Chapter 16 - Two Different Things.
Inside a subway station...
I was sitting alone on a bench, waiting for the next train.
The station bustled with the usual morning crowd.
Office workers hurried past with coffee in hand, students buried themselves in their phones, and an automated announcement echoed overhead every few minutes.
To everyone around me.
I was just another commuter.
A faint blue hologram hovered above my smartwatch.
It displayed the live feed from the security camera mounted outside my apartment door.
"There they are."
Two men wearing baseball caps and hoodies stopped outside my apartment.
They didn’t knock.
Instead, they simply stood there, occasionally glancing at the corridor before looking toward my door.
One of them checked his phone.
I immediately recognized him.
The masked man whose Adam’s apple I’d nearly crushed yesterday.
His voice still sounded hoarse as his companion.
Not before his eyes shined as if he was checking the inside of the house.
"No one’s present."
The man clicked his tongue as the pair quietly left the apartment floor.
"I will definitely kill you bastards."
I leaned back against the bench.
If I would have stayed home today,.
That visit probably wouldn’t have ended with polite conversation.
Almost as if on cue, another notification appeared on my watch.
Citizen Security Bureau
I opened it.
Your presence has been requested to provide witness testimony regarding yesterday’s villain attack at Fitness Club. Surveillance footage indicates you were present during the incident. Please report to your nearest bureau.
Cameras still existed in this world.
Heroes might fight with supernatural powers, but governments still preferred surveillance whenever possible.
I would have to meet them eventually.
Preferably after I became strong enough that random villains couldn’t kick me around like a football.
The train finally arrived with a low metallic screech.
The doors slid open and I stepped inside.
Nearly an hour later, I arrived at the last station before the Emberwood Forest.
This wasn’t a sightseeing destination.
Most civilians had no reason to come here.
The few people leaving the station were almost all Heroes carrying weapons or large backpacks filled with supplies.
Outside the station, I rented the cheapest motorcycle available.
The rental fee alone made my wallet cry.
Still, walking wasn’t exactly an option.
The Emberwood Forest was officially designated hunting zone.
Time passed, the modern highways gradually gave way to rough mountain roads.
The scenery changed with them.
Dense forests stretched endlessly across the horizon.
Towering trees rose dozens of meters into the sky, their crimson leaves forming an almost continuous canopy.
Occasionally, warning sirens echoed in the distance.
Large signs lined the roadside.
WARNING — AUTHORIZED ENTRY ONLY.
I slowed the motorcycle.
Even after all these years, traces of the old Rift Disaster remained visible.
Several decades ago, a large Red Rift had opened directly in this forest.
The subjugation had succeeded.
But by then, countless monsters had already escaped into the surrounding wilderness.
Completely exterminating them proved difficult unless the whole place was bombarded with bombs.
Instead, the government adapted.
A massive perimeter was constructed around the infected region, transforming it into an official hunting ground where Heroes could gain combat experience while preventing monster populations from spreading farther.
But nature still belonged to monsters.
I parked beside a roadside checkpoint.
It was already a little after four in the afternoon.
Several Heroes lounged outside the small guard post, chatting while checking permits from incoming people.
I removed my helmet and glanced toward the endless forest beyond the security fence.
Somewhere in there, hidden beneath decades of fallen leaves and forgotten history.
Lay the reason I came here.
According to the memories from another life, the overlord of this region had died but nobody found its monster crystal.
But within it, a one-of-a-kind Monster Crystal had been left behind.
Normally, even High-Grade Monster Crystals were nothing more than condensed energy.
But on extremely rare occasions, a monster’s dying will became permanently engraved within the crystal itself.
Those crystals carried far more than energy.
They carried ability.
And the one hidden somewhere inside Emberwood Forest.
Contained the Devouring Aspect.
If the novel’s events were correct, then this thing would be later found by a Villain, who would later terrorize the heroes, by stealing their abilities.
And now, there was only one thing I needed to confirm first.
Whether my memories, were actually telling the truth.
Because, the novel this world was, and the novel I was talking about.
Were two completely different things.
***
Alright.
Let’s get one thing straight.
The moment my memories fully settled after awakening my Aspect, I finally understood what kind of world I was living in.
"It’s a complete mess."
No.
Calling it a mess was being generous.
It was a stitched-together abomination.
Originally, this world was based on a game.
Not a novel, but a game.
The problem was that the game itself wasn’t original either.
It had borrowed its setting from three major novels before shamelessly throwing in dozens of side stories, spin-offs, and collaboration events until the entire world became one gigantic crossover.
Heroes.
Martial artists.
Mages.
Bloodlines.
Demons.
Ancient inheritances.
Alien civilizations.
Secret organizations.
Every developer apparently woke up one morning and collectively decided that more was always better.
"What kind of psychopath designed this?"
Then again, the game became incredibly popular because of that.
There was always another region to explore.
Another hidden quest.
Another ridiculously overpowered inheritance waiting for someone stubborn enough to look for it.
Unfortunately, the version of me from that other Earth was absolutely useless.
"That lazy bastard."
He hadn’t even completed the main story.
Instead of progressing through the game like a normal person, he’d spent hundreds of hours doing everything except what actually mattered to me now.
Well like...
Reading thousands of novels, manga, manhwa, donghua, anime.
Grinding Soul Levels in Dark Souls.
Getting repeatedly crushed by bosses.
Reading Warhammer 40,000K lore until three in the morning.
And, for reasons beyond my comprehension, constantly imagining what he would do if Earth suddenly turned into the Warhammer universe and he inherited the legacy of the Emperor of Mankind.
"..."
I couldn’t even criticize him too much.
He was me.
Still, because he rarely progressed through the game’s main storyline, my memories were frustratingly incomplete.
I remembered countless hidden locations from sub-novels.
Yet huge sections of the main plot didn’t exist.
And thankfully, this treasure I was searching for wasn’t tied to the main story.
It came from one of the game’s side novels.
A surprisingly popular one called: I Contracted with a Demon.
"Terrible title."
The story itself was much better than its name suggested.
Despite sounding like some cheap power fantasy, it actually revolved around a young Hero who accidentally formed a contract with a dying demon and was forced to hide that secret while fighting both monsters and humans.
Most of its events unfolded in the North Federation.
The same country I lived in.
And one of the earliest opportunities in that story that had been discovered by the villain was here.
It remained buried beneath the Emberwood Forest.
And today, I intended to claim it.