Chương 59: "You're From Earth Too, Aren't You?" (2) Service bonus + sugar context

The observation deck at the top of the Astronomy Tower sat windswept and empty at midnight. Moonlight streamed through the marble archways, falling across the massive bronze clockwork gears turning slowly overhead, letting out low metallic clicks — tack... tack... — into the still night air. Lucian leaned against a gear axle, hands in his coat pockets. Three steps away, Evelyn Wright stood with her arms crossed, staring at him through her silver-framed glasses. The awkward part was already over. They both knew.

The Wi-Fi password incident had killed any realistic chance of pretending otherwise. Now they were simply dealing with the consequences. Evelyn adjusted her glasses.

"Alright," she said in English.

"Since we're already past the part where we pretend neither of us is from Earth..." Lucian's expression immediately flattened.

"No witnesses. No dramatic reunion. No crying about instant noodles."

"I wasn't planning to cry."

"Good." A beat passed. Evelyn sighed.

"What year did you die?" Lucian was silent for two seconds.

"Twenty-twenty-three. Q4 financial report. Heart failure." Evelyn's eye twitched.

"Twenty-twenty-four. Software update release. Stroke. Three a. m." The two of them stared at each other under the moonlight. Then, almost in unison, they let out a long sigh and switched to Vietnamese.

"Đúng là chết vì làm việc như chó." Silence. Lucian reached into his coat. Evelyn's posture tensed instinctively. He pulled out a small paper packet of salted roasted sunflower seeds.

"... Seriously?"

"What?"

"You brought sunflower seeds to a secret transmigrator meeting."

"I brought snacks to a meeting after midnight. That's called planning." Lucian dropped straight onto the cold marble floor, cross-legged. Evelyn stared at him for three seconds. Then abandoned the dignity of House Wright, pushed her uniform skirt aside, and sat down across from him. She grabbed a handful. Crack.

"You have a System," she said. It wasn't a question anymore. Lucian spat a shell aside.

"Cheap green window. Makes me study languages, explore dangerous places, and rewards behavior I would've called workplace abuse in my previous life." Crack.

"And the novels." Lucian stopped chewing. Evelyn looked at him. Lucian looked at Evelyn.

"... We don't discuss the novels."

"You literally wrote them."

"Allegedly."

"I have seen your childhood manuscript."

"Circumstantial evidence."

"Your father published it."

"Parental misconduct."

"It has your name on the records." This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Administrative slander." Evelyn slowly cracked another sunflower seed.

"Still garbage, by the way."

"Thank you."

"Volume Two was especially offensive."

"Thank you."

"The cliff-jumping scene violated physics, anatomy, common sense, and probably several criminal statutes."

"Excellent. Then stop reading."

"I didn't say I stopped." Lucian narrowed his eyes. Evelyn calmly ate another seed.

"... You're hate-reading my childhood."

"I'm conducting an investigation."

"Into what?"

"How bad it gets." Lucian looked genuinely wounded. Across two lifetimes, Evelyn suspected that may have been the first attack to penetrate his defenses without using magic. She continued mercilessly.

"So what was the actual reason?" Lucian sighed.

"Language grinding." Evelyn paused.

"What?"

"The System rewarded language proficiency. Writing long-form fiction was efficient practice." He tossed another seed into his mouth.

"So I wrote the most formulaic garbage possible because clichés are fast, vocabulary repeats, and thinking about plot has terrible return on investment." Evelyn stared at him.

"And then?"

"My father found the manuscripts."

"... And?"

"He published them."

"... And?"

"They sold." Evelyn stared harder. Lucian's face darkened.

"They sold a lot." A long silence passed between them. Then Evelyn lowered her head. Her shoulders began shaking. Lucian pointed a sunflower seed at her.

"Don't." A strangled sound escaped her throat.

"Don't." She broke.

"HAHAHAHA—""Shut up."

"You accidentally became a bestselling author while grinding vocabulary?!"

"I said shut up."

"And you hate the books more than I do!"

"I am their primary victim." Evelyn had to remove her glasses to wipe tears from the corners of her eyes.

"This world is incredible."

"This world is defective." Eventually she recovered enough to breathe.

"So while you got a language-grinding System and accidentally created a publishing empire, I got nothing."

"Skill issue." Evelyn threw a sunflower seed shell at his forehead. Lucian caught it between two fingers.

"Being reborn into a Ducal house sounds impressive," she continued, "until you realize every useful thing from Earth has to be rebuilt from memory. Engineering tolerances. Chemistry. Semiconductor architecture. Manufacturing standards. I spent three months reconstructing a pressure equation because I couldn't remember one coefficient." Lucian gave her a sympathetic nod.

