blink. A chat input window materialized beneath the computer monitor that had previously displayed nothing but the point shop list.
So this was how I'd communicate with an Incarnation?
Well, it was a relief I didn't have to speak directly into a microphone.
I'd done nothing but talk to myself for over a decade—using my actual voice with another person would feel unbearably awkward.
I couldn't find the right words, so I just typed "I'll be counting on you" and pressed enter.
So that's why there was a keyboard along with the mouse.
[Constellation, Lethargic Nightmare, greets his first Incarnation.]
What the hell? They're filtering even a message this short?
Is this seriously why direct communication costs points?