91. Watch, What Fortuitous Encounter Is This?

In handing over the distribution rights to the Saint’s Blessing, Yujin entrusted the sale of the mass-produced mid-grade potions along with it.

Contract term: 3 years. Renewable by mutual agreement.

Party A (Shin Junseok) delegates to Party B (Daehan Pharmaceutical) the distribution rights to the Saint’s Tears (formerly the mass-produced mid-grade potion).

Party B receives 10% of the Saint’s Tears margin.

“A stable supply secured. Will that be possible for you?”
“If you’d give me a little more time and budget…”
“I’ll back you with equipment, by way of an advance against payment.”

Shin Junseok’s gaze slid quietly off to the side.

“Why are you reading my face?”
“You’re the one who told me not to take investment.”
“The situation’s changed, hasn’t it.”

Before, he’d kept a wary eye on incoming capital; an investor could jerk him around. He was an alchemist without a single credential, and proving a potion’s efficacy left him wide open to getting fleeced, the whole business liable to be yanked around right along with him.

“Cheon Yujin’s partner. That much ought to be name enough, wouldn’t you say.”

A joint capture alongside Arahan Guild’s rising star. The lead role in the legend of the double-gate run. Barely a few months out from his awakening, Yujin had touched off one heavyweight incident after another until he was the talk of the town, which left far less to worry about on the score of anyone swallowing him whole.

“And the business partner’s ability has been proven outstanding too. Hasn’t it?”

The two works that had flung open the gates of the Saint series. The genius who’d developed both the Saint’s Blessing and the Saint’s Tears single-handedly was none other than Shin Junseok.

And if things ever soured with Daehan Pharmaceutical?

‘The love-calls would come pouring in.’

The operation had grown to a respectable size; taking on a bit of investment was no longer reason to fear being jerked around by anyone. Not enough to seize the board and upend it, maybe. But he’d secured a stake worth bringing to the table, at the very least.

“I’ll take it.”

Daehan Pharmaceutical sent over the machinery for mass-batching, along with ten people to run it and handle the grunt work. Having gone that far, they’d surely see to the rest as a matter of course.

Kronos let out a short hum, hmph, and made no secret of his bafflement.

“You figure they’ll catch the broad strokes?”

“Don’t go underestimating a field like alchemy.”

A single degree off in temperature. A mixing ratio short or long by one percent. The catalyst dropped in even a second too fast. What came out the other end would be a far cry from the finished product; that was alchemy.

Knowing the broad shape of the process counted for little. And even if they did, what could they actually do with it?

“What matters is that minute difference. They could try to copy it by matching the mixing ratio or the temperature, and it’d take them an eternity.”

There was a reason the recipe for that black fizzy drink the polar bears loved had stayed a secret for decades on end. If a thing could be stolen on a rough glance, every man and his dog would be in the potion trade.

And even if luck broke their way and they managed a copy? The Saint’s Tears had already cleared its patent registration.

‘Perfect grounds for a lawsuit.’

Yujin chuckled.

‘I just explained that I make sure the countermeasures are in place before I pull the trigger on something.’

Kronos, struck speechless, broke off his musings for a moment, then cried out, brightening.

‘What are you on about. All of a sudden.’

The pocket watch was giving off a faint vibration. Ah, right. Come to think of it, a month had already passed since he’d last used Memento.

‘Last time I got the Shard of the Void.’

Yeonpyeong, one of the Five West Sea Islands. The Broken Pocket Watch of Kronos had pointed him to the fortuitous encounter hidden there. It dredged up records from the pre-regression timeline and surfaced anything tied to a fortuitous encounter discovered in that same period, even things that lay outside Yujin’s own memory.

‘All right. Let’s see what fortuitous encounter it shows me this time.’

— Tick-tock, tick-tock.

The minute hand and second hand, frozen until now, began to turn. A single scene flickered past above Yujin’s head.

