The Weight of Different Deaths
Bangkok’s five-star hotel, the top-floor suite.
From this room, where the city’s nightscape spread out beneath them at a glance, Woojin was enjoying a sweet, almost sinful break with Gabi.
The real Southeast Asian offensive would begin tomorrow.
Sangjin had been assigned the suite right next door, and by now he was probably soaking in the pool while being waited on by his private maids and carrying out his usual perverted antics.
But Woojin’s mind wasn’t at ease.
It was because of the one problem that had been circling in his head since yesterday.
System Quest
Enhancer Second Awakening Quest: Augmentor
Condition: Take the lives of 100 humans to complete your understanding.
Current Progress: 0/100
He had tried to bury it, but how was a person supposed to switch off his own heart as easily as flipping a light? Besides, the condition itself was unsettling beyond words: take human lives, not monsters.
Damn it. I’m honestly curious as hell about this second awakening.
Woojin stared at his empty palm.
He had spent ten years grinding his way through Unirworld, and killing monsters had long since become second nature. But humans were different.
At his core, Woojin was a decent person.
That was why he had carried Sangjin on his back through crushing poverty and hardship all the way to this point.
The conversation he had just had with Sangjin kept echoing in his ears.
***
“Hey, Sangjin. You’re a necromancer, so I’m asking you something. What does death mean to you?”
“Huh? Hyung, are you having a middle-schooler phase? Well, I guess you never really had puberty, did you?”
“Quit the bullshit already… Don’t you remember the weird crap you were spouting before about the Hymn of Death or whatever?”
“Hmm… what, are you worried you might kill someone, Hyung?”
The bastard was quick on the uptake. A real ghost.
“Let’s say I am.”
“Then you probably don’t need to worry.”
“What?”
“To me, death isn’t an end. It’s another beginning. Or, to put it in a more necromancer-like way… resource recycling? No, let’s call it ‘an opportunity.’”
“An opportunity?”
“Yeah. Look at monsters. When they’re alive, they’re useless as shit. You can’t even make soup with them. But once they’re dead, they finally become useful to me, right? I’m the one giving them a chance. A glorious chance to be of use to me. Though I’d rather not be the one dying, obviously.”
“That’s one hell of a comforting interpretation. What a philosopher you’ve become.”
“Ugh, talking seriously with you gives me goosebumps. It’s disgusting.”
“Fine. Enough. Go play.”
***
Sangjin’s bizarre but crystal-clear logic had helped more than Woojin expected.
Death, seen not as an “end” but as a “transformation.”
Even so, some knot of discomfort still lingered deep in his chest.
In the end, Woojin picked up his smartphone.
The people he could consult about such a heavy moral dilemma were not the pure-hearted types like Jo Ayoung.
He had to ask the ones who had already crossed that line a long time ago.
The first person he got through to was Eileen.
As the head of the Benedict family, she had quietly erased countless enemies over the years. When Woojin asked his sudden question, she fell silent for a moment, then answered in a lower voice than usual.
["...How it feels to kill someone? Why are you asking something like that all of a sudden, Woojin oppa? Did some troublesome bastard show up?"]
“No, it’s not like that… I just kind of started thinking about it. What was it like for you at first?”
["Hmm. So this is a situation where someone has to die, then. If you don’t want to dirty your own hands, say the word. I can handle it cleanly."]
“No, if it happens, I’d have to do it myself.”
Eileen sounded like she wanted to ask more, but when Woojin stayed vague, she didn’t press him further.
She was surprisingly delicate and kind in moments like this.
["Hmm. Want the honest answer? It definitely bothered me at first. For a few days I couldn’t taste my food, and when I lay down at night, it felt like the person’s final gaze was floating across the ceiling. But now? I can honestly say I feel nothing at all."]
Her voice didn’t waver in the slightest.
She was as calm and dry as if she were answering what she’d had for lunch.
“That’s… how it gets? You go numb?”
["Yeah. I only ever do 'necessary killings,' after all. Clearing away anyone who threatens the family’s safety, or obstacles that stand in the way of a larger cause. You don’t feel guilty about cleaning, do you? Still, if that doesn’t make sense to you, Yu Jihyun would understand this better than I would."]
“J-Jihyun?”
Woojin swallowed hard at the unexpected name.
The same Yu Jihyun who always smiled shyly in front of him and fussed over his meals?
["Right. These days she just plays coy in front of you and says silly things like some innocent girl, but back in Unirworld, Yu Jihyun was known as the Storm Reaper alongside the Valkyrie of Storms. If someone got in her way, she’d cut them down without the slightest hesitation, even if they were an unarmed civilian. That’s her real self, the one you never got to see. She didn’t become number one in contribution for nothing. Ask her yourself. She’ll give you the answer."]
After ending the call with Eileen, Woojin called Jihyun with a complicated feeling in his chest.
Before the ringing had even sounded twice, her bright voice burst through the line.
["Oppa! What’s the occasion? You’re calling me at this hour? Just hearing your voice makes me so happy!"]
The sweet, syrupy affection in her voice made Eileen’s revelation from moments ago feel like a lie.
Woojin hesitated for a moment, then carefully got to the point.
“Jihyun… I need to ask you something. What do you think about a human life? I mean, when the time comes that you have to take it with your own hands.”
The air on the other end of the phone turned icy in an instant.
Jihyun drew a slow breath, then spoke with the calm, chilling composure of a university lecturer giving a philosophy seminar.
She didn’t bother asking why, either.
