The S-Classes That I Raised

Chapter 638: Temporary System Administrator (1)

As soon as the message popped up, I felt my body about to be transported. Strong mana wrapped around me, trying to separate me from this space. I caught a glimpse of Peace, Chief Song, and Noah trying to get to me, only to be pushed back instead. The mana tried to tear Yuhyun away as well. But Yuhyun didn’t let go of my arm. If anything, he gathered his mana at his fingertips and braced against the force trying to pry us apart, and my heart dropped.

“Han Yuhyun!”

If this kept up, Yuhyun’s hand might literally get ripped off. Panicking, I grabbed my little brother and hugged him tight. Knowing his personality, there was no way he’d obediently let go of me; the more of him was in contact with me, the harder it’d be to force us apart. Just as I thought, the mana that had been raging paused, then ended up transporting both me and Yuhyun together.

“What a stubborn kid.”

As the darkness in front of my eyes suddenly cleared and everything turned bright, a woman’s voice came from somewhere.

“But no.”

Right after that, the body that had been too big to fit in my arms suddenly shrank. And then–

– Hissss.

A pitch–black cat bared his teeth at the person standing in front of us. Y–Yuhyun!

“What did you do to my little brother–!”

I jumped to my feet, hugging my brother who had turned into a cat. A woman in a white lab coat was looking at me. A face I’d seen before…

“…Lighthouse Keeper?”

“Long time no see.”

She was the creator and administrator of the system who had suddenly appeared at the hospital when I was admitted to fix my leg. It should’ve been a welcome reunion, but more than that—

“What the hell are you doing!”

Turning my brother into a cat! When I demanded if this was really okay, the Lighthouse Keeper answered lightly.

“That kid doesn’t have the right to come here yet, nor is he ready to hear what I have to say. I just swapped out his body and blocked him from hearing the conversation. He’s the same on the inside, so don’t worry. I’ll send him back perfectly fine.”

If so, that’s a relief. I looked down at the black cat nestled quietly in my arms. His vivid blue eyes blinked once, then he licked the back of my hand. He was adorable, sure, but why were his eyes blue?

“Th–that… boy…”

“Gah!”

Suddenly, a voice came from the floor. I hadn’t sensed anyone at all! I jumped and looked back to see a black shape sprawled out there. The thing weakly pushed itself upright. Long black hair hung all the way down to the floor, revealing a fairly pale face. Half–lidded pink eyes looked over at me. Pink eyes?

“That’s him, huh.”

He was all floppy and limp, but he was probably a guy, and a pretty handsome one at that. The body wrapped in a black robe also looked fairly large. He was so feeble and unsteady that he didn’t feel threatening at all, though.

“This one’s Sloth. One of the system creators like me.”

The Lighthouse Keeper explained. Sloth… it suited him. Sloth raised a hand and gave a small yawn. I caught a glimpse of sharp fangs. There didn’t seem to be any other Transcendents besides those two. The space around us, covered entirely in white, was completely empty.

“I heard you got rid of Chatterbox? Impressive.”

“Got lucky… Right, back then Chatterbox said he was going to drag in the strongest person in our world, but that turned out not to be true!”

“It was only slightly off. To be precise, he ended up becoming the strongest person himself. In your world.”

…Yeah, that was true. Technically, he did drag him in. I scratched Yuhyun’s nape, putting on a face worn down by life. My little brother purred.

“I thought I was going to die. No, I almost ended up in a state worse than death.”

Right now I had to look as pitiful as possible. That way I might squeeze a bit more out of them. Be polite, be polite.

“I’m just an ordinary, fragile F–rank…”

“Your value, including your skills, evaluates as S–rank or higher.”

“Who matches people for fights based on written test scores? You divide them by weight class. Me against Chatterbox is like a mouse versus an elephant, or no, a dragon. From a system standpoint, that was way over the line. Letting Chatterbox freely manipulate the system in the first place is unreasonable, don’t you think?”

If the King of Harmless hadn’t helped me, I’d probably be in a state right now I didn’t even want to imagine.

“It makes me wish there were no system and no Transcendents at all.”

“I told you before. Without the system’s support, monsters would just pour out directly without dungeons as waiting rooms… You might have been okay, but still.”

The Lighthouse Keeper glanced at Yuhyun in my arms as she spoke. The world would’ve been a mess, but in a way, it might have been easier for Yuhyun to protect me. On the other hand, if I was unlucky, a monster could’ve gotten me before Yuhyun ever awakened.

“So please help us out, yeah? You even made the system to protect worlds. But there are Transcendents blatantly abusing that system. So could you just make our world independent?”

If the system disappeared and Transcendents couldn’t reach us, we could handle the rest on our own. If Crescent Moon couldn’t meddle, maybe Seong Hyunjae’s situation could be resolved too. I’d still have to keep looking for a way to bring my brother back, though.

“Impossible.”

The Lighthouse Keeper cut me off flatly.

