The Aftermath

The aftermath had begun. Outside the window, the sky was already darkening as the sun set. Yesterday I’d come home and basically collapsed straight into sleep. After erasing an entire gate, I hadn’t had the strength left to lift a single finger.

“Haaaaah… I’m so thirsty.”

I still jumped at the sound of my own voice sometimes. Clear, delicate, and unmistakably feminine. It might sound a little self-indulgent, but it really was beautiful. Of course I liked it… yet even after a full month, while I’d grown used to it, it still didn’t feel like this body actually belonged to me.

I turned on my phone screen to check the time, hoping to shake off the lingering discomfort.

“What time is it?”

The screen read 6 p.m. on the 14th.

“Wait—three whole days have passed?!”

I’d entered the gate in the early morning of the 11th, which meant I’d slept straight through for three days. It was shocking, but my throat was drier than the desert. I tried to sit up and get some water.

Or at least I tried. Before I could even do that, there was one absolute must-do, the single most important routine in my life.

Checking the community boards.

Killing two birds with one stone, I logged into the gallery I always visited to see how the incident had been handled.

The place was originally a fan gallery for Kim Suhyun, the S-class Hunter who had debuted not long ago. Korea’s strongest Hunter with a pretty face—fans had flocked here, but it honestly had more random chatter than actual talk about her. I was one of the longtime regulars.

But now…

Our usually quiet gallery was completely buried under posts about me from top to bottom. The more I scrolled, the colder the chill running down my spine became.

These bastards… The video had already spread? It had only been a few days, yet instead of the rumor dying down, it was gaining even more traction. And the most surprising part was that GloomyDepressedGirlLover—the one I thought was the quietest user here—was the sharpest of all.

Then a deleted post. Aaaaaaaaagh. It was one of those “Ha” starting posts. Finally I clicked on the news repost.

In summary: At dawn three days ago, the eight stars that formed the Libra constellation had all vanished at the same time, only to reappear exactly one minute later. The same phenomenon had been recorded at observatories in Japan and China, so there was no denying it. The academic world had apparently flipped upside down, calling it an unprecedented event in the history of observation.

I slowly set my phone down.

That… wasn’t that my doing? Had I really pulled down the stars?

Cold sweat trickled down my back. But this was no time to be frozen in panic.

I’d learned one thing from living this life: in moments like these, it was better to sit down and think calmly than to flail around in a hurry. I sat on the edge of the bed and organized my thoughts.

The dangerous part wasn’t the analysis posts. No matter how much they speculated inside the gallery, it was still just people playing around on the internet. The real danger was these two lines of information.

The exact time the observatory recorded the stars vanishing: 4:04:05 a.m. The exact time the Kangseo-gu gate was cleared: 4:10 a.m. The gap between them was a mere five seconds.

If this connection got out, the story would change completely. The moment the stars disappeared and the moment the gate was erased were identical. If that became known, the Association or the government might come looking for me themselves.

An ability that could borrow stars? It was obvious they’d try to secure and manage it at a national level. If I got caught, I’d be dragged from gate to gate and trotted out at official events. Just imagining it was terrifying.

That could not happen.

After my parents passed away, the only thing I had left was this tiny room. My school days, my dreams, even the original body I was born with—everything had been taken from me, and this was the life I had barely managed to keep. The world had always stolen things from me, but I refused to hand over this small, safe existence.

So those posts had to be buried. By any means necessary.

I straightened my posture and opened the comment section. The time-coincidence post was on the verge of hitting the recommended threshold. I immediately switched to an anonymous account and started typing.

Four anonymous comments, all from me. The first comments usually set the tone for the whole thread. Once a few people started going “Oh, yeah, that makes sense,” the post would cool off. It should have died down.

But.

(Refresh)

The analysis post from the real gallery owner refused to die. It was GloomyDepressedGirlLover again. She had compiled the matching times, the observatory data, screenshots from multiple threads—everything. It was clean. Too clean.

Under my anonymous comments, replies had already appeared.

This kid. If it came down to pure logic, I’d lose. I already knew that. Then a new comment appeared on the list post.

My heart went ice-cold. That one absolutely had to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠be buried. Right now.

My hands moved faster. If I couldn’t win with logic, I just had to stop them from thinking at all. Cover it with something even more stimulating. After all, galleries loved shock value more than truth.

I fired off a new post.

Next, I dropped more anonymous comments under the roster post.

And finally, I changed direction completely. Instead of erasing the rumor, I redirected it somewhere ridiculous.

