78. To Busan

The Relic had taken shape far sooner than expected. The Arahan Guild’s doing, beyond any doubt. When it came to handing things out, they never held back so much as a sliver; they simply poured out everything they had.

‘This boss of theirs. I don’t know how he makes a profit running a business like this.’

Buurp.

Thanks for the meal.

‘For now there’s no fortuitous encounter to snatch up. I’d meant to consolidate my forces at Ground Zero, but…’

‘My fighting strength’s been reinforced, so it wouldn’t hurt to widen my range of action.’

The original plan had been to take a moment to catch his breath. He’d expanded his territory too far, too fast, and because of that he’d had to put Fafnir on defense and the rest, so with his forces stretched thin it was hard to move more boldly.

‘Ground Zero, the borderlands, and Yeonpyeong Island too.’

The plan to swallow only part of the Red Spider’s businesses had failed, thanks to the rampaging of small-fry outfits. With the help of the black market and the Madam, he’d swallowed most of the Spider’s territory instead. The borderlands ranked relatively low in importance, but since they also had to serve as a buffer against the remnants of the old North Korean army lingering beyond Kaesong, he meant to hold them. If a variable like Eye-Patch surfaced, he’d surrender them without a second thought.

‘The most important spot at the present moment is Yeonpyeong Island.’

A strategic point that governed the flow of the whole Gyeonggi coast. If history ran the same course it had before the regression, before long the man-hunters would succeed in crossing the sea and take Yeonpyeong Island for their own. Yujin’s intervention had changed the island’s master, but there was no chance those bastards would let go of their greed over a variable on that scale.

‘Take Fafnir off it and the defense of Yeonpyeong Island doesn’t hold together.’

Beyond the geographic advantage, there were plenty of reasons to hold Yeonpyeong Island. A temple there enshrined Kronos. And thanks to the Relics that surfaced on it without end, the island doubled as a supply source, where he periodically harvested rare byproducts like the scales and sinews of lesser dragonkind. That was why he’d stationed Fafnir there, even at the cost of bleeding off fighting strength.

‘And yet — what’s all this, then?’

What he’d gained from clearing the double gate was far too much. The Relic had lifted both the quality and the scale of his undead army.

— There’s no way I could lose to mere mediocrities—!

The boasting wasn’t to be trusted, but in Song Myeongseok he’d gained one formidable asset. Two notches below Fafnir in his Dragon-Scale Armor. Strip the armor off Fafnir and the gap would be more like one. With every buff stacked on, Song commanded the martial strength of a man on the threshold of 5th Stellar Rank, enough to handle nearly any opponent.

‘Their innate traits and skill sets are different.’

Jo Seungcheol possessed 4th-Rank stats, but he lacked the spells to put those numbers to use. His ceiling was Fireball, a 3rd-Rank spell. To unleash firepower worthy of his Stellar Rank, he’d have to acquire 4th-Rank spells.

‘The Martial line takes less of a Stellar-Rank penalty when learning skills, you see.’

Even Song Myeongseok, only 3rd Rank in life, had carried the A-grade skill Light-Splitting Sword. His mana control and physical conditioning had lagged, his proficiency too low to bring the technique to bear in a real fight, but weighed against magic, the Light-Splitting Sword had to be reckoned a 6th-Rank technique at the very least.

‘The important thing is money.’

A 4th-Rank magic skillbook started at a billion won for the smallest unit. Steep, considering how few Hunters had ever broken past the wall, but the reason was plain: supply fell short of demand.

‘A Martial-line Hunter can make up for it by pouring in mana even without a high-grade skill, you see.’

The magic line’s perk, by contrast, was Multi-Computation. Deploying two or more spells at once was a fine way to manufacture variables, yet unlike the Martial line, it offered no dramatic jump in firepower from breaking past the wall alone.

‘Right. So for now it’s fine to push one more piece of business forward.’

‘It’s not a fortuitous encounter — I’m going to go save someone.’

Now see here. Who did he think had saved Jang Miseon, back when she stood before her grave dithering over whether to step in or not? The person Yujin meant to meet was in a similar plight.

‘You’ll get the gist once you hear the guy’s nickname.’

