Joshua Evans was a born bodyguard.
No matter where Suho went or what he did, he stayed close without getting in the way or being obtrusive, yet was always there when needed.
After Joshua began remaining by his side, Suho felt a little more secure, and the range of his activities expanded as well.
He had said several times that there was no need to attach them to him, but the bodyguards dispatched by the Administration still followed him everywhere from a distance in a great crowd. With their outfits and their sheer numbers, they looked exactly like gangsters.
There were a lot of them, but they did not inspire much confidence.
Still, they were better than nothing.
The androids Minsu and Minji, stuck right by his side.
Joshua Evans, by his side where he could not be seen.
And the Administration agents.
With that much, it felt as though his safety was fairly guaranteed, but Suho was not satisfied with that and purchased additional security androids.
By manufacturer and by specialized combat function, he bought high-end androids as if he were collecting them.
Not just androids with security modes, but even combat-specialized androids of various kinds; before he knew it, he had gathered around twenty.
He placed all of them in the subspace warehouse and kept them plugged in to charge at all times.
In truth, the reason he had bought so many androids was because he could store them inside the subspace warehouse.
Just as one might hide weapons in subspace and take them out to use in an emergency, he thought he could make use of androids in the same way.
If he kept collecting them like this and lined them all up,
then suddenly took out an android legion in an emergency!
Ah, just thinking about it was thrilling.
* * *
Time passed, and Suho’s monotonous daily life continued.
Especially for Suho, who spent a considerable amount of time in the subspace warehouse, each day felt unbearably long.
To the point that his sense of time was becoming vague.
At the agency, for some reason, the team leader had begun keeping his distance from him, so his accumulation had slowed as well.
Day after day passed without anything that could be called a dynamic incident.
During such a time, there was something Suho was pouring his heart and energy into so that he would not be devoured by boredom, and it was none other than Dream Village.
It was a project he had begun after deciding from the start to create a small and adorable “Dream Village.”
He decided to limit it to a size he could fully perceive, then tidy it, cultivate it, and decorate it.
If it was too wide, it would only become tiring to wander around. He decided to make it small and appropriately sized.
First, on a piece of land measuring 150 meters by 150 meters that he had Ravi raise up from the ground, he installed the modular houses he had diligently ordered and inspected through web surfing and site visits.
After much deliberation, what Suho ordered were five European-style wooden prefabricated modular homes in the forty-pyeong range.
He paid great attention to every single material that went into them, choosing only the finest.
Since no one but Suho and Ravi could enter the subspace, workers could not come in.
So the method Suho thought of was to first buy an empty lot, have the ground work done with concrete to make the floor flat and solid, and then request that the modular homes be assembled on top of it.
Since they were modular homes that trailers, cranes, and heavy machinery could deliver, assemble, and install in a single day,
he carefully watched and recorded the assembly process, and after the workers left, he stored the entire buildings and moved them into the subspace warehouse.
In that way, he moved and installed a total of five buildings.
Since he needed clean water for drinking and washing, after thinking it over, he selected “clean deep ocean water” as the twenty-second item and requested Ravi to provide it...
Good heavens, the quantity was far too much.
Deep ocean water was cheaper than any item he had received so far within 1,000 yangwon, so he ended up receiving an enormous amount.
The one yangwon’s worth of deep ocean water Suho received amounted to ten ja, or 10 to the 25th power, liters—about ten thousand times the total volume of all the oceans on Earth.
When Ravi asked if he wanted to check it, Suho shook his head vigorously.
The five modular homes he had moved into the subspace warehouse were placed around the edge of the raised land, circling it so that they faced the center,
and although he considered creating a separate power plant area, he simply attached a small Aether generator to each building.
It was basically the Aether version of a portable oil generator.
It was smaller in size and utterly silent, yet incomparably more efficient.
The greatest drawback was that producing electricity required E-grade Aetherium, but that was no problem at all for Suho.
And in order to draw and use pure water, he created a small reservoir of deep ocean water some distance from the buildings.
He connected pipes from there to each building to draw in water, and to create a space for processing wastewater, he asked Ravi to dig downward.
When he asked, she said it was possible to dig as deep downward as he wanted.
From what he gathered, it seemed to be far deeper than the distance from Earth’s surface to its inner core.
So he also made the septic tank and wastewater tank enormous and buried them deep, deep underground.
Well, in any case, the only waste that would fill them belonged to Suho alone.
Afterward, he assigned a theme to each installed building and divided them into sectors.
1. He designated the first as a sleeping, resting, or treatment area, and decorated it with the finest beds and sofas.
2. He designated the second as an area for exercise, bathing, half-body baths, foot baths, showers, and the like, and set up various bathtubs, shower rooms, and other dressing rooms.
3. He designated the third as a reading area and filled the interior with luxurious bookshelves, along with comfortable chairs and sofas.
He planned to gather his favorite books there and read them.
4. He designated the fourth as a dining area and filled it with all kinds of food. Naturally, it included facilities for cooking.
5. He designated the fifth as a hobby area, and created there the leather workshop and woodworking workshop he had always wanted to try someday if he had the leisure.
He also moved all the facilities for manufacturing potions there.
In this way, he built five two-level detached modular homes, and each building had a neat terrace on the second floor, making them useful as observation decks.
Aside from those, on the empty land, he arranged several simple modular homes shaped like container boxes to serve as warehouses,
and he designated this the “treasure chest area.”
In truth, it was a completely unnecessary area, but he made it simply so he could enjoy looking at it when he wanted.
Inside one simple modular building slightly larger than a container, he filled it with gold, platinum, silver, and diamonds.
In another, he placed Aetherium sorted by grade.
