"Do you realize you've been sitting here for an hour?"
Min-a asked.
I searched for a lie, then gave up. Even in my previous life, I'd never managed to deceive her.
"I knew."
"Pardon?"
"About the buses. I let two of them pass."
Min-a blinked several times.
"……Then why were you sitting here?"
"Because I had no reason to leave."
"You're a strange person."
"I hear that a lot."
"I get the feeling this is the first time anyone's told you that."
I was at a loss for words.
She had always been like this. Even in Basement Level 4. She was the kind of person who could repeat a passing remark made by an administrator several days later, word for word.
That was why the administrators disliked her.
Min-a adjusted the strap of her bag.
"I'm leaving now. If I find you sitting here again, I'm reporting you."
"I won't sit here again."
"I'm serious."
"So am I."
Min-a took a couple of steps, then turned around.
"Mr. Yoon Jae-ha."
"Yes?"
"About the scar."
The streetlights came on. It was still bright outside, but they had switched on according to their schedule.
"When I asked if you were relieved I didn't have one, you never answered."
"……That's right."
"I think that's going to keep bothering me."
Min-a paused, looking as though she were weighing something in her mind.
"Tell me someday. Just not now."
She turned and walked away.
Her left shoelace was still the only one hanging loose.
I remained seated until she crossed the intersection.
＊
Two days later, Park Seung-woo contacted me.
「Mr. Yoon Jae-ha. Can you take a look at other people's skills, too?」
「Whose?」
「The guys from our last party. They keep asking me about it.」
It was the same Gate entrance.
The blue tent, the folding desk, and the ballpoint pen tapping against the list.
This time, the man didn't look at me twice.
Instead, he circled my name immediately.
I put on my backpack and sat down near the waiting line.
The porter sitting beside me struck up a conversation. He looked to be around fifty, with an old burn scar on the back of his hand.
"You're new, aren't you?"
"Yes."
"Name's Oh Du-sik. Been doing this for three years."
"I'm Yoon Jae-ha."
"Heard you're F-rank."
"Yes."
"I'm E-rank myself. Everyone who comes here is more or less in the same boat."
Oh Du-sik offered me his water bottle.
I accepted it.
"By the way, do you know why Gates appear?"
"No, I don't."
"It's in the textbooks. I saw it in my son's study guide."
Oh Du-sik traced a line through the air with his finger.
"Apparently, there's a membrane somewhere in the world. Something that separates this side from the other side. But when it can't withstand the pressure anymore, it tears. The place where it tears becomes a Gate. And when mana leaks in from the other side and gathers together, it turns into monsters."
"……That's the accepted theory."
"If it's the accepted theory, doesn't that mean it's true?"
I didn't answer.
An accepted theory was an explanation that most people believed, not necessarily one that had been verified.
Nobody had ever seen that membrane directly.
All they had were calculations worked backward from samples recovered inside Gates.
Those calculations had proven accurate many times, and when calculations were repeatedly accurate, people started calling them facts.
In seven years, I'd never even heard the name of that membrane.
I'd seen the seal stamped at the bottom of every blueprint, yet I'd never learned a single thing about whoever had placed it there.
Or rather, perhaps nobody knew.
"What are you thinking so hard about?"
Oh Du-sik took back his water bottle.
"My son said that if it's torn, couldn't someone just sew it back together? Kids are smarter than us."
＊
The first was Jeong Tae-sik.
He approached with his helmet tucked under his arm.
His skill was [Iron Wall], a D-rank defensive skill that coated the surface of his shield with a mana barrier.
"Seung-woo told me about what you did. Can you do it for me, too?"
"Have a seat."
Jeong Tae-sik rested his shield upright against his knees.
[Structure Inspection].
The color drained from the world.
A thin membrane appeared over the shield.
There were three layers.
The uppermost layer controlled activation and deactivation. The middle layer carried mana, and the layer beneath it converted that mana into hardness.
The pathways in the middle layer spread evenly across the entire front of the shield.
Evenly.
That was the problem.
I opened my eyes.
Three seconds.
"Which part of your shield do you use to block attacks?"
"What do you mean, which part?"
"When you block a kobold's pickaxe, where does it hit your shield?"
Jeong Tae-sik thought for a moment.
"……The upper part. Here, above the handle."
"That's what I thought. People bend their arms when they block, after all."
I pointed toward the upper section of his shield.
"But your skill coats the entire shield with a barrier of uniform thickness. I doubt the bottom third has taken a single hit in three years, yet you're giving it just as much protection. You're practically pouring mana onto the ground."
"……Then what should I do?"
"Concentrate it toward the top. The more you reduce the barrier at the bottom, the thicker it becomes at the top."
"How do I do that?"
"Instead of imagining yourself holding the shield, imagine pushing with its upper edge. You can feel where you're putting pressure on your left elbow, right? Direct that pressure upward."
Jeong Tae-sik closed his eyes.
He took two breaths.
Within my inspection view, the lines in the middle layer swept upward from the bottom.
The lower section grew thinner, while the upper section became densely concentrated.
"Huh."
Jeong Tae-sik raised his shield and pressed it against the wall.
Concrete scraped against its surface.
"It's harder."
"The bottom is thinner now. You won't be able to block attacks aimed at your feet."
"Kobolds don't attack your feet."
"They probably won't today."
The second person was the archer.
His name was Seo Dong-hwan.
His skill was [Penetrating Shot], which increased an arrow's penetrating power by infusing it with mana.
