The plastic bags filling both of Lee Jin-gu’s hands rustled with every step.
His footsteps were much lighter than usual as he walked through the traditional market alley under the morning sunlight. He hardly moved like someone who had spent the entire night crawling across a sewer floor and slaughtering a hundred mutant rats.
An ordinary F-rank hunter would have been suffering from muscle pain by now, either collapsed on an emergency-room bed or sprawled across a relief-center bench.
Yet Lee Jin-gu’s body felt strangely refreshed.
It was the result of the Strength and Agility increases he had accumulated in increments of 0.01 with every kill. On top of that, the Dark Adaptation and Presence Detection Traits he had extracted from the mutant rats meant he could barely feel the exhaustion or lingering effects of staying awake all night.
“I really was born to be a worksite foreman.”
Lee Jin-gu laughed under his breath and adjusted the boxes in his arms.
A box containing the softest gray sneakers he could find at the shoe store.
A high-quality back brace he had purchased at full price from a medical supply store.
Freshly baked treats he had swept up at a bakery, along with a CSAT past-exam workbook from a bookstore.
Spending money felt entirely different now. The hundred-odd thousand won he had just spent left him feeling far more satisfied and secure than the few million won he had occasionally earned before his regression by selling medium-sized monster byproducts he had been lucky enough to obtain.
Washing the bloodstains from his outdoor clothes at the market’s public restroom had been a good decision. He had also masked the remaining sewer stench with the savory aroma from a soup-and-rice restaurant.
At least his family would not smell blood on him and nearly faint from shock.
Before long, the old multifamily house at the top of the familiar uphill road came into view.
The peeling front door opened with a creak when he pulled the handle. The savory smell of soybean paste stew already filled the cramped house.
“Oh, you’re back early. Did your early-morning job finish quickly today?”
His mother, who was stirring a ladle in front of the stove, looked at Lee Jin-gu as she spoke.
Her manner was perfectly ordinary, as though she were greeting a son who had just returned from a normal job.
It was all thanks to how thoroughly he had removed the bloodstains and stench from his clothes before coming home.
Instead of answering, Lee Jin-gu first examined the shoe cabinet.
One pair stood out among the old dress shoes and sneakers.
His mother’s worn black flats, with one heel ground down at a grotesque angle.
Before his regression, the sight of those worn-out shoes had always made his chest tighten.
He could vividly remember her dragging those uncomfortable shoes around simply to save a few won.
Without saying a word, he picked up the flats and hid them deep in a corner of the shoe cabinet’s top shelf.
“What are you doing? Go wash up so you can eat.”
“Please come here for a moment.”
Lee Jin-gu placed his purchases on a dining chair and opened the gray box.
Along with the distinctive rubber scent of new footwear, a pair of thickly cushioned sneakers appeared.
His mother’s eyes widened.
“What’s this?”
“Try them on. You wear size 235, right?”
Lee Jin-gu removed the sneakers from the box and quietly placed them at his mother’s feet.
His mother stared at them in confusion. Once she finally realized what they were, her eyes sharpened.
“Have you lost your mind?! We have a thousand other things to spend money on! Why would you buy something like this?”
She made as if to slap Lee Jin-gu’s back with a loud smack.
There was no force behind her hand.
Lee Jin-gu ignored her protests, pulled one of her feet toward him, and silently slipped it into the new sneaker.
The moment the soft sole gently embraced her foot, the expression of the woman who had been scolding him wavered strangely.
“Goodness, honestly. Why are the soles so thick? What if I fall?”
Despite her words, his mother had already begun pacing in front of the mirror.
She wiggled her toes and even bounced lightly in place. Her lips twitched as she struggled to suppress the smile escaping them.
“They’re made from nonslip material. Throw away those torn flats now. You’ll ruin your ankles wearing them.”
“Why would I throw away perfectly good shoes? If I take care of them, they’ll easily last until next year.”
Her grumbling voice was filled with unmistakable happiness.
Just then, the door to the main bedroom opened, and his father walked out.
Clutching his aching lower back, he approached the dining table.
“What’s all this commotion so early in the morning?”
“Father, please open this too.”
As though he had been waiting for the opportunity, Lee Jin-gu held out a plastic bag printed with the logo of a medical equipment company.
His father accepted it without thinking and peered inside.
It contained the high-quality back brace the hospital had repeatedly recommended. He had refused to purchase one every time because of its high price.
“H-How much did you pay for this? These are expensive.”
