The Debut of the Beasts
Agh, what is wrong with the world?
I'd lost everything.
My money, my reputation, my family — all of it, gone.
How on earth had it come to this?
Me, the man who had it all and was racing down the highway to success...!
...I was a woodworker, a craftsman just starting to make a name for himself in the region.
From furniture like desks and chairs to exquisite works of art — if it could be made from wood, I could make it, and make it well.
A signature technique no one could easily imitate.
A working speed no one could keep up with.
Maybe not quite a master craftsman's level, but with polish and finish to be proud of all the same.
My phone never stopped buzzing with commission requests, and advertisers reached out constantly. A carving time-lapse I'd uploaded out of pure boredom blew past a million views, and my YouTube channel grew by leaps and bounds.
A mutation from a perfectly ordinary family — that's what people called me.
The woodworking genius, Na Jihoon.
A title recognized by everyone, myself included, and I'd earned it by the tender age of twenty-three.
Yes.
...That was, without a doubt, what they called me — right up until the world changed overnight.
But let's stop and think for a moment.
What if —
just what if —
a door to another world opened, and a flood of priceless treasures came pouring out of it?
Goods with designs and functionality far superior to anything made by human hands. Would my work still sell then?
And my time-lapses, each one ground out over dozens of hours of labor — would they still inspire wonder?
Speaking from bitter, firsthand experience?
'Absolutely not.'
"The pigs are all dead!?"
At some point, bizarre news had started trickling in from every direction. Things that defied all common sense.
Like a family-run pig farm being slaughtered overnight, every animal wiped out. Or an elderly couple nearby found murdered the same way — nothing left of them but clean, gleaming bone.
But of all of them, the hardest one to swallow was this...
'Heh. This bastard was the one who cracked the double-kill joke in the first place.'
Jokes aside, though, it was a photo that deserved every bit of ridicule it got.
Against a backdrop that looked like some derelict rural schoolhouse stood a green figure.
A long, jutting nose. Pointed ears sticking out on both sides. A body no bigger than a young child's.
And to top it off — a crude scrap of leather draped over its body and a dagger clutched in its hand.
Call it what you will: it was a goblin, straight out of a fantasy novel.
A goblin, standing brazenly in an abandoned school in the Korean countryside. Who in their right mind would believe that?
The poster later insisted he was innocent and released a short video taken from a distance, but it — along with the photo — was promptly deleted, and he was punished for spreading fake news.
The area around Pyeongjin Village, the birthplace of all those rumors, was sealed off, on the grounds that a specialized investigative team would be dispatched to flush out the culprit.
But the response was suspiciously swift, suspiciously excessive — and public opinion split down the middle, criticism of the government colliding head-on with its defenders until the whole thing spiraled into a political brawl.
And so Korea's "magic beast incident" — or the "goblin incident," as some called it — seemed all but forgotten.
The cover-up didn't last long, however.
A country in Central America officially acknowledged the existence of the "magic beasts" and appealed to the international community for help.
The eyes of the world turned back, and with them, Korea's Pyeongjin incident was thrust into the spotlight all over again.
The beasts had appeared on Isla Jicarón and the island directly above it, Coiba — both tourist destinations in Panama's southwest.
They were dense with thick forest, and much like Pyeongjin in Korea, rumors about the place had circulated there nonstop, drawing more and more tourists over the years.
Then, at some point, people really did start vanishing.
The Panamanian government belatedly dispatched police forces, but even they reportedly vanished without a trace amid a hail of gunfire.
The government's announcement spread like wildfire.
The UN scrambled to assemble an investigative team and rushed it to Coiba Island — where, in the island's abandoned prison, the team came face to face with a goblin tribe numbering in the hundreds.
Fortunately, the team's casualties were minor. A large contingent of special agents with superhuman capabilities had accompanied them.
Men who butchered an entire goblin tribe with utterly incomprehensible force. And that scene was broadcast live, almost brazenly, for the whole world to see.
Gates, magic beasts, and Hunters.
It was the glittering debut stage of the very things that would one day drag my life down into the abyss.