How to Read the System's Blind Spots (1)
Dohagyeong left those words behind and fled back into the mountains.
Even a minute of city noise would have been torture for him.
I remained alone in the empty hallway, staring down at a paper cup of Mocha Gold gone cold.
Mutants were quietly growing inside gates across the entire country. The system could not sense that growth. The black grain wriggling faintly in my pocket proved Dohagyeong's words true. It was the mutant's core I had crushed into a marble with nothing but the strength of my grip during the live stream. That residue, which should have crumbled and died long ago, had been weakly swelling for days by feeding on my body heat.
I had known since the old days that they would not die unless you completely smashed the core. But if they could grow on their own beyond simply refusing to die, the story changed completely. If Dohagyeong was right, this was happening on a national scale.
There was no time. This was not the moment for leisurely continuing basic sensory training—blindfolds and listening for sound. Monsters were about to pour out those doors any second. What good was knowing how to detect them alone? Once you found them, you had to kill them, or you died.
The next morning, I summoned the three of them to the Closed Training Room. S-rank Yu Seoha, A-rank Jin Seojun, C-rank Yejin. They stood side by side in front of my wheelchair, which sat alone in the middle of the room, and held their breath. They had noticed the air was different from usual. No gravel, no timer—just me sitting still with a paper cup in my hand.
"Seojun."
"Yes, Chief."
"Say you run into something inside a gate that doesn't show up on the system. What do you do?"
Seojun's brow tightened slightly as he answered.
"If I've already confirmed its position, the textbook move is to concentrate firepower and finish it with a surprise attack. At our weight class, we can force a damage race through most variables."
A model answer from a pure elite of the status-window era.
"That firepower you mentioned—you mean the skills the system hands you?"
Seojun's mouth shut.
I set the paper cup on the wheelchair's armrest and lightly took hold of my cheap cane.
"Mutants are wild beasts. You think a beast is going to sit quietly while you finish casting a skill?"
Seoha's eyes wavered. Hers was the face of someone who knew better than anyone how long her ice magic needed to prepare.
"Talking a hundred times won't do a damn thing."
I tapped the floor with the tip of the cane.
"Come at me. All three of you at once. Come at me ready to kill."
The air in the training room froze solid. Three active elites, including an S-rank and an A-rank, forced to fight a wheelchair-bound old man whose mana registered as unmeasurable. Yet none of the three looked incredulous. These were the ones who had watched, with their own eyes, a mutant get crushed into a marble at a single gesture from me during the live stream.
Seoha moved first. Without hesitation she retreated, violently drawing in the surrounding mana. Moisture in the air froze; the temperature in the room plunged. Dozens of sharp ice spears began to take shape at her fingertips. Roughly half a second until the skill fully resolved—an astonishing cast speed by system standards.
Still seated in the wheelchair, I flicked a single finger.
Absolute Telekinesis.
The air around Seoha turned as heavy as iron. Before the ice spears could even launch, the pressure slammed her shoulders down without mercy. With a crash, her body drove into the floor. The spears rising overhead lost all direction, shattered into fragments, and scattered in every direction.
"You're dead."
I looked down at Seoha coughing on the floor and spoke with flat indifference.
"In the half-second you spent gathering mana and checking the skill window, a beast already has its teeth in your throat."
Seojun used that opening to drive in from my blind spot. A perfect calculation, true to a system genius—exploiting the instant my gaze fixed on Seoha. The arc of his dagger stretched toward my neck. I did not even bother turning my head. Instead I unleashed the real killing intent I had honed crossing countless death lines, the kind that carried physical impact of its own. The sensation of hundreds of invisible needles stabbing every inch of his body crashed over Seojun. His foot locked in midair. His head had finished the calculation, but instinctive terror crushed his body; his muscles refused the order. A status window never displays something like an opponent's killing intent as a number. When a variable outside the formula appeared, the genius's brain simply stalled. I snagged his ankle with telekinesis and hurled him into the opposite wall. A dull explosion of impact, and Seojun tumbled across the floor like discarded luggage.
"You're dead too. Save the stat calculations for writing in your diary at home."
In an instant, two of them were sprawled on the floor. Only Yejin remained in the back, trembling hard, both arms raised in a defensive stance.
"Get up."
