Sirin’s Charm stat: 180.
Halved to 90 by the mask.
Nine out of ten men felt an instinctive pull toward her.
The soldiers were no exception.
But approaching her was another matter entirely.
Sirin wasn’t the cold, aloof type of beauty—the kind you could at least categorize and file away.
That was a common enough archetype.
Sirin was a blazing, unhinged beauty.
Crazy beautiful.
Beautifully crazy.
Just plain crazy.
The Imperial Army was full of rough men.
They rotated through postings, and it wasn’t uncommon to find soldiers who’d hunted monsters in the borderlands or traded blows with barbarian tribes.
If it had been any other woman—even one with the same Charm rating of 90—those hardened Imperial soldiers would have done what they always did: tossed out a lewd remark or two without a second thought.
But with Sirin, even the most weathered veterans had no idea how to handle her.
She was a type of person they had never encountered and never would again.
So instead of making a move, they’d been stalling, dragging out the conversation, just to have an excuse to keep talking to her.
Because if they pushed their luck, Sirin might demonstrate a certain surgical expertise that no man wanted demonstrated on himself.
Though, admittedly, for some men, that prospect would only make her more appealing.
And so it was that a bunch of bearded Imperial soldiers found themselves operating at roughly the mental age of a pubescent middle schooler.
Like thirteen-year-olds acting out toward the girl they liked, hoping to get a reaction.
Sirin’s looks and behavior had reduced them to exactly that.
But one shouldn’t be too hard on the Imperial soldiers.
That’s just what it feels like to admire someone you can never approach.
Everyone’s been there.
Judging that impulse too harshly is a denial of one’s own humanity—practically a crime against nature.
Of course, the soldiers had been quietly collecting the strands of hair Sirin submitted as identification, sometimes even trading them among themselves—treating them like protective talismans, given how she always came back unscathed no matter what she faced.
That part was damp, vile, and contemptible.
Punishable by death.
“You should all die!”
Sirin went absolutely ballistic.
“You little creeps—you made me stand at the gate on purpose just to steal my hair? Commander. What do you think about this? What do you think about your soldiers stealing a woman’s hair? This noble, honorable conduct befitting the Imperial Army? Well? What do you say?”
“…”
The commander felt like his skull was splitting open.
“I… I will handle it… properly… Please, for today, just—”
“No. Absolutely not. Do you have any idea how much hair I’ve lost?”
“…What do you want.”
Sirin fumed.
“Weapons inspection waived. And make sure those idiots never pull this kind of stunt again.”
“Understood. I’ll see to it. So now, please—”
“Hmph!”
Only after Sirin vanished through the gate did the security commander finally exhale.
“Haah…”
He shot a withering look at the soldiers standing frozen in place, then turned to his adjutant.
“Full kit drill. Until tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir.”
Once the soldiers were hauled away, the commander sank into his chair.
The world had gone a faint shade of yellow.
“Commander.”
A young officer standing nearby spoke up, his voice edged with disapproval.
“Are you really going to let that woman walk away like that?”
He was a new transfer, recently assigned—fastidious and difficult.
“We should revoke her bounty hunter license and confiscate her Travel Pass. No matter that they were criminals, what she did constitutes clear abuse of authority. If we allow someone who acts purely on personal emotion and does whatever she pleases to keep operating, who knows what kind of incident she’ll cause next…”
“Klaus.”
The commander cut him off, his voice tired.
“You didn’t look at her eyes, did you.”
“…I’m not sure what you mean, sir.”
A noble-born greenhorn.
Knows nothing.
But the commander knew.
Sirin wasn’t simply acting on raw emotion.
There had been conviction in her eyes.
The kind of conviction that only comes from direct experience—something lived, not theorized.
Sirin genuinely believed that pain was the path to rehabilitation and repentance.
She had seen it work.
Her eyes said so.
That was how the commander read it.
‘What on earth happened to her.
At that age.’
What had actually happened to Sirin was that she’d hurled herself off a cliff while stubbornly insisting, *this is just a dream.*
“Commander?”
The commander pulled himself out of his thoughts.
“That is not a Travel Pass that can simply be revoked. That woman carries a pass with the Imperial *Army’s* direct personal guarantee. I’ll ask you to refrain from any further unnecessary remarks.”
“But that’s not the only issue. The men we arrested keep giving the same testimony—that she’s a Witch—”
“Do not use that word again. That is an order.”
“…Understood.”
