Never Mind the Heir, I’ll Focus on Healing — Chapter 1
Never Mind the Heir, I’ll Focus on Healing — Chapter 1
Sharp LED lights.
The office, bright enough to sting the eyes, was utterly still.
Everyone was tapping at keyboards and moving their mice with sunken eyes.
Taking on work, processing it, pitching ideas, holding meetings, producing materials.
Silent but fiercer than anywhere else: the typical look of a midsize company.
Baek Yi-hyeon, who was in charge of the Overseas Business Team 2, was no exception.
No, he was the same—except he was a little busier.
Clack-clack—clack—
“Whoa, General Manager Baek. The project barely wrapped up, and you’re already back in overdrive mode?”
A coworker who had taken a half-day off and come in late asked, visibly taken aback.
“Please don’t say things like that. ‘General Manager,’ really.”
“Why not? Today’s the day the CEO signs off, right. It’s obvious what’s coming.”
“He’s right!”
Seizing the opening, team members chimed in one by one.
“This Indonesian export deal you landed is massive.”
“Honestly, without you, who knows what would’ve happened with this project. How do you manage to figure out exactly what the buyers want… I seriously want to learn!”
“Hey, hey, that’s basically his superpower. I’ve been tailing him trying to learn for years, and I still can’t do it.”
At this point, it seemed beyond just buttering him up.
Baek Yi-hyeon really had racked up staggering results.
He had landed a contract to export the company’s pharmaceuticals to a certain company in Indonesia—the world’s fourth-most populous country.
To be precise, the contract was just about to be finalized, and all that remained was recognition of his performance.
Before the contract could be signed, they needed confirmation that Baek Yi-hyeon had been in charge of the project.
“It’s all thanks to everyone’s help.”
“Aww, there you go again. All we did was pull materials from KOTRA or local sources for you—you handled everything else. Even the buyers were crazy about you.”
“Exactly. Even a CEO who plays people off against each other like him will have to side with you this time. How hard have you been working? You’ve basically been heading home once every three days.”
Just as he was having a lively exchange with his team, an HR staffer carefully called out to Baek Yi-hyeon from the side.
“Um, Team Leader Baek? Executive Director Park wants to know if you can talk now.”
“The Executive Director?”
Baek Yi-hyeon tilted his head.
‘Not Director so-and-so? Something’s off.’
Executive Director Park.
A parachute hire brought in as a relative of the CEO, commonly known as the Carrier Pigeon.
He was notorious for delivering the messages the CEO found too difficult to say himself.
‘At a time like this, they’re calling for me?’
It didn’t feel right.
The other team members must have sensed the incongruity too, because the friendly atmosphere sank in an instant.
“…No way. That thing we’re all thinking—it can’t be that, right?”
When one team member spoke up, the mood grew even colder.
* * *
The moment Baek Yi-hyeon got home, he threw himself onto the bed.
“What a load of crap…”
Bad feelings had a way of coming true.
-Regarding this contract… would you mind stepping aside?
-Do you know that the Overseas Business Team 1 leader is the CEO’s youngest son? He may be the CEO’s son in name, but he still needs at least one respectable accomplishment, doesn’t he?
-Of course, I know exactly what kind of heart you’ve put into your work. Next project, I will absolutely credit it as your achievement, so just this once, please yield.
He had received an utterly absurd proposal.
‘A proposal, my ass.’
That atmosphere, that attitude.
They had already decided, yet they were pretending to seek his consent, pretending to be sorry.
Any refusal would clearly be rejected.
The talk of a next project was clearly a sham.
‘Obviously the same thing will keep happening from now on.’
He could see it plainly: working like a beast of burden while that CEO’s son swiped all the credit.
There was no future.
Not for the company, not for him.
But he didn’t want to accept the situation and keep his head down and live like a ghost either.
So in the end, he let it all out.
-Haah… this is so dirty I can’t stomach it anymore.
-Wh-What?!
He revealed the personality he had hidden for years, turned the company upside down in one outburst, hurled the resignation letter he’d been carrying, and went home.
He felt liberated.
He’d done it in a fit of rage, but he had no regrets.
He’d already done more than enough, and he was confident he could get back on his feet.
“Yeah, since it’s come to this…”
Maybe he would live for himself for a while.
Fwoop!
Baek Yi-hyeon sprang up and went to his computer.
Back when he worked at the company, he used to let his imagination run wild about what he’d do if he quit.
Otherwise, enduring the crushing reality had been too hard.
Of all those fantasies, the very first thing he’d wanted to do wasn’t relaxing comfortably, or sleeping in until noon, or traveling for good food.
It was gaming.
“How long has it been?”
The game he’d had to quit to throw himself into the job market.
<In the World>.
It was one of many ordinary MMORPGs, but its PVP and raids, and its gathering and crafting—
in other words, its combat-focused and life-skills playstyles—were so perfectly divided that you could enjoy the game exactly the way you liked.
It updated fairly often too, so cracking new content was satisfying.
And above all, it was a nostalgic game that had been with Baek Yi-hyeon since childhood, so he had an unusual affection for it.
At one point, he had played like a madman.
“About ten years, maybe?”
