Chapter 51: Smuggling
Chapter 51: Smuggling
A soft wind drifted through the branches.
Beyond the rough yet pleasant texture of bark beneath my palm, I could sense spirit bodies gliding freely through the air.
A Clone — the highest-grade technique of spirit magic, acquired through points and effort with no one to teach me.
The first thing I did after mastering that fiendishly difficult art was pay a visit to a young boy.
A little embarrassing, perhaps, but what could I do? Wanting to drop in on the first conversation partner I'd had in over a hundred years was only natural.
Elves might live for centuries at a leisurely pace, but when you spend enough time wedged among humans, you learn to move at their tempo from time to time.
His replies had been so much friendlier than those of other Constellations — my heart had quickened just a little.
'What does he look like? Descending already... I'm a bit jealous.'
Would he resemble his Clone? Or would he be different?
What sort of mana would he carry, meeting face-to-face inside a Constellation's domain?
He keeps a branch of the World Tree by his bed and seems to sleep well — surely he doesn't dislike spirit bodies?
I tamped down the flutter in my chest.
How many decades had it been since my heart had pounded this hard?
If I had my way, I'd calm these racing nerves and wait another twenty years to converse — long enough to present myself as a poised senior — but a human lifespan is simply too short.
Dream Demons live on the same timescale as humans. If I forced elven notions of time on him, it would only wear him out.
'I've never encountered Dream Demon mana before...'
As a dwarf is deft with its hands, as a beastman sprints across the plains, Dream Demons excel at indirect experience through their Clones. That much was obvious just from watching him descend to his Incarnations within a single year — whereas I had been bound to my Constellation's domain for decades.
Like fish-men breathing underwater. Racial aptitudes. I confess I had envied his illusion-based Clone, just a little. It had been far too long since I'd spoken with anyone.
I wasn't disillusioned with my life as an elf. But sometimes, I couldn't help envying another race.
'Have I arrived?'
I squeezed my eyes shut and lay back on the bed. The green chamber dissolved away, and a strange new room filled my vision — branches of the World Tree bulging from the walls, furniture hewn from wood, and a single man staring back at me, alone.
I focused my concentration and handled the spirit. The link was still unsteady; the slightest shock felt as though it might sever it. Not that anything inside a Constellation's domain would actually harm a Clone, but still.
"He— llo—!"
The moment the spirit's mouth opened, something felt wrong.
Before I could adjust to my abruptly inverted view, a wave of mana swept across every inch of my skin, tickling, heady — like the scent of the flower-keeping jar I had tumbled into as a child.
My mouth recited the greeting I had rehearsed, but my senses had already started swimming, dizzy and drunk.
"Fa—, face to f—"
My breath caught and stopped.
I couldn't complete a single sentence. My throat locked up, breathing severed. Bubbling. Heat rising. I wrenched every muscle and forced my neck rigid.
"H-Hello!"
And that was the end.
Pop. The familiar ceiling of my room snapped back into view.
"Wh-what was that...?"
Still unable to open my eyes properly, I scrubbed at my face, utterly mortified. My cheeks blazed hot.
Something I could never have perceived through the Clone on the other side of the screen: the scent of his mana.
"So that's why the elders warned us to be careful, isn't it? I should've waited instead of dashing over the moment I said I was coming..."
Elven mana carries the scent of the deep forest.
Dwarves' mana smells of iron filings pounded under flame. Beastmen and humans carry a faint trace of their homeland's mana, depending on where they were born. I had assumed Dream Demons would be similar.
Sweet. Gamey. Blatant yet teasing. Lewd yet serene — as if it would wrap you in a warm embrace one moment and violently thrash you the next.
A maddening torrent of mana. Calling it a scent was too gentle for a sensation so violent it turned my brain inside out.
Yes. That young Dream Demon smelled unspeakably indecent.
Far too stimulating for an elf who had spent more than a hundred years holed up in her room, living untouched as a maiden.
※
The messenger stopped.
'The hell? Now I'm actually worried.'
Specifically, a tiny little spirit had popped out, warbled a few hellos, bubbled over, and then vanished — and there'd been no word since. A Constellation wouldn't come to any real harm, and Jeong Ah-rin was still walking around perfectly intact beside Han Ye-ji, so it was probably nothing.
