What Is This Money For
[Awakener's Balance]
: ₩1,078,565,998
I had spent my whole life obsessively clinging to money.
Even when no one told me to, I counted numbers by instinct with my eyes.
One, ten, a hundred, a thousand....
About one billion won.
It was the same amount I had spent an entire lifetime working myself to the bone to save.
What the hell was this....
“What, did that bastard go deaf or somethin'?”
Grandmother thrust her face right up to mine.
She barked at me in that sharp, cracking voice of hers, her mouth full of wrinkles, but her eyes were warm beyond measure.
The person I had missed most of all.
My throat tightened a beat too late.
To be facing Grandmother while I was still alive.
How long had it been?
Whether this was a dream or hell, it didn’t matter anymore.
Just being able to see her, even for a moment—how could I not be grateful?
My heart, quiet as a dry field, shuddered like the first drops of rain had fallen on it.
I was definitely dead.
I’d been bitten by a monster the moment I left the hospital and torn apart.
Was someone toying with my fate?
“Grandma. ‘Bastard’ means I’m your damn grandson, doesn’t it? That means you’re cursing your own family. You know that, right?”
I hugged her tight while saying something useless for no reason at all.
“You, you little punk!”
Grandmother snapped at me, but she didn’t push me away.
Instead, she cleared her throat and slowly wrapped her awkward hands around my back.
“What the hell did you eat today?”
Right. She had always been like this.
For all her thorny words, her actions were endlessly kind.
My younger brother smirked and shuddered.
“Ugh. Creepy. Why are you two like that?”
It had been just as long since I’d seen him too.
At some point, our relationship had gone bad, until we were less than strangers.
Then, all at once, I’d heard that he had been killed by a villain.
I had thought I’d never see him again....
When my brother caught me staring, he flinched and quickly looked away.
Maybe because I used to beat the hell out of him when we were kids, he was afraid of me.
Grandmother peeled me off and shoved a spoon into my hand.
“Quit with the rotten talk and eat before your food gets cold.”
And so, after decades, breakfast began.
I had only just been reborn, but strangely enough, my appetite was savage.
I ladled rice into a bowl of pale beef-and-radish soup, used the sour kimchi as a side dish, and scraped the bowl clean.
“Choi Sungmin. How old are you this year?”
When I asked my brother, he wore a startled expression.
“Why are you calling me by my name all of a sudden? And why do you sound like some middle-aged guy from the neighborhood?”
Come to think of it, I’d never really called him properly.
I usually just used stuff like Hey, you. Punk.
My brother and I were five years apart.
If I counted the age gap, I should be able to figure out what year this was.
As I stared at him, he wilted under my gaze.
“Could you show a little interest? I’m a second-year high school student.”
Then I was twenty-three?
Which meant I’d be drafted and forced into the military this winter.
That hellhole again?
Of all the damn timing.
There was no doubt some god was a complete piece of shit.
My brother said, “Grandma. You know, next month we’ve got a school trip....”
His voice trailed off as if someone had hit mute.
“What? Speak up!”
“No, nothing.”
“You little punk, why do you start talking and then swallow it?”
“I said it was nothing!”
It was a noisy breakfast.
Not much of a gloomy atmosphere at all.
That was pretty different from my memory.
I thought we’d been living in misery every day.
Had the past changed?
No way.
The one who had lived miserably, cursed fate, and driven himself into a corner was probably none other than me.
I had no money. I was poor.
Therefore, I was miserable.
Buried in that pit, I had never had the leisure to look around me.
I spent my whole life earning more than one billion won.
Was I happy, then?
Ha. The end I met should answer that for me.
I neglected my health and got cancer.
I died alone, with neither wife nor child.
Only now did I understand.
Money was important.
But only while you were alive.
When you died, you couldn’t take even one won with you.
The only thing I could carry into the coffin was a tumor.
The TV, left on at random, was spitting out the news.
So this world hadn’t changed after all.
Everything was still painfully vivid.
When I left the hospital after being diagnosed with cancer, monsters poured out of the sky.
When the horned man floating in the air waved his hand, everything collapsed.
