The faint glow of a mana stone flickered inside Appraisal Room 3.
Hwang Taehu stared blankly at the mountain of miscellaneous items piled atop his desk. The cramped room was filled with the smell of dust and dried monster fluids.
With a gloved hand, he picked up a blackened leather breastplate. When he sent a faint stream of mana through it from his palm, a bluish, translucent window appeared in midair.
[Worn Goblin Leather Breastplate]
-Rank: F
-Status: Durability 12% (Severely Damaged)
"This one gets scrapped too. Why do they even bother bringing things like this back?"
Taehu let out a short sigh and tossed the leather breastplate into the large box on the floor to his left. A mountain of similarly worthless junk had already accumulated inside.
He was an appraiser-type Hunter.
And only an utterly ordinary, dime-a-dozen C-rank one at that.
He was a far cry from the elite appraisers who earned annual salaries in the hundreds of millions of won at major guilds while appraising top-of-the-line equipment. At the small-to-mid-sized Iljin Appraisal Center, Taehu did little more than mechanically sort through the low-grade loot that poured out of lower-level dungeons.
Despite the grand title of Hunter, his combat ability was no better than that of an F-rank Hunter. Risking his life to fight dungeon monsters had never been his path in the first place.
'Once I put money into my savings account and send my parents their living expenses this month, things will be tight again.'
Taehu massaged the stiffness at the back of his neck and picked up the next item.
A steady paycheck.
That was the sole reason he had chosen this job. His days were an endless cycle of handling the same miscellaneous junk and attaching labels to it, but that paycheck was also the only lifeline keeping him afloat in his harsh reality.
A chipped longsword, a slime core that had lost all its mana and become little more than a pebble, a magic wand with a broken handle.
One by one, the items that passed through Taehu's hands were added to the disposal list. His C-rank Appraisal ability could read only that much basic information: the item's name, rank, and approximate condition. Determining any hidden history or unusual energy beyond that was the domain of in-house appraisers employed by major guilds.
CLATTER.
The door to the appraisal room swung open roughly, and a plastic cart on wheels was pushed inside. A dust-covered warehouse employee stopped in the doorway and wiped away his sweat.
"Hunter Hwang. Busy, are you?"
"Ah, yes. Thanks for your hard work. What's on the cart?"
"These are discarded items that were sitting in a corner of the warehouse. The other appraisers either gave up trying to identify them, or they were in such bad condition that we decided to throw them out."
The employee lifted a large plastic box from the cart and dropped it beside Taehu's desk with a THUD. A dull clatter came from inside as chunks of metal knocked against shards of broken glass.
"Just give them a quick once-over, sign off on their disposal in the ledger, and send them along. They're all going to the dump anyway, so don't spend too much time on them."
"Understood. I'll check them and send the paperwork up shortly."
Looking relieved to have dumped an annoying task onto someone else, the employee gave a brief nod and left the appraisal room without a second glance.
Taehu looked once at the closed door before turning his attention to the box beside his desk.
Its contents were nothing short of miserable.
There was a helmet crushed so badly that its original shape was impossible to make out, pieces of rusted iron crumbling apart, and unidentified powders that had long since lost their color. Everything looked as though it had been abandoned in some corner of a dungeon and left to rot for decades.
"This is basically a trash can. It's ridiculous that they even want me to check all of this again."
Muttering to himself, Taehu rummaged through the box. He intended to give everything a visual inspection and move on without wasting mana unnecessarily.
Just as he was about to put his pen to the disposal ledger clipped inside a folder, something lying beneath the debris at the bottom of the box caught his eye.
It was a silver necklace, badly cracked and tarnished.
More than half of the pendant had broken away, leaving a sharp cross-section exposed, while the silver chain had blackened completely and lost its shine. It looked like the sort of scrap even an ordinary junk dealer would refuse to take.
And yet, for some reason, Taehu could not take his eyes off the necklace.
Almost unconsciously, he reached out and picked up the broken necklace. As naturally as breathing, following the habit ingrained in him from countless appraisals, he pushed a faint trace of mana into it through his fingertips.
HUM.
The familiar translucent blue window appeared in midair.
[Damaged E-rank Accessory]
-Mana circuit severed. Function lost.
"Of course. E-rank garbage. I knew it."
An accessory with a severed mana circuit was nothing more than a heavy lump of metal.
Still holding the necklace, Taehu was about to write "Dispose of E-rank accessory" in the ledger on his desk.
