Fabre in Sacheon’s Tang

That thought occurred to me.

Why was it that whenever Gungbong got involved, things started going weird?

It felt like the moment Gungbong got even one foot in the door, nothing ever went properly.

It was the same during the Gold-Crowned Lion King chase.

It was the same when Soto first got her body stolen.

If Gungbong got even one foot in the door, without fail, things got tangled, knotted, and twisted.

It was like, just like in a life before my last, some kind of monkey’s paw of a thing had climbed onto Gungbong’s shoulder, and every time someone reached out with good intentions, it twisted it off in some absurd direction.

’You really never know.’

My wives’ voices flooded in at the same time through the group chat.

Each voice was mixed with urgency and flustered panic.

’Honorable Husband, th-this is bad.’

’W-what do we do? So-ryong? Gungbong looks like he’ll be completely unreasonable...’

’Master, what are you going to do? Gungbong is, you know...’

Everyone was thinking the same thing.

Gungbong was someone who moved on instinct rather than thinking things through.

So if the Beast-Heart Technique made his feelings of liking me properly sprout, then after that, it was obvious he’d shove logic and dignity aside and push forward no matter what.

No, rather than “bold,” it might be closer to throwing a tantrum.

Like when we ascended.

I swallowed a deep sigh inside and answered.

’I’ll ask Senior Sister once. Whether there’s a way to undo it.’

’Okay.’

’Understood, Master.’

For now, I’d decided to ask Senior Sister if there was a way to undo it, and they said they understood, but I could feel the anxiety in my wives’ hearts.

With everyone’s worries hanging over us, the registration process continued.

From Soto’s body, which had been stuck to Gungbong’s nape and then fallen off, a sparkling light suddenly burst out.

It was a light so intense it made your eyes sting.

For a moment my vision was dyed white, and when the halo of light slowly cleared, a woman in yellow clothes was standing there.

But that sight froze all of us.

”Gungbong?”

”Two Gungbongs?”

Seeing just one face already made my head hurt, so was it because the two had been stuck together for too long?

Instead of Soto’s original form, it had become two Gungbongs.

Everyone hesitated at the sight.

It felt like the worry that maybe it wasn’t just appearance, and intelligence might have been affected too, floated into everyone’s heads at once.

Soto, now with her eyes open, seemed fascinated that she had hands and feet, and she examined herself this way and that.

Maybe because she’d been constantly moving Gungbong’s body, her hands and feet felt familiar.

Some of the kids took a long time to adapt once they got human bodies, after all.

Seeing that, everyone relaxed.

It wasn’t that Gungbong had been copied.

The added terrain was a mountain as high and rugged as the Himalayas.

But it wasn’t a peak—it was a gentle plateau.

Short grass rippled in the wind, and unknown wildflowers were in full bloom.

It felt like an open plain, similar to that place where I first met Soto.

And, well, Gungbong was just Gungbong.

Gungbong was blinking with a vacant expression.

He didn’t seem to understand what had happened to him.

But after a moment, that vacant-faced Gungbong spoke to us through the group chat.

『”Uh, what is this?”』

I’d heard from my wives and the kids that you realized it almost like an instinct, and since Gungbong was more instinctive than intellectual, it looked like he’d grasped it in an instant.

’I’m telling you, I can’t even tell who’s a spirit creature and who’s a person.’

Soon, Soto’s voice also came through the group chat.

『”Gungbong?”

”So it’s Soto?”

”Yes, it’s me.”

”We’re separated, so how can we talk like this?”

”So-ryong, you said this before. If you do something called registration with the Beast-Heart Technique, you can have conversations like this in your mind.”

”I did? Why does it feel like I’m hearing this for the first time?”

”Gungbong, you always hear everything for the first time.”

”I-I do? Hehe.”』

I hurriedly cut into their conversation.

That sweet-potato conversation was happening in real time, so I had to cut in.

If I kept listening, my qi and blood would clog up.

『”All right, everyone, save the small talk for later...”

”Huh? So-ryong, Young Hero? No, not Great Hero... So-ryong?”

