Illegal Elixir (1)
Tsssss!
Meat sizzled and browned over the grill.
Pork belly, fat and lean layered in perfect proportion. Could there really be a soul with Korean blood in their veins who hated this?
"Hyung, have a seat. I'll grill it for you."
"Ah, come on. You know I hate that stuff? I'll do the grilling, so you go sit down and eat."
"That's, uh... the thing is, I don't think anyone can eat meat grilled by you, hyung..."
"......"
I quietly nudged the charred lump of what had once been meat into the fire pit.
Peeling fruit, grilling meat — delicate work like this really was beyond me.
'Maybe I should just run three skills simultaneously.'
In the end, I sheepishly took a seat at the table.
A night in Gangneung. The ocean after dark had its own charm.
"Ehehehe~ You're just the cutest little thing...!"
Shin Yeon-hee, grinning ear to ear, buried her face into a ball of fur.
"Kyeng?!"
The fur ball in question was Rir. Since there was no point hiding it anymore, I'd come clean and introduced her openly. Of course, I left out anything about class-change quests or class skills, and spun it as a hidden skill I'd picked up during the week I'd gone missing.
"Abububububu!"
"Kyeng!"
Deep in her cups, Shin Yeon-hee was unleashing her baby-talk assault on the poor creature. Rir turned to me with the desperate, pleading eyes of a drowning man begging for a rope.
"...I'm sorry."
"Kyeng?!"
Who could have guessed that alcohol turned Shin Yeon-hee into that?
"Before Rir showed up, she used to do that to me..."
"You've suffered much..."
Shin Min-woo gave a bitter laugh as he flipped the meat.
"You're amazing, hyung. First that spear, and now you command such an adorable summon, too."
He picked out the pieces cooked to perfection and set them down in front of me. I popped one into my mouth, and a flavor nothing short of transcendent spread across my tongue.
"...You're actually good at this."
"Heheh. Try my grilling once, and you'll never escape its pull."
The boy had genuine bragging rights, no denying it.
"Uuuh... Guild masterrrr..."
Shin Yeon-hee had finally liberated Rir from her clutches and was now staggering toward me. 'How many bottles of soju has she put away alone?' There had to be at least five empty bottles rolling around at her feet. A truly colossal drinker.
"You know... you know I'm really, really grateful to you... right...?"
"I know."
"If it weren't for you, Guild Master, I'd really still... Hck! Sob..."
And then the tears came, right on schedule.
"Haa, I'm really not the crying type, you know that...! It's just, I'm so thankful to our Guild Master I don't know what to do with myself...!"
After hiccupping her way through a good long cry, she abruptly shot to her feet.
"Guild Masher! I'm walking on two legths again!"
"Ah. Yes."
Congratulations. Truly. Now, would you kindly walk in the opposite direction?
"Onward! To the future~!"
Perhaps she wanted to show off how sturdy her legs were now — she marched straight off along the beach path until she vanished from sight.
...Her rehabilitation seemed to be going well.
"......"
"...I'm sorry about her."
Shin Min-woo turned his head and offered the apology awkwardly.
"But my sister means it. She still tells me all the time that she worries she'll never be able to repay everything you've done for her."
"A worry like that is unnecessary. She's already signed a lifetime contract."
Still, I treated them well. That was the rule — the closer someone was to you, the more generously you had to treat them, so the knife never found your back later on.
"...Our names are really similar, aren't they, unnie...?"
"......"
"Seo-ha... Seo-ah... Kheheheh. Someone really phoned it in when they named us..."
In a corner of the gathering, Baek Seo-ha and Ah Seo-ah were deep into their cups, holding a conversation that defied all comprehension.
"...How peaceful."
And then, unbidden, a thought brushed across my mind — that thing which had come to feel so foreign to me.
"You not drinking, hyung?"
"Nope. I've drunk my lifetime's worth already."
There was a time when I couldn't sleep a wink without it. The me drifting ever further from the name Cheonseong, the me falling lower and lower, growing uglier by the day. Alcohol let me forget, at least for a little while.
