The Change Begins
"Ah, whatever."
If this ability ever got out, he could—bluntly speaking—end up snatched by secret agents, hauled off to some black site, and used as a research specimen. Or just killed. Unique Equipment, remote equipping, special abilities—not a single piece of it was ordinary.
Granted, he was spinning the most extreme scenarios his imagination could cook up, so maybe he was catastrophizing. But there was no law that said those things couldn't actually happen.
Whether simply putting equipment on someone even counted as "using an ability" was a gray area, but forcing gear onto a person that they themselves couldn't remove? That was absolutely the use of an extraordinary power. And it wasn't just equipment—anyone looking at it would call it body modification, plain and simple.
So I can pick a target and torment them like this? And make a fortune doing it? Yeah. I'd grab me too.
He resolved to find a realistic way to make money while staying as far off the radar as humanly possible. If she were an orphan like him, she'd have nowhere to turn and would just flounder—but if her parents were well-connected people with real social clout, they might start asking around. A timid personality might just bury the whole thing and never tell a soul. Still, assuming the worst and staying out of sight was the only smart play.
So what can I even do about it?
Honestly, all he could do right now was keep crafting equipment and live his life the same as always.
Just make money.
And since he'd already gone to the trouble of earning some, and trekking back to the Material Shop was a pain, he bought a hundred more of each material while he was at it. He'd considered picking up ingredients for other recipes, but decided it was smarter to stick with a method he'd already tested and bank some cash first, rather than gamble on different crafting methods and material prices. At least in the beginning, he needed to play it safe. Plus, crafting required pulling the materials out by hand, so he might need a decent amount of space.
A hundred of each had only cost him thirteen silver coins, leaving him with a comfortable ninety-five silver and seven hundred copper. Looking at his balance, he felt a solid, reassuring weight settle in his chest. When it came to getting through life, money was the scariest thing there was—and the most comforting.
It wasn't until he got home that he realized he could only store eight pieces of equipment. He'd completely forgotten, for a moment, that Unique Equipment couldn't be taken out and set down.
"Ah."
It was his first day making gear, and it showed—plenty of rookie mistakes. Heading back to the shop zone now would look way too suspicious, so he went as far as the front door, thought better of it, and came back. He'd just keep crafting in his room with what he'd already brought.
At ten minutes apiece, six an hour was the absolute ceiling—but without an equipment window, eight was the cap anyway. Still, at a million won a pop, that worked out to an hourly wage of six million. If he moved the leftover materials somewhere else and freed up the space, he could squeeze out two more. He scooped the bead-like mana stones and the goblin claws into an unused drawer and, wasting nothing, filled all ten slots.
"Oh, hell yes."
Finishing them felt good. The only letdown was that they were all Common grade. Selling these would net him a clean hundred silver coins.
Come to think of it, the convenience store where he worked might have been in a designated zone too. He'd never actually checked. A quick search on his phone showed it was just barely overlapping the boundary. Naturally, the app for accessing the Material Shop was available there—but he was so worried that even a download history might make him a tracking target that he only searched, never installed.
Maybe it's better to go in for my shift, sell the gear I've already made, browse the materials and sketch out a plan, then come back to the goshiwon to craft and sell whenever I have time.
Since the store sat on the edge of a zone where he could see the Material Shop, he could theoretically force some crafting into his break—but making things out in the open felt like a surefire way to get his crafting ability noticed.
It's not like I can stockpile them and sell them later anyway.
He managed to soothe his impatience and kept turning plans over in his head. The one silver lining was that he could check in real time, through her shape, that she was still asleep. Watching her sleep without the faintest clue about the state of her crotch was, somehow, a little reassuring.
Yeah. Coward meta. Take it slow.
Crafting anywhere else was absolutely off the table. Having to sit still for ten minutes doing nothing was already unnerving enough. Pinching leftover scraps of time might blow the whole plan. He still didn't even know how long other equipment took to make. For now, he'd commit to crafting exactly one new piece of Unique Equipment per day. The lingering attachment to those leftover ninety materials? He let it go.
All that's left is for me to get rich.
"Haaah."
Feeling frustrated with himself—feeling like an idiot—he resolved to think things through more carefully and move with more caution. He'd been too impatient. Times like these, you needed to give yourself room to breathe, so he made a conscious effort to ease up. Whether this even counted as easing up was another question.
