Chapter 52: The Third Time
Chapter 52: The Third Time
Getting blocked from the screen was one thing—but this was deadly boring.
I'd been treating the whole Constellation-Incarnation relationship as a kind of clicker game, an idle game. The character I picked—my Incarnation—went through events, and whenever she did, points flowed back to me. I'd use those points to upgrade my own abilities and hers. If I'm being honest, that was about the depth of my emotional engagement. It isn't that I thought of Lee Ha-rin or Han Ye-ji—people who'd become my Incarnations and devoted themselves to me—as scraps of data. I mean that I'd been playing this world like one of those idle games from my past life. When you play a game about raising something or other, you tap the screen until your fingers cramp to squeeze out every bit of efficiency, idle game or not. That's what it felt like, slipping into my Incarnations' dreams to care for them and look after them—the kind of thing you could just leave running, but you don't.
Honestly, what does an ordinary guy who finished his military service, was getting ready to graduate college, and then lived through the apocalypse know about training espers and mages? Nothing I hadn't seen in a novel or a game.
'This is so fucking boring.'
Which is why having the screen blocked like this made my insides itch with frustration. My brain understood—the Constellation Protector was on for security reasons, something important was happening—but my gut was reacting like my favorite mobile game had just glitched out and frozen mid-play.
I sprawled on the bed for no reason, then got up and drank a canned drink from the fridge, then sat in front of the screen, then paced the room. Now that I had enough to eat and a comfortable life, my past-life habits were creeping back in. Back then, on days off with nothing to do, I'd plant myself in front of the computer, flop onto the bed and mess with my phone, watch a little TV—restlessly bouncing from one thing to another.
Bored out of my mind, I half-wished a note from the Unfading Giant Tree would show up, but after we'd met face to face, there'd been no contact at all. I didn't know if they had to initiate things on their end for a conversation to happen—every time I tucked a paper note between the branches, it just sat there without disappearing.
So I turned my attention to a different city where Protect wasn't active at all.
To find a third contractor.
Han Ye-ji was steadily shedding her rookie label and growing solid enough to rank among the established mid-tier Incarnations in her region, and Lee Ha-rin was diligently performing her rituals again today. Her Talent Extreme trait—the one that pushed all her growth toward one extreme—had her training in ritual-related skills with an almost obsessive focus. She still couldn't let go of her Constellation fandom even while doing that; sometimes documents about me would get organized and posted online, but it didn't give me a bad feeling. It wasn't like anyone was writing insults. The content was things like "he's handsome," "he takes good care of my food," "he's kind," "he likes sweets." I was a little puzzled about why someone was writing up a logical analysis of my decision to pick a lemon candy instead of melon candy for dessert at the barbecue place, but if that's the culture in this world, I'm the one who has to adapt. When in Rome.
I let my thoughts drift while scrolling the view over the capital.
Two Incarnations were too few. I'd been wrong to think I'd keep the number small so I could focus on taking care of them. My Incarnations weren't game characters who stopped moving if I stopped clicking. Whenever both of them had their own business going on, I was left with absolutely nothing to do. Then again, a CEO with a hundred employees doesn't personally check in on the work of all hundred.
"That's huge..."
I settled in with some salty potato chips and a sweet fizzy drink and started exploring the capital. As you'd expect from a capital city, the buildings were taller, and patches of black fog clung here and there. Urbanization, I think they call it. Anyway, the capital in this world had the same pattern: higher housing prices, taller buildings, more people.
"Now there's a food I've never seen before."
I'd started sightseeing in the capital under the pretense of recruiting one more contractor, but maybe I wasn't all that desperate. Before I knew it, I was wandering through the city's alleys hunting for good places to eat. I couldn't eat anything right now—descending via a clone meant I had no money on me—but window-shopping foods I'd never seen in my life felt like planning out a restaurant itinerary for a trip. A few of this world's traditional dishes were already unfamiliar, and on top of that there were fusion creations mixing in cuisines from other continents. It was genuinely entertaining to look at.
As I browsed the alleys, shifting the screen sideways bit by bit, a massive building filled the view. Not Eastern Continent style or Western Continent style—just a gigantic rectangular tower. It was so tall that at the zoom level I'd been using to explore the alleys, the whole screen was swallowed by it and you couldn't see anything else.
'Is that about a hundred floors?'
