Finding a Target
Hasn't everyone, at least once in their life, dreamed of winning the lottery? Or at least let the fantasy play out in their head?
In this day and age, with hunters running rampant across the world and raking in fortunes as they climb the Towers, that particular dream has shifted a little. Not by much — people just dream of awakening a good ability instead.
Those who've already drawn a dud of an ability live ordinary lives. Those who haven't awakened yet get to cling to the dream a little longer. The outcome, though, is more or less the same.
"Hah."
Seo Minwoo stared at the ability that had appeared before his eyes and let out a long sigh.
When he'd first awakened, he'd been so thrilled he nearly shouted out loud — cramped goshiwon room be damned.
But the ability he'd awakened was a crafting-type. The kind that sat at the very bottom of public perception.
Still, he'd held out a sliver of hope that it might at least be a decent crafting skill. Then he read the description. It was a piece of equipment-crafting garbage so grotesque he'd never even heard of anything like it.
Virgin Bitch Shitty Gyaru Equipment Crafting Ability
That was the precise name of his ability.
The name alone was so vulgar and so utterly useless-looking that despair was already setting in. At this rate, he was going to spend the rest of his life as a convenience store clerk, rotting in a goshiwon, living the same day over and over until he died.
This wasn't why he'd clawed his way into Seoul and forced himself to stick it out.
"Haaah."
His sigh only grew deeper.
For the next several days, he analyzed his ability from every possible angle. His stats were as follows:
A truly unremarkable set of stats.
Even ordinary people with no combat aptitude supposedly hit 10 in both Stamina and Mana when they awakened. He was below average. Bottom of the barrel.
The fact that a status window he couldn't see as a regular person was now visible meant he had definitely awakened. The ability name had some bizarre words stuck to it, but otherwise it was exactly as other awakened people had described — just his ability, his Stamina, and his Mana. That was the whole window.
No matter how many times he checked, there was no mistake. This was the ability he'd awakened with.
"Haaah."
He let out a sigh for what felt like the hundredth time and inspected his ability again, hoping there might be some hidden secret.
Of course there wasn't.
Still, the urge to actually use it won out. If he dug deep enough, he might still live a better life than a convenience store clerk.
You never know.
Naturally, if that was all the window showed, how was anyone supposed to know how to use their ability?
Surprisingly, tapping the ability brought up a written explanation — like a board game's class instruction booklet. What the ability could do, and how to use it. For something that had been dumped on him out of nowhere, it was remarkably thorough compared to the status windows in most fiction.
Minwoo read through his ability carefully.
Comparing it against information online, there were more differences from other crafting-types than he'd expected. He didn't assume other crafters had revealed everything, but a difference was a difference.
The absurdly vulgar ability name aside.
Ordinary crafting-type ability users took materials harvested from the Towers, processed them, and used their abilities to produce equipment. If they gained additional effects in the process — or if they hit a lucky jackpot proc — they made a killing. Of course, acquiring and processing those materials cost a fortune, so a failure meant going into the red. The crafting-types whose abilities already granted extra effects were all already in guilds.
Nobody even looked for a crafter unless they had an exceptional ability.
On top of that, equipment was bought, sold, broken, repaired, reused, and discarded in an endless cycle. Consumables, in the truest sense of the word. There was no such thing as Unique Equipment like in novels. No soulbound gear, either. Equipment was just equipment. It didn't even distinguish between men and women, or account for body shape.
You bought it, stole it, borrowed it, or were given it. In the early days after people first started awakening, a fair number of hunters who died inside the Towers had probably died because of their equipment.
Equipping gear was extremely simple. Drop it into your inventory's equipment slot and it auto-equipped. Take it out and it auto-unequipped. You couldn't put external items into your inventory, but items obtained from the Towers or equipment crafted via an ability could go in.
That said, putting equipment in your inventory didn't count as wearing it, so it was useless — and transferring something from the equipment slot to the inventory also dropped its specs. If you actually wore it around, though, someone could physically strip it off you. Someone could steal it while you slept. The convenience was limited to putting it on and taking it off.
And of course, if you died, you spat it all back out.
He hadn't seen it himself, but the information was solid. At the higher ranking tiers, there were supposedly consumable items in the equipment-protection category, but those were extremely rare and expensive, so they weren't used much.
His ability, however, produced equipment whose owner was a single person — the one he designated at the start. In other words, Unique Equipment, appearing in the world for the first time.
To his eyes, it looked more like a curse than anything else.
"Right now I can only register one person... and the fact that it doesn't distinguish between men and women is a little terrifying."
Could a man even have the modifier virgin bitch shitty gyaru attached to him?
He filtered the filthy thoughts crowding his mind for a moment and started scouting for a target.