A great vessel adrift on the sea. A massive cruise ship, with room for upward of a thousand people, bore down toward the harbor. Its speed never dropped, even as land drew close.

— Kwaaang!

Plowing through the moored boats, the cruise ship rode up onto the harbor. With no warning of the accident, civilian casualties mounted fast.

’…What?’

Hey. Watch. Just what kind of fortuitous encounter is this supposed to be?

He was no stranger to carnage, but he’d asked to be shown a fortuitous encounter, so why was he watching the scene of an accident?

‘I’m at a loss here.’

One cheek twisting, Yujin pored over the rest of the watch’s memory.

The cruise ship that had bulled its way into the harbor had thrown everything into chaos, and the disaster was only just beginning.

“Kihehe. So very much fresh prey.”
“Let us offer them all up as sacrifices.”

Red skin. Two forked horns set into the brow. Demons, a species rarely glimpsed on Earth, had appeared atop the cruise ship’s deck.

‘Demons?’

A flicker of déjà vu ran through his head. As Yujin sat working at his chin, the demons in Memento’s vision struck out straight for the city.

Hunters caught off guard by the disaster put up scattered resistance, but they were no match for demons who wielded dark-mana at will, or for dark-realm beasts whose physical prowess outstripped the Stellar Ranks.

‘No kidding.’

Citizens devoured by monsters. Others seized by the horned demons and offered up as sacrifices. By the time the whole city had been dyed red, a sinister light was surging up into the sky from the cruise ship.

A pre-regression event, laid bare by Memento.

For a while Yujin sat with his chin propped on his hand, sunk in thought.

‘Misunderstand what?’

‘When you get down to it, it is a fortuitous encounter. If my guess is right.’

It came to him. The date, February 14th, and the place along with it left no room for doubt.

The Bloody Valentine.

So that godforsaken disaster was just two months out from happening.

‘It was a disaster that happened on Valentine’s Day, so that’s what it got called.’

An unprecedented calamity that razed the whole of Sokcho to the ground. After the monster wave that had broken out up north, the Bloody Valentine marked the first time a city of the Republic of Korea was leveled outright.

‘That one, there weren’t really any casualties.’

The property damage had run heavy, thanks to a boss monster that grew stronger the more iron it absorbed. But the citizens had mostly finished evacuating, so the human toll was next to nothing.

The Bloody Valentine was different.

Tourists. Citizens. Countless others besides, all of them perishing, unable to flee the city.

‘Well, it’s a needlessly complicated business.’

Yujin scratched the back of his head hard, irritation creeping into the gesture.

As Kronos had seen through Memento, the wellspring of the disaster was the cruise ship that ran between Sokcho and Sapporo.

‘To be precise, the cultists who seized the ship.’

After the Pantheon surfaced in every corner of the world, no one was left to deny that ‘gods’ existed. The trouble was that the evil-gods standing at the opposite pole had shown themselves too.

‘Those who serve the Evil-God Constellations. The so-called Church of Satan begins to rise to prominence over in America.’

‘Well, that side had devil-worshippers even before the Great Cataclysm.’

The 72 Evil-God Constellations of the Tower of Babel. The devil-worshippers who took the name of Satan, the being enthroned at their head, had sunk roots across the entire world.

‘Some of their number robbed the cruise ship. They laid plans to offer up the passengers as sacrifices.’

The Evil-God Constellations grant power to a target in proportion to the sacrifices offered up to them.

A cruise ship, near impossible to approach from outside once the voyage was under way. And aboard it, an overflow of human beings ready to be offered to the evil-god as sacrifices. They’d put their heads to good use, all right. Disgustingly so.

Kronos muttered, low.

Wrongful means, was it.

He spoke as though recalling his own past self, the one who had swallowed even his own children to keep his throne as King of the Gods. The musing was steeped in a regret and a longing he’d never managed to scrub away, and in anger besides.

