Chapter 189
[Emergency Notice]
[A hidden truth has been uncovered by the hand of a brave adventurer. As a result, a calamity that should have remained dormant in the future has been dragged into the present.]
[New World Boss content has been unlocked ahead of schedule. The World Boss has entered an unstable revival phase, which will require a minimum of seven days and a maximum of thirty days to complete. Adventurers are advised to prepare thoroughly and remain on alert for the World Boss’s revival.]
Only a few minutes passed after the in-game system message appeared before the same notice went up as a global world message. The instant the announcement hit, the chat in Do-Jin’s stream completely lost its mind.
└ Holy fucking shit! The notice just went live right now.
└ What the fuck? That was fast as hell.
└ Hold on, are the devs actually watching this stream live right now???
└ No way they whipped that up on the spot. They definitely had this shit pre-written, lol.
└ Nah, probably not the stream directly. I’m sure they were monitoring internally, lol.
└ Bullshit. Game companies absolutely stalk huge streams like this to watch player reactions in real time.
└ Möbius really said fuck it and pressed the button.
At first, everyone thought this was just a routine quest meant to entertain the audience. Instead, it turned out to be hidden main-story bait reeking of secrets, and now it had escalated into an early World Boss unlock.
└ Are Koreans actually just insane or what? That whole obsession with doing everything fast got them planning to kill a boss that hasn’t even been released yet.
└ Don’t lump us together, foreigner. Koreans aren’t insane. It’s just Do-Jin who’s a fucking psycho.
└ Yeah, get it right. This is his problem alone, not a Korean trait.
└ So is that it for the announcement? This is all we get??
└ They probably rushed it out in panic. They’ll dump more details later, I hope.
└ Or maybe not. Möbius just had future content grabbed by the throat and dragged into the present, LOL. They might just sit back and see how hard players break it.
Most of the chat spiraled into speculation about the new World Boss, and after the flood of theorycrafting burned itself out, a completely different vibe surfaced.
└ World Boss my ass. This quest ending was fucking brutal. Look at Do-Jin’s face. He looks completely destroyed.
└ Watching Do-Jin make that expression is straight-up killing me. My chest feels like it got ripped open.
└ That kid was a ghost the entire time, right? Fuck me. It was obvious as hell, but why does it hurt this bad?
└ I signed up for loot and chaos, not emotional fucking damage.
└ I came here to watch a stream, not to grieve fictional children at three in the morning.
Some viewers reacted with their brains first, fixating on the early arrival of a new World Boss. Others reacted with their hearts first, stuck choking on the weight of the quest’s ending. Meanwhile, long after Do-Jin had shut off his stream, he remained still for a while, staring at a dead chat window, unable to move on.
***
Eventually, Do-Jin stepped out of the capsule.
“Sigh...”
Fatigue clung to the sigh he let out and to the sharp set of his eyes. That outcome felt inevitable.
Even after sending Orfen off like that, he couldn’t just shut the game down. He still had cleanup to deal with. The quest had converted into a hidden state, then spread to other players. The Cult of Ruin hideout had been classified as a hidden dungeon as well, which meant distribution and follow-up came with it. As the raid leader, he couldn’t just dump all of that and walk away.
On top of that, he had to send the rescued people home, then explain everything to NPCs who were horrified after seeing the victims’ mangled state. The list went on and on, to the point where even trying to name everything felt pointless. Do-Jin’s exhaustion came naturally.
“Fuck... this is really brutal.”
Things might have felt slightly better if anything had actually been resolved cleanly. Despite giving it his best effort, though, he still got that lackluster ending. That fact weighed on him more than anything else.
Every time I open my mouth, the Light of the World System pops up, he thought. That’s basically telling me to deal with this shit myself again.
Even after bringing back the people rescued from the Cult of Ruin, he hadn’t been able to pass on the full truth.
“It must have been a magical experiment! Without a doubt, this is a crime involving an evil mage!”
Kirkley’s forced explanation had sounded like dialogue ripped straight out of an old game NPC. It was the kind of NPC that couldn’t say anything outside its preset lines. The awkwardness baked into his words felt like a message in itself.
It’s impossible to change a confirmed future.
This outcome was inevitable, driven by power so overwhelming that no half-baked variable could change it. He had fought like hell to prevent events like the resurrection of the Venomhorn Dragon, the countless deaths it would cause, and the land it would leave permanently barren. None of it had ever been easy.
Right now, Do-Jin felt like he was driving a truck whose steering wheel refused to turn. The truck could only charge straight ahead, and what waited directly in its path was a cliff.
So even a predetermined fate comes with difficulty levels and rankings.
Every fate-related quest he had dealt with so far had been a pain in the ass. They were built to scream that changing the future was never easy, to the point where clearing them was flat-out impossible if one walked in blind.
This time, though, it felt different, completely different. Fate itself, and the future wrapped around it, felt like they were digging in their heels and flipping him off. It wasn’t even pretending to be flexible anymore. It just stood there, daring him to try.
I feel like the vibe I’m getting from this is “figure it out yourselves”...
The dull, exhausted look in Do-Jin’s eyes sharpened again. The tangled mess of situations, emotions, and thoughts got scooped up and shoved into one corner of his mind. He could deal with all of it later once he had room to breathe.
“If fate won’t allow for change, then I’ll break the whole damn system,” Do-Jin mumbled, then buried all those unnecessary emotions before stepping outside.
