Restart
Restart.
It was the System function that had allowed Seonwoo to live his failed lives over and over again.
Unlike the universal [System] within Goddess Saga, this was unquestionably something that applied to Seonwoo alone.
Error. A problem has occurred during the causality processing sequence.
When that System displayed an error it had never once shown before, Seonwoo felt his heart drop.
Had the problem been that he had stayed too long in that space where time ran askew?
Even so... had three hundred years still been too much after all?
Countless worries flashed through his mind in an instant.
Correction completed.
But when that fleeting moment passed, Seonwoo felt relief.
Because he could feel something familiar.
His vision went dark, and all five senses dimmed.
Even breathing suddenly turned heavy and uncomfortable.
It felt infinitely close to that moment after death and before choosing Restart, when he could feel absolutely nothing.
But this wasn't a malfunction.
It was, comparatively speaking, the sensation he had always felt first whenever he Restarted in more recent times.
Whenever he began again, the basic pattern had been the same: take a frail body and desperately train it again and again within a limited amount of time.
By the time he reached the final dungeon, he had at least managed to attain D-grade.
He couldn't properly handle Mana, and he had no talent for it, so he had been forced to reach that point through nothing but training in foundational martial arts.
This was that exact same sensation from when all of that hard-earned body had been reset.
Because the change came all at once instead of gradually, the difference felt extreme.
And the reason it felt especially severe this time was obvious.
It was because three hundred years of training had been reset.
It's okay.
But it was okay.
Seonwoo felt no sense of loss.
Because the [path] he had reached had not disappeared.
The Do-jin-gong passed down to him by his master so that he could walk that path.
The martial art the world called Cheonma Shingong, the Heavenly Demon Divine Art, was engraved whole and entire into Seonwoo's soul.
He only had to walk again the path he had once walked so deeply.
This time, it wouldn't take nearly as long.
So he simply felt relieved.
This sensation was no different from proof that he had returned properly.
If he had returned properly, then there was no problem.
"......"
No. That's not it.
But Seonwoo soon realized it.
Something had changed.
The fierce wind that should have lashed his frail body like a whip did not come.
The voice that should have followed did not come either.
The vicious, bone-deep winter cold did not sweep over him, and there was no grandmother calling his name and wrapping him in her arms.
He had not returned properly.
Thump!
His heart pounded hard.
Instead of panicking, he forced his reason cold and steady, then checked his surroundings.
...The house?
His eyes, accustomed to the darkness, made out that he was inside his own room.
He had already returned inside the house.
And cold air was drifting through the room.
That was strange.
Before anything else, this place—the house where he had lived with his grandmother—was always warm in winter.
His grandmother had always been careful about the heating so her grandchildren would never shiver from the cold.
Which meant it was impossible for cold air to be moving through the house in winter.
Click.
Then there was something else strange.
The lights wouldn't turn on.
No matter how many times he flipped the switch, the room stayed dark.
...As if the house had completely lost its functions.
Thump!
His heart slammed once more.
Seonwoo breathed, almost by instinct.
The Do-jin-gong engraved into his soul.
The breathing of the Heavenly Demon Divine Art seeped into his awkward, unfamiliar body.
Creak...
His sharpened senses, however slight, caught a sound and a presence.
It was the metallic clatter of someone handling a device.
Seonwoo realized the sound was coming from the storage shed beside the house, where the Mana Generator was kept.
Ah...!
A scene from the story flashed through his mind, and at once he calmed down.
If his guess was right, then this wasn't a catastrophic mistake.
"Huu..."
He let out a breath thick with murky emotion and moved.
He had to confirm it.
Step.
He hurried through the well-kept house with a body that felt unbearably weakened.
Out of his room and down to the first floor.
Whoooosh!
Then he opened the door, stepped out into the freezing wind, and headed for the shed beside the house.
His grandmother was there.
Working with all kinds of tools under the light of a lantern powered by a small Mana Stone.
Step.
Sensing someone there, Grandmother lifted her head from the broken Mana Generator.
"Aigoo, my dear grandson. Did I wake you?"
And just as always, she greeted Seonwoo with that warm smile.
After a span of time so long it seemed endless, Seonwoo saw his family's smile again—and smiled back.
"Yes. My eyes just... opened all of a sudden."
His heart brimmed with joy, but he reined in his emotions and answered as naturally as he could so his grandmother wouldn't find anything strange.
"Oh dear. You woke up because of the cold. What am I going to do with my poor grandson?"
Her face and voice were overflowing with sincere concern for him.
Whoooosh!
The biting wind swept past Seonwoo as he stood in front of the shed.
It was Earth's winter wind.
The kind that did not disappear even after the Dungeon Core had been removed.
A pocket dimension that was no longer a dungeon.
The frigid wind of winter was flowing in through a Gate connected to Earth.
The environment of a pocket dimension was generally fixed.
That was one of the signs proving it was not a complete world, and depending on the environment, it could be either an advantage or a disadvantage.
This place had originally been temperate—neither hot nor cold.
So it had come to mirror the outside environment instead.
And since Earth was currently in the dead of winter, this place had become winter too.
Which made this a bad situation.
Even after a Dungeon Core was removed, one fact remained unchanged: Earth civilization could not cross the Gate.
Therefore, if one wanted to enjoy the comforts of civilization inside this pocket dimension, it had to be replaced with Mana civilization.
And the indispensable foundation of that was the Mana Generator.
After the Gates appeared, the technology of Mana civilization had developed rapidly, enough to replace parts of Earth's civilization to a certain extent.
