The Antagonist's Rest
Lee Shin asked as they entered the hospital.
“Porter hyung, do you know anything about ‘Mana Dysfunction Syndrome’?”
“Mana Dysfunction Syndrome…… You mean MDS?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. MDS.”
Humanity could never be free from disease.
It was a line Lee Shin had once heard in a documentary.
Even in this world where mana existed and supernatural abilities were real, disease was an inevitable part of life.
There were colds, epidemics, and all kinds of cancer.
Of course, the existence of healing magic meant survival rates were incomparably higher, but healers were nobles in their own right, and there were still illnesses they could not cure.
Mana Dysfunction Syndrome, or MDS, was a prime example.
“Mana-related diseases are the kind that surgery and healing magic cannot touch. There are several variations—some manifest as sudden surges or complete voids of mana, while others involve abnormal mana damaging internal organs……”
“Aah…… Hyung, stop. I don’t really care about the details.”
“As expected…… The Professor works on instinct!”
This world had its own unique diseases, most of them tied to mana.
And among them, MDS sat at the very top as a rare and dreaded illness.
While they were talking, Chae Dong-ha came running from the hospital wing.
“Permission has been granted and the parents have given their consent. However, the patient himself……”
“Leave that part to me. Thanks for your hard work, hyung.”
Lee Shin took the chart Chae Dong-ha handed him, checked the name written on it—Baek Yeon-woo—along with the photo, then passed the chart to Porter.
Porter clutched it like a treasure, adjusted his glasses, and examined every detail with utmost care.
“Hmm…… This is the worst case.”
Observation 1: Mana is running rampant.
Observation 2: Mana is attacking the patient.
And the final observation, number 3.
“It’s progressing acutely. The disease is spreading far too quickly. In less than a year, more than half of his muscles have already been destroyed.”
“He must have been in a lot of pain.”
“Pain? Are you certain?”
“Just drop it.”
As expected of a rare disease, MDS presented with wildly varying symptoms. Baek Yeon-woo’s case was among the most severe.
His mana wasn’t just running wild—it was actively attacking his body, targeting his muscles in particular. Without assistance, he couldn’t even move properly.
Lee Shin knew this from experience.
What broke patients wasn’t just the pain. It was the humiliation—the crushing indignity that stripped away human dignity.
A bitter expression crossed Lee Shin’s face.
“Now I understand why this is a hospice case. A regular hospital would have given up. It might be rude to say this about Baek Yeon-woo, but it’s a miracle he’s still alive.”
“That is rude.”
“Ah, oops.”
“His mother’s coming. Watch your mouth.”
A woman spotted Lee Shin from afar and hurried over.
Her skin was dull, dark circles hung beneath her eyes—she clearly hadn’t slept properly in days. She had tried to dress neatly, but the heavy despair and exhaustion clung to her like a shadow.
Yet deep within her weary eyes burned a single spark of light.
It was hope. And Lee Shin knew exactly that it was directed at him.
“R-Representative, hello. I’m Yeon-woo’s mother……”
“Easy, relax, relax. I’m not going anywhere. Take a breath first.”
Lee Shin gently took the restless woman’s hand.
She fidgeted, embarrassed by her rough palms, but Lee Shin only smiled warmly. To him, hands like hers felt far more familiar.
“Shall we start with introductions? Hello. I’m Lee Shin, representative of the Mir Guild.”
“Ah, right! I’m so sorry. My name is Han Jeong-hye, Yeon-woo’s mother.”
“You know, I was really surprised just now.”
“……Huh?”
“Out of nowhere, this noona grabs my hand. I thought I was being hit on! And then you tell me you’re his mother? How are you this young?”
“……Pfft.”
With that barrage of nonsense, the tension finally eased, and the conversation began in earnest.
“How much have you heard?”
“Th-that you might be able to cure our Yeon-woo……”
“!!”
The one truly shocked by that statement was Porter.
Cure this? This hopeless case?
He hadn’t said it aloud, but Porter was quite knowledgeable about MDS. After all, it had been a frequent research topic at the Mage Tower.
The Tower viewed MDS not through the lens of symptoms or treatments, but through possibility.
Among MDS patients, a rare few miraculously recovered on their own—and in every such case, the patient went on to become an extremely powerful Awakener.
That was why China called it “vein severance” and considered it both a curse and a mark of genius.
