The First Success Story
Jang Eun-sil’s family ran a small, unassuming kimbap shop in Busan. They were ordinary working-class people.
“Tuna kimbap and rabokki. That’ll be 9,000 won.”
“Over here!”
“Ma’am, we’d like to order!”
“Yes, coming right away!!”
“Just got back from a delivery…”
“Honey! You’re back at the perfect time. Take that table’s order.”
“Uh, sure. What can I get for you?”
The family consisted of a dependable eldest son, a soft-hearted second son, and one beloved youngest daughter who could do no wrong in their eyes.
Raising three children on a modest income was no small burden, yet there was a lively warmth to their bustling household that made it all worthwhile.
Thankfully, all three kids had grown up straight and healthy without causing any major worries. For Jang Eun-sil, that alone felt like an incredible blessing.
On top of that, they had even managed to buy their own home. By her standards, this was a successful life.
Yet lately, a shadow of worry had settled over her usually optimistic face. During the quiet moments between customers, she would sit at a table, staring blankly at her phone.
“What are you doing, honey? Why are you looking at the bank balance? Need money?”
“I always need money. Why? You gonna give me some? Can I dip into the emergency fund?”
“E-emergency fund?!”
“The 150,000 won hidden behind the wardrobe isn’t exactly an emergency fund, is it? Guess I can just take it.”
“Ugh!”
Her husband quickly turned his head, trying to hide his trembling pupils.
Jang Eun-sil let out a small chuckle, but her expression soon darkened again as she looked at her husband’s rapidly receding hairline.
Why did you have to age so fast? It breaks my heart.
Still, even if he was losing hair on top, he wasn’t blind to what was happening around him. He caught the concern written across her face.
“Stop groaning to yourself and just tell me. You’ve been like this ever since you came back from the school a few days ago. It’s about Gang-hun, right? Let’s worry about it together, Mom of Gang-hun.”
“You really… never miss a thing.”
Jang Eun-sil finally opened her mouth.
“You remember when Gang-hun got his mana test done? The results came back, and they say his awakening sensitivity is quite high.”
“…Gang-hun?!”
It was the news she had heard a few days earlier after rushing to school with a pounding heart following a call from his homeroom teacher.
His awakening sensitivity was high enough that they should consider a career path as a hunter.
“It doesn’t seem like Gang-hun is completely against the idea either.”
“Hmm… That’s good news.”
“Right…”
It was definitely good news.
After all, wasn’t “hunter” the number one dream job shared by children around the world? It was the ultimate dream profession everyone aspired to. Hearing that their own son had the talent for it—how could any parent not be happy?
Yet the reason both their faces remained stiff was simple.
Money.
“We’ll… have to send him to an academy, won’t we?”
“Pretty much everyone does.”
“How much?”
“One hundred…”
“Are you kidding me? What hunter academy costs a hundred?”
“One hundred fifty…”
“Honey, do I need to check this myself?”
“Two hundred. This time I’m serious. It’s the most reasonable option for our situation.”
That was it.
The reason was the exorbitant tuition fees of hunter academies.
What kind of people were Koreans? Even if there was no rice for tomorrow, they would fill their stomachs with water if it meant educating their children. They were a nation defined by education fever.
According to Phobos, Korea ranked first in the world for hunter private education.
It was a country where, even before awakening, students rigorously studied magic theory and basic physical training. No one took preemptive learning more seriously than Koreans.
This educational zeal had greatly contributed to the quality of Korean hunters, but it came at the cost of increasing the financial burden on households, effectively raising the threshold for awakening.
It was no coincidence that people nowadays said it was hard for those from poor backgrounds to awaken.
But there was no way around it. Becoming that kind of hunter required more than just studying.
It meant using mana-filled simulators, special artifacts, and receiving private lessons in facilities so expensive they made you gasp. The instructors were, of course, veteran hunters with real combat experience.
The price had no choice but to skyrocket.
In the end, the couple wrapped up their conversation with the vague conclusion of “Let’s think about it some more.”
