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# Chapter 1
Bang—!
The lesser gods and angels trembled.
The one who had made them tremble was the Supreme Being, the Creator God.
Immaculate beauty and supreme divinity.
The immaculate beauty twisted.
“How, how could this happen?”
Before the Creator God.
A portion of space rippled, revealing someone.
A young man with a beautiful appearance resembling that of the Creator God... or rather, a man who still possessed the youthful appearance of a boy.
The Creator God’s eyes burned with fury as he watched the man sitting in front of a computer, completely absorbed in a game.
“I poured all my love into him... Does it make any sense that he locks himself away in his room and does nothing but play games every day?!”
At the Creator God’s fury, the lesser gods and angels scattered in all directions.
If they were caught up in that anger, even beings possessing divine status could have their existence erased.
Left alone, the Creator God stared intently at the man absorbed in his game. Then, as though he had thought of something, he broke into a strange smile.
“So you like games that much?”
A peculiar smile, filled with an emotion unbecoming of a god, settled around his lips.
“Fine. If you love games that much, then I can’t help it. Go on and enjoy your game to your heart’s content.”
Sacred light flowed from the Creator God’s entire body and was sucked into the ripple in space.
“There is only one thing I wish for—”
The ripple in space gradually faded, and the Creator God’s voice grew distant.
“Please, be happy.”
---
Yoon Geon, who had been completely absorbed in Legend of Legends, suddenly shuddered as though a chill had run down his spine.
“Ah!”
It lasted only for the briefest moment, but his opponent did not miss the opportunity.
— You have been slain.
Looking at the red words that appeared on the monitor, Yoon Geon let out a deep sigh.
It had been a crucial team fight, but he, the most fed player on his team, had died, resulting in a devastating defeat.
— Why are you inting when you were doing so well?
— Are you abusing? Enjoy the report.
— How did this game turn out like this?
The chat gradually became more vicious, and before long, they were casually asking about each other’s parents.
Yoon Geon gave a bitter smile and stood up.
He stretched to loosen his stiff body, then went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.
“Ah—!”
The refrigerator was enormous, completely out of place in an ordinary household.
It was completely empty.
He took out the milk and shook it. There was only a tiny amount left, so he poured it into a cup and checked the expiration date.
It had expired about a week ago.
“It was in the refrigerator, so it should be fine.”
In fact, he had never gotten sick from drinking milk that was slightly past its expiration date.
When he opened the cabinet beneath the sink, he found several cup noodles and some instant rice.
He filled the cup noodles with water and put the instant rice into the microwave.
Then he sat on the sofa and gazed at the garden beyond the large picture window.
“It’s autumn.”
The garden, and the mountains beyond it, were dyed completely red and yellow.
Yoon Geon forgot that he had even added water to his cup noodles as he stared blankly at the scenery outside.
— Geon. Make sure you eat.
— I’ll be back soon.
His parents had left for Seoul to watch a musical, just as they had promised.
They never came back.
On the way home, they had collided head-on with a truck and died at the scene.
The accident had been caused by the truck driver falling asleep at the wheel.
It had been two years since his parents passed away.
He checked the date on his phone.
October 12.
“The day after tomorrow.”
October 14 was the anniversary of his parents’ deaths.
The only time Yoon Geon ever went outside was once a year, on the anniversary of his parents’ deaths.
“Ah! The cup noodles—”
---
After filling his stomach with cup noodles that had swollen until not even a drop of broth remained, Yoon Geon walked around the garden.
It was a garden that truly deserved to be called spacious.
Trees were planted throughout the garden. Every time he stepped on the thick layer of fallen leaves, they made a crisp crunching sound.
At the center of the garden stood a modest pavilion.
It was Yoon Geon’s favorite place, as well as his parents’.
They would drink tea together, listen to music, and sometimes even eat meals there.
Yoon Geon climbed onto the pavilion and watched the stream of water falling into the small pond.
He could see the koi swimming inside.
His parents had put the fry into the pond on the day Yoon Geon entered elementary school, and they had grown considerably since then.
On the opposite side of the house, beyond the pavilion, stood a massive gate.
Following the beautifully landscaped stone path led directly to the gate.
It was a gate that opened exactly once a year.
Yoon Geon left the pavilion and wandered through various parts of the garden.
The garden trees, ornamental stones, small fountain, and even the flowers that had shown off their beauty until only recently.
All of them bore the touch of his father and mother.
Seeing the fallen leaves scattered throughout the garden, Yoon Geon went to the shed where the gardening tools were stored and took out a rake.
He went around the garden, gathering the fallen leaves, then collected them into plastic bags.
“There are quite a lot.”
He slung the bags of leaves over his shoulder and returned to the living room.
He opened the wood-burning stove that occupied one side of the living room wall and put the leaves inside.
Once he lit the fire, intense warmth soon began to rise.
When the house had first been completed and Yoon Geon had come here, the wood-burning stove had been what he liked most.
That was because he had often seen wood-burning stoves in foreign children’s animations he enjoyed watching.
In those animations, families would gather around the wood-burning stove and spend happy moments together.
Yoon Geon’s family had been the same.
