Ties from My Previous Life (6)
“Whoa. It’s Lee Jihyun.”
“Huh? Who’s that?”
“Just one of the streamers I watch. I heard she recently got promoted to A-rank, so why’s she in a C-rank gate?”
“If she’s a streamer, she’s probably here for content. But who’s that next to her? Hey, hey—she’s seriously gorgeous.”
“She looks familiar… where have I seen her before?”
“No idea.”
Lee Jihyun was a fairly well-known broadcaster in her own right. There was always a chance someone would recognize her.
Of course, she didn’t draw nearly as much attention as Han Yeseo.
At A-rank, she should have had some level of public recognition, but Lee Jihyun’s fame came more from her streaming career than from being a hunter.
People who knew, knew. People who didn’t, didn’t.
It was because hunting wasn’t her main focus. Maybe that was why, among the people here, more seemed to recognize me than her.
“Hey. Isn’t that the girl from back then?”
“Who? Oh…?”
“Yeah, right? The one who got tangled up with that chairman…!”
The Live Tribe had achieved their goal. At the very least, they had pulled off their plan to stir up aggro perfectly.
Otherwise, there was no way this many people would recognize me.
It was far more attention than a mere D-rank hunter deserved—nowhere near Han Yeseo’s level, but still excessive. Lee Jihyun must have found it strange too, because she asked me about it.
“Um… are you famous or something? Like a celebrity? Everyone seems to recognize you…?”
“There was an incident a while back that made me a bit well-known. It’s probably because of that. I’ll tell you about it once we’re outside.”
“Oh, really? Then should we head somewhere deeper in?”
“Deeper in?”
“Yeah. We’re not even broadcasting anyway, so there’s no reason to stay in the spotlight, right? Besides, viewers don’t actually care that much about the truth. They just want something entertaining.
If I had faked something, they’d get mad—but only because watching me get in trouble for faking it is fun. If it ever looked like I was really about to die, the viewers would be the first ones worrying about me.”
“Ah. So that’s why you went to C-rank instead of A-rank.”
“Exactly. The viewers don’t actually want me to die. They just want entertaining broadcasts. So we can head deeper in and hunt comfortably!”
Since the person herself said it was fine, there probably wasn’t any real problem. I still felt a bit uneasy about going deeper, but nothing serious should happen.
Han Yeseo was S-rank and an important figure. That made her worth assassinating—which was exactly why she had become a target.
But I wasn’t. Neither was Lee Jihyun.
Lee Jihyun’s parents were just ordinary orphanage directors, and an A-rank hunter wasn’t exactly a rare or special existence.
Sure, it was top-tier—like getting a perfect score on the college entrance exam—but it was the kind of rank where you could always find at least one person who achieved it. It wasn’t worth the cost-benefit analysis of a deliberate assassination.
I was in a similar boat. There was no real reason to target me in the first place.
Unless my identity as a mage was revealed, there was nothing about me that would make me a worthwhile target.
Who would bother going after a D-rank hunter? Because she’s pretty? If they wanted a pretty girl, they’d kidnap a celebrity, not some ordinary person like me.
There has to be value in a kidnapping. If they just offered money, plenty of beautiful people would line up willingly. Why go through the trouble of kidnapping?
“Let’s go.”
When I thought about it rationally, there was zero reason for anyone to target me. Avoiding the crowd’s gaze while hearing the rest of the story seemed like a good enough reason to move.
Once we moved deeper inside, things became more comfortable.
There were fewer people here. It was dangerous, after all.
While the chances of running into real danger were low, the fact that no one would be around to help if something did happen made it an unpopular choice.
As we continued on, a completely different landscape unfolded before us—a wasteland.
It was just dry, barren earth.
And from that barren ground, monsters were slowly crawling out.
“Most C-rank gates tend to look like this—wasteland terrain. Just dry, desolate places. Up to D-rank you still see some grasslands, but starting from C-rank, this kind of environment becomes common.”
“But doesn’t the gate’s rank get lower the deeper you go?”
“Yes. And as the environment recovers, the vegetation gradually gets thicker.”
The monsters in the wasteland weren’t particularly difficult. It didn’t feel like we were riding Han Yeseo’s bus like before, but it wasn’t hard enough to risk dying.
Rather than feeling like I was growing, it felt more like I was just doing manual labor.
Whooooosh—
Of course, even though we had killed countless monsters by now, we hadn’t gotten any skill books or magic stones containing skills. The drop rate was low, so it couldn’t be helped, but it was still disappointing.
They supposedly dropped more often in uncleared gates, so maybe it really was unavoidable.
