Chapter 20: Consumption
Chapter 20: Consumption
I woke up with a foul aftertaste clinging to my mouth and rummaged through the fridge.
What my hand landed on, of all things, was a can of watermelon-flavored fizzy stuff.
Not my first choice, but my tongue was so bone-dry I would have welcomed a mouthful of sand. I cracked it open.
Belching from the carbonation that stung my throat, I dropped into the chair in front of the computer monitor.
The TV screen next to it showed Han Ye-ji finishing her morning jog and settling into breakfast.
She didn't look run-down, and the training grounds were churning along as normally as they had the day before.
So what the hell was that dream?
A heavy, suffocating frustration welled up and gnawed at my chest.
Why had the tail end of a lucid dream warped into a nightmare like that?
Was it something Han Ye-ji had genuinely lived through in middle school, or was it just a dream—your garden-variety nonsense nightmare?
Was there even a difference between a nightmare that carried a fragment and a nightmare that didn't?
The curiosity had no outlet, and it left me teetering.
Dream demon. Incubus.
Back in my own world, he was a fictional demon dreamed up by young men and women who couldn't keep it in their pants,
had sex anyway, and needed someone to blame while preserving the cover of their piety.
Break the speed limit before the wedding, toss out "a devil-spawn made me do it,"
and the poor bastard gets saddled with a rapist's reputation just to shield the young couple's future.
Put that way, humans really are garbage.
Anyway, that is the sum total of what I know about incubi.
For the female version, succubi, I have got the usual internet-grade trivia—
that they pop up a lot in adult comics, or that they are hot in dreams but in reality they are some kind of tentacle monster.
Exactly the sort of thing you pick up scrolling online.
And even those memories date to before the world ended, so they have probably warped.
On top of that, I am no expert on dreams.
Before the collapse, I had just finished my military service and was helping my father with his work before I was supposed to head back to university.
After the collapse... well, anyone who sat around nattering on about dreams was usually the first to starve to death.
So, however grand a title "Constellation" might sound, right now it did not come with anything practically useful.
The only knowledge I owned was things like exactly how hard you had to fracture a mutated creature's skull to properly kill it,
or that stabbing someone often meant the blade would not come back out, so you needed to carry extras. That was it.
How exactly was I supposed to provide psychological counseling to an eighteen-year-old high school girl with that?
Counsel her about dreams and the unconscious, no less—with what tools?
That gnawing worry sent me spiraling into another round of it.
I had managed to dig three items out of the shop list in front of me.
It was maddening, scouring a list with no sorting, no search function.
At first the items had at least been arranged by price, but as the list grew, everything got jumbled to hell and gone.
Which was why one of the purchases I was agonizing over was the basic function update.
This godforsaken interface provided the absolute bare minimum of descriptions for anything.
Take the Dream Elixir, for instance—the consumable I had been about to buy:
All it said was that upon ingestion, physical changes experienced in a dream would be "faintly applied" to the waking body.
I had been planning to buy it to help with Han Ye-ji's physical conditioning, but I had backed off...
because what if the physical changes that happened in a dream were the wrong kind of changes?
For example, in yesterday's nightmare, Han Ye-ji had been a prepubescent middle-school kid, just shy of 140 centimeters.
If I had fed her that elixir, could she have shrunk and lost all the conditioning she had built, regressing to her middle-school self?
The basic function update claimed that once bought, I would get search, sorting, categorization, favorites, a shopping cart, and detailed item descriptions.
The other two options were for my own Authority: a dream interpretation secret manual for low-rank dream demons, and nightmare handling even imps can follow.
I had scoffed at the titles, but after seeing the garishly cartoonish covers, I kept my mouth shut.
Sure, I came from a world that only had humans, but someone else might have been pulled from a fantasy world.
In that kind of setting, dream demons probably had their own ordinary civilization and society.
The basic function update cost 5,000pt. Buying it would leave me with 1,000pt but no room for anything else.
It would not help me immediately, but it had the look of an unavoidable, must-buy upgrade.
On the other hand, buying both Authorities would let me help Han Ye-ji right now,
but it meant I would be stuck manually combing through that chaotic, unsorted list for the rest of the period.
As for nightmare handling, I had flagged it earlier because I figured it might let me collect nightmare fragments more easily.
Inconvenience versus resolving curiosity.
I did not deliberate long.
Without hesitation, I clicked purchase.
A searing pain launched from the crown of my skull, crawled down behind the bridge of my nose, and rattled through my entire brain.
Riding the wave of misery, I slumped onto my bed and lay flat, rubbing at my numb forehead in the name of strategic laziness.
I had bought the dream interpretation secret manual for dream demons.
Whenever I entered Han Ye-ji's lucid dreams, I naturally understood them to a degree, but relying on that alone was far too slow.
Nearly three months had passed since I had purchased the lucid dream, and I still knew next to nothing.
At that pace, I would probably have to wait until Han Ye-ji had put in a full career and reached retirement age before I would qualify as a proper dream demon.
A low-grade headache and a wave of dizziness had me pinned to the mattress, but the skill's effect was unmistakable.
At twice the price of Sweet Lucid Dream—6,000pt—it was already beginning to earn its keep: Han Ye-ji's situation was slowly, softly clicking into place in my mind.
