Before I knew it, I was led back to the bedroom where I had initially woken up, and Yoon Seoho gently tucked me back into the bed.
“Get a good night’s sleep today, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He pulled the blanket all the way up to my neck.
Then, naturally leaning down, he pressed his lips against my forehead.
It happened in the blink of an eye, leaving me absolutely no time to process it.
Watching me freeze in utter bewilderment, Yoon Seoho merely gave a casual laugh and walked out of the room.
‘Click.’
The moment the bedroom door shut, a heavy silence descended upon the room.
Despite the uncomfortable stillness, I forced my eyes closed.
There was no telling if Yoon Seoho was monitoring me from somewhere.
Perhaps because I had already slept quite a bit, drowsiness didn’t come easily. Instead, my mind began to churn with a mounting pile of thoughts.
There were still too many things Yoon Seoho hadn’t explained yet.
For instance, why he had explicitly called me a ‘Cult Leader’ earlier.
‘Yoon Seoho is supposed to be the cult leader, so why did he call me that?’
In the original novel, the moment Yoon Seoho established his cult, he ran completely wild, committing all kinds of insane atrocities under the guise of a religious head.
He essentially had free rein over the world.
Even though his organization was a brand-new cult, its influence expanded at an explosive rate.
Naturally, that was entirely due to Yoon Seoho’s exceptionally powerful mental-type suggestion ability.
He was a monster capable of manipulating his powers with surgical precision.
He could make a terminally ill person feel as though they were completely cured in an instant.
Of course, the disease itself hadn’t improved; he had simply tricked the brain into blocking the pain entirely.
However, to Espers who were constantly suffering from the agonizing side effects of overusing their abilities, Yoon Seoho’s power was nothing short of a divine salvation.
If joining a cult meant being liberated from a living hell of constant pain, what Esper wouldn’t be tempted?
‘Hell, even I would be tempted.’
I let out a quiet sigh.
Even though there was no one else in the room, I couldn’t find it in myself to relax.
Didn’t I get any kind of special perk for transmigrating?
Yoon Seoho claimed that I was an Esper too, but I couldn’t bring myself to trust a single word out of his mouth.
Besides, I wasn’t experiencing a single one of the side effects that Espers typically suffered from.
No matter how much an Esper tried to hoard or ration their power, there was an absolute limit. Every Esper lived with a baseline chronic headache—the very first, fundamental side effect of using superpower energy.
While that initial stage was manageable, pushing past it meant enduring a level of agony that defied imagination.
‘In fact, my body feels incredibly light.’
Right before I had snapped out of it, my body had felt impossibly heavy, but the moment I actually opened my eyes, I felt completely fine as if it had all been a lie.
It felt as though I was continuously growing lighter and healthier by the second.
…Continuously growing better?
‘Since when did I start feeling this way?’
An intense question lodged itself in my mind, causing my brain to shift gears and spin rapidly.
My body had undeniably been heavy up until the exact moment I woke up here.
It was heavy, and then…
“Ah…”
The puzzle pieces didn’t take long to lock into place.
‘It was when Yoon Seoho first touched my shoulder.’
The moment I pinned down that specific timeline, absolute certainty washed over me.
Yes, from the exact moment I made physical contact with Yoon Seoho, my body began to recover at a staggeringly fast rate.
But why?
A completely different question immediately followed.
Yoon Seoho didn’t possess a healing ability, so there was no logical reason for him to cure me.
If that was the case, then this reaction was entirely dependent on the nature of my own body…
‘Is this body truly an Esper?’
What if I did possess an ability right now, and that very power was what was causing my body to recover?
Still, the fact that I was improving without having actually done anything was bizarre.
Simply making contact with an Esper like Yoon Seoho was enough to cure my ailments?
The moment one mystery was solved, another rushed in to take its place, repeating in a vicious cycle.
For a brief moment, a wave of mental and physical exhaustion washed over me.
Whatever the case, sitting here thinking about it by myself wasn’t going to resolve anything.
I should just sleep. I didn’t want to do a single thing anymore.
‘Yeah. It’s a total shitshow, but let’s just go back to sleep for now.’
Closing my eyes once more, drowsiness pulled at me far more easily than before.
My consciousness rapidly faded, slipping into a deep, distant haze.
Just as my body grew entirely limp, feeling as though it were sinking deep into the floor…
‘Where am I?’
When I opened my eyes, I wasn’t lying in the bedroom I had gone to sleep in.
Instead, I was standing completely alone in a vast, empty void.
There was absolutely nothing around me, as if I were trapped in a space of pure nothingness.
I was entirely isolated in a dark, boundless expanse.
Strangely, no sound would leave my lips—a stark confirmation that I had entered an entirely unrealistic dimension.
As I stood there silently holding my breath, waiting, a dizzying sensation washed over me once again.
I instinctively lifted my head.
And in that moment, I realized.
‘Ah.’
This space wasn’t empty at all.
From the very beginning, I had been standing inside the belly of some massive entity.
To be precise, it was more like I was enclosed within an indefinable, colossal presence.
I could feel a staggering, immense energy completely enveloping my body.
It felt as though an unimaginably powerful, titanic force was looking straight down at me.
The sheer, untouchable scale of this sensation was so overwhelming that it threatened to fracture my sanity.
‘What on earth is this?’
Along with the confusion, a strange sense of familiarity bloomed within me.
I had definitely experienced this exact sensation once before.
Right—it was the very feeling I had when I first opened my eyes in that filthy alleyway.
The exact sensation I felt when I was drowning in an inexplicable agony, right before I completely seized whatever was inside of me and made it entirely my own.
It was a presence so unfathomably massive. It felt like being dragged down into the absolute depths of the deep sea, or floating aimlessly in the vacuum of outer space.
How on earth was I supposed to wield something like this?
How could a mere human body dare to…
‘Wield it?’
The moment that question crossed my mind, I felt as though I had finally stumbled upon the answer I had been searching for so desperately.
I was definitely thinking about ‘wielding’ this power.
Wielding, using… to handle it.
The world I had transmigrated into was a hellscape crawling with monsters and dominated by powerful Espers.
Was I supposed to unleash this massive energy against the monsters?
No, my instincts told me that wasn’t it.
Then the only option left was…
‘Espers?’
The thought crossed my mind that perhaps I was meant to utterly crush the Espers with this power, but I quickly shut down that train of thought.
What could I possibly gain from suppressing all the Espers?
Was I supposed to go on some grand quest for world domination?
I finally understood that there was something I was meant to do to them.
However, I still couldn’t gauge exactly how I was supposed to wield this power.
Perhaps I would find out tomorrow.
Since Yoon Seoho had promised to explain the rest, he was bound to make some kind of move.
With the desperate hope that all my questions would finally be answered tomorrow, my consciousness began to sink once more.
Stripped of all stray thoughts, my mind faded into complete darkness, and I surrendered myself entirely to a deep, unbroken slumber.