The new officer shut his mouth, reluctantly.
Watching him, the commander swallowed a bitter smile.
Everything the new officer had raised, the commander had already investigated long ago.
He cast his mind back.
After Sirin first appeared in this city, every criminal she brought in had babbled the same nonsense. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
*She’s a Witch.
That woman is definitely a Witch!*
*She kills people with strange curses!
Just hearing her swear is enough to drive a man mad!*
*Cursed blood!
Touch even a drop of it and your whole body rots away!*
*She spat on iron and it melted right through!
She has to be a monster in disguise!*
*She shows you hallucinations!
One person multiplies into dozens right before your eyes—wicked sorcery!*
*Witch… Witch…!
WITCH!!!!!*
There had even been a dark rumor that she’d talked a violent criminal into killing himself without laying a finger on him.
At first, he’d written it off as the usual nonsense criminals spouted to shave time off their sentences.
But there was a strange consistency to the testimonies.
The more he investigated, the more patterns emerged.
There was clearly something about that woman that set her apart from ordinary people.
The commander had eventually launched an unofficial inquiry.
Using the investigation as a pretext, he’d held Sirin for several days and quietly commissioned a discernment from the city’s Pantheon priests.
The priests’ reaction had been peculiar.
“No.”
They’d been categorical about it.
Not a trace of the malevolent aura that clings to Witches or cultists.
Under normal circumstances, that should have been the end of it.
But every single priest had been irritable about the whole affair.
Not about being summoned—that wasn’t the issue.
Their attitude was more like: *why are you showing me something this unpleasant?*
Each one, on their way out, told him never to call on them again, and they were thoroughly annoyed about it.
He’d grabbed one and pressed for an explanation, but they refused to say why until the very end.
Still, they’d been clear: whatever she was, it wasn’t something malevolent.
There was nothing more the commander could do.
Come to think of it, the Pantheon priests seemed to have gotten considerably more ill-tempered since his younger days.
Most people mellowed with age, but those priests seemed to grow more cantankerous and narrow-minded with every passing year.
His thoughts had drifted that far when a shriek tore through the air from the direction of the infirmary.
The man who’d been carried in on a stretcher earlier—the one who’d been cut.
The commander let out a long, heavy sigh.
“…Have them redo the emergency treatment. She’s probably already done it, but just in case.”
“Aren’t they going to die soon anyway?”
“We keep them alive until we execute them.”
“Understood.”
His head ached, but there would be no more trouble today.
Probably.
#
Meanwhile, the moment Sirin passed through the city gate, she completely deflated.
She was in Lutecia—one of the Imperial Army’s frontier cities in the north.
The road to the capital, Aquila, was still long.
The level of civilization here was a step up from the backwater village where she’d first landed, but it still felt too rough around the edges to be called properly early-modern.
Better than the Middle Ages, at least.
The beer was cold.
The moment she entered the city, a crushing wave of exhaustion hit her.
She didn’t even stop at the guild to collect her bounty—she went straight to the most promising-looking tavern nearby.
She ordered a beer, sat down at an outdoor table, and immediately face-planted onto the surface.
She had no desire to drink it.
Smooth, long legs in form-fitting leather trousers.
Boots.
Curves that were close to perfect.
Hair spilled carelessly across the table—glossy to the point of being decadent.
Sirin’s sharp senses registered the people around her stealing glances and swallowing hard, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.
She had nothing left to care with.
Unlike the fury she’d unleashed at the gate, Sirin was now in the grip of a brutal crash.
—Ding!
[ Your actions have strengthened the effect of the title ‘Witch’! ]
[ Your infamy as a Witch spreads! ]
[ Male entities who are hostile to you feel a primal, inexplicable dread! ]
“…”
The crash was so severe she couldn’t even react to the system message.
She had no energy to respond.
Sirin had fallen into a kind of manic-depressive cycle.
The past year flashed through her mind like a montage.
The beginning had been fine.
Parting with Peter had been sad, but Sirin had a clear goal: Body Rebirth.
Get to the capital.
Fix this wretched body somehow.
She’d traveled from village to village, town to town, making money with her particular talents.
There was no shortage of work.
The Imperial Army was far too understaffed to cover its vast territory.
Large-scale jobs could be outsourced to mercenary companies, but the smaller tasks were too numerous and scattered for the army to handle directly.
So the Imperial Army had established guilds throughout the empire, and those guilds were thriving.
Small goblin dens sprouting up like mushrooms.
