***
After the commotion that ended briefly but was by no means small, a small change occurred for me as I commuted to the team dormitory. First of all, the driver was now constantly attached to me wherever I moved.
‘Even if you go to the next building, please call me.’
The driver, who earnestly requested this, seemed anxious as he parked right next to the team dormitory and stationed himself there for several days. Of course, now that things have stabilized to some degree, he doesn’t go that far.
The next change that occurred was the team members’ attitudes. They began to try to treat me as the team guide, albeit awkwardly.
What I belatedly learned was that Do Ganghyun had dealt with the team members more severely than I thought to keep them from approaching me. All of it was accomplished through implicit threats within gates, and apparently those other than Seo Yuseok, the team’s youngest member, had caught on relatively quickly.
‘They didn’t dislike me.’
That didn’t mean they liked me either, but I thought that was something. It’s originally difficult to feel favorable toward someone you’ve just met. Especially when you’re forced to be together through an unwanted meeting.
This part was hopeful because I thought it was something I could change with effort. Unless the other party was wary of me from the start and harbored negative emotions like resentment, envy, and jealousy, the exploratory battle was rather welcome.
Of course, the only one who spoke to me comfortably so far was Esper Seo Yuseok.
“Guide-nim, you’re going to the training room today too, right?”
“Yes, but today I also need to stop by the guide building.”
“The guide building?”
I nodded my head greatly.
Having been allowed by Do Ganghyun to frequent the training room with the team members, I moved with them every morning. Following Do Ganghyun’s firm insistence that contact guiding wasn’t allowed yet, I often conducted radiant guiding, and to increase the efficiency of radiant guiding, I accompanied them to grasp the characteristics of their wavelengths and abilities. After all, since each Esper’s wavelength and abilities had unique characteristics, grasping these made guiding easier.
‘In fact, excluding Do Ganghyun who’s practically SS-rank and Seo Yuseok who has an imprinted guide, guiding isn’t much of a burden.’
Still, it was necessary work. I wasn’t a high-rank guide overflowing with guiding and excellent skills, but merely C-rank. Without such know-how, it was difficult to take care of all the team members.
‘And if there’s even a gate raid, guiding everyone is absolutely impossible.’
I swallowed my bitterness and opened my mouth about the reason I needed to go to the guide building.
“I’m going to the training center.”
The training center. Literally, a place for the education of guides who had just manifested. It wasn’t a place I needed as someone who was approaching two years since manifestation, but there were various educational materials for basic guiding there. I’d once frequented it hoping to be helpful to Do Ganghyun, but it was also a place I’d stopped visiting after experiencing a series of incidents.
However, now that I’d mentioned in front of everyone that I wanted to be helpful as a team guide, I needed to build up from the basics again step by step. The knowledge I’d accumulated so far was close to being patchwork focused only on parts for Do Ganghyun, so it was lacking in many overall aspects.
Most guides tended to neglect basic knowledge or theoretical aspects once they became accustomed to guiding, thinking it wasn’t particularly necessary. High-rank guides could overwhelm with guiding by rank alone without such knowledge, and generally such people had good skills.
Conversely, low-rank guides didn’t have the ability to utilize theory even if they learned it, and were busy just guiding along with the Esper’s wavelength.
Then a question arises here. What about me, who can visibly see and feel wavelengths if I want to, and can control guiding even against high-rank Espers?
‘What happens if I master all the theory?’
—Such a fundamental question.
“The training center? That place where new guides first enter?”
Seo Yuseok asked as if he didn’t understand.
“Yes, I’m going to apply to view the guiding materials at the training center.”
“But there’s only material about basic guiding prepared there anyway.”
He was right. And that was exactly the material I needed.
In the first place, while research on Espers’ abilities was active, that wasn’t the case for guides. Unless it was research on guiding itself—how guides stabilized Espers’ wavelengths—they didn’t pay attention to the methods of guiding and their diversity.
