001 — Let Me Rest, You Hunter Bastards
My name is Kim Seojun.
I died.
Well — to be precise, I used to be dead. And in the most spectacularly stupid way possible.
Here's what I mean: dead set on becoming a hunter, I slipped past the eyes of the soldiers who'd stood guard at the Gate since I was a kid, snuck through, and walked straight into a dungeon. It was crawling with every monster under the sun, and since I was just an ordinary, non-Awakened shota, I got my arms and legs torn off and died a wretched, utterly brutal death.
That's the truth as I know it.
And yet, for reasons I can't begin to explain, here I am — alive, breathing, perfectly fine.
When I told my mom, she said I'd just been dreaming. With a look that asked whether I'd wet the bed in my sleep.
But I know better. For one thing, the pain of that day had been as vivid as anything ever was. Even so, I had a pretty solid guess as to why a miracle like this had happened — because right before I died, with both legs and an arm gone, I'd picked up a glowing stone from a corner with the one arm I had left. And I heard the voice of a god.
The voice pouring out of that stone whispered directly into my mind. To me — screaming, every limb torn to shreds.
"I shall grant you the life you wish to live."
Oh, fuck's sake — then why the hell didn't you do it before I died?
Anyway — having died and come back from that hell, I had not the slightest, tiniest, eyeball's-worth of desire to become a hunter.
So what did I want to be, then? Simple: I wanted to craft fine gear for hunters to use and quietly get rich doing it. I'd seen more than enough monster faces to last a lifetime, and dying once was plenty.
You know the archetype — the complete nobody whose existence no one knows, whose money is practically rotting from sheer excess. That one.
And this wish of mine came true with pinpoint accuracy. The end result: what I do for a living — fresh out of high school and barely into adulthood — is artifact crafter.
But here's the exquisitely fucked-up irony of it all: I started this job so I could live quietly, and I haven't had a single quiet moment since.
Truth is, even before I graduated high school, I'd sold artifacts to hunters a few times as a tidy little side business. The money was outrageous.
But then hunters came swarming in droves, pressuring and threatening me to make things for them, until I ended up fleeing from low-grade dungeon to low-grade dungeon, working in hiding. Make one thing and they'd demand another. "I'll pay you whatever you want, so just keep working." Try to refuse so I could rest, and stalking and threats came standard.
And last time, with nothing but the Ice Snow Sword I'd made for her, Seol Hayun — previously a Rank 7 hunter — had smashed through an Advanced Dungeon and rocketed all the way up to Rank 3.
Oh, and I named the artifact on a whim, while happily stuffing my face with bingsu — Korean shaved ice — at a dessert café.
What happened after that? I got hunted even harder.
Meaning: no matter how astronomical the pay on offer, I now had to cherry-pick my commissions with ruthless care just to survive.
That day, too, I was inside a dungeon.
I was sketching blueprints in the house I'd secretly built when somebody knocked on my door. Even the knock itself was menacing — the kind of force that threatened to splinter the door clean off its hinges. There was a mad, murderous edge seeping through it, too.
"Who is it?"
"It's me."
Those two words sent a chill straight down my spine. I could tell from the voice alone — the owner of that stalker-caliber talent for tracking down the location of a dungeon I'd never told a single soul about.
I opened the door, and sure enough: there stood Seol Hayun, blue ponytail swaying, arms crossed. Her gaze was sharp enough to pin me down and eat me alive, yet her expression was oddly complicated — like a puppy convinced it had been wronged.
"...How on earth did you find me this time?"
"Last time, when you made me that... Bingsu? No, wait — the Ice Snow Sword? I secretly stuck a tracking device on your clothes."
"Are you — fuck! You can't just announce that so proudly! Isn't that a crime?!"
"Crime, my ass. This much is just affection."
The instant I started screaming bloody murder, Seol Hayun, without so much as a blink, toed off her shoes and stepped inside. Into somebody else's home, as casually as if it were her own master bedroom.
"Please, I'm begging you, just let me rest. I just knocked out a whole month's worth of orders. It's not my wrists giving out anymore — my soul is leaving my body!"
"Would money change your mind?"
"No."
"Threats don't work on you either, huh?"
"Those don't work either. You know full well I'm not the type who gets scared by that stuff."
Seol Hayun propped her chin on her hand and heaved a long sigh.
"But I have to clear this dungeon and take the number one spot no matter what. What am I supposed to do?"