Kobold packs digging tunnels and stealing livestock.
Clearing out minor threats like those was usually handled by adventurers registered with the guilds. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
But some jobs were in a different category entirely.
Murder.
Robbery.
Human trafficking.
Too procedurally complicated for the Imperial Army to handle directly, too dangerous and vicious for ordinary adventurers to take on.
The guilds put bounties on those criminals, and after a qualifying examination, the specialists who hunted them professionally were given the respectable label of bounty hunter.
Sirin, with the characteristically Korean drive for rapid advancement, naturally chose high risk, high return.
And for Sirin, “risk” didn’t exist.
She couldn’t die.
It was an unfair arrangement that would have drawn regulatory action back home, but the powerful had always lived that way in her beloved homeland too.
Sirin had a traditionalist streak—a desire to carry on the beautiful cultural heritage of her homeland, even in this uncivilized fantasy land.
Anyway.
That was how Sirin had been operating: hunting bounties, making money, beating people up, occasionally killing them, drifting from city to city, inching her way toward the Imperial capital at a glacial pace.
The problem was her martial arts.
No progress whatsoever.
Through Body Enlightenment and Mind Enlightenment she’d grasped the basics of a few techniques, but she couldn’t push past that.
A massive wall blocking her path—that was what it felt like.
Body Rebirth was a distant dream; she couldn’t even find a thread to pull on for the next stage of growth.
Something was missing.
Something crucial.
But she had no idea what.
Mildly demoralized, Sirin had decided to practice what Peter had taught her for a while.
Right—if you accept someone’s goodwill, you should know how to give something back.
She resolved to return to the world the unconditional kindness Peter had shown her.
Specifically: cleaning up the trash littering the roadside.
For better or worse, this barbaric, rootless fantasy land had trash in absolutely limitless supply.
It spread through the shadows beyond the empire’s administrative reach like mold growing the moment you looked away.
And it came in such wonderful variety.
From petty thugs shaking down travelers at checkpoints all the way up to unforgivable violent criminals.
But even cleaning up trash had its limits.
The fact that her martial arts weren’t advancing kept stoking a slow-burning frustration inside her.
Dealing with the trash and excising a few tumors gave her temporary relief, but it was never a real solution.
The extreme highs lasted for a while, and when they faded, she crashed proportionally—endlessly, flatly.
Like gunpowder.
The moment of explosion: intense, blazing, brief.
The unpleasant smell: lingering.
Sirin felt like the residue left after everything had burned away.
Maybe that was just what life was.
Once it catches fire, it burns wildly and out of control, then snuffs out in an instant, and only the ash remains for a long time.
Repeating.
—Ding!
[ Through contemplation and insight, you grasp a principle of martial arts in your heart! ]
[ You have partially fulfilled the acquisition conditions for the True Flame of Samadhi (三昧眞火)! ]
“….Give me a break.”
True Flame of Samadhi.
Whatever it was, it was a martial art.
Didn’t seem like something she could use yet.
“!”
But the True Flame of Samadhi made something click in her mind.
True Flame of Samadhi.
火.
Fire.
Fireball (火炎球).
“….!!!!”
Sirin finally understood.
“Wuxia guys…!”
Wuxia guys didn’t just swing swords really well.
Wuxia guys wrapped their blades in some kind of energy and cut through steel with it.
All kinds of ridiculous things.
That’s why there’s no armor in the martial world.
Sirin finally understood what had been missing.
She didn’t know how to use *qi*—Inner Energy!
“…..”
She almost despaired, but caught herself.
Right.
This was a mashed-up fantasy world where magic, spirits, and divine blessings all coexisted in one big stew.
There had to be something here that substituted for Inner Energy, or at least resembled it.
This wasn’t mere cope.
Her own martial arts were the clearest proof.
The source of Sirin’s martial arts—that thing called *Using Martial Arts in a Fantasy Land (Working Title)*—was a system that converted the magic, divine power, mysteries, and techniques of this fantasy world through the filter of “wuxia.”
Pierce.
Unyielding Force.
Flow.
Heres’s swift thrusts had become Pierce.
Gordo’s brute strength had become Unyielding Force.
Bjorn’s dizzying Phantom Sword had become Flow.
Taking a particular quality of a source technique and receiving it in the form of a martial art.
Her martial arts were real and functioning—which meant the “source” that would generate her missing Inner Energy had to exist somewhere too.
Sirin’s eyes lit up.