Chapter 214: Electric Sheep in a Dream 5
Chapter 214: Electric Sheep in a Dream 5
Everyone walked away from this deal with something they wanted.
I got to strip every scrap of personal data from a terrorist organization gunning for me, and I didn't waste a second doing it.
Shepherd of Electric Sheep got growth for his first Incarnation and a window into a past he'd lost.
Svetlana and the seasoned veterans got the Northern Command's entire shitshow of data organized for free.
Seonghwa Gallery Regular got her security leak forgiven and a growth opportunity on top of it.
"You do realize leaking classified material means the Northern Extreme Gulag at minimum, right?"
"Yes!"
"And you don't want to end up a test subject for hallucinogen-spirit-contract interaction experiments either."
Seonghwa Gallery Regular—Kim Jae-eun—looked a little put out, probably because she'd had to grovel to the Electronic Spirit, but honestly, a hundred times better than getting dragged off to the Gulag to serve as a meat shield and live narcotics test subject.
Judging by how pale she went, she'd picked up enough from the gallery to know exactly how infamous the Gulag was.
Though she wasn't the only one whose face had gone blue.
Kim Jae-eun got surrounded by Svetlana and the old veterans and hauled out of the dorm, but off in the corner, Lee Ha-rin was still glued to a computer, hammering away at the keyboard.
"Wow. Ha-rin's gone completely blue."
"You bitch, help me!"
"Come on. Who'd go around deleting grandpa-dick photos in the middle of the night for free?"
"There's a grandma version now, so lend me your goddamn drones!"
Song Ye-na, who'd been stuck in the mountains doing nothing but swing a sword, stood beside me like human wallpaper. Shy little Han Ye-ji was snickering behind her, and Kim Ha-eun had her chin practically on my shoulder, openly enjoying the show.
Not that it could be helped. Drawing that much aggro had gotten Kim Jae-eun forcibly appointed as sub-manager by the Seonghwa Gallery admin.
She could always quit if it really bothered her. But for an otaku like Lee Ha-rin, that was off the table. If you hate the temple, the monk walks—but a fish doesn't fly out of the stream just because it hates the water.
For a Constellation otaku like Lee Ha-rin, the gallery meant that much.
"Nice to see everyone getting along."
"...You call that getting along?"
"Obviously."
Song Ye-na gave me a skeptical look, but it didn't faze me. The Sword That Severs the Yoke had left her with a fairly stiff way of thinking, so watching three people casually call each other sons of bitches and worse probably looked awkward to her.
But isn't that how you know you're close? When you can sling insults without holding back?
Lee Ha-rin, normally demure, who floors it the moment her otaku nature kicks in. Han Ye-ji, who listens avidly to every scrap of otaku information but still puts the brakes on when Ha-rin gets out of hand. Kim Ha-eun, who helps out with her drones where she can while drawing clear lines.
The combination worked better than I'd expected.
"Why'd you even verify your identity?"
"Fucking hell... Han Ye-ji, it's your guild's fault. Someone stole that photo of our Constellation buying you coffee, so I had to verify."
"Whoa, seriously?"
"Look at her brushing it off because it's not her problem."
They talked like they'd bite each other's heads off, but none of them moved away from that computer—they couldn't.
Kim Jae-eun had spilled Academy secrets just to get attention, and now as a Constellation otaku who used the gallery to gather intelligence, Lee Ha-rin had absolutely no choice but to wrangle those internet wraiths and scrub the board clean.
Otherwise, the normal information and analysis posts she relied on would never surface.
This was, effectively, cleanup duty.
Normally Kim Jae-eun's Electronic Spirit ought to be handling it, but what could you do? To the military, the priority ranking of "restoring order to Seonghwa Gallery" was infinitely close to zero.
"We can leave them to it. Let's just go eat."
"I-is that all right?"
"Yeah. They'll feed themselves once they're done."
Leaving those three in their ambiguously harmonious state, I took Song Ye-na by the hand and pulled her out of the dorm.
※
I was walking her to the dining hall as if I were looking after her, but there wasn't any grand reason behind it. She was my newest Incarnation, and I barely knew her—she'd been contracted almost by accident.
The only thing I knew for sure was that I'd accidentally etched a voyeurism fetish into her Origin. The combination of "youngest" and "guilt" had fused into a sort of duty-bound protectiveness.
Compare her to Lee Ha-rin, whose deep-seated fantasy was to carry me in a palanquin if she could master the Clone technique, or to Kim Ha-eun, who'd declared she'd do anything she was told now that she'd been subjugated as a Dream Demon. Song Ye-na was just a girl who'd holed up in the mountains and swung a sword her whole life.
Her only real quirk? She'd hated her hick Eastern Continent name, Song Dan-dan. She'd undergone something close to a bone-deep rebirth and practically asked me for a new name on the spot.
"Hmm. The Academy's meals are extravagant."
"What was your usual diet?"
