The Man Named Park Hyunmyung
“…This game is seriously fucking broken.”
In a dimly lit room, a man named Park Hyunmyung let out a long sigh, his brow furrowed deep.
The words Game Over glowing on his computer monitor had appeared so many times that they barely registered anymore.
“That bastard Andrew.”
The problem was Priest Andrew.
A priest who ran a shelter in the Balan Kingdom’s Knight’s Garden, performing good deeds for the people. He handed out so many honor-raising quests that he was practically a mandatory stop for anyone grinding reputation.
Most of them were simple, repetitive labor quests — but once you’d completed them more than three hundred times, the content began to shift, little by little.
Just how high does the difficulty go?
The content changed. The difficulty climbed. The rewards stayed exactly the same.
That was why he had earned a notorious reputation as the kind of NPC you fled from the moment you’d hit your target honor value, never looking back. A few gamers had suspected a hidden quest and kept pushing, but the endlessly escalating difficulty and the pitiful rewards eventually forced every last one of them to raise the white flag.
— It’s a waste of time and money. That NPC just likes screwing with people. And how many NPCs like that are there in Pangenia? One or two?
In a game where dying once deleted your character, no one could afford to throw time away on something pointless. So no one challenged him anymore.
No one — except Park Hyunmyung.
“Ah, shit. This is definitely a chain quest.”
He scratched hard at his scalp.
The reason Park Hyunmyung refused to give up on Priest Andrew was simple. He knew something no one else did.
“You’ve got a daughter you’re hiding. You want to save her. So why won’t you just ask?”
Andasar, who had become an Eldritch.
By pure chance, he had discovered where Priest Andrew’s hidden daughter was. She lay sealed in a corrupted land, and breaking that seal and purifying her required Andrew’s help.
But even after hundreds of repetitive quests, Priest Andrew never once mentioned his daughter. Hyunmyung had tried every bizarre stunt he could think of, hoping there might be some hidden condition. Nothing worked.
“The Eldritch’s Cursed Black Grimoire…… Without that, I can’t craft Unique-grade gear.”
A material item for Unique-grade equipment — obtainable only by purifying Andasar. Andrew clearly held the key. And yet the priest showed no sign of ever opening his heart.
Of course, it was possible the content had been cut, or simply hadn’t been updated yet. Maybe Andrew didn’t have the key at all.
“…Or maybe he thinks he’s not honorable enough himself. Maybe he’s throwing these quests out there because he’s waiting for someone truly honorable to appear.”
But Park Hyunmyung’s thoughts ran differently.
A priest with a daughter who had become a Lich. A man who deserved to be defrocked — and yet he was still here, healing people at the shelter. More diligently, more steadfastly than anyone. He never hesitated to extend a helping hand to those in need. He saved others, and yet could never save himself.
A man who considered himself dishonorable. That was Priest Andrew.
Was there anyone more wretched than him?
……He was pitiful beyond words.
I’ll save him.
That was why he wanted to free him. He wanted to liberate Priest Andrew.
Anyone else hearing this might have laughed — What feelings could you possibly have for an NPC? — but at some point, Park Hyunmyung had begun to invest Pangenia with a meaning that went far beyond a mere game.
He wanted to save the game itself.
In reality he was just another ordinary person, but here in Pangenia, Park Hyunmyung was the Knight King. A man who valued honor, vanquished evil, and saved people.
“If a thousand times isn’t enough, then ten thousand. And if ten thousand isn’t enough…… I’ll figure that out when I get there.”
In the end, realizing there was no clever answer, he chose the brute-force method. He logged in as Wilhelm and completed the repetitive quests roughly three thousand times. At last, thoroughly sick of it, Priest Andrew poured out the deeply buried truth of his circumstances.
They brushed past her.
Countless memories of “Park Hyunmyung,” flooding toward Isabella.
Innumerable deaths. Salvations. Stories.
The Park Hyunmyung she saw was a man who did not know how to give up. So much so that it bordered on madness.
And one of the peaks of that madness was the story of Priest Andrew.
A heart that no one had managed to open for long years — Park Hyunmyung had forced it open in the end. He had crossed endless repeating trials and countless brushes with death to finally arrive there.
Could she have done it?
No.
…She couldn’t. She was certain no one could. It was something that would have been impossible if it weren’t Park Hyunmyung. Without him, Priest Andrew would have despised himself until the day he died.
And this is only the tip of the iceberg.
What was even more astonishing was that this was truly just one challenge among countless others.
Other memories surfaced. Isabella pulled one of them free.
Isaac.
The story of “Isaac the Brain-Breaking Scammer.” The tale of a villain who had committed countless evil deeds and taken countless lives.
“What the hell is this place? Why is the starting point such a dump?”
Park Hyunmyung launched straight into complaints.
He had created a character and set only the starting point to random — and somehow he had begun in a place far outside anything he’d expected.
“A nameless slave mine? The scale’s bigger than I thought.”
Turning the map this way and that to check his surroundings, Park Hyunmyung could only tilt his head. Countless half-naked NPCs swung pickaxes at the ore veins. And the ones driving the slaves were all fully armed regular soldiers.
“Escaping isn’t going to be easy……”
Main Quest 1: Survive.
The content of the main quest never changed. The moment every character was created, they were given the quest to “Survive,” and most of them were dropped into utterly dire situations. Actual survival rates supposedly didn’t even reach fifty percent.
A ridiculous game that forced overwhelming death on you from the very start.
But Park Hyunmyung was a veteran of survival. The characters he built had a survival rate approaching ninety-nine percent on Main Quest 1.
Crack. Crackle!
He laced his fingers and cracked his knuckles. Rolling his neck left and right, he threw himself properly into the quest.
