This Wasn't How It Was Supposed to Go

"Just one more run…."

Eyes shot red with blood. Energy-drink cans scattered beside the desk. A dark room, curtains yanked shut—anyone glancing in would have taken him for a shut-in who had cut himself off from the world. They would have been wrong.

"Agh…! I only meant to clear one more run over the weekend!"

Today was the weekend. All he was doing was spending a long-awaited day off the way it was meant to be spent: finally playing, to his heart's content, the game he'd never had the time for.

"It's ending service, so I've got to get as much in as I can while it's still here."

The monitor filled his vision. Color drained out of it shade by shade, and through the black a title slowly rose.

The first reactions had been predictable. What kind of title was that? Some Chinese knockoff? But once he actually played it, it wasn't bad.

No. It had blown straight past "not bad" and become the game of his life—the one he'd fed from the start of his twenties into the middle of them. A vast world. Overwhelming freedom, where no matter what you chose, the game found a way to meet you. Character models worthy of all of it besides. How was anyone supposed to look at a game like that and not fall in headfirst?

Well. Only until today.

He flipped past the screen to the developer's comment. The long, rambling post boiled down to this:

"They're really pulling the plug."

The shutdown notice had gone up last month. Time that crawled like sludge through his part-time shifts—why did it sprint only when he wanted it to stay? He came back to himself, and tomorrow was already the last day.

He clicked through the monitor again. Between stretches of black, a new line surfaced.

"Ha. Whoever came up with that."

In the usual web novels, this was where you became the protagonist inside the game, or got stuffed into the villain and suffered every misery on the menu. Not this game. That line was only one piece of its system.

"Let's see… midnight. So it's Sunday now. If I skip sleep, think I can take one more shot at a clear?"

Ordinarily, no. But if he used the Reincarnation system he'd just been staring at, it was entirely possible.

Reincarnation granted a boon to the next character you created, once the one you'd been raising met an ending—or died. Turn it down, and your score became Karma, stockpiled until the day you finally chose to reincarnate. The more Karma you burned, the more overwhelming the advantage you could claim.

"Didn't exactly save it for this… but my Karma's pretty high, all things considered."

Dokja Jeongi was a solo game, but that didn't mean the people playing it kept their notes to themselves. On the Dokja Jeongi gallery—by now a cyber senior center for veterans, the newcomers long gone—Karma like his would be rare enough to count on one hand.

Last day. Might as well dump the lot and be done.

"Let's do it."

He pressed Reincarnate and poured in every last point of Karma he had ever gathered.

A moment later—

Ba-ba-bam—!

A bright fanfare burst, and a line printed itself across the screen.

"What!?"

He couldn't believe it. The Upper Limit was the grade ceiling on skills, traits, all the small settings. Removing it meant stepping outside everything those grades were built to describe.

"This… I've only seen it once on the gallery. And that guy just got lucky, didn't he?"

For the record, he had never removed an Upper Limit himself. Of course he hadn't. That territory ran on pure, lunatic luck.

"What is it!? What's getting its limit removed!?"

Of all days—the last one before the servers died. Being handed Upper Limit Removal now was enough to turn his stomach. Even so, he had to know what it did. The eyelids that had been sinking ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠flew open.

In that instant—

The moment the messages rose, the ache in his gut vanished clean.

"Half-yokai? We had that?"

One look, and he understood. This was trash.

Not even a proper yokai. Half a yokai—what am I supposed to do with that?

Clearing Dokja Jeongi as a yokai was brutal. Not merely difficult. A hundred runs, a hundred failures. Races were assigned at random when you started, and even the veterans deleted the file and rerolled the second yokai came up.

Because nobody has ever cleared it on one.

He himself had come within a step of a clear—no. If he was being honest with himself, more like three steps. And he had failed anyway. A difficulty so soaked in spite it felt as if the game were telling him not to bother winning.

"Still… should I try?"

What happened once an Upper Limit came off? That was what he wanted to know. Even the person who had posted about it had never said.

"Create."

With that word, a violent light flared from the monitor.

Ah, wait. Don't tell me this is actually—

A week had already passed since he opened his eyes in the world of the game.

That ought to have been long enough to settle his mind and take a proper measure of the situation he was in……

"…Yeah, as if. I still can't get used to this house."

For the first three days, he had denied it outright. He might have talked a big game about possession stories, but who actually expected to fall into the game for real?

So he had stepped out of the house he'd woken in and walked the streets. The clothes were a step removed from anything modern: dopo and hanbok, traditional robes cut and altered for a living city. At the same time he realized the high-rises—stacked to wring every last scrap of use from the cramped Korean peninsula—had changed their faces as well. Eastern, through and through. For a little while, he could look at the beauty of Korea from an angle he'd never had.

He made it home on the morning of the fourth day. That he had gotten lost on the way and spent a night on the street was a secret.

The three days after that, he spent in a straight refusal of reality. And so this morning had come.

"Ah… I only knew it was spring once the blossoms fell…."

