The Foreigner on the Periphery

Solada left the guiding to the servant, and the group followed the stanian named Gulesh. The crocodile-like alien chattered in a cheerful tone.

"You humans are quite lucky. To find this mansion of all places! And right when the great Weapon Master, Lord Solada, is here. Thanks to him, you won't find a safer place around here."

The tone of the Committee's common language spoken by the stanian sounded bizarre.

In truth, their vocal cords were not suited to the phonetic rules of the language. His forced, squeezed voice sounded almost comical. However, seeing how fluent he was, it seemed the Gelanco dimension had already been linguistically colonized. While royalty and the upper classes employed interpreters and insisted on their native tongue when speaking to other races, commoners endured the discomfort and used the common language.

Minjun also noticed a detail that contradicted his old memories. Every stanian roaming the mansion was male. It had never been like this in the past. Over the last eight hundred years, stanian social culture had completely inverted.

They had strictly cut off all contact between unmarried men and women.

'The goal is probably to control reproduction.'

Minjun recalled that once a stanian woman laid a fertilized egg and hatched it, her ovulation would stop for several decades.

In other words, a woman who became a mother couldn't lay eggs again for a long time—whether fertilized or unfertilized.

He thought back to the data he had skimmed before arriving. Recently, the marriage rate of stanians had been on a slight upward trend, which was expected to drive up the price of gold in the short term and lower it in the long term. Looking deeper, these changes had become prominent right after the recent pan-dimensional plunge in gold prices. Someone was adjusting the birth rate in accordance with the fluctuating price of gold.

"By the way, the kitchen in this mansion only has stanian cooking utensils and ingredients. Will that be all right with you?"

"Ah, it's not a problem. We brought all of that with us."

"That's a relief. You must be worried sick, though. For your wife to be struck by such a wicked curse. I can't even find the words seeing it from the sidelines, so how must you feel as her spouse? I wouldn't dare guess."

Minjun didn't bother replying. He knew that some lies were perfected only by silence. He simply lowered his chin with a dark expression, his gaze carrying deep sorrow and worry. Seeing this, Gulesh looked back and forth between the human couple with an odd expression, just as Solada had done earlier.

"Well, it's unimaginable for me. As you know, stanians aren't a race that can marry as easily as humans. Should I say it's actually a relief? If a guy like me—with a lowly job, meager earnings, and no Supernatural Ability—were to suddenly get married, I wouldn't have the means to handle it if my wife got sick. Being single might just be easier."

Even though he was just playing the part of a fake husband, Minjun found the servant's words irritating.

"Anyway, the others with you are quite quiet, aren't they? They haven't said a word. Oh, now that I think about it, I haven't even asked for your names."

Gulesh trailed off, his eyes darting continuously. Minjun offered a suitable alias and added an explanation.

"Those two following us are slaves. They were caught stealing my belongings. At first, I was going to cut off their hands as punishment, but I changed my mind. I cut out their tongues instead so it wouldn't interfere with their physical labor."

"I see. Very wise indeed."

It was an explanation that only worked because Gelanco had steadily regressed socio-culturally over the past eight hundred years.

Meanwhile, the individuals Minjun had just introduced as slaves felt no resentment. One was unconscious, the other had already accepted his identity as a servant, and the third couldn't understand the common language.

"But what brings you all the way out to the countryside like this?"

"I was interested in the ruins around here and planned to do some investigating. But then, a wicked master of Dark Magic..."

Gulesh slowed his pace, looking like he wanted to ask a few more questions, but Minjun politely urged him on, citing his wife's poor condition. In the end, the servant could only smack his lips and back down.

"Then please, rest comfortably. I'll get the kitchen ready for you to use."

After the door closed, Minjun cast a barrier to prevent any sound from leaking out. He used Magic to dry the moisture seeping into the cushioning of the stanian bedding, then laid down the ex-wife he had been carrying on his back. Next, he carefully began to untie the hastily knotted tentacles, one by one.

While he focused on the task, Ha Eun-seong finally relaxed and let out a sigh. Feeling safe now, he asked Yumtus.

"Hey, mister?"

"What is it?"