Despite its height, no black fog clung to it, so I slowly panned around. Eighty-five floors above ground, fifteen below. A hundred floors total, top to bottom, a colossal building. And inside, countless people were milling around, absolutely drenched in sweat.
"Straighten your back!"
"One more, just one more—that's it, one more!"
Not a metaphor. They were genuinely drenched.
※
A feast of muscular women made my head go a little hazy. A sight I never could've imagined in my past life.
'This huge building is a gym?'
More precisely, it was a hundred-story comprehensive fitness center.
"That's right, ma'am, one more rep—I can tell from how your arms are extending, you've got one more in you."
"Keep your thighs together—whoa, if your ankle twists that'll be trouble."
"Grip the bar straight—push your thumb a bit further forward and hold it there."
Everything from basic bodyweight exercises to swordsmanship training with wooden blades to archery using plastic bows. The tightly secured underground floors even housed a live-fire shooting range. A few floors here and there held rest facilities—baths, massage, sauna, a restaurant—but every other floor was packed with people working out.
The reason, naturally, was to prepare to become Incarnations.
Giant as it was, ultimately it was a membership-based gym—no, a gym building. I picked all this up from watching people in the office getting consultations and signing up, and from listening to the trainers' advice. People building physical ability and aiming for careers in athletic fields. Get noticed by a Constellation and become an Incarnation: jackpot. If that doesn't work out, become a soldier and angle for a second chance at a military academy. Give up on that, and off to a phys-ed program somewhere, probably. Because of that, the gender ratio in the enormous building sat at something like 8:2, women teeming everywhere. Perfect conditions for finding a contractor. A military academy gathers people preparing to ship out to wars beyond the continent; this place gathered people who were openly, explicitly aiming to become Incarnations. It was like a towering vertical version of a cram-school district.
Becoming an Incarnation made your whole life bloom in a way a bottom-rung civil-servant job from my past life could never match, so the place was packed. And packed with people meant packed with beautiful women. Some had the kind of druggy, impossible-to-tell-if-male-or-female physiques, but most of the women weren't at that extreme. Long boxy tank tops that with every arm rep let a sliver of side-boob peek out through the loose armholes, skintight aerobics outfits, leggings that women wore everywhere the way guys everywhere wore shorts. Everywhere I looked, it felt like my eyes were being treated to something nice. Even more so because the women didn't seem to pay any particular attention to their clothes. A world of reversed gender roles—women were the ones casting lecherous gazes, and men were on the receiving end. In a world like that, with only women gathered together, why would they fuss around hiding side-boob or covering cleavage?
While I was browsing floor by floor, one person caught my eye.
She was dressed plainly. Gym pants and a short-sleeved tee—the kind of thing a guy could wear without a second thought. A woman with black, straight hair pulled back in a neat ponytail, drenched in sweat, running and running on a treadmill. Her figure wasn't staggering, her clothes weren't revealing. Her face was pretty enough, but if I had to compare, she was around the level of Lee Ha-rin or Han Ye-ji. Meaning less pretty than the celebrities on billboards or the famous Incarnations. And yet I found myself staring blankly at her as she ran. I slid the zoom in for a closer look. Treadmill speed: 9. Distance already run: over 60 kilometers. The kind of numbers that made you wonder if she was training for a marathon. I had a small doubt—wouldn't running like that be bad for your joints?—but once I saw her face, the trivial thought vanished. Because she was running with a desperate, almost tearful expression, barely breathing.
Her breathing was shot, her form wobbling slightly. Looking closely, her footfalls weren't even rhythmic; she kept faltering, looking like she was about to pitch backward, or fall and vomit up everything inside her. Not just "she looks like she's struggling"—this was the level where the thought 'isn't she going to die at this rate?' crept in. The treadmill was tucked into a corner, no trainer nearby, and so the self-punishing run went on and on. Finally, as if her stamina had hit its absolute limit, she pressed the STOP button and draped herself over the treadmill's armrests like laundry, gasping. She sucked in air with awful hacking sounds, like someone who'd been pulled from the water, and then—the moment her breathing steadied the slightest bit—she climbed right back onto the treadmill. This time, at least, she started at a slow jog around speed 3 to loosen up, but I couldn't help the curiosity. What made her push herself on the treadmill like she was trying to kill herself? Maybe she wasn't planning to keep running, or maybe she didn't have the stamina left. In under five minutes, she was off the treadmill again, and I sent a clone down beside her.