I planted a hand on the floor and staggered as I pushed my upper body upright.
I looked down at myself.
Instead of the top-quality navy frock coat I had been wearing in Pellua, I was dressed in Kang Woojin’s sweat-soaked hoodie and jeans—the clothes I’d been wearing before I left this place.
Utterly dumbfounded, I pulled out the pendant from inside my shirt, still giving off a faint heat, and gripped it in my hand.
“Why the hell? Why did I come back now?”
I scratched at my disheveled hair and began thinking over the pendant’s activation conditions once more.
The conditions for this miraculous artifact to open a dimension were clear.
First, an enormous amount of energy.
Second, the user’s intense desire.
“As for the first condition, I’ll say it was met because the pendant gulped down that high-density mind-control mana the fake saintess bastard was spewing as its power source.”
But the second condition was the problem.
When I first crossed over to this place, I’d had an explosive craving for the “knowledge” called mechanical engineering.
When I returned the second time, I’d had a vicious sense of purpose: to steal the perfect “alloy formula.”
“But this time… I didn’t crave any knowledge. I was just thinking that I wanted to get away from that disgusting hypnosis magic, that I wanted to survive and put a bullet in that bastard’s head.”
As I rested my chin on my hand and pondered for a moment, a flashing hypothesis crossed my mind.
“Desire.”
It didn’t necessarily have to be for academic knowledge or technology.
“Absolute rejection, or extreme mental resistance for the sake of survival.”
My frenzied revulsion toward the fallen saintess’s magic as it tried to devour my brain had acted as the pendant’s second condition—“powerful mental energy”—and flipped the dimensional switch.
“Ha… In other words, this isn’t just a door. It also functions as an emergency escape that forcibly activates when my soul is in danger of being destroyed.”
Once I understood the principle, a hollow laugh slipped out.
If not for the pendant, I might have been caught up in the fake saintess’s charm magic and turned into a puppet in Pellua without being able to take any action at all.
In the end, it had saved my life.
“Well, I suppose it’s a relief that I’m alive for now…”
I steadied my ragged breathing and looked around.
And then I was rendered speechless by the horrific state of the practice room that entered my vision.
“Holy shit…”
The high-output industrial servo motor worth tens of millions of won, which I had forcibly modified in order to create artificial energy to return to Pellua.
That massive lump of metal now had its exterior charred black, and from within it, black smoke was still rising in wisps along with sharp crackling sounds.
And that wasn’t all.
The main distribution board on the practice room wall, whose fuse I had forcibly bypassed, had its cover blown clean off, and the wires were melting as they spat blue sparks.
In the truest sense, it was a terrible mess, as if a small bomb had exploded in the corner of the practice room.
“Ah. I mean, I’m the one who did it… but looking at it objectively, it really is a total disaster.”
I was scratching the back of my head and putting my merchant’s brain to work, wondering how I should clean up this catastrophe, when—
Bang—!!
The heavy soundproof door of the practice room burst open as if it would break, and someone rushed in with a deathly pale face.
“Fire! Fire!! Bring the extinguisher!!”
It was Assistant Kim from the mechanical engineering department office, with dark circles under his eyes that seemed to reach his jaw.
Behind him, two university security guards holding signal batons hurried in after him.
“Th-there! Smoke in the corner… Huh?”
Assistant Kim, who had been about to pull the safety pin from the fire extinguisher, met my eyes as I stood blankly in the middle of the smoke.
“…”
“…”
Silence.
Assistant Kim’s pupils shook madly as if an earthquake had struck them, and then bloodshot veins rose in his eyes as he exploded.
“Kang Woojin!!! What the hell did you do in here?!”
Assistant Kim’s shrill scream struck the practice room.
“Ah, Assistant Kim. Hello.”
At times like this, shameless acting was essential.
As if nothing at all had happened, I calmly raised a hand.
“What do you mean, hello! This, this is the servo motor, isn’t it?! This is an eighty-million-won piece of equipment the department head personally imported from Germany, so why has it turned into a black lump of charcoal?! And what the hell happened to the distribution board?!”
Assistant Kim, practically foaming at the mouth, pointed back and forth between the motor and me.
“Obviously, I did it.”
The incident I’d committed without restraint in order to return to Pellua was beginning to come back to me like a boomerang.
But confessing to one’s crime was something no criminal with any sense would do.
I swiftly put on a merchant’s poker face.
