The Foreigner on the Periphery

“Gadwick, another petition has been filed from dimension #77-102. It’s taken on a pretty tough tone. Destination dimension #22-189 is asking for an explanation as to why the committee approval is slow, even though it has been a long time since the landing permit has been issued.”

Hearing the report from his subordinates, Gadwick looked at the hologram for a moment and called out, “Dotes.”

“Yes, Gadwick.”

“Can you guess why we are interfering with these three-eyed species?”

At this question, Dotes rolled his eyes. That stingy boss sometimes asked questions that would test his subordinates’ sense of work. He then chose his words carefully, knowing that his answer could affect Gadwick’s highly subjective evaluation.

“Dimension #22-189··· I know that one of the missions was recently secretly sent to the inmates of that dimension, called ‘Earth’ locally. I can’t even check the contents under my authority, though.”

“Continue.”

“However, the timing of the assignment is exquisite. An urgent message was sent to the prisoners of Earth the next day after the religious members of dimension #77-102… Self-proclaimed ‘heal judges’ asked the committee for permission to jump to Earth.”

“Continue.”

“The purpose of the Heretic Judge is to rebuke the priest of that dimension for being labeled heresy, while at the same time recovering the body of the diocesan patriarch, whom he is believed to have secured.”

“Continue.”

“The commission’s delay in the approval of the leap and assigning the district prisoners a task is ultimately interpreted as an intention to interfere with the work of the heretical judges. It is expected that while they could not set foot on Earth, prisoners were tasked with intercepting the priest or body. Is that right?”

“It was all right. To be precise, the committee has no interest in heretic priests, but in corpses.”

Dotes looked relieved, but Gadwick wasn’t satisfied yet. This was a story that anyone with a clear ear could easily infer. Then, he tried to go a little deeper. “Then why are those heretical judges so obsessed with the corpses of their own people who died abroad?”

Dotes rolled his eyes once more and said, “Isn’t that a religious or cultural reason?”

It seemed as if he hadn’t figured it out yet. Were there no ties to any of the high-ranking committee members other than him? Deeply evaluating the level of the internal network of his direct subordinates, Gadwick kindly explained. “The reasons I’m proposing are both. Since he was promoted to a saint, he insisted that the body should be enshrined in the mother dimension, while at the same time saying that the deceased’s status is quite high, so his ‘seed’ should be retrieved. Fortunately, the head of the corpse is said to be intact and undamaged.”

“Sorry. From the moment you explained the second reason, I didn’t quite understand it.”

Gadwick spoke while displaying a hologram. “The average appearance of those three-eyed people is like this.”

“You really have three eyes.”

“Everyone says that for convenience, but the one in the middle is not the eye.”

“Then what?”

“Those are reproductive organs.”

Dotes paused for a moment at the unexpected answer. “····Is that me?”

“Besides the brain, there are many other organs in the skull of that race. It’s not uncommon for evolutionary mechanisms to crawl all important parts into one place. Anyway, the seed of that race is in the skull. And even after the person dies, the seeds can be recycled, much like the seed of a plant.”

“Then the heretical judges will take their heads…”

“Before burying the body, I will entrust it to the funeral director to dig up the bones and extract the seeds. The bereaved family who receives it will hand it over to the lady of a prestigious family, which has been agreed upon in advance for a posthumous wedding. After all, the marriage of the nobles is a process in which the property of the family is combined, and the will of the parties is not important. Sometimes it doesn’t even matter as to whether the person is alive or not.”

“It’s bizarre.”

“Again, this is only a superficial reason. I don’t think the delegates believe this excuse.”

“Why?”

“Isn’t it the purpose of interfering with the marriage of a noble family when the high commissioners ordered that the priest’s head be retrieved? There must be another reason.”

“Okay. I guess there must be some other reason, and you want to get in the way.”

“Okay.”

Gadwick then added, thinking for a moment. “And the fact that dimension #77-102 is such a special case is one of the reasons, I guess so.”

