Monopolization (Part 2)
In a few weeks, word would spread that hunting villains yielded far more Karma than grinding monsters—with the added perk of unlocking an exceptionally powerful title. Once that secret leaked, the so-called high-rankers would launch an all-out extermination campaign, wiping out the outlaw population virtually overnight.
From then on, player killers would become an endangered species, remaining nearly extinct until the infamous outlaw known as "Killing Machine" stepped onto the stage months later.
Wait... now that I think about it, I completely forgot about that title.
The realization struck Sanghyuk out of nowhere. Even with a lifetime of memories, his mind couldn't retain every single scrap of trivia; an occasional blind spot was inevitable.
"What's with this bastard? Why isn't he moving?"
"Probably frozen stiff. Looks like a beggar anyway. Let's gut him quick and find our next mark."
The three PKs had already butchered dozens of travelers, and they naturally assumed Sanghyuk was paralyzed with terror.
Sanghyuk, however, was running an entirely different set of numbers.
All three are confirmed outlaws. Which means under the Self-Defense System, wiping them out won't earn me a single drop of Black Karma—and I'll harvest a tidy sum of regular Karma in return.
Instead of trembling, Sanghyuk was quietly calculating their value. He was lower in level, wore inferior gear, and faced a three-to-one disadvantage, yet the notion of losing never even crossed his mind.
Shring.
The three outlaws drew their weapons in unison—notched, rust-spotted iron swords, the cheapest blades sold anywhere in Falcon City.
"Like we said, just consider yourself unlucky. We'll make it quick."
They spoke as if he were already a corpse, closing the distance with swaggering strides. Open beta had launched barely four days ago, meaning the overwhelming majority of players had no idea how to acquire Ancient Knowledge, let alone use it.
Under ordinary circumstances, three armed thugs ganging up on a lone traveler resulted in a one-sided slaughter. When neither side had skills at their disposal, numerical superiority and cold steel decided the victor.
Under ordinary circumstances, that was.
Total amateurs. Their grips are all wrong.
Sanghyuk had nothing in common with an ordinary player. Though barehanded and without a single shred of Ancient Knowledge engraved upon his soul, his pulse didn't even quicken.
To Sanghyuk, player-versus-player combat in Eternal Life was as second nature as breathing. He lacked weapons and martial arts, but the instincts etched into his marrow carried far greater lethality than either.
The lead outlaw lunged forward, sweeping his blade in a broad horizontal slash. Rather than retreating, Sanghyuk closed the distance instantly, snapping his right palm down onto the man's wrist with surgical precision.
Crack!
The rusted sword whistled past empty air a fraction of an inch from Sanghyuk's ribs, but he didn't so much as blink. In his past life, dueling top-tier rankers meant letting blades graze skin by hairbreadths as standard practice; this crude swing was child's play.
"Aaargh!"
Sanghyuk had poured all ten bonus Growth Points into Strength. Driven with full mechanical leverage, the strike shattered the man's grip like a sledgehammer, tearing a ragged shriek from his throat as the sword spun loose.
Sanghyuk didn't stop there.
Before the falling weapon could hit the dirt, Sanghyuk snatched the hilt out of midair with his left hand and pivoted on his heel. Disarming an opponent and turning their weapon against them was a hidden mechanic that only functioned when defending against flagged outlaws.
At this early stage, not a single player alive knew such an interaction existed. Stunned by the impossible theft, the disarmed thug froze in sheer bewilderment.
Slash!
"Ghk—!"
Spinning through the arc, Sanghyuk buried the stolen blade deep into the outlaw's midsection.
Thanks to system dampening, the strike lacked the visceral resistance of severing real flesh, but Sanghyuk was intimately familiar with that muted sensation. A low-level novice with no Ancient Knowledge couldn't possibly survive a critical wound to the vitals. Without pausing to watch the man collapse, Sanghyuk ducked low, letting the converging slashes of the remaining two PKs whistle harmlessly over his head.
Their coordination was laughable—no better than children flailing sticks. Had they possessed actual weapon skills, evading might have required effort, but raw physical swings posed zero threat.
It was the combat equivalent of a seasoned martial artist watching toddlers swing foam bats.
Whoosh.
Twisting his upper body left and right in two crisp, economic motions, Sanghyuk slipped between the two blades. In the very same breath, he drove the rusted sword clean through the right outlaw's skull while his left arm coiled like a python around the throat of the man on his left.
Snap!
"Krrk..."
Sanghyuk clenched his forearm with violent torque, shattering the last outlaw's cervical spine. Hamstrung by pathetic early-game health pools, none of them possessed the constitution to endure mortal trauma.