The elf girl who'd ducked out in shyness after a single face-to-face did nag at my mind, but something else came up and scattered my attention.
"Senior, what's happening this time?"
"Dunno. Looks like something big went off..."
The familiar trio gathered in the office, huddled close. Jeong Ah-rin was right — whatever had happened was large, because the place was packed. Two or three times the population density I saw during the coffee handouts. Had they pulled in everyone except the patrols on duty?
"Alright, everyone, pay attention."
What followed felt like a dated police drama.
Two hard-faced, middle-aged women in rumpled clothes — one sharp, one grinning slyly — strode in and began briefing the room. It must have been fairly serious, because they looked important, and they'd asked me, politely and with repeated bows, to withdraw my Clone. I still hadn't managed to hand out the coffee; I was already back in my studio flat by then.
I doubted the view was any different from here, so I kept watching out of curiosity while the other Incarnations started murmuring amongst themselves.
"So, smugglers have entered the city?"
"But do we really all need to assemble over a few smugglers?"
"Doesn't this seem way too heavy-handed for that?"
Questions flew from every direction.
Fair enough. Assembling well over a hundred crime-suppression-specialist Incarnations wasn't exactly a proportionate response to a smuggling ring. We'd wiped out a terrorist cell of several dozen with fewer. A full muster over some smugglers?
But that noisy, skeptical atmosphere died in an instant. A single sentence silenced the room.
"It appears a Constellation is directly entangled on their side as well."
"Excuse me?"
Postures that had gone lax — as if the whole thing was a waste of worry — snapped back to rigid attention. Reactions ranged from people fiddling with their ears like they'd just heard something they shouldn't, to someone choking on her drink and fumbling for a napkin.
Well. Throw one Constellation into the equation and the entire story changes.
Never mind the fact that the people of this world practically venerate Constellations as semidivine — if a criminal organization gets backing from a Constellation, how much damage can it really cause?
Because this office? There's no black fog here.
Obvious as it sounds: if I can see in, so can another Constellation. If anti-Constellation countermeasures had been in place from the start, I'd never have been able to watch Han Ye-ji and eventually find my way to her. And judging by her notes, the Unfading Giant Tree had been able to peek in a few times because of me.
Out of these hundred-plus Incarnations, some of them had to be rookies favored by their own Constellations — meaning Constellations I didn't know had probably glanced through here a few times too.
So wouldn't the smuggling side's Constellation be watching this meeting right alongside me?
"Therefore, we will be activating anti-Constellation Protect for the duration of this operation. What's crucial is the contraband items themselves—"
The two high-ranking officials seemed to go on speaking, but I had spectacularly missed the point.
Why did I phrase it that way? Because the sound cut out.
"Ah, come on. Seriously?"
Like watching a broken television, the people on the other side of the screen suddenly started mouthing silently — and then, almost as if the monitor itself had cracked, the frames of their eyes, mouths, and lower faces began to distort grotesquely. Faces blurred like clay characters in a game running on a graphics card that was never meant to handle it.
"They kicked on the Protect right away?"
Wondering if it was a glitch on my end, I scrolled the mouse around and zoomed out over the city, but all of it looked like that now. Polygon lumps resembling cars drifted through the air. Stick-figure people twisted their limbs at hideous angles, lurching like balloon dolls.
'Fucking thorough, these bastards...'
Honestly, I was dying to know what the contraband was, why it was so serious, and which Constellation had gotten tangled up in this peaceful rear-guard city — and they cut the feed at the most perfect moment.
When night fell, I could enter Han Ye-ji's lucid dream, but that was hours away. Even if she fell asleep at midnight, I'd have to wait nearly eight hours.
I dragged the view around. The Protector really did seem to envelop the city completely — the highways exiting its boundaries were perfectly clear.
Still musing over it, I slid the mouse and glanced at the screen.
"Here too?"
The neighboring city where Han Ye-ji was staying. And the city beyond that.
"Insane. Absolutely insane..."
A full five cities were wrapped in Protector coverage.
Not the Eastern Continent's capital, no — but decently developed midsize cities. Zooming out on the screen still couldn't fit them in one view; it took ages to scroll across them, and you could never canvass them all even if you sent a Clone down.
And smugglers were tangled across five such cities?
At this scale, it felt less like smugglers and more like a multinational mafia syndicate.