The Encounter
0.
August 1, 1994.
Kim Changju opened the world's first Gate and stepped inside.
That same day.
Kim Changju killed a monster within the Gate and brought its corpse back out.
October of that year.
It was discovered that the blue stones found in the monster's remains could generate energy.
From then on, those blue stones were named Magic Stones.
The following year.
After Kim Changju, more people capable of opening Gates continued to appear.
Through their individual Gates they traveled to what seemed like entirely different regions, hunted different monsters, and returned with different resources.
They entered alone or in groups, but only those who could open Gates themselves were able to step through.
Thereafter, those who could open Gates were named Gate Keepers—those who managed the Gates.
Present day, 2021.
The world now ran on the various resources Gate Keepers brought back.
1.
Just apply it and it turns white. Want Narin's clean teeth? Hurry and order now!
It was a home-shopping commercial that cut in right in the middle of a movie channel. The ad had a clumsy, B-movie vibe, but I'd heard the product actually worked. Of course it did—it was made from materials brought out of a Gate.
Rumor had it that just smearing the stuff on made your teeth look brand-new. No more scaling for the rest of your life. Which was why the price matched a lifetime of dental cleanings. For a broke civil-service exam student like me, it was pure fantasy.
"I wish I could become a Keeper too."
The Keeper in that commercial, Park Narin, had been a civil-service hopeful just like me a year ago. Become a Keeper and you could flip your entire life around the way she had.
But the conditions for becoming one? Completely unknown. Countless people had tried everything. Eating food brought out of Gates. Sleeping near Gates. Living with Gate Keepers. Someone, somewhere, had almost certainly run biological experiments on Keepers. Still nothing. Keepers simply awakened one day by pure chance. They were the chosen ones.
"Of course even among them there are ranks. But still—better than nothing."
Not every Keeper struck it rich like Park Narin. She got lucky becoming a Keeper and finding something valuable inside her Gate. If your Gate only held junk, you were stuck with nothing. Some Gates didn't even produce the common Magic Stones. Still, once you became a Keeper you could enter other Keepers' Gates. That alone was enough to live large for the rest of your life. You stepped into a completely different dimension of existence from ordinary people. Becoming a Keeper put you in the top 0.01 percent of the entire world population.
Click.
I turned off the TV. Dinner was finished; time to study again. Honestly it would probably just be me staring at the books without absorbing anything, but I couldn't keep watching television forever. And pinning my hopes on the empty dream of becoming a Keeper was even worse.
Clatter.
The sound of dishes hitting the sink filled the tiny studio. I turned to sit back down at the desk—and something strange appeared right in front of my eyes.
Wooooom.
Blue waves were rippling. They formed a perfect circle, just large enough for a person to step through.
"...!"
Shock stole every word from my mouth. I carefully, slowly circled the blue waves. From the side or behind there was no trace of them. Only from the front did the rippling blue surface exist. That alone proved this wasn't some prank.
Only then did the excitement explode out of my chest.
"A Gate! No way! Is this real? It's real, right?!"
I pinched my cheek. It hurt. I jumped up and down hard enough to shake the whole room and didn't care one bit about the downstairs neighbor. This was a hundred times—no, ten thousand times—better than winning the lottery.
"Okay, then..."
I carefully raised my hand toward the Gate. The first time you touched a Gate, you awakened an ability—the power that would let you survive inside. My hand was trembling without my permission. This was the moment a Gate Keeper's destiny was decided for the first time.
Please, please, please, please...
I prayed for a good ability. Combat-related, ideally. My hand slipped into the rippling blue surface.
"...?"
Nothing happened. According to every Keeper account I'd ever read, your mind was supposed to light up and suddenly understand new things. My head stayed as blank as ever.
"Huh? This isn't right."
I waved my hand around inside the Gate. It felt like stirring empty air; nothing caught on my fingers. The only proof this was a Gate at all was that neither my hand nor the portal itself appeared in the studio mirror.
"What the hell? What's going on? This isn't how it's supposed to work."
The worst thing in the world was being given something only to have it snatched away. Surely it wouldn't end like that. I forced myself to think calmly. The Gate had opened, and no one else was around, so odds were overwhelming that this was my Gate. Going inside was an option, but charging in unprepared was suicide. You needed to awaken an ability first, then at least grab a self-defense weapon. You never knew what waited on the other side. And if you died inside a Gate, you just died. Extra lives were for comics.
I started to pull my hand back—then something brushed my fingertips. Instinctively I reached a little farther and grabbed it.
Squish.
Soft, yet springy. Strange. A normal Gate was just a passageway; there shouldn't be anything to touch. Whatever I was holding might be some dangerous otherworld substance. I yanked my hand back in panic—or maybe it shoved me. Either way I lost my balance, fell on my ass, and sat hard on the floor.
And right in front of me, a person appeared.
"Where the hell did you just—?"
Actually I knew exactly where. My own two eyes had watched them walk straight out of the Gate, after which the Gate itself vanished. I just couldn't believe it. Every Gate I'd ever heard of was a place people entered, not exited.
"****."
A woman?