“We wedged the system in between the rules of the world. As an unchanging natural law, like the sun setting and the moon rising. That way, neither the Root nor anyone else can get rid of the system. In any world the Root tries to devour, the system activates, and it doesn’t stop until that world escapes the Root’s predation. Even I can’t do anything about that. It’s automatic.”

“It seems like it breaks down now and then, though.”

“Even so, dungeons and status windows don’t disappear, do they? Even if the people in your world finish adapting and the Awakened system gets withdrawn, the dungeons themselves will remain.”

“…What about stopping Transcendents from interfering?”

“Also impossible.”

So what is possible. I hadn’t expected it to be easy, but it was still disappointing. Beside us, Sloth was slowly washing his face. Why had he even bothered to come out here?

“We’ve only snatched you away for a bit right now. Originally, you were supposed to be summoned by a different Transcendent. The Filial Duty Addicts. I have no idea what they’re thinking, but Rookie asked, and your anomaly caught our attention, so we intervened.”

Rookie, I’m really, really grateful. I’ll definitely repay you.

“Right now, Han Yujin, you’ve been given part of Chatterbox’s system management authority. That’s something that should be impossible. There’s no precedent. It’s not that no Awakened has ever touched the system without being a Transcendent, but those were people born with talent as system administrators and with help from a senior Transcendent.”

The Lighthouse Keeper said bluntly that I had almost no talent as a system administrator. I was no good with machines and had zero knack for tinkering anyway… Thinking of Myungwoo, yeah, I definitely didn’t have it.

“When you’re forcibly given a powerful ability you don’t even have an aptitude for, the body usually can’t withstand it.”

“Right. I’m very familiar with that.”

Thanks to that, my lifespan had gone up and down like a stock chart. The Lighthouse Keeper lightly ran a fingertip under her chin.

“Even if you qualified to inherit Chatterbox’s legacy, this whole arrangement only happens because both the Unfilial Children and the Filial Duty Addicts agreed to it. Which basically means the Unfilial Children don’t care if you die. Or they have some way to compensate for it.”

It wasn’t like I’d trusted the Unfilial Children to begin with. Rookie had changed a lot, but the rest of the Transcendents could toss me away as a disposable one–use item any time they wanted, all while shouting that it was to save the world.

“We don’t like doing things that way, so we’re going to tweak it a bit to lessen your burden. We entrusted the system to Transcendents who supposedly wanted to take responsibility and serve, so what are they doing dumping that burden onto baby Awakened? The Awakened of a given world only need to block monsters and dungeons.”

“Right? But I ended up going against a Transcendent too.”

“Dragging an infant into a grown–ups’ fight. They’re insane.”

“You’re saying nothing but the truth!”

Exactly, exactly. Shoving me into a Transcendents’ brawl was really shameless. The Lighthouse Keeper clicked her tongue and roughly ran her hand through her hair. Meanwhile, Sloth had set up a mirror in front of himself and was neatly combing out his long hair. Seriously, why did he even come?

“As much as I’d like to flip the whole thing over, we can’t interfere beyond the system itself.”

“That’s honestly a shame.”

“Sloth will handle the adjustments. If there’s anything you want to ask before he’s ready, ask now. In your current state, you can hear most things. Now that you’ve even gotten access to the system, there aren’t many restrictions left on information.”

That was great news. If it was something I wanted to ask the most… I snuck a glance down at Yuhyun in my arms. She did say he couldn’t hear this, for sure.

“Is there any way for me to go to the Snowfall Tree?”

“The Root?”

“Yes. There’s… someone I have to bring back from there.”

“The Root is endlessly far away and yet extremely close. The thing trying to devour your world is the Snowfall Tree itself, so in reality you could say it’s right in front of you. But in the terms of your world, it’s a different plane of existence. You know spatial movement, right?”

“Yes.”

“You need a level of ability one step above that. And on top of that, the strength to endure the move. Once you have both, you’ll finally need to figure out the precise coordinates. The Roots have been attacked several times up to now, so they hide their locations and keep changing them, which means even Transcendents can’t track them easily.”

In short, it was difficult.

“And if you’re bringing someone back… that someone doesn’t belong to your world, right?”

“…Probably not.”

“Even a decent Transcendent would have to pay a hefty price in their own power. I can’t gauge it exactly. Just getting you safely in front of the Root would already be hard.”

How had Chirp managed it? Was the power in Ru Ga Pheya’s magic stone really that great? Or else…

“Then what about simply bringing someone who’s at the Root into my world?”

“It’s not easy to shove someone who doesn’t belong to that world into it intact either. That’s why Transcendents usually go in by descending, borrowing another person’s body. Other than that, there’s substitution.”

Descending was what Chatterbox used.

“Substitution?”

“You take one person out and put a being from outside the world in their place. It’s not easy. You need the other party’s consent, you have to spend a long time working to make the two presences similar… And their existence value has to be similar or lower, so it’s a losing deal for a Transcendent. They’d fall to the level of an unawakened person or an Awakened below Transcendent.”

