The Foreigner on the Periphery

Submerged in boiling metal, the Tentacle King could not shake off a single thought.

It was about Asif-666's final words.

'Bacteria? Like mere bacteria?'

She felt no anger at her race being degraded to something lower than insects.

Instead, the King felt terror.

'When their long sleep ends, they will become so superior that the rest of the races will be viewed as bacteria—so insignificant there won't even be a reason to enslave us or treat us as livestock?'

To be exact, he had said they would need about two species.

He had stated in no uncertain terms that Endelion was not one of them.

The King interpreted this to mean Endelion would be so utterly inferior in comparison that the primordial race wouldn't even need to pay them any attention.

Until now, she had considered their return a nightmare.

But what if, in truth, the rest of the races could have continued living freely, just as they always had, even after they awoke?

There was no need to know which two races were the exceptions.

As long as it wasn't her own.

'Then why didn't he say so earlier? If I had known that was the plan, I might have kept my promise to Asif-666 after winning the war against the Dragon Race...'

That thought was immediately refuted in her own mind.

No.

Asif-666 had promised.

He had assured her that the lives of the Ancient Race would remain unchanged upon their return. He had even offered to help them become better beings together if they so wished.

But the King had not believed him.

Because a mere word guaranteed nothing, goodwill shattered easily, and trust was nothing but a prelude to betrayal.

'Lies.'

We did nothing wrong.

We simply stayed true to our survival instincts. The instinct to sense danger.

'It's a lie!'

Just as the King hadn't believed Asif-666's promises in the past, she decided not to believe the words she had just heard either.

'It's a story made up to torture me! The primordial race really was preparing to subjugate us!'

Her inner voice was becoming tainted with a terrible madness. The King had to deny it.

The moment she believed Asif-666's confession, which was no different from the past, she would have to admit that she had committed an irreversible mistake.

'If that's the truth, does it mean I willingly brought about the ruin of our... of my people?'

She had kicked away the opportunity to advance to a point where they would be so overwhelmingly superior they wouldn't even need to pay attention to other races.

She had severed the merciful hand guiding them to heaven and willingly thrown herself into the pits of hell.

'Ah... Ah! It can't be!'

Even knowing that Asif-666 had no reason to lie in this situation, the Tentacle King screamed.

Believing only what she wanted to believe, denying what she could not bear to trust.

'It's a lie! It's a lie! Aaaaaagh!'

A desperate psychic wave echoed from the bath of molten metal.

At the same time, the shrieks of her people burning to death seemed to ring in her ears like a hallucination.

The King could not distinguish them from her own screams.

   *

He decided to boil the Tentacle King a little longer.

Since Asiph-1 also needed time to rest, Minjun told him he could step back. Yumtus would keep watch over the control panel.

"..."

After drawing the screen closed again, Minjun returned to the control room and locked eyes with someone.

"...Cain."

Minjun admitted that his prediction had been wrong.

He had thought she wouldn't be able to bear it and would leave once the "operation" began, but his ex-wife had remained to watch until the very end.

The emotions provoked by such a situation could not be neatly measured by reason. The logical conclusion that even her mother had to pay for her crimes was difficult to reconcile with the sheer shock of watching such a horrifying spectacle unfold.

Dell spoke with an indescribable expression.

"I have something to ask."

Minjun decided he would understand even if his ex-wife went back on her word and begged for forgiveness. Such contradictions were part of what made a person human, after all.

While he was thinking that, she asked her question. Once again, it was something unexpected.

"What exactly is this Shelter?"

She then asked about its size and shape.

"If we find that, you won't need to torture the 'King' anymore, right?"

Noting her choice of title, Minjun nodded.

"The King has nothing left but spite. She seems to think that holding out without giving me what I want is a form of revenge."

A dreadfully foolish and self-destructive revenge.

Dell grimaced as if she could hardly bear to hear it.

The King's bizarre obsession was destroying her from the inside.

"That Shelter is absolutely necessary to complete your plan, right? Then I'll look for it too."

Asiph-1, who hadn't left his seat yet, tilted his head.

"Didn't you say the vault was in a location only the King knows about?"

Dell explained her plan.

Their home planet had practically collapsed in the aftermath of a planetary collision, and most of its original records had vanished.

However, the tentacles had left a database on another planet in the star system in case of emergencies.

"She probably didn't record the vault's explicit location. But if I trace the King's past movements, a clue might turn up."

Dell was the only person free to move who possessed the knowledge to handle that data right now.

"You want to find it as quickly as possible, right? Let me help."

From Minjun's perspective, there was no reason to refuse the offer.

