Chapter 29: Incarnation, Lee Ha-rin
Chapter 29: Incarnation, Lee Ha-rin
She worshipped Incarnations and Constellations. Hers was the heart of a true believer, utterly convinced that ordinary humans and Incarnations existed on entirely different planes.
That didn't mean she looked down on regular people. She simply filed them away in the category of the mundane while sanctifying Incarnations and Constellations.
Calling it an ordinary ideology felt wrong—it was too warped for that.
Calling it an extremist ideology felt insufficient.
Her grades were excellent, and she had a reputation as a die-hard grind, but her innate physique left her with little stamina. That gap had bought her some time to look into contracts before anyone else snatched her up.
Other Constellations browsing the candidates here would target the top-fifty elite first anyway.
The genuine geniuses already had stamina rivaling a top-tier warrior by this continent's standards and had amassed considerable knowledge besides. They weren't about to just scoop up a half-baked prodigy. If it were up to me, I'd stamp my seal on her right now and declare I was watching.
But she wasn't an Incarnation yet, so I slipped into her dream without worry.
An endless white corridor stretched before me, subtly different from Han Ye-ji's.
Where Han Ye-ji's memories had been displayed at varying scales depending on their importance, Lee Ha-rin's were cleanly divided into two branches: memories entangled with Constellations and Incarnations, and those that weren't.
I'd had some idea from watching her pray, but wasn't this level of fixation a little beyond devotion?
I left the worn, discarded memories scattered on the floor alone and gently brushed my hand over the dazzlingly ornamented ones.
An ordinary, well-off household. Reasonably harmonious parents. An obedient child.
Lee Ha-rin's life had been impossibly smooth. On the surface, at least.
Incidents had cropped up since her elementary-school years, but all of them had been resolved without lasting harm—which was precisely where the problem began. Because young Lee Ha-rin had received those events differently. She'd had no choice but to.
In accordance with her parents' belief that a girl ought to grow up bold and active outdoors, she spent every day after school playing at the playground. The monster that appeared before her there was the start of everything.
Age 10: she witnessed a monster at the playground and froze in terror. An Incarnation rescued her.
Age 12: on her way to school, a rampaging woman targeted her. An Incarnation rescued her.
Age 13: during an elementary-school graduation trip, the destination was attacked by fallen Incarnations. She was rescued without a scratch.
15, 16, 18, 20... Lee Ha-rin's family kept stumbling into catastrophes as if cursed, each brush with disaster so narrow I found myself tensing as I watched. Yet every single time, her entire family escaped unharmed.
In fact, the compensation payouts grew so frequent they drew suspicion for insurance fraud—until an Incarnation and their Constellation cleared them of the charges.
"Really, I don't know how we'd have survived without the Incarnations."
"I know. What luck we have, honestly."
Lee Ha-rin's parents tossed off such remarks lightly each time an incident passed. But young Lee Ha-rin absorbed them to the marrow: without Incarnations and Constellations, she wouldn't even be alive.
Over a decade, her parents' casual words and gestures had become a kind of gaslighting, etched deep into her psyche. By now, she believed her entire existence was wholly the product of Constellations and Incarnations.
Her grades were good because Incarnations kept the peace so she could focus on her studies. Her mother's company thrived because a Constellation had blessed it. Her father lived comfortably as a full-time homemaker because a Constellation and an Incarnation had saved them.
From the basics—food, sleep, clothing—to her warm, harmonious family, their considerable wealth, her mother's swift career ascent, her gentle father—everything that made her life a happy one had been bestowed upon her by the boundless grace of the Constellations.
'...She's properly insane, isn't she?'
I'd seen people with this kind of mind before, more than I cared to count. The fanatics and doomsday-cultist bastards who insisted humanity's extinction was divine will and must be accepted humbly. The lunatics who crawled up to the surface with their bare bodies, arguing that the earth's contamination and human mutation into creatures were all God's design—their own sins—and that resistance was forbidden, all while swelling the bellies of the creatures.
On ideology alone, Lee Ha-rin's was actually more extreme.
Those doomsday cultists had been suicide-seekers who believed the apocalypse was God's will and stripped themselves of everything to walk naked into the surface world. But Lee Ha-rin didn't just see a situation as divinely ordained—she saw every breath she took, every day of her growth, every element of her life as existing for the sake of the Constellations.
And she wasn't even living through an apocalypse. She'd simply been going quietly mad in the course of ordinary life, absorbing her parents' everyday conversation.
'Should I take her, or shouldn't I?'
Her loyalty was a sure thing, at least. Her looks were striking, too. By this world's standards, Lee Ha-rin was on the small side and lacked some of the physical appeal expected of women, but to my eyes she was more than satisfying. With an ideology this solid, she wasn't likely to turn into a deserter Incarnation if I sent her to a battlefield.
What I really wondered about was that fanatical ideology itself. I'd have to face her in dreams soon enough—how was she going to react? Not badly toward me, at least, I hoped.
