Chapter 22: Dream Demon (Part 2)
Chapter 22: Dream Demon (Part 2)
As time passed, I chewed on my options.
What to do, how to do it, what approach would be most efficient.
Even now that I was banking 5,000 points a month, the truly expensive Authorities still ran into the millions — a reality that wasn't changing anytime soon.
Rough math: a million-point Authority that once meant waiting 83 years would now take a mere 16.
But obviously I had zero intention of spending those sixteen years lounging around this studio apartment.
Maybe I'd overlooked something.
Day after day I told myself just that, combing the shop catalogue and grinding my brain against the problem — and that's how I finally saw it.
The fact that I am a colossal goddamn idiot.
I rolled the last pill between my fingers, a faint clatter of gelatin against skin.
100 points a pill, sold in packs of five — the Dream Elixir.
I'd looked it up the very moment I became a Constellation. Then it took me three full months to remember it again.
...Yeah. Three months.
Watching Han Ye-ji trudge across snowy training grounds toward the cafeteria, the self-loathing hit like a brick.
I really grasped just how dense I was — or, more precisely, how rigid my thinking had become.
The Dream Elixir's effect was "manifesting changes from a dream into reality."
My original idea had been to use it to boost Han Ye-ji's physical abilities.
But I'd seen that whenever her concentration slipped during a dream, she'd lapse into dreams from middle school or even elementary school. So I never once tried it.
The risk was too high — if the thing somehow regressed her body, it'd be poison, not progress.
And so I'd completely blanked on the Dream Elixir and kept mindlessly scrolling the shop catalogue thinking, "Isn't there some other Authority...?"
I hadn't even factored in the part where I was turning into a Dream Demon.
My whole species had changed — I could freely manipulate dreams now —
but it never once crossed my mind that this might have wiped out the Elixir's side effects. I'd just sat there watching Han Ye-ji's shooting practice, on loop.
Still, at least I'd figured it out before the year was up.
I'd already taken ten pills — a full month's basic point income, 1,000pt worth.
One pill every three days. Over twenty-seven days, the drug's effects had wrapped around my body and slowly settled into something quiet.
One last pill in my hand, and this whole ordeal would be done.
I dreamed myself into becoming a Dream Demon. The real deal.
I had no way of knowing whether actual Dream Demons existed in this world — I was simply dreaming myself into the version I'd pieced together from my imagination.
The hand holding the pill was a man's — large and assured, but not thick-knuckled or brutish.
Elegant, bone-white fingers that could pass for a pianist's, set against a lean, corded forearm.
Below that: visible abs, and calves that looked like they'd been sculpted on an athlete.
And under the shorts, a heavy mass that announced its presence with every step I took.
A body modeled on the men who'd starred in Han Ye-ji's and every other nearby woman's wet dreams — the sexiest male form by this world's standards.
I had no mirror so I couldn't confirm, but my face had probably gone from rough to downright pretty, too.
Granted, since I was a man of this world, even with that washboard-abs beastsman-type build, raw muscle strength still fell short of what any woman could put out —
but a Dream Demon's whole existence wasn't about throwing hands anyway.
Muscle strength was beside the point.
What mattered was the substance, not the shell.
Although, honestly, watching a bodybuilder who looked six-foot-three get barehandedly manhandled by a five-foot-seven girl — one of the female cadets apparently ran that scenario in her rape fantasies —
did make me a little curious about how exactly human muscles worked in this world.
※
The Dream Demon I dreamed up had abilities close to a certain famous slasher-movie character.
Because, well, that's all I had to work with.
Honestly, if you randomly grabbed passersby and asked them what a dream demon was, wouldn't most people come back with pretty similar answers? ...Or maybe this world ran a little differently?
There was the one I'd glimpsed on some 19+ site the night before the apocalypse—
and occasionally one would show up in novels I skimmed to kill time—
but what had truly seared itself into my brain was a movie franchise about a serial killer.
A demon brimming with sexual energy that forces you into erotic dreams — that premise always felt a little shallow to me. Far more interesting was the one who reads his target's fears, builds a nightmare from them, then overlays that nightmare onto reality to kill. That had real craftsmanship to it.
No burn scars, no bladed-finger glove, but the capabilities I was imagining were built from that franchise's protagonist.
A demon with the ability to excavate whatever his target feared from their unconscious—
the power to explore that unconscious, and the further power to actually drag pieces of it into reality.
Obviously, a body altering wasn't the same as some earth-shattering evolution — not from a measly 1,000pt worth of pills.
I could now read others' dreams, but trying to pull them into reality still gave me skull-splitting headaches.
Same as the first time I'd bought the Dream Interpretation Secret Manual — trying to unravel Han Ye-ji's nightmare had left me fighting a migraine for over five hours.
Maybe I hadn't evolved enough yet. In my studio, the best I could summon was something roughly on the level of a furious chihuahua.
It'd snarl for about three seconds, then vanish.
