Do pets dream?
There is plenty of evidence that mammals other than humans both sleep and dream. Whether a dog twitching its paws in its sleep is truly dreaming of running is difficult to say, but most animals do, in fact, dream.
And the individual about to appear here is neither a dog nor a sheep.
Naturally, they too frequently enter REM sleep.
...This is the dream of a beast.
Whenever Beast's past surfaced in dreams, it was always accompanied by a strange sense of melancholy.
No matter how happy the scenes themselves might seem, the ending of this story was invariably tragic.
Ten years ago.
Back then, Beast lived deep in the remote mountains, filthy and unkempt, making a living by chopping wood.
Then, one day, an unfamiliar creature was caught in the spring trap Beast had set for rabbits.
It was a young man.
What was more, he had a clear, pleasant voice and a beautiful smile.
A hiker who had lost his family in a tragic plane accident and was wandering through the wilderness in a daze.
A fateful encounter with a beast of the forest.
What followed was the sort of development one might commonly see in a romance story.
The two of them—no, to be precise, there were three—fell in love at first sight, brought together by the smallest of accidents.
Beast was captivated by the deer-like appearance of the man caught in the trap.
And the injured stranger, who had been wandering alone through the mountains, felt a strange attraction and sense of kinship toward Beast's loneliness.
That was how their love began.
Over time, Beast, who had never before experienced pure affection from another person, gradually became accustomed to receiving it.
Beast was rough, eccentric, and utterly incapable of fitting into ordinary human society.
But the stranger patiently guided him with kindness and affection, slowly taming the wildness within him.
"Honey, this is dental floss. Let's make sure you use it before bed from now on."
"Isn't brushing enough?"
"You'll get cavities between your teeth if you don't. I've already made an appointment, so we're going to the dentist together tomorrow."
After that, Beast did whatever the other person asked of him and avoided whatever he was told not to do.
And yet, he was happy every single day.
Strangely enough, he found himself content with that modest life, simply following the foreigner's lead.
But happy times always pass quickly.
Beast spent those joyful years with his first love in the little cabin.
And several years later, the beautiful foreigner finally proposed to him.
***
A few days later.
[Heavy rain is expected nationwide today. If you plan to go outside, make sure to bring an umbrella.]
On television, a weather forecaster dressed in a raincoat announced that the spring rain would continue throughout the day.
They say autumn is the season for reading.
Yet here was an alien, still in a season when summer had not even arrived, struggling with a lengthy text for quite some time.
"Uhm..."
In fact, the alien had run into a major obstacle while trying to create a decoy capable of deceiving Kang Changho.
The magic he was accustomed to using simply refused to function properly on Earth.
After throwing himself into research, he eventually realized that the problem stemmed from environmental differences between Earth and his home planet, Alphauri.
He was currently entering dungeons to gather materials that might help him compensate for those variables.
'Damn it. It's just a difference in air pressure or water pressure, so why the hell does it keep shutting itself off?'
Things were beginning to get a little troublesome.
Concepts involving elements such as carbon or nitrogen were comparatively easy for the alien to understand because the properties of individual elements were clearly defined.
But when it came to measurements such as length or pressure, the different systems used by the two planets made the calculations painfully complicated.
In particular, the Alphaurin alien was furious when he discovered the existence of both the imperial and metric systems on Earth.
He became so irritated that he even considered exterminating the users of one or the other after conquering Earth someday, simply so that all units could finally be standardized.
"Hmm."
Despite such violent thoughts, however, the problem itself proved surprisingly easy to solve.
This alien had devoted most of his life to magic and had been an exceptional scholar.
His stubborn personality meant that he lacked many ordinary life experiences and often behaved carelessly in everyday matters.
But when it came to the study of magic, there was no one who could surpass him.
"Right. This should work."
Before long, a solution came to mind.
And once it did, the research progressed without too much difficulty.
But even if he managed to complete the dummy smoothly, it would all be meaningless if he became stuck at the next stage...
'Damn it, but how the hell am I supposed to get a new body?'
He had now completely unlocked the potential of his F-class magic.
As a result, he was capable of performing the soul-transfer spell once again.
All of that was good news.
But just as he had feared from the very beginning, obtaining an appropriate body proved to be the greatest obstacle.
South Korea had an extremely well-organized resident registration system.
When someone died, the authorities could almost always identify the family and contact them.
Even unidentified and unclaimed corpses were taken into municipal custody and given proper funerals.
And because the bodies of Awakened possessed considerable research value, there had already been cases of theft.
As a result, security at cemeteries specifically intended for Hunters was much tighter than normal.
The convenient possibility of finding an unattended corpse abandoned somewhere on the street simply wasn't going to happen.
So how was he supposed to obtain a new vessel?
And it couldn't be just any corpse.
He needed the body of an Awakener who had been at least E-rank.
'Hmm. Paying the family for the body... No, that won't work either. Giryeo's brain has been screaming at me for a while now that if this counts as human trafficking, we'll get caught.'
As the days passed, his worries only continued to pile up.
Meanwhile, outside the window, beyond the spring rain, signs of a new change were beginning to emerge.
***
Perhaps the steadily increasing size of dungeons up until now had merely been a rehearsal for this day.
Earth.
At last, a new type of dungeon appeared in this world—one truly deserving of the word "giant."
"What is that?"
"Is it a new gate?"
At 1 a.m. GMT on the 14th, a Blue Gate was discovered off the eastern coast of Argentina.
At first, the Hunters assumed it was nothing more than another ordinary gate manifestation.
"Mm? The dungeon's mana density is C-rank, so why are the monsters only D-rank?"
"Something feels strange."
