Chapter 42: Growth 3
Chapter 42: Growth 3
People with dazzling talent grow faster and faster as time passes. It's as if they don't understand the word "limit"—their growth accelerates.
To those without talent, watching them would be so disheartening and envy-inducing it could drive a person mad.
Even if everyone has talent, the gaps between talents are inevitable. Talent is one thing; grit and character are another—that's why a handful of fallen Incarnations and Constellations exist.
'What a world...'
Who is the Creator of this flat artificial continent? I'm curious about what kind of being gathered so many souls from so many different worlds. Did they trade souls like stocks, bid on them like a collector at auction, or steal them one by one like a thief pilfering brilliant souls?
After I'd briefed Han Ye-ji, I manifested in her house while she was at work and her younger brother was at school. The objective was, the computer. I clicked through the website UI with increasing familiarity, surfing the web.
[Military Operation in the City Center: Is the Eastern Continent's Public Safety Acceptable as It Is?]
A news article about the time Han Ye-ji pulled off that clean air-gun snipe. It was full of details neither she nor I had known. The anti-social motive was laughable: it was a group of "Incarnations who hadn't been chosen by the Constellation they wanted." Whether it was the criminals targeting specific Constellations' Incarnations, or this world's government launching an anti-terror military operation in the city center over a mere group conspiracy to commit crimes against Incarnations—both were astonishing. I skimmed the article and queued up a few movies I'd been meaning to watch.
Talent—gifts and abilities.
Obviously, the word talent isn't limited to any one field. Someone might have a talent for sniping, another for magic, another for swordsmanship, martial arts, or close combat. Likewise, there are people with talent for video editing, cooking, music, and art.
'Damn, this is genuinely fun...'
And that was why I'd fallen into the cultural life of this world.
Information about Constellations was surprisingly widespread on the internet, because Constellations dealing in art and culture gathered information for their creative work and disseminated it to their Incarnations. I still remember laughing when I discovered this world had its own subculture genre of gender-role-reversal stories, or TS fiction where women turn into men.
Even niche genres were handled by writers with strong prose or artists with impressive illustration skills, so I won't waste words on the mainstream ones. Even old bargain-bin movies—the kind whose discount events had ended and that were offered as free TV reruns—were full of gems that would easily score an 8 out of 10 back in my old world. A brown-haired bombshell of a woman heading off to the frontlines, while a blond bodybuilder sees her off with tearful eyes—it's a little awkward, but still entertaining. I wasn't stuck for lack of things to watch; there was so much to watch I didn't have enough time to get through it all.
I ate meals in Lee Ha-rin's dreams and enjoyed my leisure time in Han Ye-ji's reality. It was killing two birds with one stone: I could just laze around and enjoy entertainment, and I'd still be training Dream Entry and Nightmare Handling twenty-four hours a day. I even had a bit of a surplus of points, so I started taking care of little luxuries like iced coffee—life was becoming a little more comfortable.
There was just one thing worrying me.
"This doesn't seem like a match either... From here on, the fields get a lot more niche. That makes the early stage tough, but later you can become an expert who's respected by everyone."
"Hoo, I appreciate your help."
It was Lee Ha-rin's situation: a month in, and she still hadn't found her talent.
I couldn't stop thinking about it—watching a movie, glancing in on Lee Ha-rin, then going back to the movie. My screen kept shifting.
Only one month to find a lifelong talent? You might question that, but Lee Ha-rin's case was different. It takes about one to three hours to try out a basic magic kit. A talent for the Extreme trait will let you know within that timeframe whether you have aptitude or not.
She'd gone through an average of five subjects per day, weekends included, for thirty days straight—and every single one had failed. From common elemental magic all the way to magical engineering, the kind that makes corporations' eyes light up when they recruit—roughly 150 fields of magic, all of them.
All that remained were obscure and ambiguous magics like voodoo or ritual magic. Having a niche talent isn't a bad thing, but the problem was Lee Ha-rin's mental state, which was steadily fraying. No matter how positive a person is, thirty consecutive days of failure would be hard to bear.
'Should I consider this a trick?'
If you cut sleep, you harm your health—and you need sleep to meet me. So I told her to get a full night's sleep every night.
Lee Ha-rin took that to heart and slept a solid eight hours out of every twenty-four. No matter how busy she was, she went to bed at eleven and woke at seven like clockwork. So far, so good. But...
