Chapter 8: Sweet Dreams (Part 3)
Chapter 8: Sweet Dreams (Part 3)
Spend enough time online and you inevitably run into people who use the mask of anonymity to dredge up their ugliest desires.
She already knew, as a woman, that having your eyes drawn to a handsome man's chest or the proud ridge of his groin was just biology.
But human sexuality was a vast and many-splendored thing, and all kinds of specimens crawled the web.
Han Ye-ji, having sampled the internet's buffet of uninhibited kinks, was by now theoretically well-versed in just about everything.
A few she'd accepted. A few made her recoil with the thought: Isn't that a bit much, coming from a woman?
There were horsefuckers who got drunk on animations of purple ponies and other colorful breeds transforming into well-endowed pretty-boys,
and who were obsessed with dildos molded like equine genitalia.
There were genderswap creeps who arbitrarily rewrote historical Incarnations and Constellations as men.
And there were the ones who called caring men "Daddy" and acted out infantile baby-talk.
She couldn't understand it.
She shouldn't have been able to understand it.
'Fuck... this is so humiliating. The Constellation doesn't know, right?'
The mortifying memory of being a high schooler, shoving blankets and underwear into the communal laundry room in the dead of night.
Thankfully, the Constellation appeared to have been asleep at that hour—or else looking elsewhere—since there'd been no reaction whatsoever...
But he hadn't actually watched the whole thing and then kept his mouth shut out of sheer consideration, had he? Seriously?
No matter how many sexual positions or varied fetishes existed in the world,
she'd always thought that turning into a clingy, mewling woman was, well, a pretty questionable one.
She'd thought that right up until last night's dream.
The gentle, tender touch stroking her hair.
The soft rustle of a man's thick fingers parting the strands and caressing her scalp.
That masculine hand sweeping smoothly from the crown of her head, down her nape, all the way to the small of her back.
The warm chest pressed against her spine was a strange sensation—firm yet snug all at once.
Burying her face against that man's chest as he held her was so profoundly comfortable her mind went blank.
Shut off from the world, feeling nothing but pure paternal affection inside that fiery male embrace.
At her ear, a low, bass voice murmuring good girl, good girl as if soothing a child—
and then, a hand squeezing her ass before a firm finger stealthily slipped somewhere secret...
'It wasn't—it wasn't really the Constellation, was it?'
Wasn't that practically more father-and-daughter than anything between a man and a woman?
Savoring paternal affection and acting like a spoiled child, and then resolving sexual desire on the back of that?
No matter how she thought about it, it felt like a twisted fetish.
Worse, the target wasn't some random attractive guy she'd seen somewhere—it was her imagined Constellation.
Constellation. Your first contractor's first use of her new Authority was to have a dirty dream.
And in that dream-fantasy, she conjured up an image of you—
At that thought, a tidal surge of self-loathing washed in, and Han Ye-ji cut the line of thinking short.
She rationalized it away, desperately telling herself it was just the stress of living in a dormitory, in an unfamiliar place instead of home.
※
Booted out of Han Ye-ji's dream, I sank into deep contemplation.
'Endure for twelve hours, or jerk off once and go to sleep?'
Enforced celibacy had dulled me,
but a naked beauty rubbing her whole body against mine inside a shared dream was more than enough to shatter that discipline and leave my senses razor-sharp.
I was no frog emerging from hibernation. My cock now sprang to attention at the mere sight of Han Ye-ji on the screen, anytime and anywhere, and it was starting to get genuinely annoying.
If I wanted to take care of it solo, I could.
There was no bathroom, but this room made food waste and filth simply vanish.
But when I thought about the post-nut clarity and self-loathing that would follow, I couldn't act rashly.
Better to just hold out for another sixteen hours or so and then re-enter Han Ye-ji's dream.
After kicking me out of her dream, Han Ye-ji had been racing around breathlessly.
Laundry at the communal room from the crack of dawn, a shower before morning training started.
She'd chosen the intensive physical conditioning track, then proceeded to sweat buckets at the gym—
she was spending her day at a frantic, borderline self-abusive pace, no breaks.
Until night found her again, and she lay down on her bed.
Her pose—lying stiffly on the bed, hand frozen midair with a finger raised—was honestly comical.
Well, considering she'd had a wet dream that woke her up just from being touched by hand, she had every reason to be mortified.
What was the joke? Cup noodles took three minutes. This had taken a few prods of a finger.
As I was thinking that, whether lust had won out or she'd decided she was used to lucid dreaming by now,
she pressed her finger firmly into the air and then let her arm flop down.
[Will you intervene in Incarnation Han Ye-ji's lucid dream?]
[Yes / No]
The button I pressed was, naturally, Yes.
The big TV screen I'd been watching at my side and the mouse in my hand whooshed away.
Feeling the now-familiar white noise flooding my ears, I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them.
'Now where's this?'
Not a house, not a café, not a restaurant. Out of nowhere: a gym.
In a space lined with treadmills and packed with all kinds of machines whose names I didn't know, Han Ye-ji was by herself, going hard at some muscle training.
The wall where the dumbbells were shelved was a full-length mirror—probably for checking form—so I headed that way.
