The Foreigner on the Periphery

Adkiel was one of the noble ones.

From birth, she bore a heavy destiny: to ensure that humanity lived in enduring stability, order, and happiness.

This was the duty of those raised in special facilities—superhumans whose worth no collective of ordinary people could replace.

Highly advanced technology and social systems had already fulfilled the first two conditions. With stability and order guaranteed, humanity now craved even greater happiness. And death stood as the most fatal catastrophe obstructing it.

The noble ones answered the call. Thanks to the efforts of her ancestors, the average human lifespan had surged dramatically, and it continued to rise even now.

Adkiel herself might not escape death, but the next generation might truly attain something close to eternal life.

And now, Adkiel was pondering the next step.

'The devices implanted in their brains have limits.'

This was before the invention of the tool that served as the prototype for Asiph-1—the ultimate weapon forged from souls.

It was not a problem that would manifest in the next few centuries, or even millennia.

She was looking far beyond that, agonizing over a crisis that would unfold long after her own death.

'Numb to happiness, people will begin expressing their despair and frustration as rage. Anything imperfect or incomplete will become a target for their hatred. They will seize upon the slightest flaw or difference as an excuse to despise one another. If we are already destined to turn our disgust upon ourselves, the conflict will only worsen when other species rise to the point of interacting with us. Hating inferior beings is all too easy.'

What must be done to prevent this world from becoming a hell of guaranteed immortality? What virtue would the people of the future need?

Adkiel already knew the answer.

And the boy who appeared before her seemed to be the Key that would guide humanity to that answer.

'A child who can be loved beyond all limits.'

The love she envisioned transcended mere sexual attraction.

It was love as the antithesis of hatred, a love that would serve as the absolute foundation against prejudice.

'What exactly about him makes this possible?'

Could she implant that same brilliance into everyone? Could she ensure that humanity would continue to love one another for a near eternity?

Adkiel decided to find out.

'Come with me.'

If the boy's unique trait was a type of supernatural ability, it had to be influenced by both his body and his soul, for the physical and spiritual intertwined to construct life.

Adkiel chose to begin her verification with the most accessible components. Her experiments commenced immediately after she brought the boy to an isolated pastoral planet.

Extracting biological samples like blood without his knowledge was a trivial matter. Through her research, Adkiel discovered a unique gene within him. However, rather than being the source of his anomaly, it seemed to be a mutation resulting from it.

Adkiel wondered if transplanting this gene into others would yield similar results. The primordial race had experimental subjects prepared precisely for such occasions—entities whose physical traits were virtually indistinguishable from humans, yet who absolutely could not be considered human.

The results, however, were disappointing.

'No. This isn't it.'

A unique pheromone that seduced across species barriers—the gene responsible for emitting this substance successfully expressed itself in the subjects' blood. Yet, its potency paled in comparison to the boy's. It produced a fascination rooted entirely in sexual attraction and dictated by sexual orientation. It was far from what Adkiel sought.

She halted the experiment. The subjects—who had even been infused with souls through orchestrated accidents—were released. They were left to mingle with others who had been similarly discarded in the past. Adkiel abruptly cut off all interest in them.

'His physical body merely changed in response to his soul. I have no choice but to center my research on his spirit.'

While the boy slept, Adkiel induced an unconscious out-of-body state.

She applied various stimuli to his separated soul and meticulously recorded the results. Through this, she discovered another unknown property residing within the boy's spirit.

'How is this even possible?'

She watched in disbelief as the boy's soul simply phased right through her barrier.

It was impossible.

While it was true that a spiritual body ignored the physical resistance of the material world, that did not mean it was free from all constraints. Magic was the prime exception. Certain types of barriers were specifically designed to trap souls.

But the boy's spirit shattered even that fundamental law.

'His soul renders even magical and spiritual boundaries entirely meaningless!'

Adkiel's thirst for research flared with unprecedented intensity, but her experiments continually ran into roadblocks.

