A Different World
Would things be different if it were Seoul?
Were his parents doing okay?
“Is there no generator?”
“There are solar panels on the school roof, but only a few of them are working properly….”
“Better than nothing, I suppose.”
“Just in case, I’ll cut the line coming in from the headquarters and switch it over to our own supply.”
Kang Yeon-sung explained the current situation in moderate detail. There were roughly two hundred people inside the gymnasium.
Just over fifty of them were elderly, while the rest were children under ten or teenagers up to around fifteen years old.
“Too many useless mouths to feed.”
“Hyung….”
“Up until now you’ve only relied on rations, right? You haven’t done any independent production?”
“There wasn’t really anything we could do…. The kids can’t go out and hunt.”
“Even a three-year-old holding a knife can kill an adult.”
“That’s talking about people, though.”
Kang Yeon-sung pointed out that they couldn’t hunt monsters, but his older brother’s expression remained unchanged.
“If there’s nothing to eat, you catch rats.”
“We already are….”
“You’re catching them?”
“Yes. We set traps. The meat is….”
Kang Yeon-sung’s gaze drifted toward the large pot in the cooking area. It looked like a pot for making porridge, and it probably contained rat meat.
“We have purification tools, so we can deal with any germs…. And the relief supplies don’t have much in the way of protein-rich food.”
“Where do you relieve yourselves?”
“The bathroom. At least it has a bidet… so everyone handles their own cleanup.”
“There must be a septic tank, then.”
Kang Tae-sung nodded. He could already decide on one of the tasks they would start tomorrow.
“How does the headquarters get its supplies?”
But this was the more important question.
He knew the city itself couldn’t be self-sufficient. The real issue was where the headquarters was sourcing its goods.
“There used to be an army base to the north. A lot of supplies apparently came out of the empty warehouses there. Not much is left now, though…. Other than that, hunters bring in what they get from hunting, or we search stores and shops scattered throughout the city.”
But none of those were bottomless wells. Everything would eventually run dry, and that day was drawing closer.
“In the southeast outskirts… never mind.”
Kang Tae-sung stared at his younger brother, who had told him to pretend he hadn’t heard that. Even without being told, he could pull the memory of what lay there from his past life.
“I remember there was a large supermarket there.”
“…It’s a monster den now, hyung.”
The southeast was close to the industrial zone. With wide-open roads, monsters roamed freely across them.
“People sometimes gather there hoping to scavenge something, but every time, some of them don’t make it back. And what they do bring back isn’t much.”
The youngest’s warning not to even think about it came from worry that his older brother might actually consider going there.
It would have been a lie to say he had never considered it, but there were good reasons why no young men— not even awakened hunters—readily thought of heading in that direction.
It wasn’t just that monsters lived around the large supermarket. The things had completely taken over the interior.
So unless it was a proper hunting team, no one approached it. And even proper hunting teams tended to avoid it like the plague.
“I’ll go help with the electrical work, hyung.”
“You don’t need any help?”
“I’m all grown up now. I’ve been doing it for a while, so I’m used to it.”
Apparently the boy had been helping with electrical tasks around here. He couldn’t handle anything too complicated, but he knew how to do simple work and repairs.
Kang Tae-sung watched his younger brother walk off with a few fairly sturdy-looking boys, carrying a toolbox. Suddenly he felt a faint tingling and rubbed his temple with his fingers.
“It finally spread. Must not have been enough blood.”
Muttering to himself, Kang Tae-sung lay down comfortably on the mattress and closed his eyes.
Beneath his closed eyelids, his eyeballs began to move back and forth.
‘A forest.’
The hazy vision gradually grew clearer.
What Kang Tae-sung was looking at was a forest packed with impossibly thick, towering trees.
And scattered everywhere in front of him were the same monsters that had burst out of the rift earlier—Gargos—wandering around.
He wanted to fix his gaze on one spot, but it was impossible. What he was seeing right now wasn’t through his own eyes, but through the eyes of a Gargos.
He had smeared his blood on Jo Yun-jeong’s arrowhead precisely to see this scene. The reason he hadn’t killed the creature himself was the same.
The foreign blood mixed into Kang Tae-sung’s veins allowed him to borrow some of the original owner’s abilities.
One of those abilities let him share, for a limited time, what the recipient of his blood could see.
However, perhaps because there hadn’t been much blood on the arrowhead, or because the Gargos had strong natural resistance, the reaction came later than he had expected.
‘It definitely isn’t just a simple game system.’
