I'm an Adult, Though

I'm an adult, though.

Today, I died. Overwork? A traffic accident? I don't know.

What I do know is that it hadn't been a particularly enjoyable life. Just an ordinary, thoroughly ordinary—no, an ordinarily unhappy Korean man's life. Nothing more.

I slept a long sleep after that.

And then, at some point, I woke up.

So why does my life have to be like this?

"Haa…… two lives in a row without a father or a mother."

I stretched up onto my tiptoes in front of the bathroom sink. Staring into the mirror, a tiny little kid stared back at me.

Was it because I'd had it rough as a child? My height and build were absurdly small. I might look like this, but I was a proper adult!

— Gurgle

My stomach sounded the alarm. I needed to find work, and fast. At this rate I was genuinely going to starve to death.

"Please, please let me get the part-time job today…."

— Ding-a-ling

"Welcome— oh, are you here on an errand?"

"I'm Baek Soyu! I have a part-time interview scheduled for today!"

The store manager blinked at me like I'd grown a second head. Then he snapped back to himself and started the interview.

A short while later.

"I'm not a little kid. I'm an adult!"

I held out my resident registration card with my tiny, fern-sprout hands, and the look on his face as he stared was pure bewilderment. The manager glanced back and forth between the ID and my face, then shook his head with a pitying expression.

"I get your situation, but convenience store night shifts are rough. There are scary older guys, weird people who come in—it's dangerous."

He was scaring me the way you'd scare a child. A familiar situation.

"I'll work hard! I'm good at my job!"

"Sorry. I'd be too worried leaving it to you."

So today's interview had gone down in glorious flames too?

I was about to leave the store with my head hanging when the manager's voice called from behind me.

"Hold on a second."

He dug three lunchboxes out of the corner of the refrigerated section and handed them over.

"Sorry I couldn't hire you after you came all this way."

"Thank you!"

Three discarded lunchboxes—three whole ones. At this rate I can easily hold out for three days, right?

A ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠goofy smile spread across my face before I could stop it. My gloomy mood climbed out of the uncanny valley and shot straight up Mount Euphoria.

But where there's an uphill, there's a downhill.

And the money I scraped together from flyer-handing gigs is almost gone.

I plummeted from Mount Euphoria straight into the Trench of Wailing. A sigh escaped me as I wondered how I was supposed to keep eating.

That was when a loud voice stabbed at my eardrums.

"Ha, fuck! They said they won't buy it! I climbed all the way to the twentieth floor to pick this up and it's worth zero won—does that make any sense?!"

Up ahead, a man was screaming his head off in the middle of the street without a shred of manners. I didn't need to ask what he was talking about. I already knew.

That's right. My previous life had been ordinary, but this one had Towers and hunters.

The disappointing part? I hadn't received any of those special privileges. Even as I approached full adulthood, that famous Status Window still refused to show itself.

"Beef? What frozen-to-death beef?! I botched the bid in the raid and completely tanked!"

My body reacted to the word beef. I swallowed hard without meaning to.

Ah— I want beef so bad.

The man irritably flung something into a flower bed and stomped off, seething. The second I confirmed he was out of sight, curiosity got the better of me and I hurried over to the planter.

Something that came out of the Tower….

I'd overheard that it was a junk item worth zero won. But it was still something from the Tower—a place I would never set foot in my entire life. Vague longing and anticipation made my heart pound.

Looking into the flower bed, I found a fist-sized stone lying there.

"Whoa, it's pretty…."

It was faintly translucent, like glass, with yellow particles embedded throughout like stars in a night sky. Among countless ordinary pebbles, this one alone looked alien. When the light hit it, those particles even shimmered softly.

"Something this pretty is worth zero won?"

If I listed it on a secondhand trading app, someone would buy it, right? There were people who collected rocks as a hobby. And this wasn't some riverbed pebble—it was a stone from the Tower that only hunters could obtain.

"If I list it for twenty thousand won, someone would buy it, wouldn't they?"

Even if it was a worthless junk item, tossing something this beautiful onto the street and walking away—at least by my standards, that made no sense.

"Even a bottom-tier hunter makes more climbing the Tower once than a corporate employee does."

If it didn't make money, pretty didn't matter, apparently. I quickly picked up the glittering stone, brushed off the dust, tucked it into my pocket, and headed home.

A single basement room that reeked of musty mold. Fresh from the shower, I cracked open one of the discarded lunchboxes the manager had given me.

"I'm in a bad mood today, so I'm pulling out a special item too."

I took a beer from the fridge. In this world, it was the single hardest thing for me to buy. Showing my ID did nothing.

"You've got to be kidding me. You're not putting that back?"

"Has the world gone crazy? Where did a kid like you learn this?"

"Even if I confirmed you're an adult, no. If I sell this wrong, the store gets shut down!"

I'd bought this beer at a hole-in-the-wall shop next to an orphanage far from home. The old woman there had known me since I was little. She'd passed away not long ago, and that place was gone now too.

"I'll eat this and go look for work again tomorrow!"

While I chewed through the lunchbox and sipped the beer, I powered on my junk PC out of habit. Amid the rattling noise, the desktop loaded, and I headed straight for the Hunter Aspirants Gallery. Maybe because everyone there was in a similar boat, it felt like a place where I could find some solidarity.

But today's featured post was one that particularly stood out.