”Yes, it’s me. Don’t be startled. I was only going to register Soto, but since you two were linked, it looks like you both got linked. I’ll find out how to undo it, so for now don’t worry too much.”

”I’m not worried. More importantly, we can talk mind-to-mind... Now it’s not just me and Soto, I can talk with So-ryong too, so I’m happy.”』

The moment I heard Gungbong’s bright, innocent answer, I realized it.

Later, Gungbong would absolutely refuse to go back to normal.

Not just my wives—now even the other kids could talk mind-to-mind, so for Gungbong, this was basically heaven.

With ordinary conversation, you could pretend you didn’t hear it or ignore it, but a conversation delivered directly into your mind was impossible to avoid.

If Gungbong’s words rang in my head, I couldn’t ignore them.

But no matter how much he threw a tantrum, I had to find a way to undo the registration.

Before feelings of liking me sprouted.

Thinking that, I delivered the precautions for now.

Because right now, there was nothing else I could do.

『”You can’t use this unless it’s urgent. I’m busy and I don’t have the bandwidth. Got it?”

”Huh? Yes, yes, I got it.”』

As soon as I warned them, a question came in.

’It’s okay if I talk separately like this, right?’

Now Gungbong was talking to me through a private channel.

Since he was an instinctive person, he’d apparently already noticed private channels too.

I pressed my fingers to my forehead as I said it.

’Yes. Just don’t pester me too much.’

’O-of course! Hehe.’

That bright laughter echoed in my head.

My heart felt stifled, but at the same time, I realized something for the first time.

The moment Gungbong got registered, an oddly specific hot-spring terrain was added.

It was almost exactly the same scenery as the Tengchong Volcano hot-spring region in Yunnan that we’d gone to for recuperation.

Steaming pools, a bamboo forest surrounding it, even the faint sulfur smell.

A place like the Tengchong Volcano hot-spring region in Yunnan that we’d visited to recover had been added as terrain.

Honestly, I’d thought this.

Gungbong was someone with no thoughts in his head, so maybe no terrain would be added at all.

Because the terrain added when a spirit creature registered in this Dokmul-hyang was that individual’s ideal world.

If someone’s head was a flower garden, then the whole world was an ideal world, so nothing might get added.

Because if reality was already an ideal world, there was no way an “ideal world” would exist separately.

But for reasons I didn’t know, hot springs were added.

It felt like something my wives would like if they knew.

And if my realm rose this time and I formed a primordial infant, I thought I might be able to have a fun time with my wives in the hot springs.

No, dual cultivation.

Hot springs were a peculiar terrain.

Water originally held yin energy in abundance, but hot-spring water also contained hot yang energy inside it.

A unique state where yin and yang were mixed together.

If we did dual cultivation in that water, we could maximize my wives’ yin energy and pull up my yang energy at the same time.

Now that the first-run perk was gone, it meant a perfect place had appeared where we could push dual cultivation efficiency to the limit.

’This is pretty good.’

Even if it was “help,” it was help in a big way.

Underwater sex—no, underwater dual cultivation, or the act of pressing bodies together in the water and exchanging energy, just thinking about it made my heart pound.

After a brief moment of hesitation, I decided I’d ask Senior Sister not only how to keep the registration, but also how to make sure feelings of liking me wouldn’t sprout.

’Please. Please let Senior Sister know.’

Praying inside that Senior Sister would know, I decided to continue registering the other kids.

For now, registration was urgent.

”Who should I register next?”

The Blood-Eyed Green Grass Shrew trio was already registered to Sister Seol, so exclude them.

What was left was Thunderquake Earth Ant Panda Ant Rimrimi.

Red Cloud Black Millipede Ranghyang, White Snow Shell Sunbaek and Baekbaek, Ram.

Silver Fish Yeon-yeon, three Exploding Jade Aquabug babies.

Black-Clawed Red Earwig Hongdan, Twin-Blossom Orchid Mantis Sandan and Blackwood Locust King Changcheon, Crimson Poison Harpoon Snail Yeoncheon, and the senior Yeonji.

