Dreams for the Future (6)

Harem.

Another term for it was polygamy. On 21st-century Earth, it was nothing more than a sexual fantasy for men.

However, it wasn't particularly illegal in the otherworld.

In my experience, this world's sexual mores were more open than Earth's. That doesn't mean women were promiscuous. Respect and consideration for chastity existed here too.

In fact, even among men, Vikings took pride in remaining virgins until they died. Fucking insane bastards.

Anyway, this is what I mean by open sexual mores.

In this world, it wasn't just polygyny. Its opposite—polyandry, in which one woman lived with multiple husbands—also existed. I was utterly shocked that this kind of twisted marriage culture existed openly regardless of gender.

‘Fuck, what the hell are harems and reverse harems supposed to be?’

It was a reality that made my future look fucking bleak, but I had no choice but to accept it. This was a world where the tier-obsessed bastards considered it ethical for the capable to monopolize whatever they could.

That made sense, since this was a world where an individual's martial power could sometimes exceed that of a nation.

There was nothing strange about a culture of survival of the fittest and the strong prevailing spreading before human civilization had properly taken root.

Even if one insanely strong primitive man called himself a tribal chief and impregnated every woman in sight, anyone who opposed him would have the top of their skull neatly popped off.

This could roughly be called part of Dick Selection Theory too.

There were even records of a single individual possessing tremendous power and taking every woman in an invaded tribe as his wife back when humanity was still going uga-uga.

A total of 98 women. There really were some insanely badass primitive men out there.

Anyway, this was a form that could often be seen in the wild as well.

In the wild, one superior male keeps multiple females. Many animals, from lions to gorillas, share this trait.

Thus, the culture of the strong taking the most turned this world into a paradise for tier-obsessed bastards. In other words, the humans here were still living in an animal kingdom.

Polygamy was one consequence of that.

Some parental qualities were inherited by children to a certain degree, and honestly, powerful people—men and women alike—wanted to take as many wives and concubines as they could.

But to put it bluntly—this fucked-up behavior in the otherworld had little to do with me.

I was someone who would one day develop teleportation technology and return to my home, 21st-century Earth.

For someone whose goal was to leave this world, starting a family would be incredibly irresponsible and rude. I couldn't just run off to Earth like that legendary bastard Liu Bang of Han, going Dehehehe, I can always have another kid, and then run away.

Therefore, if I simply stopped caring about that culture, which offended my common sense as an Earthling, it would be someone else's problem and have little to do with me.

No—I thought it was someone else's problem.

─Hey. When you get free from slavery, are you going to get married?

Back when I was at Carmine University, one fucking long-term project finally ended. Dana asked me that at a drinking session where only the two of us remained.

─No? I haven't really thought about marriage.

At the time, I was still a slave, so I answered politely. I told her that I had a dream I'd wanted to achieve for a long time—returning to Earth—and that I didn't plan to get married until I achieved it.

─This idiot still doesn't understand how the world works.

After I'd also finished explaining my dream, Dana sighed as she drank.

─Listen, if you want to achieve that dream of yours, you have to get married. Preferably, you should take multiple wives.

─Huh?

Astonishingly, that was the reality.

─From the moment you acquire enough ability to achieve your dream… No, even your current abilities are enough for most nobles to covet you. You're a talent several nobles have their eyes on.

─Isn't that a good thing?

─No, idiot. Don't you know what it means to be targeted? It means impoverished nobles who can only wield power in the frontier will forcibly marry you to their daughters.

─Oh, shit.

Marriage by abduction! I was going to be targeted as the victim of an otherworldly variation on that horrifying Mongol-style kidnapping-and-rape custom? Dana's words left me dumbfounded.

─Don't even dream of researching alone. Where will your research funds come from? When someone says they'll sponsor your research, it means they acknowledge your ability. You have no idea how many people are constantly hitting on Professor Yerna, do you?

─Can't I just refuse them like the professor does?

