“S-spare me. Please! I have a wife and kids at home—”
That was his last plea.
Crunch, crack.
The magic circle gaped open like a starving beast and chewed up the man’s body whole, grinding it down without mercy. The office, which had been filled with screams and sobbing only moments before, fell silent in an instant. And not long after, the blood and chunks of flesh that had been strewn across the floor like garbage vanished as if they had been washed away. On the surface, it looked as though nothing had happened at all.
Choi Miyeon asked, “Was that summoning magic? It’s only been about a month since the last dungeon clear. Looks like you’ve leveled up already.”
“Yes.”
After clearing the last dungeon, just as promised to the system, my overall level had increased by five.
I opened the system window.
Jeong Daon (Normal)
Potential Ability Rating: S-rank
Stamina: LV. 21 (No cap)
Strength: LV. 20 (No cap)
Mana: LV. 45 (No cap)
Overall Level: LV. 23 → 28
Recommended Dungeons: C-rank
Most encouraging of all was the fact that, just as I’d declared, I’d poured every spare point into mana. Before, using a fourth-circle spell two or three times was enough to drain my mana completely. Now, by my estimate, I could probably cast a fourth-circle spell around six times.
Of course, under normal standards, this is barely enough to manage third-circle magic.
But I’m not a mage whose limits can be measured by raw stats alone. If I had the time to refine my magic circles, I could probably increase the number of uses even further. The spell I’d just cast had also been a fourth-circle spell.
Demon-type summoning really is efficient.
Call Beast, a type of summoning magic that calls forth a designated demon-type creature from another dimension and allows the caster to command it for a limited time. This time, I’d summoned a ghost piranha, a gluttonous monster. Extremely efficient when it comes to killing a single human without leaving a trace.
That said, summoning magic always requires a price.
In most cases, summoning demon-types demands a cost beyond mana alone. This time, however, there had been plenty of fresh flesh and blood to feed it, making the spell exceptionally efficient. Now that I’d fed it well and satisfied it once, the resources required for the next summoning would be reduced.
Even so, I was still far from regaining my power at its peak. I needed to keep increasing the number of cards I could play, one by one.
I can’t rely on incantation magic alone forever.
Its effects are excellent, but incantation magic overheats the mana circuits throughout the entire body, which makes what comes afterward a problem. Still, the fact that I could continue steadily increasing my stats was already good news, and then—
The system entrusts the judgment of “Jeong Daon”’s behavior suitability to members of society.
Deriving results…
A majority of social members judge that “Jeong Daon”’s actions have mitigating circumstances.
Some social members judge “Jeong Daon”’s actions to be a “necessary evil.”
Quest “Doing Good Deeds Will Bring Blessings¿” completed. “Jeong Daon”’s ability restrictions have been weakened.
Stamina has increased by 2.
More than anything, at this point I could say I’d completely grasped the loophole in the “Doing Good Deeds Will Bring Blessings¿” quest. It had been the same during the Truelight Sect incident: if an action was one that most members of society empathized with, even murder incurred no restrictions. In fact, when the target was a criminal widely condemned by society, the system even loosened ability restrictions.
The only caveats were that the range of that effect was quite small, and that the system adjusted the stats on its own.
Ah, strictly speaking, it was indirect murder.
If I’d truly killed them with my own hands, there was a high chance restrictions would have been applied anyway, especially since the system views me as a potential threat to humanity’s survival. But looked at another way, it means that as long as an eyesore like me doesn’t kill them
directly
, it doesn’t matter.
“I’m glad I could help.”
In that case, what I need is an accomplice.
“Thanks for helping.”
Choi Miyeon, the one who had helped me this time, broke into a bright smile. “Don’t mention it.”
Choi Miyeon is a Hunter in a “water balloon” state, one whose body can only be maintained by periodic drug injections every few hours. That doesn’t mean she can’t use magic. As long as the magic circle and the mana required to activate it are supplied from the outside, she can cast spells without issue. Think of it as pressing a switch. It was similar to when she controlled the desert whale last time. All I had to do was prepare everything in advance.