The next day, feeling frustrated, Jang Eun-sil browsed YouTube hoping to find some useful information. That was when she stumbled upon Mir Guild’s channel. It seemed her husband and children were fans, as the account was already subscribed.
At the time, Jang Eun-sil had no idea that the broadcast she clicked on by chance would change their fate.
“In the next segment of Division 3, let’s talk about ‘How to Increase Your Awakening Probability by 2%.’”
Awakening? Did he just say awakening?
There was a way to increase the probability of awakening?!
With her eyes wide open, Jang Eun-sil frantically took notes as if possessed.
“Split the magic stone into three equal parts… head, chest, stomach…”
Magic stones weren’t exactly cheap, but they weren’t impossible to afford. After struggling to obtain one, Jang Eun-sil did something she had never done before—she typed a comment in the live chat.
And when Jang Eun-sil called out to Lee Shin, he became her miracle.
Out of more than 300,000 viewers, the fact that he singled her out for a phone consultation was nothing short of a miracle.
“Hello?”
“H-hello! My name is Jang Eun-sil, and I run a small kimbap shop called Joga-ne in Busan…”
“Haha, ma’am, please calm down. Take a deep breath. Shall we take this slowly? First, I’ll send you my email address. Could you please send your son’s mana test results there?”
“Yes, yes, yes!! Just a moment. Please don’t hang up!”
Even now, thinking back to that moment made Jang Eun-sil’s palms sweat.
She hadn’t been this nervous even when she walked down the aisle holding her father’s arm toward her husband.
After sending the photo, three minutes that felt like three days passed. Then Lee Shin spoke in a bright voice.
“There seems to be plenty of potential?”
“R-really?! Is that true?!”
“Yes. Both his awakening sensitivity and mana compatibility look good. His base mana is solid too.”
“Thank you. Thank you so much. Really, truly, thank you. I feel like I’m going to cry.”
“We haven’t done anything yet and you’re already crying? Save the tears for later. For now, let’s try the Wave Resonance Method I mentioned. How much did you hear last time? Never mind, I’ll explain it again from the beginning.”
That day, Lee Shin patiently comforted the flustered Jang Eun-sil and answered all her questions. Not only that, he even uploaded a video tutorial to the guild homepage.
That night, Jang Eun-sil stayed up all night watching the video on repeat. By morning, she had everything prepared.
“Son, come here. You have to keep this on at all times. Even when you go to the bathroom, during PE class, and when you sleep! Got it?”
“…What is this? No way, it’s embarrassing.”
“Tsk! Be quiet!”
She wrapped a hairband around his chin, placed one piece on the crown of his head, one on his chest, and one below his navel.
Her son made a face like he was about to cry from embarrassment, but after his mother earnestly pleaded, “This is what you need to do to awaken!” he kept wearing the ridiculous-looking setup without complaint.
He was such a good kid.
And so, a few days later, the son endured his friends’ teasing while the mother prayed for him every single day.
Then one morning, as he was eating breakfast, light began to radiate from his body.
It was an awakening.
The small kimbap shop on the corner was now bustling with a huge crowd of people.
“Hey, let me through!”
“Come on, at least let me stick my camera in! I came all the way from Seoul!”
“Damn it! Who parked their car like that? The tow truck is honking like crazy!”
They were all reporters who had come down to cover the story of the awakened son from this shop.
While an awakening was certainly good news, it wasn’t normally enough to draw reporters all the way from Seoul. This wasn’t the post-war era—what was all the fuss about?
Besides, unlike the monstrous Park Su-bin who had awakened at a very young age, this was an utterly ordinary awakening with nothing particularly special about it. So why were so many reporters swarming the place?
“So you’re saying you followed the method Lee Shin demonstrated in his recent live broadcast?”
“It’s called the Wave Resonance Method. Wave. Resonance. Method!”
“Ah, so you followed the Wave Resonance Method exactly, and that’s how your son awakened?”
“Yes.”
It was all because of Lee Shin’s Wave Resonance Method.
