Rustle. Rustle.
The sound of thin sheets of paper brushing against one another.
The faint ticking of the clock on the wall.
And, in the background, the subtle scent of wood.
"-_-"
This was a public library in Seoul.
People sat at desks with books and notebooks spread before them, absorbed in their reading.
And in a secluded corner between the bookshelves, a hooded figure had claimed a desk for himself.
A high school student, who would normally spend hours staring at a workbook, had come ✧ NоvеIight ✧ (Original source) to the library for a change of pace. While choosing a book, the student happened to glance toward that particular desk.
For some reason, a few rather strange titles seemed to have been mixed in...
After staring at the desk for a moment, the unnamed high school student quickly moved away, unwilling to disturb the person reading there.
At the same time, an unusual shade of hair peeked out from beneath the lowered hood of the library patron.
"-_-"
That's right.
The person sitting there was none other than South Korea's fourth S-rank Hunter—Kim Giryeo.
Flip.
He turned the pages rapidly, continuing to read at a brisk pace, yet no matter how much time passed, his stiff expression showed no sign of changing.
There were only four top-tier Hunters in the entire country.
And yet one of them was sitting in a public library in broad daylight.
In truth, Giryeo had recently encountered a completely unexpected problem.
He had thought that gaining a deeper understanding of the human body might reveal some sort of breakthrough, so he had begun studying with a sense of urgency.
'What the hell? How is the information marked Ⓢ here suddenly Ⓢ over there too? They're completely contradicting each other!'
There was far too much inaccurate information on the internet.
After trying several different approaches, he had eventually arrived at a place called a library.
At the very least, printed materials distributed offline had usually undergone some degree of fact-checking, making them comparatively reliable.
If he intended to study properly, a place like this offered more advantages than the internet.
Unfortunately, the more information he gathered, the clearer his pessimistic conclusion became.
No matter how he approached the problem, there seemed to be no way to artificially awaken the body's dormant potential.
To be precise, Kim Giryeo's ultimate limit was clearly far higher than F-rank.
The problem was that there was no apparent way to accelerate the agonizingly slow rate at which his awakening value increased—roughly 2 per year.
"No, seriously."
The more he researched, the more rapidly he arrived at the same conclusion.
There was no answer.
"This is driving me crazy."
What living creature wouldn't feel the same?
Alphaurt was a planet where the desire to extend one's lifespan had always been intense, and compared to Earth, its biotechnology was extraordinarily advanced.
With proper care, even someone in Kim Giryeo's condition could preserve his body for three hundred years.
Perhaps even a thousand.
But a thousand years...
To spend an entire millennium in a body like this.
'Damn it. By then, the human species on Earth would've adapted to magic to the third stage, and there'd probably be SSS-rank people running around. What the hell am I supposed to do then?'
Click.
He leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head, sinking into thought.
For the moment, simply living wasn't particularly unpleasant.
'Earth... really is a good planet.'
Even setting aside its aesthetic appeal, there was the internet.
Well-maintained water and sewage systems.
Affordable lighting.
Fashion.
Food.
Music.
Culture.
Culture.
Culture.
Earth was a world overflowing with things worth enjoying and loving.
In fact, compared to a certain someone's home planet, Earth was emotionally peaceful and warm.
So even if he could no longer enjoy the status of an archmage, he had no complaints about becoming a citizen of this land.
The problem was...
'The karma I've accumulated...'
He rubbed his nose with one hand, following a habit inherited from the corpse he occupied.
The falsified rank.
At least the lie involving the rank registered with the Association could be undone relatively easily.
Tomorrow, he could deliberately injure himself, announce that he could no longer continue as a Hunter, and retire.
That much wasn't a serious problem.
But the ambition.
And the matter of becoming a sacrifice.
How was he supposed to deal with those?
'How am I supposed to stop Kang Changho with F-rank magic power...?'
Was there any way?
"There really isn't. Unlike Brooklyn, he's especially talented at control, so I can't even shut down his spell with [Mana Burn]."
But sitting here lamenting wouldn't make the world change on its own.
Giryeo silently resolved to begin cleaning up the mess he had created, one piece at a time.
Flap.
After finishing the third book, Giryeo picked up the comic he had brought over out of curiosity.
