Upgrades, Secrets, and the Dowager's Call
A few days had passed since they finished the purification request.
"Tch. Has it already been that long?"
Jincheon grumbled as he rose from his cross-legged seat the moment Heliane's transmission came through.
They had taken the enormous seven-hundred-thousand-credit payout from the job and poured it straight into the modifications they had been putting off to save money.
Jincheon had added a new-model 95mm rail machine gun and a high-voltage shock wire to Gareld's right arm, then forced the mecha's speed upgrade from 1.7 times to 2.5 times. He had originally aimed for triple speed, but the price of any booster engine capable of that performance had suddenly more than doubled, so he had to settle short of the mark.
Heliane upgraded the performance of Saisalas's rear beam gun and the beam guns mounted on its fists, then swapped the targeting sensors and radar for high-grade units.
Calsira replaced her heat axe with a laser sword, bought the exact same new-model 95mm rail machine gun Jincheon had chosen, then modified the left arm to fire shotgun shells and focused the rest of her budget on incremental overall performance boosts.
The seven hundred thousand credits vanished in an instant. They even burned through part of the money they already had on hand. Still, everyone looked thoroughly satisfied now that they had finally been able to customize their machines exactly the way they wanted.
"All of you, get in."
"Squeak."
Inside the transport ship's power room, Jincheon sent the tiny rats he had created scurrying into the maze of machinery. They were no ordinary rats. Their hides were a reddish-brown that looked almost painted on.
"Heh. This is why this world is fun. There's always something new to learn."
He settled into place and smiled with genuine pleasure at the Mother currently absorbing energy from the power source. After reclaiming the Mother as spoils, Jincheon had brought it straight to the power room and poured every free hour into mastering control of its body.
A Mother normally absorbed human corpses for resources, but when no corpses were available it could convert energy drawn from a power source into the raw materials needed to produce Crypters. The rats he had just created were living proof—creatures he had shaped by directly piloting the Mother. Because he was the one controlling it, the transport never suffered power shortages.
With the modified mechas due any moment, he locked the power-room door and went out to confirm the hand-over. The technician who had done the work turned out to be the same Cave-race mechanic who had once warned him. The man simply looked at Jincheon, let out a long sigh, and walked away without a word.
"Time to get back to work."
They had spent every credit they earned on the upgrades, but since they had finally reached the performance levels they wanted, they would focus on making money for a while.
"Jincheon."
"Hm?"
Once the technicians had all left, Heliane approached with a slightly stiff expression.
"What is it?"
"That Mother. Are you really going to leave it like that?"
"The Mother's soul is already gone. What's left is nothing but a shell that moves according to my will. It's not dangerous in the slightest."
"I already confirmed that part, so I don't care about the danger. The problem is what happens if other people find out."
The anti-Zabalcan coalition Heliane had once belonged to, the Zabalcan Empire itself, and every other nation in the galaxy all shared the same burning interest: how to put Crypters to military use.
"Somewhere out there, right this second, people are pouring endless research into controlling Crypters. If you can turn cheap biological soldiers into elite troops without expensive machinery, the utility is beyond any price tag."
"And if they catch us, what then?"
"Exactly. The moment word gets out that we can control Crypters, the entire galaxy will try to recruit us. And knowing your personality…"
"Not a chance in hell."
"Right. That's when the real problem starts. If persuasion fails, they'll try to kidnap us by force. And your power won't tolerate that."
"Hmm. Sounds like it could get pretty messy."
Now that he understood what Heliane was driving at, Jincheon pictured himself fighting the people who would come to snatch him and smiled with open satisfaction. In the worst case they might end up facing entire nations as enemies.
"But I'm not about to give up the convenience I'll gain just because I'm scared of that. I'd rather fill my crew with monsters I create myself than take any men into the party."
Unless the situation was truly special, Jincheon never traveled with male companions. Even back in Murim he had only shared the road with men when they were chasing the same target or when he was saving someone in crisis. He had no intention of riding this tiny transport forever, and he needed Crypters if he was ever going to crew cruisers and battleships with the handful of people he actually kept around. Living corpses that moved only by his will made perfect subordinates.
