The landing point from his glide lay well past the midpoint of the grasslands.
After touching down, Joo Do-gyeom glanced back.
The hill he had started from was now a faint blur beyond the horizon.
He had crossed in an instant a distance that would have taken days on foot.
‘That alone was worth the one billion won.’
The calculation was simple.
He had saved several days.
He had also avoided hundreds of minor monsters he would otherwise have encountered along the way.
For reference, the minor monsters in the Garden of Eden were notorious for offering little experience and poor rewards no matter how many one killed.
That was because this was a dungeon people entered solely for a single Adam’s Apple.
In other words, fighting them was a waste of time and stamina.
He had skipped half of that entirely, making this as economical a purchase as any.
‘Good. Shall we get moving?’
The moment Joo Do-gyeom took his first step.
RUSTLE—!
The bushes right beside him shook, and something leaped out.
It was a person.
No.
It had the shape of a person.
A human figure composed entirely of ash-gray stone.
Every time its joints moved, the grinding scrape of stone rasped through the air.
And around its neck, a pitch-black snake hung like a necklace.
The drooping snake’s head flicked its tongue toward Joo Do-gyeom.
The snake was the true body.
The stone body was merely a puppet under its control.
Hence the name.
‘Serpent Doll.’
A serpent’s doll, and a serpent stone.
Thinking it was a cleverly chosen name, Joo Do-gyeom drew the Great Axe from his Inventory and gave it a light swing.
CRASH—!
It had been light.
Without question.
But the result was anything but.
The Serpent Doll’s torso shattered completely, spraying stone fragments in every direction, while the bushes caught in the aftermath split apart in a fan shape.
It was a sharpened axe, yet the satisfaction of smashing things with it surpassed even the sledgehammer.
‘Now this is a fine weapon.’
As expected of a handcrafted weapon made by a renowned artisan and bought for hundreds of millions of won at the Luxury Market, rather than a low-grade item from Yongdun.
Perhaps because of its heft, it also felt remarkably durable.
It almost made him conflicted.
‘......Should I call this a good thing or not?’
That madness of his.
In the meantime.
Beyond the split bushes, more than a dozen shadows were walking toward him across the exposed grasslands.
Every one of them was a Serpent Doll.
The stone puppets, each with a snake draped around its neck, came creaking toward him.
Joo Do-gyeom watched them and considered his options for a moment.
Fight?
‘There’s no point.’
As he had said, they offered neither experience nor rewards.
They were minor monsters whose Mana Stones did not even look appetizing enough to braise.
Then there was only one answer.
Joo Do-gyeom kicked off the ground and sprinted forward.
Straight at them.
Before the bastards could even extend their arms, he lightly vaulted over their heads.
『Skill Ten-Thousand-Li Wind-Chasing Movement Art (1st Stage) acquired.』
Ten-Thousand-Li Wind-Chasing Movement Art.
It was a lightness art said to let its user run ten thousand li in pursuit of the wind.
It lacked the explosive acceleration of Lightning Flash Flight.
Instead, it allowed the user to maintain a high speed for a long time.
A very long time.
For long-distance travel, escape.
And skipping pointless fights altogether, as he was doing now, no martial art was better.
The grasslands flowed beneath his feet like a river.
The Serpent Dolls creaked after him from behind, but soon dwindled into dots and disappeared.
***
The rewards from its monsters were meager, yet the Garden of Eden was astonishingly a C-Grade dungeon.
That was because of its vast scale and the staggering number of Serpent Dolls, which were both tougher and more troublesome than crude zombies.
For a Hunter with stats similar to Joo Do-gyeom’s, clearing it would have been virtually impossible.
Yet Joo Do-gyeom was crossing the dungeon as though taking a stroll.
He shattered the bastards blocking his path with a single blow from the Great Axe.
He vaulted over those that came in groups.
『Skill Ten-Thousand-Li Wind-Chasing Movement Art advanced to 2nd Stage.』
Even his proficiency rose smoothly.
The result was only natural, since his ability to wield those stats was on an entirely different level.
Meanwhile.
Joo Do-gyeom suddenly became conscious of the sensation in his hand.