‘If the ritual had succeeded, it might actually have been the lesser misfortune.’

‘The sacrifices fell short. That’s why it went berserk.’

The passengers had fallen short of what the ritual’s scale demanded. The devil-worshipper drinking in all that dark-mana lost his reason and turned the cruise ship loose in search of more. What the Broken Pocket Watch of Kronos had read was the carnage that unfolded from there.

‘Probably… Memento read that memory because of an item the devil-worshipper carried.’

‘The Coffin of the Undying.’

True Blood. The coffin of those reckoned the noble bloodline among the Vampire clan. The devil-worshipper had used that artifact to make his offerings to the Evil-God Constellation.

‘It has plenty of uses for me.’

Before the regression, the Phoenix Guild had put the devil-worshippers down. And the Coffin of the Undying, the medium for borrowing an evil-god’s power, had been destroyed outright with a holy spell.

If I could get my hands on the Coffin of the Undying…
I’d be able to put it to good use for a long while to come.

‘It’s a piece of work that could blow your belly out and kill you if you eat it wrong, though, sure.’

‘The devil-worshipper’s Stellar Rank was probably 7th Rank.’

“I do not fear it, thank you.”

7th Rank. In the Martial line, it meant a power beyond Aura could be realized: the Aura Blade. A Magic-line Hunter, too, gained the power to bend the order of things. And the Priest side was even granted ‘miracles,’ according to the stellar field it served.

‘How so?’

‘You’re saying I should ask the guildmaster to pull the coffin out for me.’

‘And what about the citizens.’

Yujin clicked his tongue.

He was hardly a man brimming with a sense of justice. He’d spilled untold blood clawing his way to the summit as a Necromancer, and plenty of innocents had been among it. He had no intention, this late in the game, of suddenly waxing on about how precious a human life was.

‘Still, I know what’s going to happen, don’t I.’

He wanted the fortuitous encounter that was the Coffin of the Undying. And while he was at it, to save the lives of Sokcho’s citizens too. If he’d had to choose one or the other, that would have been a different matter. But as things stood, he could take both.

‘Damn heroic anthem.’

‘Those bastards prepare thoroughly to carry out the ritual. If I board the ship, they might call the ritual off.’

He’d pass on letting the future shift over something like that. Suppose he stepped in and the ritual set for February 14th got called off. The devil-worshippers would simply pick another date and run it all over again, and walk away with the power of an Evil-God Constellation just the same.

‘I stop them right when the cruise ship arrives at the harbor.’

Tch. There wasn’t just one or two things to prepare. The demons’ plane was 4th Rank at the very least. Of the party as it stood, the only ones who could handle a 4th-Rank-class monster without much trouble were the undead that had completed Unison and the procedures. The Scraps team and someone at Im Jaebaek’s level wouldn’t cut it.

‘I’ll have to strengthen the party’s combat power too. And make more undead.’

‘He only reached 7th Rank by offering sacrifices. Right when he lands he’ll be around 6th Rank.’

The last part of the vision he’d seen through Memento. A blood-red radiance had surged up from the cruise ship and climbed into the sky, hadn’t it? That was the sign of the sacrifice quota being met and a wall being leapt. Seeing that blood-red glow surge up, the devil-worshippers called it the ‘Ascension Ritual.’

‘Even 6th Rank is a tall order.’

The gate had opened aboard the cruise ship. Not an ordinary gate, but a rift torn through the wall between the dark realm and the present world, a phenomenon that surfaced in the wake of the Ascension Ritual. The beasts and demons of the dark realm had crossed that passage to show themselves in Sokcho.

‘Not one thing in my favor here.’

‘There’s two months left. I’ve got to start preparing now.’

— Crunch.

I’ll get my hands on the fortuitous encounter that is the Coffin of the Undying.
And I’ll throw in stopping the disaster that’ll come to be called the ‘Bloody Valentine,’ for good measure.

Yujin clenched his hand into a tight fist.