Suho’s daily routine went like this.
- Wake up
- Visit the subspace warehouse
- Pretend to do Admitee Collecting (filming collection scene videos)
- Eat breakfast and wash up
- Close protection of Minsu and Minji in a luxury vehicle,
commuting to work amidst full protocol by other Administration Bureau bodyguards
- Work at the Agency
- Visit the subspace warehouse
- Lunch at the Agency
- Small talk with Taeyoon and other colleagues
- Sniping OnTower auctions
- Visit the subspace warehouse
- Leave work under protection and protocol
- Dinner at home
- Shopping and placing custom orders for SimCity inside the subspace warehouse
- Visit the subspace warehouse
- Sleep
“Hah, now that’s what I call a fulfilling day.”
Suho wrote the schedule in his diary and smiled in satisfaction.
He used to merely chat with Rabi or roll around in hills of gold and silver treasure inside the subspace warehouse, but ever since setting a goal of building a village inside the warehouse, it had certainly felt more rewarding.
The modular houses and small ether generators he’d commissioned would take some time, so these days the work Suho was focusing on in the subspace warehouse was potion packaging.
He had brought in an automatic liquid quantitative injection and packaging machine, moved over several vacuum packing sealers and large tables, and launched a full-fledged potion workshop. He had even neatly prepared shelves to organize the finished potions.
He had Rabi make five large diamond water tanks, decanted the potions by type in portions of about 200 liters, and began the work of injecting them into titanium bottles.
*Shhhhhh-*
“Oho, so you put it in like this…”
*Hiss—clank.*
“Aha, so that’s how it seals. Simple.”
The potions were quickly finished using a machine that automatically filled and sealed them just by holding the titanium bottle up to it.
“Can’t mix up the bottle labels and the contents. Up to here… is the healing potion. Okay, let’s do just one type at a time.”
Just what was the master of the Cheonyangwon subspace planning to do with such a small amount of potions?
Rabi flew around nearby, watching with great curiosity at what on earth Suho was doing.
Holding a completed [Top-Grade Healing Potion] bottle, Suho smiled proudly and asked,
“How about it, Rabi? A top-grade healing potion in a very luxurious titanium bottle! Buyers will feel thrilled purchasing it, right?”
“Hmm……”
“You were going to ask again what I’m going to do by packaging such small amounts separately, weren’t you?”
“Oh, that’s right.”
“Sigh. Rabi. In the human world, no matter how much I have, I can’t just release it all freely.”
“Why is that?”
“Because the human world has a concept called the economy. Supply and demand must be balanced, and if that balance collapses too severely, chaos breaks out. So just blindly supplying a lot isn’t always a good thing.”
“Hmm, I see.”
“That’s why I only take out very small amounts that Earth’s economy can absorb. What’s in this subspace right now is astronomical in quantity, but setting aside the amount, each and every item is something that would shock heaven and move earth…”
Rabi seemed to know everything, yet occasionally showed a complete inability to understand specific concepts like this, making him impossible to pin down.
Rabi was simply fascinating.
First, he made only fifty bottles each of top-grade healing potion, top-grade regeneration potion, top-grade ether potion, top-grade detoxification potion, and top-grade disease cure potion, lined them up neatly by type on the display shelf, and put away the remaining 750 empty titanium bottles separately.
Considering the auction house’s digestion capacity, honestly, he had no idea when even these 250 bottles could be sold out.
Suho took only five top-grade healing potions and left the subspace warehouse.
* * *
“Oh my, Suho, this is pretty. Oh, our son had this kind of sense too!”
“I like it too, thank you, big brother.”
“S-Suho… what about Dad’s? Don’t I have one?”
“Hya… hyung… what about me…”
Suho gathered his family, who had been busy going out and about lately, in one place and handed out the [Tempered Light Ring] to his mother and younger sister Suji.
He had only prioritized them because he felt the need to protect his relatively frailer mother and younger sister first.
As expected, his father and Jiho were very disappointed.
“I’m continuously acquiring defense items, so don’t worry. Next time, I’ll get Dad’s and Jiho’s first.”
“Really? You promised. You hear me?”
“Dad, I’ll record Hyung’s words.”
Mother and Suji had thought they were just accessories shrouded in pretty light, but when Suho explained the detailed abilities and functions of the rings, their jaws dropped.
“Wow, how can I not show this off!”
“Don’t, dear.”
“That’s right, Suji. That’s a protective item above all else, before it’s an accessory. If word spreads here and there, it can’t do its job of protecting you in an emergency.”
