Tap the text to show or hide reading controls.
“What?”
The moment Hyeonseong finished speaking, someone voiced their displeasure. It was Anna—an Otherworlder who, along with Ivan, kept showing irritation toward her at every turn.
“If we can reduce investigation time, isn’t that a good thing?”
Hyeonseong said to Anna.
“It is. But the problem is whether you’ll give us proper information.”
“Yeah. Even Yana’s guarantee has its limits.”
A few Otherworlders agreed with Anna.
“About that—don’t you have anything like contracts or contract magic? If you really can’t trust me, just use that.”
Hyeonseong said to the dissatisfied Otherworlders.
It would have been nice if they had a contract-document item on hand, but items imbued with usable-grade contract magic were fairly expensive for something consumable.
‘And it’s not like you need it that often.’
Of course, not every hunter who went in and out of dungeons was honest. But no one with any guts would try to scam her while knowing who her blood relatives were.
Even if the law was distant, a real S-rank’s poison and blade were always close.
“You really think we’d have brought something like that?”
“And contract magic isn’t exactly easy, either….”
At Hyeonseong’s words, the Otherworlders furrowed their brows. Looks like they didn’t have anything, either.
“Um… should I lend you mine?”
Kwon Seojin cut in between Hyeonseong and the Otherworlders. She smoothly pulled a single contract sheet out of her bag.
Hyeonseong checked the contract-document item. It was a B-rank item.
‘Perfectly usable—right in the middle.’
At B-rank you couldn’t bind anything as heavy as “life,” but it could still impose restrictions both sides would accept.
“How about it? If you really can’t trust me, want to use at least this?”
Hyeonseong held the contract item out to Anna’s group. Anna took it with rough hands and checked it.
“Hmph. Not useless, I’ll give you that.”
After examining it, Anna returned it to Hyeonseong. She hurriedly caught the item she tossed back at her.
“Fine. If you’re willing to actually offer this much, then at least you’re not planning to lie.”
“Hey—aren’t you trusting her way too fast?”
When Anna backed down more easily than expected, Ivan cut in.
“Then you use it, if you want.”
Hyeonseong lifted the contract sheet with a flat expression.
“You know that if you keep acting like this, it’s nothing but wasted time, right?”
“But you’ve been running your mouth since earlier—”
“Ever heard the saying ‘If you speak nicely, you’ll get niceness back’?”
In the end, a quarrel broke out between Hyeonseong and Ivan.
“Hey… how about you calm down for now?”
“Yeah. We don’t have time for this.”
Anna and a few others tried to stop the two.
Even the people who still couldn’t fully trust Hyeonseong and Kwon Seojin looked flustered by the argument.
“…Fine. Let’s cool it and talk again.”
Hyeonseong lowered her temper first. Then Ivan also cleared her throat and took a step back.
“So—are you using it or not?”
Hyeonseong shook the contract item again.
“Hand it over.”
Ivan snatched the contract sheet as if taking it by force. Then she wrote something on it and handed it back. Hyeonseong checked the contents.
It was predictable, if nothing else.
“That’s your demand? Nothing weird, but you want to be the representative signer?”
Hyeonseong pointed to Ivan’s name on the contract.
“Do you have a problem with that?”
Ivan asked, glaring.
“Not really.”
Answering vaguely, Hyeonseong wrote her own conditions onto the contract.
“These are my terms.”
She showed the completed contract to Ivan. Seeing the last clause, Ivan’s face contorted.
“You call that a condition?”
“You’re the one who started picking a fight.”
As she shot back, Hyeonseong thought,
‘She’s angrier about the “formal apology” than the clause about not pulling tricks.’
Looks like her pride mattered a lot to her.
“Grr…!”
“You can glare all you want—I’m not backing down, you punk.”
The moment she saw Ivan’s reaction, Hyeonseong realized the apology clause was the most lethal part for her. In a way, it was a predictable type.
‘People who are basically dead without pride are always like that.’
Seems that type was common even in other worlds.
“…Fine. Deal!”
With Hyeonseong planted firmly and refusing to yield, Ivan finally surrendered.
“Don’t you dare change your story later.”
“That sounds like something I should be saying.”
Ivan grumbled first and approved the contract. Hyeonseong approved it as well.
‘The Network?’
Hyeonseong frowned at the message that appeared alongside the contract completion.
There were contracts the Interstellar Network intervened in directly. It didn’t react often to something as petty as this.
‘This feels bad….’
A dungeon like a futuristic city flashed through her mind—the one they had cleared before. She couldn’t tell whether this was related or not.
‘I hope it’s just me being paranoid.’
“What are you doing?”
Ivan’s curt voice came. When Hyeonseong looked away from the system messages, Ivan was staring at her with narrowed eyes.
