The world flipped upside down.
Gravity vanished, color vanished, and sound vanished. Song Ji-hu was falling through endless darkness.
And at last-
THUD-
When his feet touched the ground, he was in the middle of a bloodstained dungeon.
“Finally… I can break this damned loop.”
The thought that he finally had a way to deal with this damned mental contamination sent a thrill rising from the depths of his heart until it nearly consumed his entire body.
“A cave… is it?”
The walls were damp, and green moss was growing on the ceiling. The air was so thick with a rotten stench that even Song Ji-hu could not help frowning.
“This makes things much easier.”
It seemed that the mental imagery reached through Mental Dive also took the form of a dungeon.
And then-
“Graaagh-!”
When a scream rang out from far away, Song Ji-hu began running in that direction.
He passed through the cave, went down the stairs at the end, and finally arrived in a wide space. Five corpses lay scattered there.
More precisely, five Hunters.
They had collapsed, bleeding. But they were not dead yet, only on the verge of breathing their last.
And Kim Su-bin stood at the center of them.
THUNK-
Song Ji-hu tried to move toward her, but some translucent wall blocked him, as if refusing to permit interference.
“Hurry… I have to hurry….”
With trembling hands, she was trying to cast a skill. Her voice was close to sobbing, and the tears falling drop by drop soaked the floor.
“No… No….”
But no matter how desperately she tried, no light came from her hands.
“Yu-jin… Ah… please.”
The tanker coughed up blood and reached out.
THUD- But that hand only swept through empty air before dropping to the floor with a soft TAP-.
“Ah… aah….”
Kim Su-bin’s eyes shook. Then the other party members, one by one, stopped breathing as well.
“Aaaaaaaaagh-!”
Kim Su-bin’s scream filled the dungeon. And Song Ji-hu watched the scene without expression.
‘So this is her trauma….’
At that moment, the walls of the dungeon began to warp.
CREEEAK- CREEEAK-
The walls began to writhe as if alive, and something protruded from them.
They were black masses in human shapes.
Something dripped from the bastards’ bodies onto the floor and burned away with a ‘HISS-.’
“It’s your fault.”
The black masses pointed at Kim Su-bin.
“You killed me.”
The other corpses rose as well. All of them were blaming Kim Su-bin.
“Murderer.”
“You killed us.”
Kim Su-bin sank to the floor and clutched her head.
“I’m sorry… I’m sorry….”
The moment Song Ji-hu witnessed the Abyssal Monarch’s trickery, strength naturally entered his fist, and he tried to move toward her once again.
THOOONG-!
His body bounced back, and he was driven out of the dungeon.
“Ghk-”
After being thrown out of the dungeon, he managed to stop in a wasteland outside it. The cave entrance, which had been gaping pitch-black, now had a sturdy iron barrier erected before it, and something began to squirm up from the rough wasteland ground.
GURGLE-
What rose from the wasteland were shapeless dark-red masses. Residues of guilt, fragments of trauma. They approached stickily, without having taken on a proper physical form.
“Aha… I get the gist. I don’t have the authority to enter that far yet, is that it?”
Song Ji-hu raised the 200,000-won mass-produced sword he had bought in a hurry before coming here.
SLITHER-
The first mass stretched out like a tentacle and aimed for Song Ji-hu’s leg.
Song Ji-hu instinctively brought his sword down.
SPLAT.
“As expected. They aren’t opponents physical force works on properly.”
The sword pierced through the black mass, but there was no resistance, as if he had cut through jelly.
“Fine. It wouldn’t be fun if it were easy. This kind of flavor needs to be there, too.”
He retreated while dodging the second and third attacks from the black masses. As if he had never once fought a ghost-type or mental-type monster over more than 100 years.
“Tsk… Back then, I at least had attack skills… I’m not sure if this’ll work. And I’m C-rank on top of that….”
Song Ji-hu stirred his energy several times, gauging the amount and timing, then soon grinned and activated the skill Mental Barrier.