Good thing the floor below the office was vacant.
Sneaking into the empty unit and struggling to draw a magic circle on the ceiling connected to the office above had been worth the effort.
Strangely enough, killing one another seemed not to register as a threat to the system at all, as long as it was humans killing humans. What a stupid hive-mind intelligence.
Choi Miyeon looked around the office that had once belonged to six people, now vanished without a trace, and shook her head. “You interrogated them for quite a while earlier. Did you get the information you wanted?”
“Nothing beyond what I expected.”
These loan sharks, their figurehead boss, and even a high-ranking official from the Central Management Office. We tortured them until dusk, but the yield was minimal.
“They said that after sending low-ranking Hunters into the dungeon, they’d send over their personal details through a messenger app, and then the payment would come in.”
Shining had received transaction proposals through a messenger app that left no trace. It was the same route they’d used to distribute illegal potions. The only difference was that this time, what they were trafficking wasn’t potions; it was people. After luring desperate, low-ranking Hunters through online gambling sites, Shining sent them into that dungeon on Yeongjong under the pretense of a job request.
They specifically targeted people with no family, those unlikely to be searched for even if they went missing. Nearly a hundred people had been killed that way.
“Looks like human trafficking is outsourced these days, too.”
From what we heard, every time they sent a single low-ranking Hunter, about five million won’s worth of virtual coins would be deposited by their “business partner.”
That a human life could be priced in cryptocurrency, and that someone would really sell another human being’s life for such a paltry sum, was astonishing. In the end, the members of Shining had been engaging in human trafficking simply to pad their bank accounts, without ever daring to think about what they were actually doing.
Choi Miyeon shook her head again. “They’re no different from the cult leader. Absolute trash. They deserved to die. Besides, you said the law can’t even properly punish them anyway. Tossing them in prison wouldn’t make them repent.”
That was a remark fitting of an accomplice to a devil. Still, it wasn’t entirely Choi Miyeon’s fault. After all, the fact that this kind of private vengeance could earn social approval was proof of how broken society had become. A society with no faith that criminals will be properly punished, and no belief that prisons can rehabilitate anyone.
And that, in turn, is the weakness in the leash the system has fastened around my neck.
If this were truly a society where doing good deeds brought blessings and doing evil brought punishment, just like the quest name suggested, there’d be no reason for a devil like me to step in like this.
“Then whose wish was it this time?” Choi Miyeon asked, her face oddly animated.
Sorry to dampen her expectations, but I shook my head. “It wasn’t anyone’s wish.”
There was no one left alive in the dungeon. The only exception was that idiotic idol monster that had been artificially transformed by absorbing other people’s souls, and it had died the moment it saw sunlight. A completely different case from Lee Arin.
So this was just…
“Just…me venting my anger.”
“Venting?”
“Yeah. I saw too many horrific things in that dungeon.”
The truth behind the Truelight Sect had been horrific enough, but the place where the soul core was discovered this time was just as bad. Corpses drained of mana, sucked dry to the very last drop. The lifeless idol monster, an S-rank creature that had devoured countless souls. And…
“My dear sister. Welcome home.”
“Wow, you’re bleeding from your lip.”
“Don’t worry about it. I just remembered something unpleasant.”
Dear sister, my ass.
I’ve been reborn into a completely different body from my previous life, and I have no desire to dwell on ties from that past. In this life, here and now, the only blood family I have is Jeong Dajeong, the sole reason I still choose to remain human.
…But “welcome home,” really?
No matter how I thought about it, that line bothered me. That one called the Enemy of Humanity was targeting me wasn’t exactly shocking at this point, but
welcome home
?
The scenery inside the dungeon had looked eerily similar to that of my previous life, but that alone wasn’t proof it was the same dimension. In fact, the odds of that were low.
There are countless dimensions in this universe. Dungeons do connect to other dimensions, but there’s no way to link to a specific one. So I’d assumed it was just a reconstruction, something my enemy from a past life had recreated to torment me…
…But that would have taken far too much effort.
On top of that, the paper Leo had practically swallowed and brought back showed clear signs of age.