Reality had its own share of trouble waiting for him.
What had started as a one-off real-time event stream had turned into a full-blown World Boss event by the end, so the company was in complete chaos. It was unusual enough that he hadn’t even properly finished the game before logging out, and a message had already come in asking him to talk things over.
“Do-Jin!”
The moment he stepped out, Chun Ji-Hyun rushed over. She was the one who’d catch the most heat if the company wanted answers, so her reaction made sense. Still, before saying anything about work, she checked on his condition first.
“Do-Jin... are you okay?”
Chun Ji-Hyun had watched the entire quest unfold from the outside, and she couldn’t forget his expression at the very end, that look on his face while he was surrounded by the starlight.
Seeing the worry on her face loosened something in his chest, if only a little. He asked casually, “What’s there to worry about?”
He appreciated the concern, but wanting to avoid making someone worry was a separate, equally natural thing. Of course, Chun Ji-Hyun noticed this but pretended she hadn’t.
“Do-Jin, you know things are absolutely blowing up right now, right? Everywhere I go, all anyone talks about is you.”
The topic change felt a little awkward, but it was fine with Do-Jin. He replied flatly, “They’re talking about the World Boss, not me.”
“You really think they can talk about the World Boss without bringing you up? Either way, two team leads have been waiting so long for you that their necks are basically snapping.”
As if on cue, the smartphone in Chun Ji-Hyun’s hand started chiming nonstop with incoming messages. She shook the phone lightly and let out a bitter smile.
“Can you save me here?”
Do-Jin smiled back and nodded.
***
“This is going in a direction that completely blows past my expectations,” Cecilia muttered under her breath, half stunned and half annoyed.
She was the one with the Contractor class, the one who had delivered a hidden map to Do-Jin after accepting a request from the being she was contracted with.
Since she had already gotten wrapped up with him once before, she had been keeping tabs on him ever since. Though to be honest, with the way he stirred up chaos everywhere he went, it wasn’t like she needed to try very hard to keep track of him.
This time, too, Cecilia had tuned in to Do-Jin’s stream. She hadn’t been expecting anything major. She figured it was just another event stream that most content creators ran from time to time. Instead, it turned out to be a quest connected to the Cult of Ruin, and somehow it ended with an early World Boss trigger.
“You’re telling me a single fucking player triggered an entire World Boss event? Seriously?”
This is beyond absurd. So what if he was a Star Apostle? Does that suddenly make him God? I’m a Contractor too. And this was hidden content. Hidden.
Cecilia lifted her head and addressed the entities she was contracted with. “Hey. Are you guys seeing this shit? Got anything you want to say?”
“It seems you’re already aware,” a voice said out of nowhere.
The faint note of surprise in their voice made Cecilia smile. “My intel game’s pretty fucking strong, you know.”
Most of it came from the real world, but she saw no reason to explain that.
“That works in our favor,” the entity replied. “A capable contractor is always welcome.”
“Well, since I’m so fucking competent, my amazing brain started wondering about something.”
“And what would that be?”
“Last time, I brought him a map. Someone asked for it, and I delivered it. This time, none of that happened.” Cecilia narrowed her eyes. “So how did he get that far again?”
She paused for a moment, then asked what she actually wanted to know. “You’re not affiliated with another Contractor behind my back, are you?”
Cecilia had been wondering whether there was an unknown Contractor feeding information to Do-Jin. Otherwise, how could he have stumbled upon so many opportunities?
“No.” The answer came back without hesitation. “You’re the only Contractor.”
“So you’re saying all of this just happened by coincidence?” Cecilia asked in disbelief.
“Not quite. Everything that followed still began with the one map we provided. That current has simply not ended yet.”
Cecilia let out a dry, exaggerated laugh. “So you’re telling me that one map was enough to wake up a World Boss that was supposed to stay asleep?”
She thought for a second, then nodded. “That’s fucking insane.”
“We... do not entirely disagree.”
“Well, yeah,” Cecilia replied. “Given how far things have gone, you’re really saying we’re not doing anything?”
“Our judgment is that direct intervention would be inappropriate. The flow remains stable.”
Cecilia clicked her tongue, then tilted her head as she remembered something. “Oh, right. Didn’t you say that guy became some kind of Apostle of Star or whatever? Does that mean he’s like me now?”
“No. He has no relation to us.”
“I see.” Cecilia nodded casually while her thoughts spun in the background.
So whatever was backing Do-Jin was something entirely different.
She still had no clear idea what the entities she had contracted with actually were. That question had been her way of testing whether they had any connection to stars at all.
“Either way, you’re telling me you don’t need me to do anything again? Just sit back and watch?” she asked.
“That is the role assigned to us at present. It is also the most ideal outcome.”
“Man, that’s boring.”
The silence that followed dragged on just long enough to be noticeable.
“Alright, alright. I’ll behave,” Cecilia promised.
When no response came back yet again, she pursed her lips. “I guess you’re gone already. Could’ve at least said something.”
Then again, this always happened. Sometimes they would vanish mid-conversation only to pop back in a few seconds later with a random order. There was no telling when they might reach out again. And honestly, they probably would.
I can’t believe the World Boss appeared early... Something that huge is going to change a hell of a lot depending on how it unfolds.
Cecilia couldn’t deny the fact that one person caused all of this.
“I guess you’re the fucking hero now.”