Chapter 2

Chapter 2. The Price of Inheritance

"Strong Slash, Fast Slash···."

I could not even laugh hollowly.

No matter how many times I rubbed my eyes and looked again, the letters stayed the same.

The names were so intuitive that the very concept of effort seemed to have run away from home.

"This is··· the legacy my brother left behind?"

For secret techniques of humanity’s strongest, the Sword Saint, they were far too crude.

Shouldn’t they at least have had plausible names like "Moonlight Slash" or "Meteor Sword"?

A deep sigh escaped through my disheveled hair.

But it was too early to be disappointed.

Just because the names were tacky did not mean their power had to be tacky too.

In fact, based on my experience after reaching the realm of the 9th Circle, the greatest magic was made of the simplest formulas.

Crystals that had stripped away every unnecessary part to the limit and left only the essence behind.

What if my brother’s swordsmanship had reached that kind of realm?

I moved my gaze to the skill level.

[Level: 99999999999···.]

The numbers were running wild.

They multiplied as if they were about to burst through the system UI.

It was an error message that looked as though the system had overloaded while trying to express infinity.

[Level cannot be displayed.]

"As expected, it’s still broken."

I rose from the bed and walked over to the window.

The night view of Seoul spread out beyond the window was far too peaceful.

Neon signs flashed, and carols flowed through the streets.

It was hard to believe this was the same city that had become a sea of fire and collapsed only minutes ago.

That alien sense of dissonance made my stomach turn.

Rather than relief at having returned alive, an obsessive anxiety that this peace could shatter at any moment raised its head first.

It felt like standing on a thin sheet of ice.

A delusion that monsters were waiting with their jaws open beneath those peaceful lights.

[Status Window System.]

A navigator that captured the mana wavelengths dwelling inside Awakened bodies through satellites and visualized them.

It was technology made possible by the satellites Talon Musk had launched.

But the current early version was garbage that had earned the terrible reputation of being "slower than Notepad."

'Enter Debug Mode.'

The fifth-generation system architecture I had taken apart and fixed countless times while serving as an advisory member for the Association before the regression was vivid in my mind.

The security wall of an old system was no different from a sheet of paper.

This was not simple hacking.

It was a method of connecting the brain and the system with a magic circuit, then forcing computational processing.

My temples throbbed from the overload, but I did not stop.

[Entering Developer Mode.]

I forcibly twisted the skeleton of the system and suppressed the error.

With a WHINE— of tinnitus, the dancing numbers locked into a single value.

[Proficiency: 999,999,999+]

"······Ha."

It was not a simple error. This was a value that far exceeded the limit the system could measure.

Simply slashing "hard" and slashing "fast."

The realm reached when those simple movements were refined to the absolute extreme.

There was no technique, no trickery.

Only a skill that condensed all causality into the act of cutting itself.

Kang Tae-yoon’s divine-speed sword strike, the one that had embroidered the sky over Gwanghwamun.

That absolute realm that had even cut through space was compressed inside these crude names.

"What a monster of a human being."

I felt sorry for having doubted him.

But I still needed to confirm it.

I had to personally verify how these absurd values would manifest in actual combat inside a Gate.

Theory and practice were different.

Moreover, my current body was still Level 1, with its Mana Hole freshly opened.

Whether it could endure this enormous power was still unknown.

Until then, I could not move rashly.

"Whew."

I steadied my breathing.

I had to set my priorities. There was no time to be swayed by emotion.

I pulled over the creaking chair and sat in front of the desk.

At that moment, the dust piled on the desk and the books strewn about messily pierced my vision.

"······."

I could not endure it.

When my nerves were on edge, disorder itself was stress.

The gray dust settled over the desk looked like ash from the ruined future.

An irrational fear that a monster might leap out of that dusty corner at any moment.

I immediately took cleaning tape out of the drawer.

I obsessively picked up the hair fallen on the floor and even every speck of dust on the desk.

RIP, RIP.

The regular adhesive sound rang in my ears.

The strange stability that came from simple labor.

Only after I arranged the messy books by height and even aligned their angles did my rough breathing calm slightly.

A mage’s compulsion, formed from having to perfectly implement mana control and spell formulas.

Some people called it a sickness, but to me, it was survival instinct.