I inspected it for four seconds.
This wasn't a system of pipes.
It was a scale.
The structure sacrificed range in exchange for increased penetration, and the balance had been pushed all the way toward penetration.
It had remained at the setting assigned during his Awakening.
"From how far away do you usually shoot?"
"About twenty meters."
"This skill was designed to be used within eight meters."
"Eight meters? That's practically point-blank."
"Which is why you'd be better off shifting the balance. Sacrifice a third of your penetration, and your range will increase to forty meters."
"A whole third?"
"You gain as much as you give up. The total capacity is fixed."
Seo Dong-hwan looked at me while holding his bow.
"Which would be better?"
"That's not for me to decide."
There was already a dull ache inside my temples.
This was only my second inspection, and I was feeling it already.
"If you're firing from twenty meters, your current configuration causes the arrow to lose roughly half its power before impact. That's a fact. But which configuration you choose is entirely up to you."
It took Seo Dong-hwan ten minutes to shift the balance.
Afterward, he fired a test arrow.
It embedded itself in a concrete pillar thirty-five meters away.
He stared down at his bow for a long time.
"……I've been shooting from twenty meters for three years."
"I know."
"Nobody told me anything for three years."
"Because nobody could see it."
The third inspection was where things went wrong.
It was the healer.
A woman who looked to be around twenty-five. I hadn't learned her name during the previous Gate raid, but this time I did.
Yoo Ji-su.
"Can you do mine, too?"
"Have a seat."
She sat down.
I closed my eyes and activated [Structure Inspection].
And the image trembled.
This was my first time inspecting a recovery-type skill since returning.
The structure was unfamiliar.
It seemed to have four layers rather than three, but one of those layers overlapped with another.
Looking at the surface alone wasn't enough to determine where the bottleneck was.
Just one layer deeper.
Thinking that was my mistake.
I pushed farther in.
My vision plunged downward.
Something appeared beneath the overlapping layers.
A blurry point.
It was the same thing I'd seen beneath Park Seung-woo's hand in the cavern.
Something with no discernible shape, only a location.
The seal stamped at the very bottom of every skill in this world.
The signature.
It flickered.
Once.
It went dark for a brief instant, then returned.
"Huh."
My voice sounded as though it belonged to someone else.
When I came to my senses, I was on my knees.
I braced myself against the asphalt. Fine grains of sand dug into my palms.
My stomach lurched, and I couldn't hold it back.
I vomited into the drainage channel beside the Gate tent.
I hadn't eaten anything that morning, so only water came out.
"Mr. Yoon Jae-ha!"
Park Seung-woo patted my back.
Yoo Ji-su reached out her hand, then stopped.
Recovery skills didn't help with mana exhaustion.
"I'm fine."
I wasn't fine.
It no longer felt as though something was pressing against the inside of my skull.
It felt as though something was pushing outward.
An afterimage lingered in my left eye, making people's faces appear doubled.
It lasted about two minutes.
This wasn't the first time I'd experienced it.
It had happened at the research institute, too.
But back then, they'd only assigned me one inspection a day.
One request form would arrive, and the next wouldn't come until the following day.
I'd thought they were being considerate.
They weren't.
They had simply been conserving their raw material.
Han Do-gyeong had known my limits.
I hadn't.
I'd spent seven years being worked under that man's control, yet he was the one who possessed the measurements of my own body.
I steadied my breathing.
From now on, I'll measure those limits myself.
＊
I named my price that evening.
Park Seung-woo, Jeong Tae-sik, and Seo Dong-hwan were sitting beneath a parasol outside a convenience store.
Yoo Ji-su said she'd return tomorrow because she hadn't received a diagnosis.
"How much do we owe you?"
Park Seung-woo asked, taking out his wallet.
It was thin.
No one in this world had ever assigned a price to [Structure Inspection].
Only one person had ever done so, and the price he'd placed on it was a single room in Basement Level 4.
"Three hundred thousand won."
Jeong Tae-sik put down his helmet.
"Three hundred thousand?"
"Yes."
"I heard the research institute charges thirty million for a procedure."
"That's the price for modifying a skill. This is the price for examining one."
I raised my hand, showing them my empty palm.
"All I did was tell you where the components were. You three moved them yourselves. If you think three hundred thousand is too expensive, you don't have to pay."
The three men looked at one another.
Seo Dong-hwan was the first to ask for my bank account number.
＊
When I returned to the gosiwon, I opened my notebook.
The first page contained three names.
I turned to the second page.
For the first time, I wrote something different.
3 seconds. Jeong Tae-sik. No abnormalities.
4 seconds. Seo Dong-hwan. Temple pain.
6 seconds. Yoo Ji-su. Failure. Vomiting. Visual afterimages for 2 minutes.
Below that, I added one more line.
Two per day. A third is too much.
I put down my pen and stared at the ceiling.
There were hundreds of blueprints in my head.
I knew exactly what to look for in every one of them.
Yet today, I'd managed to read only two.
The distance between what I knew and what I could actually read had been recorded precisely in a single line of my notebook.
I had to increase that number.
There was only one way to do it.
Keep reading.
My phone rang.
It was Park Seung-woo.
I answered.
"Mr. Yoon Jae-ha, I think I might've messed up."
"What did you do?"
"I posted about it in the guild chat room. I just wanted to brag a little."
He was speaking quickly.
"I don't know how many people will show up tomorrow, but I just counted, and there are nineteen."
Two.
I can only read two a day.