“The medical supply store at the market had a sale this morning. Hurry and try it on. Stop covering yourself in pain-relief patches every day.”
His father fiddled with the brace, unable to relax his stiff expression.
He was clearly bewildered by where his son had suddenly found this much money.
At that moment, Su-a emerged from the bathroom in her school uniform, rubbing her still-damp hair with a towel.
“You’re back? What are those shoes? Mom, did you buy them?”
Su-a’s gaze moved toward the bag of bread and the books still resting on the dining table.
Lee Jin-gu slid the thick books beside the bread toward her.
“Those are for you.”
“What are they?”
“The books you added to your online shopping cart a few days ago but never bought. These are the past-exam workbooks you wanted, right?”
Su-a’s hands stopped.
Even her textbooks had been too expensive for her, so she had always searched for cheap secondhand books instead.
Her eyes trembled as she smelled the crisp paper of the new books.
“Why would you buy these for me? I don’t need to start solving them right away.”
“What do you mean, you don’t? Your exam is right around the corner. I bought some bread too, so share it with your friends at school.”
The sudden barrage of gifts left the living room filled with both bewilderment and warmth.
Normally, this was when they would exchange brief morning greetings, eat, and hurry out of the house.
But the atmosphere around the breakfast table that morning was unusually heavy and strange.
The soybean paste stew bubbled at the center of the table.
Rather than picking up their spoons, Lee Jin-gu’s family stared intently at him.
As far as they knew, Lee Jin-gu was an inexperienced hunter who had received an F-rank classification.
Yet their son had returned after a single night with gifts worth hundreds of thousands of won.
Common sense left them no choice but to assume he had risked his life doing something dangerous.
His father was the first to break the silence.
“Did you go somewhere dangerous?”
His father’s voice was low and filled with concern.
“I heard F-rank hunters can’t even receive proper requests. Did you work as someone’s porter? You didn’t get mixed up in some illegal operation under a gang of thugs, did you?”
Su-a also put down her chopsticks and pressed Lee Jin-gu for an answer.
“You didn’t do anything strange, did you? We don’t need the money. I’d hate it more if you got hurt.”
His mother even bent down to remove her new sneakers.
“Return these immediately. You don’t have the money to buy things like this. My old shoes fit me better anyway.”
If this had been an ordinary hunter drama, he might have wiped away his tears and shouted that he would handle everything himself.
Or perhaps he would have made some emotional excuse and told them not to worry.
But Lee Jin-gu was a hunter with ten years of experience.
His method was different.
Nothing calmed anxiety more effectively than hard evidence people could see for themselves.
“Just a moment.”
Lee Jin-gu removed his smartphone from his jacket pocket.
He played one of the work videos he had recorded inside the sewer the previous night and placed the phone in the center of the table.
“Watch this.”
The screen showed the filthy, cramped sewer passage.
The footage then revealed mutant rats struggling one after another in traps fashioned from crudely gathered mud and broken pieces of wire mesh.
“It was a Sector D Sewer Minor Rift Purification Request. The district office posted a job to exterminate the rats. The reward was ten thousand won per rat.”
As the video neared its end, Lee Jin-gu removed a crumpled sheet of paper from his inner pocket and unfolded it.
It was a receipt bearing the clear seal of the subcontracted payout office at the Hunter Association First Examination Center.
“I didn’t charge at them with a knife. I safely caught them by setting traps along their routes. It was a legitimate request officially approved by the Association, and I was paid after they counted the tails. It wasn’t illegal, and there was no risk of me getting hurt.”
His father carefully picked up the receipt.
The payout amount of one million won was printed at the bottom, accompanied by the Association’s official seal.
The document was perfect and left no room for suspicion.
“You really only killed rats?”
“Yes. The sewer smelled terrible, but even a beginner like me could handle the work with properly placed traps. I just used my head. Chasing them around would’ve been dangerous, so I blocked their path and prevented them from passing.”
Su-a replayed the video and muttered.
“What the heck? You really did only kill the ones caught in the traps. But why are the rats so huge? They’re disgusting.”
“Creatures living around Gates consume mana and grow larger. At the end of the day, they’re still just rats. They’re cowards too.”
Lee Jin-gu calmly ate a spoonful of soup.
“Do I look like the sort of person who’d play hero and charge into a large-scale Gate? I’m only doing manual labor. I prepare every safety measure, kill only as many as I can handle, and collect the reward. So stop worrying and use the things I bought.”
