Prologue: For the First Time
How many years has it been since I last lay on a sofa and watched TV in peace?
The question drifted unbidden through Lee Jeong-Hoon’s mind, and he shook his head.
Never. Not once in my entire life.
It was a setting that might have drawn a gasp of pure wonder from anyone else, yet Jeong-Hoon kept half an eye on the room even as he fixed his attention on the screen. Sprawling across a sofa with a beer can in one hand while still reading the atmosphere around him was faintly ridiculous—but he had no choice.
“The hunter joining us today is—well, she’s been quite the sensation lately, hasn’t she? The youngest hunter ever to reach S-class! Hunter Han Si-Eun!”
“Oh! It’s Han Si-Eun.”
Dungeons had appeared. Those dungeons spat out monsters. And the Awakened known as hunters went in and cleared them. In a world like that, hunters had become idols in their own right—which was why Jeong-Hoon, an ordinary twenty-year-old, followed the famous ones the same way everyone else did.
“I’d love to meet her once.”
Han Si-Eun, in particular, was a hunter he personally rooted for. The wish to meet her as a fan was no exaggeration.
“Then I’ll have her brought here.”
The voice from behind made Jeong-Hoon start; his grip tightened on the beer can as reality snapped back into place.
A sofa finished in the finest leather, every stitch the work of a master’s hand. A massive television filling an entire wall. And, beyond that, a suite so crowded with luxury furniture that simply tallying the prices would have made anyone’s head spin. The man whose mood Jeong-Hoon had been carefully gauging while occupying all of that space—an elderly butler well past seventy—gave a mild snort as he watched the young woman on the screen.
Han Si-Eun, the youngest S-class hunter. Declaring, as if it were nothing, that he would simply summon an idol who was called a walking corporation.
And yet the power to make that happen existed.
This family that Jeong-Hoon had, one ordinary day, suddenly inherited as its sole heir—