Among the corpses sprawled across the ground, there was one face I recognized.
An S-class Hunter ranked among the nation’s best.
If he couldn’t stop them, no one could.
Was that when the end began?
Was this place going to be destroyed next?
I didn’t know.
Even if I did, there was nothing I could do to change it.
“Thank you for the meal.”
My brother gathered his bowl and stood up, and Grandmother smacked him hard across the back.
“I’ll do the dishes, so hurry up and get to school!”
“Tch. Fine.”
My brother slipped on his shoes at the front door.
I stood there and looked down at him.
Those shabby canvas shoes, worn to threads, caught my eye.
“Hey.”
I pulled a wallet from my pocket.
I took out every bill inside and held them out to him.
“Take it.”
My brother blinked.
“Seriously?”
I used to hoard money like a paranoid lunatic.
I had never given my brother allowance for no reason.
Whenever I spent even a little, I’d scream at him like a maniac.
Just like my father, who trembled over every hundred won coin.
So that was how I had lived too.
If you treated money like a corpse and kept hoarding it, it would just turn to shit anyway.
What had I been fighting so hard for?
“If you don’t want it, forget it.”
“No. Give it here.”
The boy’s shabby uniform, the schoolbag with its frayed straps.
That one-room semi-basement apartment was so bleak even ghosts would have fled from it.
We’d survived in a place like this, scraping by like cockroaches.
The three of us crowded together, wearing down each other’s dignity.
Maybe it had been an unconscious expression of that, but even before I died, I would sometimes feel disgust when I saw bugs.
My brother took only one five-thousand-won bill from the stack I held out.
“Thanks. I’ll buy snacks at the convenience store.”
Five thousand won wouldn’t buy much of anything useful.
He was probably trying not to burden me.
I shoved the rest of the bills into his school-uniform pocket.
“Buy new clothes and new shoes before the school trip. Buy anything else and you’re dead.”
“...Yeah. Aren’t you going to work?”
I checked the time.
About now, I’d be heading to work.
“Take it easy, will you? Or you’re going to drop.”
My brother watched my face carefully before adding, “And you should meet your friends too. Or maybe get a girlfriend—no, never mind.”
That little shit.
That was a cruel thing to say to a virgin who’d been single for fifty years.
Should I take the money back and beat him?
Before I could say anything, my brother fled the house.
“I’m off!”
My phone had been vibrating in my pocket for a while.
I took it out and checked the messages.
- Boss, you not coming?
- Haven’t seen you in a while for a survival check-in.... you sick or somethin’?
- The chairman’s throwin’ a fit and makin’ a mess.
The sender was Karki.
He was a foreign laborer at the hunter equipment production factory where I worked.
Little by little, reality began to settle in.
I had been given a new life, but my life was still disgustingly poor.
To escape this repeating abyss, I’d have to work again and make money.
I bit my lip hard.
Human greed was endless, and people repeated the same mistakes, but....
Couldn’t I afford to be greedy in this life and not repeat my old mistakes?
After eating a proper meal, I felt full of energy.
I could feel, all over again, that my body had returned to my twenties.
They say even if you roll in a field of dung, this world is still better than the next.
Reincarnation really is something.
After finishing the dishes, Grandmother got ready to go out.
She wore a newsboy cap, a fishing vest with all the threads coming loose, and arm sleeves over her forearms.
It was the outfit she wore every time she went out collecting scrap paper to take to the junk dealer.
I bent my knees so I could meet her eyes.
“Grandma. Let’s go get you checked at the hospital right now.”
“What kind of nonsense is that? There’s nothing wrong with me.”
Grandmother wasn’t diagnosed with terminal cancer until after I finished my military service.
Was there still time to do something now?
“Please.”
I took her hand and pleaded with her earnestly.
“What’s gotten into you today?”
“....”
There were many things I could compromise on.
But not this time.
Only then did Grandmother let out a long sigh.
“Hah. Fine, fine. Move, you little brat. We’re going tomorrow. I’ve got work with old man Kim at the junk shop today.”
“You promise.”