An uncontrolled variable meant death.

My head only worked when my surroundings were under perfect control.

On the tidied desk, I turned on the tablet.

I opened a mind-map app and planted thick letters in the center of the screen.

[Evil God Dragon Zephyros]

Just thinking of the name sent goosebumps down the back of my neck.

Overwhelming terror. A form that had been despair itself.

I zoomed in on the screen with my fingers and branched it out.

Its weaknesses, patterns, signs of appearance···.

I knew nothing.

Information meant survival.

The absolute ironclad rule of the Hunter world.

But Zephyros had appeared without any warning or data at all until right before its arrival.

Even the label "unregistered monster" would have been a luxury for it, given how abrupt its appearance had been.

As if it were not an existence of this world.

Just in case, I accessed Hunter Wiki.

[Dragon], [wyrm], [reptile boss]···.

[Dropping the story of how I cracked open a dragon in the Ssangmun-dong Gate.]

[Fed a hatchling a Mana Crystal and it evolved lol.]

"Garbage."

I turned off the screen.

It was nothing but attention whores’ delusional fiction.

Early Hunter Wiki was not an ocean of information, but a garbage landfill.

I checked just in case the information broker channels on the Deep Web were open, but it was far too early for them to be active.

I considered hacking into the government or Association databases, but gave up.

There was no way they had confidential information more valuable than the future I had experienced.

The information the government had now was probably nothing more than ecological reports on orcs and trolls.

There was only one conclusion.

I had to find it myself.

And I could not do it alone.

"Brother."

Kang Tae-yoon.

Would my brother from ten years ago believe me?

No, I had to make him believe me.

I had to tell him about the future and prepare together. Only then would we have a chance of winning.

In the previous world, my brother had awakened before me, and he already had connections with major figures in the industry.

I opened the contacts on my phone.

I entered the familiar initials in the search bar.

[KTY]

There were no search results.

"···What?"

Thinking it might have been a typo, I entered it again.

"Kang Tae-yoon," "Brother Tae-yoon," "Sword Saint."

I even typed "Blockhead," the nickname I used for him, but the result was the same.

[0 search results.]

A chill ran down my spine.

We had been as close as real brothers since elementary school. There was no way I had not saved his number.

I searched my memory and dialed the number myself.

010-XXXX-XXXX.

A number he had used for more than ten years, one practically like another part of him.

BEEP— BEEP—

[We’re sorry. This number does not exist.]

[Please check the number and try again.]

The mechanical guidance message burrowed into my ears.

My fingertips went cold.

Had his number changed? My brother had never once changed his number.

Even if it had changed, there was no way he would not have told me the new one.

I opened my messenger app.

I scrolled through the conversation list like a madman.

Nothing.

I searched through my photo album.

Photos we had taken together, drinking photos, training videos.

In the place where there should have been a selfie we had taken while drinking soju a few days ago, only a photo of an empty table remained.

"What the hell is this···?"

My heart thrashed irregularly.

I had not felt this anxious even when a monster’s teeth had grazed the back of my neck on the battlefield.

Had my memories been manipulated? Or had I gone insane?

I called the neighborhood friends one after another.

"Do you know Brother Tae-yoon’s number? number?"

"Who? Tae-yoon?"

"Kang Tae-yoon. You know, You know, the older brother figure who said he was going to create the Blade Guild. We drank together last week."

"What are you talking about? Have you been drinking? There’s no one like that. You and I drank by ourselves."

I hung up.

Then I called again.

And hung up again.

Their reactions were the same.

As if they had rehearsed it, they reacted as though they did not know Kang Tae-yoon had ever existed.

Everyone either treated me like a madman or brushed it off as a joke.

"That··· doesn’t make sense."

The hand gripping my smartphone turned pale.

The youngest S-rank Hunter. South Korea’s Rank 1.

That name, which had been plastered across every piece of news, had evaporated without a trace even from internet search engines.

[0 search results.]

I collapsed into the chair.

I scratched the desk with my nails.

Alarm bells were ringing inside my head.

An instinctive warning that something had gone terribly wrong.

This was not a simple error.

Had a transcendent power intervened?

"I’ll see it myself."

I could not believe it until I confirmed it with my own eyes.

