A fairy, but not exactly the kind-hearted one from fairy tales who grants a poor girl a night-long dream.
If
this
fairy were to come across a cinder-covered girl dreaming of marrying a prince, it would first wonder
why
she believed marrying a prince would make her happy. And after hearing the reason, it might whimsically take her to the party where the prince would appear.
Or
it might kidnap the prince at that very party, drag him in front of the girl, and ask whether marrying him would really make her happy without sparing a thought for what came after.
Fairies are closer to spirits, ideational beings driven by curiosity, who purely pursue their own amusement. Sometimes, it’s said, a fairy will take a human child on a whim, raise them for a while, and then return them once they’ve been tainted by the human world. In the end, because their sole standard for action is their own enjoyment, they will casually commit acts that humans would consider evil. Even so, at their core, they are beings who cherish life and possess an innate nobility. Compared to humans, infinitely closer to perfection…
But precisely because they dislike the impurity of humans who covet the flesh, they usually do not reveal themselves before people at all. Which was why it was so astonishing that Han Jaeyeong could replicate a fairy so perfectly.
A half-blood with a fairy…or maybe a child raised by fairies?
Judging by the way they spoke while wielding that brutally ominous fairy wand, it seemed plausible.
A human who called a fairy their mother.
Now that I think about it, they do feel fairy-like.
I didn’t know whether Han Jaeyeong could be called a perfect being, but the fact that their standards of action were built entirely around personal interest certainly resembled a fairy. No matter how skilled a transformation mage might be, transforming this perfectly could only mean they shared many traits with fairies.
And there was one more thing. Something trivial, but it made sense now why Han Jaeyeong never bothered to specify a gender. If they could transform their body into a fairy with such perfection, then their usual body must be close to sexless as well. Since Han Jaeyeong was that kind of mage, it also explained why they hadn’t stepped forward rashly during the Gwanghwamun Dungeon Break.
A transformation mage, one who could even turn into a fairy? Even if they’d been in a state where they could use magic, Gwanghwamun had far too many cameras. If footage of someone freely altering their body, especially transforming into a fairy, were captured on camera, the risks would have been enormous in many ways.
In modern society, Hunters don’t deal only with monsters. They also have to deal with humans. Trusting a human who can freely change their face and body is no easy thing.
So that’s why they stick with Yu Hanul.
Unless you were someone as foolish—no, as
heroic
, as Yu Hanul, you’d hesitate to work alongside someone like that. Of course, the same applied to me.
A hero and a fairy… this isn’t some childish fairy tale.
If they found out that my previous life was the Demon Lord, wouldn’t I be treated as something impure? No matter how I looked at it, the image of those two teaming up to raid a Demon Lord seemed almost
too
fitting.
The more I thought about it, the more I felt like I should keep my distance from the duo of hero and fairy. Even as these thoughts crossed my mind, Han Jaeyeong was methodically finishing off the monster.
Crunch!
The monster attempted a counterattack toward Han Jaeyeong, but its already sluggish movements had grown even slower. With the existence of a fairy, the very air in this area now denied the monster’s existence.
Honestly, even I felt suffocated on a conceptual level.
Tap. Tap.
The body meant to contain mana was being purified, and with the fairy’s presence slowing the monster’s movements to a crawl, even the mana it had painstakingly absorbed was useless.
The monster let out a wretched howl, “Krrrraaaaah!”
It desperately tried to gather the mana that its vessel could no longer contain, scattering away, but I didn’t let it.
The system is determining the monster’s name.
The system is re-evaluating the monster’s threat level.
An S-rank monster was, by definition, a class so dangerous that even hundreds of Hunters working together would struggle to defeat it. Yet here it was, this weak. It was understandable that the system wanted to reassess the threat.
If the system’s fundamental purpose was humanity’s survival, and monster ranks were calculated based on how threatening they were to humanity, then by that standard, this monster was undeniably S-rank.
“I want to live, I don’t want to die, I want to live!”
“I was wrong, I won’t do it again, I was wrong!”