※
The first Incarnation contract had been free, but the price of the next one was staggering. Fortunately, Han Ye-ji had joined a Suppression Squad and started delivering minor results, bringing in roughly ten thousand points a month, so I'd barely scraped together enough to make the purchase.
'My hands are shaking.'
Han Ye-ji earned between ten and fifteen thousand points a month, and the second contract cost a hundred thousand. Points I'd been saving religiously from her Academy graduation through to her employment, just to afford one expensive Authority. Nearly a year's hoard, gone in a single click—the thought hollowed out my chest.
What choice did I have, though? If I kept going like this, I'd die of boredom and end up stuffing my studio apartment with game consoles and luxury goods. Spending half a year flat on my bed in a one-room doing absolutely nothing already felt like psychological torture. The best move appeared to be expanding my Incarnations at a reasonable pace and finding a way to visit that other world.
I spent the points, bought the contract, and clicked on Lee Ha-rin with the mouse just as she was starting another prayer.
Two clicks. In less than ten seconds, every point I'd frugally saved for a year was gone.
The sense of loss lasted only a moment. On the screen, Lee Ha-rin was reacting in a way that surpassed anything I'd imagined.
She didn't leap up in joy. She didn't spring from her seat and bolt out of the library.
She simply, silently—
"Agh, what the fuck! Healer, get a healer!"
"Someone call the medical instructor!"
"What the hell is going on now?!"
On the screen, she quietly toppled over, foaming at the mouth, frozen in the exact pose she'd held reaching up to press the Y in midair. Her chair flipped backward as she crumpled sideways, and her paralyzed arm shoved into the neighboring desk.
"She was fine a second ago—why is she like that?"
"Did she overtrain?"
"Sh-shouldn't somebody close her eyes?"
"Oh, fuck, isn't that what you do for dead people?"
No scream of joy, no final death rattle. Just her body locked rigid, eyes wide open. Students gathered hesitantly around her. Her reputation as a die-hard grind seemed to give her decent standing, at least.
In the distance, someone in a white coat came sprinting.
While the students and I all stood there dazed, the medic tore open Lee Ha-rin's upper garment like ripping off buttons. A slender waist with an eleven-line ab definition, and a somewhat modest chest, came into view.
"Everyone, back! Activating the resuscitator—one, two, three!"
The medic placed electrodes above her chest and on her ribs, applied something, and then—crack!—a loud jolt rang out.
"Hkkgh—!"
"Wake up, steady your breathing!"
A flash of light, and Lee Ha-rin thrashed back to consciousness. The medical instructor pinned her shoulders, holding her still. Seeing her come around intact, the students scattered like ants fleeing rain, leaving only the instructor and Lee Ha-rin.
Her eyes were wide and round. She darted her gaze around, tried to bolt upright—and the instructor held her down. From the instructor's perspective, this was a student who'd fainted and hit her head on the way down; she was protecting a possibly concussed brain. But Lee Ha-rin, eyes already rolled back in her skull, couldn't spare a single thought for that.
"I have to press it—I have to press it! Let go of my arm, you bitch!"
The contract wasn't finalized yet, so I couldn't send a message telling her to calm down. Han Ye-ji was on patrol somewhere far away, earning her keep—useless here.
"What—are you actually insane?! Stay still, you're thrashing your head!"
The medical instructor, calm at first, eventually lost her temper at Lee Ha-rin's flailing and screaming. She twisted the girl's wrist and pinned her down—with the clean, practiced form you'd expect of an instructor, medical department or not.
"I have to form the contract with the Constellation—let go of me, fuck!"
"H-huh? You mean an Incarnation contract?"
"I said let go, fuck!"
Foam still un-wiped from her mouth, Lee Ha-rin glared at the instructor as if staring down the enemy of her entire existence. Only then did the instructor release her.
Her forearm was reddened where she'd been restrained. Her clothes were rumpled and dusty from rolling on the floor, her short hair disheveled. Without even straightening her wrecked appearance, she bolted upright and stretched her hand toward the Y.
Obviously I'd wait for her—what was the rush? Did other Constellations cancel the contract out of wounded pride if they didn't get an instant answer?
Light bloomed outward, just as it had with Han Ye-ji in that convenience store long ago. The gazes that had dispersed across the library swung back.
At the center of those gazes, Lee Ha-rin stood frozen with her hand outstretched toward the empty air. Tears streaked down her rigid face.
[Constellation, Lethargic Nightmare asks if your body is all right now.]
"Th-thank youuuu..."
Weeping openly, Lee Ha-rin bowed her head deeply to the empty air. Watching this, the medical instructor quietly retreated step by step and vanished without a word. She was an instructor who had just traded profanity-laced insults and physical struggle with a student—disciplinary action would've been a justified response, wouldn't it? But perhaps worried about having interfered with a Constellation-Incarnation contract, she slipped out of the library in silence.