Climbing Starts Again!
Inside a high-end mixed-use apartment complex locked down under airtight security.
I sat on a terrace chair overlooking the wide sweep of the Han River, took a leisurely sip of iced coffee, and watched the water glitter under the sun.
"Ahhh, this is the stuff…!"
It tasted like pure, melted capitalism.
A full month had already passed since I'd cleaned up the Gate Break.
My life had completely changed since then.
I guess you could say things have gotten a lot more comfortable?
Money and points.
Freed from that grinding yoke, my mind had settled into such calm that even the flow of the Heavenly Demon Divine Art felt smoother than before.
After soaking in that luxury and drinking my coffee with a little swagger—
"Upsy-daisy!"
I stretched with a satisfied groan, picked up the empty cup, and stepped back inside.
The first thing that met my eyes was Seonghwa, planted on the living-room sofa and glued to a kimchi-stew restaurant video on the TV.
Oh come on. Kimchi stew again?
Was she never sick of that stuff?
Judging purely by behavior, it was impossible to tell whether she was a holy relic or just some NEET freeloading in the spare room.
And then—
"What's with that dirty look the second you walk in?"
Even though this clearly wasn't Manmajeon, her radar was absurdly sharp.
Her personality was so prickly you could almost believe she was the master of the house.
I walked over, perched on the arm of the sofa, and asked,
"You're really not going back?"
"Obviously not."
Sigh…
For how completely she had invaded my daily life, it hadn't actually been that long since Seonghwa stormed out of Manmajeon.
After I finished the Gate Break in Pocheon, the loot alone came to a full two hundred billion won.
According to Senior Haeyeon, the original value had been around a hundred fifty billion, but rare competition had inflated it by another fifty.
Whether it was a hundred fifty or two hundred, my jaw was still on the floor at the ridiculous number when the Association contacted me. They said they'd picked up several factions digging into my background and recommended a residence with rock-solid security. That place was right here.
It normally went for tens of billions, but under national-level support they offered it at a shocking one billion won, so I signed on the spot without a second thought.
Maybe the real trouble started when, in my rush to move, I dumped every last scrap from my old one-room into Manmajeon.
That was how Seonghwa found out I was moving.
So the morning after I walked into the new place, I opened my eyes in bed to find a pair of deep red eyes sparkling right in front of my face.
"Hello."
I'd just woken up; my brain was still soup. There was supposed to be nobody else in the apartment.
And yet what I got was that completely unhinged greeting.
"Kyaaaaah!"
A full-blown girlish scream tore out of me, adding yet another indelible black mark to my personal history.
From that day on Seonghwa shamelessly refused to return to Manmajeon and simply claimed one of the spare rooms as her own.
Three weeks into this bizarre cohabitation—
"You have to clean the dishes right after you eat…!"
"Delivery trash has to be sorted by type!"
"You put the detergent and fabric softener in the wrong way around!?"
"Turn the laundry inside out when you hang it or folding is hell!"
"Clean your room— is this a pigsty?"
And so on.
It felt exactly like raising one extremely high-maintenance kid.
The kind of endless nagging you hear in any ordinary household poured out of my mouth without pause.
Looking back, I was reciting word-for-word every line my mother used to have permanently parked on her lips before I started living alone.
Situations like this just made a wave of fondness for her surge up in my chest.
Remembering those days, I shot Seonghwa—who had at least started looking vaguely human after all the scolding—a half-dead look and asked,
"Ahh, whatever. More importantly, how many more points did we get today versus yesterday?"
"Hmm… 97,423 points."
"Almost another hundred thousand today, huh?"
"Yeah. Current total is 4,922,351."
My channel had already blown past five million subscribers.
I'd sparred with the Teenage Heavenly Demon a few times in between, so the points had dipped a little, but they were still closing in on five million as well.
The relief of no longer having to obsess over every point, now that the channel was firmly on track, did not last long.
Behind that explosive growth, the number of people giving me the side-eye had naturally multiplied.
And the timing could not have been worse.