I was careful not to use too many anonymous accounts or it would look suspicious, so I also used one of my old fixed nicknames I’d prepared. If the suspicion could be funneled toward “a retired middle-aged male ranker,” people would gradually stop paying attention to the actual cleanup crew from yesterday’s incident.

I was a frail young woman with no registered identity who worked on the aftermath cleanup team. The most insignificant combination possible. All I had to do was let the gallery thicken that disguise for me.

(Refresh)

Twenty minutes had passed. My palms were sweaty.

The number one post on the real-time best was the fake bait I’d posted. The earlier threads had been buried under new floods of posts, and the analysis thread had been pushed back two whole pages by the sheer firepower.

I set my phone down and lightly rolled my wrists.

“It actually worked… I’m saved.”

I’d put out the immediate fire. But the root cause was still there. The reason I’d been noticed was because I had used the Libra constellation, of all things.

Libra. It was one of the easier constellations to spot in the night sky. In the countryside you could see it with the naked eye. All eight stars embedded in it had proper names. Of course it was going to cause an uproar when they all vanished at once.

The answer was obvious. I just had to use nameless stars next time.

Truthfully, when I activated the ability, it felt like I could sense the majority of celestial bodies throughout my entire body. I had simply chosen the famous stars of Libra last time. This time I could pick different ones.

The night sky was filled with billions of faint stars invisible to the naked eye. Sixth-magnitude, seventh-magnitude, nameless catalog-only stars. If I borrowed just one of those, it would be hard for anyone to notice it had disappeared.

Besides, I had loved stars ever since I was little. Beyond dinosaur otaku or fish otaku—I was a full-blown star otaku. Those ten years of completely useless knowledge had finally proven their worth.

It was eleven at night. The problem, once again, was money.

The dark-red pebble rolling around beside the bed. The Orc General’s magic stone. At the very least two thousand. Maybe more if I got lucky.

But I couldn’t sell it. To hand it over to the Association officially I needed an Awakener’s license, and to get the license I needed an ID card. The ID card currently listed—

Lee Suhyuk (09xxxx-3xxxxxx). A male born in 2009.

Why didn’t the system automatically handle this kind of thing like it did in novels? And it wasn’t as if I had any relatives who could help. I’d been living alone ever since my parents passed away.

An unregistered S-class Awakener? I’d be lucky if they didn’t drag me off to a lab. After all, an S-class that didn’t cause problems even when provoked was rare. Of course, summoning a single star would probably shut them up, but still.

In any case, a place that would buy a magic stone without an Awakener’s license or ID. The kind of place that would rip you off on the price, scam you, and occasionally make customers disappear… exactly the sort of place I’d read about on the gallery.

Make two thousand or not. There was nothing to think about. Two thousand was how many packs of ramen?

Before I realized it, I was standing in front of a signless basement entrance. The address I had scraped together from the gallery.

When I went inside, an appraiser was waiting. A skinny old man. The moment I placed the magic stone on the counter, he picked it up with a bored expression.

“Orc General magic stone, you say? Let’s have a look.”

He set it on a pedestal and held a measuring device against it. Beep. The machine gave a short tone. The old man set the device down and lifted the stone up to his eyes.

“…What the hell is this?”

He clearly had no idea. But I did.

Inside the stone. Right in the center of the dark-red crystal. A single, tiny point of light was embedded there.

‘Wait, that was a star?’

Yes. It was a star. The remnant left behind when I had summoned Libra to erase the gate and it had lodged itself inside the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠magic stone.

I checked the color of the light. A bluish-white glow. A high-temperature star. Its academic and astronomical value would be—my mental calculator spun rapidly—astronomical.

“This…”

The old man licked his dry lips. The bored look in his eyes had completely vanished.

“Where did you get this… Where the hell did you get it?”

I realized too late. I should never have brought this.

His hand slowly slid beneath the desk. Inside my hood, I quietly steadied my breathing.

This time, a star that no one knew.

A single point of light gathered at my fingertip. Small, cold, and distant. Because of that light, the inside of the hood that had been hidden in shadow was revealed for the first time.

The old man’s hand stopped. My face was reflected in the glass plate on the desk. A face so pale it looked bloodless, with starlight flickering coldly across it like the Milky Way.

To the old man’s eyes, it must have looked like something that would bring disaster if touched.

“Goddammit.”

The old man muttered the curse as if chewing on it. In the night sky, one nameless star quietly twinkled.