Chapter 56: Genius
Chapter 56: Genius
There's one massive difference between talents and Authorities.
The price.
It sounds odd, but the price gap between the most expensive talent and the cheapest Authority is at least fivefold.
To put it in game terms, it's like comparing a 2nd-job-advancement mage's ultimate skill to a 5th-job-advancement archmage's basic attack.
That was the easiest way for me, with my crap brain, to wrap my head around it.
The talents Han Ye-ji had awakened were two: Illusion (幻), an extra phantom strike on every attack, and Swiftness (快), which boosted projectile speed.
The talents I'd gifted her with points were shooting-support skills: Steady Hands, Keen Eye, Calm Breathing.
Apart from digesting the Dream Demon's essence, she hadn't really gotten a thing on her own.
If you converted them into points in the shop, those talents went for roughly 10,000 to 50,000 points a pop.
And now I was scanning the shop for the Authority Kim Ha-eun had just awakened.
A Dream Demon Authority. The shop price of Hope Usurper was a million points.
Considering that Dream Demon-related skills, not general ones, come at a ninety-percent discount...
It was a ten-million-point Authority.
Putting them side by side like this felt a little cruel, but...
One person spends a year mastering a 50,000-point skill someone handed to them, and that's the whole story of them.
Another cracks a ten-million-point skill wide open in an hour.
If you thuggishly reduce it to points alone, wasn't that a two-hundredfold difference in talent?
If I really wanted to be pedantic, she hadn't even gotten a 10,000-point skill on her own, so... about a thousand times the difference?
[Constellation Lethargic Nightmare lavishes praise upon the Incarnation who has independently awakened a high-grade Authority.]
The message I'd sent just to say "that's incredible" got translated into this massive, over-the-top spectacle of a line.
Though, to be fair, the Authority deserved a bit of spectacle.
People always said those with dazzling talent were like fantasy-novel protagonists. They weren't kidding.
[Constellation Lethargic Nightmare expresses wonder at the Incarnation's Hope Usurper.]
[He adds that it is an Authority which mimics the perfect form dreamed of by others, and instructs her to use it well.]
Dreams.
There are the dreams you have when you sleep, and the dreams you hold as hopes for the future.
Hope Usurper literally steals and wields those dreams.
Supposedly, it only works on dreaming intelligent lifeforms, but then, all Dream Demon arts work like that.
Beating Lionheart's contractor is a gym manager, a woman who's dead serious about fitness.
Inside her unconscious mind, there had to be a small, hopeful little wish.
A tiny dream: to exercise with the most perfect form in the world.
Kim Ha-eun had copied that dream outright.
Reading the Authority's detailed description, I was honestly at a loss for words.
Because her mana reserves are so small, she only managed to copy something like exercise form, but what happens once she grinds it up over time?
Just by training to increase her stamina and mana capacity, she could become an all-purpose warrior.
Stand next to an Incarnation of The Sword That Severs the Yoke, and she'd become the greatest swordswoman alive.
Copy someone like Namgung Hui, contracted to the Impregnable Wall, and she'd hit the peak of bare-handed martial arts.
Sword, spear, bow, martial arts — even all kinds of magic.
It's an ultimate move that only makes her strong for a limited time and needs a nearby target to copy, but its utility was practically infinite.
Even now, just looking at the situation: if she copies Beating Lionheart's dream during training, she can execute theoretically perfect training sessions.
'So this is what a genius species looks like.'
The way I'd been planning to sneak looks and copy whatever Dream Demon traits I saw — it felt arrogant just thinking about it.
Screw textbooks. It's like a kid scraping by at the bottom of the math class trying to copy Einstein by memorizing his math.
'I got lucky.'
On the very first day she pulled herself together after her parents' deaths and walked into a gym,
I happened to find her. I wanted to send a thank-you to some faceless god for that.
Anyway. Should I give her a hand there?
"No, please, I'll pay you double — just one more try!"
"Ugh, c'mon, I said I'm completely out of mana!"
"The filming didn't come out right, just one more pull, please!"
"I literally can't move anything below my elbows right now. I'm not running away, boss, why are you like this?"
On the screen below, the gym manager was down on her knees on the floor, eyes bloodshot.
She looked about ready to slam her forehead into the wooden floorboards.
"That pose — the one that made my heart race! You have to show me tomorrow, okay? You promised, Incarnation to Incarnation! Wait, no — when you signed up, you wrote down your address, didn't you? I'll come pick you up tomorrow right on time."
"I said fine already. I can't even lift my arms, so please let me go..."
Was this what you'd call a side effect?
This was the reason the Dream Demons, inhabitants of the dream world, never quite fit into other worlds and always ended up on the fringe.
When you start carelessly messing around with other people's dreams, you get one of two reactions.
