Building the Guild
An elixir that was reportedly selling for as much as 300 million won a bottle in the United States.
Back home, it never went for more than 10 million even at a premium — and yet these people were charging over four times that.
Even so, supply couldn't keep up with demand, and everyone was losing their minds over it.
"Artifact exports. Elixir exports. My personal assets have already passed two trillion won, and I'm even selling crops domestically."
Meanwhile, the job posting I'd put up for the guild was drawing enormous attention.
I had no intention of recruiting guild members yet.
Returnees, to be precise.
What I needed right now were elite professionals to handle incorporation paperwork and all the other administrative work that came with it.
South Korea was in the grip of a brutal job crisis, after all.
Things had eased up somewhat recently — the big conglomerates had launched mana stone ventures, and subcontractors had sprung up in their wake — but the reality was that highly educated young people were still sitting idle.
For now, there was no practical way to hire foreigners, and I didn't need talent so rare I'd have to import it from abroad anyway.
"Whoa, we've got graduates from every top university in the country here?... What even is this? This is insane."
Money was overflowing, so even the entry-level salaries started at 50 million won across the board.
And I planned on raising them further down the line.
"First, I need to hire the legal team."
I'd interviewed plenty of lawyers, but one group stood out above the rest.
They weren't large in number, but nearly all of them were former prosecutors and judges — a small, elite firm of veteran attorneys.
I hired them first, then acquired a company that specialized in handling exactly this kind of administrative work.
With the firm and the legal team combined, we launched a full-scale hiring campaign.
The number of applicants this time? A staggering 130,000.
We cut a full 100,000 on paper screening alone.
The remaining 30,000 all went through aptitude testing along with physical and psychological evaluations, which narrowed the pool to roughly 25,000.
I decided not to sit in on those interviews myself.
But for the special recruitment candidates, I attended in person.
And so, the man now standing before me.
"Graduated early from a top domestic university after two years. Completed a bachelor's and master's simultaneously at a prestigious American school. Twenty-six — same age as me... Is this guy even human?... And his IQ is 170?"
An absurd specimen of a man walked in.
I'd sat through plenty of secretary interviews, but I'd never seen anyone like this.
As I was still processing it, the head of the legal team seated beside me spoke up.
"With credentials like these, even the President would have personally signed off on him. He could be earning hundreds of millions — why on earth did he apply here?"
"If you accept my proposal, I will start as your secretary immediately and serve Guild Leader Kim Hyunwoo with everything I have."
Squirm.
The lawyer who'd asked the question grimaced.
Just as he was about to open his mouth, I cut in first.
"And this proposal is...?"
"...A one-million-coin Elixir."
"What in the—!"
"Hold on. Why do you need it?"
"My wife has stage 4 cancer. She has less than a week left. The damage has already reached her brain."
Thud.
Without warning, the man dropped flat to the floor.
"I am Lee Siwoo! Guild Leader, if you would only save my wife, I would throw myself off a cliff if you asked! Please... please, I'm begging you! You have that many coins, don't you?!"
"Even so, a round trip to buy the Elixir would take at least a month."
"Th... then..."
Perhaps this truly had been his last hope, because he collapsed straight into despair.
"I don't have a million coins either."
"I... I see... I apologize. That was disgraceful of me."
"But I do have an Elixir."
"...I'm sorry?"
Lee Siwoo, who had bowed his head and been on his way out, spun around.
"Can you truly work for me?"
"Of— of course!"
"Then sign here."
What I slid across to him was a contract worth a full 5,000 coins.
Fail to honor the terms written on it, and you lose your life.
And not a clean death, either — you die in agony, and even afterward, your soul lingers for hundreds of years in unending torment. Or so it goes.
Confidentiality was baked into it too: you physically couldn't speak or write of its contents. A contract straight out of a genuine fantasy novel.
It was practically a slave contract, no two ways about it.
The legal team's was weaker by comparison, but they'd signed theirs all the same.
The contract before us now was, in essence, the optimal slave agreement that every lawyer on the team had banged their heads together to engineer.
Tremble, tremble.
Lee Siwoo knew this too.
"...If that's how it works, then I'll sign. If you don't hand over the Elixir, Guild Leader, the penalty falls on you as well, doesn't it?"
"It does."
"Then I accept the contract."
Scritch.
Lee Siwoo took the dagger sitting beside him and sliced into his own fingertip.
The moment his blood dripped onto the contract, the paper absorbed it whole.
Blood had certainly fallen on that contract, yet not a single stain remained.
This was the same contract the legal team on either side of me and the heads of my administrative firms had all signed.
I had bought all of them outright, and in exchange, they'd received their futures.
Annual salary: two billion won.
Plus family benefits of a kind found nowhere else on Earth.
I don't like my people betraying me.
And simply saying so out loud isn't something I trust.
So I bind them with contracts.
As for Pitasha and Rune — they were summoned through my own Authority, which means betrayal is impossible for them.