─Maybe. You said you're twenty-six, right? If we assume it takes you thirty years to establish yourself without patronage like the professor, you'll get your doctorate and your own lab when you're fifty-six.

─Life is starting to feel like total shit.

─That's reality, you bastard.

Dana's words forced me to face reality.

In this otherworld, polygamy was a symbol of a person's ability and authority. Even in Britannia, plural marriage wasn't illegal.

This was a world where even Puritanism and Confucian thought had never originated. As long as a man was capable of supporting them, it was fine for him to have several wives. Nobles even separated wives and concubines and assigned ranks among their wives.

As a result, a tendency arose to view unmarried men as incompetent.

In fact, even on Earth, until the 1980s and '90s, unmarried men and women were treated like idiots.

Getting pummeled by insults and nagging every holiday was routine, and one of my older uncles wasn't even allowed to visit the main family home during the holidays until he got married.

This atmosphere was even worse in the otherworld. Didn't the internet used to have a joke like this?

─Polygamy should never be made legal.

─Why?

─Fuck, if polygamy became legal, women would want to become Kang Dong-won's ninth wife instead of dating me.

─You don't even have any applicants to be your wife now.

─Where do you live, you fucking bitch.

Thus, the institution of polygamy could actually become an enemy of men.

Just as a weak male monkey lived alone all its life, picking bugs out of a corner to eat, the abilities of each person determined their worth in this world of tier-obsessed bastards.

─What you do for a living doesn't matter. But if you don't want nobles targeting you, you need to take several wives.

Dana said.

─If you're single or have only one or two wives, you'll be taken as the kept son-in-law of some noble you don't even know.

─It would be hard for me to refuse a proposal, then. They might not just cut off my sponsorship; they could even try to retaliate.

─You understand. Exactly. Even if you claim you have no intention of getting married, they won't believe you. I don't know how things were in your country, but in Britannia and the surrounding countries, nobody will accept that someone with a master's or doctoral-level ability from Carmine University isn't getting married.

It would have been unwise for me to refuse a marriage proposal from a noble. If I was unlucky, they might interpret it as me rejecting them because I didn't consider that noble good enough.

“I'm not satisfied with a family at your level!! I'll wait until a more impressive noble proposes!!”

That was how my refusal sounded to nobles.

─Isn't it enough to have only one wife?

─Ahem. Hmm. I don't know? Still, having only one wife means letting your abilities go to waste. Wouldn't you get angry if she went somewhere and heard people saying, Why does that woman's husband have so much ability, yet she lives like that~?

Dana added this while drinking heavily.

─And this is probably just an urban legend, but I heard that in Romania, they once killed the wife of a bureaucrat devoted to his wife so they could take him as a son-in-law. Romania is a place where political struggles are especially vicious, so you can write that off as an exception, but it's too early to feel safe in Britannia either.

─…At that point, wouldn't it be faster to hope that one of the noble ladies who isn't completely insane takes me?

Faced with an unbearable and hopeless reality, I escaped into that fantasy.

A stunningly beautiful, haughty noble lady with blonde ringlet curls tugging on my leash and saying, Become my one and only slave! That future didn't sound so bad, did it?

─Sane, beautiful noble ladies are generally used in political marriages with other nobles. The proposal that comes to you would probably be to become the fourth husband of a thirty-year-old woman who's massively overweight and has a bizarre personality.

─I've actually dreamed of having multiple wives since long ago.

What kind of country was this?

I mean, was this really a country?

I looked into it later, and Dana had been fucking right. In most countries, polyandry was much rarer than polygamy, and it was viewed far less favorably as well.

The main excuse for polygamy was supposedly to produce more heirs, but since a woman could only be pregnant with one child at a time, the argument was that there was no point in having multiple husbands. It was miraculous logic.

For that reason, few women took multiple husbands unless they had what was known as a ‘fucked-up image.’

Rather, it was more common for a woman with a marriage score of 80 to become the Nth wife of a man with a score of 150.