"Those crocodile heads from earlier, they're stanians, right? When I was snooping around, guys who looked like that were the only ones in the area."

He was too scared to strike up a conversation with his creditor, so he was trying his luck with the more approachable priest instead.

Yumtus replied with a benevolent smile.

"That's correct. They are one of the races that make up the United Kingdom in this dimension. Though I've heard their numbers have dwindled significantly compared to the past."

Since he hadn't understood a single word of the conversation earlier, Ha Eun-seong was curious about their situation. He listened closely to the explanation and nodded.

"So the tallest, most heavily built stanian is the master here?"

"It appeared so."

"Seeing how big this house is, he must be a noble? Or rich? Something like that, I guess. I knew it, his appearance was out of the ordinary too."

Even though they all had crocodile heads, that tall stanian stood out immensely.

It was like seeing a mastiff mixed in with a pack of ordinary yellow mutts.

Not only his sheer size, but his facial features were also remarkably different from the others. It was a clear distinction that even an Earthling could not miss.

"He had the most intimidating presence out of all the stanians here. He's a crocodile, but he looks cool. Like he's just in a different class, you know?"

Minjun, who had been listening in silence, suddenly scoffed. Ha Eun-seong had unconsciously been evaluating Solada's appearance based on this world's standards.

"What? He's the best-looking one of the bunch? You have truly bizarre taste."

Ha Eun-seong flared with anger at those words. Even if everyone in the world criticized his aesthetic sense, he absolutely refused to be judged by Minjun of all people.

'Who is he to talk? The guy likes tentacles.'

For a man who fell in love with a tentacle woman to criticize someone else's taste was simply deplorable.

Ha Eun-seong still didn't know the exact details between the two of them. However, he could reconstruct the story just from the conversations exchanged between the bedridden tentacle woman and the agent. In fact, he had already filmed a whole soap opera in his head.

Minjun headed for the door and said,

"Wait here for a bit."

Yumtus asked,

"What will you do for a meal? You must still be running on an empty stomach."

"It's not the right time yet. I need to feed those guys first."

Minjun gathered his cooking tools. Until then, Ha Eun-seong didn't dare express his feelings and merely grumbled inwardly. 'Right, the guy in debt is the sinner here.' The moment Minjun stepped out, Ha Eun-seong turned to Yumtus as if he had been waiting for this.

"Do you happen to know? What exactly was the relationship between those two?"

Yumtus only smiled faintly and shook his head. It was an ambiguous response. Did he not know, or did he know but couldn't say?

Ha Eun-seong laid out his own theories.

"Putting all the information together so far, the person sleeping over there is the princess of a tentacle country, right? And she was deeply involved with the agent. If they had officially married, it probably would have made the news. But I've never heard a peep about it. So they couldn't have been husband and wife."

The truth—that the 'tentacle country princess' was once a prisoner, and that she and Minjun had gone a step beyond marriage and had already divorced—was a realm far beyond the imagination of an ordinary twenty-something Earthling.

"There's a difference in race and a difference in status. Naturally, they wouldn't have received permission from the woman's side, right? But listening to their stories, it sounds like they lived together?"

Wow, it was even premarital cohabitation.

The values of a Confucian youth sleeping deep inside him kept urging him to bring out the disciplinary cane. Perhaps as a reaction to his own turbulent family history, Ha Eun-seong was rather conservative in that regard.

"Even if his personality is eccentric, he seemed like the type to build an absolute iron wall when it came to that stuff... Turns out he was wildly unconventional. People just don't know about it, but if it got out, wouldn't it be the romance of the century that flips the whole world upside down?"

If it were known, things would likely flip upside down on a scale far beyond what Ha Eun-seong imagined.

Listening to him, Yumtus spoke in a soft voice.

"Well. I do not believe I have any need to know what worldly connections he has made, and unless he speaks of them himself, I do not think there is any reason to waste mental energy trying to guess."

At that, Ha Eun-seong felt awkward. It sounded as though the priest was calling him out for taking too much interest in someone else's private life. Yumtus looked at the unconscious half-human, half-tentacle woman and continued.

"However, there is one thing I can tell you."

"What is it?"