I never once imagined I'd get chewed out for being a high-rank Climber loafing around filming low-floor videos.
With Gate Breaks getting more frequent lately, the public was never going to smile on a high-rank Climber like me hanging around the lower floors just to shoot content.
For the haters leaving hate comments, I was the juiciest bait imaginable.
Yeongjae blocked the slander and tried to hold the line, but against a runaway public opinion I finally had to swallow my tears and put the low-floor climbing content on indefinite hold.
Even though I couldn't exactly come out and say, "I'm only on the fifteenth floor…!" my insides burned black.
Which meant it was time to cook up some brand-new content.
Until I figured that out, I gave Yeongjae a temporary vacation and decided to pick up the hard-mode climbing I'd set aside.
"I wonder what'll show up on the fifth floor…?"
I'd already cleared the third and fourth floors over the past few days.
Today was finally hard mode's fifth floor.
Even in the hard-mode Climber community, the fifth floor was basically uncharted territory.
Judging by those two seniors' stories, the basic mission seemed to be escape—but every person started in a different place, and the difficulty looked anything but ordinary.
And there was something else I had to keep in mind.
"Why is it that I always get stuck with the especially brutal difficulty…?"
From the first floor through the fourth.
If I'd only had the skill of an ordinary hard-mode Climber, I would have fled back to normal mode ages ago.
And for good reason.
First floor: trolls.
Second floor: ogres.
Third floor: hundreds of undead plus a lich that had stashed its life vessel.
Fourth floor: a full tournament—ogres, orc chieftains, a drake, even a cyclops.
The difficulty was so grotesque I might as well have been cursed.
At this point I had zero idea what the fifth floor would throw at me.
Still, just in case—
"You don't know anything?"
I asked Seonghwa.
"If I tell you ahead of time it violates the contract."
She always dragged out some contract with who-knows-whom at moments like this.
She was supposed to be a helper, yet at every decisive point she was completely useless.
"But I can guarantee one thing. If it's you, Doyeon, you'll get through it just fine."
I decided to trust that strange little scrap of confidence.
Yeah. In the end you only know by throwing yourself at it.
I started making thorough preparations for the climb.
"Alright then—first things first, I need to fill my stomach properly."
My body had terrible fuel economy, so I had to stockpile enough calories that I wouldn't run dry mid-fight.
Besides, on the third floor the battle had dragged on longer than I expected; I'd almost had to bail for real just because of hunger.
"Okay. Today I'll cook…!"
I cleaned out every expensive ingredient in the fridge and laid a lavish spread with the skills I'd honed during my one-room days—
"What's this? Just order delivery…"
The holy relic who'd tasted modern civilization was thoroughly unimpressed.
"No, you can't live on delivery every day! We should cook at home sometimes too."
I ignored the still-grumpy holy relic picking at her food and vacuumed everything on the table one dish after another. Once the table was clean and the dishes were done, I changed into the martial-arts uniform I'd taken from Manmajeon, tied my hair back tight so it wouldn't get in my eyes, and finished climbing preparations that were laughably sparse compared to other Climbers.
"Alright, I'm off!"
"Have a good trip."
I said goodbye to Seonghwa and lightly pressed the center of my watch.
"What, a mountain this time…?"
Deep in the mountains, where a strange stillness hung heavy.
I drew a deep breath of the clear air—
and the message the Tower dropped right in front of my eyes was more than enough to freeze every sense cold.
Escape the Heavenly Net and survive.
"Ha. Damn it."
Pssht.
The instant I instinctively snapped my head back, an arrow sliced through the air and buried itself in the exact spot where my skull had been, letting out a tiny sonic boom.
"Right. As the Heavenly Demon I should experience a trial like this at least once…"
When I extended my senses, the mere presence I felt beyond the mountain easily numbered a thousand.
"Alright then—let's do this…!"
Even though I couldn't feel a single scrap of killing intent, the tension only crawled deeper under my skin. I quietly began to raise my Magi.
Razor-sharp true energy surged from my dantian, wrapped coolly around my entire body, and woke senses refined to the absolute edge.