‘......The axe feels like an extension of my hand.’
It was strange.
In his previous life, Joo Do-gyeom had mainly used a sword.
As someone called the God of War, there was no weapon he could not handle, but a sword had always felt the most comfortable.
It was also a sword that had ended the Demon King of Annihilation.
Yet now.
This crude axe fit perfectly in his hand.
So perfectly that he felt no particular desire to hold a sword instead.
While he was thinking that, more than ten Serpent Dolls appeared before him.
Too lazy even to avoid the bastards blocking his path, he swung the Great Axe.
The drawback of a massive weapon was that it was heavy and difficult to use at close range.
Its strengths were its destructive power and its wide reach at longer distances.
This time, those advantages showed themselves in full.
CRASH-CRASH-CRASH—!
More than ten Serpent Dolls collapsed all at once beneath a single sweep of his axe.
Immediately afterward.
『Skill Heavenly Strength Axe Art advanced to 4th Stage.』
『Skill Heavenly Strength Axe Art advanced to 5th Stage.』
‘......What?’
At the messages sounding one after another, Joo Do-gyeom’s brow twitched as he ran.
He could not help being surprised.
The Skill’s proficiency had advanced twice in immediate succession.
As with stats—no, perhaps even more than stats—Skill proficiency became increasingly difficult to raise at higher levels.
Yet it had climbed two stages at once?
It was not impossible.
Occasionally, proficiency in abilities related to a tool that perfectly matched the user’s talent grew at a terrifying rate.
The future Joo Do-gyeom and his comrades had all experienced it a few times.
That was precisely the problem.
‘An axe...... is my talent?’
To repeat, he had favored swords in his previous life.
His greatest talent had, in fact, been with the sword.
His current Class was even Chef of All Things.
Yet an axe.
This enormous weapon, chosen by his madness and toward which he himself had felt drawn, was apparently the weapon that suited him.
It left him with a strange feeling.
‘Is this another effect of the Heavenly Killer......?’
But only for a moment.
‘Well, that can happen.’
Joo Do-gyeom decided not to think too deeply about it.
If holding it made him stronger, that was enough.
Attaching stories to weapons was not his way.
As he had said, the reason he had used a sword most often in his previous life was simply that his talent with swords had been the greatest.
If, after Regression, he had more talent for axe arts, then unless the situation specifically required otherwise, he could simply follow that path.
How long had he been running?
At last, it began to appear above the horizon.
An apple tree.
***
Joo Do-gyeom slowed down the moment the tree entered his sight.
Then, erasing his presence with Scattered Flower Shadow, he climbed atop a large rock on a nearby hillside and lowered himself.
He did not rush.
This was where the true highlight of the dungeon began.
The apple tree viewed from atop the rock looked utterly peaceful.
It was a picture-perfect tree bearing exactly one luscious fruit.
It seemed as though all he had to do was run over and pluck it.
‘No.’
The moment someone came within a certain distance of the tree, the dungeon’s true mechanic activated.
‘Paradise Illusion.’
Why else would the dungeon be called the Garden of Eden?
This place showed intruders paradise.
More precisely, it showed them the sight they most desperately wished to see.
And anyone whose heart was captured by that paradise could never leave.
‘Serpent Dolls.’
The stone puppets he had shattered and vaulted over on his way here.
Those puppets were the fate awaiting anyone captured by paradise.
A body seized by paradise turned to stone.
A snake then settled into the empty hollow of its neck.
Once one knew that, the slow, creaking way they walked could not help looking different.
At any rate.
It was a mechanic that burrowed into the mind of its target.
The Joo Do-gyeom of his previous life would have snorted and walked straight in.
Not now.
‘Madness.’
An uninvited guest he himself had not yet fully understood had taken up residence in his mind.
No one knew how Paradise Illusion might become entangled with that madness.
Charging in while relying solely on a Mental Fortification Ring would be foolish.
Confidence stood upon evidence.
Without evidence, it was called arrogance.
Joo Do-gyeom was a confident man, but he was not arrogant.
‘So I’ll shorten the distance. As much as possible.’
He had already prepared the method.
