The Secret Beyond the Edge of the World
After leaving the junkyard, Kim Seonwoo avoided the CCTV cameras and made his way home.
"Seonwoo!"
Grandmother, who had been worrying herself sick, rushed out to greet him the moment he arrived.
To put her at ease, Seonwoo broke into a bright smile.
"It worked out, Grandma."
"It worked out?"
"Yes. Apparently they'd already been looking for something tied to gangsters these days."
"Really?"
"Yeah. Gangsters are easy targets if you want to build up your record, right? So they'd been keeping an eye out for a case."
And then, just in time, some thugs had shown up and started terrorizing civilians.
"They said they'd use it as an excuse to haul them in."
"I see. That's good."
Grandmother nodded, but the shadow didn't fully leave her face.
It couldn't. This wasn't a clean, definite resolution. It was only a story about how he hoped things would go.
But for Seonwoo, this was the best well-intentioned lie he could tell right now.
And in reality, it would probably be resolved cleanly anyway.
All he could do was hope news of what had happened to Beomho Development would come quickly.
"Where's Eunseo?"
With that thought, he changed the subject.
"She took her medicine and went to sleep."
Maybe it was because she'd gotten chilled when the generator broke down yesterday.
Eunseo had come down with a bad cold.
In all his countless repetitions, there had never been a time around this point when she'd gotten sick like this.
But thinking about it, the stranger thing was that she'd slept through a cold snap before and hadn't gotten sick.
The major flow of events had always been fixed, but the finer details often changed. Seonwoo nodded to himself, accepting that this could happen too.
"I hope she's completely better before school tomorrow."
"Oh, and I'm going to take a shower and head to the library for a bit."
"To study?"
"Haha. Just because."
He decided he'd talk about his reawakening over dinner, once Eunseo had joined them. Then Seonwoo stepped back outside.
Onto a route covered by CCTV.
Naturally, he went to the library.
He had a lot on his mind about Beomho Development, but there was nothing sharp or immediate he could do. So the best he could come up with was to show himself at the library, flipping through books on legal matters.
In other words, he was reinforcing his alibi.
As he opened a book and sat there, he thought about how Beomho Development and the Sihyeok Guild would react.
Seonwoo himself had acted as if it were nothing.
But the aftermath wouldn't be.
From Beomho Development's and Sihyeok Guild's perspective, this was the kind of catastrophe that felt like a natural disaster.
No joke, either. People could genuinely end up dead.
But the chances of attention turning toward Seonwoo, the one who'd caused it, were slim.
He was tangled up in the center of the incident, yes, but could anyone even imagine that Kim Seonwoo had the ability to pull something like this off?
Common sense wouldn't allow that conclusion.
The more they thought about it, the more they'd believe otherwise.
And since he'd already built an alibi designed to lead them in exactly that direction, that would likely be the end of it.
"Ha... fuck, what the hell is this?"
The eldest young master of Sihyeok Group, Bang Hyeong-seok, let out a dry laugh as he swept a hand through his hair.
He wore a crooked grin, pretending to be relaxed.
But Lee Beom-ho, who knew better than anyone that it was only a mask he put on when he wanted to look composed, stayed taut with tension.
Bang Hyeong-seok was, in truth, a vicious small-minded coward.
If things went even slightly wrong, even Lee Beom-ho could be chopped to pieces in an instant.
"I heard the boys failed?"
"Yes, sir."
"For fuck's sake. When things start going wrong, your luck really turns to shit, huh?"
"...Yes, sir."
The rank-and-file failures were one thing, but what had happened to Lee Maeng-ho was truly impossible to understand.
Under normal circumstances, it would've been an issue they could never brush aside so easily.
But right now, there was a much bigger problem, one so serious it left no room to care about something like that.
"Who the hell was it? No... was it a whole group?"
"......"
On the CCTV footage Sihyeok Group had secured, Kim Seonwoo was seen tying up the three unconscious men with rope and dragging them into some secluded corner before dumping them there.
That alone had been audacious enough to make them think, What kind of bastard is this?
But then Lee Maeng-ho and the two underlings, dumped there in that corner, never returned by evening.
That simply made no sense.
The two low-level thugs, maybe, if you forced the explanation. But Lee Maeng-ho was a D-grade physical-type awakened.
D-grade meant someone far beyond the level of an ordinary person.
It was hard enough for someone like that to lose consciousness in the first place, and even if he did, he should have come to quickly and made his way back.
That was absolute common sense.
But things hadn't followed common sense.
They were only discovered after a search, still unconscious long after sunset.
That was well after Lee Beom-ho had already stopped by the junkyard for routine oversight and found the note.
They'd examined them, but there were no traces of drugs or ability-based attacks.
Which meant they'd been hit with some special measure that couldn't be detected by ordinary means.
And Lee Beom-ho's phone was gone.
That meant this had been planned from the very start.
By an individual, or by a group.
"Beom-ho."
After thinking for a long while, Bang Hyeong-seok called him over.
"Yes, Director."
With a grave expression that suggested he'd come to some meaningful conclusion, Bang Hyeong-seok spoke.
"Trim the family down. It's time we tightened things up internally, don't you think?"
There was no benefit in having too many mouths around that knew things.
What he meant was simple: kill everyone except the useful ones.
Lee Beom-ho didn't hesitate.
"Yes. I'll clean it up."
"Good. When it's done, go stay at the mine for a while."
The mine was an excavation site beyond a Gate.
In other words, hide somewhere beyond the reach of modern civilization and lie low for the time being.
...If you really thought about it, that solved nothing at all.
Kill off the ones who don't really know anything, then hide. That was the whole plan.
"Yes. Understood."
But Lee Beom-ho gave nothing away and bowed his head, just as he always did.