The world hadn’t merged with a game. The creature was clearly walking around in a completely separate, real world. It wasn’t existing as data.
It seemed the rumor his youngest brother had mentioned was true.
Unfortunately, unlike sight, he couldn’t share sound, so all he could do was watch what the creature saw. It left him feeling somewhat frustrated.
What kind of properties did the rifts have? How did rifts form on the other side, and how did they react?
He was curious about all of it, but what he could see right now was nothing more than a dense forest and Gargos moving through it.
The one that had taken an arrow to its eye had already recovered. Its injured eye and two broken legs were completely healed.
‘So going back through the rift restores them to full health.’
In that case, it was fortunate that the blood he had injected hadn’t been purged and was still working properly.
‘……?’
The Gargos suddenly began to move faster.
It pushed through bushes and shoved trees aside, half-running as it moved. Around it, other Gargos appeared, along with much smaller types of monsters here and there.
Where were they going?
What was happening?
As its speed increased and the bushes whipped past savagely, the scene that eventually came into view made Kang Tae-sung grateful that the Gargos had fixed its gaze there.
A rift.
It had the same shape as the one he had seen on this side and sat in a slightly small clearing within the forest.
Something soon crossed over from the other side of the shimmering rift. It was a person.
A large man holding a heavy shield burst out first, looked around, and clenched his teeth. Behind him, nearly ten more people arrived through the rift one after another.
‘I heard you can’t come back if you go in.’
They didn’t look like people hoping to commit suicide.
Everyone had serious expressions as they adjusted their weapons, and one of them even had grenades hanging from his belt.
But those grenades were never used.
The battle progressed in a very one-sided manner, yet somehow none of them died. The way they held on was impressive.
Then at a certain point, as if by prior agreement, they all retreated at once and leaped back into the rift. Just like when they appeared, they vanished to the other side.
‘…….’
The monsters did not chase after them. Or perhaps they could not.
Following the rift that slowly faded and disappeared, the monsters that had gathered there began to scatter in every direction as if nothing had happened.
‘So you can hold out for a set amount of time on the other side.’
There was the question of whether there was any real reason to do so, but if it was a densely populated metropolis, such a response might be unavoidable.
‘Still.’
Right now, his curiosity outweighed any sense of relief. Just what were the rifts, and why did the system exist?
Why connect two completely different worlds and make them fight each other?
‘But this is good news.’
Kang Tae-sung considered it quite a harvest to learn that the place beyond the rift wasn’t just darkness, but another real world, and that even if one went in, it was possible to come back out.
That said, he had no intention of crossing a rift himself. There was no reason to.
Shhh.
‘It’s over.’
When the increasingly blurry vision finally went completely dark, he slowly opened his eyes.
Kang Tae-sung sat up from the mattress, swung his legs over the side, and crouched down. He let out a quiet sigh and lightly rubbed his face with both hands.
“You’re awake?”
At the voice coming from the side, he turned his head. Kang In-hye stood there awkwardly in a rough apron, looking at him.
“You haven’t eaten anything, right? Would you like some porridge?”
“No. I’m not hungry.”
Kang Tae-sung shook his head slightly as he answered. He thought not much time had passed, but it was already midday.
The people in the gymnasium were gathered in small groups, eating porridge from similar bowls. It probably contained various ingredients.
“Everyone knows what’s in it when they eat.”
Kang In-hye spoke as if she knew exactly what he was thinking.
“Where’s Yeon-sung?”
“He finished the electrical work… and went to check the traps.”
“I see.”
“Sometimes really big rats get caught in the traps. I think they might be a type of monster…. There’s a rumor that killing them still raises your experience points.”
She said Kang Yeon-sung had only started setting rat traps after hearing that rumor.
At first it was for the experience points, but after hearing how bad the food situation was, he began processing the meat through purification so it could be eaten.
Whether the rumor was true or not, however, was something that couldn’t be confirmed until he awakened.
There were stories that awakened hunters did go out to catch them, but no one ever said whether their experience actually went up. Maybe it was a matter of pride, or perhaps they were worried about creating more competition.
“Oppa… are you strong?”
Kang Tae-sung quietly looked up at Kang In-hye as she suddenly asked that. After thinking for a moment, he opened his mouth.
“More or less.”
“Will you stay here?”
“No.”
“…….”
Her face had brightened slightly at his first answer, but the next one seemed unexpected. She was left speechless.
“I have to go where my family is.”
Thank you.
See you next time…