This son was the very first person to successfully awaken using the method Lee Shin had created.
“Could you walk us through it from the beginning, starting with buying the magic stone? What was the exact order of steps?”
“First, I bought a D-rank magic stone officially certified by the Korea Mana Corporation. They attach a certificate to it. I remember it cost about 735,000 won at the time.”
“Then you must have gone to a craftsman next.”
“Yes. The processing fee was around 50,000 won? It wasn’t as expensive as I expected. It wasn’t a famous workshop. I just chose the closest one that could do it as quickly as possible.”
“I see.”
“Can I ask just one thing? I heard the craftsman is charging whatever he wants now?”
“That’s right. Getting a reservation with him is like winning the lottery these days.”
“Oh my. That’s a relief.”
She wasn’t wrong.
The moment her son, Jo Gang-hun, awakened using the Wave Resonance Method, mothers across the country—without a hint of exaggeration—had all rushed to workshops with magic stones in hand.
As a side note, the workshop Jang Eun-sil had reserved with was now fully booked for the next year.
Some extremely dedicated mothers were even offering dozens of times the normal price to have their stones processed in exactly the same shape, using the exact same process and tools.
That was why her “That’s a relief” was directed at her son, but it was also something she was saying to herself.
If she had been even a little later, she would have been one of those people fighting in the crowd.
Jang Eun-sil tightly held her son Jo Gang-hun’s hand.
“This is KBC reporter Kang Man-bok. Did you have absolute confidence from the beginning that Lee Shin’s Wave Resonance Method would work?”
“If I said I was completely confident, that would be a lie.”
“If you weren’t confident, what made you decide to try the Wave Resonance Method anyway?”
“That was my situation at the time. I had just learned that my son had talent as a hunter. As a parent, I wanted to do everything I could to help him develop that talent, so I started looking for hunter academies… but as you can see, our family’s financial situation isn’t great. Desperate? Looking back, I think I was desperate.”
Several reporters who were also parents nodded solemnly and quickly typed away on their laptops.
The pattern continued.
When Jang Eun-sil spoke…
“There weren’t many difficulties. If it had been extremely complicated, I wouldn’t have even tried. But Representative Lee Shin explained everything step by step in the video, making it really easy to follow.”
The articles went up in real time.
“The biggest thing was that Representative Lee Shin gave me courage. After looking at the test results, he told me Gang-hun would definitely awaken and cheered us on so much. Oh dear, I’m getting carried away. Why am I tearing up again?”
Her son, Jo Gang-hun, was no different.
“It was a little uncomfortable at first, but I got used to it eventually. At the beginning I didn’t want to do it because it was embarrassing, but my mom looked so serious that I just endured the teasing and kept wearing it.”
Did the two of them even realize it?
Every single casual word they spoke was causing mothers across the country to hold their breath.
And that the person at the center of all this had just arrived…
“This is Dispatch reporter Yoon Sang. I know it might be rude, but I’d like to ask about Jo Gang-hun’s ‘awakening realization process.’”
The reporters flinched in surprise.
The method by which someone first realizes their own power was called the “awakening realization process,” and asking about it was generally considered rude.
Jang Eun-sil, who didn’t know this, simply widened her eyes and asked, “Awakening realization process? What’s that?” while Jo Gang-hun, who had looked it up, looked troubled by the barrage of camera flashes.
Then a voice rang out from somewhere.
“If you know it’s rude, then don’t ask rude questions.”
At that moment, the noisy crowd parted like the Red Sea.
“I knew this would happen, so I came. What kind of rudeness is this in someone else’s place of business?”
At least have the decency to buy a roll of kimbap before you leave.
The man who appeared after delivering that sharp rebuke to the reporters seemed to shine with light. His overwhelming presence turned everyone around him monochrome. Jang Eun-sil and Jo Gang-hun could only gape like goldfish as they greeted him.
“Hello. I’m Lee Shin, representative of Mir Guild. This is our first time meeting face to face, isn’t it?”