Yet.
‘If he really can cure it……’
This would be nothing short of a magical revolution!
Gulp. Porter swallowed hard and stuck close behind Lee Shin, terrified he might be dismissed at any moment.
Meanwhile, Lee Shin felt tense for an entirely different reason.
‘This is nerve-wracking.’
Porter was focused on the treatment, but for Lee Shin, whether the cure worked or not wasn’t the issue.
It would work. The character he was about to meet would definitely be cured.
The real reason for his tension was something else.
‘This is the first time I’ve met a character I don’t know……’
Lee Shin was a super veteran who had witnessed every single character ending in existence.
This was the same obsessive player who had dug through even the most obscure side stories like “Choi Family Pharmacy” and “Evil Peak” because he genuinely cared about the characters and the world.
And yet he didn’t know this one?
Strangely enough, it made sense.
The person he was about to meet played an indispensable role in the GM’s story. Far more deeply tied to the world than any side character, this was someone who could force users into action despite not being a hunter themselves.
Yet they were also the kind of character users could never interfere with.
They were commonly known as:
Antagonists.
The wicked.
“Yeon-woo, say hello. This is the representative.”
The frail boy lying in the raised bed slowly turned his head toward them with great effort.
Baek Yeon-woo—the named villain known as Grief.
* * *
This was the ending of a certain character.
The story itself was a common one.
A character who lost his mother to a villain organization trained relentlessly until he surpassed even named hunters and became a ranker. Alongside his guildmates on a villain extermination request, he finally captured the named villain Grief—the man responsible for his mother’s death.
The cutscene began atop a mountain of corpses.
Amid the blood and scattered body parts, a gaunt man—Grief—knelt, drenched in blood.
“So this is how it ends…… Damn it.”
The magic sword lying on the ground rolled its eyes frantically. The hand that should have held it had been severed and lay discarded on the floor, blood gushing from the stump like a waterfall.
Meanwhile, blue tentacles writhed grotesquely, desperately trying to keep their host alive.
Grief tore them out of his veins with a look of disgust.
“Disgusting things. I’ve repaid the debt for keeping me alive long enough. Now let me rest, you little bastards.”
Here the character asked if he remembered the people he had killed.
“What the hell is this idiot saying? How would I remember that? Do you know how many people I’ve killed?”
The character spoke again. Among them had been his mother.
“……Mother? That can’t be right. I don’t kill women. You’ve got the wrong guy, you idiot.”
The character was taken aback. So was Lee Shin. Was the secret of the death about to be revealed here? What a twisted game.
Then came the line that changed everything.
“If you get it, just kill me already and go find your real mother’s killer. I want to rest too.”
I want to rest.
Why had that single sentence, spoken as he collapsed, pierced so deeply……?
Even before this, Lee Shin had been paying attention to Grief.
He was undeniably a great evil, yet he had never attacked cities. Despite killing countless hunters, he strangely avoided harming civilians.
A fascinating character who seemed to carry a heavy story.
Exactly Lee Shin’s type.
From that moment on, Lee Shin began searching for the character who was deeply connected to Grief—more precisely, the one bound to him by hatred.
If something piqued his curiosity, he had to know. And if it was part of the GM’s story, Lee Shin would stop at nothing.
Systematically manipulating villain characters was impossible. Viewing their status windows was impossible. Even their stories were unknown.
So he had no choice but to investigate indirectly. After a long and grueling search, he finally uncovered a few fragments of information.
For example……
“Justice? Hah, don’t make me laugh. I only ever had one thing I called justice—my mother. I endured hell just to protect that one thing. And then you people killed her.”
“Killing you bastards is my justice.”
He cherished his mother and had lost her in an incident involving hunters.
“Why did I become a villain? You’re really asking that? Did you think anyone’s born with ‘villain’ stamped on their forehead? No. So stop saying comfortable things like that.”
“I just wanted to survive. So did my mother. So spare me your half-baked pity and kill me, you idiot.”
Becoming a villain hadn’t been his choice—it had been forced on him by a desperate reality.
And the final piece—the decisive clue that let Lee Shin find Grief—came while he was raising a relatively low-level character.
By pure chance, he encountered Grief. A situation where he should have been instantly game-overed.
Yet when Grief saw his wallet in the cutscene, he reacted unexpectedly.