Because he knew very well that the one who would truly solve this problem was the representative of Sihyeok Group.
Bang Seong-jun.
Around the same time, over at Changseong Group, Chairman Kang Suhyeok was personally reviewing the situation.
"So. It's safe to assume that someone far from ordinary made a move?"
"Yes, Grandfather."
Whoever it was had moved without appearing on CCTV at all, and had left the three men from Beomho Development unable to regain consciousness for a long time.
That same person had also avoided CCTV again while leaving a note in the junkyard office.
And then they'd sent information related to the Elf Auction to Kang Han-na's personal number, a number known only to a select few.
Information about that very same Elf Auction that even Changseong Group's intelligence network had struggled to get a handle on.
And they'd sent it using Lee Maeng-ho's phone, the one recovered from that back alley corner.
Not a single part of it was something an ordinary person could have done.
And by the same logic, only a person or organization of that caliber could have dug up information on the Elf Auction in the first place.
Naturally so.
"Kim Seonwoo. You said he was an entirely unremarkable student?"
"Yes."
He had been at the center of this incident, and yet Kim Seonwoo had to be excluded from consideration.
A student so hopeless that Kang Han-na couldn't understand how he'd ever managed to get into Seoul Hunter Academy in the first place.
That was Kang Han-na's evaluation of Kim Seonwoo.
An assessment made as Kang Han-na of Changseong Group, with not a trace of personal feeling mixed into it.
And though brief, the group's own review had arrived at much the same conclusion.
Even if he'd gained something since graduation up to now, it still shouldn't have made him a meaningful variable.
It should have been that simple.
And yet...
"Your eyes keep going back to him."
Chairman Kang Suhyeok said it, and Kang Han-na nodded.
"Yes."
For some reason, both Kang Suhyeok and Kang Han-na found their gaze drawn to Kim Seonwoo on the CCTV footage.
He was doing nothing more than walking calmly.
But there was an unshakable certainty in the way he carried himself.
It wasn't the look, or the presence, of someone who should be called a failure.
That was why.
Instinct.
The very thing Kang Suhyeok emphasized, and Kang Han-na herself trusted.
That instinct kept dragging their attention toward Seonwoo, someone who should never have been worth considering.
"Hm..."
Kang Han-na's eyes, fixed on Seonwoo in the footage, gleamed faintly.
...That part had fallen outside Seonwoo's expectations.
Once enough time had passed, Seonwoo left the library.
He helped Grandmother set the dinner table, and the family gathered together.
"How's your cold? Feeling any better?"
"Yeah, Oppa. I feel better after sleeping!"
Her pale face was still a little flushed, but there was strength in her voice. She really did seem all right.
With the family all seated together, Seonwoo spoke.
"I'm going to take the Hunter exam this time."
"...You want to become a Hunter?"
"Yes. I reawakened, remember? I think I can become a Hunter now."
There was worry in Grandmother's voice and in her eyes, but Seonwoo nodded without hesitation.
He knew very well what she was worried about.
Her son and daughter-in-law.
The two people who had been parents to Seonwoo and Eunseo had both been Hunters.
D-grade ordinary Hunters, the two of them had died in an unfortunate accident.
But in this era, it had also been a common one.
Hunters losing their lives to monsters inside Gates was just that common.
But for the family left behind, it was a tragedy beyond compare.
Of course Grandmother couldn't help worrying when her grandson said he wanted to become a Hunter.
At that worry, Seonwoo smiled.
Then he spoke seriously.
"It's okay, Grandma. My dream is to live happily with you and Eunseo."
"And I'm becoming a Hunter to make that dream come true. So I will never, ever die."
He truly would never die.
Even if he died in the process of reaching that dream.
Even if he died a few times, a few hundred times, a few tens of thousands of times.
He would repeat even more lives than that, if he had to, until he reached the happiness he longed for.
After dinner.
Ssshhh...
In the stillness, Seonwoo moved his body as he breathed according to Yeon-shin-geuk-gi-gong.
Yeon-shin-geuk-gi-gong was, at its core, a moving art.
It was a cultivation method that allowed one to temper the body and train internal energy at the same time through motion.
By chance, its first function to reveal itself had been its ability to support a body on the verge of breaking and push it beyond its limits, but in truth, Yeon-shin-geuk-gi-gong was a rather orthodox method that advanced through steady, proper stages.
You repeated movements that contained the principles of martial truth within their forms, engraving them into the body, while your breathing built internal energy.
By persistence alone, internal energy accumulated and the body was tempered.
Hm...
The problem was that he didn't have enough time to follow the orthodox path now.
Through three hundred years of training in Hanwa, where time stood still, he had reached the path that allowed one to surpass talent itself.
But no matter what, there was still an absolute amount of time required to reach certain realms.
Especially with Seonwoo's current body, one that had been born inherently weak.
Just releasing force once was enough to make his body creak in protest.
If he had gone through a proper Restart, it would have been fine.
He would have had enough time to prepare.
But he hadn't.
And now, with the academy arc over and the story having truly begun, that had become a serious problem.
But...
Saaaaa...
It felt as though there might be a way to solve it.
"Hoo..."
Seonwoo exhaled deeply, expelling the foul breath mixed with impurities, then stepped out of his room.
Deep night.
In the silence, he left the house and walked on.
He followed the gently sloping path, and at some point the scenery of the grasslands, which had seemed to stretch on forever, began to warp.
The end of the world, abrupt and absolute.
It was one of the clearest signs that this was not a normal world, but a fragment of a broken one.
The moment Seonwoo arrived at that world's edge...
SSS: Seed of the World Tree confirmed.
Conditions have been met.
Would you like to enter the Land Promised to the Future?
The secret of this world had opened.