The Price of Admission

Inside the private quarters Cheon Woohyeok kept in the Sacred Moon Guild building, he was hurling furniture in every direction, giving raw, mindless shape to his fury.

"This fucking ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠bullshit! Fuck! Fuuuuuuck!"

He'd lost?

He'd lost?

Losing, fine. He could swallow a loss. What Woohyeok could not endure was the feeling that had risen in him toward Hyun Jisu.

Fear.

Dread.

A primal terror of something unknown.

It was a feeling he had forgotten entirely — one he hadn't tasted since becoming a hunter, and not even in the years before that, when he'd been scraping by on the streets.

I got scared of that guy?

"AAAAAAARGH!"

He screamed with everything he had. It didn't help. A humiliation he had never once experienced. An insult he could not, under any circumstances, tolerate.

No. Absolutely not. I am not letting this slide. Hyun Jisu — I'm going to kill you.

Woohyeok clenched both fists until the knuckles went white. He didn't even have the faintest idea how he would do it. But someday — someday — the chance to kill that man would come. He had no grasp of what kind of ability Jisu possessed, or where its limits lay, but a weakness had to exist. It always did.

I'll never forgive him.

Woohyeok was not the only one swallowing a mouthful of bile. Jeong Siyun's expression had been dark from the moment she stepped back into her office.

A body that has all but transcended the limits of the human species — something close to diamond-hard invulnerability. What kind of ability does he have, to be this strong?

As an S+ rank hunter, she had climbed to her current position by encountering every variety of hunter imaginable. She could not, if she was being honest, remember ever seeing one this powerful. She had met hunters who possessed a berserker-like explosive burst, but none of them had anything approaching Jisu's staying power.

If that ability is SS-rank… that would actually be the strange part.

Frankly, he had looked like SSS-rank. No — SSS+ or higher. Of course, there had been no reports of an SSS+ hunter appearing in Korea, or anywhere on Earth. But if the SS-rank designation was accurate, then the ability was clearly not a permanent one.

The Hunter Association could have been lying, but if he were genuinely SSS+ or above, there would have been no reason to paper over it with a false ranking. The benefits of simply telling the truth would have far outweighed anything they stood to gain by hiding it. Which meant there was a reason he had been rated SS-rank — and seeing through that reason was the key to finding the crack in Jisu's seemingly invincible armor.

I have to get him. I cannot, under any circumstances, let another guild take him.

She hadn't been able to confirm the limits of his ability, but if a hunter of Jisu's caliber threw his weight behind any one faction, the delicate balance they had all been maintaining would collapse overnight. It was fine if he wandered alone like a lone wolf, belonging to no pack. Sending him to another guild, however, was a future that could not be allowed to happen.

Right. I'll bring him into the Sacred Moon Guild by any means necessary. But I don't need to bow my head and grovel for the privilege. He comes in under me. That's the only way this works.

What a man wanted was simple enough. Honor. Money. Power. And women. The Sacred Moon Guild could give him all of it.

As proud as she was, Siyun had no intention of chasing after anyone — no matter how gifted — begging and letting herself be led around. Refusing to take on an Operator who didn't even hold a hunter rank had been a matter ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠of pride as well. It was tied to her ability, of course, but still—

Siyun reached into a drawer and drew something out. A potion vial. A precious thing, producible in Korea by the Sacred Moon Guild alone. She drank it down. The sound of swallowing carried through the quiet office.

Even if this was what became of her body. Absolutely not.

Yes — just as that woman she hated to death had once said. She had been born as someone who could never stand beneath another.

Today was the day of decision.

Hyun Jisu, who had been lurking in silence all this time, posted a message in the open chat for the first time.

He'd managed to typo it, but Lynx didn't seem to care.

He followed the link, and a private chat with Lynx opened.

Twenty Equalium.

At current prices, one Equalium was worth one million won. Twenty million won, then. Absurdly expensive for a signal room — but between Lynx's reputation and the results he kept posting in the free room, nobody seemed to be complaining about the price. Equalium, alongside Bitcoin, was famous as a blue-chip cryptocurrency, a so-called safe-haven asset. In other words, the price didn't move much. Equalium had been range-bound around the one-million-won mark ever since Jisu first started hanging around Bitstorm.

Just as he'd researched before even asking about the paid room, Jisu created a Bitstorm account. It was a little ridiculous that he'd been haunting the site this obsessively without ever making an ID — but then, he hadn't been putting up any actual cash.

Once the account was set up, he linked a bank account and deposited the money. A safe twenty-one million won. He'd already confirmed the signal room's price from the free chat, and fortunately, twenty-one million was enough to buy all twenty Equalium.

So this is what it feels like to actually pay for this stuff.

He'd been playing at investing with his stats this whole time, but purchasing coin with real money left him with a strangely unsettled feeling. The difference from investing stats was this: the Equalium he'd just bought was Equalium someone else had sold at this price. A major cryptocurrency like Equalium had so many buyers and sellers that it hardly mattered — but he suspected that trying to trade the no-name altcoins sitting on Bitcoin or Equalium pairs would be a genuine ordeal.

He'd looked into deposits as well. You submitted a transfer request to a wallet that looked complicated even at a glance, and the coins moved through the blockchain. He honestly had no idea what any of that actually meant, but whatever. This was how you did it.

Alright. Stay calm.

The wallet address was so long and tangled that Jisu was hunched over his tiny smartphone screen with the rest of the world tuned out. If you typed the address wrong, there was no error message telling you so — and the Equalium you sent was never coming back. It would simply vanish into the void.

Of course, wiring twenty million won to a complete stranger on nothing but their word was a pretty funny thing to be doing in the first place. But it wasn't a sum that would make Jisu's hands shake. Not anymore.

He entered Lynx's wallet address in full, checked it more than ten times, and hit the deposit button.

According to what people said, even a completed deposit didn't land instantly — it took time, depending on the network. The more he looked into this technology, the more he wondered what on earth possessed people to claim it would replace currency in the future. But theory mattered less than reality. And the reality was that it made money.

It was money the old Jisu would have died before spending. But he'd been watching Lynx from the sidelines this whole time, and even if it turned out to be a scam, he was confident he could earn twenty million won back.

And then — sooner than expected — Lynx's reply arrived.

He followed the link, and the room title appeared.

Pay the money and they call you VVVIP. Cute.

In hindsight, it was obvious. Who on earth was more VVVIP than the suckers who'd just wired twenty million won to a face they'd never seen? And the more surprising part: there were already eighteen of them. Nineteen, counting Jisu. Even on a simple calculation, Lynx had pulled in close to three hundred million won.

He entered the password and stepped inside. The people in the chat were already there to greet him.

The names were somehow familiar. These were the people who'd appointed themselves Lynx's honor guard and spent all day chatting in the free room, weren't they? At first he'd wondered if they were shills. Finding them actually sitting in the paid room was a strangely novel feeling.

After the round of greetings, Jisu checked the room's pinned notices.

Wait. They knew all of this?

So the people in the paid signal room knew everything.

Suddenly he understood why these people had parroted "paid room, paid room" in the free chat like they'd been paid to say it. When you were being fed information of this quality, of course the people whining in the free room looked pathetic.

Good.

Time to study how Lynx actually invested — what he bought, how he bought it, and why. If Jisu could just learn that secret, becoming an invincible hunter with no penalty attached wouldn't even be a dream.