As he slowly gathered his thoughts, a character in the book ended up stranded in the middle of a vast ocean, drifting in a rubber dinghy.
And at that moment, an idea suddenly flashed through his mind.
"Ah."
Come to think of it...
'Is it already that time this week?'
Outside, summer was already in full swing, humid rain pouring down in heavy sheets.
That's right.
It had been about three months since he first visited the headquarters of the guild called Garion.
Which meant the initial tutoring period he had contracted with Jung Haseong was coming to an end.
***
Whoosh.
The scent of fire.
By now, it had become quite familiar.
I followed the heat carried on the wind, my hands clasped behind my back.
"Uhm."
As you can see, the people's hero was receiving private lessons from the Archmage of the Twin Stars and growing as rapidly as bamboo shoots during the rainy season...
"Jung Haseong. Look here again."
"Ah, yes."
Swish.
With a tiny sound, a small spark appeared before the disciple's eyes, no larger than the flame of a flickering candle.
It was the storage magic contained within the [Pyromancer's Necklace].
"Don't just let it hover there. Make it rise from within. Think of this hand as a cross-section. Like this—the point where the x-axis and y-axis intersect is the ignition center."
"But when I do it that way, it feels like something is pushing back..."
"There's a repulsive force. When your internal magic power overlaps with the activation point of a skill, the two interfere with each other. That's why Awakened people find it difficult to cast skills directly inside their own bodies."
"Ah."
"But if you think of it as forcing your way through while searching for the gaps, it can penetrate more easily than you'd expect. Practicing this is extremely useful for improving skill control."
"A gap?"
"When the flow slows down, aim for that instant and stab through..."
I had been using my right hand as a teaching aid while explaining the principle at length.
Then, partway through the sentence, my voice gradually trailed off.
"If you stab through at that exact moment, it should work, but..."
Haseong looked puzzled by my reaction, but soon returned to his practice.
About two hours later.
The lesson had ended, and we were preparing to leave the training room.
"Thank you again for today. I'll practice everything you taught me on my own and make sure I've mastered it by the next lesson."
The moment Haseong said those particular words, I finally voiced something I'd been considering for a while.
"Ah, Haseong. About the 'next' lesson..."
"Yes."
"Um... just to make sure, you're not planning to end the lessons here without renewing the contract, are you? Even though I already told you that your progress won't be as dramatic as before, you're still planning to keep learning until the very end, right?"
Thud.
Immediately afterward, Jung Haseong dropped his brand-new phone onto the floor.
How could he carry such an expensive phone around without even putting a protective case on it?
I stared at the phone lying on the floor and thought.
Private tutoring with the country's number-one-ranked Hunter.
It had begun as a way to make money, but by now, the original purpose had faded considerably.
Do you have any idea how much money is sitting in my bank account right now?
After deducting what needed to be deducted, then adding the reward for handling the [Thornbush Forest] dungeon break and the final tutoring fee...
The total came to 5.82 billion won.
A staggering 5.82 billion won.
That was my current balance.
Even after buying two Infinite Power Cores—items so expensive that I once trembled at the thought of purchasing even one—I still had plenty of money left.
In Korea, the average first-prize lottery jackpot was around 2 billion won.
And yet someone with more than 5 billion won in capital still wasn't free from manual labor.
Whether that was right or not was seriously questionable.
"Ugh, I don't want to work..."
I muttered a phrase that virtually every worker must have thought at least once.
Switching bodies in the future was no longer possible either.
The curse imposed by the knight's oath itself was meaningless, but because of the physical effects it placed on the contractor, my remaining life expectancy was only about nine years.
'I just want to quit everything.'
And so, an impulse came over me.
All the scheming and petty tricks I'd been using to make money were starting to feel unbearably troublesome.
If possible, I wanted to abandon all this nonsense and start resting immediately.
Besides, this was something I could say with a certain amount of confidence after doing the calculations myself as his teacher.
'I think he's strong enough now.'
Indeed, Jung Haseong had already significantly reduced the collateral damage that had concerned me most.
As long as he didn't directly strike someone...
His flames no longer left indiscriminate burns merely from being nearby.
"Hmm."
But when I thought about it again, the real problem wasn't Haseong.
It was Esther.
Jung Haseong's habit of leaking magic in every direction was something that could be corrected somehow.