Until now, I’d believed that the Enemy of Humanity had only discovered me in this world two months ago. That the moment the system found my soul, that being had found me as well.
But what if that wasn’t true?
What if they’d discovered me long ago and had been preparing for a very long time just to torment me?
Choi Miyeon staggered slightly, as if she were dizzy. "...Ugh."
“Are you okay?” I reflexively grabbed her arm to steady her. Her already sickly face had gone even paler.
“Ah, I’m fine. This is nothing…” she said, but she didn’t look fine at all. It felt like she could collapse at any moment.
This wasn’t the time for me to get lost in baseless paranoia.
“Let’s head back now. Sorry for dragging you out in the middle of your treatment.”
“No, it’s fine. Honestly, it was a nice change of pace.”
Someone had just died, and she called it a change of pace. I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not.
Choi Miyeon carefully declined my support and stood on her own. “The treatment’s going much better than I expected, too. Medications have improved a lot lately.”
“Really?”
“Well, there’s no chance of a full recovery. But the prosecutor said they’ve handled ‘water balloon’ Hunters a few times before. Thanks to that, I qualified for support, so my hospital bills are almost fully covered. I wish I’d known about this kind of system earlier.” As she said that, Choi Miyeon let out a small laugh. “Then again, maybe there was no need to know. The Truelight Sect provided everything for us…”
That was true. Until Choi Miyeon killed the cult leader Lee Manbok, the Truelight Sect had covered all medical treatment free of charge, so there’d been no reason to look into other systems. It just hadn’t been goodwill. No different from fattening pigs for slaughter.
Now, Choi Miyeon had no such shelter left.
“The prosecutor said that even though Lee Manbok is dead, quite a few followers are still holding out. They say their leader will be resurrected.”
“I figured.”
I’d heard there were several successors within the organization still insisting on Lee Manbok’s resurrection. Of course, with the Truelight Sect’s laboratory gone, they’d never be able to reproduce the “miracles” he once performed. Their influence would gradually shrink. Whether they’d seek out another “god”, or resign themselves to a miserable ordinary life, I couldn’t say.
“Leave the ones who still want to believe alone. They’ll believe what they want anyway.”
Just like Choi Miyeon once had, unless someone realizes it on their own, no one can help them. A devil can punish villains, but it can’t change what people believe. Even a god couldn’t do that.
“I guess you’re right.” Choi Miyeon’s face darkened for a moment, but soon she smoothed her expression. “If something like this happens again, call me. If I can send even a few more people to hell before I die, I’m in.”
I turned to look at her. “Is that your wish?”
“You talk like you’re hoping someone
would
make a wish like that, Daon.” She smiled as she said it. “But I’m not selfless enough to offer my soul for someone I have nothing to do with. Sorry. If I were that kind of person, then my dad, or Lee Arin…” Choi Miyeon trailed off.
There was no need to hear the rest.
After a brief silence, she spoke again, forcing a brighter tone. I didn’t call her out on it. “By the way, is it really okay to just leave this place like this? You said it was already under police investigation. There aren’t any traces left, but still…”
“It’ll be fine.”
At least, if my reasoning was correct.
“Come on. We’ve been out long enough. Let’s go.”
“Do you think there’ll be another chance like this?”
“Not for a while. I’ll be going in for basic training soon.”
"Oh dear." Choi Miyeon laughed as if she found it amusing. “That’s going to be seriously annoying. I wonder if someone with your personality can handle it, Jeong Daon.”
“What’s wrong with my personality?”
“Well, I guess it’s not you. It’s the other people who’ll be the problem.”
"..."
And afterward—
The police concluded that Shining, which had vanished without a trace, had set fire to the office to destroy evidence and then fled, and proceeded with the investigation under that assumption.
As for Gi Jeonghyeon, a high-ranking official from the Central Management Office who had suddenly disappeared, they noted that he had withdrawn a large amount of cash from an ATM shortly before vanishing. Based on that, they suspected he’d fled overseas out of fear of being investigated for bribery.
For six people to evaporate overnight, it was an incredibly modest outcome.
Just as I’d thought.