After all, the matchmaking culture of the 21st century was exactly the same. Even I would rather be the kept husband of an oil tycoon's daughter than have three high-school-graduate convenience-store workers as my wives.

In other words.

The head of a noble family would attach capable commoners as husbands to a daughter living a hopelessly fucked-up life, turning them into the family's legal slaves.

That was the reality of polyandry.

Even if someone wasn't already a slave, if you coveted their abilities, you could put a marriage collar around their neck and work them like a slave!!

─Fuck. I never thought the day would come when I'd understand how women who were disgusted by harems felt.

When I learned that, my vision went yellow as I thought of the men who were even now being sexually exploited indefinitely as slaves somewhere.

It was like the lives of poor Larvae stuck to a fucking Hatchery!!

A hell where living wasn't really living!

An evil spin-off of bossam, the marriage-kidnapping custom that survived into the early Joseon period!

What kind of feeling was someone supposed to have as they carried on living as a baby-making machine, along with countless other chores, rather than merely a machine for giving birth?

On top of that, perhaps the women of this world had a sexual fantasy similar to this, because stories about noble ladies exploiting all kinds of men were wildly popular in the publishing industry too!! Goddammit!!

─Wow, I almost fucking ruined my life.

I was sincerely grateful to Dana for telling me this. If I had stupidly gone around saying, Nord isn't getting married, derp, my otherworldly life wouldn't have been far from ending in slavery.

Fuck, think about it. It was a choice between a harem-loving macho man and a feminist reverse-harem guy, so how was I supposed to avoid being consumed by machismo?

─Gah!! Give it up!! Do you think becoming an otherworlder makes you the protagonist of an erotic novel?! A harem that ignores women's dignity?! Say something that makes sense!!

Sometimes the rootless Confucian-Taliban dragon inside me rampaged, shouting that I shouldn't spout such nonsense, but the macho Nord who had adapted to the otherworld didn't even blink.

And I, too, took the side of macho Nord.

─Oh, just shut the fuck up, you piece of shit!! If I just sit around, I'll end up the fourth husband of a 150-kilogram, wheezing, hysterical hag and become hole-brothers with pathetic suckers like me!!!!

Even if it killed me, I couldn't live in an environment like that.

I would rather die than live as a collared husband-slave, dragged around by every kind of odd job, from translating ancient documents and interpreting for foreign guests to giving Kumon lessons to brats.

And on top of that, mandatory defensive battles with a fat woman in her forties?

Every night, I'd be forced into a desperate battle with the grim resolve of a soldier marching into the Battle of Haengju.

Eventually, I'd end up pinned beneath a wife with a thicker waist than mine, letting out a pathetic cry of “Ngghh!”

If my parents knew about my situation, even they couldn't oppose me building a harem.

And honestly, fuck, I'm still a man. There was no way I could dislike taking several beautiful wives!!

Of course, I hadn't given up on researching a way to return home. If I had, I wouldn't have come as far as Sargadis.

I absolutely had to start a family.

But running off to Earth and abandoning that family was out of the question.

─Then why not just find a way to travel back and forth between Earth and the otherworld?

It wouldn't exactly be impossible. Just as nobody foresaw space travel before spaceships were developed, technological advancement turned the impossible into the possible.

By the same logic, bidirectional dimensional travel had to be possible too! I only needed to recreate it in an otherworldly form.

It was possible that I would ultimately fail, or that returning to Earth would be a one-way trip from which I couldn't come back here, but that didn't matter much to me either.

I could return together with the family I built in the otherworld, or give up on returning to Earth and stay here while sending letters to my family back on Earth.

In the letters, I would write down memories and secrets known only to my family. Then they would believe that I hadn't disappeared and died, but was alive and doing well somewhere.

Anyway, having reached that conclusion—I resolved to take several wives in this otherworld.

That way, I wouldn't be threatened with marriage by someone targeting my research achievements or abilities, and I could build a family befitting my own abilities.

That was why I came to live as a macho man in the otherworld.