Joo Do-gyeom checked the remaining duration of the blessing displayed in one corner of the System Window.
‘Ten minutes.’
He had spent two hours and fifty minutes traveling, which meant Heavenly Wings had exactly that much time left.
Paradise Illusion activated when someone set foot on the ground within that zone.
In that case.
‘I only need to pass through the sky.’
He would cross most of the mechanic zone through the air and land directly in front of the tree.
That would reduce his exposure to the illusion to the absolute minimum.
Joo Do-gyeom steadied his breathing.
One.
Two.
He kicked off the rock and leaped.
FWOOSH—!
The wings of light spread behind him with the last of their strength.
***
The glide was perfect.
His landing point was close enough to the tree that he could have touched it with his nose if he fell forward.
The wings of light exhausted their lifespan and scattered as Joo Do-gyeom’s feet touched the ground.
At the same time.
The world changed.
‘......’
The green grasslands vanished.
A street appeared in their place.
A familiar street.
The Integrated Asian Fortress City as it had looked before its fall.
The lights of early evening.
People moving along the streets.
The smell of rice cooking somewhere nearby.
And.
“Joo Do-gyeom! What are you doing, man? Hurry up!”
A voice reached him.
He knew it without even turning his head.
‘Javier.’
A Spanish man with a bear-like build stood before a street stall, waving a cup of liquor.
He had been the shieldbearer who guarded Joo Do-gyeom’s flank while alive.
The bespectacled man beside him, shaking his head as though Javier were too loud, was Li Wei.
The brown-skinned sniper sitting indifferently with a skewer between her lips was Anisha.
They had promised to survive the next battle as well and enjoy another night together.
Every face he had never seen again after that day was there.
Smiling.
Alive.
And that was not all.
“Joo Do-gyeom! If you’re late, there won’t be any broth left for you!”
At the center of the street stall.
A woman held her cup high and waved her hand lightly.
‘......Vivienne.’
Vivienne Ashcroft.
The Archmage who had burned away her own life to send him back to this era was smiling with her body whole and unharmed.
And.
‘......’
Between them stood two people who could not possibly have been there.
His mother.
And his father.
The two people who had died before the fortress city was even built stood naturally among his comrades, looking at him.
They called his name.
“Do-gyeom.”
“Joo Do-gyeom. Our son.”
It was an impossible scene.
Those two and his comrades had never even existed in the same era.
Paradise cared nothing for historical accuracy.
It merely crammed everything he wished to see into a single frame.
‘......Shoddy.’
That was what he thought.
Shoddy.
Crude.
Which meant he could endure it.
Joo Do-gyeom stood there and took in every one of them.
One.
By one.
Without missing a single face.
He took them in, engraved them upon himself, and remembered them.
Then he ran.
Straight ahead.
Right through the midst of those beckoning to him.
Because they were fake.
Because every one of them was fake.
It was not as difficult as he had expected.
‘That’s a relief.’
The moment he thought, with complete sincerity, that it was a relief.
Something ran down his cheek.
Joo Do-gyeom wiped it away with the back of his hand without slowing.
It was wet.
A tear.
‘......It must be the madness.’
That was Joo Do-gyeom’s conclusion.
He had no intention of reaching any other.
Behind him, paradise was collapsing.
The affectionate voices stretched and warped.
Before long, they transformed into inhuman screams and poured against his back.
“SCREEEEEECH—!”
“AAAAAAAARGH—!”
“JOO DO-GYEOOOOOM—!”
It was paradise revealing its true nature to prey it had failed to seize.
Joo Do-gyeom did not look back.
Without realizing it, his fist had clenched tightly.
***
At some point.
The screams stopped abruptly.
The world returned to the original grasslands.
As if declaring that the illusion had been nothing but an illusion.
Everything had vanished, leaving only emptiness behind.
Before him stood one enormous apple tree.
He knew.
He had cleared the mechanic.
‘Now all I have to do is find Adam’s Apple and pick it......’
Then it would be over.
He could return to Earth.
Joo Do-gyeom was about to take his final step toward the tree.
『You are the first challenger.』
A sudden System message sounded.