There was a strict limit to the data she could gather without inflicting permanent damage to his spiritual body.

'Research without samples has its limits.'

Experiments in the material world posed no such problems. She could extract as much of the boy's blood and spinal fluid as she pleased.

But spiritual experiments were prohibitively difficult. It was like taking an agonizingly long detour while ignoring a clear shortcut.

Eventually, Adkiel made her decision.

'I won't make any progress at this rate.'

She would take the shortcut.

'Carefully, so I don't wake him...'

People often spoke of the soul's annihilation, but Adkiel knew the truth. Souls did not vanish. They merely fractured and disintegrated into pieces too minuscule to perceive.

Adkiel resolved to subject the boy's soul to this process. Just as a surgeon excised a tiny tissue sample for a biopsy, she would fragment and extract his soul in microscopic increments. With isolated particles that small, she could apply the most extreme stimuli without risking the whole.

Slowly, from the very edges, she began to carve the boy's soul into tiny fragments.

   *

"Are you awake?"

"...Yes."

It was a morning like any other, but as the boy sat at the dining table, his expression was unusually hollow.

Once again, they were sharing breakfast alone. The boy reached for his utensils, then froze.

"What's wrong?"

The boy hesitated before speaking.

"I feel strange."

"How so?"

Despite knowing exactly what the cause was, Adkiel feigned ignorance.

The boy lacked the vocabulary to describe the sensation consuming him. He wouldn't learn the right words for another few years.

It was a sense of profound loss. A feeling that a vital, foundational piece of his very being had been ripped away.

Accompanied by a sorrowful certainty that he would never get it back.

The boy recognized it on a purely instinctual level.

"I don't know. Everything just feels... off. I feel empty, and sad."

"You must have had a nightmare."

Adkiel raised her teacup, her expression completely untroubled.

   *

It happened around the time Adkiel extracted her fiftieth sample.

"Give it back!"

"Grrr! Grrrr!"

Just outside the house where the master and disciple lived.

The boy was facing down a Hatchling.

"I said give it back!"

The boy shrieked. He was glaring at a young Dragon so small that, even with its wings fully unfurled, it wouldn't reach his knees. The creature growled around a ball clamped tight in its jaws.

"It's mine! Give it here!"

Despite the boy's furious shouts, the Hatchling refused to open its jaws. In truth, the young Dragon simply wanted to play with him. The Dragons on this planet adored the boy, but holding affection for someone and submitting to their commands were entirely different matters.

"I'm warning you!"

A vicious, unchildlike glare flared in the boy's eyes. He threw his hand up. As he slowly curled his outstretched fingers, the air began to vibrate sharply, humming like a freshly honed blade.

That was when Adkiel intervened.

"Enough!"

His master quickly defused the situation. She set a bowl of feed in front of the Hatchling, and the young Dragon instantly dropped the ball—its previous obsession forgotten—and dove for the food.

Adkiel picked up the slobber-soaked ball and silently handed it to her young disciple.

Given how thoroughly enraged he was, and seeing his favorite toy slathered in livestock spit, it would have been perfectly normal for him to throw a tantrum and refuse it.

"..."

But the boy accepted the toy without a word. He clutched it fiercely to his chest, as if determined never to let it be taken from him again.

He panted heavily, still unable to suppress his boiling fury.

"It... it wouldn't listen to me."

His opponent had been a young Dragon barely weaned onto solid feed. Much like human toddlers, it was simply wild and rambunctious.

Furthermore, the behavioral conditioning laced into their feed only implanted a few basic obedience commands. It wasn't designed to enforce control down to such trivial play behavior.

The boy ducked his head, hiding his contorted face. Adkiel watched her disciple and silently mused.

'His obsession with his own possessions is growing stronger.'

Coincidentally, as her experiments of fracturing his soul progressed, this very tendency had become far more pronounced.

It was as if he was trying to smother his instinctual sense of loss by gripping desperately onto whatever else he could claim.

The boy muttered into his chest.

"It would be so much better if things just did what they were told instead of fighting me."