HUM-
A faint silver film wrapped around his body. When the masses touched the barrier, they burned away with a crackling sound.
“Hmm… Well, if you can attack with it, then it’s an attack skill.”
He threw himself among the dark-red masses.
Every time they touched the Mental Barrier, the bastards burned with the sound of protein cooking, and with his energy-wrapped sword, he split a mass of thought in two.
He could see dozens of them, but numbers at this level posed no problem.
His second life had been marked by force. In order to break past the limit of being B-rank, he had fought until he was sick of fighting.
Instinctively, he cut them down, then cut them down again. The bastards rushing into his sword’s blind spots were crushed with his fists, and he tore thoughts into two pieces…
Around him, masses of Residual Thought turned to ash and scattered, and the apocalyptic dark-red sky changed into a cloudless blue.
“Phew….”
He steadied his breathing. A smile seeped onto his lips.
***
When he returned to reality, Kim Su-bin was collapsed on the floor, panting roughly.
“Hah… hah….”
Unlike before, the dark-red energy was disappearing from her body as she gasped for breath. It was not a complete recovery, but at least she had returned from the middle stage to the early stage.
‘It worked…!’
Setting even the slight backlash aside, something hot surged up from within his chest.
Exhilaration.
Real hope, felt for the first time in his seventh life.
“I’m sorry… Senior… I’m sorry….”
She muttered in a hazy state of consciousness. It was probably the name of someone she had hurt.
‘Should I just leave her here?’
But his feet would not move. An emotion that had slowly worn down over decades.
“…Damn it. Consider yourself lucky.”
Unable to simply ignore the pity he felt, Song Ji-hu carried her on his back. The nearest general hospital was twenty minutes away on foot.
When he arrived at the hospital emergency room entrance, nurses rushed over.
“How did the patient….”
“She was collapsed on the road.”
He pulled his cap lower.
“Are you her guardian?”
“No. I’m just someone passing by.”
“Wait, at least your contact information….”
“I have urgent business.”
The moment he was about to leave the emergency room, a faint voice reached him.
“Thank… you….”
When he turned around, she was looking at him with a hazy gaze. Though she looked as if she would lose consciousness soon, she was waving her hand toward him, as if trying hard to remember Song Ji-hu’s face.
Song Ji-hu left the hospital without answering.
Outside, he took a deep breath. The cold spring wind filled his lungs.
He took out the compass. The needle had begun spinning madly again. Now, he felt certain he knew what he had to do.
He took his phone out of his pocket. On the screen was the Hunter Association Awakening examination reservation page.
‘I need to officially become a Hunter first.’
Dozens, hundreds, no, perhaps thousands, tens of thousands of faces that had crumbled before the Abyssal Monarch in his previous lives flashed quickly through his mind.
***
After returning home, Song Ji-hu checked the condition of his body after Mental Dive.
“Whew- The mental fatigue is worse than the physical fatigue.”
At least the fortunate part was that he had more confidence in his mental fortitude than anyone else.
“The time….”
Then he played the video from the camera he had set up.
“Hmm… The time ratio is 10-to-1. Same as a dungeon.”
It was possible that diving into another person’s mind also counted as a kind of dungeon.
“But… how do mental-type skills branch?”
Song Ji-hu opened his skill window and, after discovering a new change, stared blankly at the screen.
“Huh… Skills could evolve instead of branching?”
[Skill 1: Mental Detection - C-rank] - 1.5%
[Skill 2: Mental Barrier - C-rank] - 1.7%
[Skill 3: Residual Thought - C-rank] - 0.9%
[Skill 4: Thought Projection - C-rank] - 0.3%
[Skill 5: Mental Dive - EX-rank]
It was common sense in this world that a rank was a person’s vessel, and that skills branched rather than grew.
Then what were these rising percentages, as if they were about to level up?
‘What is this… Is it telling me to do more Mental Dives and save more people…?’
This seventh life, from Mental Dive to the current skill leveling, was full of things that caught him badly off guard.
