One who sees through to the heart of a problem and resolves it properly.
One who guides all living beings onto the right path.
One who foresees the future and prepares for it in advance.
Such a person was what we called a Divine Shaman.
It was a name that had almost been forgotten.
***
They say that even when a wealthy family falls, its fortune lasts for three generations.
That saying isn't always true.
Sometimes, a wealthy family can go under in a single generation.
Unfortunately, my own family proved that point firsthand, so it's a fact I can't argue with.
Until my grandfather's generation, our family was said to have been one of South Korea's most distinguished households.
We weren't widely known, but those who mattered—the upper crust who wielded a little influence in South Korea—knew of our family.
And knowing of us was hardly the extent of it.
Even saying that they trusted and depended on us wouldn't have done it justice.
People called our family the Divine Shaman Family.
That's right.
We were a family of shamans.
Naturally, we weren't just any family of shamans.
The fortunes told by the Divine Shaman Family, guided by the miraculous divine power of our Ancestral God, were never wrong.
Our family's mystical authority was supposedly so great that even presidents from other countries came to us in utmost secrecy to request consultations.
Wealth and glory followed the Divine Shaman Family as a matter of course.
Ours was also a family with history and tradition.
I was taught that our ancestors had stood proudly among the great families of the Joseon, Goryeo, Silla, and Gojoseon periods, and even in the ages before them.
The Ancestral God our family had worshipped for generations—the same one my grandfather served at the time—had personally vouched for it, so it was probably true.
After all, the words of the Ancestral God, who guaranteed our family's miraculous divine power, were practically gospel.
For a family that had endured for so long to collapse all at once, something truly momentous must have happened.
─ It is all because of the Great Cataclysm......
I suspect the words my grandfather, the last Divine Shaman of our family, left behind almost like a final testament were the answer.
That's right.
The Great Cataclysm.
That event, which shook the entire world, marked the beginning of our family's sudden downfall.
***
It happened exactly twenty years ago.
That was the year I was born, so there's no way I could confuse it.
The Great Cataclysm took place that year.
It was the incident in which incomprehensible structures called Labyrinth Towers appeared simultaneously all over the world. As though by prior agreement, exactly one Labyrinth Tower appeared in each country.
Strictly speaking, saying they rose out of the ground isn't quite accurate, but let's just say they did.
In any case, it was a phenomenon beyond human understanding.
[If you desire this world's continued existence, climb the Tower.]
If humanity failed to conquer the Tower's sixty floors, Earth would perish.
If the highest floor reached in a Tower wasn't updated within a year, the country in that Tower's designated territory would also perish.
It was something everyone came to know naturally, as though a god had worked a miracle.
With destruction suddenly hanging over their heads, people everywhere fell into a panic.
When confusion and chaos flood the world, people naturally seek someone they can trust and depend on.
The leaders of nations rushed to visit our Divine Shaman Family.
─ Divine Shaman, what will become of the world? What should we do? Please tell us what the future holds!
There were plenty of shamans in the world, but ours was the only family whose powers had been proven through actual results.
Naturally, many believed that the Divine Shaman Family would offer some brilliant solution to calm the chaos.
They trusted us to show them the right way forward.
But...
─ ......I do not know either.
After saying those words, my grandfather, the Divine Shaman of his generation, disappeared from public view.
The Divine Shaman Family shut its doors.
That was because, with the Great Cataclysm, my grandfather—the most spiritually gifted Divine Shaman in the world—had lost his divine power.
After the Great Cataclysm, the Ancestral God who had always protected our family and bestowed divine power upon us never visited the Divine Shaman Family again.
***
[Awakened Ji Seo-yeon has become the first to clear Floor 1 of ‘Labyrinth Tower - Korea’.]
[Awakened Brian Rector has become the first to clear Floor 1 of ‘Labyrinth Tower - United States’......]
People known as the Awakened began to appear.
They climbed the Towers, postponing the world's destruction.
New heroes had been born.
─ The Awakened will save the world!
─ We're saved!
When the spark of hope called the Awakened emerged amid the chaos of the Great Cataclysm, the world began to stabilize with astonishing speed.
Perhaps it was because no monsters or other strange beings immediately burst into the world to spread chaos.
After all, people quickly grow indifferent to dangers and fears they aren't directly facing.
As time passed, many came to regard the Towers as little different from the climate crisis.
And so the world gradually regained its old form.
No, with the emergence of the Awakened and the byproducts brought back from the Labyrinth Towers, the world grew more prosperous than before.
However...
The Divine Shaman Family, which had lost its divine power in the Great Cataclysm, never recovered what it once had.
