Chapter 24: Graduation Preparation
Chapter 24: Graduation Preparation
As I kneaded her soft chest, Han Ye-ji tilted her head back, her eyes full of curiosity as she gazed up at me.
Pure, simple curiosity shone in those round eyes.
"Does touching these actually feel good to you?"
"They're soft."
"Well, they are pretty squishy, I guess."
Watching her poke her own breasts with her index finger, I felt desire stir despite myself, but I had no choice but to hold back.
How many times had we already given in and fucked under the pretense of dream-control special training?
We were sitting not in the apartment living room, but on a wooden veranda in the countryside. A cool breeze drifted through, pleasantly tempering the warmth of our pressed bodies.
She reached for a chunk of watermelon on the tray, and beneath her arm my hand slipped in, groping her bare chest.
We weren't grinding frantically. We weren't doing anything especially significant. The whole point was for her to train her control over the lucid dreaming Authority she'd been granted.
"Ah, I messed up."
"Focus a little harder, dear."
The watermelon in her hand had turned into a Korean melon. The sight of watermelon seemed to trigger a cascade of associations, and it began morphing unpredictably.
By the time I registered the change, the melon had already become a honeydew melon instead.
I pressed the underside of her breast upward to signal her to concentrate.
The melon turned into melon-flavored ice cream.
Under the sunlight, the ice cream melted at once and dripped down her fingers. With her nestled between my legs, the runoff splattered naturally onto my thighs. She tugged at the hem of her top and wiped away the ice cream, and I responded by squeezing her breast hard and kneading it once more—a reminder to stay focused.
"Ahaha, that tickles."
No matter how much I fondled her chest, in this kind of atmosphere, it didn't function as a sexual overture. Because, in this world, women's breasts didn't carry much significance. Which made it easier to play with them casually.
In a world where the sexual mores of men and women were inverted, a woman's breasts held about as much weight as an earlobe or the nape of a neck would have in the previous world. There had probably been people who got turned on by a pretty ear shape or a glimpse of a woman's nape when she tied up her hair. But just as no one got arrested for public indecency over baring their ears or neck, breasts worked the same way. Sure, some people did get aroused by a beautiful chest—but calling them explicitly obscene body parts felt like a stretch.
Women covered their breasts simply because shirts happened to cover them. No baffling fashion trend where women walked around in shirts with the chest cut out had ever taken off. No matter how much common sense shifted and norms flipped, what kind of world would ever embrace the bizarre fashion of a belly-band shirt that covered the stomach but exposed the breasts?
So in situations like this—lounging around at home, dressed comfortably—nobody bothered to cover up their chest. The way you'd slip on sandals instead of dress shoes to run to the convenience store: a casual thought that baring your breasts was no big deal.
"Ah, this is harder than I expected."
"Your watermelon smells like fresh red-bean bread."
"Probably because of the bakery we went to today."
A firm handful of breasts—just the right size. I held Han Ye-ji's slender body captive in my arms and toyed with her as I pleased, but she paid no attention whatsoever. She was too busy noticing the scent of fresh-baked bread wafting from the watermelon, rather than the chest being kneaded like a toy in my hands.
She'd succeeded in turning the melted ice cream back into a watermelon, but now the aroma and taste had started blending together at random. A sign her concentration had hit its limit.
"Fiddly details really are the hardest to control."
Grumbling, she now held not a red-bean-bread-scented watermelon but a watermelon soda—the same brand I'd seen back in my studio apartment. A sun-drenched garden, a cool breeze across the veranda, a tray beaded with condensation, cold water, a watermelon... soda. With lucid dreaming, she could easily picture the shape of an object, but senses like taste and smell were proving much harder to control. Made sense—conjuring the image of a watermelon was easier than summoning its flavor.
The whole while, my hands kept freely fondling the breasts in my embrace. Part of me wanted to just throw her down and sprawl out on top of her, but there wasn't enough time.
"Ugh, another failure today."
"Don't get too impatient."
The watermelon juice in her hand vanished. The bright, beating sun vanished too, and the cool breeze died. As the dream world crumbled inward from its edges, Han Ye-ji, still in my arms, said goodbye.
"Well then, I'm off~"
"All right, take care."
※
No matter how close an Incarnation and a Constellation might be, they couldn't stay glued together forever.
If I followed my desires, I'd spend the entire day stuck to Han Ye-ji. I could eat and drink whatever I pleased in dreams, conjure up any setting I liked, and mess around clingily with a high school girl who had eyes only for me.