In yet another, he packed in potions and elixirs that had been finished in titanium bottles.
So that he could look at them anytime and take them out easily.
And because the hill of gold, silver, and jewels he had made like a royal tomb looked messy, he cleared it all away.
In that manner, he arranged the modular homes in a circle around the edge, and in the empty central space, he made a fire pit, a small swimming pool, and an outdoor hot spring.
While searching for birch, oak, pine, and the like to use as firewood for the fire pit, he stopped and asked Ravi, receiving a special wood from her.
A wood called [Everglow Wood].
It was a mysterious lumber that emitted light on its own, and when it burned, it gave off a bright glow, while its smoke was said to have an effect that restored vitality.
Once lit, it burned for an astonishingly long time and displayed fantastic flames tinged with gold.
On top of that, its fragrant and sweet smoky scent was a bonus.
Because it was an extremely rare wood even across the entire universe, he could only receive one trillion tons of it.
That might not sound expensive, but if one trillion tons cost one yangwon, then it was an incredible hundred times more expensive than S-grade Aetherium.
Suho thought he had created and completed his own Dream Village up to that point, but when he actually looked around, there were many things he found lacking.
So he asked Ravi to raise more land right next to Dream Village, then divided that area into five sectors.
1. The first was an automobile gallery. He planned to gather the finest cars there as he obtained them.
2. The second was an android gallery. He planned to charge the high-end androids he was diligently buying and collecting there.
3. The third was an area for a movie theater, PC games, and racing simulators.
4. The fourth was an area for indulgences, such as a large wine cellar.
5. Lastly, he also created a luxury goods gallery.
He thought that when he was bored, he might go shopping in reality and try collecting bags, watches, and the like.
“It’s done...!”
Looking at the finally completed village, Suho threw both arms up in triumph.
“Ravi, you worked hard too!”
The construction of Dream Village, which he had clung to for several weeks, had only been possible because Ravi followed him around and moved everything according to his requests.
From the very beginning, it was something Suho could not have done alone without heavy machinery or workers.
For a while, Ravi had not understood the meaning of the work Suho was undertaking and kept asking this and that,
but later she gave up even being curious about why he was doing such a strange thing and fell silent.
In truth, Suho had realized it long ago.
Ravi’s brain structure was far too different from a human’s for her to understand.
Creating the village’s structure and building it had been fun in itself,
but filling the interiors with furniture and appliances had been even more enjoyable,
and above all, he found fun once again in organizing and arranging everything.
“Ahh... Now I should really start enjoying this place. I’ll come often to rest, play, and eat. This is my secret hideout.”
As Suho kept walking around the village and gazing at the results with satisfaction, one thing he did not like caught his eye.
“Ravi, what do you think of this village?”
“...I will make no comment.”
“You mean it’s wonderful. But don’t you think something is missing?”
“......”
“You know what it is too, right? Something’s lacking. And what that is, is scenery! Scenery! What do you see when you look around?”
“I see the widely spread subspace warehouse.”
“Exactly, that’s the problem. There’s nothing here. It just looks like a flat desert. A horizon that looks like beige tiles have been laid out endlessly! That’s all there is.”
“Why would that be a problem?”
“What do you mean, why is it a problem? The problem is that there’s no incredible scenery!”
“I do not quite understand the utility of scenery.”
“There’s just something about it. You wouldn’t know. Anyway, this is a flaw. A flaw. I need to make scenery.”
After much agonizing, Suho decided to create “Subspace Chungju Lake” as a landscape that could be seen from the village.
And after he diligently thrust photos of Chungju Lake at Ravi while explaining, he succeeded in having her dig out the land around the village in a way that was very similar to Chungju Lake.
Then he filled it with various potions and elixirs and naturally divided it into several sections so that they would not mix with one another.
Because each potion had a different color, the broad lake formed a mysterious landscape.
“It’s still not enough... If it’s going to look like Chungju Lake, it needs mountains...”
Since there were no mountains inside the subspace warehouse, he was forced to pile up gold, platinum, diamonds, and Aetherium to create artificial mountains.
In particular, he used a large amount of D-grade Aetherium, which gave off green light.
The base of the mountains itself was framed with D-grade Aetherium.
As a result, the mountains looked like Christmas trees draped all over with ornaments.
A lake of mysterious colors, and radiant mountains of every hue surrounding it.
A mystical landscape had been created artificially.
“Wow! It’s done. It’s done! This is it! Hehe, the view’s great, isn’t it?”
“......”
Ravi grew more and more silent.
With a bright smile on his face, Suho wandered here and there, then left the dream village and ran to the shore of Subspace Chungju Lake.
“Ravi! Ravi!”
“......?”
When Ravi fluttered over, what Suho requested was something round and flat, small enough to fit neatly in one hand.
It was a stone shaped like a Go piece, about five or six centimeters in diameter.
First, he asked her to cut a diamond into that shape and size and tried throwing it, but its flaw was that it was a little too light.
“This doesn’t quite feel right...”
After testing various things, the weight of EX-grade Aetherium felt the best.
Suho piled up a heap of EX-grade Aetherium cut into palm-sized Go-piece shapes beside him and stood at the shore of Subspace Chungju Lake.
The water lapping before him happened to be the section filled with [Elixir of Anti-Aging].
He struck a splendid pitcher’s pose and threw!
Whoosh—
Spin, spin, spin... splash— splash— splash— splishsplishsplishsplish...
The flat skipping stone made of EX-grade Aetherium skimmed and bounced over the surface of the Elixir of Anti-Aging.
“Wow! Ravi! Did you see? Did you see? It bounced more than ten times, right?”
“......”
Ravi did not answer at all, but it did not matter.
Not even the carefree play of immortals seemed enviable.