002: Hand of God
If I'm being completely honest, there was a bit of... baser curiosity involved, too.
Come on — what guy out there hasn't wondered, at least once, what it would actually feel like to live as a woman? I was no exception.
Besides, no matter how thoroughly I reworked a male face, I figured I'd stand out among the hunters either way. So the math was simple: change gender entirely, and not a soul on earth would ever be able to connect me to the "Artifact Crafter."
And so — not just the face, but the figure as well. I transformed, completely, into a woman.
Then I stood there for a good long while, staring at the beautiful girl reflected in the mirror.
She was fucking gorgeous. This was me, somehow — and she was, to the letter, my ideal type.
"...This can't be real."
At some point, both my hands had drifted, perfectly aligned, toward my own lovely chest.
Transformation complete, I opened my laptop and started clearing out my inbox — every commission I'd received to date, including all the ones I'd been putting off.
The message was simple: Due to unavoidable circumstances, I will be postponing all work for the next several months.
That one line was enough. Naturally, the moment I hit send, protest emails came raining down — threats among them, desperate pleading, even a "I know where you are, so watch your back."
But what were they going to do about it? If I went dark, what exactly could any of them do to me? To find me, they'd have to comb through every dungeon in the country — and wouldn't their time be better spent just clearing those dungeons instead? So sit tight and wait, you bastards.
Besides, most of the people firing off those protest emails were cut from the same cloth as Seol Hayun — the type to open with threats and bark "WORK, BLACKSMITH!" at me. I didn't owe people like that so much as a speck of guilt. They deserved no leniency whatsoever.
With my commissions squared away, I headed for a hunter guild — still in my transformed, female form. The reason was simple: information gathering, and my own safety. Most of my clients were top-ranked hunters, which meant they really could search every dungeon in South Korea if they put their minds to it. So my strategy was to deliberately walk into the tiger's den myself and secure my safety from the inside.
The target: the Ice Guild. The very guild where Seol Hayun sat as Guild Master.
Standing in front of the guild building, I looked down at my own hands — now those of a perfectly unfamiliar woman, like a stranger in a mirror.
"...Wow, fucking gorgeous. Alright then. Time to head in."
I'd died a miserable death in my past life, and all I'd wanted this time around was a quiet one. Yet somehow, here I was — a woman, wearing a mask of my own making, walking into a hunter guild. Life really does take you places you'd never expect.
Pausing in front of the Ice Guild building, I took a moment to collect myself. My new body still felt so foreign that every single step carried the awkwardness all the way down to my toes.
But what could I do? I'd come this far — might as well go in.
The moment I pushed through the doors, the receptionist at the front desk looked up and beamed at me.
"Welcome in! What brings you here today?"
"I, um... I'd like to apply for guild membership."
"Oh, a prospective member! Wonderful! Then could you fill out this form — your name, along with your awakening details?"
I took the form she offered and set pen to paper. In the name field, in place of my real name — Kim Seojun — I wrote the alias I'd prepared in advance.
It was my real name with a few syllables shuffled around and dressed up to sound as feminine as possible. If I was going to be flitting in and out of the guild in this body, I figured I'd better have a proper name ready.
The problem was the next field.
Awakening ability. I was not an Awakener. Which meant that, artifacts aside, I didn't have the personal strength to take down so much as a single slime — all I had going for me was a good pair of hands. But if I honestly wrote "I am not an Awakener" here, this form would go straight into the trash. Why would a hunter guild accept someone with no powers at all?
So I decided to embellish. Just a little, and ever so naturally.
Of course, I couldn't exactly write "I possess the Hand of God that crafts artifacts" — the instant the words Artifact Crafter appeared, every hunter in the country would come charging at me like lunatics. So I toned it down and kept it simple.
This much felt just right. And it wasn't even a total fabrication — the skill name that cursed stone had slapped on me was exactly the same as my moniker: Hand of God. And strictly speaking, Hand of God wasn't an ability limited to artifacts. Anything made by hand — potions, whatever — was fair game. Artifact crafting was simply the most efficient use of the lot.