He barely managed to placate the excited Suji, who wanted to brag about it.
He checked how they were doing with the two bodyguard androids assigned to each person, and it was quite a sight.
His father played Go with an android every day without ever winning, and often played golf matches he could never win.
His mother took the middle-aged-woman-appearance android to various social club gatherings, introduced her to her friends as if she were a best friend, and had made herself a famous lady among the other women.
Suji was busy buying clothes for the handsome androids, and Jiho was featuring the androids on his Wetoob channel to boost views.
As these were high-end androids equipped with high-performance AI, they seemed to have quickly finished adapting by learning each family member’s values and lifestyle habits.
At any rate, the bodyguard androids had become indispensable existences to the family, and accordingly, the family members would be that much safer.
Suho was relieved by that.
* * *
“Rabi. You said you know about all the materials in the universe, right?”
“That’s right. I know almost all of them.”
“And you know many things that have never appeared on Earth at all.”
“Honestly, so little has been released on Earth…”
“That’s true. I didn’t know, but I’ve learned a lot while staying with you.”
Suho recalled the time he had slightly pressed down on the car of Han Shin-cheol, the fussy man from the Agency, and asked Rabi something he had been wondering about.
“I have a question. There’s something called specific gravity. What is it… it’s measuring how much heavier something is compared to water…”
“I know. It means the ratio between a substance’s weight per unit volume and a standard substance. Usually on Earth, pure water at 4°C is taken as specific gravity 1.”
“……Then why don’t you know anything about economic concepts or the human heart?”
Rabi shrugged his adorable shoulders with a mischievous expression and said,
“My assigned warehouse master is an Earthling, so I am studying Earth only now. I’m prioritizing necessary things like material composition, so there is still much I don’t know.”
“So that’s why… Anyway, there are substances with high specific gravity. I heard the thing with the highest specific gravity on Earth is osmium. Right?”
“Correct. Osmium is the densest substance existing on Earth. It weighs 22.59 grams per cubic centimeter.”
“But that can’t be the densest substance in the universe.”
“Of course. Osmium doesn’t even rank within the top one thousand for density.”
“Huh… to that extent? Then what’s the densest material?”
“It’s Oberon. Oberon’s specific gravity is 2,016 grams per cubic centimeter, approximately 89 times that of osmium, and approximately 2,016 times that of water.”
“Huh, so if it’s 1 liter in volume, it’s over 2 tons… Wait, the perfume I decant is 5 milliliters, so that would be 10 kilograms?”
“Correct.”
“Oh… depending on how you think about it, this could be very useful. I’ve decided. Give me 1 yangwon’s worth of Oberon.”
“Understood. Oberon, too, is a metal never observed on Earth, so its maximum value would be set accordingly, but since it is a metal with no special characteristics other than being heavy and having a high melting point, it is set at a low price. As the 21st item in Suho-nim’s Cheonyangwon, 1 yangwon’s worth of Oberon, 100 quadrillion tons, has been generated.”
“100 quadrillion tons…? Cheap. It’s only worth as much as gold?”
“Yes. It was priced at 100 million won per 1 kg.”
Suho briefly imagined cutting off a huge chunk of the densest metal in the universe and dropping it.
While flying on a plane and passing through the upper atmosphere, if he dropped this monstrous metal from about 12 kilometers up in the sky… what would happen?
Suho took out his phone and tapped on the AI calculator.
How heavy would a mass dropped from about 12 kilometers, the average cruising altitude of a passenger plane, need to be to deliver an impact enough to bring about global apocalypse?
The AI’s calculation: 3.56 trillion tons.
Then, if he made a sphere of 3.56 trillion tons from the newly received Oberon, how big would it be?
The answer was a sphere with a diameter of merely 1,500 meters.
Suho suddenly felt a chill.
At himself, who could easily bring about an Earth apocalypse ending with a metal lump barely even 2 kilometers in diameter.
No, rather than such a cumbersome method, there was actually a much easier way.
That was putting the entire Earth into the subspace warehouse.
Putting a small star like Earth into a subspace warehouse with the width of the solar system was no big deal.
But sentient beings with souls couldn’t receive storage approval for the subspace warehouse, so lifeforms would be left alone in space.
And they would die quickly.
Suho himself could just go live in the subspace warehouse.
Earth apocalypse, no, Earth annihilation, a deletion ending.
If he merely asked, Rabi would execute it immediately, and Suho himself could become the Great King of Terror who brings apocalypse upon the world at any time, the Demon of Destruction.
Suho’s body trembled.
“Crazy fuck…”
It was too easy.