If I admitted here that I had deliberately tampered with the wiring, I’d be saddled not only with destruction of property but even attempted arson of a building.
“I was just startled after coming in myself. I was passing by when I smelled something strange burning from the practice room, so I came in to put out the fire, and the motor had sparked and exploded on its own.”
“Don’t lie! There are obvious traces of someone forcing the breaker to be bypassed! I gave you the master key to the practice room because you were top of the class last semester, and you go and commit this insane act of terrorism?!”
“You misunderstand, Assistant Kim. No matter how mad I may be about engineering, do you think I’m such an idiot that I wouldn’t know the thermodynamic basics—that directly connecting the power supply would melt the coil? This is clearly a short-circuit accident caused by the aging of the school’s wiring.”
I made my excuse in an exceedingly confident and logical manner, even putting on an expression that seemed slightly wronged.
Before the tongue I had trained by dealing with countless swindlers and great merchants in Pellua, Assistant Kim, an ordinary graduate student, seemed at a loss for words and stammered.
“Th-that’s… B-but you were here alone…!”
“Now, let’s put out the remaining embers first. Give me the extinguisher.”
I snatched the fire extinguisher from Assistant Kim’s hands and skillfully put out the remaining sparks.
One hour later.
The mechanical engineering department head’s office.
For the time being, the incident had been tentatively concluded as “a short circuit and motor overload accident of unknown cause.”
Because I had so logically insisted on “aging of the power supply,” and because the school itself could not be free of responsibility for neglecting safety inspections, they seemed inclined to cover it up without making the matter bigger.
“Hoo. Student Kang Woojin.”
Professor Park Taejun, the department head, took off his glasses and set them on the desk with a deep sigh.
“Your claim may be correct. But it is also true that you remained in the practice room without permission. We won’t convene a disciplinary committee, but you will have to take responsibility for part of the motor repair costs and the distribution board replacement costs.”
What that meant was that he was certain I was the culprit, but he would let it slide.
If a disciplinary committee were convened, not only could I be penalized for violating school regulations, but if I resisted there as well, I might even end up under police investigation.
Since he knew I didn’t have much money, he was saying we should settle the incident for an appropriate amount.
“…How much do you expect it to be?”
“At least ten million won. Even after processing the school insurance, your share will likely come to about that much.”
Ten million won.
The balance currently displayed in my smartphone banking app was…
“Understood. I’ll find a way to prepare it.”
I nodded calmly and left the department head’s office.
I trudged out and slumped onto a bench in front of the engineering building.
The cool autumn wind brushed past my sweat-soaked hoodie.
I opened a cheap canned coffee from the vending machine and took a sip.
As the sweet, bitter taste of the canned coffee slid down my throat, the adrenaline finally subsided, and a terrible sense of reality crashed over me.
“Haa…”
Leaning against the back of the bench, I looked up at the empty autumn sky.
I had narrowly escaped the heretic saintess’s mind control.
Right now, I was in the middle of a safe South Korean campus.
But.
“What… do I do now?”
A hollow murmur escaped my lips.
The situation in Pellua must be a complete mess.
Even if I went back now, I would run into the heretic saintess in the apprentice’s secret room.
“How am I supposed to deal with that woman…?”
I had no particular method.
I was not someone who possessed any martial power, nor was I someone who could be called superhuman.
When I was young, I had received basic instruction from knights who trained in aura and mages who walked the path of magic, but I had been judged to have no outstanding talent.
“I was told that if I put in a great deal of effort, I might reach a certain level, but that there was also a strong possibility I wouldn’t.”
With Father’s immense support back then, I might have been called a knight or mage more exceptional than others, but there was no way he would invest in such ambiguous talent while the position of the great trading company’s head was at stake.
“I have plenty to do, though.”
I had to install the steel steam engine at the factory on the Renne River and complete the automated factory.
I was supposed to receive investment for eastern trade and establish a joint venture, and I had been planning to start a new business.
But all of that had come to a complete stop.
“Now I can’t even enter the lab, so the means to forcibly go back is gone…”
The professor had strictly forbidden me from entering the lab until I resolved the ten million won.
I had no desire for knowledge,
no blueprints I needed to steal.
Only troublesome tasks that needed solving were piled up like mountains in both worlds.
I downed the rest of the canned coffee in one shot and crushed the empty can.
“Well, I do have experience as a merchant in Pellua. You think I can’t earn a measly ten million won here on Earth?”
*
“Is making money supposed to be this hard?”