‘The Executioner.’

A title a hundred and eighty degrees off from something like “next Sword Saint” or “Arahan’s Supernova.”

Yujin took out his cellphone.

“Madam. Can you find one person for me?”

Even with the commission’s result still pending, he didn’t let the spare time go to waste.

“Getting a feel for it at all?”
“It’s there and not there — let me try just a little more.”

Shin Junseok was locked in a wrestling match with a cheap mana engine, an item Yujin had gone to no small trouble to procure for the sake of passing on the Golem Synthesis skill. If a man could pick the skill up the instant he’d cracked a Blood Golem open for a look, scholars the world over wouldn’t be breaking into cold sweats trying to build golems.

Shin Junseok was a peerless genius. Yujin, the one set to hand down the alchemy skill, stood right beside him, and even so, Golem Synthesis could be acquired only once a man grasped a golem’s structure to perfection.

‘He’s going to have to slave away a few more day—’

— Flash!

A brilliant light surged up out of the cheap mana engine. The boulder he’d set in place beforehand heaved, folded itself around the engine, and sprouted arms and legs. A stone doll, walking upright on two legs like a man. A blue light spilled from the boulder where a head should have been.

“Or, ders.”
“I-it’s a success!!!”

Ah. Tsk. Now hold on. This isn’t quite right, sir. Teacher.

‘It took even me, who inherited the craft through the Ring of Black Darkness, a full ten days to make a golem that runs properly!’

‘Fafnir, and now this — every last one of these so-called geniuses is a piece of bad luck, aren’t they.’

Sulking for no good reason, he turned his head away and played deaf.

‘A business partner’s growth is a happy thing, but every so often I wish he’d act within the bounds of common sense.’

‘I’m a regressor, you know. I used cheat codes too, so naturally.’

‘Argh. Don’t go talking lightly about the fruits of someone else’s blood-and-guts effort.’

He’d snapped at Kronos, but Yujin too owned a talent brilliant enough to leave him without a rival in necromancy. Through the Ring of Black Darkness he’d come into even the lore of the necromancers of old, so it was quite literally a case of giving a tiger wings. The heads of the Seven Great Families aside, Yujin alone had reached the realm of Transcendence, after all.

— Bzzzt.

His phone was buzzing.

“I took the call.”
“Found him. Someone by the name of Im Jaebaek.”
“Fast. I only gave you the name and a rough age range.”
“Hoho. The name you gave me isn’t a common one, so I pinned him down right away.”

Im Jaebaek
Age: 35
Occupation: Hunter (in penal labor)
Place of residence: Busan
Family: father / mother / younger sibling
…

His personal details were set down to the finest grain. The resident registration number went without saying; his assets, his recent movements, every last category of information lay spread out.

Yujin’s eyes slid slowly downward. They came to rest on a single line, and a glint rose over his retinas.

“In penal labor down in Busan?”
“Yes. An outfit called the Seagulls, whose main trade is smuggling across the Korea Strait.”
“Looks like they’ve got some weakness on him, then.”
“It’s because of his younger sibling’s debt, apparently. I couldn’t make out the details.”

‘This is the man, no mistake. I’d heard he got tangled up in illegal work for his sibling’s sake.’

The one snag was that his current whereabouts lay far from Yujin’s base of operations.

“Could you get one debtor handed over to the Seagulls?”
“For that kind of side job, why not get a referral from Mister Black instead?”

Quick on the uptake, this one.

At the sound of Yujin clicking his tongue, the Madam let out a short laugh. Hoho.

“I’ll make a place for you. Just give me one day.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. Old man Jeong says that next time he’ll treat you to a cocktail instead of milk, so do drop by.”

Having sounded Yujin out lightly, the Madam accepted the commission without prying any further.

‘I like how cleanly she handles her work.’

‘It’ll take a few days.’

A day to pass himself off as a debtor and get handed over to the Seagulls. Two or three days to read the situation and map Im Jaebaek’s range of movement. Counted at the barest minimum, the schedule ran four days and then some.

Yujin gathered the Scraps members, still mid-training, along with Shin Junseok, and told them he’d be gone about a week.