In the evenings, they would settle around the wood-burning stove and spend happy moments together.
He sat on the sofa and covered himself with the lap blanket his mother used to favor.
The warmth made him feel at ease.
After adding more leaves and a few pieces of firewood stacked beside the stove, he closed his eyes.
Sleep soon began to drift over him.
---
Yoon Geon checked his appearance in the full-length mirror.
A baseball cap with a long brim, sunglasses, and a black mask.
Even after the infectious disease known as COVID had thrown the entire world into crisis, there were still plenty of people who wore masks, so he did not look particularly strange.
Unlike his usual self, Yoon Geon was dressed rather nicely.
Today was the one day a year he went outside, and it was the day he went to visit his parents.
When he opened the front door and stepped outside, the newly risen sun was just peeking its face over the mountain ridge.
The reason he was leaving the house so early was, of course, to minimize contact with other people as much as possible.
“I’ll be back.”
He bowed toward the empty house, then crossed the garden and opened the gate.
“Hoo—”
After letting out a long breath, he cautiously took one step outside the gate.
To others, it might have been the easiest step in the world.
To Yoon Geon, it was a step taken at the edge of a cliff.
Once he passed through the gate, he let out a sigh of relief.
It was only one step.
Other people could never understand how difficult that single step beyond the gate was for him.
The reason his father had purchased an entire mountain in Gapyeong and built this house halfway up it was also because of Yoon Geon.
Extreme social avoidance syndrome.
That was the illness Yoon Geon suffered from.
His condition was so severe that it could not simply be described as ordinary social anxiety, which was why the word “extreme” had been added to its name.
In fact, even Yoon Geon himself was not certain whether it could be called an illness.
Ever since childhood, he had been unable to get along well with other children.
It was not simply that he could not socialize with them.
Whenever another child approached him, he would even have difficulty breathing.
For no reason at all.
The children had never bullied Yoon Geon or harmed him.
His parents’ choice had been psychiatric treatment.
One of his father’s acquaintances was a professor of psychiatry at a famous university hospital in Seoul, and through him, they tried to treat Yoon Geon.
But in the end, they could not discover the cause of Yoon Geon’s social avoidance syndrome.
Without knowing the cause, they could not find a treatment either.
Because interacting with other people acted like poison to Yoon Geon, his father purchased the secluded mountain in Gapyeong and built a house there for him.
Naturally, Yoon Geon could not attend elementary school and instead was homeschooled.
Even then, they could not invite a teacher to the house, so his mother became his teacher.
Perhaps thanks to the immense love and devotion of his parents, Yoon Geon’s condition gradually improved.
He reached the point where he could be around other people without suffering an attack or fainting from difficulty breathing.
His parents spared no effort in helping Yoon Geon gradually develop his social skills, but his condition showed no improvement beyond a certain level.
Even on the day his parents died, they had purchased a ticket for Yoon Geon.
In the end, however, he had been unable to go with them.
Only the two of them had gone, and the accident had happened.
“Hoo... Shall I go?”
---
It took about an hour to walk from the house to the bus stop.
There was a bicycle at home, but Yoon Geon chose to walk.
As he waited for the bus at the bus stop, Yoon Geon’s eyes kept darting around.
He was worried that someone might come to the bus stop to board the bus.
After a while, the bus arrived.
Fortunately, there were only two middle-aged women on board.
He went to the very back seat and turned his gaze toward the window.
His heart was beating rapidly, but he could endure this much.
“A few days ago, XX’s house got robbed...”
“Oh my, oh my. What happened?”
The two women seemed to be neighbors, and their chatter did not stop.
In the past, even this level of chatter, no, even this amount of noise would have caused his body to react.
Fortunately, he could endure this much now.
And so he arrived at the columbarium.
“You came again this year.”
A bouquet of flowers had been placed in front of his parents’ memorial niches.
The flowers had not wilted and still held moisture, as though someone had visited earlier that very day.
Yoon Geon knew exactly who that someone was.
“I told him it was okay, but he keeps doing this.”
The person who had left the flowers was most likely the truck driver who had taken his parents’ lives.
The driver of the offending vehicle had driven for one or two hours at a time, surviving on short naps in order to support his family.
On the day Yoon Geon’s parents died, he had been unable to overcome the overwhelming sleepiness and had dozed off.
The result had been horrific.
The truck driver had come looking for Yoon Geon several times, wanting to apologize, but because of Yoon Geon’s illness, he had been unable to meet him.
He had even come to the gate of the house, knelt down, and cried for several days.
Yoon Geon could feel that his remorse was sincere.
Last year, and again this year, the driver had come to his parents’ memorial niches before Yoon Geon and offered flowers.
Because meeting him face-to-face was difficult, Yoon Geon had sent him a text message telling him that he no longer needed to do this.
But perhaps these acts were the small punishment he imposed upon himself, and perhaps they were also the only way he could ease his guilt.
“Are you doing well?”
Beyond the glass, his parents in the photographs were smiling brightly, just as they always had.
“I’m doing well too.”
A bright smile spread across Yoon Geon’s lips.
“I’ll continue to do well.”