“……Huh? Your daughter has MDS? Idiot, why would I touch your daughter? Just answer the question. Twenty years old, two years of treatment……”
Then he said:
“This is boring. Go. And don’t tell anyone I let you live.”
The Grief Lee Shin knew was merciless.
A character who shed bloody tears from eyes filled with despair, swung his sword while mocking the world, and met his end consumed by rage.
Yet he had spared an enemy?
That day, watching Grief’s lonely retreating figure in the cutscene, Lee Shin made a decision.
He would find out everything about that character—no matter what.
* * *
Lee Shin had been searching for Grief for quite some time.
This was different from Park Su-bin or Yu Ri-ra. Park Su-bin had been Lee Shin’s signature character, while Yu Ri-ra had been planned around his maxed-out Charm stat.
Grief—Baek Yeon-woo—was purely personal.
It was heartbreaking. That single line, “I want to rest,” had resonated too deeply, too painfully.
So he had simply wanted to see him, just once, for his own sake.
To finally see the face of that captivating character he had never been able to meet because of the system’s walls.
The problem was that the information wasn’t as plentiful as he’d hoped.
Still, Lee Shin might lack information, but he certainly didn’t lack money.
Using every scrap of intel he could gather, he deployed people across the globe. Finally, not long ago, the Russian brothers from “Brother Mercenary” had contacted him.
— “Hey, remember that guy you described? Think we found him. Just like you said—he takes real good care of his mother, life’s been rough, and his face matches the vibe you mentioned. Not exactly the same, but close.”
— “But the kid’s sick? Something called MDS, I think. He’s hospitalized for it, and from what I hear, it’s pretty bad. Oh, and his name is……”
That was when Lee Shin first learned.
That Grief’s name was Baek Yeon-woo.
“Haaah.”
Late at night. As he walked down the training hall corridor and opened the door, the scent of medicine filled the air.
“Welcome, Professor.”
“Hey, Porter hyung. How’s Yeon-woo?”
“He just fell asleep.”
It had already been several days since they brought the skeletal Baek Yeon-woo from the hospital. Since then, one of the Five-Star Beds in the training hall had become his.
“The more I see it, the more incredible it is. Rest, healing, enhancement, tuning, optimization……! To think a magical tool of this caliber exists in the form of a bed! This is a revolution in magical engineering!”
“Heh, if you want to take care of a raid party that’s always complaining, you’ve gotta bend over backwards.”
“As expected of you, Professor! Even your mercy knows no bounds.”
“Any improvement?”
“Ah, I was just about to mention it. Please take a look.”
Just as Lee Shin had only recently learned Grief’s name was Baek Yeon-woo, the information he had obtained in-game was limited. But that didn’t mean he was ignorant.
He might not have personal details, but he had gathered plenty of miscellaneous facts.
One of them was how the organization had treated Baek Yeon-woo—and surprisingly, it had been through the Wave Resonance Method.
The way he had discovered this was rather absurd……
‘I only realized it after seeing his back in the DLC’s main story.’
In the DLC Consonance, the main story featured the protagonist-level characters of each country in the foreground.
And in the background stood three figures with their backs turned— one of them had been Grief, Baek Yeon-woo.
“Good. He’s improving day by day. Right?”
“Indeed. His once-unstable mana is gradually stabilizing.”
“Good work. I’ll take over, so go get some sleep in the next room.”
“It’s fine. There’s still so much research left to……”
“You know this isn’t something that’ll finish in a day or two. I even got you your favorite bulgogi lunchbox.”
“Ooooh! Bulgogi!!”
“Go.”
After Porter left, Lee Shin sat down beside the bed.
For a moment, the strangely familiar scene made him tilt his head in confusion before he let out a soft chuckle.
“Ah, that’s it. Heh.”
It was the same sight he had grown tired of when his own brother had been hospitalized.
People really were terrifying. Even those heart-wrenching days eventually became memories.
And then it hit him—why Baek Yeon-woo had always lingered in his thoughts.
‘You’re carrying the image of my brother…… and you resemble me.’
Lee Shin gazed at Baek Yeon-woo’s back as he lay turned away.
“Hey, kid. I’ve got a lot of questions for you.”
So.
“Get better soon and tell me your story.”
While Lee Shin stretched and checked his phone, Baek Yeon-woo’s eyebrows twitched ever so slightly—unnoticed by anyone.