In that instant, a chill crawled up my spine like a snake.
She thought I might be useful?
Those were not words that should come from a saintess’s mouth.
That blatant nuance, as if she were assessing a tool.
“Of course, I know full well that to those in power who command the masses, a single human being looks like a tool, but…”
Even if they used people as tools, would they really speak of it so openly?
Instinctively, I took a step back and looked her up and down.
“This is strange. What is this sense of wrongness?”
Pale skin. A pure-white priestly robe.
Outwardly, she was a perfect saintess.
But my sharpened senses were warning me that something was wrong.
Her eyes.
Deep within the clear eyes of one who served the God of Light, I caught sight of a murky, blood-red energy coiling and writhing.
“Damn it. That’s not a saintess.”
I understood the situation in an instant.
Doge Enrico.
That crafty, meticulous old raccoon would never have handed over a heavyweight capitalist like me to this suspicious woman without a word of explanation, no matter how much of an old debt he owed my father.
Out of the corner of my eye, I glanced at Doge Enrico standing by the window.
His gray eyes had lost their usual sharpness and were slack and hazy, like empty glass beads.
The great ruler of Pellua had already been reduced to a puppet whose reason was being controlled by someone else.
“A heretic… So that’s what you are.”
At the low mutter that slipped from my mouth, the woman’s eyes curved like crescent moons.
“Oh my, a heretic? That is such an insulting word used only by blind fools clinging to a decrepit god crumbling away.”
Her voice began to echo in layers.
It was a beautiful yet grotesque devil’s song, one that seemed to burrow directly into the brain and paralyze reason.
The fallen heretic saintess stepped lightly toward me.
With every step she took, the air of the secret chamber began to stain with a viscous pink mist.
“We are not heretics. On the contrary, we are the true ‘saviors’ who seek to rescue pitiful humanity, sunk in the swamp of ruin, in place of the silent god.”
Fanatics always insist that they are never heretics.
They claim they are seekers preserving the most righteous and pure faith, and preach that the original religion is the true heresy or a false god.
With an ecstatic expression, she pointed beyond the secret chamber’s window, toward the sky dyed gray.
“Look, Chief Merchant. The sun in the sky has cracked, and the earth is frozen, refusing to yield grain. The starving monsters beyond the barrier tear into humanity’s flesh every single day. This old and diseased ‘material world’ has already reached the end of its lifespan. It is no different from a sinking ship.”
“…And so?”
“And so, we intend to migrate humanity to a perfect refuge free of bodily suffering… the ‘Dimension of Dreams.’”
“What lunacy.”
“To cast off the heavy shell called the flesh, and enter a paradise of the mind where one will never hunger, never freeze, never be wounded. For all humanity to enjoy eternal happiness within one vast dream. Is that not the sole and perfect salvation by which humanity can survive in this sinking world?”
Her words carried a strange persuasiveness.
A sweet whisper to abandon a suffering reality and flee into an eternally happy dream.
As someone utterly ignorant of theology or religious doctrine, I had no knowledge with which to refute her ideology on theological grounds.
However.
The merchant’s abacus in my head, and the reason of a mechanical engineering student, knew all too well just how repulsive and deceitful that noble-seeming sophistry truly was.
“Salvation? Paradise?”
I snorted.
Her red demonic energy was tightening around my throat, but my lips twisted into a crooked arc as I confronted her logic head-on.
“Don’t make me laugh. That isn’t salvation. It’s nothing but a ‘mass grave,’ locking all of humanity inside a giant hallucination and cutting off their breath.”
“Oh my. You have yet to understand the transience of the flesh.”
“Transience? Humans are creatures that live by rolling around in the mud of reality.”
I had not the slightest interest in faith.
To begin with, in the trade city of Pellua, it was hard to find believers who maintained any firm faith.
Sailors, at least, tended to believe in the God of the Sea, but that was closer to a folk belief with no proper divine power to speak of.
If there had been a God of Gold, I would have believed in him, and perhaps merchants might have found the God of Contracts worth believing in.
Even so, we found heretics utterly repulsive.
The reason was simple.
“Because they’re worse than pirates.”
Villages suddenly being massacred, plagues breaking out, people turning into monsters—those were all the deeds those heretic bastards had wrought.
And yet what?
Besides, I had a method.
Not some method where humanity fled into a dream.
A way to truly save humanity!