The rage-bait post completed its summoning ritual. Moments later, the Chaos of Chaos—no, the comment section—was summoned.

"……."

I quietly closed the window. My stomach burned. It wasn't from the beer I'd just drunk.

No matter how much people tore into him for being E-rank, reality didn't change. One Tower run for that guy probably earned more than a month—no, two months—of me handing out flyers.

I'd thought we were all ants crawling on the ground together. Turns out that guy had been a butterfly with wings all along.

My eyes fell on the stone sitting on the desk. I stared at it blankly. The zero-won pretty pebble I'd washed and set on the desk the moment I got home. Yellow crystals glittering inside the translucent stone. Looking at it was oddly comforting—like a tiny campfire crackling away.

"Still, looking at it is kind of healing."

Right. Being jealous wasn't going to change my life. Tomorrow I'd go back out and hand out flyers again.

And with that, I went to bed.

That night, I had a very strange dream.

It felt like I'd logged into a community the way I always did—except it wasn't the Hunter Aspirants Gallery. The language people were using was weird, too. I was pretty sure I'd done something in there, and then…

I opened my eyes. A nonsense dream?

"Ugh… weird dream. So tired…."

Starting today, I'd work hard again. I rubbed my eyes and got up—and in that instant, I could only stand there, dumbfounded.

For no other reason than this: a Status Window was floating right in front of my eyes.

"Huh?"

For a second I thought I could hear my own heart hammering in my ears. The Status Window floating before me was packed with strange characters I couldn't read—but that wasn't what mattered, was it?

The fact that a Status Window was floating in front of my eyes—that was what mattered. The exclusive property of hunters was right there, right now!

I should ask the gallery right away……

No—what good would asking do? Once you became a hunter, you hung out in the Hunter Gallery. You didn't come back to the Aspirants Gallery. And the Hunter Gallery only let verified hunters post, didn't it? So asking there was impossible too.

No—was even that not important right now? The situation had changed, hadn't it? I just needed to go to the Hunter Administration Bureau, get measured, and receive my hunter certification!

I washed my face in the barest cat-lick of a wash, then pulled the cleanest clothes from my closet. Even while changing, a rose-tinted future unspooled like a panorama. In my imagination, I was grilling beef in a Han River-view mansion.

My heart racing, I did something I normally wouldn't even dream of—I took a taxi straight to the Bureau.

And a few hours later.

"You're not a hunter."

"No…. There's really a Status Window right in front of my eyes. It's real!"

"Please calm down, Mr. Baek Soyu."

The counselor looked at me with pitying eyes. That look you give a poor, unfortunate child. In my previous life I would have been the one looking coldly the other way—but in this life, most people looked at me like that.

"Mr. Baek Soyu. What you're seeing ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠right now is a hallucination."

"I can really see it. It's floating in front of my eyes right now!"

"Mr. Baek Soyu. Dozens of people every day claim they can see one, just like you."

"No…. It's real, though…."

"Of course, I don't think you're deliberately lying."

"…."

"It's a hallucination created by unconscious longing. On our end, we call it Delusional Awakening."

"It's not Delusional Awakening…. It's real…."

"If you rest well at home for a few days, it'll get better."

"I can really see it…."

"Next, please."

In the end I was pushed out of the counseling window like I'd been kicked out. Behind me, the waiting people murmured among themselves.

"That little kid has Delusional Awakening? Like a phantom pregnancy or something?"

"Watch what you say. Imagine how badly he must've wanted to be a hunter."

The way those couples looked at me with pity. I'd rather they just cursed me out! Sympathetic stares that said poor thing were ten times worse.

I left the testing center carrying a deep sense of injustice.

Guess I have to go back to handing out flyers…….

Then the bills I'd been ignoring came crashing down all at once. Today's lost wages, the taxi fare, the expensive coffee I'd bought on the way. My stomach burned.

That was when a big man who'd been loitering near the entrance sidled up to me.

"Hey kid, did you awaken today by any chance?"

A crude guild mark was pinned to his chest. I knew exactly who people like him were from the news. Predatory guilds that snared naive young hunters into slave contracts.

The man approached like a predator eyeing prey and spoke in a friendly tone.

"Join our guild and we'll pay you a ton, and the work's easy. How about it?"

"I don't need it."

Regular people wouldn't hire me because of how I looked, but hunters apparently didn't care about that. No—if I'd actually been a real hunter, I could've brushed him off cheerfully. Right now, with my mood scraping the floor, talking to this guy just felt like being insulted.

"How about we grab a coffee nearby and talk it over?"

He grabbed me like he was going to drag me along. The anger that had been building exploded, and I shouted.

"I'm not a hunter!!"

I wrenched my hand free with a snarl, and the friendly smile on his face twisted into something vicious in an instant. Was it because I'd suddenly lost my temper? No—more likely it was because someone who wasn't even a hunter had the gall to snap at him.

"Then just say you're not. Where does a shrimp like you get off talking down to me?"

The man barked roughly. He came at me with his fist clenched, and it really looked like he was about to hit me. One punch from a guy like that and I might actually die.

No—maybe getting beaten to death would be easier on the heart.

I squeezed my eyes shut, ready to give up on everything—and in that exact moment.

— Fwoooosh!!

In my right hand, a black flame dragon—no. With a tremendous blast of heat, a blazing red fireball erupted into existence.