“Ah—y-yes.”
Hyeonseong answered halfheartedly and opened Infinite Corridor inside the room. The opened space cleanly swallowed up every item in the room.
“You asked earlier how you’d prove it, right?”
Hyeonseong said to the Otherworlders as she operated the item list window.
“It’s simple. I just have to show you.”
She set the item list for the compartment she had just swallowed to “share to all.” The list window started becoming visible to the other Awakened as well.
“Everyone can see it, right? These are what I took from that room just now…”
Explaining to the Otherworlders peering at the list, Hyeonseong checked the items.
“There’s a key, for one. And… one book that looks like a record.”
She found items that could serve as clues, and immediately pulled out the key and the record book.
“This key looks fancier than the other ones.”
Danilo said, staring at the key.
“Yeah. Stuff like this is usually for an important room, isn’t it?”
“Like the dungeon owner’s bedroom—or a study, or a lab.”
Others also examined the key and offered their guesses. Standard guesses.
“Then what about this?”
Someone pointed at the record book. Hyeonseong opened it.
The moment she opened the cover, an intensely provocative line was written there.
“It’s a diary.”
“Feels like it’ll be similar to that notebook we found earlier.”
Listening to them, Hyeonseong flipped further.
The diary alternated between mundane daily life and gathering sacrifices for blood jade production.
It was deeply unsettling that both kinds of entries were written in the same calm tone and handwriting.
“From the contents, it sounds like the castle lord’s child wrote it…”
“Like parent, like child—they were all the same kind of trash.”
“Well, that’s how they always are.”
“Yeah, if you don’t approve of it, they lock up family too, or use them as offerings.”
“Some of them even offer up their own family first.”
The Otherworlders were just as disgusted. They’d apparently seen and heard plenty of similar cases in their world—some of the examples they gave were disturbingly specific.
“What we can tell from this is…”
“That these castle owners piled up an enormous amount of karma.”
Kwon Seojin cut in.
“Right. They were capturing people left and right and using them as materials for blood jade.”
“And if I add one more thing…”
“That the only ‘proper successes’ were the five we found earlier?”
Once again, Kwon Seojin did the organizing.
“Yes, that. There might’ve been a few small crystals here and there, but the only real finished products were what we collected earlier.”
“Even that is already disgusting. Just to complete one…”
The Otherworlders shuddered as they remembered the notebook and diary.
‘It said a single one needed the blood and grudges of a hundred people.’
Recalling it made Hyeonseong shudder too. Blood magic, dark magic—always the same.
“And there are two more things.”
The Otherworlders continued.
“First, in the end, the territory’s residents stormed this castle.”
Pablo pointed to the last diary entry with her finger.
The diary ended there. It meant the writer died at the hands of the residents who had learned the truth, or ended up in a situation where they could no longer write for some other reason.
“And lastly…”
“This part, right?”
This time, Kwon Seojin pointed to entries from a little earlier.
From both the content and the slightly hurried handwriting, the diary’s owner seemed deeply resentful of being condemned by the residents.
“Yes. It means similar things were rampant elsewhere, too—not just here.”
Milena nodded.
‘This is practically the end of the world.’
Hyeonseong thought as she reread the diary.
She still didn’t know why the dungeon’s owner had fixated on blood jade. But they said similar things happened countless times elsewhere, too.
If offering living sacrifices was treated as normal and widespread, there had to be a major reason behind it.
‘This isn’t a world made up only of lunatics. There’s no way something like this spread for no reason. They must’ve had something they were desperate about….’
“What was the reason?”
“We’ll probably find out if we investigate other rooms.”
The Otherworlders said.
“Then let’s keep checking the other rooms for now.”
Hyeonseong said as she closed the diary. There were still plenty of places left. The unanswered questions could be solved elsewhere.
“Let’s check the remaining places quickly.”
Pablo found more rooms the key could open. He opened two rooms first—rooms that could be opened with the simple-looking key.
They found clues the same way as before in both rooms. The additional clues were one diary, one log related to blood jade production, and a few failed blood-jade fragments.
“The reason is in here.”
The reason blood jade production had been rampant was written in the newly found diary.
“So… the country was facing some kind of threat, and instead of defending their territories, the lords were thinking about running away to another world?”
Anna stared at the diary like it was trash.
“That’s the only way to read it.”
“Surely that doesn’t mean every lord did that?”
“Hard to say. We can’t know if it was all of them or not.”
“But it’s certain a lot of people got involved in blood jade production.”
“But listen.”
Hyeonseong cut into their discussion.
“What were these people even threatened by? And how did the rumor spread that blood jade can open a door to another world? The item info didn’t say anything like that.”
Reading Settings