It was only after talking with the photographs of his parents for quite some time that Yoon Geon finally turned around.
“Hm?”
His parents’ photographs began to glow faintly.
The light gathered together, becoming a tiny particle that flew toward the space between Yoon Geon’s eyebrows.
Startled, he tried to turn his head and dodge it, but the particle of light seeped into the space between his eyebrows and disappeared.
It would have been difficult to dismiss it as an optical illusion caused by reflected light, considering the only light source around him was the fluorescent ceiling light.
“What was that?”
After confirming that he felt no unusual physical symptoms, he left the columbarium to return home.
---
The bus stop.
“Twenty minutes left.”
Most people who visited the columbarium came by car, so it was only natural that the buses passing by had long intervals between them.
Yoon Geon gazed blankly at the cosmos flowers growing around the bus stop.
There were quite a lot of cosmos flowers growing in the garden as well.
His mother had liked cosmos flowers.
As he stared absentmindedly at the flowers, five minutes remained until the bus arrived.
He touched his phone to check the time.
That was when Yoon Geon’s eyes narrowed.
“I never installed an app like this.”
A strange icon had appeared on his phone’s home screen.
There was not even a title indicating what kind of app it was.
What was strange was that the icon alone was glowing faintly.
The light looked just like...
“Earlier?”
It resembled the light that had flowed out of his parents’ photographs and seeped into the space between his eyebrows.
He cautiously touched the icon.
“Huh!”
The phone screen turned black.
Just as he hurriedly tried to touch the phone, thinking that something was going wrong—
— Go to Seoul, meet Hwang Choong-sik, and have a meal with him.
The name Hwang Choong-sik was closely connected to Yoon Geon.
Yoon Geon’s legal representative was attorney Hwang Choong-sik.
Hwang Choong-sik, his father’s closest friend, had become Yoon Geon’s legal representative after his parents passed away, when Yoon Geon was still a minor.
It was largely thanks to Hwang Choong-sik’s help that Yoon Geon had been able to protect the house he lived in and the fortune that would have been more than enough to support him for the rest of his life, as long as he did not overspend.
“What is going on all of a sudden?”
Although Hwang Choong-sik was someone closely connected to him and currently the only person Yoon Geon could trust and rely on, meeting him was another matter entirely.
Aside from a few times long ago when his parents were still alive, and once after their deaths when Hwang Choong-sik became his legal representative, Yoon Geon had never met him face-to-face.
Naturally, it was because of Yoon Geon’s illness.
Even if he tried to think that someone was playing a prank on him, the situation itself made no sense.
Two minutes before the bus arrived.
Yoon Geon shook his head and was about to put his phone back into his pocket.
— If you fail to clear the quest, you will be penalized by being unable to speak for one week.
After reading the message on the screen, Yoon Geon let out a small laugh.
“I hardly talk anyway.”
It was a penalty that was practically meaningless.
Yoon Geon was about to put his phone back into his pocket when—
Bzzzzzzzz—!
The phone vibrated violently.
— The penalty has been changed. If you fail to clear the quest, your electricity will be cut off for one week.
Yoon Geon raised his head and looked around.
There was no one there.
Staring intently at his phone, Yoon Geon muttered,
“It really feels like someone is watching me. But definitely...”
The changed penalty was devastating to Yoon Geon.
Going a week without speaking would not be a problem at all.
But losing electricity was an entirely different matter.
Most of Yoon Geon’s daily life, as someone who lived alone, consisted of playing computer games or using his phone.
Not only that, losing electricity would also create problems with his food.
The question he now had to consider was whether the person who had somehow installed this strange spam app really possessed the ability to impose such a penalty.
That was when it happened.
— Don't doubt me.
As though it had read Yoon Geon’s thoughts, a single line of text appeared.
Yoon Geon flinched and once again looked around.
Naturally, there was no one around him.
“A quest, clear, penalty. Is this some kind of game?”
He organized the situation in his mind.
An app he had never installed had appeared on his phone, and it was giving him strange quests and penalties as though it were watching him.
Among the games Yoon Geon enjoyed playing were games based on genre novels.
As he became interested in games, he naturally began reading the original novels as well, and by now, he had read quite a large number of them.
Wasn't this exactly the kind of cliché commonly found in genre novels?
A protagonist suddenly gains a strange ability and uses that ability to change reality.
Lost in his own thoughts, he did not even notice the bus passing by.
Then, a thought suddenly occurred to him, and he muttered to himself.
“There’s a quest and a penalty. But what about the reward?”
— ...... If you clear the quest, the reward will be ...... ‘Mochang.’
“Ha, haha. Mochang. Ha, hahahaha.”
Yoon Geon looked up at the sky.
If this was some kind of prank by an absolute being, like something out of a novel, then its purpose was obvious.
“Are you trying to make me leave the house?”
Otherwise, there would be no reason to suddenly give him a quest telling him to meet Hwang Choong-sik and have a meal with him.
He considered ignoring it, but soon shook his head.
“A week without electricity would be hard to endure.”
While searching for transportation to Seoul on his phone, Yoon Geon looked up at the sky and said,
“Still, the reward can't be Mochang.”