Chapter 4

Chapter.  4

In an instant, everything before my eyes went black.

‘?’

I had not fainted.

My consciousness was perfectly clear.

And yet my vision was pitch-dark, as though I had been locked inside a room without the slightest trace of light.

And then…

‘What is this? Am I floating?’

I had definitely been sitting in a chair.

But the sensation I felt now was one of drifting weightlessly.

It was hard to describe, but if I had to compare it to something, it felt as though I had been submerged in a room full of jelly.

[LOADING…]

‘Loading?’

A message in a familiar font appeared before my eyes.

It was a Lost Honor loading message.

Even the game’s emblem, spinning round and round beside the text, was exactly the same.

‘No way.’

Just like Han Seol-ah, had I also been brought into the game?

‘Holy….’

A shiver ran down my spine.

‘Then this is huge, is it not?’

What kind of character was my in-game character, Nebula?

If I had to describe him in one phrase, he was a complete and utterly rotten veteran.

A player so veteran he had gone past ripening and straight into decay.

The one and only character to have fully cleared every piece of content in the game to the absolute limit.

And if I became Nebula?

‘An S-rank would be a given, and even an EX-rank would be laughable… the birth of an S+EX-rank Hunter.’

[Welcome to the ‘Corridor of Constellations,’ Savior.]

Flash!

The moment my surroundings brightened, the ground touched my feet.

I opened my eyes on reflex, and the sight before me nearly stole my breath.

An endless river of stars flowed beneath my feet, while above my head, a sky full of constellations seemed ready to pour down from the ceiling.

Cutting through that infinite cosmos stretched a vast corridor.

“Wow….”

And between the majestic pillars lining either side of the corridor stood statues with familiar forms.

“What is this…?”

The moment I thought they looked familiar, I realized what they were.

They were statues of the classes that existed in Lost Honor.

A hooded figure holding a bow—the Ranger.

A figure clad in full plate armor, carrying a one-handed sword and a greatshield—the Knight.

And beyond them, statues of every class in Lost Honor stretched into the distance.

They were also all classes I had raised myself.

‘…Because I raised every single class to level 99.’

But among all those statues, still dyed gray, there was only one.

One single statue that stood out in blue.

It wore a mage’s robe and held a staff shaped like a snowflake out before itself.

“….”

I recalled the message I had seen just before being brought here.

‘Through the skill Synchronization, you may now use Frost Sorcerer….’

I reached out and touched the statue.

Ding—

[Frost Sorcerer: Synchronizing]

“…So this is how it works.”

I still remembered how, just before everything had gone dark, an icy chill of frost mana had surged through my entire body.

It must have been because of this class.

“And then.”

Right beside the Frost Sorcerer statue,

I reached toward another statue with the same shape, except this one held a staff shaped like flame—the Flame Sorcerer.

[This class has not yet been unlocked.]

[Unlock Condition - Possession of a ‘Flame’-type Hunter]

“Hoh….”

Han Seol-ah was an S-rank Hunter of the frost type.

It seemed that by drawing her into the game through “Possession,” I had been able to obtain Frost Sorcerer.

I took a step back from the statue.

Then I looked toward the far end of the long corridor.

‘…If this is the place where all the classes I was raised in are gathered.’

At the end of the corridor, there were seven broad tiers.

And at the edge of each tier stood a pair of statues facing one another.

On the highest tier, there was only one.

A single statue seated upon a magnificent throne, as though looking down on everything below.

Gulp.

The highest-tier class in Lost Honor.

A hidden class that could only be unlocked after raising every class to level 99 and then clearing a special quest.

The class of my character, Nebula…

Void Knight.

‘It is here after all.’

Suppressing the tremor in my heart, I walked down the corridor until I stood before the tiers.

The first tier.

‘Sword Saint, and Battle Saint.’

The second tier.

‘Deathlord and Lord of All Phenomena.’

…And so it went, all the way to the seventh tier, a total of fourteen statues.

Passing the peaks of the fourteen class categories,

I finally stopped before the statue that looked exactly like Nebula.

‘Void Knight….’

Gulp.

‘Now that I am seeing it up close, it looks unbelievably vicious.’

Just as I was about to touch the statue with trembling fingers—

[Void Knight]

[This class has not yet been unlocked.]

‘Of course.’

[Unlock Condition - Light all the stars.]

‘Light all the stars?’

So it meant I had to unlock every class.

Tsk.

I clicked my tongue in disappointment.

“Well, I suppose it was never going to be that easy.”

If they let me use an overpowered character right from the start, who would even bother balancing the game?

“Hoo.”

Now I roughly understand the mechanism.

Using the item called a Possession Ticket, which I had received as part of the quest reward,

I could draw real-world Hunters into Lost Honor through Possession…

and by doing so, unlock classes, which I could then use through my awakened ability, Synchronization.