“But just how many skills do you have? No… I didn’t expect you to have this many…!”
Since I hadn’t revealed that I was a mage, Lee Jihyun couldn’t hide her astonishment. Even if she said it was close to C-rank, I was still only D-rank.
In percentile terms, I was in the lower ranks. I hadn’t even reached mid-tier hunter status yet.
How many hunters at that level could possibly have a lot of skills? At most, three.
And yet I had just used over seven different spells disguised as skills.
Wouldn’t that get me caught?
I could just insist I obtained them normally.
That one-in-8-million chance. The odds of being struck by lightning seven times.
Even the lottery—which people who are bad at math call “a tax on the mathematically illiterate”—still produces two or three winners every week.
To those winners, the probability was one hundred percent. No matter how low the odds, if you insist it happened, it’s hard to prove otherwise.
Since proving a negative is impossible, I decided to just push forward with the story.
If you searched the entire world, there were probably one or two D-rank hunters with this many skills.
Probably?
“Sowol, would you ever consider appearing as a guest on my stream sometime?”
“I don’t mind. I’d actually be grateful. I’m a fan, after all.”
The relationship between the two of us right now couldn’t really be called normal.
It was bizarre. Even though we had only met today, we were already interacting like friends.
I was aware of that fact. Lee Jihyun wasn’t stupid, so she had probably noticed it too.
Normally, we would have met as fan and streamer, parted ways, met a few more times, and only then challenged a gate together. That would have been the natural progression.
But we had skipped every single step in between.
Why? Lee Jihyun might not know, but I had a pretty good idea. The souls from our previous lives were bound together far more tightly than I had realized.
Isn’t that kind of abnormal for a previous life? I don’t know.
Reincarnation was something that hadn’t been proven through magic anyway, so the thought that it was possible kept creeping in.
No matter how I thought about it, the old saying that death belongs to the living kept coming to mind.
Lee Jihyun had liked me. She was probably still mourning me.
But I didn’t have any particularly strong feelings toward Lee Jihyun. The guilt wasn’t that heavy either.
It was Lee Jihyun who had never expressed her feelings.
Even if I had accepted her confession, I could say with certainty that I wouldn’t have left her if we had become lovers.
The reason I had been able to end my life so easily was because no one would mourn Heo Donghyeon for very long.
That was why it had been possible.
Still, don’t worry.
The living might worry about the dead, but the dead were living quite well, thank you.
Now that I knew reincarnation was real, I decided I would be able to send off the dying with a lighter heart from now on.
Of course… my case is a bit of a special one.
I still didn’t know why I had become Baek Sowol. I hadn’t been born as Baek Sowol—I had woken up inside a perfectly healthy Baek Sowol who had already been living her life.
If I had retained memories from before, maybe. Or if Baek Sowol had been born after Heo Donghyeon died, maybe.
But Baek Sowol and Heo Donghyeon had lived at the same time.
That was why I knew this wasn’t normal.
The same soul couldn’t exist twice.
That was why I had grown interested and was trying to look into Heo Donghyeon.
It wouldn’t be easy.
Still, I had no intention of giving up.
Because pursuing truth is what it means to be a mage.
That was why I had approached Lee Jihyun. If not for that, there would have been no reason to get close to her when our relationship was so awkward.
Why approach her at all? There was no real benefit.
I had approached her because uncovering the truth was the duty of a mage.
That was what I believed.
“Let’s go.”
While I was lost in thought, the monsters had all been taken down at some point.
The crystal fragments that emerged from the monsters’ bodies melted and flowed into Lee Jihyun.
Her growth was steadily accumulating. The sight made me smile with genuine satisfaction.
It looked like almost all the monsters in this area had been defeated. I lifted my head to look for the next spot.
And then…
“…Oh, fuck.”
“What? Sowol, what’s wrong?”
Something that absolutely should not have been there entered my field of vision.
There was no way. Neither Lee Jihyun nor I had any elements that would make us targets.
I had definitely thought that.
Yet a person wearing familiar clothing was walking straight toward us.
Lee Jihyun must have seen it too, because she asked me,
“Um… who exactly is that person?”
Who else? An assassin.
I had no idea why they were targeting us, though.
“Jihyun… have you done anything to earn someone’s grudge?”
“No…? Not that I know of…?”
Right. That’s what I thought too.
“Then… can you follow my instructions?”
“Um… who exactly is that per… son…?”
In terms of hunter ability and experience, Lee Jihyun had far more than I did.
But there was one thing I had experienced much more of…
“It’s an assassin.”
Combat experience against villains.
“They’ve probably come to kill us.”
We had to survive this villain.