And indeed, something was strange.
The dungeon before them was an enormous labyrinth, with an internal span reaching 6.1 kilometers.
And its entrance had not appeared only in South America.
Additional entrances had emerged in Moldova, Iceland, Lebanon, Korea, and other countries scattered randomly across the globe.
One enormous dungeon.
Multiple entrances spread across different nations.
Thus began the existence of a strange parallel world that would later come to be known as [Mimic City].
[Mimic City].
An endlessly sprawling gate, almost as though it were trying to imitate the prosperity of human civilization itself.
At first, however, experts remained relatively calm.
The monsters emerging from the dungeon reached only C-grade at most.
Surely the raid would be completed quickly.
That optimism did not last long.
Experts from several countries soon discovered the true severity of the situation.
The dungeon was chaotic.
Different types of monsters appeared without any discernible pattern.
More importantly, no clear leader or boss could be found anywhere.
Could this be a Type II Blue Gate?
A dungeon without a boss?
'This is troublesome.'
If that were true, there could hardly be a more inconvenient spatial anomaly for national authorities.
The dungeon was enormous, making hidden monsters extremely difficult to locate.
And as the raid dragged on, unverified Hunters were already beginning to enter and leave through entrances located in other countries.
But the raid itself wasn't the only problem.
Even if every monster were eliminated and an exit appeared, the dungeon would not collapse as long as living people remained inside.
Handled poorly, this gate could effectively become an illegal route for foreigners to enter another country without passports or immigration screening.
The governments of Argentina and the other affected nations quickly identified the locations of the newly formed entrances and began scrambling to establish control.
Unfortunately, their troubles were only beginning.
"Oh my God!"
Eight hours later, an Icelandic surveyor delivered a horrifying report.
The dungeon was still growing.
Could [Mimic City], from the perspective of whatever entity maintained its core, be something like a buffet?
Hosts of many different nationalities had been thrown together into the same container.
And because of the dungeon's structure, leaving it alone was simply not an option.
The following characteristics were eventually confirmed.
Over time, the dungeon's internal area and number of entrances continued to increase.
Every 780 minutes, the dungeon's progress reset.
Any altered terrain returned to its original state.
Deactivated traps reactivated.
And the population of ordinary monsters reverted to its previous numbers.
The monsters inside the gate also displayed extremely high levels of aggression.
In other words, once they discovered a gate passage leading outside, they would inevitably rush toward it.
Scholars naturally phrased their reports somewhat more elegantly.
But in plain terms, it was an unbelievably troublesome gate.
The only saving grace was that [Mimic City's] "reset" phenomenon also erased corpses inside the dungeon.
At least there would be no nightmare scenario in which mountains of monster remains accumulated after every reset.
Still, public anxiety only worsened.
What if one of the labyrinth's passages suddenly opened in someone's backyard?
What if a dangerous criminal entered the country through the dungeon without undergoing immigration inspection?
With every passing day, the citizens' concerns deepened.
Eventually, the World Cooperation Organization urgently began organizing an international agreement aimed at stopping the endless expansion of the colossal labyrinth...
***
Before anyone realized it, Monday had arrived.
'Heh heh heh.'
While everyone else was consumed by worry, a certain young man living alone in a one-room apartment was struggling to suppress a victorious smile.
Illegal immigrants.
Ferocious monsters charging toward the outside world.
Yes.
Those things were obviously terrifying to ordinary citizens.
But they had no idea about the truly heinous crime that was about to take place.
"The idea that the world hates me... I think I'll have to take that back today. Looking at this, it feels like the entire universe is on my side."
What if a rank fraud secretly entered that sprawling dungeon and stole a corpse...?
Only an exceptionally meticulous person would ever bother worrying about such an absurd possibility.
And as that thought suggested, Giryeo was eagerly waiting for his chance to enter [Mimic City].
When the dungeon first appeared, he hadn't paid much attention to it.
But as more and more of its characteristics became known, a certain idea suddenly occurred to him.
Even now, new entrances to the dungeon were appearing at random locations all over Earth.
Unknown Hunters from countless countries were gathering there.
And the sheer size of the dungeon made it perfect for one particular activity.
Harvesting corpses.
'Oho.'
According to the news, the international cooperation organization, with the agreement of several nations, planned to carry out the first formal exploration of the dungeon on the 15th.
Using the information gathered during that expedition, they would develop a proper raid strategy and begin a full-scale cleanup operation on the 16th.
Giryeo intended to take advantage of the exploratory phase on the 15th.
'If I hide somewhere deep inside the dungeon and wait for the right moment, won't an Awakener eventually die in an accident?'
In the Hunter industry, when someone died during combat, carrying the corpse while retreating could endanger the remaining survivors.
For that reason, it was common practice to abandon the body and escape.
All Giryeo had to do was remain hidden and wait.
Once a suitable corpse appeared, he could take it and leave through an exit with relatively loose security.
'With my current mana, I can't perform anything as powerful as an eternal frost spell... but I should be able to freeze a corpse for a few weeks.'
Then another possibility occurred to him.
'What if I bury the body in another country and travel there later to perform the body-transfer spell? My movements are much more restricted inside Korea anyway.'
Naturally, putting such a plan into practice would introduce plenty of variables.
For example, he might carefully check that no one was nearby before stepping outside, only to discover later that someone had witnessed him near the exit.
But even in such a case, he could simply deceive the world with his eloquence.
After all, he had already analyzed his previous incidents in painstaking detail through extensive web searches.
'If anything happens, I'll just say I was rescuing victims, like with the misunderstanding at Gampo Port!'
Scheming like this was an Alphaurin specialty.