A single potion might fetch a few hundred thousand won, a few million at best. A single artifact, on the other hand, could go for millions — and in the extreme cases, hundreds of millions, even billions. Naturally, I had zero reason to waste my talent on potions.
Now, while we're here, a quick word about my family. With the money I'd made selling artifacts, I'd already shipped my parents off overseas — and not just anywhere, but somewhere so comfortable they'd never need to work another day in their lives. The money was, frankly, rotting. By now, Mom and Dad were probably sprawled on some beach in the Maldives, mojitos in hand.
I'd even drilled them properly, just in case the hunters ever got their hands on them: Kim Seojun? Never heard of him. That boy's dead to us — we threw him out years ago. At the end of the day, all that mattered was that I didn't get caught.
The truly hilarious thing about these hunters was that their legal compliance was impeccable. They'd never touch another person's property or life — but to monopolize little old me, they'd happily resort to every mad scheme under the sun. Threats, sweet-talking, stalking, secretly slapping tracking devices on me, the works. Which left me no choice but to run around changing my face and my name like this.
I finished the form and handed it over. The receptionist skimmed through it and nodded.
"Ah, potion crafting! Then we'll just have you take one quick practical test before you go. Could you try brewing a healing potion for us?"
"Oh — yes, yes, of course."
I took the prepared materials and started mixing them together, deliberately, gloriously half-assing the whole thing. Something too perfect would raise suspicions of its own, so I aimed for exactly the feel of a healing potion turned out by an ordinary rookie Awakener. And I mean I really phoned it in.
Then I handed the finished healing potion to the receptionist.
"Hmm, the color looks fine. Let's test this one."
And that was precisely when it happened.
A commotion broke out deeper inside the guild. Apparently a hunter in the middle of training had been injured — his arm, by the look of it, completely shattered.
"Oh — actually, it just so happens we have an injured hunter right over there. Would you mind letting him drink this? Call it a field test," the receptionist asked, a little too casually. As an Awakener herself, she could apparently sense that my potion carried no poison or harm, and she seemed ready to try it on the spot.
I gave my blessing, cool as anything.
"...Um. Sure. Go right ahead."
The injured hunter drank the potion. A few seconds later—
"Huh...? Wh-what?!"
His broken arm snapped back to normal in an instant, as if someone had rewound time itself. You could even hear the bones clicking into place. The room went dead silent — and when the silence broke, the murmuring began.
No, seriously, even I was shocked, goddammit. I made that thing like absolute garbage. How?
"...What the hell was that just now?"
"A healing potion can do that?"
"Isn't that thing straight-up high-grade?!"
The way the hunters looked at me changed in a heartbeat. What had begun as idle glances — oh, another hopeful, I suppose — had become something else entirely. These were the eyes of people thinking, we absolutely cannot let this one slip away to another guild.
"Excuse me — is that seat uncomfortable? Won't you come sit over here?"
"Shall I get you some tea? Or would coffee be better?"
"I just brewed a fresh cup — here, take mine!"
There was even a hunter who sidled up behind me and reached for my shoulders.
"Oh, your shoulders look awfully stiff. Here, let me just—"
"...That's quite alright. They're not stiff."
If I'd been a man, this would've been an instant sexual harassment lawsuit. I only let it slide because I was a woman. I eased my body backward, awkward. The sudden about-face in treatment was somehow even more suffocating — though I suppose this was the hunter industry's golden rule at work: skill determines how you're treated.
And just as I stood there in a daze, being pampered to death inside the guild—
The main doors swung open, and a crowd returning from a hunt poured inside. At the head of it strode Seol Hayun, blue ponytail whipping behind her. Trailing her came the elite, household-name hunters and the guild's executives, and the sheer force they carried was like Prince Suyang of Joseon himself swaggering home from a grand royal hunt.
The hunt's chill still hadn't left her. Walking in with that cold air trailing off her, Seol Hayun's gaze swept, ever so naturally, around the guild in a full circle.
And it landed — dead center — on me.
My heart plunged straight through the floor.
In that instant, Seol Hayun's eyes and mine met head-on.