“Hah, let’s save Eun Seo-jin first and think after that.”
***
The lobby of the Hunter Association Seoul Branch was, as always, filled with air in which hope and anxiety were mixed.
After the job of Hunter emerged, this enormous building became a stage where some could turn their lives around, and a tiresome workplace for others.
And to Song Ji-hu, it was only the starting point of a stage repeating for the seventh time. Of course, now it was a starting point that would become a little different.
“Next, Mr. Song Ji-hu. Please enter the measurement room.”
With calm steps, he stood in the center of the circular platform.
“Please do not move, and look only at the crystal before your eyes.”
The blue scan pouring down from the ceiling no longer stirred anything in him.
WHIRR-
Together with the strange sensation of something sweeping across his entire body, the results began to appear.
“Uh… mental-type?”
When the scan results came out, bewilderment entered the examiner’s voice. The researchers in the observation room beyond the glass window began murmuring among themselves.
“We will… proceed with additional testing.”
In this age where mental contamination was widespread, this was the rarest and most desperately needed talent. The examiner’s voice trembled faintly.
“I will… check your eyes. Please look at the lens in front of you.”
A new machine magnified Song Ji-hu’s irises. On the monitor appeared a silver aura that softly scattered like the Milky Way.
“It is definitely mental-type. Rank… C-rank. What skills do you possess?”
At that question, Song Ji-hu stated his skills without hesitation.
“Mental Barrier and Mental Detection.”
He hid Residual Thought, Thought Projection, and Mental Dive. After all, there was neither need nor reason to tell them everything.
The rest could be used at the proper moment to raise his value and overturn the situation.
“Mental… Barrier, you said? What kind of mechanism does that skill have?”
“It generates a thin protective barrier that resists mental attacks or emotional incitement.”
“My goodness…!”
The examiner’s eyes widened. The change in his expression alone revealed the value of this skill.
In this age where mental contamination was eating away at humanity, a mental-type who could protect himself was a strategic asset in himself.
“I would like to request a skill demonstration for a moment. Could you deploy the barrier?”
At the examiner’s request, Song Ji-hu grinned and focused lightly.
HUM-
A pale silver film wrapped not around his own body, but around the examiner’s. The output was about 60% of his maximum output.
“To already be able to manifest it on o… others!”
He could sense the researchers in the observation room bursting into admiration.
“And the stability… It is to the point that I simply cannot believe this is C-rank.”
The examiner quickly recorded something on his tablet, then hid the excitement in his tone and spoke as officially as possible.
“Hunter Song Ji-hu. Your final rank has been determined as C-rank.”
Then he looked at Song Ji-hu and whispered in an extremely small voice.
“With the Mental Barrier skill alone, many guilds will probably want you. And if you wish, I can connect you with some quite decent major guilds.”
“Thank you, but I already have something in mind.”
Song Ji-hu merely smiled good-naturedly and shook his head.
“Then… you may return. Your Hunter license will be delivered to your phone within three days, so please make sure to check it.”
As soon as the examination ended and the door opened, before he had even left the examination room, he faced the crowd that had gathered as if waiting for him.
‘As expected.’
He had revealed the Mental Barrier skill because he had anticipated this situation. He also knew roughly how examination results were transmitted outside.
“Hunter Song Ji-hu! We promise the best treatment in South Korea! We are Ironwall Guild!”
“Our Dawn Guild can offer 1 billion won as a signing bonus….”
“What! With a mere 1 billion won?! Hunter, our Black Heaven Guild knows your value!”
Business cards poured down like snow, and shocking terms were thrown about amid noise loud enough to deafen him.
If he had been the Song Ji-hu of the past, who had never regressed even once, he would have been flustered, not knowing what to do.
But the current Song Ji-hu knew exactly where he had to go within this chaos. He spoke to the crowd in a low voice, but loudly enough for everyone to hear.
“I will review everything first, then contact you.”
Now, rumor, hurry up and sprout wings. Spread in a blaze.