I lifted the paper cup and drained the last of the coffee.
"A beast doesn't show mercy just because you've fallen down."
Seoha and Seojun staggered to their feet. Both pairs of eyes had turned vicious. Seoha gasped for breath and stared through me. The look that once saw a pitiful old man was long gone. All that remained was a ruthless, stubborn will to leave even a single scratch on a wall she could not reach.
"We're going again."
Seoha bit her lip and kicked off the floor. This time she did not retreat. She abandoned the habit of casting from range and closed the distance to right in front of my face with ferocious speed. Seojun charged from the opposite side at the same moment. I lifted the cane and drew a light line through the air. This time I did not press down over a wide area. I compressed dozens of pellets the size of pebbles and fired them forward like a shotgun. The two twisted their bodies desperately to avoid the hail of telekinetic rounds. There was no time to activate system dodge skills or barriers. The instant they gathered mana, an invisible strike was already hammering a vital point. In the end, all they could rely on was bare flesh and raw survival instinct. Seoha's shoulder snapped back; Seojun's thigh tore open. Even so, I flicked a finger and shot a single piece of gravel from the floor toward Yejin's forehead. She had not even dared join the fight, but she caught the faint sound of the flying stone and ducked her head to avoid it. That was how you stayed alive—by keeping every sense stretched taut.
The breathless beating continued. I stayed in place, moving only fingers and cane, while the three of them rolled and shattered themselves across the training room floor. As time passed, subtle changes began to show.
Seoha cracked her shell first. After being driven into the floor dozens of times and covered in dirt, she no longer tried to chant her flashy ice magic. In the instant my telekinetic rounds flew, she dodged and at the same time sheathed the surface of her bare fist in a thin, sharp layer of ice. Not a formal skill registered in the system—a primitive application that instantly hardened the mana she released. An intuitive reaction that completely erased the half-second cast time. Proof she had stopped being dragged around by skills and started controlling mana as part of her own body.
Seojun was the same. He abandoned calculating the irregular flow of killing intent with his head and half-closed his eyes, entrusting his body to the sensation on his skin. He reflexively avoided the places where the killing intent thickened and rolled on instinct toward the blind spots where the flow of mana thinned. He was breaking the system's frame and putting on the ways of a beast. This was why talented ones were so satisfying to grind.
The problem was Yejin. She was not in a weight class that could punch straight through a predator's killing intent the way Seoha or Seojun could. While her two seniors hit the floor for the third and fourth times, Yejin could only barely dodge the flying gravel from a corner of the room. Her eyes searched for a gap to enter. But there was no door. The killing intent and residual telekinesis I was scattering pressed down on the entire training room; with C-rank mana capacity, she could not even gauge the thickness of that wall. Even so, Yejin did not give up. She squeezed both eyes shut. She was not listening for sound. She was extending the sense she had honed in the gravel training in a different direction. She pushed out a single slender strand of mana from her fingertips—not spreading it like mist, but long and thin like a thread of silk. The thinnest line of mana she could control began to feel its way through the room.
I stopped mid-sip of coffee. I recognized what that was. The principle was the same as the detection method Dohagyeong had used his entire life. Only the direction was reversed: Dohagyeong suppressed overflowing senses; this girl focused insufficient senses into a single point. Opposite directions, same core. You read the wave that returns from wherever the mana touches. The place where nothing returns—where the mana vanishes as if falling into a hole—is where something outside the system is hiding.
Yejin's head turned slowly. Left to right, extending the thread, drawing it back, adjusting the angle by a hair and pushing it out again. The tempo was slow. But that head stopped dead at the single point where I had packed my killing intent densest.
"Over there."
Yejin pointed with her eyes still closed.
"Only that spot—I send it and it just cuts off. No answer."
It was the blind spot of killing intent I had deliberately created. While scattering telekinesis and killing intent through the training room, I had intentionally left one place empty—a simulation of the exact blank space the system would show when a mutant was hiding. Seoha and Seojun, absorbed in combat, never noticed the gap. Yejin, who could not even enter the fight with her C-rank mana, found that empty place. The result of stubbornly repeating fundamentals no one else bothered with, not missing a single day.
