The First Step to Saving Seol Yun-ri
Seonwoo greeted his grandmother, who looked like she was dying to know what kind of magic on earth he had used, then stepped outside with Seol Yun-ri.
Originally, he had planned to buy her one of the desserts currently going viral on social media.
But—
Grrrgle…
Because Seol Yun-ri had been holed up in that dark room since morning without eating a thing, the menu had changed.
After making sure she was at least decently dressed and tugging her cap low over her face, he brought her to a burger place.
At Yun-ri’s insistent request—made through several forceful little tugs on his sleeve—they took a seat as far into the corner as possible.
“I’m paying, so eat as much as you want.”
“...Thank you.”
Shiver—
Even remembering it made her body tremble.
Dragged out of her room by that truly terrifying and underhanded threat, Seol Yun-ri still couldn’t resist burgers and fries.
She stuffed them into her mouth and swallowed at a frantic pace, cramming them in like a squirrel storing food.
Only after she had finished everything did she notice the grease shining around her mouth and on her fingers, and her face flared red all over again.
Seonwoo, who had been watching with quiet satisfaction, held out a tissue.
Accepting it, Yun-ri lowered her head and wiped herself clean before finally forcing out a question.
“How did you know? Th-that.”
That.
The amateur web novel currently serialized online: S-grade Saintess Smashes Iljins' Heads with a Mace.
What she meant was simple—how had he known that Seol Yun-ri was the author of a work that didn’t even have that many views?
“Hmm...”
Seonwoo didn’t answer right away.
A trace of bitterness hung in his softened voice.
He knew because he had been a player of Goddess Saga, yes—but he wasn’t the only one who would know it.
Not only in Goddess Saga, but here too, in this reality after enough time had passed—
The world learned that the Elementalist Who Brings Ruin had been Seol Yun-ri.
And then people became interested in who, exactly, Seol Yun-ri was.
Those who lived off attention rushed in, greedily collecting and spreading every scrap of information they could find.
Mixed among them were people interested only in sensation, in views and profits, in stirring up outrage for its own sake.
And so, because people could be unbearably shallow, the name Seol Yun-ri spread everywhere through a hideous kind of “excavation”—the sort where people yelled as though they were exposing some grand truth while really doing nothing more than desecrating the dead.
A girl raised by her grandmother in crushing poverty.
A Seoul Hunter Academy student once expected to succeed as a spiritist, but who couldn’t summon even a low-level spirit.
A girl who hadn’t even made it through a single year before being driven into her room by bullying and abuse.
And even the fact that, while shut away, she wrote a self-indulgent novel to survive it all.
They said whatever they pleased, and then had the nerve to ask why no one had stopped it.
They said the system needed to better protect people like her.
Those hollow words made it even more revolting.
It was a grotesque exhumation—dragging out a dead person’s body and carving it apart for public consumption.
And no matter how much he wanted to change it, that had been part of the unalterable main story.
She had been mentioned since the academy arc—the unfortunate girl. With the repeated references and even illustrations of her, players expected her to become a companion.
Instead, the opposite happened.
At the end of tragedy, she became an enemy who brought ruin to the world, and she was put down in a battle soaked in misery.
The sight of her cursing the world in rage had been tragic more than anything else.
And now that he was facing her in person, it felt even worse.
That was why Seonwoo wanted to change it.
Attempting to alter the story.
Success Probability: 0.00003%
Following the story is recommended.
[Y/N]
Even when the System shoved a probability so close to zero it might as well have been nothing at all in his face, urging him to obey—
[N]
“Hmm... I just happened to find out?”
Swallowing down a hundred other things, Seonwoo simply smiled and answered like that.
Then he changed the direction of the conversation.
“You don’t want to delete it, do you? Your story.”
“...No.”
That novel had been important enough to drag her out of the room she had hidden herself in.
But Seol Yun-ri had never once thought of deleting it.
She couldn’t.
In that dark, freezing, cramped little room, the novel had been what kept her alive.
Something terrible had happened at the end of all that bullying—something so awful she could no longer endure it.
So Yun-ri ran.
She refused to go to school and locked herself in her room.
And inside that room, the place she escaped into was the story she wrote.
Because she had been forced to struggle and move desperately since childhood, she couldn’t stand the idea of letting time pass in a blur.
That was why she started writing.
Inside that room, with only her phone in hand, it was the only thing she could do.
She wrote recklessly, pouring out whatever came to mind.
And there had been people who said it was fun.
Just a handful of comments.
But that alone made it feel like she could breathe again.
Even the smallest bit of recognition from someone else was enough to make Seol Yun-ri happy.
Replying to each comment one by one, interacting with those strangers—that was her only support.
“But you can’t live on just that forever.”
“......”
It was unquestionably something that made her happy, but at the same time, for Yun-ri, it was also an escape.
An escape that let her pretend not to see her grandmother’s suffering—the grandmother who had raised her in place of parents she could barely even remember.
Seol Yun-ri was a very kind girl.
And she was a smart girl too, which meant she couldn’t possibly fail to understand the sacrifice of the grandmother whose hair had turned white with the passing years.
That sacrifice burned in her heart like an endless flame.
“I... I’m going to work.”
Seol Yun-ri said she would. After a little longer. Really, just a little longer.
Even if she couldn’t summon spirits, she was still an awakened person capable of handling mana, so she could at least do manual labor.
She would earn money that way and make things even a little easier for her grandmother.
For most people, it would have sounded like the kind of thing someone says while running away from reality.