***
Deep in the remote forests of Gangwon Province stood the Divine Shaman Family's ancestral home and shrine.
There had been a time when countless people came and went, seeking relief from their anxieties. Since the Great Cataclysm, though, it had become a backwater that hardly anyone visited.
"Cough—! Cough—!"
The current head of the Divine Shaman Family—my father—coughed harshly, his throat dry.
"Yeong-hwan."
"Yes?"
"Do not resent your grandfather."
"Come on. I don't resent him. He was so good to me when I was little."
"......You rascal."
Even if the Divine Shaman Family had lost its divine power, hadn't we accumulated plenty of wealth over the years?
And yet our family had still fallen into ruin.
My circumstances were no different from those of an ordinary person.
If anything, they might have been a little worse.
That was because, far from having any wealth left, all we had were debts.
"......For a man who spent his entire life pursuing divine power, losing it was like going blind."
The family fortune, amassed over countless generations, had been completely squandered.
My grandfather had spent it all in his desperate efforts to regain his divine power and restore his severed connection to the Ancestral God.
And desperate really was the word for it.
I'd heard that he'd sought out every kind of shaman and religious practitioner, commissioned shamanic rituals, rites to dispel misfortune, and ancestral ceremonies—in short, tried absolutely everything he could.
That was how our once-abundant wealth had vanished without a trace.
Yet his divine power never returned.
Perhaps that was only natural.
Every shaman my grandfather had sought out was a fraud.
It was something we learned only later, but the Divine Shaman Family hadn't been the only shamans to lose their divine power.
It seemed that the Great Cataclysm had stripped the entire world of its divine power and granted the miracle of Awakening in its place.
My grandfather had been honest. The fraudulent shamans hadn't.
Even after losing their own divine power, they pretended to be just as miraculous as ever. They deceived my grandfather, claimed they could restore his powers, and swindled him out of his money.
Had my grandfather retained his divine power—or, at the very least, been capable of thinking straight—he wouldn't have lost his fortune so easily.
Anyway, that was what happened.
The story of how my grandfather, once the most genuinely powerful Divine Shaman in the world, was tricked by charlatans and stripped of his entire fortune became our family's shameful little secret.
"It pains me that all I have to leave you is an obligation. You can still give it up, if you wish."
"It's all right. This was my choice."
"......Thank you."
I was twenty years old.
My father wasn't even fifty yet.
But he was growing weaker by the day, steadily approaching death.
No matter how many hospitals examined him, they could never find a cause.
My father, however, knew the reason.
"This is the fate of a shaman who cannot serve a god."
They called it Spirit Sickness.
My father said that he had been born with the constitution of a spirit medium, passed down through our family for generations. He was destined to serve a god, but because no god came to him, he had fallen ill.
"Huff—huff—huff—"
My father's breathing grew ragged and faint.
His body, weakened by years of Spirit Sickness, could scarcely manage even the act of breathing.
"Please...... take care of...... the family."
With those words, spoken almost as a final testament, my father passed away.
"Rest in peace, Father."
Perhaps knowing the day he would die and calling me to his side had been the first and last display of divine power my father ever managed.
I was twenty years old.
On a clear autumn day, I became the head of the fallen Cheon Family of Divine Shamans.
Someone who knew nothing of shamanic practices, who didn't even know whether he possessed divine power, and yet had become the head of the Divine Shaman Family.
Cheon Yeong-hwan, the last descendant of the Divine Shaman Cheon Family.
That was my name.
***
I managed to complete my father's memorial rites without a single visitor coming by.
Before I even had time to collect myself from the grief, I picked up a calculator and a notebook.
After a while spent tapping away at the calculator and scribbling in the notebook, I scratched my head and gave up.
"Tsk."
What remained to me was ten thousand acres of forest land in a remote corner of Gangwon Province, along with the Divine Shaman Family's ancestral home and shrine.
You might think that owning a house and land in this day and age made me rich.
It didn't.
Even if I sold all that rural real estate, it wouldn't fetch a billion won, while the debts secured against it exceeded two billion.
That's right.
As I said, the Divine Shaman Family's wealth hadn't lasted three generations—it hadn't even survived twenty years. I was now thoroughly buried in debt.
"......This is hopeless."
Two billion won in debt for someone just starting out in life.
There really was no way out of a situation like that.
Even if I'd possessed a Divine Shaman's divine power, I doubted I'd have been able to see a way forward.
"Maybe I really should've given it up."
I could have renounced the inheritance.
But I couldn't bring myself to do that.
