Chapter 205. Beast (3)
Do pets dream too?
There’s plenty of evidence that mammals other than humans sleep and dream.
Whether a dog, wiggling its paws, is really having a running dream, who knows?
Most animals dream, but the one I’m about to talk about isn’t a dog or a sheep—it’s a human! Naturally, he must also dive frequently into REM sleep.
…This is inside the dream of a beast.
Whenever the beast saw his past in his dreams, he felt a bit melancholic.
No matter how happy the scene appeared, the end of this story was always tragic.
Ten years ago.
At that time, the beast was living a rough life, hiding in remote mountains, chopping at trees.
One day.
An unseen creature got caught in the rabbit trap he’d set up.
It was a young man.
Moreover, he had a refreshingly bright voice and a beautiful smile.
A hiker who had become an orphan due to a tragic aviation accident, wandering in despair—a chance encounter with a forest beast.
What unfolded next was a typical relationship development straight out of a romance novel.
The two individuals—no, to be precise, it should be three—had fallen in love at first sight during a minor mishap.
The beast was charmed by the prey’s deer-like appearance.
And the wounded outsider felt a strange attraction, resonating with the loneliness of the beast living alone in the mountains. Thus, love began.
In this process, the beast began to be brainwashed by the pure affection from this stranger. Although originally a rough and eccentric being who couldn’t socialise normally in human society, thanks to the outsider’s patience and ongoing kindness, his wild nature gradually softened.
“Honey, this is dental floss. You must use this before bed from now on.”
“Can’t I just brush my teeth?”
“You’ll get cavities between your teeth if you do that. I’ve made an appointment. You’re coming to the dentist with me tomorrow.”
From then on, the beast did what the outsider told him and avoided what he wasn’t supposed to do.
Despite that, the beast was happy every day.
He felt a level of satisfaction in the humble life he was leading under the outsider’s guidance.
Happy moments tend to pass quickly.
Thus, the beast spent joyful times with his first love in his cabin, and after a few years, he received a proposal from that beautiful outsider.
*
A few days later.
[Today, heavy rain is expected throughout the country. If you go outside, be sure to take an umbrella.]
On the TV, a weather forecaster dressed in a raincoat said it would rain all day.
But they say the season for reading is autumn.
Yet the alien here was wrestling with long texts during a time when summer hadn’t even arrived.
“Hmm…”
Actually, this alien was stuck trying to deceive Kang Chang-ho and encountered a snag.
The type of magic he was familiar with wasn’t functioning properly on Earth.
So, after delving into research, he realized this issue stemmed from the environmental differences between Earth and Alphauri. Now, he was actively working on finding a solution by collecting materials directly from dungeons to adjust the variables.
“Damn it, it’s just a difference in air pressure or water pressure, so why does it keep shutting off on its own?”
Things were going a bit rough.
Concepts like carbon or nitrogen had defined properties per element, making it easier for an alien being like him to quickly learn the new terminology.
But when it came to measurement units like length or pressure, the two planets had entirely different systems, which gave him a headache when it came to calculations.
He was especially furious when he discovered the yard-pound system and the metric system on Earth.
He thought that when he eventually conquered Earth, he’d eradicate one or the other to unify those units.
“Hmmm.”
Yet, surprisingly, the intense issue he was facing was resolved quite easily.
This alien, after all, had devoted most of his life to magic and was an excellent scholar.
Due to his stubbornness, he had fewer ordinary experiences and sometimes showed a careless side in daily life, but on the contrary, he possessed unparalleled knowledge in Magic Studies.
“Okay. This should work.”
It didn’t take long for him to grasp the solution.
Ultimately, the research advanced without any major difficulties.
However, merely completing the project wouldn’t mean anything if he got stuck at ‘that stage’…
‘Damn, how am I supposed to get a new body?’
He was able to fully utilize the F-Class magic power he possessed.
Thus, it became possible to cast the exchange spell to transfer his soul.
All of this was good news for him.
But as he had worried all along, the process of acquiring that body was proving to be a hindrance.
Korea, with its systematic resident registration laws, would make it almost obligatory to contact families when a death occurs, even if an unidentified corpse appeared. The authorities would collect it and conduct a funeral.
Moreover, since the bodies of Awakened ones have high research value, there had been several theft cases, leading to tighter security at hunter-exclusive cemeteries.
There was no way to simply toss a corpse on the street as a convenient solution.
So how on earth was he supposed to procure a new vessel?
Not just any vessel, but at least an E-Class body!
‘Hmmm, pay the family a sum for the body… Nope, that won’t work. Gi-ryeo’s brain has been warning me since earlier that it’s human trafficking if I go down that route!’
As he pondered daily, the outside world, once again, was undergoing a new change amid the spring rains.
*
Perhaps the gradual expansion of the dungeon until now was all a rehearsal for this very day.
Earth.
A new type of dungeon finally emerged that fully qualified for the adjective “huge.”
“What is it?”
“A new gate?”
At 1 AM Greenwich Mean Time on the 14th.
A Blue Gate was discovered off the eastern coast of Argentina.