But we both knew where that road ended, and it wasn't anywhere good. Though, the number of times we'd rolled around together before learning even that much restraint was beyond counting.
I turned the screen away from Han Ye-ji, who'd soon be in mock combat at a survival training ground, and directed it elsewhere. To a different continent—not even the Academy. I was mapping out this world and gathering nightmares that looked useful.
I didn't touch any Incarnations outside the Academy. I only had one Incarnation—Han Ye-ji, who hadn't even debuted in society yet—and I had no desire to start friction with other Constellations.
On the doughnut-shaped continent shrouded in black fog, I collected people's nightmares.
The continent was endlessly fascinating. A patchwork of the world I knew and a world I didn't, comfortably jumbled together. An alien place where even the most basic food culture and ideologies were slightly mixed. If I ignored the fact that my homeland, the Republic of Korea, didn't exist, the familiarity was strong enough I could almost convince myself I was just in a foreign country from my own world.
The more I read people's psychology in bits and pieces, the stronger that déjà vu grew.
What people on the Eastern Continent universally feared was ghosts—the kind that pop out suddenly. Since fantasy monsters like specters and wraiths actually existed here, they were deeply afraid of souls. Maiden ghosts with unbound hair were a recurring staple of nightmares.
The Western Continent looked like the US and Europe blended into one. Hard to say for certain—Earth was destroyed before I ever got to travel it. Here, they feared physical monsters over spirits: clowns, masked killers, the furry creature under the bed, boogeymen in the closet.
Up north, where more than half the land lay under snow, you'd find a region packed with Slavic beauties. Similar to the Eastern Continent, but instead of ghosts, malevolent spirits that tormented people appeared alongside the blizzards. Wendigos, sasquatches, dragons forged from ice crystals.
Down south, where tropical rainforests stretched everywhere, Latin beauties and people of African descent mingled. With all the harsh terrain—jungles, swamps—the fears here centered on nature and beasts. Werewolves stalking on two legs, man-eating leopards that snatched people, giant man-eating alligators lurking in the swamps.
those were just the emblematic fears—I encountered plenty I'd never heard of. Take the sight of two bikini-clad porn stars materializing in my room, for example. A bronze-skinned South American beauty with an ass bigger than her breasts and a blonde, blue-eyed glamour girl had launched into a catfight, hips swaying.
"Ah, fuck—get out of here!"
The woman's face buried into a massive chest that had to be an E-cup. A plump brown ass too big for two hands met a pale palm with a sharp crack. Huge tits the size of a human face and hips quaking and rippling—yes, the sight was captivating. Could've been, anyway, if these goddamn bitches hadn't been flailing around inside my cramped studio apartment.
I'd summoned two at once without thinking, and the moment they locked eyes they lunged at each other viciously. Because of them, a soda can that hadn't been cleared away got crushed, lunchbox debris splattered onto the bed, and I took a couple of solid smacks to the back of the head.
It didn't hurt—getting hit by soft female flesh—but the feeling was oddly unpleasant.
So killers, clowns, and ghosts couldn't actually harm me, but if they thrashed around the room like that, I could still catch a stray blow. Lesson learned. Filing that fact away, I resumed my sightseeing tour across the continents—after first shoving the dented cans and scattered lunchbox scraps into a corner.
In the end, I spent the most time peering at the Eastern Continent. Maybe because it resembled pre-apocalypse Asia, I felt some sense of attachment to it. Seeing a world teeming with black hair instead of every color under the rainbow put me oddly at ease.
Given the time of day, students were at school, office workers at their companies—a peaceful cityscape. Gates did rarely tear open in midair, but suppression squads dispatched instantly and hunted the monsters down before they could even finish roaring. Apart from that, it was a truly ordinary world.
Zoom the screen in just a little, though, and it got a lot more watchable. Even a glance at the streets showed beauties strolling around with their cleavage utterly unguarded. At the gym especially, college girls in sleeveless shirts slit deep down to the ribs—past just side-boob—were working out with fierce dedication.
what most of them secretly feared was a soft, lush, fully ripened figure completely free of muscle, so I wasn't going to harvest any nightmares from them. Still, it was fine—I'd already gathered a diverse collection. If I kept stockpiling bit by bit like this, I'd be able to support Han Ye-ji when she eventually saw real combat.
And right now, I could only dispatch these nightmares into the immediate vicinity of my Incarnation, Han Ye-ji. But once I got a little more comfortable with the Dream Demon's power, I felt like I'd be able to send them wherever I wanted. It was just a vague hope hovering at the edge of my senses—but my gut insisted it was right.