He ambushed the regular soldiers with a sharpened stone and punched through the mine along the shortest route he had already mapped out. He faced death roughly three times along the way, but extreme control carried him through every crisis. Then he changed into a regular soldier’s uniform and slipped out of the mine without further incident.
“So it was a hidden ‘Mine City’ that doesn’t even show on the map. No wonder I’d never seen it before.”
Only after a successful escape did he learn the mine’s true nature. Pangenia had several such hidden cities, and this Mine City was one of them. From the looks of it, people were being forcibly abducted, locked up, and worked to the bone.
“…Whoa. This place is insane.”
The more he uncovered about the city’s reality, the more he couldn’t help but marvel. It was a den of pure corruption. Corrupt priests of the Goddess Sect and numerous nobles from various nations all had their hands in it, turning a blind eye in exchange for a share of the treasures dug up from the mine.
Places like this weren’t unheard of in Pangenia — but among everything he’d seen, this one sat at the absolute top of the heap.
“Interesting.”
Perfect timing. He had planned to use this character for “evil deeds” anyway. If the operators were actually running this game, they would have no choice but to step in when an entire city simply vanished. Especially a city of this scale…… The related interests alone would be countless. At the very least, some kind of notice ought to go up.
That was when it began. The plan to collapse the mine and erase this vast city of evil from existence.
Step by step, from the bottom up, he hunted down everyone involved — killing them, tearing them apart, devouring them — and at last he buried the Mine City. The slaves were freed thanks to him, but every powerful figure connected to the mine was now hunting “Isaac” with fire in their eyes.
He had made far too many enemies. Without a top-tier appearance-altering potion, death was a certainty.
“…This game really is fucking broken.”
And still, not a single notice went up.
Shaking his head, he logged out from a safe zone. And Park Hyunmyung never logged back in as Isaac again. Naturally, they never met again — not until their reunion in the monster city of Kramdel.
It truly was a strange thing.
The memories of Park Hyunmyung moving Isaac. While under Hyunmyung’s control, Isaac — stricken with Divine Illness — had lost his memories. By the time his mind returned, he had somehow become a fugitive and drifted all the way to Kramdel.
If he hadn’t caught Divine Illness……
He would certainly have died. Isaac would have. In that hell of a mine.
And that wasn’t all. That hell of a mine would still be operating to this day.
It isn’t just Isaac.
……And that wasn’t the only strange thing.
Those stricken with Divine Illness. The people Park Hyunmyung had controlled. Every single one of their situations had been uniformly the worst imaginable. They had begun in circumstances with no way out, situations where death was already certain. Situations that truly demanded “survival.”
But wasn’t Divine Illness something you caught through bad luck? Or was it selected under specific conditions — for instance, people standing at the brink of death?
Even so, it was strange that only people who happened to be on the verge of dying at just the right moment would catch it.
…People who were already certain of their own deaths.
People who already knew. That they were about to die. People trapped in extreme situations, with no escape hatch in sight — those were the ones who caught Divine Illness.
Then I……
If that premise held, then she herself must have been facing the worst possible situation as well.
But Isabella’s expression hardened.
I can’t remember.
……Because the memories from the time she caught Divine Illness were still wiped clean. She had caught it in the Dercian family and drifted into the desert city of Faisalmer — that much was certain. But a young lady of a great imperial house, facing a life-or-death crisis there?
Did that make any sense?
“Ah……”
Her head suddenly throbbed. A pain like an awl boring through her skull. And before long, another memory brushed past.
This one was her own. Not a memory through Park Hyunmyung — but a forgotten memory of Isabella von Dercian herself.
It was a suffocating place.
This place — the Dercian family.
From the moment she first became aware of herself as a child, that was what she had thought.
“Mary. When am I going to die?”
One day, Isabella said this to Mary, the maid who looked after her. The woman tidying her sleeves went wide-eyed with shock.
“Young miss. What on earth are you saying? Why would you die?”
“I know everything. That I’m the ninth clone.”
“…No, that’s not— Isabella, you are absolutely not going to die.”
“Yes, I am. Before this year is out, I’ll be disposed of. Or sold off to Faisalmer like the other clones.”
“……”
“So you knew too, Mary?”
“Isabella……!”
Mary’s eyes shook violently. Isabella knew something she must never have known. Learning this truth ended in only one way: disposal.
“My little sisters are in the desert city of Faisalmer, aren’t they? They’re being sold to the Desert Queen. My sisters, and me too — because even if the odds are slim, we might awaken Jormungandr……”
“Shh! Please be quiet. I’ll pretend I didn’t hear a thing.”
Deathly pale, Mary fled the room in a hurry. After that day, Isabella never saw her again.
She didn’t care. Everyone in this family already knew. That she was someone’s clone. That she had been judged to have no potential, and would soon be disposed of or abandoned in the desert city.
Isabella gazed out the empty window at the birds wheeling through the sky and spoke.
“When am I going to die?”
She simply wanted to know. If she couldn’t escape it anyway — when she would die.
That was when it happened. One of the bluebirds wheeling overhead changed course and settled on the windowsill. It was rather curious, but Isabella asked without much feeling.
“Do you know?”
“Do you want to live?”
“……Huh?”
For a moment she thought she had misheard. A bird, talking?!
But she hadn’t misheard. The bird kept chirping.
“If there were a chance to grant one wish — even if you forgot everything and lost everything — wouldn’t you want to try?”
“What…… are you? How can a bird talk?”
“I am the operator of this world. Once this moment passes, you won’t remember meeting me anyway. So choose. Will you accept death as you are — or will you throw yourself into the flames like a moth, for the sake of a wish?”