Until that point, hunters thought it was just the normal occurrence of a new gate.
“Hmm? The dungeon’s magic density is C, so why are the monsters showing up as D-Class?”
“Something feels off…”
But this wasn’t the case.
What appeared before them was a vast labyrinth with an internal space stretching 6.1 km.
Its entrances had emerged haphazardly in various countries including South America, Moldova, Iceland, Lebanon, and Korea.
A global dungeon sharing several passages.
This was the commencement of a different world known as [Mimic City].
[Mimic City].
It seemed to want to imitate humanity’s vibrancy, sprawling endlessly.
Still, since the monsters emerging from the dungeon were at most C-Class, they figured conquering it would be a breeze.
But the experts from all over the world soon realized the gravity of the situation.
This chaotic dungeon, where diverse monsters of different species appeared inconsistently, surprisingly had no visible boss!
Did that mean this was a type II Blue Gate with no boss?
‘What a headache.’
If that were the case, it couldn’t get more annoying from the leaders’ perspective.
It was already challenging to find hidden monsters due to the dungeon’s vastness, and now, the longer they dragged out conquering it, the more unverified hunters were entering through the other countries’ entrances…
The issue wasn’t simply about conquering the monsters.
Even if they killed all the monsters and opened the exit, if any survivors remained inside, the dungeon wouldn’t collapse!
This gate could potentially become an illegal means of allowing outsiders into their country without passports.
Leaders in countries including Argentina swiftly identified the locations of the newly generated entrances and began urgent management efforts.
But their misfortune wasn’t over yet.
“Oh my God!”
Eight hours later.
A terrifying report came in from surveying knights in Iceland, stating that the dungeon was ‘growing larger and larger.’
Was Mimic City, from the perspective of Ki-simche, a sort of buffet restaurant?
Various hosts of different nationalities suffering in one basket.
This Mimic City was constructed in such a way that it simply could not be ignored for conquest, and it had several characteristics:
Ⓐ As time passes, the size of the space and the number of entrances increases.
Ⓑ The dungeon’s progress resets every 780 minutes. This means the changed terrain, deactivated traps, and even the population of general monsters would revert to their previous state.
Ⓒ The beasts of this gate exhibit a very high rate of escape. In other words, once a passage is discovered, they charge out without fail.
Although scholars had moderately refined the expression, in simpler terms, this gate was incredibly troublesome.
Fortunately, the ‘reset’ phenomenon of Mimic City removed all corpses from within the dungeon, preventing the nightmare of having piles of hunting byproducts accumulate with each reset.
Yet, what if one day a maze passage suddenly opened in my yard?
What if a dangerous criminal entered our country without going through immigration checks?
The citizens’ anxieties deepened day by day.
Thus, the World Cooperation Organization hurriedly initiated a response agreement to halt the devouring of this vast labyrinth.
*
Monday eventually arrived.
‘Hehehe.’
While everyone was immersed in worry, a certain young man living in a studio apartment was wearing a smug smile.
Illegal immigrants.
The furious charge of monsters who love the outside world.
Cancer, those things are naturally frightening for good citizens.
But they were completely unaware of the powerful crimes that would potentially unfold ahead.
“I’ll have to retract my statements about the world hating me starting today. Looking at this, it seems the entire universe is on my side, doesn’t it?”
What if some grade forger sneaks a corpse away in that complicated dungeon…?
A truly delicate person should worry about such absurd possibilities.
As this thought suggested, Gi-ryeo was constantly watching for an opportunity to enter [Mimic City].
When the dungeon first emerged, he hadn’t given it much thought. But as the characteristics became clear, a plan flashed into his mind.
At this very moment, dungeon holes were forming randomly on Earth.
Hunters of unknown origins were converging from various countries.
Moreover, the vast area of that place was merely an immense advantage for acquiring corpses.
‘Oh ho.’
According to the news, the international cooperation agency planned an initial exploration of the dungeon on the 15th with the consent of each country, and based on the information gathered, they intended to establish a proper conquest plan for a true cleanup on the 16th.
Gi-ryeo aimed to take advantage of the exploration slated for the 15th.
‘If I hide in a relatively unseen corner of that dungeon, perhaps an Awakened one will accidentally die at some point?’
In the hunter’s industry, when casualties occurred during battle, it was often the case to leave the corpse behind and escape to avoid risking the remaining survivors.
So all he had to do was remain still and wait until a suitable casualty occurred, then take it and head towards a less monitored exit.
‘With my current magic, I can’t employ spells like the eternal frost, but… I can at least freeze a corpse for a few weeks. How about burying it on foreign soil, then coming back later to perform the body exchange spell at that coordinate? Domestic actions are rather limited in various ways.’
Of course, if he actually executed this plan, there would be many variables.
For instance, he might think no one was around when coming out, only to find a witness near the exit.
But in such a case, he could just talk his way out of it flexibly.
He had thoroughly analyzed past incidents through extensive web surfing.
‘If worse comes to worst, I can just say I was rescuing a victim like the misunderstanding that happened at Gampo Port!’
Crafting such schemes was the specialty of Alphaurians.
