Jackpot of the Master Trial! (1)
I stared at the messages, heart pounding.
Intelligence has increased by 10.
Intelligence has reached 20.
You have acquired all intermediate knowledge regarding the Rot Virus.
You can now manufacture Loter Virus Mitigator 2.
You can now manufacture Loter Virus Mitigator 3.
You can now manufacture Loter Virus Mitigator 4.
.
.
.
I immediately scrolled to the very bottom.
You can now manufacture the Loter Virus Custom Cure.
“Wahahahaha!”
I let out a roar like a man who’d just hit the jackpot.
But two seconds later, reality crashed down on me.
With my massively enhanced brain, I instantly understood that crafting a custom cure for a single person would take at least six hours.
Damn it.
Yejin’s family, not counting her, totaled four people.
That meant only two would get the chance.
I rushed back to the lab and spoke to Han Yejin.
“It’s hard to explain, but right now I can only treat two of your family members. No questions! Please make the choice immediately!”
“Ah! That’s such a difficult…”
I could only imagine the dilemma.
Father, mother, Eunpa, Dongpa…
If I could only save two out of those four, what on earth would I choose?
“Ugh…”
Overwhelmed, Han Yejin clenched both fists and began to cry.
“Yejin, I know it’s hard to choose, but you need to hurry. If we’re too late, we might not even manage two.”
I spoke while frantically reviewing the equipment.
At that moment, Han Yejin seemed to reach a decision.
“…Please treat Dad and Mom. Of course, once they’re cured they’ll scold me. They’ll ask why I didn’t choose my older brother and younger brother… But those two still have so much life ahead of them, right? Oppa will definitely save them later, won’t you? Say yes! Please say yes! Hic…”
I answered firmly.
“Yes, I absolutely will. Then let’s begin.”
I threw myself into the research like a madman.
The treatment method now in my head wasn’t universally applicable to everyone, so I had to meticulously examine every unique trait in the vast biometric data of Yejin’s parents.
I had taken the pouch at 8:23 p.m.
That meant I had to stay glued to developing the custom cure until 8:23 a.m. tomorrow, without sleep or even bathroom breaks.
One hour…
Two hours…
.
.
Five hours…
I gulped coffee like water and focused with insane intensity.
* * *
Just past 5 a.m., I slammed into an entirely unexpected obstacle.
As the data accumulated, one insight emerged.
To make this reagent, I absolutely needed live tunnel centipedes?
At least twenty of them.
Damn it.
I had already harvested plenty of their venom in advance and stored it in my subspace belt.
But I had never imagined a situation where live specimens would be required.
The waypoint at the bottom of the artificial lake was fine.
Yet traveling to the centipede cave and back would take at least an hour.
That would leave me short on time to compile the research data.
“Argh! Damn! Ugh!”
When I cursed to myself, Han Yejin, who had been waiting anxiously nearby, asked,
“Is something not working out? Can I help?”
“Well… this isn’t something you can help with…”
Wait a second.
She was a national climbing athlete.
And she was incredibly brave—she had free-climbed an apartment building to save Jang Hancheol’s wife.
“Yejin, are you very scared of bugs?”
“What kind of bugs?”
“Centipedes.”
“Huh, I raise centipedes. As pets. After I got infected with the Rot Virus, the one that bit our baby was a centipede too.”
“The ones I’m talking about are huge.”
I turned off the lab lights, pulled out Matdeu without warning, and tossed him onto the floor.
“Eek!”
She seemed a little startled at first, but soon started poking and touching Matdeu.
“…Whoa! Amazing! He’s really big!”
Since she already knew centipedes, she adapted incredibly fast.
“He has the normal thirty legs… His eyes look almost completely degenerated, so he’s a subterranean species. Two mandibles, and the venom claws are well developed too. The spines on the last pair of legs match the ones I raise…”
“Could you catch twenty of these big centipedes alive for me?”
“Well… if I have to, I think I can manage. But where from?”
I looked at her and said,
“What I’m about to tell you must never be spoken to anyone for the rest of your life. The moment you say it… I won’t be able to look after your family anymore. Understood?”
“Yes.”
“These centipedes live in the basement of the Tower. You’ll have to go there and catch them.”
“The Tower? But I’m not a hunter.”
I opened the rune stone storage, materialized the most suitable one, and handed it over. It was from the Byeon brothers’ stones—nothing I needed, but too good to sell, so I had kept it.
“It’s a rune stone that converts other stats into stamina. I don’t need it, but it should be perfect for you right now. Touch it and absorb it. If you want to cure your parents… hurry!”
Whoosh—
The word “parents” made her absorb it instantly.
“At Gwanghwamun there’s a place called the Uijeongbu Site Excavation Ground. There’s a secret passage there that leads to the Tower’s basement. You’ll have to go down through it.”