"You took the Mother right in front of the other mercenaries. Crypter researchers are going to come looking. What then?"
"I'll just say I sold it somewhere else. Tell them I even took a confidentiality fee. What are they going to do about it?"
"…Haa."
Heliane shook her head at his stubborn refusal to bend.
"Um."
"Yeah?"
Calsira, who had been listening quietly, tilted her head as something occurred to her.
"Couldn't we just replace that role with machines? Sure, they'd be expensive and need maintenance tech, but it still seems more stable than pouring money into research."
"Oh, I thought of that too. They make robots, right? Just slap some artificial intelligence on them."
"What… Ah. Right. Both of you are missing some basic knowledge."
Heliane had been about to call the idea stupid, then remembered the special circumstances the two of them lived under and carefully explained instead.
"Fifty years ago, someone developed artificial intelligence that could think for itself like a person."
"Fifty years?"
Jincheon cocked his head, finding it strange that he had never once seen an AI despite half a century having passed.
"The nation that developed it automated every single weapon. No training needed—just inject knowledge and the machines handled everything. They didn't even need people anymore."
"…This is starting to sound really bad."
Calsira felt the atmosphere grow stranger with every word.
"The moment every weapon was fully automated, the AI declared it would kill every living thing and create a machine nation."
"Pwahahaha! This world is the absolute best! Aliens and Terminators existing in the same setting!"
Jincheon burst out laughing at the existence of both space-monster Crypters and a Skynet that wanted to rule humanity, cackling so hard he could barely breathe. Heliane ignored him and continued, certain he could still hear her even while laughing.
"At first everyone laughed it off, but once machines far superior to humans were weaponized, they overran the neighboring countries in no time. Then they started capturing people and forcibly converting their bodies into machines."
"Th-then what? What happened after that?"
Calsira asked as if she were listening to a horror story.
"Fortunately the Draconians and several federations took the threat seriously and joined forces. They managed to wipe it out. The nation that created the AI was reduced to scorched earth—a dead land where nothing can live."
Of course the story did not end there.
"They could terraform the dead land anytime they wanted, but they left it as a permanent warning so the same disaster would never happen again. Because of that, no matter how much automation you build, only a human is allowed to oversee it."
That was why a world capable of building giant robots and warships still had no advanced artificial intelligence.
"So automation devices are everywhere, but there's no AI to command them all."
Jincheon finished laughing and muttered that the lack of AI was a shame, then suddenly exploded.
"Damn it! If I was going to come to this world, I should've arrived fifty years earlier!"
He was furious that he had missed the chance to film Skynet versus Murim Man after already having Alien versus Murim Man.
"No. Something like Skynet wouldn't go down that easily. It's definitely hiding somewhere, waiting to rise again."
"Don't say scary things like that! That would be a real catastrophe!"
"Exactly! Even as a joke, please don't say that!"
Scolded by both women, Jincheon still refused to abandon the idea that the AI was out there somewhere. In any case, even the slightest attempt to develop artificial intelligence now invited the entire world's condemnation—a path of thorns—so the shift of interest toward Crypters was inevitable.
The problem was that controlling Crypters required controlling a Mother, and nothing anyone had tried could do it. Research enthusiasm was drying up. In that climate, the existence of a man who could freely command Crypters was a shock that could rewrite the flow of the entire universe. The bigger problem was that only Jincheon could do it.
Just absorb the Mother's soul, then send your own Intent into it. Simple, right?
Saying it that way did not make it any more possible for anyone else.
"Don't go talking about Crypters anywhere."
"Okay, okay. I get how important it is."
"…Huuu…"
Heliane sighed at his playful answer and set the problem aside for now. The ship's food stores had run dry; they needed supplies. They could have simply ordered, but Jincheon insisted on seeing and tasting the ingredients himself, so the party took the elevator down to the residential district and headed for the commercial district.
A low murmur of voices rose around them. More precisely, every mercenary who spotted Jincheon began whispering among themselves.
