Uprooting (1)
Uprooting (1)
I left the Calamity Flame Family and headed straight for my destination without delay.
The destination was the former territory of China, relatively close to the Calamity Flame Family's main estate on the Korean Peninsula.
I didn't use a warp gate for the journey.
China was a textbook gray zone, after all.
Hardly any gates were open there to begin with. And since I wasn't using my identity as Lee Ha-yul, I simply traveled under my own power.
Walking the whole way on foot would've taken considerable time, but I had methods available, so I arrived quickly enough.
And so I reached China. Where exactly was this? By the old place names, somewhere between the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and Liaoning Province, maybe.
I slowly swept my surroundings with Observation.
I pushed the range of Observation outward, overextending it briefly.
A tidal wave of information flooded in. I pressed down on my throbbing head and took a moment to sort it all out.
'Rundown.'
The first impression that surfaced was just how rundown everything was.
I scuffed the ground lightly with the tip of my foot.
The asphalt had peeled away, revealing dark, murky soil beneath. At a glance, the dirt looked poor in quality.
The same went for all the surrounding infrastructure.
Gray concrete buildings stood riddled with cracks everywhere, as if they might collapse at any moment.
The walls were caked with random graffiti and grimy, blackened filth. Not a single intact windowpane was in sight.
Those buildings were the lucky ones. Some areas weren't even concrete—just sprawling shantytowns cobbled together from wood and cloth.
The people living in such places looked equally far from healthy, gaunt and emaciated.
It was starkly different from the world's infrastructure I'd experienced over the past few months.
There were no cities you might call peaceful, no modern beauty whatsoever.
Even Sipnaha, treated like a backwater small city, had been rough but still recognizably developed. This place looked worse than a small town or rural village. It looked like abandoned ruins.
'Most of China is like this, supposedly.'
After the Great Cataclysm, China was one of the nations that collapsed, unable to preserve even a proper shell of itself.
A vast territory means more ground to defend.
China's land was immense, so there was that much more to protect.
Not only did they have to fend off external enemies, they also bore the heavy burden of dealing with dungeons and monsters spawning from within.
That was why, after the Great Cataclysm, most nations with expansive territories either shrank, disappeared, or splintered into countless smaller groups.
Among them, China had actually fared relatively well.
Once superhumans emerged, human resources became more crucial than anything else.
China had a large population to match its vast land, and by extension, a large number of people who awakened as superhumans.
The disposition or character of those awakened superhumans didn't matter. Good or evil, they were still human.
In the end, survival meant subjugating monsters and conquering dungeons.
The nation fractured into dozens of pieces. Countless people died or vanished.
The large population meant many victims, but realistically speaking, it wasn't enough to cause extinction.
In the present day, China was ruined. Nearly all those dozens of splintered groups were ruined too. A vast portion of its territory simply became unusable land.
And it was the doing of a single monster.
'Twin-headed Poison Dragon.'
The entity's name: Twin-headed Poison Dragon (雙頭毒龍).
By Association threat classification, a 3rd-Rank Alpha.
At around 3rd Rank, even most top-grade heroes can't subjugate it solo.
It requires multiple top-grade heroes leading support units to carry out the subjugation.
The Twin-headed Poison Dragon held that level of standing, but several factors allowed it to single-handedly drive the massive territory of China past the point of recovery.
The most prominent were its diseases and poison.
True to its name, the entity resembled an Eastern dragon with two heads.
One head spewed poison; the other exhaled concentrated masses of disease.
Its lethality was absurd. Whether poison or disease breath, a direct hit meant near-instant death for even a top-grade hero on the spot.
The more serious problem was that the spread potential of that poison and disease was staggering.
The poison didn't just affect people—it corrupted the terrain itself. The surrounding region was transformed into a poisoned dead zone.
The disease was extraordinarily contagious. When the Twin-headed Poison Dragon first appeared, it slaughtered hundreds of thousands, and the disease spread from the few survivors, causing the devastation to balloon absurdly.
The Twin-headed Poison Dragon's innate physical capabilities fell below the 3rd-Rank average, but it was an entity specialized in inflicting harm on humans.
That was how the territory of China ended up completely demolished.
Relatively outlying areas like this were one thing, but the inner region centered on Sichuan—where the Twin-headed Poison Dragon first emerged—remained steeped in poison and abandoned to this day.
As a result, much of the former Chinese territory had long since become a gray zone where monsters and humans coexisted.
Monsters appeared daily and devoured people, and superhumans who flouted Association international law as routinely as breathing inhabited the places where humans lived.
In a way, the dilapidation was only natural.
'Tsk.'
It left a bad taste in my mouth.
I clicked my tongue for no real reason and approached a utility pole left standing on the outskirts.
A long gray pole with arms branching from its top. Black electrical lines tangled haphazardly across them.
'It's been a while...'
A utility pole.
A common sight in the world I came from, but in this one, it was a relic of the distant past.
Nowadays, they use mana, not electricity.
Mid-range mana is supplied via cables buried underground.
So there was no reason for structures like utility poles to exist anymore.
I tapped the utility pole with a strange sense of novelty.