Adding the job-hunting period and the time he’d rotted away at the company, it seemed to be around that long.
“It hasn’t been hacked in the meantime, right?”
Truthfully, he hadn’t even set up password refreshing or OTP, so even if it had been hacked, he couldn’t complain.
Sure enough.
He lifted the dormant account status and carefully checked his account…
[No Primary Character has been set. Would you like to set one?]
“…What kind of scumbag cleanly deletes only the characters?”
The cash he’d loaded long ago was still fully intact, but the characters alone had vanished without a trace.
Archer, Priest, Assassin, Druid… even the alts he’d poured as much money and affection into as his main, all of them.
Oddly enough, the most valuable thing—the cash balance—was untouched. It made no sense.
But Baek Yi-hyeon accepted it with surprising calm.
“Well, it can happen.”
If it had been him ten years ago, he would have thrown a wild fit.
But now that he was a battle-worn office worker, it left him with only a twinge of regret.
“Eh, since it’s like this, I can just raise a new character without any lingering attachments.”
A long time had passed, so he’d lost any obsession with the game.
He only wanted to revisit an old comfort game and indulge in a little nostalgia.
“Now then, has anything changed?”
Baek Yi-hyeon was humming <In the World>’s BGM while browsing the homepage when, at some point, his brow furrowed deeply.
“What’s with the last update?”
Baek Yi-hyeon rubbed his eyes and looked at <In the World>’s update history again.
Scroll, scroll.
No matter how many times he scrolled down, scrolled up, or clicked…
“The last substantive update was four years ago?”
There had been updates as recently as two weeks ago, but they were what gamers dismissed as “non-updates.”
Mostly bug fixes, cosmetic item additions, or server stabilization.
Now that he looked, the homepage UI and design still looked like they were from ten years ago.
Some banners even showed garbled characters because they were in a Flash format nobody used anymore.
“Has the game… died?”
Sure enough.
When he opened his mailbox, there was a message from the game company.
Stripping away all the preamble and small talk, the gist was this:
<Thanks to you, Hero, In the World has achieved peace. Thank you for your hard work.>
<Now, we hope you will return to your own lives and enjoy a happy adventure.>
In other words, the official story was over.
“‘Return to your own lives,’ my ass.”
The game was barely alive, running on life support, kept online only by server maintenance.
He felt deflated by the harshness of passing time, and he even resented that a game he’d loved had ended up like this in that span.
If there was any silver lining, it was that he’d experienced <In the World> all the way to endgame content before jumping into the job market.
“Yeah. This probably won’t matter to me.”
In any case, whatever had become of the game, the character Baek Yi-hyeon was about to raise here was a fair distance from PVP and raids.
“A life-skills build.”
He didn’t want to experience injustice even inside a game.
He just wanted to be self-sufficient with life skills, to find the memories of those days and some peace of mind.
“I’ll do some fishing, pluck some herbs, and focus on healing.”
He casually put together a character and was about to press the connect button when
Baek Yi-hyeon’s fingertips hesitated.
“…Still, I should use up the leftover cash, right?”
Buying talents seemed less frustrating than starting from scratch.
-Purchased 5 Life-type Talent Random Boxes.
-Would you like to open them?
[Yes/No]
Baek Yi-hyeon pressed the “Yes” key five times in succession without hesitation.
The box-opening animation skipped briefly, and five talents written in bold lettering appeared.
[Expert’s Eye]
[Mana Allocation]
[Potion Crafting Specialization]
[Artisan’s Touch]
[Spirit Communion]
“Oh.”
Should he call it a returning player’s luck?
These were nothing short of a jackpot of talents.
If the talent limit per character wasn’t five, he would have even made extra purchases.
‘Especially [Expert’s Eye].’
It provided advantageous information not just for life-skill content but all across gameplay.
In other words, for a life-skills character, it was one of those talents you’d really be annoyed not to have.
Beyond that, [Potion Crafting Specialization], which granted all sorts of benefits for potion-type production, and [Mana Allocation] and [Spirit Communion], which could be used broadly in advanced crafting later—both were solid picks.
‘Originally, mindlessly gathering materials, grinding out crafts, and earning money is pretty rewarding.’
And then, when a probability-based skill like Artisan’s Touch triggered and a high-grade item came out, boom—the dopamine hit.
“Next, the character’s appearance…”
He wasn’t really that serious about customizing looks, but it was still better to aim for a bare minimum of handsomeness.
Going around with a default face made it far too easy to be called a gold farmer or a macro user.
Baek Yi-hyeon quickly finished setting the appearance and moved on.
“Good. Good. Let’s give this a try before it dies for good.”
Though he’d said it cynically, the thought of finally seeing and experiencing <In the World>’s world—the world he’d seen as a child—once more as an adult made his heart race.
An emotion he hadn’t felt once while working at the company.
Baek Yi-hyeon grinned like a kid who’d just gotten a new toy and pressed game start, and…
* * *
Then, one day, after he had spent about a month “inside” <In the World>.
“This wasn’t the kind of healing I wanted.”
Baek Yi-hyeon.
No—the eccentric known as Lion, whom even a family of archmages had given up trying to understand, was at it again…
Pop!
[You acquired Blue Basil!]
He was plucking weeds.