After thinking for a moment, I decided to register Ranghyang and Hongdan first.

They’d been here for quite a while compared to the other kids.

Ranghyang took the form of a huge-breasted woman with her eyes covered by a blindfold.

Hongdan looked like a mischievous kid with red bobbed hair, around ten years old.

For Hongdan, the added terrain was a tropical forest.

It was similar to the tropical forest formed around the volcano where his mother had dug a burrow.

It felt like it would match well if we placed it next to the hot springs.

But the problem was the terrain that appeared after adding Ranghyang.

More precisely, it didn’t appear—nothing appeared at all.

Even Gungbong had an ideal world in his heart and got hot springs, but our Ranghyang got nothing?

’No, this can’t be happening.’

That was the instant I made a shocked expression.

Somehow the surroundings gradually seemed to grow darker, and then night suddenly arrived.

”Uh, what is this?”

”Why is it suddenly night?”

I didn’t know exactly what determined day and night in this Dokmul-hyang, but it seemed to be set by something like an artificial sun rising in the sky and then setting.

A bright light hung over our heads, and when it became night outside, it became night here too.

I’d thought it was either affected by the outside environment as I perceived it, or that Dokmul-hyang had its own clock running separately, but while there was something like a moon, there were no stars.

A slightly different red-moon-like thing floated up, and it served as night lighting.

But it wasn’t bright like a moon, and there was no starlight, so it became a relatively dark night.

However, the moment we were startled by the sudden night and looked up at the sky—

Tiny lights began to appear, scattered across it.

Stars, rising one by one from one side of the sky.

Soon, the sky was covered in countless stars.

Since the moon wasn’t bright, it wasn’t as bright as a full-moon night, but it was far brighter than before.

In that moment, I understood why stars had appeared in the night sky.

The last time I registered Cheonhae, something other than terrain was added for the first time.

What was created by Cheonhae’s registration was a cloud that sprinkled rain.

There were already clouds here in Dokmul-hyang, and rain did fall, but it was a different kind of cloud.

Up to that point, it had felt like something somewhat artificial that moved through zones and sprinkled rain, but with Cheonhae’s addition, real clouds were added—ones that could pour down a true downpour, or a light drizzle.

So even aside from terrain, something could be added, and these starlights in the darkness were clearly something that came from Ranghyang.

’Ah. So this was created because of Ranghyang.’

Ranghyang couldn’t see ahead, so the only thing he “saw” was darkness.

He’d been living inside complete darkness.

So he must have longed for light, and in that darkness, wanted tiny starlights to rise.

When we were adventuring around the Central Plains, a conversation I’d once half-heard between Hyang and Ranghyang when they woke up in the middle of the night came back to me.

—Tsrurur. 『Sister, isn’t it stifling since you can’t see?』

—Kyuki.

—Tsrut. 『I don’t know what “seeing” is, so it isn’t stifling.』

—Kyu.

—Tsrururur. 『I feel like it would be stifling because it’s pitch-black, but even in a dark night, the moon or starlight floats up so it isn’t dark, but if you can’t see, it feels like it would be stifling.』

—Kyukii?

—Tsrut. 『The moon rises in a dark night and shines bright, but its shape changes every day. Sometimes it’s a little dark, sometimes it’s bright.

And stars float in the sky, and they’re small and sparkling and pretty. These always sparkle.』

—Kyukikyuki.

—Tsrurururut. 『How do I explain sparkling... Ah! You know how when you bump into something hard, it flashes in front of your eyes? That kind of light is small and very precious, and it’s floating all over the sky.』

—Kyuki...

And now, at this moment, I felt like I understood what Ranghyang’s last words had been, back when he couldn’t understand it.

—Kyuki... 『I see... Sister wants to see something called stars, at least once.』

Those last words Ranghyang had said back then felt like they had become the starlight floating in the sky now, looking down at me.

I stared up at the sky, then looked at Ranghyang.

—Tsrurur! 『Sister, stars came out! Now our sky has stars too!』

Ranghyang was still wearing the blindfold, but at Hyang’s words, a very small smile rose at the corner of his mouth.