Prologue — The Age of Awakening
The Age of Awakening dawned, and with it came a cataclysm that reshaped the world.
Gates began opening all across the globe.
Humanity — already past seven billion and straining at the seams — chose to see it as hope, and threw itself into a massive campaign of exploration.
And in truth, the dungeons beyond those gates turned out to be El Dorado.
They held materials no one had ever seen on Earth, and with them, entire domains that modern science had never been able to conquer were finally overcome.
The most famous example was the Magic Stone.
When the first Magic Stones emerged from a gate, magic-type Awakeners dismissed them as little more than crafting material — good for making enchanted items, nothing more.
But then scientists ran their tests and discovered something extraordinary: as long as a Magic Stone retained its mana, it maintained superconductivity at room temperature.
In other words, the Magic Stone was that legendary holy grail — the room-temperature superconductor.
It was the First Great Revolution, the one that struck the scientific world like a thunderbolt. It granted humanity, which had spent decades groveling before the price of oil, an infinite source of electricity through room-temperature fusion technology, and innovation swept through every field of electronics and electrical engineering.
Beyond that, certain monster byproducts turned out to be new materials that even the most advanced materials science on Earth couldn't synthesize — substances no chemical engineering could reproduce.
Even better, dungeons were like Earth's own ecosystems in one crucial way: there was no need to worry about extinction from overharvesting. A short while after a raid, the monsters would regenerate and fill the dungeon right back up.
So dungeons that yielded monsters made of precious materials came under national management, and the countries that held many gates reaped rewards far greater than the oil kingdoms of the past ever had.
The problem was that the only things allowed into this land of gold were a human being's bare body and whatever items could be acquired beyond the gate. It went without saying that the market value of Awakeners — the only ones who could enter dungeons and bring back Magic Stones and monster byproducts — shot up beyond the clouds.
Thus began what everyone called the Golden Age of Hunters.
Statistically, Awakeners made up about one percent of the population. Awakening itself was a long shot to begin with.
Worse, whatever knowledge or ability you gained from awakening was completely random. Trash abilities were everywhere, and the cases of someone awakening with a power actually useful inside a gate amounted to less than ten percent of all Awakeners.
Which meant only one in a thousand people could become a Hunter. That was the decisive reason Hunters could live like aristocrats.
And you only got one shot. You were born with a single awakening, no more.
So there was a saying: an unscratched lottery ticket still holds hope, but a scratched losing ticket is nothing but a scrap of tissue paper.
It was better to live as a non-Awakener — at least then you could carry the hope that someday, with one percent odds, you might awaken, and within that, with ten percent odds, you might gain a real ability.
But what about the Awakener who drew a trash ability?
They had to live out their lives in a Hunter's world with not a shred of hope.
That was my story.
Or so I thought — until I learned what my ability was truly worth.