Then it happened.
FLASH!
A sharp, static-like sensation suddenly shot through the fingertips holding the necklace.
Taehu's shoulder jerked reflexively.
Then an unbelievable sight unfolded before his eyes.
CRACK! SHATTER!
The blue appraisal window floating in midair fractured and broke apart as though it were an actual pane of glass.
Amid the scattering fragments of blue light, vivid golden text unlike anything he had ever seen flooded his vision.
[Damaged Necklace of the Wind Spirit]
-Original Rank: A
-Status: Severely damaged and sealed.
-Restoration Possible: Yes.
-Required Materials: 3 low-grade Wind-Attribute Magic Stones, 10 g of refined silver powder.
-Correct Restoration Method: Grind the Wind-Attribute Magic Stones into powder and mix them with the silver powder, then apply the mixture clockwise to the severed mana circuit of the pendant.
"……What?"
A stupid sound escaped Taehu's mouth.
He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again.
But rather than disappearing, the golden text floating before him shone even more clearly than before.
"A-rank?"
Taehu sucked in a sharp breath.
A-rank.
In the world of Hunters, the letter A carried enormous weight.
If an accessory—not even a weapon or a piece of armor—was A-rank, then it was a top-tier item worth tens of millions of won at the very least, and quite possibly hundreds of millions.
It was the kind of item wealthy guild masters and Rankers fought bloody bidding wars over at auctions.
But the original rank was not what truly made Taehu feel as though he were losing his mind.
'It can be restored? It even tells me the required materials? And the restoration method too?'
He had completed four years of the Hunter Academy's standard curriculum and obtained his license from the Appraisers' Association, yet he had never heard of anything like this.
An Appraisal skill was supposed to read an item's current condition.
No matter how impressive a name an item might once have possessed, if it was broken and leaking mana now, common sense dictated that it would simply be identified as damaged E-rank junk.
What kind of insane Appraisal skill displayed a repair estimate and an instruction manual right in front of someone's eyes?
"Have I finally lost my mind from overwork?"
Startled, Taehu hastily dropped the necklace onto the desk as though throwing it away.
The moment the item left his hand, the golden text floating in the air scattered and vanished as though it had never existed.
Breathing heavily, Taehu steadied his trembling hand and looked around.
'I need to verify this.'
He picked up the intact E-rank steel dagger he had set aside earlier while appraising it.
It was an ordinary low-grade weapon with a perfectly functional mana circuit.
He infused it with mana.
[Steel Dagger]
-Rank: E
-Status: Good.
It was the same plain blue window he had always seen.
Not a single line of hidden information or restoration instructions appeared.
Taehu set down the dagger and picked up an undamaged leather bracer instead.
The result was identical.
Nothing appeared beyond the normal information.
It was exactly the same commonplace C-rank Appraisal result he had always received.
GULP.
Taehu swallowed hard.
His gaze returned to the broken silver necklace lying alone on the desk.
Carefully, very slowly, he reached out and took the blackened piece of metal into his hand once more.
He did not even need to channel mana into it.
The instant his fingertips touched it—
FLASH!
[Damaged Necklace of the Wind Spirit]
-Original Rank: A
-Restoration Possible: Yes.
The golden text appeared before his eyes with unmistakable clarity, as though driving the truth home.
Taehu's eyes trembled violently.
Perfectly functional equipment produced no reaction whatsoever.
Only damaged items—things everyone else had deemed worthless and thrown into the trash—revealed their true value and restoration methods to him, information that ordinary Appraisal could never uncover.
Most astonishing of all were the materials listed in that golden text.
'Three low-grade Wind-Attribute Magic Stones and ten grams of silver powder. Even all together, those materials would cost less than two hundred thousand won. I can spend two hundred thousand won and restore an A-rank item worth hundreds of millions?'
Numbers began racing wildly through his head.
It meant that among the discarded items everyone else threw away as garbage, he alone could uncover treasures worth tens or even hundreds of millions of won.
It was as though the gates to an untouched gold mine had suddenly opened before him.
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
The pounding of his heart thundered in his ears.
With a dazed expression, Taehu looked back and forth between the golden text and the broken necklace in his hand.
Resting on his rough, dry palm, the cold lump of metal seemed to radiate a strange heat.
It was a miracle discovered inside a box of discarded junk.
Taehu slowly tightened his grip around it.
The necklace's jagged edge dug into his palm, but he could not even feel the pain.