I handed her a hazmat suit, a subspace backpack, centipede venom extract, and other supplies while briefly explaining the tunnel centipedes’ habits and how to catch them.
“But it’ll take forever to reach the Tower, won’t it?”
She had never set a waypoint in the basement.
So using a waypoint to get there was impossible.
“From here to Gwanghwamun normally takes about two hours. But since it’s dawn, if you floor it you can make it in an hour and a half. Before you leave, set the waypoint I drilled under this artificial lake. On the way back, use the waypoint near the Tower.”
She was fundamentally a rock climber.
Her courage and physical ability far surpassed the average man’s.
Her ability to improvise would surely be excellent too.
Plus, if she worked in my full-body hazmat suit, she wouldn’t be poisoned by the tunnel centipedes.
As long as she was careful of the queen centipede…
It was possible.
It had to be possible!
“Got it. What’s the time limit?”
“Current time is 5:12 a.m. …You must not go past 8.”
“Okay! Set waypoint under artificial lake, capture twenty live centipedes, return before 8! I’m heading out right now!”
With those words, she left the lab, opened a window, and—
“Wait, Yejin! What are you doing? Take the elevator…”
Han Yejin took a running start, twisted lightly in front of the window, and said,
“Better safe than sorry, right?”
* * *
I had finished every task I could do.
Now I just needed twenty live centipedes to complete the cure.
The clock read 7:52 a.m.
It was the first all-nighter I had ever pulled, even during my senior year of high school.
Thirty-one minutes left.
Yet… there was still no word from Han Yejin.
She had left at 5:12.
If she reached Gwanghwamun by 6:40 and spent an hour catching centipedes, she should have been back by now.
I stared at the lake in agitation.
Then—
“Pwahh~”
A beautiful woman in a skintight hazmat suit burst through the water’s surface. She freestyle-swam to the edge with agile strokes, then sprinted madly into the building.
Moments later, Han Yejin burst into the lab wearing the subspace backpack. The clock read exactly 7:58.
“Huff, huff. Made it before eight, right?”
“You did great.”
I asked her to extract the venom and dripped it into dozens of pre-prepared reagents to test their reactivity.
I quickly narrowed down the candidates and completed the final custom cure.
With three minutes and twenty seconds of my Intelligence 20 time remaining, I thought about how to spend it meaningfully.
I began writing an email to myself.
TO: Intelligence 10 Geumpa
Geumpa, when your intelligence has dropped back to 10.
Read this and let it become a compass for your life.
I lived twelve hours with a supercharged brain, and let me tell you—
There’s no better fate than just digging with a shovel.
Doctors, lawyers, professors… they might look good, but they’re all miserable.
So don’t even think about anything else.
Just sweat hard and keep digging down the Tower.
FROM: Intelligence 20 Geumpa
A short while later, my mind grew dull as the knowledge inside my brain evaporated in a chaotic rush.
Intelligence has decreased by 10.
Intelligence has returned to 10.
You have lost all intermediate knowledge regarding the Rot Virus.
You can no longer manufacture the Loter Virus Custom Cure.
It really had been a bizarre experience.
When I tried to recall the custom cure manufacturing process I had just performed with such excitement…
Fuck, how the hell did I even do that?
I couldn’t even begin to imagine it.
And finally the time came to inject the completed custom cure into the patients.
If this succeeded, it would be the world’s first complete cure of a Rot Virus patient.
* * *
That evening.
I woke up after sleeping deeply in the lab’s duty room and met Han Yejin again.
We strolled slowly along the walking path inside the Jeguk Medipharm grounds and talked.
“Thank you so much. Really, thank you, Oppa.”
“Your help was huge, Yejin. If you hadn’t brought the live centipedes back in time, I would have failed to finish the cure within the limit. By the way, how are your father and mother?”
“They’re sleeping right now. But the checkup this afternoon… showed no Rot Virus components left in their blood. Their sense of touch and pain have returned, the skin discoloration has almost disappeared, and inflammation markers have dropped rapidly.”
“That’s a relief. In any case, you must never tell anyone that I developed the custom cure. Or about the centipede cave in the Tower basement. Got it?”
“Of course. Oppa, my lips are sealed!”
Developing the custom cure had been a dilemma.
To make it again I would need to spend an insane 3.2 billion won to raise my intelligence back to 20.
On top of that, each dose required six hours stuck in the lab. If this ever leaked to the public, the pressure of public opinion might trap me in the laboratory for the rest of my life.
I felt sorry for the Rot Virus patients, but I decided to seal the custom cure until I could develop a mass-producible version.
After all, Rotters were immortal, so taking my time wouldn’t kill them.
At that moment, Han Yejin held out a belt to me.
“Here’s the remaining 0.5 kg of adamantium. I’ll give it to you now. I believe you’ll cure my brother and younger brother someday too.”