["Hmm… I think it depends on what you place value on, oppa."]
“Value?”
["Yes. Everyone assigns a different value to death. The 'sanctity of life' we’re broadly taught is the result of education that governments instill in people to keep the system stable in peaceful times. Otherwise, the public would be difficult to control. If murder ran rampant, society would collapse. But people like Eileen and me, who grew up in special environments, tend to think of life not in terms of morality, but purely in terms of 'benefit' or 'threat.'"]
“That’s a little scary, you know? Isn’t that a bit too calculating?”
["You should start thinking that way too, oppa. The example may not be perfect, but what if there’s someone who would definitely hurt you or Young Master Sangjin if you let them live? I mean fanatics who hate the undead, or criminals who’d kidnap Gabi because they want to steal your power. What if you let them live, and the people I care about got hurt?"]
Woojin thought of Sangjin and Gabi.
Even imagining them in danger made his heart clench hard.
["If you don’t know, then fine. But if you do know, you have to keep it under control. Break them, or silence them forever. If you wait until after something happens and then regret it, it’s already too late. We learned that the hard way in Unirworld. Half-hearted mercy coming back to bite you. It’s not like we haven’t been stabbed in the back after letting enemies go, right?"]
Jihyun’s voice stayed soft, but the content was viciously cold and practical.
She seemed to have already seen through exactly why Woojin was asking.
["Oppa, this is because of that 'Awakener criminal group' on the Cambodia-Laos border, isn’t it? I’ve separately collected material on them. I’ll send it to you right now. Read it. You can kill all of them. No, you have to kill them. In the world we live in now, they’re worthless weeds that need to be weeded out."]
It wasn’t actually that, but Woojin didn’t correct her.
At this point, this was practically a gift.
There were guys like that?
["I’m on your side even if you decide to wipe out a whole country, oppa. If you’d torn down the Thai government and rebuilt it from scratch, I would’ve applauded. So don’t worry about anything. You can just kill the bad guys. Your thoughts are my thoughts. Okay? I love you, oppa. Talk to you later."]
“...Yeah. Thanks. You stay safe too.”
After the call ended, an encrypted file arrived on Woojin’s phone a moment later.
It was a detailed report on a Cambodian Awakener crime syndicate called Prasap, sent by Jihyun.
A name so arrogant it meant “superior.”
Woojin started turning the pages of the report one by one.
As he read, his eyes grew steadily redder.
The narcotics-producing region of northern Cambodia and southern Laos was practically lawless.
The organization called Prasap, which had seized it by force, was committing atrocities beyond imagination.
Using their Awakener power, they hunted weak Awakeners and ordinary people, forcibly extracted their mana, and even carried out so-called “human butchery,” ripping out organs without hesitation.
“This… is this what humans do? Not even beasts act like this.”
They distributed a new type of drug made from Gate byproducts, addicting children across Asia, and when they had to defend their fortress, they forced villagers to serve as human shields.
As Jihyun had said, they were more vile and more evil than monsters.
Woojin realized it then.
He understood why the System had demanded one hundred lives from him.
It wasn’t telling him to become a murderer. It might have been a trial, one meant to teach him to think like an executor—someone capable of cutting away rotting flesh without hesitation in order to augment the world into something stronger.
What’s stopping me? If clearing out a hundred pieces of trash like that is the road to strengthening the world...
Woojin decided to think like Eileen and Jihyun.
Not as Kim Woojin the ordinary citizen swayed by emotions, but as an absolute being reshaping the order of Asia.
The calculation that killing one hundred syndicate members was equal to saving ten thousand innocent lives.
From the standpoint of cold benefit rather than morality, this was an overwhelming gain.
While Woojin was deep in thought, Gabi had already rubbed her eyes and padded over to tug at the hem of his clothes.
She stared up at his serious face with her big round eyes.
“Appa, why you look like dat? You worry? Don’t frown. You get ugly. Here, eat dis. It yummy. Mango sweet.”
Woojin patted Gabi’s head and asked carefully.
Come to think of it, Gabi was the progenitor of all goblins and an Origin-grade being.
Her perspective might be tied to some fundamental truth far beyond the shallow rules of human society.
“Gabi, Appa wants to ask you one thing. There are very, very bad people. People who bully the weak, kill them, and make nasty drugs to hurt them. What should happen to people like that?”
Gabi didn’t even think about it. She peeled her mango and answered with certainty.
“Kill ’em.”
“...Huh?”
Woojin blinked, thrown off by the brutally simple answer spoken in such a clear, innocent voice.
“Still… can’t you talk it out or send them to prison? They might reform.”
Gabi shook her head and took a huge, refreshing bite of mango.
“Slurp! Mmm~ so sweet! Appa, bad Kim Seobangs don’t reform. Goblins know. If a soul’s rotten black, letting it live just stains clean souls too. It spreads like mold. Even ghosts and goblins have to be purified by death if they go bad. That’s the way of the world!”
Her words were simple, but unmistakably clear.
Rotten fruit had to be cut away, and livestock with a contagious disease had to be culled.
Only then did Woojin admit it to himself: his hesitation hadn’t come from noble morality, but from cowardice—an unwillingness to bear the responsibility that came with killing.
“...Yeah. A daughter’s words are worth listening to. My daughter’s better than her dad.”
Woojin slowly rose to his feet.
The uncertainty drained from his eyes, and in its place, a hard, unshakable resolve began to take root.
This quest… looks like I’m going to have to do it.
The hesitation was over.
Now it was time to execute.
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