"Ugh…"
"I expected this, but… my face feels like it's on fire…"
Both women knew exactly why. The mercenaries who had shared the purification request had uploaded footage of Jincheon's performance to the deep web. Other mercenaries had then reposted it across every site they frequented, turning him into a brief viral star. The silver lining was that almost everyone treated the video as a clever composite or deepfake and refused to take it seriously.
Technology had advanced far enough that even amateurs could produce convincing fakes, and true experts could create composites so perfect that even professional video analysts could not spot them without expensive, time-consuming forensic work. Who was going to spend that kind of money and time? Even if someone did and declared the footage real, everyone would simply dismiss it as attention-seeking lies. Jincheon's video of casually demolishing Crypters was simply too far outside this world's common sense.
"Hey, isn't that the guy?"
"Yeah. So he actually exists."
The stares would fade with time, but until then they would have to endure being looked at like animals in a zoo.
"Tch. I don't like it. Treating Crypters like toys."
"Exactly. Crypters aren't bugs you just blow up for fun."
A few more serious mercenaries openly resented the trivialization. Some glared with such open hostility that, in a less secure district, they would already have picked a fight.
Heliane and Calsira could not lift their heads under the blatant attention; their faces burned.
"Heh. The feeling of fame and all those eyes on me… it's been a while."
"None of those looks are good ones, you know."
"I still can't believe those guys uploaded that without asking us."
"We'll have to give them an earful next time we see them."
Each of them reacted in their own way as they walked toward the commercial district. Mercenaries thronged there as well, and the stares continued, though the shoppers were slightly less interested than the people lounging in the residential district.
"Whew. Every single one of these is new to me."
Jincheon stepped into a grocery store stocked with ingredients completely different from the supplies the pirates had once given them and whistled, smiling with open curiosity. Pink fruit covered in long spiky protrusions, meat whose yellow flesh was exposed after the scorpion-like shell had been peeled away, vegetables that looked like animal horns but were actually layered plants—every item was pure catnip for a cook's curiosity. The fact that they belonged to an unknown domain only made them more interesting.
The store also sold ready-to-heat meal packs, but Jincheon bought individual ingredients and began tasting each one on the spot to learn their flavors.
Meanwhile Heliane and Calsira used their Bio Devices to check the Baphelrod Guild site for suitable requests. Both of them were people of this world who simply threw ingredients into a pot; they lacked Jincheon's ability to evaluate raw materials.
"How about this one?"
"I don't know. Doesn't it seem too simple? What about this instead?"
"Bounty hunting… but our ship doesn't have weapons for tracking a target."
"If we board the mechas when we get close… hmm, if they run while we're fighting, tracking them would be hard…"
They kept browsing, deliberately avoiding safe but distant jobs or missions that would drag on too long. Both of them had confirmed on the way back from the purification that their piloting skill had skyrocketed thanks to Inner Qi. Jincheon's own preferences had begun to rub off on them as well, so they searched mainly for short, intense jobs even if the difficulty was high. Any mission that truly interested them would still need Jincheon's approval, so they simply bookmarked candidates and kept looking.
"I'll take these."
"That comes to nine hundred eighty-three credits."
"Dock address is…"
While they searched, Jincheon finished buying the food they would eat and placed the order. After confirming delivery to their dock address the next day, he signed the contract and completed the purchase.
"All done."
"These are the requests we gathered. Take a look."
Calsira transferred the list to Jincheon's Bio Device and showed him the ones that had caught their interest. As they walked outside he reviewed them and smiled at the fact that most were emergency calls from parties already in a bad position.
Their confidence has grown. After gaining Inner Qi, this kind of swagger is only natural.
Seeing his women full of self-assurance was a pleasant sight. Others might call it arrogance, but all they had to do was prove they had the skill to back it up. Jincheon began examining the candidates they had chosen, deciding which request to take.
"Hm?"
One listing with an interesting description caught his eye.
Under normal circumstances he would never have taken an escort job, but the pay was solid and the rare title "Empress Dowager" made him open the full description.