He ordered Yumtus to prepare a spaceship for his ex-wife.

After Dell headed out the door, Minjun stared quietly at the empty space she left behind.

"..."

He added one more command for Yumtus.

"From the next interrogation onward, do not inform Dell of the time and location."

The priest bowed his head politely.

   *

Returning to his quarters, Minjun was left alone and opened his subspace.

Flash!

Two items that had been bound together emerged at the same time.

Belongings he had packed before escaping Earth.

He had suddenly sought these out because he needed to organize his thoughts. More precisely, he needed to make a decision regarding the item on the left.

However.

"..."

Minjun's gaze settled on the right instead of the left.

There lay a Dagger.

It was not the black ritual dagger he favored using on Earth. Nor was it a transformed state of the Frying Pan that had once been Asiph-1's main body.

He had received this as a gift from someone over a hundred years ago.

It was quite an excellent weapon, but he almost never used it in actual combat. This was because his relationship with the person who gave him the gift had completely broken down.

He looked at the Dagger's hilt. A brief sentence was engraved in the common language of the dimension known as Ashtal.

He read it with a quiet gaze.

—To my most precious.

Right now, Minjun wasn't thinking about the topic he had intended to ponder when he entered this place.

Instead, he thought about Dell.

'Mere memories from nearly a century ago.'

According to Minjun's hypothesis, memories were a medium to increase the universe's total information. The providence of the world desired exactly that.

Then did all memories hold value proportional to their volume?

'That can't be it. A single fleeting memory can sometimes define a person's entire life.'

A period of just over a hundred years when he cherished only one person in the world above all else.

Because those memories from back then still exerted a great influence on him now, Minjun felt both concerned and relieved.

Just as one thought led into another, a psychic wave flowed in from beyond the room and reached him.

=May I see you for a moment?=

Minjun replied.

'Come in.'

A moment later, the door opened and Asiph-1 showed his face.

"I have something to report, and something to ask you."

He had told him to rest for a while, but it seemed he had been working hard instead.

Asiph-1 reported that a large-scale internment camp capable of imprisoning every Kavite on the planet was on the verge of completion.

That was the topic Minjun had originally intended to focus on here.

Instead of the Dagger on the right that he had pulled from his subspace, he picked up the glass container on the left. A small amount of liquid sloshed inside it.

"Do you remember this?"

The pope wore an expression filled with shame.

"...Yes, I remember."

There had once been a Frying Pan that wanted to make everyone in the world happy.

In his eyes, the dragons were the root of all evil, exploiting and bringing misery to every other race.

He knew the Committee was behind it all, but from the perspective of the common folk, foot soldiers throwing their weight around with the backing of authority often looked worse than the corrupt officials themselves.

And so, the Frying Pan had thought.

If dragons disappeared from this universe, wouldn't the total sum of happiness everyone felt increase?

Lacking the power to act on his own, the Frying Pan decided to plant that ideology into a certain dragon.

"That's the virus Jang Tae-jun created."

Asiph-1's voice was dark. It was because he was reflecting on his own sins.

"Right. The materials must have been lacking, but he managed to create something quite plausible. A virus that reacts solely to the genes of a dragon."

The container holding this virus was an item Minjun had sealed away in his bottom drawer along with the Dagger back when he lived on Earth.

Asiph-1 didn't know this, but Minjun had made a slight modification to it. He kept its property of reacting to specific genes but swapped out the target information.

From dragons to Kavite.

Now, this virus reacted exclusively to Kavites.

The symptoms of infection? Simple. It activated a certain switch implanted in their blood.

The switch of a special gene the Kavites themselves had cloned and implanted to build resistance to dragon blood.

'The Kavites who made contact with that self-hating dragon provided support to develop a biological weapon targeting the dragons.'

Minjun thought it was quite symbolic that the Kavites would fall victim to that very creation.

Right then, Asiph-1 brought up his first question.

"Are you truly going to drive them to extinction?"

Would the creator carry out the massacre just as he had declared?

Asiph-1 was about to speak for the first time on a matter he had pondered and agonized over for a long while.

Tension was evident in his brows and the corners of his mouth.

"Among them, there must surely be those who were merely born as Kavites and bear no actual sin. Furthermore... after observing the Tentacle King's dreams, I saw that it was Endelion who manipulated them from the shadows in the first place."

Even though the Kavites had been the ones to first discover Minjun, deceive him, enslave him, occupy the Mint Bureau to squeeze the lifeblood out of their own kind, and forcibly seize and manage Yongreung, if the Kavites had to face extinction as the price for those sins, then it would only be right for Endelion to be rendered extinct as well.