They either get jealous and hate you, or they get bewitched and cling with sticky desperation.
"I'll walk on my own two legs, so put me down!"
"Ha-ha, look at those legs wobbling like jelly."
The gym manager hoisted the helpless Kim Ha-eun over her shoulder like a sack of rice and headed for the elevator.
Every office worker's eyeballs swiveled toward them.
Getting slung over a muscular woman's shoulder and delivered like a sack of grain right in front of dozens of people.
If it were me, I'd have bitten my tongue off from sheer humiliation.
※
I watched the gym manager carry Kim Ha-eun all the way home — Kim Ha-eun's legs still trembling like a newborn fawn's from the backlash of forcibly copying someone's dream — and at some point the sun had gone down into a dim dusk.
Lee Ha-rin had finished dinner and was now practicing drawing perfect circles on an uneven floor.
Kim Ha-eun, propped up by the manager, made it back inside and collapsed in the entryway without even washing up, plunging straight into unconscious sleep.
If I had my way, I'd visit Kim Ha-eun's dream right now... but not today.
The city still had a Protector up.
Honestly, I was dying of curiosity.
What the smugglers were transporting, why a Constellation would bother with low-rent smugglers in the first place, and which Constellation it was.
Hell, just taking care of a few talented kids out on the continent would've set them up in luxury. So why do this?
Weren't they basically the first hostile Constellation I'd run into since arriving in this world?
Heart thumping with anticipation, I turned the screen toward Han Ye-ji's bedroom at home.
The world just looked shattered, like low-poly game graphics — but the coordinates weren't jumbled or scrambled or anything.
Lie down on that bed and trigger a lucid dream, and it'd be Han Ye-ji a hundred percent. Obviously.
I killed time munching on a tangerine-like fruit that had shown up in the fridge,
wasting brain cells on stupid thoughts like: was this a fruit that merely looked like a tangerine, or was it a tangerine with just different selective breeding?
Sooner than I expected, somebody came home.
On the screen, what I saw was a brownish mannequin with its name glitching out and its limbs bent backward, sprawling onto the bed —
but the Protector didn't seem to block the dream world.
Because instantly, the world began to spin.
The warped, dirty, jagged field of view snapped into perfect clarity in a single moment.
Before I'd even adjusted to the familiar room, a warm, soft presence latched onto my arm and pressed up against my side.
"Constellation!"
"Yeah. You look like you've got a lot to say."
Before my ballooning curiosity could even form the question about what happened,
she was already clinging to me, posture screaming she was ready to spill everything.
Was there some juicy story? Or did she just want to chatter comfortably?
Excited as a puppy about to be taken on a walk, her little lips wouldn't stop moving.
I gently stroked the back of her head as she leaned against me, and the stories that poured out were all over the place.
From what she had for lunch today, to the senior team she only sees once every six months because their shifts don't line up.
We'd only been apart a single day — how could she possibly have this much to say?
I found it so cute that I ruffled her hair hard, and she just pushed her head into my hand like she didn't care if every strand got messed up.
"Oh, and about the smuggling."
"Right. That's the part I was curious about."
Playing around with her soft hair, I'd followed her story chronologically from lunch onward,
and it had finally reached the part I was interested in.
"They haven't confirmed one hundred percent that a Constellation is directly involved — they're still suspecting it. She said she's about eighty percent sure, but since she doesn't know the Constellation's name, she couldn't state it explicitly."
"Hm. How'd they figure out a Constellation's involved, without knowing which one or having any solid proof?"
"They caught one unofficial, unregistered Incarnation. Said the person had been one for less than two weeks — a total nobody with zero talent, a small fry. But they were carrying three spatial-type Authorities. The kind that eats away at your lifespan and health — just jammed in there brutally, barely enough to let them activate the Authorities..."
"Then it's basically confirmed."
Awakening an Authority is impossible on middling talent alone.
Kim Ha-eun had locked eyes with me and assimilated Dream Demon mana within five minutes flat — and didn't she crack an Authority right then and there?
A once-in-a-century genius with that level of talent,
and one with spatial abilities usable anywhere — you'd have to be insane to turn them into a terminal burn-out asset.
You'd just burn them up for nothing. And 'guy' — or was it a woman?
"Yes. The low-level operatives they arrested had all been granted Authorities way too powerful for their capabilities, so the investigators suspect direct Constellation intervention. She also mentioned the goods they're handling are a complete mishmash, so there might be a targeted endgame."
Han Ye-ji, still rattling off various advisories she'd heard at the meeting, quietly reached out a hand.
Fingers circled around the small of my back, then crept slowly toward my thigh and hip.
I didn't have any particular reason to brush them away, so I just smiled slightly.
She let out a silly little "hee-hee" laugh, kept talking, and quietly started undoing my pants.