Two Wives and a Level Up
Without even realizing it, the moment I saw the photo the Druid had posted, my blood started to boil.
I'd always prided myself on having reached a state of enlightenment where no amount of bait-posting could make me lose my cool. Who would have thought my mental discipline would be rendered utterly useless?
Ah, of course — it's not like I'm furious just because the Druid happens to be ridiculously handsome.
There is exactly one thing I take issue with.
ㄴDruid) What's wrong?
ㄴAzure Sky Sword Emperor) A worthless fool did worthless things, that's all. Why the fuss?
ㄴDruid) Is that so?
ㄴHeadMod) Explain the women in the back of the photo.
ㄴDruid) Ah, you mean Elsie and Viola? Those are my wives.
ㄴHeadMod) DIE!!!
Two women in borderline risqué outfits had been captured in the shot, and I'd hoped I was imagining things — but two wives? Seriously?
Absolutely unforgivable.
Two? TWO? You have TWO of them?
ㄴDruid) Yep, two!
ㄴHeadMod) What on earth did you DO to end up with two wives?!
That traitor. I'd felt a sense of kinship with him, if only for a moment, knowing he was also a version of me from a parallel world — and here he was living it up in an alpha male harem paradise.
What exactly separates him from me? We're both Kim Namwoo. We both went through the exact same awkward teenage years.
Which meant the only person left in the multiverse who could truly understand me was the Azure Sky Sword Emperor.
And that hope of mine—
ㄴAzure Sky Sword Emperor) Why is everyone in such an uproar? If we speak of wives, I myself have three.
—was obliterated, thoroughly and mercilessly.
Right there, I closed my eyes and quit the gallery.
There was no way I could breathe the same gallery air as these traitors.
The gallery-goers I knew weren't like this.
Ahh, how I miss it.
My homeland — the Hunter Gallery.
Of course, going back to the place that banished me wasn't exactly an option, but I am who I am.
For a veteran gallery-dweller like me, the art of Multiple Ghost-Account Clone Jutsu comes standard.
I was just about to hop back onto the gallery using a VPN and a ghost account when a worry crept into my mind.
In a world where the government was manipulating information to poison the galleries, was it really safe to log in this defenselessly?
The Kim Namwoo of the past would never have exercised this much intellect — but this was a truth I could only reach because I'd been venting my urges through the substitute that was the Parallel World Gallery.
"You don't even need to log in to browse the gallery!"
Like Archimedes shouting "Eureka!", having grasped this self-evident truth, I connected to the gallery like a normal, law-abiding person — no VPN, no ghost-account clone jutsu, for the first time in ages.
And thanks to that, Kim Namwoo slipped straight through the web that the Hunter Administration Bureau kept trained on anyone using a VPN, without so much as breaking a sweat.
Ah, this raw, wild energy.
I did not miss it. Not one bit.
JOAT.
Come to think of it, this place was called the Hunter Gallery, but were there even any actual hunters in it?
It felt less like a source of hunter intel and more like a place where people traded crude jokes and snickered at each other.
The closest thing to real information was the occasional hunter-related news story, and even those amounted to little more than "So-and-so Hunter cleared Floor whatever" or "This is what the Tower reward was."
The Tower reward stories, in particular, always racked up the upvotes — because beyond mere magic stones, world-shaking marvels had a way of popping out of the Tower, so they were always popular.
Among the most famous were a high-grade healing potion that supposedly worked on baldness, and something called a gender-swap ticket.
Both were items that stirred up plenty of controversy in more ways than one — which, naturally, meant they were absurdly expensive.
So there I was, drowning in this ocean of information. How many hours had I sunk into the gallery?
Suddenly, a ringing alarm chimed.
"What now?"
The sound of a familiar alarm made me turn my head.
"So it just levels up from lurking, too?"
The Parallel World Gallery had leveled up.
The central conference room of the Hunter Administration Bureau.
It had been a while since that room had been opened, and it was a place overflowing with lush rumors.
Rumors like how it was where the future of South Korea was debated, or that the words exchanged within it were vital technology driving society forward.
But nothing like those rumors was happening — from the lips of the hunters and Bureau officials gathered here, only negative voices were flying back and forth.
"So what exactly are we supposed to do here?"
"Right. The Tower's deadline is almost up."
"How about we concentrate all the current support on one single person? Me, for instance."
"You're talking out of your ass, you lunatic."
Every one of them was a superhuman who had climbed past the 30th floor — giants who, in name and in fact, held up the nation of Korea. Yet listening to their bickering, all they seemed to do was eye each other warily.