The one silver lining of this ability was that it showed a Compatibility Score before you imagined a target and registered them. The Compatibility Score was a 100-point evaluation across four categories.
1. Appearance(25)
2. Potential(25)
3. Intelligence(25)
4. Stamina(25)
He had no idea whether the system simply didn't care about anything else, but he accepted it. The most important baseline, of course, was that the target had to be a virgin. The fact that the evaluation method appeared separately from the status window was another curious detail.
"Hmm."
Information was better than no information, at least.
Appearance meant a pretty face, literally. It didn't seem to look at anything else — face only. He didn't know if there was a universal standard of beauty, but apparently a face that everyone would call pretty by the system's criteria was worth 25 points.
Potential was the numerical value of the abilities that could be gained when his equipment was equipped. He judged this to be the most important category, no question.
Intelligence seemed to be a comprehensive judgment of ability-usage sense, IQ, knowledge, application, and so on. Since it was the system's evaluation, it was probably accurate. He didn't think too hard about it.
Lastly, Stamina assessed not just basic endurance and muscle strength, but also the body's capacity to accept the equipment, mana capacity, recovery, and other comprehensive factors.
It was a far more thorough document screening than he'd expected.
For several days, he checked customers who came into the convenience store during his shifts, and scanned people on the street as he walked around. Non-awakened: couldn't register. Not a virgin: couldn't register. Stamina, Intelligence, Potential — nobody scored more than one or two points in any of them. And they had to be virgins by adult standards.
These days, the pretty ones all got experience back in school. Was he even going to find anyone on the street?
"Haaah."
This wasn't going to work. He went back to his goshiwon, lay down, and picked up his phone. Better to search among people who were already verified.
Surprisingly, this world had a ranking system based on how far people had climbed the Towers. Not every awakened person had to register, but you had to register if you wanted to climb, so a minimum of information was on file.
He'd been curious whether this would work for registration too, so he started plugging names in one by one, in ranking order.
"Oh!"
It worked.
Feeling considerably more at ease, he decided to try registering them one by one as he scrolled down. He filtered out the men. Per the description, men could be entered too, but he yanked them out immediately for fear of accidentally registering one.
The numbers on Heo Junghyeok, the Rank 1 hunter he'd checked by accident, were staggering.
A full 92 out of 100.
So that's what it took to be number one. The high Potential still left a sour taste in his mouth. The guy almost certainly had sexual experience, so was the system counting him as a virgin? Then again, a man who wasn't a virgin was also a little frightening in its own way.
"Hmm."
There really was only one woman in the top 10.
The old debates about women's quotas and all-female parties flashed through his mind, but he moved on immediately. What mattered to Minwoo right now was a registerable woman.
Rank 8. A healer, famous for her pure, delicate looks. She wasn't a virgin.
"Ugh."
He'd expected as much, but confirming it himself left a bitter taste.
Obviously Heo Junghyeok, her own party member, already fucked her.
Women who couldn't be registered: instant pass.
After that, he dropped farther down the list than he'd expected. He'd never thought about it, but he'd assumed men and women would sit at similar ratios not just in the top 10 but afterward too. There were far more men. Maybe because climbing the Tower was a form of labor, so more men did it. Or maybe the people willing to risk their lives were disproportionately male. He couldn't know the exact reason, but what mattered to Minwoo was Compatibility Score.
And there were far too many people who weren't virgins. Finding a virgin was actually the harder part.
Climb the Tower together, catch feelings, have sex. He'd heard that living with your life on the line created a lot of situations that got people worked up. He'd expected it, but getting this little peek into the world they lived in left him bitter all over again.
Here he was, holed up in a goshiwon, chewing over problems like this. Meanwhile those people were raking in money and fucking to their hearts' content.
"Haaah."
Another sigh, and he looked at more women.
He scrolled for a long time before a woman finally qualified as a target — all the way past rank 1000.
"Ah."
The Potential was far too low. He filtered her out without a second thought. She was pretty enough, probably thanks to makeup, which was a little disappointing.
If I search and search and still come up empty, I can always register her then.
He scrolled much farther, and another one came through at rank 2701.
"Pass."
Nine out of twenty-five was just too low. Even with makeup covering for her, the face was a letdown.
He kept scrolling. This one filtered for one reason, that one for another, on and on without end.
Isn't there a single pretty, high-Potential virgin ranker out there?
He let out a hollow laugh at the absurdity of his own thought.
He had nothing else to do all night anyway, so he kept scrolling down the ranking board and checking. The next day he came back from his shift and checked the board. The day after that, the same thing.
The ranking board went up to 100,000, so he kept scrolling, believing a suitable person would appear before he hit the bottom.