Ha Eun-seong's eyes sparkled.

"I do not know how he feels about that woman. But it is certain that the Princess showed tremendous courage for his sake. She overcame agony and terror that races like yours and mine cannot even fathom."

"Agony and terror we can't fathom?"

"Just as those who haven't experienced it cannot gauge the pain of childbirth or kidney stones, the emotions she must have felt are difficult for other races to imagine."

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"They say there is a certain word in the language of Endelion. My vocal organs couldn't properly pronounce it anyway, but to force a transliteration, it would sound something like this: 'Kermathei-asha-kw'aterai.'"

The words Yumtus murmured at the end sounded to Ha Eun-seong like a clogged drain suddenly unclogging and sucking down water.

"What does that mean?"

"There's no suitable word for it in Earth's languages. Narcissism? Pride? Self-esteem? They're all slightly off. To explain it at length, it would be something like, 'the state of knowing one's objective value is so exceptionally high that one treasures it, fears losing it even slightly, and endlessly loves oneself.'"

"Isn't that just self-esteem?"

"Self-esteem is the love that comes from assigning oneself a subjective and absolute value. But that word signifies loving oneself because one knows one's objective value. They say the word is underpinned by the Endelion race's self-awareness of just how precious they are to this world."

Ha Eun-seong vaguely felt like he understood.

"So it's similar to the dragons' superiority complex? The whole 'we are the greatest in the universe' thing?"

"It's different from the pride of the Dragon Race. Endelions genuinely believe this. They believe they are contributing to turning the world into a paradise, a better place. And that if any mishap were to befall them while doing such important work, it would be a pan-universal loss."

Ha Eun-seong clicked his tongue internally.

Wow, an inflated ego like that is practically legendary.

Why are they deciding for themselves whether they're important or not? How is that an objective value?

"Because of that, they are often criticized as cowards who don't match their massive size. They play it safe—far too safe. I've heard that unless they belong to the upper echelon, they rarely even attempt dimensional leaps. Because if an accident were to happen to their universally precious 'selves,' it would be an irreversible pan-dimensional loss."

"That's weird. Shouldn't the upper echelon play it even safer?"

"Even so, someone among them inevitably has to take the risks. I'm told they hold an ancient belief that those who embrace that danger are the truly noble ones."

It was becoming harder and harder to understand.

"Anyway, these are beings who consider even riding a Jump Ship to be a massive risk, yet the Princess made a dimensional leap with her bare body. The terror they feel in the face of something that threatens their lives... is an extreme emotion other races cannot imagine. Agony that feels like losing one's mind, incomprehensible unless you are an Endelion. They describe it as a physical pain felt by the heart."

Yumtus murmured softly.

"Overcoming even that terror, the Princess stepped forward to help him. The reason? It's simple."

Ha Eun-seong thought he knew the answer.

Because they love each other?

But Yumtus's answer was different.

"Because... he is just that magnificent a being!"

"...Huh?"

Why did the conclusion suddenly jump over there?

"Serving by his side, every single day is a procession of awe and admiration. Miracles bloom with every step he takes. What's more, this time, he guided the Princess of Endelion to overcome her innate terror. Do you understand? The impossible made possible! Everything he dreams of becomes reality. A beautiful light that makes all things possible, capable of twisting the very providence of the world. He is the absolute truth that we worship."

Ha Eun-seong sighed faintly as he watched the priest suddenly start chanting in a tone brimming with the Holy Spirit. Before long, a red flush began to swell on the alien's forehead.

'Anyway, none of them are normal.'

Not the tentacle who loves a human, not the human who loves a tentacle, and not the alien who worships the human who loves the tentacle.

All of them were bizarre beyond measure.

Ha Eun-seong lamented. How did a normal person like him end up stuck among such weirdos? Anyway, ever since meeting Minjun, he hadn't had a single peaceful day in the afterlife.

'I'd better keep my wits about me.'

Suddenly dragged to an alien world and forced to move with a bunch of abnormal people, his only way to avoid sudden disaster was to keep his own sanity intact. As Ha Eun-seong made that vow, the faint moans slipping from the Princess reached his ears.

"Oh... God!"

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