I set down the Mocha Gold paper cup and withdrew the telekinesis. Only rough breathing filled the training room. Seoha and Seojun lay sprawled on their backs, gasping; Yejin knelt, sucking in short breaths. All three were caked in sweat and dust. The eyes of greenhouse flowers that had depended on status windows were gone without a trace. What remained faintly resembled the eyes of the first generation—people who had glimpsed how to survive in a life-or-death mud pit.
"Yejin."
When I called her, she flinched and lifted her head.
"Do you know what you just did?"
Yejin shook her head.
"I didn't have the strength to cover the whole room, so I just tried sending the thinnest line I could, as far as it would go."
"That's the right way."
I took the black grain from my pocket and showed it to them.
"This is a mutant core. The system will never catch this thing. It doesn't appear on status windows, has no rank, and shows no weak points."
All three pairs of eyes locked onto the grain in my palm at once.
"But if you send mana, only the place where this thing is hiding returns no wave at all. The mana vanishes whole, like it fell into a hole. That empty spot is its position."
Seojun muttered under his breath.
"Negative Space of Mana."
"Call it whatever you want. What matters is what Yejin just did. You don't need to spread it wide. One thread is enough."
Yejin's eyes went wide. The face of someone finally understanding the weight of what she had just done.
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Seoha and Seojun have too much mana. If they lay it down wide, they drown in information. Shooting thin like you do makes the empty spots stand out more clearly."
In other words, the weakness of being C-rank became an advantage in reverse for this detection method alone. Seoha lifted her dust-caked face and looked at Yejin. A complicated look—pride and recognition tangled together.
"Get up. We're not done."
I turned the wheelchair and headed deeper into the training room.
"Seoha, Seojun. You two repeat what your bodies just figured out. The second you try to use a system skill, I hit you. Yejin, you keep training that thread. Every time I change the empty spot in the killing intent in here, you find the new position."
The blood-spattering afternoon began again. Only when the sun was tipping down did I finally withdraw the telekinesis. The three of them sprawled on the training room floor, forcing out ragged breaths. I figured I would rinse off roughly and head home. I had rolled people instead of gravel too much today; my shoulders ached.
Then the heavy iron door of the training room slammed open. Docheol burst in. The usual easy, sly expression was gone without a trace. Cold sweat stood on his forehead; he must have run hard on his prosthetic leg.
"Taehyun."
"What. Running short on training footage to edit?"
"This is no time for jokes."
Docheol thrust the tablet he was holding at me. On the screen was a large gate site on the outskirts of the capital under Baekho Guild's jurisdiction. A place that should have been safely cleared under system control had turned into a slaughterhouse.
"It just blew. The system said a pack of B-rank monsters."
Docheol's voice had gone hard as stone.
"Everything pouring out of there is stuff that doesn't register on status windows. Dozens of mutants."
On the screen, the elite suppression team was being swept away. The tanker's taunt skill was ignored; the mage's wide-area spell got her throat cut while she was still casting. Hunters who fought by the system's rules were collapsing helplessly before wild violence that recognized no rules at all.
"The field commander put out an emergency rescue request. But there's no reserve force we can throw in right now. The guild's main strength is already inside another large gate."
Docheol glanced at my face as he let the words trail. He was asking me to go clean up that mess myself, of course.
I took my eyes off the tablet screen and looked at Docheol.
"We go."
Docheol nodded and stepped back a pace.
"Right. If you step in, it'll be over in a second."
"Not me."
"What?"
"You go."
Docheol froze.
"It's time your guild members saw how far the vice guild leader of Baekho Guild can go."
Docheol's expression shifted in a subtle way. The slick salesman's smile and the urgent anxiety both fell away, and for an instant the face that had stood behind me in the Grand Hall twenty years ago flickered there.
"Your place isn't behind a desk signing papers, Docheol."
I drained the last of the cold Mocha Gold.
"Kids are dying out there. You think a first-generation hunter is going to sit in an editing room playing with YouTube?"
Docheol gave a short laugh. Twenty years ago that laugh had always come first—the one he wore right before charging onto a battlefield, the one that swallowed worry and fear whole.
"Yeah. That's true enough."
Docheol turned. His prosthetic leg strode hard out through the iron door.
"Taehyun."
Without stopping, he threw one line back over his shoulder.
"If the live cameras are still running, get a good shot of it."
The heavy iron door slammed shut with a boom.