Girardian Isekai Part 7: Reinheit von Djerba, The Cynical Tyrant of Utility

Hopefully the illustrations catch up to the webnovel by the time I publish this

The third story from ORV is both the most simple and most nuanced. It is a classic trope: the heroes enter a false utopia sustained by a dark underbelly. Reinheit von Djerba is the ruler of this dystopia.

Paradise.

There were numerous references to it in Ways of Survival.

The tomb of the scenario. The nest of incarnations. Flowers blooming on the plains of despair … these were some of the descriptions for this place.

In fact, most of them were true.

It offers the most direct Girardian reading of the three, since the false utopia is literally powered by human sacrifice which turns humans into demons. 

“You should've known. Paradise isn't perfect. It is natural for a beautiful place to have a shadow."

Jung Heewon didn't respond. Ignorance was a deception. Of course, she had thought about it. This place must be hiding some awful truth. She just didn't think it would be this…

"Why are you mass producing monsters? Are you going to conquer Dark Castle?"

"I'm not doing anything. They are just the nutrients of Paradise."

…

Rapidly moving branches grabbed the humans one by one. The prisoners screamed but there was no room for resistance. The rapidly moving branches tied around the prisoners' bodies and three them into a hole in the trunk.

A terrible noise was heard and then there was a scream like a soul was being castrated.

After a while, buds blossomed on the tree trunk. Jung Heewon sensed what would be born from the bud and shook. In less than a few minutes, a giant monsters was born from the bud. It was the human who had just been swallowed by the tree.

The Perpetual Motion was a tree that made demons.

There’s an immediate Girardian reading: the antichrist will demand human sacrifice for a facade of utopia. This is certainly paralleled in many communist regimes, as well as in modern campaigns around sex and gender. How it relates to technology is less obvious.