“If there’s a hole in the roof and rain leaks in, humans don’t burn the house down and run away into a dream—they pick up tools and fix the roof! If the sun has cooled and the world is cold, then we mine coal from beneath the earth and light fires. If the land has frozen and people are starving, then I send out my ships and carry food from the warm south!”
That was the history of humanity as I knew it, and the essence of civilization and technology.
If something was lacking, we filled it. If something was broken, we fixed it. When we came up against a limit, we broke through that wall and advanced.
“You say the material world is over? Not a chance. In my eyes, it’s still full of undeveloped resources and markets waiting to be rebuilt. I have no intention of handing over even a single gold coin for your paltry ‘dream refuge.’”
At my resolute, realistic rebuttal, the heretic saintess’s smile cooled.
“…Truly, you are a worldly and arrogant human.”
The sweetness vanished from her voice, replaced by chilling killing intent.
“That merciless steel monster that ignored the wind, tore through the currents, and cooked pirates alive. I thought the immense power born from your ‘knowledge’ would become the perfect pillar to complete our ritual. But it seems you are not the sort who can be persuaded with words.”
“You want to use me for that madness of destroying the human world?”
I said this while reaching for the small self-defense magic tool hidden at my waist.
“Go to hell!”
But.
“Ugh…!”
My body would not move.
The disgustingly sweet scent that had seeped in through my nose as we spoke had already traveled through my blood vessels and forcibly put the nerves throughout my body to sleep.
My vision warped, strength left my legs, and my knees nearly buckled.
“Hallucination? No, mind-control magic!”
She had to be a high-ranking heretic priestess, or someone who had made a direct pact with a demon.
Before this powerful authority of enchantment that had even bewitched Doge Enrico, an ordinary human body and flimsy mana resistance were as helpless as a sheet of paper.
“Do not resist.”
The heretic saintess gently cupped my chin.
From her cold fingertips, red demonic energy stretched toward my eyes like snakes.
“In any case, your mistaken thoughts can be corrected little by little.”
My reason melted, and a terrible impulse of submission struck my mind—the urge to prostrate myself at her feet and offer up every blueprint and steel formula in my head.
“Those paltry thoughts of yours end here. Now, swear to me. Swear that you will use that great knowledge solely for our paradise…”
Just as the spell of enchantment was about to erode my brain like sweet poison, at that desperate moment—
Vrrrrrrr—!!
Inside my chest.
The pendant of House Carnoble, which had been quietly hidden beneath my shirt, began to vibrate madly and interlock into motion, as if enraged by the foreign substance trying to corrode its master’s brain.
“…Huh?”
For the first time, bewilderment colored the red eyes of the heretic saintess who was gripping my chin.
The power of enchantment.
That too, in essence, was a type of highly compressed “energy.”
This unfathomable mechanical artifact, which had even gulped down the energy of a boiler explosion with a yield strength of 480 MPa, recognized the heretic saintess’s mind-control magic surging toward it as an excellent “power source” and began absorbing it all!
“W-what is this…? My authority… is being absorbed?!”
The heretic saintess screamed in shock and tried to pull away the hand cupping my chin.
But the blue light of the pendant spinning madly at my chest was sucking in every last trace of the red demonic energy spewing from her fingertips like a vacuum cleaner.
Looking down at the heretic saintess’s face twisting in fear, I put strength into my self-defense magic tool.
“How dare you try to hypnotize me!”
At the same moment I attempted to use the magic tool, the pendant broke past its critical point and emitted a blue flash more dazzling than the sun.
A bizarre roar rang out as a dimensional gate opened.
“Kyaaaagh!”
My vision burned white, and my body was violently sucked into a vortex of weightlessness.
A terrible nausea, as if all my senses were being shattered to pieces and then reassembled.
And then.
Thud!
“…Gah!”
My back was roughly slammed onto something hard and cold.
At the same time, a smell struck my nose sharply.
It was not the sweet smell like rotting honey that had clung to the heretic saintess, nor the salty stench of Pellua’s harbor.
It was the smell of burnt wire insulation, melted plastic, and acrid ozone.
Coughing harshly, I snapped my eyes open.
“Cough, cough! Haa, haa…”
A glaring white fluorescent light flickered above, stinging my eyes.
This was not the Doge’s dark, secret chamber.
What spread before my eyes was a gray floor and white walls marked here and there with soot.
The Republic of Korea.
The large machinery workshop of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Hanguk University.
“I… came back?”