"By the way, you don't have to drink, do you?"
"I tried a glass earlier, and... why on earth does anyone drink this? Coke tastes way better."
No wonder he'd been hauling that box of soju around so enthusiastically earlier. Not a love of drink — pure curiosity.
"Honestly, I don't know anymore either. Why anyone drinks this stuff."
I didn't want to drift away from this reality anymore. Nights spent trading idle chatter like this — I had dreamed of this small shard of peace, again and again, for longer than I could count.
But the more I sank into it, the more a cold current of vigilance welled up from somewhere deep inside me.
'Because ruin can tear this scene away at any moment.'
No matter how much I wanted to rest easy, the moment I closed my eyes, that world rose up before me in unbearable clarity. Ruin and apocalypse. They had seeped horrifically deep into my bones — too deep to be washed away by scraps of borrowed peace.
'This much peace is all I'm entitled to. It's enough.'
And so this time, I would block the catastrophe. Without fail.
Bzzzt.
My pocket buzzed. For an instant I mistook it for a call, and my eyes darted — entirely without my permission — toward Baek Seo-ha.
"......"
She was already face-down on the table, fast asleep. 'Darkening' state or not, nothing about that needed my attention.
A message. The sender was Ji Yeon-ha.
The contact I'd been waiting for. Time to return to the battlefield.
After returning from Gangneung, I headed straight for the Magic Tower in Yeouido.
"There you are."
As if she'd been waiting for me, Ji Yeon-ha cut straight to business.
"First — the analysis of the fragment is fully complete. We've identified the original host, too."
"You can even do that?"
"Anyone could, with a bit of resourcefulness."
I couldn't quite shake the feeling that this "resourcefulness" was power and money.
"Just as you said, traces of a human were found in the fragment. It shocked even me."
Just as I'd suspected. The monster at City Hall Station had been a transformed human being.
"The human who served as the host was one Gwak Dae-hyuk. A C-rank hunter belonging to the Blue Rake Guild."
Ji Yeon-ha conjured the man's face in midair with a flick of magic. An ordinary middle-aged man, somewhat thin on top.
"Hold on. The Blue Rake?"
Wasn't that the very guild slotted into the preliminary rounds of the upcoming guild war? To think something like this had been happening far closer to home than I'd imagined.
"That said, his movements since then are rather suspicious. Take a look at this."
Ji Yeon-ha handed over a file. Inside were numerous photographs — not of Gwak Dae-hyuk, but of a different man entirely.
"And this would be...?"
"Jin Han-seong, the Blue Rake's guild master. Or rather, their former guild master, I should say."
"Which means..."
"The Blue Rake Guild has already disbanded and vanished. The timing lines up roughly with the City Hall Station incident."
"...So the odds are high this wasn't the lone act of a single guild member."
It was too convenient to be coincidence. The Blue Rake had no reason whatsoever to disband so abruptly at that particular moment — by every account in the file, their trajectory had been on a steady, healthy climb.
"Jin Han-seong's whereabouts went murky the instant he dissolved the guild. And recently, he's been resurfacing here."
Ji Yeon-ha snapped her fingers, and a map of the Korean peninsula unfurled before us. One region glowed red.
"Busan."
This case was getting interesting. The moment a guild member turned into a monster, the guild master abruptly dissolves the guild and goes to ground — and now, of all places, he's reappeared in Busan.
"That's as far as my investigation goes."
"Thank you. This helps enormously."
This was something I'd have to go dig out myself, on-site.
'Let's go. To Busan.'
A harbor heavy with the smell of brine. Someone moved furtively through the dark of night, slipping from shadow to shadow until they reached a concealed spot — and made contact with a man in a long coat who had been waiting there.
"You're way too late!"
"Then go get it yourself if you're gonna whine. You think procuring this stuff is easy?"
The man grumbled as he handed over the bag he'd been carrying. The other cracked it open just enough to check — bundles of banknotes, packed tight.