Barely three seconds had elapsed.
The first thug collapsed into the dirt just as the second took a sword through the head, immediately followed by the wet crunch of the third man's broken neck.
A sequence so blistering it defied description was over before the wind could settle. With an utterly detached expression, Sanghyuk cast the limp corpse aside.
Instead of blood, showers of luminescent white particles drifted through the clearing, softening what would have otherwise been a horrific bloodbath. Sanghyuk remained entirely unfazed. Much of that stoicism was thanks to the User Mental Correction Program, a breakthrough developed a decade ago that had catalyzed the modern VR boom.
Whenever a situation threatened to inflict psychological trauma, the program intervened instantaneously, draping the event in a hazy, dreamlike filter. It didn't disconnect the senses entirely, but softened the emotional impact enough to prevent psychological shock from settling in.
Without this failsafe, hyper-realistic sensory feedback would leave players crippled by post-traumatic stress. As such, it was a mandatory legal requirement hardcoded into every commercial DN title.
Crucially, the correction didn't inhibit motor control or degrade combat precision. While early prototypes suffered from noticeable input lag, modern implementations functioned seamlessly. It merely scrubbed away the horror of slaughtering another human being, rendering the act as harmless as a passing dream. Explaining the mechanism made it sound paradoxical, but experiencing it firsthand made perfect sense.
While an ultra-sensitive minority still struggled with full-dive immersion, Sanghyuk had spent ten brutal years swimming through battlefields. To him, accepting the sensation was as natural as breathing.
You have eliminated Outlaw travelers and claimed a portion of their accumulated Black Karma.
Congratulations! Your accumulated Karma has triggered a Level Up!
The three corpses dissolved into brilliant sparks, vanishing into the ether. In their wake, they left behind not only a substantial bounty of Karma, but also a modest pile of dropped gear—loot they had stripped from previous victims.
Sanghyuk gathered every single item. Without a Space Expansion Bag, he had no choice but to haul the bundle by hand.
"Junk in the long run, sure, but right now? People will kill for this stuff."
In the opening days of a fresh server, even basic gear commanded a premium. There was no earthly reason to leave free money lying in the grass.
Upon returning to Falcon City, Sanghyuk listed every looted piece at the local consignment shop. Consignment operated on a different model than the planetary auction house. While the auction house enabled planet-wide transactions in exchange for steep broker fees, consignment shops charged a negligible commission to have city NPCs display goods to local foot traffic.
Since virtually the entire player base was currently clustered around Falcon City anyway, paying exorbitant auction fees would have been an utter waste.
With his hands freed, Sanghyuk marched straight to the public bank and retrieved the Traveler's Treasure Sword from his vault.
His original agenda after claiming First Mountaineer had been to monopolize several critical resource nodes. But cutting down that outlaw trio had rearranged his priorities.
First Villain Hunter. No way in hell am I letting a goldmine title like that slip away!
If he didn't secure it right now while rogue outlaws were multiplying unchecked, the window of opportunity would slam shut for months the second the high-rankers began their purge.
Titles bearing the "First" prefix were strictly Unique-grade—only one player in the entire world could ever claim them.
"What were the exact modifiers again? I remember it was broken, but the specifics are hazy..."
The precise stat values eluded him, but the core principle remained: when an uncontested advantage presented itself, you took it. Sanghyuk immediately began laying the groundwork for his hunt.
"The Great Library. It was stored in the archives there, wasn't it?"
He set his sights on Falcon City's Great Library. His objective: securing Ancient Knowledge.
Sanghyuk had already mapped out the four archetypes that would fill his Soul Holes. None of the four final disciplines could be obtained immediately, which meant his first task was securing the foundational root that was easiest to claim.
The Great Library housed the tier-one discipline required to seed one of his ultimate arts.
His end goal was the discipline known as Shadow Knight.
It was by no means an ultra-rare discipline. Within a year, it would become one of the most popular builds in the game—a ubiquitous "bread-and-butter" staple among the player base.
Its acquisition path was relatively straightforward and had been discovered early in the timeline: first, acquire the foundational tier-one discipline Knight; cultivate it to maximum proficiency to evolve it into tier-two Blade Knight; and finally, synthesize it with Shadow Thief.
Since Shadow Thief was equally accessible, Shadow Knight sat squarely at the low end in terms of raw scarcity.
Yet Sanghyuk, armed with blueprints for countless legendary and esoteric combinations, chose it without hesitation.
It was the indispensable linchpin that would anchor his Quadra Soul build.