But even that — just having something I was genuinely capable of doing — made me ecstatic.
It was far more productive than watching Han Ye-ji train all day while I nursed a can of something fizzy.
Plus, watching an Authority that almost felt like a psychic power actually develop with effort — that was fascinating.
Unlike lucid dreaming, the act of conjuring something from absolutely nothing made me feel like a real esper.
I got so absorbed in it that I lost count of how many times I'd snoop into people around Han Ye-ji, only to black out from the headache.
But a little thing like that wasn't going to sour my mood.
On this constructed donut-shaped model continent — where souls were supposedly pulled from all sorts of parallel universes — the things people feared were surprisingly universal.
And collecting them one by one had its own appeal.
Han Ye-ji was terrified of furry beasts.
Specifically, things like large off-leash dogs.
The shooting instructor, Sergeant Nam, was terrified of giant cockroaches that, once sprayed with pesticides, would take off into flight.
And beyond that — clowns, enormous spiders and roaches, old dolls that radiated some deeply wrong uncanny valley feeling,
shadowed back alleys with flickering streetlamps, malfunctioning elevators — a whole variety.
Reading the minds of people on the other side of the screen carried a strange sort of addictiveness.
The world was different, so there were things I couldn't understand at all — which only made watching more fascinating.
Take one of the female cadets in Han Ye-ji's class.
Her nightmare was a sexy blonde in a micro bikini.
The fabric was so thin it just barely covered her nipples, stretched horizontally across her chest with no shoulder straps.
Breasts so huge a little movement looked ready to snap the whole string, a waist so trim one arm could've wrapped around it with room to spare.
And down below, a bikini bottom made of a patch of cloth about as wide as two fingers, perilously held by strings.
A sun-kissed, healthy-skinned golden-blonde glamour model swayed in front of me for about ten seconds,
hips rolling obscenely, before vanishing.
Right before she disappeared, she'd confirmed I was a man and her expression had soured instantly.
Still, just watching it sent a pang straight to my crotch. So why was this exhibitionist beauty some nameless cadet's nightmare?
A lewd woman who, in just a swimsuit, could've hit the trending videos on any given porn site — and she was the scary thing?
I couldn't beat back the curiosity. I slipped straight into the cadet's unconscious.
The intrusion itself was simple.
I just angled the screen and gazed deep into the target's eyes.
I hadn't gotten the hang of it yet — moving targets were hard to track on the screen and I'd fail occasionally — but right now we were in the middle of a lecture.
The girl I was targeting was just sitting at her desk, facing forward.
Messing around here might spark friction with some other Constellation,
but that obscene little scene I'd just glimpsed had hooked into me. I couldn't help it.
Why the hell would someone be scared of a woman in a bikini?
Brown eyes, different from Han Ye-ji's. Monolid. A fairly attractive young woman.
The deeper I stared into her eyes, the more I read the memories of this nameless young cadet.
Was this what an android felt like downloading data?
The memory started, somewhat jarringly, with a young girl masturbating.
A prepubescent girl, not yet fully grown, secretly looking up porn behind her parents' backs.
A schoolgirl sailing into puberty, wandering the internet to satisfy her sexual curiosity.
Naturally, she'd encountered pornography — had gone so far as to use her parents' credentials to log into an adult site.
Finding a free porn site URL somewhere, lacking the courage to bookmark it, she'd simply memorized the address.
A textbook puberty.
Then one day, in the middle of that peaceful sexual awakening,
an innocent click on a free porn site link changed everything.
"Agh, what the fuck is this!"
She'd been prepared for, at most, a photo of an erect penis. What actually unfurled on-screen was a video of two women wrestling in micro bikinis.
"Uh— uh— why won't it close!"
The little girl, who hadn't even properly pulled her underwear back on, shot up in panic, her bare bottom entirely forgotten.
Frantically, her small palm smacked at the keyboard, but the malicious link was still doing its job.
- Get the FUUUK!!
- You Biiiitch!
A blue-eyed golden-blonde glamour model and a brown-haired Latina beauty were lunging at each other in nothing but micro bikinis.
Two nearly nude female bodies tangled together — pulling at strings, pinching nipples, slapping ass.
But none of that was the real point.
It was the overwhelming terror born of sheer anxiety and panic.
The fact that her parents were due home in ten minutes — and the creeping fear that she'd just bricked the family computer while sneaking porn.
The screen in front of her: screaming lesbian porn, women enthusiastically jamming fingers into each other's asses.
And even when she turned the speakers off, the video kept playing.
A forced shutdown would have solved everything, but a panicked, terrified elementary schooler didn't have that baseline knowledge.
Ultimately — a last-shot memory of yanking the entire power cord out of the wall — I was ejected from the cadet's psyche.
Off-leash dogs, spiders, cockroaches, clowns — and now a gay porn actress.
For a nightmare collected by a Constellation... this one was pretty pathetic.