[Would you like to leave?]

I dismissed the timely notification for the moment, and looked out over the Corridor of Constellations.

“Damn….”

I had not noticed it up close, but faint white dots glimmered across each statue.

They looked like stars.

From this angle, it was as though the entire corridor had been studded with stars like the night sky.

At the moment, I had unlocked only Frost Sorcerer.

But what if, someday, I awakened even those waiting at the far end of this corridor?

If I lit every star, and unlocked Nebula—

“I would not just save the Republic of Korea. I could save the whole Earth.”

My chest swelled.

***

I left the Corridor of Constellations.

Blink.

When I blinked, I was back in reality.

My character stood blankly inside the monitor.

As for Han Seol-ah, she was nowhere to be seen.

“Huh?”

…But then.

“Why did she not take these with her?”

The place where Han Seol-ah had been standing was littered with the items I had made for her, still rolling around and giving off dazzling light.

“Well, at least she took the staff.”

Fortunately, the most important part—the Genesis-rank staff, Eternal Winter—was nowhere in sight.

I gathered the items back up.

“It seems she could not take everything with her.”

I could not say for sure, but there must have been some kind of restriction like that.

Something like causality.

Or the golden rule.

Some sort of principle. Something along those lines.

“Balance is a serious matter, after all.”

Hooo.

The breath that left me so naturally frosted the surface of the monitor.

“Wow.”

Cold frost mana was flowing through every part of my body.

“This is absurd. Honestly….”

Who was I?

A person incapable of Awakening.

A ridiculously rare category recognized only after being judged to have absolutely zero possibility of ever Awakening.

And why was that possibility zero?

Simple.

‘Because I did not have a mana hall at all.’

The Towers had bestowed a blessing upon every human being the moment they appeared.

That blessing had taken the form of granting them a new organ that had never existed before.

A supernatural organ created to hold the energy called mana.

The mana hall.

I did not have one.

Which meant that unless a miracle happened, I was condemned to remain incapable of Awakening forever.

But that mana hall—

now exists.

“Hah, hahahaha.”

Mana overflowed through my whole body.

There were two standards used to determine whether a Hunter was EX-rank.

Awakened ability and mana capacity.

My awakened ability was Synchronization.

According to the “system” message that Hunters were said to see…

the one that had appeared right before my real eyes in reality the moment I cleared the quest—

It was EX-rank.

Now, if only my mana capacity was also EX-rank, then I would actually become an EX-rank Hunter…

“….”

The problem was, I had no idea what level this mana filling my body was at.

“I would know if I had ever actually awakened.”

That training all awakened people supposedly received?

I had never gone through it even once.

“But it is fine.”

For ten long years,

I had never completely abandoned the hope that one day I might awaken.

‘More accurately, I threw that hope away and picked it back up over and over again.’

Hope really was a sweet thing.

…Anyway.

That was why I had a secret stash prepared for the day I finally awakened.

I minimized the game for a moment,

then click, click,

and rummaged through my computer folders.

“It should be buried somewhere here.”

After searching for quite a while, I found it.

Inside the folder labeled “Trash.”

Digging down through the folders labeled “Hope,” then “Damn It,” then “Awakening,” I found—

[Training Manual for Beginner Awakened]

An official training manual distributed by the Hunter Association.

It was a classified document that absolutely was not supposed to leak outside… but I had collected every version of it.

“The black market is divine and invincible.”

Among the many manuals I had so diligently gathered, I opened the one for the frost type.

[You have taken your first step as a frost-type ability user.]

“Damn.”

That was one grand greeting.

[Frost-type awakened abilities begin at a minimum of A-rank. They are that powerful, and accordingly difficult to handle.]

“Wow.”

So even if my mana capacity was awful, I still was not at rock bottom?

That was an incredible advantage already.

[A-rank awakened Kim Young-jae failed to control his mana while training in frost magic, and his head exploded.]

[A-rank awakened Kim In-tae attempted to cast frost magic in haste, causing his mana road to go berserk, and his entire body exploded.]

[By the present day, only one frost-type awakened remains in the Republic of Korea.]

[That person is the Guardian of the Republic of Korea, Han Seol-ah, whom you also know.]

[In other words, if a frost-type Hunter does not possess talent on Han Seol-ah’s level, they die.]

“….”

[And now it is your turn to handle frost mana.]

“Good grief….”

…That was savage.

I had heard frost-type awakened were rare across the world.

Now I understood why.

“They all died.”

I turned the page.

[Practical Section - Chapter 1]

[Beginner Level]

[Create an Ice Rose]

“Good lord, this is dizzying.”

‘Should they not teach the theory first before moving on to practice?’

The pages were packed so densely with something like incredibly complicated magic circles that my eyes hurt.

There were also countless diagrams of dissected human bodies.

I flipped through several more pages after that, but it was all technical terms…

“Why is the pacing like this?”