Curse magic, however, belonged to the realm of mental interference.
'I've strengthened his physical defenses to a certain extent, but if he gets caught in a storm of curses, they'll still pierce straight through.'
There were still many things I needed to verify before beginning Esther's training.
So I decided to keep using Jung Haseong as a test subject, refining the training methods I intended to apply to my next disciple, while barely suppressing the urge to retire.
Anyway, these thoughts were probably only a temporary reaction to the shock of my recent failure.
Originally, once I had successfully changed vessels, I had even intended to mail the remaining techniques and several case-study documents to Jung Haseong's home address.
So at least I possessed some semblance of a conscience.
"Th, then... does that mean you don't want to extend the contract, Hunter Kim...?"
"No. What I said just now was something I brought up casually. Don't worry about it."
Click.
The next sound was that of the locker door in the Awakened training room closing.
"Seriously. I only said that because I can genuinely tell how much you've improved. I'm not just flattering you. Even if you stopped the lessons right now, you wouldn't have to worry about your work anymore. Things are completely different from before."
"-_-"
"Oh, right. Since drawing up another contract is annoying, let's skip making a separate oath this time and just keep paying the deposit at the beginning of each month like before. Then we can continue the lessons immediately."
I retrieved Kim Giryeo's phone from the locker and casually changed the subject.
But Jung Haseong, who had been staring at the side of my face, soon spoke again.
"It didn't sound like you were joking... Is this perhaps because of the tuition fee? If necessary, I can increase the payment whenever we renew the contract."
If this had been before, that single sentence would have been enough to hook me instantly and leave me practically drooling.
'Yeah. What good would hoarding gold and treasure do for a low-tier wizard? I'd be lucky if someone didn't rob me. At this point, having too much money might actually be dangerous.'
From now on, I really had to live as a weakling.
That meant I needed to be more cautious than ever.
If I recklessly tried to regain my former standing by relying on equipment, I might end up as some unfortunate victim, just like in that frog incident before.
More importantly, with this F-rank body, there were plenty of high-grade artifacts whose true power I couldn't even draw out properly.
'Ha...'
Maybe once my mood improved, I would start collecting epic-level items again with some renewed sense of hope.
But even then, it shouldn't be something I pursued by exploiting Jung Haseong.
Let me say it again.
I was now a soul that could no longer leave Kim Giryeo's body.
It might already be too late, but if I wanted to survive even a little longer, shouldn't I start trying to get along with this S-rank Pyromancer from now on?
'If I build up enough goodwill, maybe he'll forgive my mistakes when the truth eventually comes out. It'd be too suspicious if I suddenly started speaking formally to him. For now, I should just treat him well in little ways...'
Hunters generally had most of their wealth tied up in equipment.
Jung Haseong, who wore epic-level gear, was no exception.
Furthermore, given the dangerous nature of their profession, Hunters were frequently seriously injured during missions, and treating those injuries in the middle of battle required extremely expensive disposable medical supplies.
To keep demanding enormous amounts of cash from someone in that position every month...
'Hunters don't actually make money until they sell off their loot, so cash flow is slow... Once taxes are included, 6 billion won a month must've been a serious burden even for an S-rank Hunter.'
Let's not be greedy.
I barely suppressed the sigh rising inside me and continued.
"You don't need to increase the amount. Just keep sending the same amount as before."
"That's true, but..."
"Really, it's fine. Actually, if you want, I could even lower it. Should I?"
"...No."
"Alright. Let's stop talking about this and go get something to eat."
Fortunately, my consistent attempts to reassure him seemed to have worked.
'As expected...'
Mumble.
For some reason, Jung Haseong muttered something strange under his breath as he left the training room.
But well.
Whatever.
***
After finishing his lesson with Jung Haseong, Kim Giryeo headed toward the shiitake mushroom rice-pot restaurant he had reserved, lost in thought.
During the previous three months of lessons with his first disciple, he had experimented with several different teaching methods.
And now, without taking any break in between, he planned to begin teaching Esther immediately.
However, there was one thing the Archmage had forgotten.
[ -If you become strong enough for even me to acknowledge you, I'll team up with you as much as you want.]
Come to think of it...
Hadn't there been a little more riding on these lessons than merely improving the abilities of the country's number-one-ranked Hunter?