His thorough explanation and documentation left no room for anxiety.
He had not recklessly fought monsters. He had used the terrain to lay traps and catch rats.
And he possessed a legitimate receipt for one million won.
Only then did the dark expressions on his family’s faces gradually soften.
“Even so, be careful. Sewer floors are terribly slippery. If you get hurt, the medicine will cost even more.”
His mother sighed and began fiddling with the laces of her new sneakers again.
His father silently tightened the Velcro straps of his back brace, while Su-a carefully placed the crisp past-exam workbooks inside her bag.
The savory aroma of soybean paste stew once again drifted over the table.
Ordinary scolding and nagging passed between them, while their chopsticks moved busily toward the side dishes.
Lee Jin-gu silently watched his family eat.
It felt as though the emptiness inside him was finally being filled.
Once breakfast ended, his family left for their respective workplaces and school.
His mother stepped out lightly in her new gray sneakers.
His father departed for work with his back held straight.
Su-a also marched energetically out the door with the bag of bread in one hand.
Click.
The front door closed, leaving Lee Jin-gu alone inside the house.
He sank onto the empty living-room floor and quietly stared at the closed door.
A heavy emotion filled his chest.
Before his regression, on the day the large-scale Gate collapsed and transformed the surrounding area into a sea of blood, he had lain dying on the cold asphalt.
In that moment, his mind had not been filled with pleas for salvation or resentment over his fate.
He had thought about his father, who groaned every night because they could not afford his hospital bills.
His mother, who dragged around shoes with unevenly worn soles.
And Su-a, who could not even afford to attend a cram school and had nearly abandoned her university application.
That regret and guilt had strangled him until his final breath.
But at this moment, his family’s ordinary life had not collapsed.
Instead, small but unmistakable smiles had appeared on their faces.
‘The reason I came back.’
Lee Jin-gu lightly clenched and opened his fist.
His finger joints moved smoothly, producing a series of pleasantly soft cracks.
The mutant rat Traces he had collected throughout the night were permeating every part of his body and subtly reconstructing his cells.
When he stilled his breathing and concentrated, he could faintly detect footsteps beyond the thin walls of the old multifamily house and even the television playing in the neighboring home.
Such a change would have been unimaginable with the dull senses of an F-rank hunter.
This regression was not merely a miracle that had returned him to the past.
It was a definite opportunity to turn everything around and protect the everyday lives of those he loved until the very end.
Lee Jin-gu rose and removed his smartphone from his jacket pocket.
He activated the screen and opened the Hunter Association Request Board app.
D-rank or below. Minor rifts. Area clearance. Monster extermination.
Once he applied the filters and narrowed the conditions, countless requests flooded the screen.
They were dirty, dangerous, and difficult low-rank requests—the kind other hunters scoffed at because they paid poorly and avoided because they were filthy and foul-smelling.
“Let’s see.”
Lee Jin-gu’s gaze rapidly swept down the screen.
He had no interest in dazzling dungeon expeditions, giant boss raids coveted by top-ranked hunters, or secret missions from major guilds that circulated only through high-rank-exclusive channels.
He was searching for only one thing.
A reliable workplace where he could continuously harvest Traces while steadily generating cash.
“A Sector E Abandoned Factory Venomous Insect Colony Cleanup Request. This place must be crawling with insect monsters. It’s perfect for raising my Poison Resistance Trait.”
A faint smile appeared on Lee Jin-gu’s lips.
The reward was only five thousand won per creature, half as much as the rats, but their numbers were plentiful and their Trace efficiency was high.
Without hesitation, his finger pressed the ‘Accept Request’ button.
Ding.
A cheerful notification sounded from the screen.
His new hunting ground had been decided.
He would sweep up every last one of them and earn enough to cover his father’s rehabilitation expenses and Su-a’s tuition next month.
Lee Jin-gu shoved the smartphone into his pocket and put on the hiking boots lying on the floor.
He had a great deal to accomplish.
He had to gather Traces and establish a firm foundation.
He also had to begin at the very bottom and track every clue connected to that damned Black Crystal that would erupt ten years from now.
If anyone attempted to obstruct him, he could simply smash their head in with the rulebook and evidence.
“I should rake it in while I can.”
With that brief mutter, Lee Jin-gu opened the front door and stepped outside.
There was not the slightest hesitation in his footsteps as he walked through the ordinary slum alley.
The next job of a ten-year survival expert determined to squeeze out every advantage and remain alive had begun.