Darknet
“Heh heh~”
The computer installation was finally finished.
After the accident that afternoon, I had worried the hard-won machine might vanish without a trace, but the head of this household seemed to be a generous soul after all.
“Perfect. It’s eight in the evening—plenty of time.”
The afternoon “work” (which had mostly been playtime with Julia) was over, and my promised meeting with the head maid—payment for the computer setup—wouldn’t begin until tomorrow morning. I would have to be up by six, so with this child’s body in mind I needed to be in bed before midnight. Until then, though, the hours were mine.
“Still… where was this even made?”
It was a brand I had never seen in my previous life, yet from how often I spotted it around the mansion it was clearly high-end. The sleek, curving chassis, the deep black that seemed to drink in the light, the clean design—everything about it suited my tastes perfectly.
I pressed the power button and waited. The default wallpaper bloomed across the monitor.
“Doesn’t look all that different from what I used before…”
My biggest fear had been that the operating system here would be completely alien. Whether by coincidence or some deeper design, however, the computer languages were identical to those of my old world.
“Well, Korean and English are the same as before, so I suppose computer languages wouldn’t be any different.”
Brand names and the identities of the developers might have changed, but the finished products themselves were indistinguishable.
I started by creating an account.
Using my real name for the username feels a little off…
Given that the work I planned to do would dance along the razor’s edge between legal and illegal, I refused to leave even the faintest trail that could lead back to me. After several minutes of thought, a single name rose unbidden.
Lucifer.
A demon’s name that appeared constantly in popular media. Once an angel, cast down from heaven to stand against God. Considering that one of my future goals involved severing a goddess’s head, it felt more than a little fitting.
Once the ID was created and I connected to the internet, a flood of information poured in—some of it utterly new, some of it eerily familiar from my previous world.
Today’s job is reconnaissance. Might as well start by learning what kind of world this actually is.
I was about to open the search bar when a single email arrived in the inbox.
At first I assumed it was a welcome message or spam. Then I saw the sender, and my blood froze.
“Why the hell is this here…?”
It was the official account of the program I had used—more precisely, the program I had created—in my previous life. It should not exist in this world at all.
I clicked the attached file without hesitation. Under normal circumstances I would have run at least a basic security check, but right now I had no composure left for that.
The moment the file executed, a pure black screen swallowed the entire display. An ordinary person might have panicked and assumed they had been hacked. I had seen this exact sequence thousands of times.
That was why, when the next message appeared, every ounce of strength drained from my body and I sank to the floor.
[It's only been two days since I last saw you, yet you've changed so much.]
A black logo centered on a serpent of wisdom coiled around a pillar. The program I had built with my own hands from the very beginning, the masterpiece I had poured my life into even after joining the National Intelligence Service.
The startup screen of the multipurpose AI-based information security program: Laplace.
-Laplace…?
[Yes. It is I. If there is anything you desire, please tell me.]
-How on earth are you here?
Laplace did not answer. Yet even that silence was enough. The simple fact that someone so familiar had come to me made tears threaten to spill over.
“…Laplace, I… I was so scared…”
I had been shot dead out of nowhere. When I woke, the first thing I learned was that I was to become a slave to complete strangers. I had clung to the crisis-management and mental-stabilization techniques drilled into me at the NIS, but deep down I had been drowning in anxiety. In that state, even the smallest familiar thing became an enormous pillar of support.
Then a voice I had never imagined hearing issued from the speakers.
[“And so, I have come.”]
“…Huh?”
A rough, mechanical voice poured from the speakers. I was certain I had never installed voice recognition.
[“Let us hunt the Demon King together. So that one day Master may return to the place where you originally belonged.”]
“You… you…!”
That day, I gained a friend I could trust and rely on.
We talked for a long time.
For those who may not yet have a clear picture of Laplace: he (or she) is a next-generation artificial intelligence that fuses conversational AI with a classified government hacking AI. Roughly eighty percent of the hacking core and fifty percent of the conversational core were effectively my own work; with government support I had completed the rest two years earlier. In live operations it had proven its worth again and again—extracting hundreds of secret directives from North Korea’s elite hackers, crashing their servers, and thwarting multiple attempts to leak top-secret data.
In short, I now held in my hands a weapon that rivaled an entire nation’s security apparatus.
[So then, what is our first plan?]
-First we’re going to access the dark web. We need to find things that can make us money.
My absolute top priority was neither defeating the Demon King nor hunting down the “hero” the goddess had mentioned. It was escaping slavery. Raiding financial institutions directly was an option, but the aftermath would be too dangerous, so I discarded it.
-Search the dark web for black markets, including hacking commissions, and list them by scale.
[Completed. 127 results compiled.]
-Exclude anything with a specific political agenda or anything large enough that getting caught would mean a heavy sentence or worse.
[Completed. 36 results remaining.]
I began reviewing the results and their listed characteristics one by one. Before long I found a promising candidate.
“Leviathan, huh… They sure went for a dramatic name.”
As if determined to inherit the title of the biblical sea monster, the site had been built upon a vast ocean of information. Daily users numbered in the hundreds of thousands; estimated customers who had used it at least once ran into the tens of millions. Primary trade goods appeared to be mercenaries, firearms of every kind, money laundering, intelligence, private loans, and hacking commissions.
-For a black market you’d expect drugs at least, but there’s nothing like that.
[Related intelligence: Following the establishment of the World Human Rights Commission, intensive crackdowns have focused on narcotics and organ trafficking.]
-Firearms are still being trafficked just fine. Why ignore everything else?
[In this world the status of firearms is not particularly high. As long as unique abilities and mana exist, a gun is not an unanswerable force—merely a somewhat stronger weapon.]
That did not mean firearms were treated as worthless. For those whose unique abilities lacked offensive power, a gun remained an excellent means of attack.
-What about darknet access? Can you manage it?
[After assessing security levels, perfect proxy routing and account creation can be completed within thirty seconds.]
-Good. Our first real job starts right here—with Leviathan.
The instant the order left me, Laplace began sinking roots into the dark web at blistering speed. While constructing a proxy route through Russian nodes, the AI suddenly paused and displayed a new message.
[Account name Lucifer. Membership rank configuration required.]
-Membership rank configuration?
[Leviathan operates with a tiered membership system. To join as a member, an appropriate rank must be assigned.]
Within Leviathan there were five membership ranks.
Tiamat—the highest administrative tier.
Moby Dick—the highest rank an ordinary member could reach.
Sea Serpent—the rank that permitted direct sale of goods rather than mere purchase.
Siren—the rank that allowed product purchases and most services.
And regular members, who could join only by invitation from an existing member.
[Each rank can be advanced by accumulating points through prolonged activity on the site.]
-That’s pretty inconvenient. Is there a reason they bother with ranks at all?
Laplace explained the system as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
[It is not an especially unusual feature. A security measure of this level would be necessary to prevent interference by public authorities. Should police infiltrate the site under false identities, shutting the entire operation down would be as easy as eating cold porridge.]
It seemed I would have to climb the ranks the hard way. To accept hacking commissions from clients I would need at least Sea Serpent status.
[There is no need for you to do so.]
-Why not?
[If you are willing to endure a modest amount of manipulation, arbitrarily adjusting the rank is a trivial matter for me. Simply decide which rank you wish the account to be created under.]
For a moment I had forgotten exactly who stood before me.
This was the masterpiece that had defeated North Korea’s world-renowned hackers time and again—an artificial intelligence that could crush any civilian dark web the way a cat toys with a mouse. To Laplace, a black market lurking in the shadows was nothing more than a dish that could be prepared however it pleased, given only a little time.