Hell Joseon. The country that topped every list of places people swore they wanted to escape. Even saddled with mockery like that, few could have meant it from the heart. Set beside this world—where every kind of monster ran wild, and superhumans called exorcists existed to hunt them—Hell Joseon didn't even qualify for the roster of hells.

Here, a monster can show up without warning in a house where people were living just fine.

There were devices meant to keep them out, but those cost money. The stronger the effect, the higher the price climbed, straight through the ceiling.

No education. No credentials. For someone dropped into this world with empty hands, they were hopelessly out of reach.

"I want to go home…."

That was when it happened.

Ding-dong—!

The doorbell of a house that should have had no visitors rang, followed by the soft sound of something being set down outside the door.

What?

He peered through the peephole, confirmed that no one was there, and only then opened the door a crack.

Clunk. A box caught against it.

Someone sent me something? Why?

He put an ear to the cardboard. Nothing. He gave it a shake—clatter—and something small knocked around inside.

"No sender. And the recipient is… Shin Bihyung?"

Shin Bihyung. That was his name. Shin—the surname left by the mother who had abandoned him at an orphanage. Bihyung—the name the director had given him after watching that woman vanish like a ghost. Who in this world was supposed to know it?

Bihyung tore the box open at once and looked inside. A single phone.

"What."

He hadn't touched it, yet the screen turned itself on. Only the basic apps were installed. And then, among them—

Ding!

A message chimed without warning and threw off light.

These are the advantages I got when I made the character.

The words Upper Limit Removal Right struck a spark behind his eyes. Bihyung couldn't hold the curiosity down. He started typing.

One minute. Ten. The longer the silence stretched, the drier his throat burned. Then, just shy of the half-hour mark—

Ding!

A reply arrived.

With that, the messages stopped.

"…See the ending."

Then he would know. It wasn't the answer he had wanted, but the goal was set.

Bihyung downloaded both files.

Fwaaat—!

The phone's light surged, and a screen opened before his eyes.

A diagram of a human body drew itself across the screen, and the names of many races rose beside it.

So I drag one in.

He wanted to test it. Strangely, he couldn't bring himself to—not with that warning written in such heavy type.

Bihyung worked through the yokai one by one, calling up everything he had read on the Dokja Jeongi gallery.

Beastmen were supposed to be strong early. The Tiger Clan's bodies, especially—people said they were that tough.

The orthodox power pick, Dragon, wasn't bad either. You were forced to start as an imugi, a great serpent not yet a dragon, but grow past a certain point and you became one, disgustingly strong.

And then he remembered that even those had never seen an ending.

More than anything, I have to adapt to this world. I have to survive.

In that moment, one yokai caught his eye.

Its rank was not high. Of course it wasn't. Yokai backed by myths and lore of every kind of fear were one thing, but dokkaebi were usually portrayed as familiar with people.

The less they're feared, the weaker their power.

Even Dueogsi, the only one who had ever truly been feared, had a theory attached that he wasn't a dokkaebi at all.

But if I remove the Upper Limit?

A dokkaebi's racial tier was a mere D. What happened if he tore away the thing forcing it to stay there?

The dokkaebi's trait was the Bet, wasn't it?

Wager against an opponent. Stake what you want. Take it. Remove the Upper Limit, and that ability would grow ferocious.

I'm going dokkaebi.

Better to bet on an unknown he didn't yet understand than to uncap some other high-tier race. A veteran's gut was whispering it.

Human nature and yokai nature. Half and half.

In the field that set the ratio, he entered exactly 50:50. Fifty was the minimum the yokai side would accept, so that was the choice he made.

In exchange, not even a tenth of a percent of error.

He did not want to throw away who he was as a human.

Perhaps that was why.

"Achievements… even in the game, they barely did anything."

Cosmetic. Moving on.

A beat passed beneath the storm of notification chimes. He chose what he wanted, and he locked it in.

Done. The bare minimum is in place.

As if answering that thought, a new chime rose with a message.

The moment he saw it, he was certain. Like it or not, he had been pulled aboard the game's story. There would be no climbing back off.

"See the ending? Fine. I'll give it a shot."

Story made different demands depending on the character you had just created. Two humans could walk the same exorcist route and still be told different things—one, to annihilate every monster; another, to become the strongest exorcist alive. The stats, tendencies, and perks chosen at creation, whether you had reincarnated, and everything else besides: the system consulted all of it and wrote a story that belonged to that character alone.

"I can handle just about anything."

A yokai's story never left its broad frame. Build a world for yokai. Last time he had failed with about three steps left. With the Upper Limit gone, he thought he might actually succeed.

For that, first thing—don't get tangled up with the exorcists.

A professional monster-hunting outfit. To them, a monster was something you cut down the instant you met it. Now and then one was tamed, but those became test subjects, or slaves. Bihyung had a self. He had no intention of ending up like that.

A yokai is still a monster, when you get down to it.

Whatever they might think of a half-yokai, they were not a crowd he wanted to meet.

And then, in that very moment—

The Story floating before his eyes ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠was telling him, in no uncertain terms, to get tangled up with the exorcists.

"…Huh?"

This wasn't how it was supposed to go.