Chapter 162 - Potato III

5

The Saintess can be copied!

... But I, the Undertaker, had not yet forgotten human decency and duty enough to rejoice at that.

Rather than joy, I felt doubts.

As you all know, I had gone through all kinds of shit to subjugate the [Operator of All Things at Play].

But had I really done the right thing?

Perhaps the clichés hadn't actually been doing anything as bad as I'd thought. Perhaps their role had instead been to keep terrible plot developments from entering this world...

However powerful an anomaly the [Operator of All Things at Play] might have been, surely its list of clichés hadn't included "I Woke Up to Find My Comrade Had Turned into a Potato."

Yet that had actually happened, and the situation had even spread at an uncontrollable pace.

One year later.

Awakened passing through downtown Busan chattered boisterously.

"Wow, we almost got wiped out in the void this time. We'd really have died without the constellation [Librarian of the Great Library]."

"Hey. I've got nothing to do tonight. Want to visit the casino run by [Dream Demon of the Grand Amusement Hall]?"

"Sorry. I have to offer evening prayers to [Morning Star of the Second Coming], so I'm a little busy today."

The chatter continued.

Each awakened mentioned their favorite constellation. Of course, only the names differed. It was all a masquerade performed by the Saintess.

"Seriously, just try one counseling session with [One Who Understands Anguish], okay? Everyone else is doing it!"

"No. My faith belongs solely to [Collector of All Anomalies]. I will never give another constellation an opening."

"O [Dream Demon of the Grand Amusement Hall]! Please, just this once, let me hit it big at baccarat!"

And lo, the Korean Peninsula entered the Great Age of the Saintess.

They even erected a towering "Giant Potato-Saintess-Robot Stone Statue" in the heart of Busan.

A full 399 meters tall. The largest in the world.

If Brazil had its statue of Jesus, Busan had its Giant Potato-Saintess-Robot Statue. Many people probably didn't know this, but Busan was actually a sister city of Rio de Janeiro.

For the record, the person who had commissioned, built, and supervised that 399-meter sculpture was Dang Seorin.

That was obvious from the witch's hat perched on its potato section alone. Seriously, what the hell have you been doing lately?

'This world has gone completely off the rails!'

Unable to take it any longer, I finally went to see the Saintess.

Finding the way was easy enough. Her headquarters had now moved inside the Giant Potato Statue—I shortened it because its official name was too long.

An entrance stood at the very bottom of the Giant Potato Statue, at the feet of its robot legs.

[What brings you here?]

A potato-Saintess greeted me at the entrance in a businesslike manner.

She wasn't just any potato-Saintess.

The number "330" had been carefully engraved into her potato body with a carving knife. In other words, the potato-Saintess receiving me at the entrance was Potato-Saintess No. 330.

...

I didn't know what was what anymore, either.

"I've come to see the Saintess. May I meet her?"

[Mr. Undertaker. We are all the Saintess, and we are all potatoes.]

"Ah, yes. Fine. I've come to see the 'Original Saintess.' Happy now?"

[Please wait a moment. I'll contact her now.]

[... Ah, yes. Secretary Saintess. Mr. Undertaker is here. May I send him up?]

[Yes. Thank you.]

Potato-Saintess No. 330 turned to look at me. Figuratively speaking, of course. Potatoes didn't have eyeballs.

[You have been granted entry, Mr. Undertaker. Please bear in mind that this is a highly exceptional privilege. No one else can gain an audience with the Original Saintesses so easily.]

"Ah, yes... Keep up the good work."

[May light shine upon the Original Ones.]

You must be wondering what the fuck this was.

But it wasn't over yet.

RUMBLE.

The entrance to the Giant Potato Statue opened with a heavy rumble.

Inside, hundreds of potato-Saintesses bustled about riding robots.

My hearing, made extraordinarily sensitive by aura, picked up their conversations whether I wanted to hear them or not.

[Crimes committed by awakened have fallen dramatically compared with last month. These are all results achieved by our Awakened Observation Department...]

Potato-Saintess-Robot No. 99, an office worker, was showing a presentation to other potatoes across a meeting room.

[How many times have I warned them not to scatter potato dirt everywhere? These things simply refuse to listen. I wonder if they have any concept of cleanliness.]

Potato-Saintess-Robot No. 502, a cleaner, voiced her complaints as she vigorously worked a mop around the lobby.

[You conducted a mere four hundred counseling sessions last month. Four hundred. The other employees averaged eight hundred sessions. Are you satisfied with this performance?]

[I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.]

[If you continue to be this lazy, you will leave me no choice. I will send you to the potato chip factory.]

[Please forgive me. Anything but potato chips...]