Fluorescent lights, refrigerators, boilers—such things could all be recreated through Mana civilization's technology.
And since electricity could not be brought across the Gate, each household instead relied on a Mana Generator powered by Mana Stones to supply energy.
......
And that generator had been broken.
In the middle of the night.
His grandmother had been out here repairing that broken Mana Generator.
And she looked practiced at it, because she had no choice but to become practiced.
She had lost her husband early, then lost her son and daughter-in-law too.
All she had left were her young grandson and granddaughter.
To protect those grandchildren who had lost their parents, she had been forced to become skilled even in things she had never been meant to master.
Sensitive to the cold, she had been the first to wake, but instead of thinking of herself, she had come outside to repair the generator for the sake of her grandchildren.
And she couldn't afford to show fear.
The Mana Generator had not merely malfunctioned.
It had been broken.
Not through natural failure, but because someone had deliberately smashed it.
Out of malice.
And the culprit who had snuck in before dawn and destroyed it with such malice was obvious.
The gangsters who had come trying to buy this place at a laughably low price.
The thugs from Beomho Development.
When she had flatly refused them, they had withdrawn too easily, and that had only made her more uneasy. Her instincts had not been wrong.
If anything, they were even more dangerous than she had thought.
To sneak in before dawn and smash the generator...
These were men who could commit crimes without a second thought.
What am I supposed to do...?
Anxiety slowly crept upward.
After the Gates appeared, it truly had become an age where violence was closer and more dangerous than the law.
If they were willing to sneak in and break the generator the moment they were refused, then this was only the beginning.
They would undoubtedly do worse next time.
The problem was that she had no way to stop it.
She was a Hunter, yes—but only an E-grade Hunter.
That was why anxiety filled her chest to the brim.
And yet, Grandmother smiled.
So that her grandson would not feel uneasy.
"I'll fix it up quickly before my grandson gets any colder, so go back inside, all right? Ah! There's the heater—I should turn that on first."
"Grandma didn't think of that. I'm sorry. I'll turn it on right away. You're cold, aren't you?"
Even with senses so ruined they were little better than blindness, Seonwoo could see her heart with painful clarity.
So clearly that pretending not to notice was almost impossible.
He could feel his grandmother's heart too vividly.
So he smiled with all his strength.
"It's okay, Grandma. I know where it is, so I'll take care of it."
"And Eunseo shouldn't wake up because she's cold, so I'll turn one on for her too."
"Oh, that's right. Eunseo can't get cold either. My grandson really does take good care of his little sister."
"I should take good care of her. I'm her big brother."
"That's right. Oh, how dependable. My grandson."
At this point in time, Seonwoo was seventeen years old, and in the world of Goddess Saga, that was considered an adult.
But Grandmother still treated him as if he were a child.
No matter how old Seonwoo became, she always would.
To keep his emotions from spilling out, Seonwoo busied himself with movement.
First, he turned on one of the portable heaters that worked by directly inserting a Mana Stone and placed it beside his grandmother.
Then he took another to the sleeping Eunseo and set it next to her as quietly as possible.
After that, he returned to the shed.
"Aigoo, I told you it's cold. Hurry and go inside."
"I'm fine. I like being here with you more. And we've got the heater too."
His grandmother yielded to her grandson's stubborn insistence that he wanted to stay with her.
...In the end, grandmothers were never meant to win against their grandsons' stubbornness.
"Then Grandma will fix this quickly, and after that we'll go in together."
"Yes, Grandma."
And so, despite the piercing winter wind, they spent the night in that shed warmed by the heater, where it somehow did not feel cold at all.
The next day, Seonwoo checked old records, including his diploma, pieced together many things, and reached a conclusion.
So it progressed according to the proper history.
This point in time had unfolded according to the proper history.
In other words, six years had passed according to the story of Goddess Saga.
The missing protagonist had been found, time had passed, and he had enrolled in Hunter Academy and graduated—everything had proceeded exactly according to the predetermined story.
Seonwoo had been unable to handle Mana, yet he had stubbornly trained his body and graduated with an E-grade evaluation.
...An E-grade in name only, really. In truth, he had been at a level where Hunter activity was practically impossible.
To begin with, someone at that level should have been expelled halfway through or perhaps never admitted in the first place.
Which made Seonwoo wonder if the System's error correction he had seen the moment he returned had forcibly pushed events into place like this.
Whatever the case, what mattered was that he had returned safely.
Returning not to the age of eleven he had expected, but to seventeen, was an enormous variable, and it twisted many of the things he had planned.
But instead of complaining, Seonwoo resolved to do the best he could with what he had now.
Things had become more difficult in many ways, but they were not hopeless.
He breathed and turned his awareness inward.
Pzzt!
He could clearly feel Astrape dissolved into his soul.
SSS: Astrape.
Even after coming to this world and reaching the final dungeon, he had never even touched an SSS-grade item. Hell, he hadn't obtained even an S-grade item until he became famous as the Prophet and was designated one of the most important figures in the world—only then had he been allowed to borrow one.
And now he was starting with an SSS-grade item from the very beginning—an item so rare that even nations called Hunter superpowers often didn't possess a single one.
More than that—
EX: Core (Baekseol).
The core of Baekseol, the friend he had made, had also returned safely with his soul.
I can do this.
This time for sure.
It felt as though Seonwoo might finally be able to grasp the happy ending he had longed for and pursued so desperately.
"Aigoo, I hope you got through the night all right. The energy in this place is bad, you see."
...And in order to reach that ending, the first tragedy he would have to overcome arrived before he had even finished preparing for it.