But Asiph-1 was not arguing that Endelion should be slaughtered too.

"If you have granted Endelion the mercy to avoid extinction..."

Until now, he had resisted Minjun exactly once. And that was because he had been implanted with false memories by Adkiel at the time.

Yet right now, he was harboring doubts of his own accord.

Was it right to unconditionally obey the creator? Dell had considered that incorrect, and thus defied the Tentacle King.

If so, am I capable of judging value for myself?

If he were a person, he ought to be able to do so.

Although he had spent a long time as a tool, he still had to be a person. Still obsessing over qualifications and validation, Asiph-1 could not give up on that question.

"Might you, perhaps, have any intention of giving the Kavites the same opportunity?"

A moment later.

Minjun spoke in a flat voice.

"I already wrestled with that dilemma a long time ago. On the planet now known as Yongreung."

Minjun's words ended there.

Asiph-1 found it difficult to tell whether that was a confirmation, a denial, or a deferment of the answer.

He stared for a moment at the glass container his creator held.

Swish!

Then watched him put it back into his subspace. Now, only a single, ominous Dagger remained on the desk.

A brief silence hung in the room.

Giving up on any further answer, Asiph-1 decided to bring up his next question.

"I heard you refer to the dimensional barriers as cell walls, Father."

He changed the subject.

"And... you compared Elahu-Praga to blood vessels."

"That's right."

"And because of what you told the King today, I've grown even more curious."

Asiph-1 carefully chose his next words.

"I still don't completely understand. Your kind, Father... what kind of beings will they become once they all wake up? And what kind of world will the dimensional planes turn into?"

Compared to his first question, the answer to this one returned quickly.

"A world where they hold dearest what I hold most precious."

The son rolled that answer around in his mouth a few times.

"...Is it a world where the Golden Rule applies unconditionally?"

"At least among our kind, it will be."

"Then will the primordial race all become a mental collective with connected minds?"

"It goes beyond that."

Minjun declared firmly.

"To sever hatred toward others, we must all perfectly understand one another, and the reasons for our antagonism must also disappear. This is not to say we will extinguish our individual egos. We will be many, and yet one at the same time."

"If so, then the meaning of the cell walls and blood vessels is..."

Minjun turned his head to look out the window.

"A mental connection alone is not enough. We must all share the same life force. By doing so, any reason to oppose and hate each other will vanish. If we share the exact same life, hatred toward another will become self-denial—an attack on oneself."

Everyone becoming a single living organism.

Asiph-1's face stiffened in shock.

Though it was one of the possibilities he had imagined, he found it hard to believe there was actually a way to realize it.

The son stammered.

"Th-then what about the physical body everyone will share?! What will you do for a body?"

"There is a preceding question that must be answered before yours."

"What is it?"

"Once people have grasped a peaceful, eternal life free from mutual hatred, what must they prepare for next?"

Asiph-1 couldn't reply immediately. Too many answers drifted through his mind.

His creator relieved his dilemma.

"My answer is this: Where are we supposed to live while enjoying eternity, without fighting, and achieving prosperity?"

"Are you talking about a location?"

"Yes. Even if we attain eternal life, what use is it if the universe perishes first?"

"Ah!"

Only then was Asiph-1 able to understand completely.

Just how far the grand design painted by the primordial race truly reached.

At the same time, he felt his body tremble from astonishment and overwhelming awe.

The creator's explanation continued.

"When the long sleep ends, we will grant complete permanence to our lives. If so, shouldn't we grant the same permanence to our home, to this very universe?"

Asiph-1 knew that an end would eventually come to the universe. It was an event in a future so distant there was no need to worry about it in advance, but it was certain that such a time would arrive.

Stars, the suns, were bound to cool. In a constantly expanding universe, gases would disperse so thinly they could no longer form new stars. Furthermore, one day, every region of the universe would exhibit the exact same temperature distribution, cooling down completely.

No one could live in such a place.

"To prevent the equilibrium of an isolated system, we utilize the spirit realm. That is why Talent must stand on the boundary of spirit and flesh. For the sake of entropy exchange between the material world and the spirit realm."

"Then the reason the primordial race positioned themselves at the heart, and why the Talent flowed through the blood vessels...!"

"Yes."

Minjun confirmed.

"We will become the blood of the universe."

Continuously delaying the universe's end, they would grant order to all things as they broke down into disorder and chaos.

The race that had harbored an unwithering spring of life within their chests.

In the distant future, they would become the medium that spread an unwithering life force across the universe.

Asiph-1 shuddered.

"And the universe..."

"Yes, the universe."

Minjun took up his words.

"The universe will gain life."

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