Then, Dotes began to ask a question, seeing as there was something he couldn’t seem to understand. “Why are the replacement delegates neglecting that dimension until now?”

“Please elaborate on the question.”

“It was strange to shut down the dimension at will, but isn’t the committee leaving them alone? We do not send migrants or engage in force trade.”

“Did they refuse?”

“But they’ve been so gentle…”

“Then what should I do? Shall we force the exchange to begin again by pushing it with overwhelming firepower?”

Dotes thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No, that’s not the way the committee works.”

The ancient races that made up the upper part of the committee were only a handful in the whole dimension in terms of the number of pages. Of course, there was technology that could not be compared with other races, but if one was to suppress all those they did not like by force without a proper justification, a huge loss would occur. Moreover, it was obvious that the dragons, who had managed to maintain a peaceful relationship after the declaration of the end of the war, would be stimulated.

And so, instead of starting a war, the Commission dominated another dimension with money and technology. The process usually started with paying off debt. It was to generate foreign debt using talents that were known to be mined in a proper way only by the committee as a weapon. “Isn’t that dimension also owing a talent to the committee since it built a terminal and traded at one time? Our method is to notify that we will visit emergency collections or debtor credit evaluation as an excuse, and use force as an excuse if they refuse…”

“I have no debt.”

“Yes?” Dotes didn’t understand what his boss was saying.

“Dimension #77-102 paid off all external debt to the Commission in one lump sum just before it went into lockdown decades ago. The compound interest, as well as the prepayment fee, are thoroughly calculated, leaving no penny behind.”

“······No way!”

According to a loan system designed by the committee’s top financial engineers and future planners, that would be impossible. “That too, I paid the full amount of talent in real money.”

“?!”

There was an explanation of the source of the funds. In the past, before the committee was launched, talents of unknown origin were sometimes excavated while sealed all over the dimension. If the workmanship of those who handled it was poor, a significant amount would then be evaporated during the mining process, but in any case, even a very small amount was being distributed.

Residents of #77-102 explained that the money they had collected at that time was collected and paid on a global scale.

“No way…” Dotes felt anxious.

“Yeah, the delegates are now feeling suspicious. Could it be that they discovered another way to mine talents we do not know about?”

“That sounds pretty reasonable.”

“It’s still just a suspicion, so the dilemma is not being able to actively take action. Even if you try to be rough, you have to keep an eye out for that disgusting giant reptile. In the midst of that, the lockdown is suddenly released and he is showing suspicious movements, so shouldn’t we have to intervene?”

“It would be. It’s nothing else, it’s about talent.”

“And the time when they started moving is so questionable. In any case, the cycle is approaching now…”

“Yes? What cycle are you talking about?”

Soon, Gadwick realized he had made a speech mistake. Dotes was a member of the Council, but he was not an ancient race. “It’s nothing.”

Gadwick did not bring out the next words but buried them inside. After a while, the time for the now sleeping ‘them’ would soon come to a shallow depth of sleep. That fact alone made him feel uneasy.

***

“·····Then we will go back.”

“Take a look.”

The Frankfurt police, who were dispatched after receiving the report, searched the Dreamland building, but could not find anything suspicious. What was more, even the rats running on the walls of the building dispersed and eventually disappeared, so there was no reason to dig around any further.

However, even after the police returned, the hidden Minjun remained inside. The expression of the priest who was in charge of the guide changed since then, and the police opened a secret door that they did not notice. There was a passage leading to the basement, and the secret chapel that Ha Eun-seong witnessed while walking through the wall appeared beyond it.

Minjun quietly followed along. The service, which had been interrupted, resumed when the priest reported that the police had left.

‘Ha Eun-seong was terrified to see this scene.’

It was disgusting to Minjun, who had already seen the terrifying scene in Jenkinson, but it wasn’t to the point of being stunned. Moreover, the grotesque scene filled with blood and filth, whether it was a different kind of worship from the exorcism ceremony, was soon over.