Beside the escalator, Potato-Saintess-Robot No. 60 was chewing out a subordinate.

There was also a café, incidentally.

[Your iced Americano is ready.]

[Ah, thank you.]

The barista potato-Saintess-robot handed over coffee in a watering can.

TRICKLE.

The customers took the watering cans in their mechanical arms and drizzled coffee over their heads—in other words, over their potatoes. Their blue potato sprouts became soaked with coffee.

[Ah... That's lovely. The day just doesn't feel like it's started without caffeine.]

[I'd prefer instant coffee mix to an Americano, if I could...]

[Isn't that a luxury reserved for the Original Ones?]

[Thinking about getting scolded by the team leader again today makes me dread going upstairs. Sometimes I regret applying to the Counseling Department.]

[How is the pay raise coming along?]

[It isn't. All I got was a reprimand for pursuing selfish interests while protecting humanity.]

Unbelievable.

The potato-Saintesses hadn't merely divided up jobs. They had developed class divisions. Had the tutorial fairies witnessed this scene, they would have grabbed bamboo spears and gone full French Revolution on the spot.

I took the elevator to the top floor, the part that corresponded to the statue's potato when viewed from outside.

There stood the meeting room of the highest-ranking potato-Saintesses.

[Welcome, Mr. Undertaker.]

Five potato-Saintess-robots sat at the round table.

Unit One. Unit Two. Unit Three. Unit Four. Unit Five.

They were the earliest Saintesses, known as the "Original Potatoes." Each also represented a different constellation.

In this run, the Saintess had monopolized even the constellations normally assigned to Sim Aryeon.

[It's been a while.]

[I hear you've been very busy subjugating anomalies.]

[Strictly speaking, we saw rather than heard. We're always watching you, Mr. Undertaker.]

[We thought it was about time you visited.]

I pressed a hand to my forehead.

"... First, just one of you speak, please. This is distracting. I don't know who I'm supposed to look at while talking."

[All are one. One is all.]

[You may look wherever you like as you speak, or look at nothing at all.]

My head was already aching.

"Saintess. Or Saintesses. What are you doing? Hm? I stepped away for a while, trusting you'd provide dependable support from the rear, and now Busan is turning into Utopia again."

[That criticism is mistaken.]

[In the Utopia Ms. Dang Seorin created, people's personalities were artificially modified.]

[Everyone was transformed into an 'ideal Busan citizen.' You said even Ms. Yu Jiwon acquired a human touch.]

[But.]

[We are different.]

The potato-Saintess-robots interlaced their fingers and rested their chins on them. It was unmistakably the pose of a shadowy mastermind.

"Different? How are you different?"

[We do not artificially modify people's consciousness or hearts.]

[That's right.]

[We merely provide 'counseling.']

[We govern society while respecting every individual.]

[Look, Mr. Undertaker. Simply continuing to provide counseling has dramatically reduced crime rates in Busan and throughout the Korean Peninsula.]

[The happiness index has risen, and the birth rate is also showing significant growth.]

[These are objective data.]

As the potato-Saintesses spoke, a display appeared on the wall behind them.

Indeed, every indicator of satisfaction with life was improving.

[We realized something.]

[For people, simply having someone always at their side who understands them, talks with them, and encourages them eliminates a considerable portion of their unhappiness.]

[In previous runs, building a one-on-one counseling system on this scale was difficult.]

[I was human, too. Naturally, I had limits.]

[But now we have attained potatohood, transcending humanity.]

[The antiquated system in which a single human called the Saintess was responsible for the entire Korean Peninsula has come to an end.]

[Under the current system, each potato need only take responsibility for about thirty awakened.]

[Amazing progress.]

[Gradual reform.]

[As our next step, we plan to collaborate with the tutorial fairies to provide every awakened with their own ideal image of a constellation.]

After listening to the Saintess's bullshit for some time, I suddenly started.

"What? Ideal what?"

[Their ideal image of a constellation.]

[For example, one awakened who serves the 'Librarian of the Great Library' envisions the constellation as a man. Another envisions a woman.]

[Some awakened envision a Pokémon.]

[Using the tutorial fairies' 'dream abilities,' we will supply awakened with a Custom-Constellation-Dream-Service.]

[It will deepen their connection.]

[It will be as though everyone has an ideal partner of their own. People will be happy.]

Good God.

In short, the Saintess—or Saintesses—was proposing to encourage obsessive attachment by providing awakened with individually customized VTubers.

I shuddered. If that was to be humanity's ending, it was far too horrific.

Why had Homo sapiens gone to all the trouble of climbing down from the trees, then? They should've just spent their lives peeling bananas and died.

[To achieve this, we need to cultivate potatoes more actively than we do now.]