At this point, I should mention: to this day, I have no idea why this woman is so obsessed with being number one. Every time I ask, she just brushes me off with a "you don't need to know that." You'd think she'd lost some blood feud to the Rank 2 hunter or something. But poking at it would only make my life more complicated, so it's none of my business — I'm just a guy who wants to draw blueprints and live in peace.
"Miss Hayun, I genuinely can't this month. My waiting list is already this long."
When I shook the stack of documents at her, Seol Hayun abruptly leaned all the way forward, her face closing in until it was right in front of mine.
"...Should I pay you with my body, then?"
"...I'm sorry, what?"
"If you want. Anything."
The air in the house froze solid in that instant. Granted, her hunter attribute was literally ice, so things did get chilly whenever she got close — but this was a different species of cold altogether.
In the end, it was only after promising Seol Hayun one more artifact that I finally managed to escape that spot with my life.
"I'll have it done by next month. So now, please, go. For fuck's sake!"
"You mean it? That's a promise?"
"Yes, yes, I promised. Satisfied?"
After finally shoving her out the door, I immediately started packing up. Once again, I'd decided to relocate my humble abode — no surprises there. The house itself meant nothing; all I had to do was put these golden hands to work and build another one, snap-snap. Even one raised inside a dungeon looked like a perfectly ordinary home if you fenced it off nicely and hung curtains in the windows. Of course, since it sat inside a dungeon, the building did need barrier wards built in, too.
Now, hold on a moment — I should probably explain how I can even do any of this.
I am not an Awakener. Not a hunter, either. I'm not some guy with superhuman physical specs or anything of the sort. I just happened to pick up one suspicious rock right before I died. And that rock, by some absurd stroke of luck, granted me a god's power. That's all there was to it.
I'd gained the ability to take whatever my hands touched and process it into anything I wanted — no separate materials required. And I don't mean crafting in some laborious, sweat-on-the-brow sense; the moment I got my hands on something, it came together like snapping together a plastic model kit, and just like that, an SSS-rank artifact rolled off the line.
At first, even I couldn't believe what was happening. Where in the world does anything come this easy? But then, in practice — whoa, it actually works? One idea was all it took: a blueprint would unfold in my head all on its own, and my hands would move on autopilot, following it to the letter.
So there I was — not a hunter, not anything special physically — who had simply become the single best person on the planet at the one narrow category of "making things." Hunters, in place of my name, call me the Hand of God. I'm not a fan; the title makes me cringe.
Anyway — thanks to this ability, I was now living this endlessly exhausting fugitive life. A wonderful power that did nothing but make my life miserable: a backwards, doesn't-add-up kind of situation.
Then, somewhere in the middle of packing, a thought struck me.
"...Wait. If I can make literally anything as long as I've got my hands — no, fuck it, couldn't I just change my own face?"
Think it through, and there wasn't a single reason it shouldn't work. I'd built swords, armor — hell, just last month I'd even made a pair of "shoes that fly through the sky" for one hunter who asked. Was there any earthly reason a guy like me couldn't manage one artifact to change a face?
And so, for the first time in my life, I resolved to craft an artifact not for someone else — but for me.
Its name: the Fox Mask. Like a nine-tailed gumiho, the fox spirit of Korean legend.
An item that would let me transform into as many different people as I wanted, exactly to my taste. Sure, the name was cringe from the first syllable. So what? I was the only one who'd ever use it.
As for materials — a few scraps of hide off a silver fox-type monster I'd scraped up in the dungeon, plus a single high-purity mana stone. More than enough. The instant I held them, the blueprint unfurled through my head in one smooth cascade, and all I had to do was move my hands along its lines.
And then — the moment I set the finished Fox Mask onto my face.
I felt my entire body shift, smooth as sliding silk.
I looked in the mirror.
"...Wow."
Wow — holy shit, for real!
I made this thing myself, but it's absolutely insane!?
A completely different person stood in the mirror. Different features, different voice — even the entire aura around her had changed. For a second I genuinely believed someone else was standing there, and I nearly glanced over my own shoulder.
Of course, I figured even a disguise this perfect might get picked up by a sensory-type hunter of truly exceptional caliber. But what were the odds of ever crossing paths with a sensor of that top-tier class? In Korea, at least, I could safely assume it would essentially never happen.
And so, I made one more decision.
"...If I'm changing anyway, might as well go all the way and switch my sex to female, right?"
And that's how I decided that, from here on out, my life would be lived as a beautiful girl.
Frankly? It was fucking great.