The figure was wrapped head to toe in a rough leather robe straight out of a movie, hood and all, so gender was hard to tell—until I heard the voice. Definitely a woman. Slightly husky, and pretty damn attractive. I just had no idea what she was saying.
"Who are you?"
"****."
She pushed the hood back. I sucked in a sharp breath. Blue hair and blue eyes so mysterious and beautiful they looked like they'd stepped out of another world. Well—she literally had.
"****."
I still couldn't understand a word, but my wariness had already melted away. Feeling attraction toward a beauty was only natural, especially one blinking those big eyes at me. Even without a shared language, a man's instinct was to find some way to communicate.
"This is Korea, and this is my room... It's small, right? Want to sit down for a second?"
I stood and offered her the chair. She looked back and forth between the chair and me, then pulled a hand out from under the robe. In it she held a wooden stick about as long as a forearm. A wand, maybe?
"********."
She began speaking in a clearly different language, different tone. The word rose unbidden in my mind—the thing everyone hoped for but no one had ever obtained.
Magic.
"*****!"
She almost shouted the last word and pointed the wand at me. No flash of light or anything visual. But the effect was unmistakable.
"**** (Where is this?)"
Amazing. My ears still heard only gibberish, yet the meaning bloomed clearly inside my head.
"I-Is this magic?"
"**** (It's translation magic. More importantly—answer me.)"
She was hearing me the same way. Magic after all. Something no one on Earth had ever seen or heard of, performed as casually as breathing.
"This is Korea. My name is Lee Jungmin."
"(Korea? Another dimension?)"
"Probably. You came through a Gate, after all."
"(Right, I crossed a Gate. You could see it from this side too? Then whose Gate is it?)"
"Well..."
I almost said "mine," then stopped. I hadn't awakened any ability through the Gate. But it didn't seem like hers either—she clearly wasn't sure herself. Wait, could otherworlders even become Gate Keepers? I was the first human to meet one, so how would I know?
"...I'm not sure. Should we try opening the Gate again?"
"(If we can.)"
We couldn't. I had no idea how to open a Gate. Supposedly Keepers just knew after awakening, but apparently that wasn't the case here.
"It's not working. Can you do it?"
"(I can't either. I understand the mechanism of opening Gates through research, but this situation is a first.)"
"Then maybe this Gate doesn't belong to either of us. Neither of us is a Keeper."
"(Correct. Good reasoning. So what is this, then?)"
"Without information we should reserve judgment. For now, treating it as an accident seems right, doesn't it?"
She fell silent and stared straight at me. Getting a beauty's full attention made my face heat up even though I hadn't done anything wrong. Wait—had I given a bad answer? No, I hadn't...
"(Not the work of a demon or a witch?)"
"Those don't even—ah, well, maybe they do. We have Gates, so demons aren't that far-fetched. Are you a demon? You don't look like one."
She was beautiful. So beautiful I still couldn't quite think straight. But she didn't feel like a demon. There was a solitary air about her, yet she gave off more of a fairy vibe than anything diabolical. My completely uninformed gut feeling was probably wrong, but even if it was, what was I supposed to do? Honestly, if a real demon was standing in front of me, what countermeasure did I have? Bite my tongue and die?
"(I'm not a demon. Are all the people here as calm as you?)"
"I don't know about calm, but nobody believes in demons or witches. This is a world of science and reason."
"Sai-ence and ree-zon?"
Her mangled pronunciation made the translation cut out. I could guess what was happening. Those concepts simply didn't exist in her world. Rough leather robe, wooden wand, magic—definitely medieval fantasy.
"Science is... accepting only results verified through observation and experiment, I guess? It's hard to explain on the spot. Anyway, something like that."
She nodded. Had my answer been enough? If I'd known I'd be tasked with explaining science to an otherworlder, I would've prepared better. Such a shame.
"(Then is having that many books normal too?)"
Her next target was my tiny bookshelf. About thirty volumes sat there, though calling it a bookshelf was generous—most were civil-service exam workbooks.
"That many? Pretty much every house has at least that."
"(Can I read them?)"
"Of course. Here."
I handed her one of the books open on the desk. She examined it, then carefully turned a page. Even her movements showed she was marveling at the paper quality.
"(This kind of paper is common?)"
"(There are two kinds of letters?)"
"(How did you write this densely? Magic?)"
I answered every childlike question with complete sincerity. You were supposed to be kind to the first otherworlder you met. It had nothing to do with those bright blue eyes or how pretty she was. And I needed to ask questions of my own.
"My name is Lee Jungmin. Don't you think it's about time you told me yours?"
"(Keira Mustang.)"
A pretty cool name. I liked it already.
"Then let me greet you properly. Nice to meet you, Miss Mustang."
I held out my hand to the woman still absorbed in the book. She gave it a perfunctory little shake, as if annoyed, then went right back to reading. The books must have been that fascinating.
"(Just call me Keira.)"
"Then please call me Jungmin."
I had no idea what would happen next. But somehow it felt like good things were coming. The lingering warmth of her hand in mine seemed to say so...
Ah!
Only then did I remember the soft, springy sensation that had first brushed my fingertips. That smooth yet elastic something, hidden under the robe.
It was... bigger than I expected...
See? Something good had already happened.