That was exactly why he absolutely must not think like this.
Or he would be consumed by the curse of futility again.
The more he thought about it, the more annoyed he became.
What was that so-called administrator of the universe thinking, giving this kind of power…
Ah, he was the one who had asked for it.
Anyway, this was all because of Cheonyangwon, because of her.
Suho took a deep breath.
“If I want to maintain my mental health, live healthily myself, let my family live well, and have the whole world live together in harmony to reach a happy ending, I must not think like this.”
Suho hammered his head with his fist.
“I fell into thoughts of Earth’s apocalypse!”
Think good thoughts. Good thoughts.
Proper thoughts. Healthy thoughts. Good thoughts.
No, specifically, he needed to focus on smaller things, more trivial things.
Certain happiness found in trivial things.
That was where his path to survival lay.
* * *
Yi Dan-bi received the repaired [Song of the Star].
Yi Seo-jun, who had accompanied her to the smithy to pick up the sword, asked,
“How is it?”
“…Something’s different…”
When Yi Dan-bi infused ether,
the sword hummed low and emitted a pure white light.
“It’s become stronger than when I first got this sword. What magic did you use?”
The blacksmith Admitee, who had taken the repair, merely shrugged.
“Magic, nothing of the sort. I melted the Starlight the Clan Leader obtained, welded it to the broken part to make a joint, then tempered and heat-treated it. I quenched it to increase hardness and sharpened the blade… In truth, I simply used the same method as with any other sword repair.”
“But how…”
“The materials were good. Perhaps having undergone countless refinement processes, the purity of the Starlight was extremely high. Higher than the sword itself.”
“I see… Thank you anyway. I will pay my respects formally again after we clear the raid.”
When Yi Dan-bi bowed her head, the blacksmith waved his hand.
“Nah, forget it. I’m doing it all for money anyway, and I already received more than enough compensation. You even gave me 50 grams of Starlight. Do you know how much that costs?”
“Still…”
“I’m just doing my job, so the Clan Leader should do the Clan Leader’s job. You need to get rid of that damned tower so I can sleep with my legs stretched out. Well then, safe travels.”
“Yes, don’t worry. Then we’ll meet again.”
Yi Dan-bi and Yi Seo-jun bowed together and left the smithy.
The [Song of the Star] at her waist felt sturdier than ever.
Inside the car returning to the clan building,
Yi Seo-jun, who had been looking at his phone, chuckled.
“Noona, look at this. There are still guys selling Stardust.”
Yi Dan-bi frowned at the screen.
“400 million per gram? Ridiculous. It’s a relief we’re now freed from such extortion.”
“Keke, right?”
Yi Seo-jun, who had been giggling while scrolling, suddenly stopped dead.
“Uh……”
“What?”
“Something strange came up as a new auction item. [Top-Grade Healing Potion]?”
Yi Dan-bi tilted her head too.
“Top-grade? Does such a thing exist? I’m suddenly confused. Was there always something like this? Isn’t high-grade the highest?”
“Of course not. Someone seems to be playing a prank…”
Even a high-grade healing potion had tremendous performance.
Deep cuts and stab wounds were basic; it could reattach severed arms. It regenerated shattered bones and was pretty much an all-purpose medicine for external injuries.
That was the ‘high-grade healing potion.’
Of course, it wasn’t common. Very, very rare.
Even most high-level raid teams in many places had never laid eyes on a high-grade healing potion.
The potions usually brought along for raids were lowest-grade to low-grade healing potions.
Mid-grade healing potions did exist on the market, but were so expensive their use was avoided.
If you used a mid-grade healing potion to save an injured teammate during a tower raid, even disposing of all the rewards obtained afterward from the tower might not balance the books.
Let alone a high-grade healing potion.
‘But a top-grade one, not even high-grade…’
“Haha, whatever it is, this is interesting. What is this, something that revives the dead? A medicine that would grab a fresh corpse by the collar and haul it back up?”
“Yeah, how much is it listed for?”
“Let’s see… the starting bid is 1 million. They listed five bottles for 1 million?”
“A-all five bottles?”
“Yes.”
“…Seo-jun, what are the odds that a seller would play such a prank with goods at the auction house?”
“Almost none. Well, if you’re going to play a prank, you’d have to be prepared to get arrested.”
“…Right? I think it’s definitely that person. It can only be that person. That person is up to something new again…”
“That person? Ah…”
Seo-jun immediately recalled the seller who had delivered the shock of Starlight.
Yi Dan-bi’s desire to obtain Suho grew even more desperate.