With my head throbbing like this, I wanted to jot down the information as it sorted itself out,
but when I thought about it, this room did not even contain a notepad or a pen.
And I was not about to spend 1pt on stationery just to end up effectively wasting 999pt.
At the same moment, an unfamiliar sensation slid across my body, thick and viscous.
A grotesque feeling, creeping sluggishly through my veins.
The way anesthetic spreads outward from the injection site: it bloomed from my heart, meticulously bleeding all the way to my fingertips and the tips of my toes.
Through the headache, a small thought surfaced.
The manual was 'for low-rank dream demons.' Which meant that, as far as my body was concerned, I really had been converted into a different species.
It was an intuition, entirely unsupported by evidence, but I knew it was right.
Could whatever bizarre Creator ran this soul-harvesting world possibly be stymied by something as small as altering someone's species?
It was not as if horns were sprouting from my skull, or a tail, or wings.
But just as an infected person instinctively senses their body beginning to mutate, I felt my own flesh shift beneath me.
Dazed, I barely managed to turn my head and look down at the TV screen.
Time had slipped away: lunch was long past, and the screen showed Han Ye-ji in her own room, washed up and changed after dinner.
And in the same moment I saw her, I understood something else—that yesterday's dream had been a false nightmare, swollen with her own imagination.
The creature that had barged onto the training field had not been that huge, nor had it launched any kind of ranged cutting attack.
It was the sort of monster that was too weak to be called a monster—something closer to a large feral dog that had slipped past the detection net.
A white-haired wild dog had caught the scent of school lunch, bounded onto the field, and made a dash for the cafeteria.
The damage stopped at a male assistant teacher's leg being bitten while he shielded a student.
The things that were true: blood had splashed across her face, blocking her vision,
and through that blurred sightline, she had witnessed—for the first time—a wound deep enough to expose bone, directly in front of her eyes.
A small, hidden trauma she had not even known about had apparently been tucked away in a quiet corner of her memory.
Just as I was puzzling over how I had managed to perceive all this, more time seemed to flow past: Han Ye-ji, who had been studying, was now lying in bed.
It was going to take a while to get used to this dream demon ability.
Like someone typing for the first time, slow and clumsy, I had needed several hours just to read one trivial dream.
From the end of dinner until she lay down to sleep meant I had been staring blankly into space for four or five hours...
If I did not get comfortable with this fast, the time-sink would be brutal.
[Would you like to intervene in Incarnation Han Ye-ji's lucid dream?]
[Yes / No]
I might feel like shit, but the work still had to get done.
※
Whatever lingering regret she had held from the previous night's unfinished dream must have been strong, because today's dream was set in that same firing range.
The layout had shifted slightly, but the scattered mannequins and drones littering the place were identical.
This month's shooting drills had averaged out at 93 points, with her highest score hitting 94.8—no wonder it had seared itself into her brain.
The moment I opened my eyes inside the dream and looked across the range, the whole context slotted into place.
The difference compared to reality, where I had lain grinding through a headache for hours just to get fragments, was staggering.
Was it being a dream demon that made me stronger inside a dream?
While I held back and simply observed, the dream replayed itself faithfully.
Mannequins popped up; Han Ye-ji fired; the scores bobbed around 93, 94.
Because this dream was grounded in reality, she was completely missing the drones that emerged from the drainage grates and skimmed along at low altitude—she only tracked the ones dropping from above.
Every time a black drone rose from a drain and clipped the leg of a white mannequin, 0.1 points were deducted, and because she never noticed, her score kept bleeding.
Stress was beginning to outweigh her competitive drive; the edges of the firing range were slowly crumbling into nothing.
"Your firing stance is solid. No bad habits."
"Mm. Widen your field of view."
"When you are providing cover fire, you need to see more at once."
"Relax—your focus is pinholing!"
The same-faced male instructor—the marksmanship instructor I had seen before—kept appearing, delivering a single line, and vanishing.
Widen your field of view. See more. Your focus is pinholing.
The instructor was handing her the answer on a silver platter, just in oblique terms, and she still was not catching on.
She seemed to assume that flying hostiles naturally descended from above; she never checked below the knee. That was the problem.
"Po-o-o-sture-e-e-"
"Oh for fuck's sake, shut up!"
Maintaining the lucid dream must have been draining her mentally, because I could feel the dream starting to fray under the stress.
If it collapsed on her now, her recovery would take a hit.
The whole point of lucid dreaming was supposed to be that staying active inside a dream recovered her condition even faster than just sleeping.
If that benefit vanished, why bother with the Authority in the first place?
The dream was already splintering, so I could not barge in directly, but simply letting it run would just waste the Authority I had poured points into.
As I was racking my brain hard enough to crack it, a familiar computer shimmered into existence in front of me, right alongside the headache.
I sat in the chair that hung in empty space and immediately started pounding the keyboard.
[Lethargic Nightmare advises: watch what is underfoot.]
"Wha— Constellation?!"
Startled, she snapped her gaze downward.
There it was: a white mannequin with a crack spidering across its thigh, and a black drone proudly brandishing its untouched wings despite all the bullets flying around.
An expression of realization flickered across her face—right as the dream ended.
And I was still sitting in front of the computer.