A being that cannot communicate and makes no attempt to understand the other is, by definition, an enemy. In the language expressed by this collective intelligence, such a being is called a
monster
. Humanity cannot understand the language of monsters, but I am different.
I was once the Enemy of Humanity.
And so, to me, the screams this monster was letting out came through clearly as language.
No wonder the dungeon’s synchronization rate keeps rising.
I already knew that, during the Truelight Sect incident, they had been experimenting with forcibly extracting the souls of living humans and turning them into soul cores. At the time, I didn’t understand why they were doing such a thing, but now it seemed likely it had been a preparatory step for the experiments being conducted in this dungeon.
“I hate this, I hate this!”
“Why am I even here…?!”
Countless voices overlapped, as if many people were speaking at once.
That this monster was treated as something impure was only natural. The reason its body was breaking apart in pieces under Han Jaeyeong’s hands was because the body itself had been artificially constructed. From the moment I looked at this village through the item Han Jaeyeong handed me, I could see the countless souls bound to it.
If people were brought into this dungeon and left to wander, their steps would naturally lead them here. The mana contained within that wretched statue naturally drew Hunters in. That was why I had told the HP guild members to leave this dungeon as quickly as possible. Han Jaeyeong was an S-rank Hunter, so they avoided having their soul drawn in, but Hunters below that level could have easily lost consciousness the moment they stepped into this village.
Every one of those souls would have been absorbed by that monster, a vessel stitched together from multiple human bodies so it could endure containing the souls of others. And the act of fixing countless souls inside that vessel; that was the true nature of the monster.
What should one even call such a thing? A pitiful
lifeless
idol? One that was created entirely against its will.
The system designates the monster as “Lifeless Idol.”
"Don't copy me."
But once activated, the system did not stop its calculations.
The system begins analyzing the correlation between “Lifeless Idol” and “soul cores.”
The system defines “Lifeless Idol” as “a form in which multiple soul cores are fixed.”
The system recognizes “Lifeless Idol” as a massive threat to humanity’s survival.
It wasn’t wrong. If I hadn’t come here this time, this dungeon would have continued raising its synchronization rate and threatening Earth. Eventually, the synchronization would have climbed too high, the dungeon would have gone uncleared, and a Dungeon Break would have occurred.
There really are all kinds of ways to ensnare people.
At first, I thought there might be a human experimentation facility here, like the Truelight Sect had. But after actually coming here, I realized that wasn’t necessary. If the Truelight Sect had turned their followers into soul cores one by one, this place was a step ahead. Like the corpse we discovered earlier, the alchemist who attacked the HP Guild would, given a bit more time, have been drawn here as well, ending up offering their soul to this lifeless idol.
If someone like that went missing one day, and it came out that they were buried in gambling debt, most people wouldn’t question the disappearance too deeply. And even if an investigation began, all it would take was for the owner of Shining, now under scrutiny, to say something like this: “Oh, that guy? He had gambling debts, so I felt sorry for him and gave him a job. He worked diligently for a while, but the day after asking for an advance on his paycheck, he just stopped showing up.”
On top of that, this place was essentially a dump, a location humans had no interest in. If someone died here, they’d never be found, even by the end of the world. And there was no shortage of souls to feed the lifeless idol, almost as plentiful as those drawn in by cults. In a capitalist society, money is practically life itself, yet people throw that life away gambling, rushing in like moths to a flame.
Humans were, in effect, walking into hell on their own. Honestly, more than Lee Manbok, money itself might be closer to this world’s new god, and it seemed the Enemy of Humanity had figured out how to make use of that new god.
And it wasn’t just that, the culprit’s bad taste went even further.
Did they recreate it?
The scenery of this crumbling village was painfully familiar to me. It was exactly like the countless ordinary villages I had seen in my previous life. The fact that they had deliberately recreated a village like this and then placed a lifeless idol at its center… Frankly, it was grotesque. Skin-crawling. Just what was my sibling from my previous life doing now? Whether they had reincarnated or something else entirely, couldn’t they just live their own life in a new world?