It then moved on to the next stage. Minjun hid himself in the corner, watching the priest on the pulpit.

‘He’s sleeping!’

Here, he couldn’t be kidnapped in the first place. This worship was an event that only ‘bone marrow molecules’ attended among church members, without exception, a strong divine power was felt. It was not wise to make a fuss in this situation.

‘I’ll have to wait until the service is over and then kidnap me,’ said the bishop of the pulpit when he thought so.

“Then, everyone, take out the ‘Book of Asif’ next.”

‘?!’ Minjun was taken aback for a moment. A word so familiar had just come out of the mouth of an unexpected person.

A few moments later, they pulled out a scripture with nothing written on the cover. Cathy began to read from the research material. “It was said that the Bible of that denomination is divided between what ordinary believers see and what priests who have divine powers see. The latter is a kind of secret sutra that even members of the church cannot read without qualifications.”

‘Then it must be a coincidence.’

Even in the global culture, there were a lot of homonyms. However, what if they expanded the scope to all dimensions? The word Asif had various meanings for different races.

He was going to be writing a maze. Receiving the invisible gaze of Minjun, the bishop began to mumble a prayer. He sang, “In your dreams we dream of you.”

The priests chanted back, “In your dreams we dream of you.”

Only then did the untitled sutra open and the bishop began to read it. However, it was not written in the language of the earth.

‘What?’ Minjun listened subconsciously. It wasn’t the language he knew, but something deposited within him reacted to the bizarre melody and phonology.

The moment he fell into deep concentration…

Beep!

A sharp pain ran through his head as if it were piercing through his head.

‘What, this?’ He wondered if it was a mental attack, but the pain gradually subsided. This was because the bishop had translated the sentences he had read in a foreign language back into German and started reciting them.

As he listened a little more, Minjun was able to roughly understand the contents of the scriptures. What they read was the oldest of their veneration scriptures, and were written in the earliest days of the denomination’s formation. The bishop was talking about a prophet who had become the starting point of religion.

‘A common repertoire.’

The Prophet said that he came down from heaven. In front of the people of the dimension where Dreamland was founded, he performed various miracles. It was the miracle that the indigenous people most wanted at the time. He fed the hungry, healed the sick, and raised the dead.

‘It would have been impossible to raise the dead with divine power. Unless even a warlock was sticking around.’

Eventually, the natives came to serve the Prophet and worshiped his truthful words as religious revelations.

The bishop translated and read the scriptures. “The village villager said to the prophet, “Why did you come by designating them to lead them?”

“With that, the prophet answered, “Your people have the talent to reach happiness and ecstasy on their own without help. Therefore, you are a people who can wake up and dream, and you will not need a handful of pills or blood worms to achieve happiness. Therefore, I know that you are the best fit to welcome the original race, who dreamed of the happiest dream and slept in the dream.”

Among the conditions listed as conditions for reaching ‘blood bug,’ the word ‘bug’ caught Minjun’s attention. The bishop then began to read the next sentence in an alien language, and this time his head was pounding, but it was more tolerable than before.

“The villager asked again, and said, “What is the name of the original race?”

“The Prophet answered, ‘Those who dwelt in Elahu-Praga before anyone else before history was written, and those who have in their hearts the fountain of eternal life, who sleep for almost eons, but never die, but create anything in their dreams. Inira.”

“The villager asked again, and said, ‘What is Ellahu-Praga?’”

“The prophet answered, ‘Just as a piece of glass under the sun shines in various colors depending on the eye, so the meanings of these five syllables are more than the branches of a stream flowing over the vast earth, and I know all of them, but you, who are not wise, cannot understand them. Ira.”

“The village father looked up again and asked, “How shall we call the prophet who has spoken all these words of wisdom?”

“The prophet answered, ‘My true name was long long forgotten, but the beasts of this day call me ‘Asif,’ a sinner of the greatest evil.”

At that, Minjun’s eyes widened.