'She's not eating much lately...'
Since she couldn't cut back on sleep, she chose to cut back on meals. Her stamina decreased, but she couldn't reduce exercise time either, so she kept up her morning workouts faithfully, but her meals began to suffer.
At first, it was a full spread that looked like a proper home-cooked meal; then the number of side dishes shrank, and she started making do with simple rice-in-soup. Before long, she was eating sandwiches, rice balls, and instant food while researching magic.
Not that it was a genuinely inadequate diet. She still slept eight hours a night, ran for over an hour every morning, and even her meals had the nutritional ratios properly adjusted. Aside from the visible mental strain, there was nothing to criticize.
But that didn't mean I was going to leave her alone.
Her body might be fine, but her mental state was visibly crumbling.
While I was thinking that, the world suddenly began to spin.
※
A ritual: the act of offering food to spirits or the souls of the dead to show devotion, or the ceremony itself. Whether in the world I'd lived in or in this one, the word meant the same thing. But in this world, a ritual wasn't an annual religious observance—it was a magical ceremony.
"Seeing it like this, it's much bigger than I imagined."
"I-Is that so? I'll bring you something to drink."
The old magic professor's kind face filled with fluster as he scurried away. Anybody would be flustered when a Constellation suddenly appeared right in front of them.
"Does anything ache? Are you feeling all right?"
"Yes, I'm fine."
Lee Ha-rin had summoned me with an egg-mayo sandwich and a hot Americano she'd prepared for lunch, and she was watching me with a flustered expression. In this world, a ritual was a primitive magical event blending animism and totemism. It was a kind of simplified contract ceremony—offering tribute to a Constellation to form a connection.
Offerings became points and were received by the Constellation. In return, the Constellation granted what the Incarnation desired. At first glance, that sounds great, but in truth it wasn't much use. Unless you were a tyrant who'd pour a nation's pillars into rituals and ruin the country, you couldn't offer a large number of points. And if a Constellation and Incarnation had already contracted, they could communicate without a ritual and grant each other's wishes anyway.
But Lee Ha-rin's Extreme talent surpassed a great many things.
"Could you explain it simply?"
"Yes. Originally, it starts as a simplified ritual ceremony, and the act of offering—"
Just as magic has its tiers, rituals have their levels.
The lowest is a simple Thanksgiving Ritual. You offer tribute with nothing asked in return. The offering is converted into points based on its value and settled to the Constellation.
Next comes a ritual where something is requested, like a Rain Ritual. You offer many points, conduct a formal ceremony, increase the scale, and ask the Constellation for a miracle. They say the response varies depending on the Constellation's nature.
The final level is the Descent Ritual.
The very situation I was experiencing.
"So, you really don't feel any pain or exhaustion?"
"No, I think I'm okay."
It isn't just requesting something from the Constellation—the act requests that the Constellation personally descend to the earthly plane. In this case, it was like a miracle brought about by the convergence of Lee Ha-rin's Extreme talent, her fervent desire, and the faint power of my true body.
When I use my ability to descend on my own, it feels like being a stuffed plush doll full of cotton balls, whereas descending through Lee Ha-rin's ritual felt like being a plastic Barbie doll. I patted Lee Ha-rin, savoring the vague sensory difference.
I'm too stupid to express the sensations of a non-human Dream Demon and Constellation in words, so I'll stop there.
"Anyway, now that I know, take care of yourself. Your meals have been inadequate lately—please eat your lunch."
The egg-mayo sandwich she'd meant to have for lunch had vanished, turned into the ritual offering. A prickling sensation ran across the back of my head, as if the clone were about to dissolve, and I sent Lee Ha-rin to the dining hall.
Come to think of it, the professor had rushed off to get me coffee—I'd done him a disservice.
With that thought, I squeezed my eyes shut, and when I opened them again, I was back in the one-room apartment. On the screen, Lee Ha-rin was wolfing down a full-course meal, so excited she was choking a bit and gulping water; meanwhile, Han Ye-ji's younger brother had come home early from school and was watching the movie I'd left playing. I wondered whether I'd dozed off and had a dream, but when I turned my head, there on the small table in the studio sat a still-warm egg-mayo sandwich and an Americano with steam curling upward.
An Incarnation who can summon a Constellation to descend... But where could she even use a piece-of-trash summon like me?