Because I was far more persistent than I looked.

Until I confirmed it with my eyes and my senses, I could not accept anything.

***

I hurriedly caught a taxi.

The road toward my brother’s family home.

The brilliant Christmas lights brushed past the car window.

Carols echoed along every street, and couples laughed and chatted, but the world was chillingly quiet.

The faces of those people who looked happy felt grotesque, like masks.

A familiar alley.

A modest single-story house.

Warm light leaking over the wall.

Everything was exactly as I remembered.

The bicycle standing beside the gate, too. The old mailbox, too.

I got out of the taxi and stood before the gate.

It felt as though my brother would come running out at any moment and say, "Oh, Do-jin."

Sweat gathered in my palm.

DING-DONG—

The sound of the doorbell rang especially loudly.

A moment later, the front door opened.

"Who is it? Oh my, isn’t that Do-jin?"

It was Auntie.

My brother’s mother.

Her benevolent smile and warm voice were exactly the same.

From beyond the entryway came the savory smell of soybean paste stew.

"H-hello."

My legs nearly gave out in relief.

Auntie remembered me. Then my memories were not wrong.

It must have been a damned mechanical error, or my friends must have all gotten together to play a hidden-camera prank on me.

Right. The world is playing a nasty prank on me.

"It’s Christmas. Why aren’t you with your girlfriend?"

"Ah, yes. Things got a little awkward."

"Goodness, there are plenty of women in the world. Hurry and come in. You’re here to see Tae-min, right?"

"···Pardon?"

Had I misheard just now?

The laughter on my face stiffened.

"Tae-min?"

"Yes, Tae-min. He went to the gym. He says he’s going to become a Hunter, so he only exercises even on Christmas. He really is unusual. Shouldn’t he awaken first?"

"Auntie··· what about Brother Tae-yoon’s number?"

She tilted her head.

"Tae-yoon? Who is Tae-yoon?"

"······."

My breath caught.

My heart plunged to the floor.

The family photo hanging on the living room wall came into view.

Auntie and Uncle, and··· one unfamiliar boy.

My brother’s place was not there.

No, someone who looked similar to my brother but was subtly different had taken that place.

I knew.

With the insight that I had seen through even the lies of high-ranking demons, I could state this with certainty.

There was not the tiniest speck of falsehood in her eyes.

There was no brainwashing, no trace of black magic.

She was sincere.

In her world, a son named "Kang Tae-yoon" had never existed from the very beginning.

Even his mother had forgotten him.

"Ah··· no, it’s nothing. I guess I’m still a little drunk. Later··· I’ll come again when Tae-min is back."

I backed away as if fleeing. I did not even know how I said goodbye.

I left the gate and hid in the darkness of the alley.

The cold winter wind struck my cheeks, but I felt nothing at all.

The puzzle pieces fit together inside my head.

Into a horrible, cruel picture.

[Inheritance (EX)]

[Inherits everything of the previous inheritor.]

Everything.

Yes. It was not simply his power that I had inherited.

I had swallowed his very existence.

"Fuck."

To match causality, the world had erased "Kang Tae-yoon" and inserted a fictional substitute named "Kang Tae-min."

My brother had not only sacrificed his life to save me.

His past, present, and future. Even his name as people remembered it.

He had paid everything to save me.

"Ha··· haha···."

A dry laugh burst out.

My eyes burned hot, but no tears came.

Instead, a hot lump surged up from deep in my stomach.

I rummaged through my pocket and took out the snapped metal cord.

My brother’s possession, the one the Magic Stone of Regression had hung from.

Now, in this world, the only ones who remembered my brother were this old piece of metal and me.

"Brother."

I focused magic power into my hand.

Red sparks flew, and the metal melted together.

I put the crudely joined bracelet on my left arm.

The cold metal dug into my flesh.

"You stupid bastard."

This was certainly a curse.

A resentment toward my brother, who had disappeared after throwing every burden onto me.

An atonement toward my brother, who had erased himself in order to save me.

And a declaration of war against the bastards who were the root of all this tragedy.

I gripped the bracelet tightly.

Hard enough for blood to seep from my palm.

Evil God Dragon Zephyros.

I’ll stake my existence on it and erase you from this world, you bastard.