But not for Seol Yun-ri.
She really had forced herself outside and worked menial jobs.
But—
“That’s not enough.”
Seonwoo shook his head and spoke with certainty.
“That way... it’ll be too late.”
Seol Yun-ri’s tragedy did not end here.
“......”
“If you become a hunter, you can make your grandmother comfortable a lot faster, can’t you?”
“If that were possible—!!”
The shout burst out of Seol Yun-ri reflexively.
In that instant, a wave of fury surged up so sharply it turned her vision red and made her forget where she was.
She hurriedly lowered her voice halfway through, but that blazing anger remained written all over her face.
“I’m sorry.”
“I-I’m sorry...”
Seonwoo apologized to the nearby customers first, and Yun-ri followed.
Then that kind-hearted girl, face twisted with anger, continued as if grinding the words between her teeth.
“If I could’ve become a hunter... if I could’ve summoned spirits, then none of this would’ve happened in the first place.”
She was right.
If only she had been able to summon spirits, none of the tragedy would have begun.
It wasn’t that Seol Yun-ri had done nothing.
If anything, she had tried more desperately than anyone else to find a way to summon spirits.
She practically lived in the library, and she accepted every form of support the academy could offer.
For one reason only.
To summon a spirit.
But it hadn’t worked.
No matter what method she tried, she hadn’t found even the slightest clue.
She simply couldn’t summon spirits.
And Seol Yun-ri from the world where Changseong Group spared no support because they believed in Seonwoo’s Precognition had been no exception either.
“It just... didn’t work.”
Her eyes glistened, and so did her voice, as she clenched her teeth and gripped the edge of her clothes tightly in both hands.
As Seol Yun-ri fought to hold it back somehow, it almost looked as if something black and murky were bubbling up from inside her in place of tears.
0.00003%.
This was Seol Yun-ri’s self-reproach, born from a fate the System had declared unchangeable.
If only she could blame the world, it might have been easier.
But Seol Yun-ri couldn’t even do that. She blamed no one but herself, and kept condemning herself again and again.
Those feelings tightened around her throat and tormented her.
“It’s not your fault, Yun-ri.”
And then there were words that slipped gently into those feelings and reached her.
“......”
The voice wasn’t sharp, nor was it loud.
But it reached her clearly, and softly.
No doubt because it carried absolute certainty.
“The reason you couldn’t summon spirits isn’t because of you, Yun-ri.”
“Then... what is it?”
Negative emotion surged up in an instant.
If it had been nothing more than a tired, conventional comfort, then no matter how nice the words were, they never would have reached her.
“There’s something called Marking.”
But what came from Seonwoo’s mouth wasn’t that.
It was one of the truths that had never been uncovered to the end.
A fact even Seonwoo had not known during the endless ages of repetition.
“...Marking?”
“Yeah. Ever heard anything like this? They say talented spiritists sometimes get a feeling.”
“A feeling that someday they’ll become a spiritist.”
...She had heard of it.
And because Seol Yun-ri had searched through every scrap of material she could find about spiritists, she knew it even better than most.
Not just vaguely, either. Quite a few successful spiritists had said something like that at least once.
Even Christine, one of the most famous spiritists alive, had said the same thing on a TV show just a few days ago.
I felt like I was going to become a spiritist someday.
People treated it like the sort of thing that gets said in interviews all the time, and let it pass by without much thought.
“That’s not just a feeling.”
“What?”
“Powerful spirits sometimes set their sights on talented beings in other connected dimensions.”
“And people born with the talent to become spiritists instinctively sense that. That’s what creates the feeling.”
It was something she had never heard before.
Seol Yun-ri had never seen any paper or theory related to it either.
But it didn’t sound like a lie in the slightest.
Because it was true.
Seonwoo had heard it directly from the Thunderbolt Dragon himself.
“No matter how extraordinary the talent may be, most can only sense it faintly.”
“...I never felt anything like that.”
Those words only cast her further into shadow.
That feeling.
She had truly never felt it even once.
“Yeah. You wouldn’t have.”
“......”
What is he trying to do?
The ugly thought sprang into her head at once in response to Seonwoo’s answer, given without even the slightest hesitation.
But Seonwoo only grinned.
“Want to move somewhere else?”
After paying, Seonwoo strode ahead and led Seol Yun-ri to a deserted corner of the shantytown.
He had deliberately brought her all the way from the burger shop to a place near her house where hardly anyone ever passed by.
And so, when Yun-ri began to show the first faint signs of unease, Seonwoo suddenly held out a single twig.
“Want to hold this?”
“Why...?”
“It’s hard for you to touch people directly, isn’t it?”
“......”
At those words—careful, considerate in a way even gentler than before—Seol Yun-ri froze.
The reason a girl who had endured brutal bullying for months had eventually been forced to run.
The thing that might have happened to her if she hadn’t.
Seonwoo was being considerate of that trauma.
And that consideration was what made Seol Yun-ri slowly, cautiously reach out and take the twig.
She didn’t know what he was trying to do.
But instinct whispered to her.
That instinct, buried under sticky despair, whispered at her to grab it.
Swish—
Facing Yun-ri now connected to him through the twig, Seonwoo smiled.
“Don’t let go. Got it?”
Seol Yun-ri—
Story Alteration Success Probability has changed.
“...Okay.”
She nodded.
Success Probability: 72%
It was the first step in Seonwoo’s attempt to save Seol Yun-ri—the girl who, as part of the original story, had been doomed to become a tragic boss.