"Yeah. That sounds awful." Evelyn narrowed her eyes.

"You were born to the Sword Emperor and a former Knight of the Demon Lord."

"That also sounds better than it is."

"Explain."

"When I was a newborn, my parents discussed assassinating the Tax Bureau." Evelyn froze mid-crack.

"... What?"

"They didn't understand why the government was entitled to part of their income."

"That's not—""I know."

"And assassination was their first solution?"

"Second."

"What was first?"

"Invading the Ministry of Finance." Evelyn slowly lowered the sunflower seed.

"... Your family is insane."

"My father can cut mountains in half. Tax literacy was never going to be his primary stat." That got another laugh out of her. For several minutes, the two former corporate slaves simply sat hundreds of meters above the academy, cracking sunflower seeds and complaining about reincarnation. No prophecy. No chosen-one revelation. No sacred bond between souls from another world. Just two overworked employees from Earth discovering that death had somehow resulted in a transfer instead of retirement.

Evelyn's current theory — based on the statistically magnificent sample size of exactly two people — was that transmigration wasn't divine intervention at all. Earth simply lost exhausted workers. This world suffered a staffing shortage. Some cosmic HR department connected the dots. Lucian considered the hypothesis for several seconds.

"That would explain why we both died working."

"Exactly."

"So reincarnation is recruitment."

"Forced recruitment."

"No salary negotiation."

"No benefits package."

"No orientation." Lucian looked genuinely disgusted.

"Illegal." At the base of the tower, two night-patrol knights walked past and glanced upward. They spotted the silhouettes of the generation's two great geniuses sitting beneath the enormous astronomical machinery, heads bent together as they spoke in a strange, unknown tongue. Occasionally, one of them made a sharp clicking sound. Crack. Crack. One knight stopped walking.

"Do you see that?" His companion swallowed.

"First Scholar Evelyn and Young Master Vance..."

"Secretly exchanging coded intelligence."

"At midnight."

"At the highest point of the Academy." They looked at each other. The first knight whispered:"They're dividing control of the Academy." Hundreds of meters above them, Evelyn brushed sunflower shells off her skirt.

"Anyway. Business." Lucian immediately became attentive.

"Finally."

"There's a sealed titanium-alloy gate on Floor Fifteen of the Jungle Dungeon. Pre-war construction. Crude semiconductor control system. I can recognize the architecture, but translating it into this world's magical circuitry alone will take too long."

"And?"

"Next week's field trip. You bring your ridiculous Spell Control and language skills. I handle the engineering." Lucian's eyes sharpened.

"What's behind it?"

"High-energy mineral deposits." He sat straighter.

"And?"

"Blueprints for an arcane engine." Lucian stood up.

"Fifty-fifty."

"Sixty-forty. I found it."

"Fifty-fifty. I open it."

"Fifty-five-forty-five."

"After taxes?" Evelyn stared at him.

"You reincarnated and somehow became worse."

"Fifty-fifty after taxes." She held out her hand.

"Deal." Lucian shook it.

"Pleasure doing business." Evelyn turned toward the spiral staircase. Then stopped. She glanced back.

"Oh. One more thing." Lucian immediately looked suspicious.

"Volume Three." His face went blank.

"What about it?"

"Tell your father's publisher to hurry up." Lucian stared at her.

"You called Volume Two a crime against literature five minutes ago."

"It is."

"You said the protagonist has the survival instincts of a concussed pigeon."

"He does."

"You spent forty minutes explaining why the sword cultivation system makes no sense."

"It doesn't."

"Then why the hell do you want Volume Three?" Evelyn pushed her glasses up. A perfectly serious expression settled over her face.

"I need to know how much worse it gets."... Lucian stared at her.

"You are paying money to hate-read my childhood."

"Correct."

"That's a mental illness."

"It's relaxing."

"Stop."

"No."

"I'll buy back your copies."

"I'm annotating them." Lucian's face finally changed.

"... You're what?" Evelyn smiled.

"Good night, bestselling author." She disappeared down the spiral staircase. Lucian remained alone beneath the slowly turning bronze gears. Tack. Tack. Tack. After ten full seconds, he muttered into the empty tower:"Fucking software engineers." From somewhere down the stairwell, Evelyn shouted back:"I HEARD THAT, FINANCE GUY!" Lucian looked toward the stairs. Then at the empty sunflower-seed packet in his hand. Then quietly activated his System.

[LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY: ACTIVE] [CURRENT EMOTIONAL STATE: NOT SUPPORTED]"... Useless."