"Heh heh heh. You pay up reliably, I'll give you that."
The coat smiled thinly and passed back a second bag. Inside glimmered several pills, shimmering with a faint violet haze.
"So this is the elixir...!"
"It's momentary, sure, but it'll outperform most A-rank or S-rank elixirs. Just don't be an idiot and swallow a bunch at once."
"Yeah, yeah, I got it. Kikikikik!"
Clutching the elixir, the man glanced around and melted into the night.
"Another tidy payday."
Looking at the bag fat with cash, his heart seemed to warm along with it. After waiting a good while, he picked his moment and slipped out of the harbor.
Creeeak!
His destination: inside a shipping container left beside a construction site. This was no ordinary location. It was the hideout of a criminal ring dealing in illegal elixirs, with the man in the coat at its head.
"Deal's done."
"Fat haul again today, eh? Heheh!"
Three hunters, himself included, made up this operation. One of them — a bald wall of muscle — was already drooling over the stack of bills.
"And all we do is move the product! They pay us this much just for distribution!"
"We're the lucky bastards, that's for damn sure."
A hunter with a scar carved across his face smirked and picked up one of the elixirs.
"What is it with these things, everyone clawing each other's eyes out to buy them? Maybe I'll try one myself."
"Give it up, man. You eat that carelessly and you're genuinely screwed."
The man counting money in his chair — Jin Han-seong, guild master of the former Blue Rake — didn't even look up.
"Eat that wrong and you'll turn into a monster."
"What a load of crap. A human turns into a monster? Please."
"Then don't believe me. Eat it, get hunted down as a threat, and die. Just know that your share of the money's mine when you do."
"Haah... fine, fine. Not eating it. I won't eat it."
The scarred hunter set the elixir down with a snicker.
"By the way — this place really is safe, right?"
"Relax. I paid through the nose to have a barrier installed."
Jin Han-seong replied, his eyes still glued to the cash.
"To crack this barrier, see through it, and get inside? You'd need to be at least a World Ranker."
"Oh, for real? So that means Rir's senses are World Ranker-tier."
"...?"
A man none of them had ever seen before was standing inside the container. At some point — without any of them noticing — he had simply come to occupy a place among them.
"Wow, nice barrier you've got here. Must be something else, huh, if Rir had to sniff it out and track it all the way from a distance."
"Wh-what the—?! Who the hell are you?!"
"Ugh. My ears work fine, so keep it down."
The man picked at his ear, grimacing.
"Wow, you guys are loaded, huh? So how'd you earn all this?"
"You insane bastard!"
The buzzcut swung his fist.
"DIE!"
"Oh."
The uninvited guest — Lee Tae-hyun — didn't dodge. He caught the punch clean out of the air.
"You're hunters, huh?"
"Wh-what strength is this...?!"
The buzzcut twisted and thrashed with everything he had, but he couldn't pry himself free of Lee Tae-hyun's grip.
"My stats went up a while back, see? Be a good sport and help me test them."
Crack-crack-crack-CRUNCH!
Lee Tae-hyun simply closed his fist, crushing the man's hand to pulp.
"AAAAAAGH!"
"Ugh, you're loud."
A single blow to the jaw put him to sleep.
"Next up is..."
Before anyone could even register the order of things, the scarred hunter had drawn his sword and lunged at Lee Tae-hyun.
"A swordsman this time?"
"Die, you son of a—!"
Again, Lee Tae-hyun didn't dodge. The blade met his body — and then —
"Wh-what the...?!"
The edge couldn't even break his skin. It just... stopped.
"I went back into the training grounds for another round recently."
This time he hadn't entered chasing a new trait, but to reinforce the ones he already had. And among them was one trait that had gained a rank.
Steel Bones (A)
A body tempered beyond mortal limits — blades break before bones do.
"You absolute freak... Ghk—!"
CRACK!
A headbutt, and the man's skull caved.
All that remained now was...
"S-stay back!"
"I've been looking for you, Jin Han-seong."
One old friend he had a very long conversation saved up for.