Sun Wukong himself vouched for that, so it's a certainty.
Once the contract was sealed, I told him,
"Let's go. To your wife."
Whoosh.
"Y-yes! Right this way!"
He hurried off at a near run, and I followed. In the room at the end of it lay a woman with unfocused eyes, drool slipping from the corner of her mouth.
She must have been breathtakingly beautiful before this happened. Now her hair was shorn to stubble and her body was a map of surgical scars.
But the husband gazing at his ravaged wife with nothing but love in his eyes raised the Elixir he'd received from me.
"Please... I'm begging you..."
Squeeze.
Prayer and diet had already cut off the cancer's spread, so I drove the massive syringe holding the Elixir straight into her neck.
And then—
The Elixir coursed through her veins, light flooding the room as death itself was torn out of her body.
"Nngh!"
Thank goodness for the sunglasses I'd prepared on the off chance this would happen.
Ordinary shades wouldn't have cut it, so every one of us was wearing a pair Pitasha had crafted herself.
"I... this is..."
"Impressive, isn't it? A treasure that money can't buy."
Apologies to Lee Siwoo, but I'd brought the two of them along specifically to show him the lengths I could go to.
Not that Lee Siwoo spared them a single glance — he sprinted to her side.
Though she was older than him, she looked nothing of the sort; if anything, she could have passed for a high schooler.
She looked utterly beautiful, and utterly at peace.
"S... Sia...?"
"Mmm... just five more minutes..."
"Sia!"
"Kyaa!"
Lee Siwoo crushed her into his arms.
She started to scold him, then remembered where she was — and what she'd been — and froze, staring down at her own arms.
"Wh... who are you...?"
"Sia... this is the man who saved you. I'm so sorry you had to see me like that, Guild Leader."
"Guild Leader...? What are you talking about?"
"It's a long story. The world changed. Thank you — truly, thank you, Guild Leader."
"It was nothing. I hope the two of you enjoy your time together."
They say Lee Siwoo and Kim Sia were childhood friends who'd promised to marry each other.
In other words — a genuine, honest-to-goodness pure-love couple.
"Sniff..."
"Mmm..."
"You two didn't strike me as the sentimental type. How touching."
"A guild leader who doesn't cry is the strange one here... ahem."
Both of them, eyes rimmed red, turned away.
Pfft.
In the days that followed, once the bulk of the interviews wrapped up, a great many people came into my fold.
And the thing that really made me feel like the head of a massive guild? The money pouring out of my accounts without pause.
"This is insane... one trillion isn't enough to run a company?"
I'd transferred a full trillion of my personal fortune into the corporation, and it was bleeding out fast.
Part of it was that we had no revenue yet, but I'd certainly set the salaries on the generous side.
So many elites had applied that I wanted to hire every last one of them...
At any rate, I brought on everyone — entry-level staff, assistants, department heads, executives, the works.
Put together an audit team from the cold-eyed ones... there was a mountain of things to do.
Those forty days I spent here, I lived flat-out busy.
"Guess it's time to head back."
"Mom's tteokbokki beats anything I could buy at the shop!"
"Hoho, I'll make you some when you're back. Don't get hurt out there, you hear?"
"I'm a rear-line unit, though?"
"Bah! If I say be careful, be careful!"
"Yes... hehe..."
FWOOSH—
When the appointed time came, light swallowed us up, and when my eyes opened again, the familiar Abyss stretched out before me.
My Abyss had grown vast from all the clearing I'd done — even the Spider Queen was long since handled.
The factories had been running nonstop for those forty days, and an enormous stockpile of artifacts had piled up in the meantime.
"Then I'll be off to make a subdimension!"
"Good. Rune, let's push the Wave stages forward now."
"I'd love that. I want to deal with those orcs as soon as possible."
"Haha... right."
KUOOOOOOO—
Fresh off our rest, we threw ourselves straight into Stage 41 the moment we arrived.
The instant it began, a sea of orcs came howling to greet us.
"May I warm up a little?"
"Go ahead."
SHWOOOOOOM—
A single kick sent Rune sailing hundreds of meters through the air.
Kuma wheeled and circled around her.
The moment the two of them materialized in the heart of the enemy line, the orcs began to charge.
"Nope."
Hisss...
Steam began to vent from around her body — and in an instant, the heads of hundreds of orcs went flying.
"...What the hell?"
I hadn't seen a thing.
She was still holding the exact same pose. So was Kuma.
But every orc in the vicinity was dead.
Only a single 4th-Rank orc at the very rear and a handful of 3rd-Ranks beside it remained.
Tremble, tremble, tremble.
They felt it too.
The certainty that they could never win.
Skitter—
Rune simply flicked her finger at them.
And along the path of that finger, orcs came apart, limbs scattering in every direction.
"...Easy."
SHRAAAAAA—
A belated rain of blood came pouring down from the sky.
Time taken to slaughter hundreds of orcs:
Fourteen seconds. Flat.