If I renounced it, there would be no way to protect the forest land, ancestral home, and shrine that the Divine Shaman Family had guarded for generations.
I'd never gotten to live extravagantly as the son of a wealthy household, but this was the place that had raised me.
It was my home, filled with memories from my entire life.
I kept telling myself I was crazy, but I had a feeling I'd make the same choice even if I could turn back time.
"I suppose I'll have to find some way to make money......?"
I began squeezing every last drop of wisdom out of my rather limited brain.
With neither divine power nor an Ancestral God to help me, I had no choice but to think for myself and carve out my own path.
"......"
It went without saying, but no matter how much I thought, I couldn't come up with an answer.
"Might as well clean."
For now, I'd start with something I could actually do.
***
"That's better."
I'd finished cleaning the shrine.
Since no one had been able to tend to it after my father fell ill, the place had been thick with dust. Now it was spotless again.
An altar stood in the inner courtyard of the shrine.
As far as I knew, it had been used for offerings back when the Ancestral God still watched over our family.
Suddenly, I felt an urge to place an offering on the altar.
"Do I have anything to offer?"
Of course, a half-unemployed debtor cleaning his house wasn't likely to have anything suitable to offer.
"Oh?"
Fortunately, something that could serve as an offering caught my eye.
The apple tree in the courtyard bore a delicious-looking fruit.
At the tail end of autumn, the lone apple still hanging there, showing off its fine appearance, seemed a lot like me.
Pluck.
I picked the apple and held it in my hand.
"How am I supposed to do this?"
Though I was a descendant of the Divine Shaman Family and its current head, I'd never learned the shamanic arts.
─ Divine power has vanished from the world. I do not wish to burden you with this responsibility now. I want you to live an ordinary life.
My father hadn't taught me shamanic practices.
And yet I'd ended up as the head of the Divine Shaman Cheon Family anyway. There was a certain irony in that.
In any case, while I hadn't learned the shamanic arts, there was one thing I knew.
─ You wish to make an offering to the Ancestral God?
─ Yes, Grandfather.
─ Hoho. Your heart is in the right place, so I shall tell you. It is not difficult.
─ How do I do it?
─ Sincerity.
─ Sincerity?
─ Yes, sincerity. Our Ancestral God possesses such miraculous divine power that he recognizes your sincerity regardless of the formalities.
─ I see.
─ Indeed. Since he knows our sincerity, I am sure the Ancestral God will return to us someday......
That was what my grandfather had taught me when I was an innocent child.
I carefully placed the apple on the altar.
Since I didn't know the proper rituals, I simply pressed my palms together.
And while I was making an offering to the Ancestral God anyway, I decided to make a wish.
Surely that much was all right.
'Please let me win first prize in the lottery. Preferably in a draw with a huge jackpot.'
As far as my brilliant mind could tell, it was the only way to solve my family's problems.
Just then...
[You have Awakened.]
A clear, pure voice rang in my ears.
"Huh?"
I'd asked for a lottery win, but I'd been given something else.
It seemed the Ancestral God really was miraculous. Even after all those years without a visit, he'd still given me something.
Twenty years had passed since the Great Cataclysm.
By now, even the procedures to follow after Awakening were common knowledge.
I did what I knew I was supposed to do.
"Sta...... Status Window?"
That's right.
You had to call out for your Status Window.
As though confirming that I'd truly Awakened, a Status Window appeared.
[Status Window]
Name: Cheon Yeong-hwan
Class: Divine Shaman
Level: 1
Trait: Spirit Command
─ First Spirit: Ancestral God
Trait Skills: Lending / Spirit Communion (Inactive) / Divine Descent (Inactive)
Common Skills: Subspace Inventory / Tower Entry Ticket (Available)
I didn't understand most of it, but one thing stood out: my class.
It was a word I knew all too well.
"Divine Shaman?"
I'd Awakened, and I'd become a Divine Shaman.
I didn't even have time to process it.
[The severed connection to the source has been restored.]
Another system announcement rang out, drawing my attention.
"......What's this?"
There had been no mention of a message like that in the guide for the Awakened.
─ Fuck. Finally broke through.
I heard a strange voice. It wasn't a human voice, but it wasn't the system's voice either.
A hazy, pale figure appeared before me.
It had a human shape, but I could tell that whatever it was, it wasn't human.
"Who are you?"
I was a descendant of the Divine Shaman Family, after all.
Ghosts didn't frighten me, so I was able to ask in a calm voice.
─ Me? I'm your Ancestral God, you bastard.
"Pardon?"
The Ancestral God my grandfather had spent his entire life searching for had descended before me the moment I Awakened.