His master saw the unmistakable void haunting her disciple's eyes, but she simply smiled, feigning ignorance.

"You must be exhausted from playing outside all day. You should get to bed early tonight."

   *

The experiments proved arduous. With every passing session, the fragments of the boy's soul that Adkiel sliced away grew steadily larger.

It was around the time she extracted her hundredth sample.

Master and disciple sat by a crackling campfire in the night-shrouded forest. Paradoxically, this era considered primitive practices to be the height of refined taste. Ignoring convenient technology to invest time and effort into inefficient tools was proof of one's absolute leisure. Burning wood to make a fire fell perfectly into that category.

The forest's silence wavered in the hazy heat of the flames. She had no experiments planned for tonight; instead, she intended to focus purely on his lessons until late.

The disciple stared vacantly into the fire. The longer they lived together, the more the boy's expressions seemed to lose their color and variety. Adkiel knew, however, that his learning capacity remained entirely unimpaired.

Sparks danced into the crimson-tinged darkness. Against the crackle of burning wood, Adkiel spoke.

"Someday, you will have a 'companion' of your own."

The term referred to a special Dragon raised personally by a dragon herder.

She scratched the chin of the Gold Dragon lounging at her feet. Purrr! Adkiel's companion let out a satisfied rumble.

"These specific ones have been specially bred. They constantly observe and intervene with the other Dragons, even when their master isn't watching. Furthermore, they offer their masters an extraordinary devotion and easily empathize with human emotions."

Adkiel began to explain a tradition passed down among the noble ones.

"Dragons raised as livestock don't receive names. As you know, we just refer to them by alphanumeric codes. But a companion must be given a name. A human name."

And that name carried a very specific significance.

"It is named after someone immensely precious to you—someone you can no longer keep by your side."

Someday, you will have to give your companion a name like that.

Her disciple reacted slowly to this explanation, as if he had been lost in his own thoughts.

"Then... whose name was 'Elysion'?"

Adkiel could not answer immediately. She looked down at her companion, who was currently rolling around and exposing its belly at her feet. The very Dragon who bore the name her disciple had just spoken.

"..."

It seemed she ultimately decided not to answer. Wordlessly, she scratched the base of Elysion's wings. The Dragon narrowed its eyes in absolute bliss, purring contentedly.

The boy stared at his master's profile for a long time. Adkiel was so deeply submerged in her thoughts that she never even noticed his gaze. The boy guessed she was reminiscing about the distant past.

The boy didn't like that one bit.

He had forgotten nearly everything from before he arrived on this planet. None of it held any meaning for him anyway. His clearest memory was the day he first met his master. For all intents and purposes, the boy's life had truly begun here. This pastoral planet was his entire universe. His master and the Dragons were everything he possessed. He knew nothing of life beyond this place.

But it seemed his master was different.

Whenever Adkiel made that expression, the boy felt the divide acutely. Every time she looked at Elysion, it seemed she wasn't seeing the Dragon at all, but someone else entirely. Her eyes might be anchored in the present, but her mind was racing through the distant past. An era the boy knew nothing about. A period of time that had absolutely nothing to do with him.

Just who was this person she remembered so wistfully?

A part of him was agonizingly curious, while another part fiercely prayed for a day when he wouldn't have to wonder at all.

Crackle! Pop!

The pop and hiss of burning firewood was the only sound echoing through the quiet forest.

Realizing he had been staring at her for too long, the boy forced his gaze away. He pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. A sickening, gnawing sensation squirmed in his chest, but rather than bowing his head, he tilted his chin defiantly upward.

He sat there, staring up at the night sky for a very long time.

   *

That gnawing sense of deficiency haunted the boy for years.

He viewed himself as a fundamentally broken existence, entirely incapable of finding satisfaction within himself. He constantly hungered for something to fill the cavernous void in his soul.

And because of that, the boy could never accept himself.

   *

Around the time Adkiel extracted the six-hundredth sample.