The pole was covered in cracks, its surface plastered thick with all kinds of flyers.
A quick scan showed organ trafficking, illegal drugs, bounty lists... the sort of flyers you'd expect in the criminal underworld were plastered everywhere.
'They've got one here too.'
I ripped one of the dangling flyers free.
Among the old, torn, and frayed flyers, this one had been posted relatively recently.
The contents were nothing particularly unusual.
Follow the god. He shall soon descend, and He shall deliver His lowly faithful from death... and so on and so forth.
It was religious promotional text dense with long, convoluted sentences.
Obviously not a proper religion, but the kind of organization you'd lump in with cults.
China had been a gray zone for a long time.
With so many people living in destitution and hopelessness, it was the perfect environment for such cults to run rampant.
The gist was basically "follow the god and be saved, so shut up and obey." There was no way that was anything legitimate.
'...A Death God, huh.'
Having conquered death and ascended to divinity, He has become death itself.
Thus He is the Death God who delivers the undead...
The god preached by the religion in this flyer called itself the Death God.
Religious phrases thick with flowery rhetoric praising the Death God filled the rest.
The cover depicted something in a black robe holding a scythe.
I indifferently examined the spell formula inscribed on the flyer, then crumpled it into my pocket.
'...For a god, it looked more like a giant snake.'
The Tower Master of the Dead.
For reasons I couldn't fathom, a fair number of factions already worshiped that thing, even though it hadn't even begun its invasion yet.
Later on, this faction would locate and resurrect the Twin-headed Poison Dragon as an undead, unleashing catastrophe across China once again.
That calamity would annihilate even the humans who'd barely survived, turning China from a gray zone into a black zone—a demon realm.
'That can't happen.'
It's a shitty outcome that must never come to pass.
The Sipnaha Incident had been a major event, but if this disaster occurred, the death toll would be on an entirely different scale.
Above all, the Three Great Families, closely tied to China, would also suffer damage.
Baek A-rin of the Changhae Family, Hong Yeon-hwa of the Calamity Flame Family—they would both be harmed.
'I need to nip this in the bud.'
Of course, I needed to prioritize boosting my specs first.
Finding the entrance to the Lake of Mana in this vast stretch of land would normally be extremely difficult, but with the Observation Authority, I could finish the search quickly.
As for the entry conditions... I could probably brute-force it with the Space Authority.
I'd explore the dungeon and look for the cultists along the way.
Even if I couldn't exterminate them completely this time, I needed to deal them damage.
And in case things got dangerous midway, I had an emergency escape button ready.
I let out a deep sigh and stopped walking.
Before I knew it, I was standing in front of a decrepit building.
Beside the entrance, a rough-looking man sat on a chair he'd brought out.
Judging by the mana inside his body, he was a superhuman.
The man's gaze fixed on me as I trudged toward him.
I was wearing a baggy robe.
The hood was pulled up, and a pitch-black mask with no eye holes covered my face. A thoroughly suspicious appearance.
"No outsiders allowed. Lose the interest and fuck off. Now."
A cold expulsion order before I could even get a word out.
The man tapped the sword at his waist and put on a menacing scowl.
Considering my getup, the reaction was somewhat understandable.
'......'
"What, you deaf too? I said get lost."
I ignored him and, just in case, ran Observation over the building once more.
Two floors above ground, two below.
The first floor was a spacious lobby. The second had several rooms for living quarters.
The place was a pigsty with no maintenance, not even basic cleaning, but that wasn't an issue.
And underground—
People locked inside iron animal cages. At an altar in the center of the basement, someone resembling a priest was performing an offering ritual.
A corpse with its belly split open lay on the crude stone altar.
Blood oozed out in pulses, running down the stone altar and filling the grooves carved into the floor.
The corpse's face was hideously contorted. They'd evidently done it while the person was still alive, tearing the belly open.
"Tch. Guess I'll make you leave the hard way."
The man rose from his creaking chair. He laid a hand on the hilt of the sword at his hip and walked toward me.
"Lately there's been way too many rats sniffing around, pissing me off."
Scrape...
The sword came free with a grating noise. The whole motion was clumsy. Even the sound of the draw was full of messy friction.
Sure, there weren't witnesses, but the way he openly moved to kill someone told me all I needed to know about the state of law and order here.
With public safety this nonexistent, acquiring sacrificial victims must be pretty convenient.
The man swung his sword at me.
He hadn't even coated it with Aura. I extended my foot.
—Crash!
My instep buried itself dead center between his eyebrows.
Crack! His neck snapped backward and his body hurtled into the building's door.
The wooden door tore off its frame as it collided with the man.
The door swung wide open, untouched by any hand.
I glanced at the corner of my vision.
The text in the Status Window (presumed) seemed to have changed again.
'...Is the correction system actually working?'
My body did feel a bit lighter...
I tilted my head and stepped into the building, dust billowing up around me.
* * *
[Savior Correction System: Evil Annihilation Progress]
[Main Quest 「Tower of the Dead」 Link Confirmed]
[Assisting the Savior]
...
[Savior Correction System: Salvation Progress]
[Mental State 「Salvation」 「Goodwill」 Confirmed]
[Assisting the Savior]