"Now, now, everyone, calm down."
It was then that Oh Dong-hyuk, Director of the Hunter Administration Bureau, spoke up.
"Times like these are precisely when all of you must join forces and clear the floor."
"What a joke."
"……."
"Cooperation this, cooperation that. Is that the only thing you know how to say?"
"Sua-nim, that's going too far."
"Oh, am I wrong? Hiding information about the Tower wasn't enough, and now what? The 'countermeasure' you're handing us is for us to sit around laughing and working hard together?"
BANG—!
The moment Choi Su-ah slammed her hand down on the table, flames erupted at her back, rapidly driving up the temperature of the room.
"You're damn right I am."
"That's enough. The Director surely has his reasons for everything, so surely you wouldn't act like this otherwise."
The one who stepped forward then was a muscular man with a crew cut.
"If the great Fist King himself is asking, I suppose I should stop?"
"…I don't believe I told you to call me that."
The man called the Fist King raised his fighting aura in turn, refusing to be outdone by Choi Su-ah.
The only one flustered by this display was Oh Dong-hyuk; the rest of the hunters watched with the calm of people witnessing a routine occurrence.
And small wonder. The deadline the Tower had set?
It had nothing to do with them.
The Tower was always like this.
It would hand down a fixed deadline and threaten that if the next floor wasn't cleared in time, it would kill that nation's citizens under the name of a "penalty."
And the Korean government — or rather, Oh Dong-hyuk, Director of the Hunter Administration Bureau — had covered it up and manipulated public opinion.
The Tower's difficulty is low.
Anyone who awakens can enter and clear it. That was the line they pushed.
People who believed those words, awakened, and entered the Tower died — but that had been deemed acceptable.
In fact, Oh Dong-hyuk had genuinely believed that this lie would produce a true hero from among the fakes.
Not a manufactured hero, but a genuine one.
Yes — just like the person who had once led the climb up the Tower.
"S-Sua-nim, surely you understand as well? The number of awakened people is fixed by the Tower, and to create a newly awakened one, someone already awakened must die."
"And if you pull that kind of garbage, what then?!"
"And yet it hasn't been without results!"
Oh Dong-hyuk hastily brought over a tablet and played the footage of Kim Namwoo clearing the 3rd floor.
"His movements are good."
"Yeah, he's nimble. He's got talent."
"At that level, he's worth cultivating."
"……."
"Well? Even now, will you say my method was wrong? If I hadn't kept filtering out the trash, a rough gem with this much talent would have been left abandoned, never awakening at all."
Oh Dong-hyuk delivered his rhetoric with the blind conviction of a man who believed himself unconditionally right.
Never mind that a spittle-flecked middle-aged man screaming like this was far from a pretty sight.
"So have you found out who it is?"
"Ah, that is… he's such a master of hiding himself that they haven't been able to identify him."
"A relief, regardless. To think Korea still had talent like that left."
"Right? Maybe nobody has to die this time."
"……."
Choi Su-ah found herself squeezing her eyes shut without meaning to.
They've lost it. All of them have gone completely insane.
It was easy enough for them to spout whatever they pleased — they were high-floor hunters, after all. Just emigrate abroad and you could dodge the Tower's penalty entirely.
But this was different.
The Director, who had gone mad since that man died.
The Fist King, Kwon Seo-jun, who either lacked the brains or the situational awareness and kept spouting nothing but nonsense.
And the rest of them, fools who thought of nothing but emigrating.
The only thought she could muster was that the situation was truly spiraling into madness.
And what was this, anyway?
The newly awakened hunter will clear the next floor for us?
Fine — the footage showed he had talent. She could admit that.
But with less than two months left on the Tower's clock, saying that now was no different from telling a complete stranger with zero information to climb the Tower at a floor a day.
Anyone could see it was madness — a suicidal act — and yet apparently the only person in the room who couldn't was the Director, chattering away in high spirits.
To be fair, Choi Su-ah herself had been drowning in despair since that man's death, unable to see any path to clearing the next floor. There wasn't much more she could say here.
"Hold on — that's—"
It was then that Choi Su-ah's eyes caught the sword Kim Namwoo was holding on the screen.
It looked like nothing more than an ordinary iron sword, but she could tell at a glance.
That was a sword she had forged with her own hands — the gift she'd given to that flicker of possibility she'd glimpsed not long ago.
At the memory of Kim Namwoo's face, Choi Su-ah's eyes began to gleam.