“Ah, for heaven’s sake! I said I’d do it, didn’t I?”
I hooked my pinky around her wrinkled little finger.
Then, watching her back as she went off to work, I murmured softly, “Grandma. In this life, let’s at least live like human beings.”
I said it to her, but somehow it sounded more like I was saying it to myself.
“I’ll go make some money too.”
With that, I left the house.
Because I was still getting used to my second life, I ended up getting to work later than usual.
All the way there on the bus, I stared into empty space.
[Awakener's Balance]
: ₩1,078,565,998
What was this supposed to mean?
Was it money I could actually use?
Just to be sure, I bought a bottle of water at a convenience store on the way.
I handed the cashier my card and paid for it.
But the Awakener's Balance remained unchanged.
So this had nothing to do with my real-world money.
Then.
[[ Hero Skill Shop ]]
1. Super Kid Series.
1) Judgment of the Superhuman
: One-time purchase, ₩1,000,000.
2) Divine Aura
: ₩5,000,000.
....
So the only things I could buy with this imaginary money were these.
Super Kid was a world-famous hero representing the United States.
His signature costume was a blue bodysuit with a red cape fluttering behind him.
He possessed a steel-hard body and all kinds of superpowers.
Looking closer, item 1) was black.
From item 2) onward, they were gray.
Was that a lock setting?
There was no reason to hesitate.
I’d died once and come back to life—what couldn’t I do?
When I clicked number 2, an alarm sounded.
The required conditions have not been met.
Conditions.
What did that mean?
That left only one choice.
I clicked item 1).
Pre-purchased.
: (Tutorial)
[Awakener's Balance]
: ₩1,077,565,998
Exactly one million won had been deducted.
That meant I had bought Judgment of the Superhuman.
At the same time, the window changed.
[[ Choi Yongki ]]
- Talent: Purchase.
- Skill: Judgment of the Superhuman
It was common knowledge that only an Awakened could see the holographic window.
Still, since I’d never experienced it before, everything felt unfamiliar.
Despite the impressive name, Judgment of the Superhuman was, by definition, simply the power Super Kid himself wielded.
He could lift airplanes, crush buildings, and knock villains flat with one blow.
I remembered the hallucinated voice I’d heard before dying.
: You can buy the talents of the figures you admire.
The figures I admired—did that mean the heroes I’d dreamed of since childhood?
And I could buy their powers with the one billion I’d saved in my previous life?
I lowered my head and stared at my open palm.
If Super Kid’s power really had taken root in my body....
I still couldn’t feel a thing.
If I could use Judgment of the Superhuman in reality, just how strong would it be?
It would be nice to test it once.
Rumble.
Then the ground trembled as if an earthquake had struck.
Outside the front windshield, across the road, a massive shape came rolling toward us.
The bus lurched, and the driver shouted, “Hold on tight! It’s a monster!”
The thing charging toward us slammed into the side of the bus.
The bus tilted over completely and crashed onto the road.
As the windows shattered, the interior where the passengers sat turned into chaos.
Smoke rose, and the passengers who had been thrown sideways struggled to their feet inside the overturned bus.
“Aaaagh!!!”
“Damn it. What the hell is this disaster?”
“Argh! My arm! My arm’s broken!!”
I was just as disoriented as everyone else.
The impact from the crash left the skin near my forehead hot and throbbing.
I touched it and found blood soaking my hand.
“Let’s get out of here!”
“Call the Hunter Bureau first! There are injured people here!”
“I’ll do it. Hello? A monster has appeared! Location is near Bulgwangcheon, and the type is....”
The creature standing outside the window was called a Biglarva.
Its movement was slow while crawling, but its carapace was hard. If it curled up and launched itself forward like this, even a grazing hit could be dangerous.
After ramming the bus by driving against traffic, the Biglarva stretched its body out as though performing some sort of victory ceremony.
“Kikikik!”
As if mocking us, it made that bizarre sound too.
Watching that, I could feel my temper rising.
Staring at the Biglarva, I muttered, “This is why I fucking hate bugs.”
Before I knew it, my bloody fist had clenched tight.