He had a shift tomorrow, so he tried to sleep. The rush of crafting his first Unique Equipment, equipping it, and selling it, though, made it nearly impossible. After a long stretch of tossing and turning, Minwoo finally drifted off.
The hour he fell asleep, morning arrived, and a young woman slowly opened her eyes.
Kang Jia. Twenty-one years old. Currently a university student.
She had awakened a formidable ability, climbed as far as the thirteenth floor, and broken into the top hundred thousand—Rank 71,903. She was even a member of the well-known Changwoon Guild, though the contract she'd signed respected her wishes: they would help her finish university before pushing her to climb the Tower in earnest.
People might assume every hunter who cleared the same floor shared the same rank, but the order actually shifted according to their assets. And since those assets were calculated solely in gold, silver, and copper coins—no cash—plenty of people dismissed the ranking as meaningless. There were even hunters with excellent abilities, like Jia herself, who simply weren't climbing. Still, it was an open secret that the two people sitting on the boundary between floors were, respectively, the poorest hunter on the floor above and the richest on the floor below. Who had cleared which floor, and how much they actually had, was private information; guilds and hunters pieced it together through back-channel sharing, nothing more.
Among thirteenth-floor hunters, she sat in the mid-to-upper range, holding more than a full gold coin in assets. Her ability belonged to the elemental manipulation type: the free-form control of water. Its name was—
Water Spirit
Although she could only control water she had created herself from mana, it was rare by any measure. She could drink it, wash with it, even fire it like bullets. Considering that most people who awakened ended up with crafting-type abilities or some trivial physical enhancement, she had been lucky in more ways than one.
That luck had, in the end, landed her in this situation—but looking at the ability itself, the Unique Equipment was a stroke of fortune too. And she was already sitting on more than a hundred million won at twenty-one. There was no comparison to Minwoo, an orphan scraping by on a convenience-store wage in a goshiwon.
Her father worked at a major conglomerate; her mother was a professor of English literature. The family was elite through and through. She had been a strong student even before awakening, which was how she had gotten into the famous Hankuk University Mana Department—a genuine talent. Love calls had come from everywhere, and not just guilds: idol agencies, modeling firms, the works. Of course her looks backed it up. She'd make a perfectly serviceable face for a guild down the line.
The reason she was still a virgin was simple: she'd been saving it. It was her first time, so it mattered, and she simply hadn't done it yet. She was, of course, currently dating a university senior. They'd been together about ninety days already. He was in a different guild, but he was a returning student in the same Hankuk University Mana Department—Choi Seokhoon, Rank 12,776. He was well-built and on the handsome side, and around the hundred-day mark she was agonizing over whether to give herself to him completely.
When it came to judging virginity, the system apparently counted only the physical hymen—not the mental or spiritual kind. And right now, because of Minwoo, her virginity was being forcibly protected.
It was Friday, and as usual she had no morning classes, so she'd slept in. She sat dazed on the edge of the bed—and then a strangely scratchy sensation at her crotch made her frown. Spring was already on its way out; had a mosquito gotten in and bitten her?
The feeling was faintly stinging, too. She slipped her pajama pants and panties down and checked.
What met her eyes was not the pretty, smooth crotch with its modestly grown pubic hair. It was a different shape entirely. She had been expecting a rash, or a mosquito bite. This was unbelievable. It looked like someone else's crotch, and for a long moment she just sat there blinking, wondering if she was seeing things in her half-asleep haze.
She had never seen another woman's pussy—but she had certainly never seen a crotch this vulgar. The pubic hair she'd kept trimmed had grown out, bristling like stubble. And the patch dyed crimson in the middle of it was bordering on grotesque.
Fresh morning sunlight streamed in, lighting her crotch in cheerful brightness. Because she was looking down from above, she hadn't yet seen that it was a heart. But as it dawned on her that this hideous shape filling her vision was her own crotch, she sucked in a breath that went nowhere.
"Hhk!"
In a panicked scramble she bolted to the mirror, yanked her pants and panties straight down, and examined herself up close. And only then did it register: her pubic hair had been dyed into a crimson heart.
"What the hell..."
So this was what people meant when they said your brain just stopped—when something this far removed from reality hit you out of nowhere. She stood there stammering, checking her crotch over and over. Her pretty face twisted, unable to process the impossibility in front of her.