Thud!
How much time had passed?
Whether it was a desperate will to live even in that state, or nothing more than futile struggling, the monster’s body, which had been crawling across the ground while avoiding Han Jaeyeong, finally lost all strength and collapsed. The body that had barely maintained a human shape by being stitched together piece by piece had now lost all cohesion, reduced to nothing more than a lump of flesh. And this death, at least, was the mercy I could grant it.
Though perhaps even thinking that was arrogance on my part.
“I can’t really tell…whether it’s dead or not.”
Fluttering their fairy wings, Han Jaeyeong knelt beside the fallen monster and examined it closely.
“And it really does look like a person.”
“Didn’t you hear the system? It said it’s a monster.”
“…That’s true.” After saying that, Han Jaeyeong turned to look at me. “But you don’t seem very surprised?”
“About what?”
“These wings. Most people are so shocked they practically faint when they see this. Then again, Hunter Jeong Daon isn’t exactly normal.” Han Jaeyeong smiled and gave their wings another flap. Powder drifted through the air on the breeze from the wings.
I frowned, but said nothing.
Han Jaeyeong’s eyes sparkled even more. “So you’re definitely not something impure.”
It seemed the fairy had been suspecting that I might be something unclean. Whatever the state of my soul, my body itself was an ordinary human one. Fairy dust wasn’t going to affect me. And honestly, now that I knew everything I needed to know, I didn’t want to get any more involved than this.
A hero wasn’t bad enough, now a fairy too?!
“Stop shedding dandruff and get lost.”
At my words, Han Jaeyeong jumped.
“What?! Dandruff? Wow, that’s harsh. This is, you know, the pure dust of a noble fairy—”
The dimensional rift is being repaired after defeating the boss monster.
The dungeon has been cleared.
Time until dungeon escape becomes available: 00:03:00
The system will protect the user until dungeon escape.
“They say the dungeon’s cleared.”
“You’re changing the subject!” Han Jaeyeong snorted, but regardless, they immediately knelt down again and resumed observing the monster. “I don’t know how this will sound, but about that bracelet from the Truelight Sect...”
“What about it?”
“It has a structure similar to this monster.”
Sure enough, Han Jaeyeong had sharp instincts. After all, there was a high chance the same person had made both.
“Don’t tell me Hunter Jeong Daon was trying to save th—”
“Meow.” As Han Jaeyeong was about to continue, Leo came bounding over, his tail brushing against my ankle like a foxtail.
“Me too! I helped too!”
“That was your job. Did you find anything?”
When I collapsed the ceiling upon discovering the lifeless idol, I had deliberately thrown Leo inside. I needed to draw the idol out into a wider area, but at the same time, I wanted someone to search the place it had been.
At my words, Leo froze with his mouth hanging open in shock.
“You’re cruel!”
He hadn’t started thinking he was actually fragile just because his size had shrunk to that of a kitten, had he? Especially since, after coming here and absorbing all this abundant mana, he’d even grown a little bigger.
“So? Any results? If you found nothing, I might just leave you here.”
Leo’s expression fell for a moment, but thankfully, it didn’t seem like I’d need to abandon him in the dungeon.
“Found this!”
Something like a scrap of paper was visible between Leo’s teeth. After a few low retching noises, he spat it out like a hairball.
“That’s disgusting…”
“Cruel!”
He must have swallowed it while clawing his way through the dirt. I carefully stepped closer and picked up the paper Leo had coughed up. “This is…”
The paper, damp with saliva, carried the weight of time. And…
“What are you looking at?” Han Jaeyeong spoke to me, but I couldn’t answer and remained silent. “Did you find something?”
“…No. It’s nothing.”
The moment the paper touched my hand, it crumbled into ash. But I had already seen everything I needed to see. More precisely, I had read it.
“My dear sister.”
A familiar handwriting, written in a language that no longer existed in this life.
“Welcome home.”
A message sent by my sibling.