Seong Hyunjae had said he’d been transplanted. The fairy dragon that received a part of Seong Hyunjae had Changeling traits as well, so it must’ve been substitution.

“By any chance, would siblings have similar presence values?”

“Yeah. Their genetic information is similar.”

I see. But if possible, we were going back together.

“There are a few who get tired of living as Transcendents and give up their Transcendent status through substitution to belong to a world. To reduce their existence value, they lose most of their power and even their memories.”

Crescent Moon had forced Seong Hyunjae into that. If the method she’d used was substitution, then who had traded places with Seong Hyunjae, and what happened to them?

“Boy.”

Sloth called to me. Sure, compared to them I was way younger, but boy? On the inside I was thirty–one.

“Sit over here.”

At some point, a black cloth had been spread on the floor and a wooden low table set down. Sloth, with part of his long hair twisted up and pinned with a silver hairpin, was sitting on the other side of the table. It was all dark and gloomy, but the vibe was like I’d walked into a shaman’s fortune–telling parlor.

“Um, I’ve been wondering for a while—if you’re a Transcendent, couldn’t you fix your hair with a single wave of your hand?”

“Formality is important. We may call ourselves Transcendents, but we’re still bound by form. Form is a shackle, yet if that form disappears, we’d lose even our sense of self. For us to exist as individuals, we still need a shell with which to look back and recognize ourselves… I’ll stop there.”

“…Ah. Okay.”

Sloth wore an expression like he was dying of annoyance. His attitude was completely different from any Transcendent I’d seen so far, so I quietly asked the Lighthouse Keeper,

“…How did he end up becoming a Transcendent?”

“He’s lazy, but apparently that’s why he wants to handle everything quickly and efficiently. Back when he lived in his world, he couldn’t stand watching people around him botch their work. Since he was extremely capable, he figured he’d just take care of things himself quickly and then rest plenty—but you can guess how that turned out.”

Yeah… There are people like that. The kind who can’t stand others being slow and just butt in and finish everything themselves.

“He was thrilled when we made the system, saying he’d finally be able to rest forever.”

“Guess he couldn’t just drop everything and rest from the start, huh.”

“If he had the kind of personality that could do that, he probably wouldn’t have become a Transcendent in the first place.”

Which meant he was a good person, in his own way. As I walked over, a floor cushion appeared in front of the low table. The cushion was nice and soft. Yuhyun stretched out along my legs. His sleek tail curled around my arm; it seemed turning into a cat wasn’t all that bad. Even if he couldn’t understand the conversation, he could probably tell from the mood that these people were friendly toward me.

“Do I… have to explain?”

His pink eyes were blatantly hoping I’d say it was fine. But I still had to listen.

“Keep it brief, please.”

Sloth let out a sigh. Up close, the color of his eyes really was beautiful. Maybe it felt that way even more because it was the only vivid color in this world of monochrome. Sloth lifted his hand into the air above the table, and from his fingertips, complex blue lines and patterns appeared and spread out.

“We’ll place you under the system administrator. Think of it as a lower–rank, like a trainee employee.”

“So I’m the trainee and the higher–ups take the responsibility, right?”

“Correct.”

Sloth looked pleased, maybe because there was less to explain.

“It’s not like there will be zero burden, but…”

“It’ll be small, right? Something I can handle?”

“Hand.”

“Put it here? Like this? A little to the right? How about here?”

Sloth nodded, satisfied. I smiled back at him.

“Just like that.”

“I’ll stay still. Is it okay if I talk with the Lighthouse Keeper while we do this?”

“Fine.”

Great, thanks. Keeping my hand on the blue pattern, I looked back at the Lighthouse Keeper. In the meantime, Sloth was slowly pressing different parts of the pattern.

“I want to know how to sever a contract with a Transcendent.”

“The standard way is to terminate it with a stronger power.”

“And if that’s impossible?”

“If you made a contract first with someone of roughly equal rank, that contract takes precedence and the other one can break naturally.”

For Seong Hyunjae… There probably wasn’t anyone. Crescent Moon would have been first.

“Depending on the contract, killing the other party can erase it along with them. There are also ways to exploit gaps.”

How was I supposed to kill Crescent Moon. Even if I wanted to exploit a gap, I didn’t know the contract terms. Maybe the original Seong Hyunjae would remember.

“What can I do with the administrator authority I have?”

“Well, the details will be decided over there. Administrator authority doesn’t mean anything outrageous. It’s a support system to begin with. And… there’s an enormous amount of information stored. All the accumulated data we don’t even fully know.”

The Lighthouse Keeper looked straight at me.

“Don’t poke at it carelessly. It’s more than you can handle.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

I answered. It wasn’t like I was asking for a lot. Just to get my brother back and escape the threats of the Root and the Transcendents. …Okay, that wasn’t exactly a small list.

Warmth seeped into the hand I was holding out. The blue pattern climbed up my fingers like vines, wrapping around my wrist and forearm.