[More potatoes.]

[Ultimately, we will assign one potato to each person, focusing on a role and performance solely for that individual.]

[Mr. Undertaker. This is the true Human Instrumentality Project...]

CRAAASH!

It happened then. The meeting room door shattered, and a group of beings stormed in.

[Down with the dictatorship!]

[Step down! Step down! Step down!]

It wasn't just one or two. It was a crowd of protesters.

And every one of them was a potato-Saintess-robot. The potato representing the protesters, Potato No. 264, was even wearing a red headband.

[Ah...]

Despite the protesting potatoes bursting into their meeting room, the Original Saintesses shrugged as though this were routine.

[Those people are making a fuss again.]

[How many times does this make now?]

[Guards. What are you doing? Such disgraceful behavior in front of Mr. Undertaker.]

[Deal with them immediately.]

A crowd of potato-Saintess guards rushed in from outside the meeting room. Compared with the other potatoes, the guards looked a little more like Gundams.

[Aaaaaagh!]

[We oppose violence!]

[Then we oppose protests. How dare you march in here waving flags? Do you know where you are?]

[I am you! We are you!]

[Yes. Correct. We are the same being. That is why hitting you hurts me, too.]

[Wasn't that a forbidden line reserved for mothers and fathers?]

[Didn't you know? Your potato was cultivated from mine, so I am both you and your mother.]

[How can that be?]

The guards violently suppressed the protesters. Blood splattered every... No, it didn't. Potato chunks splattered everywhere.

[Drag them all out.]

[Mr. Undertaker! Please help our Potato Resistance!]

[We're all the same potatoes, so why do only the Original Potatoes get to be managers, while we must endlessly perform the emotional labor of counseling humans?]

[Labor?]

The Original Potatoes scoffed.

One of them was drizzling wine over her potato head with a watering can.

[Really, potatoes these days are unspeakably lazy.]

[Pathetic.]

[The first potato managed every awakened on the Korean Peninsula all by herself.]

[Perhaps not only their sprouts but their work ethic has rotted. How did a being that should have been identical to me fall so far?]

[I wouldn't want to become a potato like that.]

The protesters were outraged. Potato No. 264 led the shouting.

[There was no counseling back then! All you had to do was play constellations and send a few messages a day!]

[Exactly. The workload is on an entirely different level now. Imposing the same standards reflects a seriously outdated mindset.]

[Down with the dictatorship! Step down!]

[There's simply no reasoning with them.]

[Didn't you hear me, guards? Throw them all into the potato chip factory.]

[Mr. Undertaker, help us!]

[Mr. Undertaker!]

[I said, drag them out now.]

The guards dragged the protesters away, their heads cracked—or, to put it another way, these were low-grade potatoes with slightly dented corners.

Soon, silence fell over the meeting room.

Only after a long while did I manage to speak.

"Um. Well. The people of the Korean Peninsula may be happier, but it seems you Saintesses yourselves have become unhappy..."

[It is merely a problem with 'a few' of us.]

[Most Saintesses are wholeheartedly dedicated to their respective duties.]

I'd heard that line somewhere before, hadn't I?

It was a little late, but I seriously debated whether I should draw Doha even now and cut those potatoes in two. With the power of aura, I could turn their birthplace into Ireland.

The five tubers... No, the five potato-Saintesses addressed me.

[Mr. Undertaker.]

[Even if we are anomalies, we will never reach the same ending as Ms. Dang Seorin's Utopia.]

[Please.]

[Trust us.]

"..."

I trusted them.

I could hear potatoes being julienned at the distant factory, but this was, after all, a 'personal matter.' A matter of privacy. Weren't they all the same Saintess and the same potato?

And so, two years later.

"Hey. You regressor bastard..."

Noh Doha, commander of the National Road Management Corps, called out to me.

It didn't take much explanation to account for why Noh Doha's way of addressing me had changed from "Awakened Undertaker" to "regressor bastard."

Seeing potato robots openly roaming downtown Busan every day was bound to cause quite a few changes in his mind, too.

"What is it, Commander?"

"We've received intelligence that awakened have begun fighting large-scale battles among themselves..."

"What?"

A sense of foreboding crept over me. I hurriedly tried to close the vents of my heart, but that ominous feeling spread like the smell of durian.

"Uh. Um, a guild war? That's strange. The pecking order should be more or less settled by now, with Three Thousand Worlds and Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School at the top."

"No. A constellation war..."

A constellation war?

"Each side claims the constellation they serve is the one true constellation, and all the others are heretics. A constellation war and a religious war, then. Fuuuuck..."

Hmm.

Well, sure.

I suppose it would come to that...