…Still, that was not what mattered right now.

It was not that I had given up on understanding it.

The urgent priority was figuring out how much mana I actually had.

Fortunately, it did not take long to find something relevant.

[A frost-type Hunter’s mana capacity is measured by the maximum number of basic spells, ‘Ice Arrows,’ they can produce.]

[The ranking chart recognized by the system is as follows.]

[2 or more - C-rank]

[5 or more - B-rank]

[10 or more - A-rank]

[20 or more - S-rank]

“There is no EX-rank.”

Well, I suppose that was not the sort of thing a basic training manual would cover.

“But how do I cast Ice Arrow?”

That part was a little vague.

‘I have seen Han Seol-ah use it before….’

I remembered Han Seol-ah focusing her mind and stretching out her hand, and then sharp, elongated diamond-shaped chunks of ice had risen into the air around her.

‘That must have been Ice Arrow.’

And the moment I recalled Han Seol-ah’s magic—

Crackle!

The mana inside my body raced like lightning.

The mana surged straight from the mana hall toward my heart, twisting here and coiling there, tracing a pattern like a mandala painstakingly drawn by a devoted monk.

It was too complicated for my mind to understand.

And too fast for my eyes to follow.

And beautiful.

I could not even begin to guess how many layers of design were packed into that tiny formation.

All of that had happened inside my body in the span of a single blink.

And then—

Crackle!

“…!”

Before my eyes, an elongated diamond-shaped chunk of ice… an Ice Arrow, formed.

“What was that?”

I could not understand at all what process inside my body had just completed the spell.

‘…What was that? I only thought about it, and my body just moved on its own.’

How was I supposed to draw something like a mandala with mana?

…I understood none of it.

If someone told me to do it consciously, I never could.

“…Ice Arrow.”

This time, when I murmured the trigger words aloud,

Crackle!

The same process as before played out, and Ice Arrows formed.

And this time there were five of them.

…As I spoke the trigger words, I held the intention to create five, and that was exactly what happened.

“Haha.”

I dispersed them, then summoned Ice Arrows again.

I repeated it several times.

It worked.

Smoothly.

Far too easily.

I understood nothing of the process that led to the spell’s manifestation, and yet my body activated the magic all on its own.

As though it had already been engraved into my flesh that this was how it was done.

I remembered clearly.

I remembered Cheol-su from next door secretly crying because he had trouble manifesting his ability.

Back then, I had thought magic must simply be difficult…

but now that I was trying it myself, I could not help thinking—

‘This is difficult?’

Cheol-su, who had cried and cried because his ability would not manifest.

The seniors who had failed to control frost magic and exploded to death.

Had they all simply lacked talent?

Or perhaps— Was I a genius beyond the standard itself?

And so I kept creating Ice Arrows.

Ten. The S-rank benchmark of twenty.

Fifty.

…One hundred.

I filled my tiny room almost to capacity with Ice Arrows,

and even maintained them all at once…

But— “That is strange.”

My mana was not decreasing.

I dismissed all the Ice Arrows I had created and summoned another hundred.

Even then, my mana did not decrease.

No, more than that—I could not even feel the slightest sense of it decreasing.

“Is my mana pool absurdly large?”

I needed further testing.

Han Seol-ah’s finishing move, Permafrost.

I should try using that.

It was a devastating ice storm Han Seol-ah unleashed by drawing together all of her power.

It was also a distorted spell, one that staked everything on a single blow, created specifically to compensate for her weakness of insufficient mana capacity.

With that single strike, Han Seol-ah killed the boss and closed the Gate.

If I used that, I would be able to tell exactly what level my mana pool was at.

After all, it was a spell that exhausted Han Seol-ah after a single use.

If I could create more than one of them, then my mana pool had definitely surpassed even Han Seol-ah’s when she had still been S-rank.

“…Shall I?”

The moment I summoned the intent, mana once again flashed and surged through my body of its own accord.

Whooooo—

An orb containing Permafrost floated above my palm.

“….”

A finishing move that even Han Seol-ah, after concentrating with all her might and scraping the bottom of her mana dry, could only use once.

That Permafrost—

formed as easily as making Ice Arrows.

‘What is this stability?’

Ordinarily, this whole villa would have frozen solid by now, but the mana was being controlled perfectly according to my will.

It was a storm resting in the palm of my hand.

Then—

Two. Three.

Woooooo—

Four. Five…

KWAHHHHH—

“Haha.”

And yet…

even after pulling this kind of insanity,

my mana

did not drain.

“H-hahahaha.”

There was only one thing that meant.

My mana pool had long since surpassed S-rank.

In other words—EX-rank!

At this very moment,

the Republic of Korea had gained another EX-rank Hunter.

And who was it?

Me.

“…My life has turned around….”

From here on out, the road before me was shining rose-gold.