“Our team will head over to the borderlands.”
“Will you be all right?”
“It’s pretty safe to hunt with the fog up, turns out. If things get hairy, we can just lure them toward the undead.”

Kang Minho said it lightly, with an easy laugh, as though it were nothing at all.

These kids. Back when they’d first laid eyes on a zombie in the Garden of Antiquity, they’d seized up at the mere sight of it. Not even three months on, and here they were, calmly weighing the undead as a shield.

‘Is it that their nerve is strong. Or that they’ve gone numb.’

Set against the Mirror Hunters’ resounding renown before the regression, it had to be the former.

Yujin’s gaze turned to the side.

“You come along too.”
“Business partner. Where to?”
“You just heard me, so why play dumb.”
“Why would a researcher go somewhere that dangerous!”
“Monster hunting is just the thing for raising your level.”

Job classes like blacksmith and alchemist drew their experience from research or crafting results. That was why their Stellar Rank climbed even without their setting foot in a gate. The trade-off was that combat skills came hard, and even the ones they did learn never delivered their proper might. That was the rub.

“They do say that in your youth you should pay to take on hardship.”
“Paying to take on hardship isn’t to my taste. And don’t go saying things like that when you’re younger than me.”
“Hmm. I thought it’d be a good chance to run a Golem Synthesis test, but a shame. Just go on your own, the lot of you.”

Yujin wrapped it up in an offhand, couldn’t-care-less tone. The last line he tossed off snagged at Shin Junseok’s ears.

“Come to think of it, there was the golem.”
“Nah. Treat it as something you never heard. There’s no better teaching material than the real thing, but with your ability you’ll manage to improve the golem’s performance just fine.”
“The borderlands. I’ll come along.”
“No. I’m telling you it’s really fine. What’s gotten into you?”

The two of them went back and forth. Off to one side, the Scraps team shook their heads.

“That older fella’s pretty pitiful too.”

Kang Minyeong’s muttered grievance went round and round in the empty air.

— Squawk. Squawk.

The cries of gulls prickled at his ears. The smell of brine tickled his nose. With the blindfold strapped on there was nothing to see, but it was easy enough to tell he’d been brought somewhere near the sea.

“Out.”

— Tok.

A rough grip coiled around his right arm. By the strength bleeding through to his forearm, the man was a 2nd-Rank Martial-line Hunter. He could have stood his ground had he cared to resist, but Yujin saw no point in making a scene and let himself be led out.

— Fwap.

The cloth over his eyes was wrenched away, and the blue sea, the gulls wheeling across the sky, and at last a putt-putt boat chugging in from the distance all swam into view.

‘Handling things too thoroughly is its own kind of problem, huh.’

The Madam had turned Yujin into a debtor inside a single day, exactly as promised. She’d appropriated the ID of a missing man. The face photo went without saying, and on top of it she’d matched every detail that might trip him up to Yujin himself.

‘And after that, she sold me off to the Seagulls.’

Selling a debtor off, it seemed, had taken the black market’s help. Put to Mister Black, the job had found him only too eager; if it was work that helped Yujin, word had it, he’d pitch in with a glad heart.

‘I even caught myself wondering whether the fellow’s real source of joy lay somewhere else entirely.’

‘Damn it. I never went through an experience like this even before the regression.’

Call it penal labor, to dress it up nicely. Taken this far, it was slavery raised from the grave in the modern age. They’d kept his eyes covered the whole way down to Busan, and that was the least of it; they’d searched him for anything the slightest bit suspect, down to his underwear. The one mercy was that they couldn’t pry loose the soul-bound Ring of Black Darkness.

‘I suppose I ought to be grateful they didn’t cut off the finger.’

Yujin swallowed back a sigh. Cumbersome as it was, this was the easiest way to worm into the Seagulls.

The debtors mobilized for penal labor came to five. Board that putt-putt boat, and it would ferry him to where the future “Executioner” was serving out his own sentence of penal labor.

‘I put up with it all the way here. What’s there to not be all right.’

‘What about Mr. Im Jaebaek?’

‘Your thinking will change once you know the origin of the title.’

Yujin slowly began to tell the tale he’d heard before the regression.