Adkiel sat alone, watching a magical projection.

"Elysion, come here!"

The feed showed the outskirts of the forest. He had no lessons today. Granted a day of free time, her disciple had left the house early in the morning to go play with the Dragons.

The boy had no idea he was being secretly observed.

"Yeah, just like that. Good boy."

On the screen, the boy was entirely alone with his master's companion.

However.

"Grrr... Grrrr!"

Elysion was acting strange.

The Dragon kept sniffing nervously at the edge of the boy's pocket. "Grrr!" It reeled back in fright, leaping away before spinning in anxious circles.

This wasn't a threat directed at the boy, nor was it playful excitement.

The Dragon was issuing a warning. A desperate warning about a threat looming over its family.

"Grrrr!"

The boy gave an awkward, strained smile. His eyes were dead and rigid; only his lips curled up in a forced imitation of joy.

"It's fine, I'm telling you it's fine."

He pulled something out of his pocket.

"Grrr!"

The Dragon recoiled in terror.

The boy was holding the very thing the creature had been frantically warning him about.

He shouldn't be touching that!

"Grrr! Grrrrrr!"

The beast danced anxiously, frantically trying to swat the object out of the boy's hands with its snout and wings. The Dragon knew. That thing was dangerous. Eating it wouldn't just give you a stomachache—it could paralyze you permanently.

This herding Dragon had already seen several of its kin eat that exact creature and die.

The object the boy had fished out of his pocket was a vibrantly colored, highly venomous amphibian.

Its lifeless limbs dangled limply from his grip.

He whispered to the Dragon.

"Here. Eat it."

Elysion understood the command, but refused to obey. Instead, it grew even more distressed. Eat it? That thing will kill me!

It assumed the poor human child simply didn't understand the danger. Unable to watch any longer, Elysion whipped its tail against the back of the boy's hand. Hey! Drop it!

Smack!

"Ow!"

The boy barely managed to keep his grip on the dead amphibian. He grabbed his stung wrist with his free hand. It was already swelling red.

"Grrrrrr!"

The Dragon finally bared its teeth. Throw it away right now! If you keep holding that, you're going to die!

At that exact moment...

"...!"

The boy lowered his head and gritted his teeth, muttering.

"You're so annoying... Such a pain... I told you to just do exactly what I say."

When he raised his head, a starlit glow flared deep within his eyes.

With an overwhelming authority he had never displayed before, he commanded.

="Eat it!"=

   *

A survivor of the primordial race—the sinner who had once borne the designation Asif-666—remembered the past. He and his master were the only ones left alive who knew exactly how the Dragons had obtained their invulnerability to all poisons.

When Elysion had been found dead in the forest, his master had been devastated. She had locked herself in her laboratory for days, refusing all food and water.

Watching her suffer, the sinner had made up his mind. He was the only one who could fill the gaping void of her loss.

He swore to always stay by her side... so she would never again have to think about her mysterious past connections, or mourn Elysion, the Dragon who had stayed by her side the longest.

Hopefully, for a near eternity.

Minjun remembered that pledge as clearly as the day he made it. But right now, all he felt was overwhelming bewilderment.

Through the shadow monster's memories, a truth he had never known was finally unraveling.

"..."

He couldn't have possibly imagined it at the time. The greatest sin of his childhood, an act he swore no one had ever witnessed. A past that remained his darkest, most secret shame.

But his master had actually been watching the whole time.

"My god! This is—!"

His master gasped, her eyes glued to the screen.

Unable to contain her ecstatic thrill, she bolted upright and paced wildly in circles around her laboratory. Seeing the world through Adkiel's vision, Minjun watched the room spin past him over and over again.

And then...

"...This goes beyond anything I ever imagined!"

His master's voice trembled with sheer, manic elation. Her breathing hitched, her hot, rapid breaths filling the room.

She finally stopped pacing and leaned heavily against the window. Looking through his master's eyes, Minjun saw her reflection in the glass.

Adkiel was smiling.

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