A sleeveless tank top, and a physique with noticeably more muscle definition than last time.
If my last appearance had been "clean-cut church boy," this time I was basically a buff gym trainer.
Did that mean I was supposed to help Han Ye-ji as she rhythmically shoved her legs against some bizarre machine?
When had I ever set foot in a gym?
What should I do—just walk up to her first?
I approached softly from behind.
Han Ye-ji was dressed for the gym too, though her outfit was a shade on the breezy side.
Tight gray training pants that climbed just above the knee, halfway up her thighs, and a black string-back tank that left her eleven-line abs completely exposed.
If her chest had been even a little larger, the amount of fabric actually covering her skin would've been so scant you couldn't tell if the top was a tank or a sports bra.
Not that it was small, exactly... a solid B-cup, maybe.
Definitely bigger than the malnutrition-flattened women back in the apocalypse.
My eyes met Han Ye-ji's as she panted through her lower-body workout.
Her pupils darted breathlessly again. But today's reaction was a little different.
Her eyes rolled around as if she couldn't figure out why I was there.
Compared to last time, when she'd been so flooded with lust that she'd visually devoured every part of my body, now her gaze flicked toward the floor and our surroundings far more often.
"No—why, how are you...?"
She shook her head a few times, and then that muffled white noise filled my ears again.
This time, we materialized in the Academy's enormous athletics field.
Not a shred of shade, the full force of the sun beating straight down, and there was Han Ye-ji, running by herself.
Now she was wearing an ordinary short-sleeved, shorts gym uniform, and I was in a male instructor's uniform and dress shoes.
Watching her back as sweat poured off her, I recognized her state.
She was trying to crush her libido with exercise, mortified by the wet dream in this lucid-dream state.
But did exercise even suppress sexual desire? Especially exercise in a dream, not reality?
As I stood on the track, Han Ye-ji finished a lap and naturally came toward me.
Panting, she'd been staring up at the sky while running; her gaze shifted to me,
and the world started whirling again. I took a long stride forward.
"Con—Constellation, you're..."
"And if I am?"
"Agh... but that can't be...?"
The spinning world settled back into a familiar sight.
That bedroom from before. That bed.
The exact spot where Han Ye-ji had been defeated by two of my fingers and had awakened mid-climax in a wet dream.
The mortifying memory must've struck her all over again; her face erupted into a churning mess of red and pale.
Now, there was no bathrobe. We sat facing each other on the bed, each wearing nothing but underwear.
As my gaze briefly snagged on her braless, springily mobile breasts, she forcibly squeezed out a voice.
"This—this is a lucid dream of mine... so you can't really be the Constellation, right? You're just my dream..."
That crawling voice of hers gave me a strange thought.
Or rather, a strange sensation. As if etched into instinct, I responded naturally.
"That's right. This is your lucid dream."
"Right? So that means I..."
"And I am the Constellation of Nightmares."
The blazing red on her face drained to stark white.
I'd only been in this world for three months, but Han Ye-ji had been born and raised in it.
Just as surely as men did housework and women handled outside affairs, Constellations were beings so exalted that humanity could not presume to approach them.
For one thing, without the Constellations, humanity would've gone extinct.
Gods who communicated in real time and bestowed gifts upon mankind.
That was what Constellations were.
Han Ye-ji was feeling every emotion at once as she recalled the fact that she had projected her sexual urges onto such a Constellation and relieved her lust with him.
Attraction to a handsome man.
The subtle sex appeal she felt from a fit member of the opposite sex.
Gratitude toward the Constellation who had chosen and cared for her.
The paternal affection she'd felt in his soothing touch.
The shame of having her desires exposed so nakedly inside a dream.
The guilt of having dared to use the first Authority her Constellation had granted her to process her own horniness.
And a sense of moral corruption at seeing the version of me that indulged her pampering—and her own self that wanted to keep acting like a spoiled child.
What had made her dream was desire; what had made her stop was guilt. So my job was simple.
Lethargic Nightmare—my Dream Demon instincts, now part of my identity, were guiding me on how to move,
what to say, which direction to take here.
This place was Han Ye-ji's lucid dream, but it was also my main stage as a Dream Demon.
Once again, I spread my arms and embraced her like last night's dream.
Savoring the sensation of her soft breasts rubbing against my bare chest, I gently nibbled her crimson, burning earlobe.
"Yes. I am your Constellation, my darling first Incarnation."
"I'm so sorry, Constellation. Doing this—using the Authority I was given to do this—"
"Shh. What does it matter? I am your Constellation, but this place is your dream."
Like a radio with the power yanked, her mouth clamped shut.
Her rambling self-justifications had long since vanished.
Her body's fine trembling signaled that lust was slowly eating away at guilt.
"This place is entirely your dream. A sweet lucid dream where everything you wish for comes true."
My mouth moved on its own, pouring out words in an old-fashioned register.
A gentle, affectionate voice I could hardly believe was coming from my own mouth—a mouth far more accustomed to phrases like "grab everything, kill everything."
"What would you have me do for you?"
At that small question, she parted her lips with difficulty.