Although various facilities were established and they were responding to gates quickly, less than 100 years had passed since the world changed. As long as one could guide, that was enough; research on the diversity of methods inevitably fell behind in priorities.
So the materials I needed only existed within basic guiding from the start. Developing it further was also my responsibility.
“Is there intermediate or advanced guiding? It just follows the guide’s rank.”
“Then why—”
“I’m a bit lacking in basic guiding common sense. I manifested at a late age, and since Esper Do Ganghyun-nim’s situation was so urgent, I learned guiding according to needs, so it’s a bit biased.”
I scratched my cheek with an awkward smile. It was a bit embarrassing to be filling in lacking basic knowledge now.
When I worked at the communal guiding room until now, not only were the Espers’ ranks similarly low to mine, but I also worked together with multiple guides. It meant the burden of guiding was significantly less. Work was assigned according to my situation on its own.
However, now that I was working as a team guide, it was different. Because Do Ganghyun was SS-rank, there were no S-rank Espers among the team members, but they were all A-rank. With Do Ganghyun also needing my guiding, there were five more high-rank Espers I needed to take care of. Even if each had a guide with whom they had a pair or imprint, it was naturally too much for a C-rank guide to care for all at once.
‘Of course, a situation where I guide everyone simultaneously won’t occur.’
At least when assuming a similar situation, there needed to be a minimum way to cope. And the alternative I thought of was exactly—
‘A guiding zone.’
Creating an artificial guiding zone.
A guiding zone was naturally created as a guide lived in one place for a long time, but in fact, various conditions were needed for this.
First was time. The time the guide spent during the day had to be overwhelmingly high. After all, because it was a principle where the wavelength the guide unconsciously emitted permeated objects and was generated, time played an important role.
Second was a sense of security. In the end, a guiding zone was formed when the guide thought of it as their own territory. So the comfort and sense of security felt in the place were important, and the guiding wavelength unconsciously emitted was also related to that.
For these reasons, the space where a guide slept or lived was very important. It wasn’t for nothing that the guide building was managed with such thorough security.
‘That’s why the Esper-nim told me to leave the dormitory too.’
Do Ganghyun had me leave the dormitory to form that guiding zone in his house. Because it was greatly influenced by the subconscious, there was a need to eliminate the dormitory where I’d originally been living. It wouldn’t be easy to accept a new place when there was a territory to return to.
In addition, it was also to change my sleeping place to his house to make me feel a “sense of security.” After all, in a sleeping state, one is greatly influenced by the subconscious, and even if uncomfortable and awkward at first, it’s difficult not to think of the space where one sleeps as one’s own territory.
In fact, I heard that in some teams, guides deliberately lived in the team dormitory to generate a guiding zone.
‘Though it doesn’t apply to me.’
In the current situation where a guiding zone was already being generated as I lived in Do Ganghyun’s house, I couldn’t create a guiding zone in the team dormitory again. Do Ganghyun wouldn’t allow me to live here, and if I tried it for no reason, I might end up with neither.
So what I thought of was an artificial guiding zone.
In the end, the core principle of a guiding zone was that the guide’s wavelength permeated objects and the space. Then what if I forcibly made it remain?
‘I’ll have to try it, but…’
Perhaps I could generate a guiding zone artificially.
Worries came first about how many guides had tried such a challenge until now, whether they succeeded or failed, and if they failed, what the cause of failure was, but somehow confidence that I could do it boiled up.
From what I’d observed so far, there was no guide who injected free will into their wavelength to the degree I did. At first, I thought everyone did it this way, and later I learned that wasn’t the case, but there was no use for me, a C-rank, to have such an ability.
However, while guiding Seo Yuseok, a hypothesis was formed just in case. The hypothesis that if I had control ability to the degree of being able to guide an Esper imprinted with someone else, generating an artificial guiding zone wouldn’t be impossible either.
There was actually evidence supporting that hypothesis. While frequenting the training room, I’d guided team members with radiant guiding, and most of the efficiency came out above expectations. The only problem was that I got tired quickly because my total guiding amount was small.