"When you're training, cooking becomes a hassle... so I ate strictly for nutrition."
She said it flatly—most of her meals had been military rations and supplements. She hadn't grown up poor; this was a woman of the reversed world who found cooking a nuisance but still made sure she got proper nutrition.
I mean, with The Sword That Severs the Yoke's wealth, buying top-quality ingredients wouldn't even be the ceiling—she could buy the land the ingredients grew on and still have money left over. There was no way the Incarnation of the Eastern Continent's strongest Constellation ate poorly for financial reasons.
"But you're not indifferent to food, are you?"
"No. My master was quite the gourmand herself. The bothersome part is cooking and cleaning up. I have nothing against eating delicious food."
She said this while smoothly collecting a meal ticket at the Academy dining hall. This was the VIP restaurant, added because of all the distinguished guests who came through now. The system was simple: you looked over the ingredients on display, wrote down the dish you wanted, and submitted your ticket.
Watching her casually scribble names of dishes I'd never heard of, I figured she really did enjoy eating.
"Any recommendations?"
"Mm. The food I eat isn't for strong flavors—it's closer to temple cuisine designed for nutritional balance..."
She started listing things—vegetable bibimbap tossed in a lightly sweet soy sauce, or healthy wraps with boiled cabbage stuffed with meat and colorful vegetables. From the sound of it, every dish was miles away from my childish palate.
'Now I'm curious. Maybe I should ask her to just boil up some instant noodles.'
I was idly scanning the premium ingredients when the seafood caught my eye, and a memory from my past life surfaced. I'd once tossed a crab into instant noodles and couldn't even taste the difference because the soup was so spicy.
These ingredients weren't coming out of my own pocket. Might as well dump in every top-shelf piece of seafood they had and get them to boil me some noodles. Plenty of things were completely different from my past life, but instant noodles and lunchboxes? A lot of those were similar.
Case in point: the soda dispenser, deeply out of place in a high-end restaurant. Maybe they'd set it up as a courtesy because I drank so much sweet stuff—milk tea, yogurt, soda.
Two crabs, five shrimp. I skipped the other seafood since I couldn't even tell what they were from the names.
I slid my ticket over. Song Ye-na shot me a worried look.
"Are you sure you should eat that?"
"Constellations don't need to manage their health through food."
"No, that's not what I meant..."
It took me a solid twenty minutes before her uneasy reaction made sense.
I mean, sure, you toss in a crab and boil it, but does instant noodles normally take this long?
As if mocking that stupid thought, a bowl the size of a serving platter was set before me.
"Uh... the crab and shrimp...?"
"Probably a specialty from the Southern Sea. Just came in."
I'd been imagining palm-sized flower crabs. What arrived were two king crabs bigger than my face. And the shrimp weren't jumbo—they were tiger shrimp as thick as my forearm, five of them.
The platter was so packed with bright red crustacean shells that the single serving of noodles underneath was completely invisible.
Thinking about it now, this was a restaurant meant to serve the continent's VIPs. Kind of inevitable. When the menu said "such-and-such flower crab" and "such-and-such shrimp," I'd just blithely asked them to throw it all into noodles. That one was on me. Should've gotten suspicious the moment I saw extra words tacked onto the names, like some kind of game title.
At this size, a twenty-minute steam time made perfect sense.
"Shall I shell them for you?"
I was staring blankly at the forearm-sized shrimp when Song Ye-na quietly reached over. She must've assumed I'd frozen up because I was bad at peeling shells.
She wiped her hands clean with a wet tissue, coated her fingertips with mana, and began dismantling the shrimp.
'Huh. That works.'
Had she formed some kind of glove at her fingertips using Sword Qi or Sword Aura? Her fingers moved and the shells came apart as smoothly as if she were filleting with a blade. The sight put a ridiculous thought in my head: with fingers like that, she could probably cut paper like scissors.
In a fine-dining restaurant where everyone else was doing dignified work with knives, eyes were drawn to the woman peeling shrimp with her bare hands. Though everyone recognized the person sitting across from her was a Constellation, so nobody actually glared.
Who in this world would pick a fight with a Constellation inside a restaurant built for Constellations?
"These are meant for grilling, really... I'm not sure how they'll do in a soup."
"You've got a real interest in cooking, huh?"
"More precisely, just in eating. Once I became an Incarnation and was given special treatment, I didn't really want for anything, so naturally I gravitated toward high-end ingredients."
Made sense. This wasn't the Northern Continent—nobody was going to fall into drugs out here. And she'd spent her time meditating in the countryside; luxury apartments and imported cars probably didn't appeal to her either.
I was thinking that and reaching my chopsticks toward a plump piece of shrimp when someone dropped into the seat next to me.
"Is this animal called a shrimp? So this is what it looks like with the shell removed."
"The hell? How'd you get out?"
It was Shepherd of Electric Sheep. The man who was supposed to be in his own Sanctum.