"Heh heh heh. Do not be so shocked. It is all something you lot will go through in time anyway. Oh, right. The 1st Assault Corps has two cafeterias, one on the fourth basement floor and one at the top on the fiftieth floor. The fourth basement floor serves all three meals a day hotel-buffet style. Lobster and king crab, all sorts of sushi and steak are laid out as standard, so it should be worth eating."
"Oh!"
The new employees swung between joy and gloom with every word.
"And the top floor is divided into Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Italian restaurants, but for the time being I recommend you go to the buffet on the fourth basement floor. The top-floor restaurants have a lot of strong-willed seniors, so it can be uncomfortable."
"We will bear it in mind."
The new employees answered loudly.
This senior liked teasing people, but his character seemed decent enough all the same. He told the newcomers a great deal of practical information they needed.
"Heh heh heh. Then everyone go into your own rooms, unpack, and rest. From tomorrow you will be trained until your mouths taste of blood, so today you had best empty out your heads and rest."
With these words as his last, the senior left.
Han-eol and his fellow recruits went into their assigned rooms and unpacked their backpacks first.
The employee ID hung around the neck served as the room key.
'Now that I think of it, they said that when eating at the buffet cafeteria you just tap your employee ID on the terminal too? This is quite convenient.'
Han-eol liked the welfare benefits the Shinseong Group provided.
He was especially pleased that the room provided to employees was far more spacious and pleasant than Han-eol had expected. Frankly, Han-eol could not understand calling this a room.
A luxurious living room.
One bedroom with an attached dressing room.
A bathroom fully equipped with a marble whirlpool tub and even a dry sauna, plus a spotless toilet.
A bamboo grove garden laid out beyond the window despite being on the third basement floor.
This was a luxurious suite Han-eol had never even dreamed of.
'Training starts tomorrow, so I had better rest well today.'
Following the senior's advice, Han-eol drew warm water into the tub and soaked his body through, then went straight to sleep.
The plush bed guided him to the land of dreams.
***
The next day, May 21.
Brrrrrring!
The moment it turned six in the morning, a bell rang noisily.
"Wash, eat breakfast, put on your combat uniforms, and assemble in the great auditorium on the first floor by seven. Repeating once more. Wash, eat breakfast, put on your combat uniforms, and assemble in the great auditorium on the first floor by seven."
An announcement like this came out of the speaker at the head of the bed.
"Haa, so it begins now?"
Han-eol scrambled up, showered quickly, and ran down to the fourth basement floor.
At the buffet cafeteria, Han-eol's fellow recruits were lined up and filing in.
Han-eol tapped his employee ID and went in as well, and diligently ate his vegetables first. Next he polished off two cheese-topped garlic lobsters, then filled his stomach with a little soybean paste stew and rice from the Korean corner. For dessert he added yogurt and fruit.
At that point it was already 7:40.
"Oh no. I cannot be late on the first day."
Han-eol hurried back to his room, finished brushing his teeth, and changed into his combat uniform.
'Hold on.'
Han-eol, just about to step out of the room, thought of something and put on the A-grade vest underneath his combat uniform.
Not only that, around his neck he hung a potion crafted in the form of a necklace.
This potion was a miraculous elixir that rapidly healed serious injuries, and it was the treasure Han-eol had received as his Outstanding Intern prize.
According to the hint Lee Ru-in had given Han-eol, the price of a single bottle of this potion came to ten years' worth of Han-eol's salary.
'The intensity of the training might be beyond my limits. Given the 1st Assault Corps Leader's character, somehow I doubt the training will be ordinary.'
This was Han-eol's reason for taking along the vest and the potion.
While he was at it, it had already become 7:53.
'Yikes. At this rate I really will be late.'
Han-eol ran at full speed toward the great auditorium on the first floor of the building.
Just as Han-eol arrived in front of the great auditorium, general employees lined up in a long single file began handing out one new backpack each to Han-eol and his fellow recruits.
Since the backpacks were packed full, they were heavier than expected.
'What is inside? Training equipment?'
Han-eol got an ominous feeling from somewhere.
Sure enough, the 1st Assault Corps Leader inside the great auditorium hurled outrageous words at the new employees like a thunderbolt dropping from a clear sky.
"Is the best training not actual combat? So this 1st Assault Corps Leader intends to give you fledglings the best training there is."
'???'
The new employees wore stunned expressions.
The 1st Assault Corps Leader twisted one corner of his mouth nastily.
"Hard of understanding? I said I would give you training just like actual combat."
'??'
"What is everyone doing? Move quickly, quickly. From here on you are entering the Highland. The items necessary for your survival have already been put into your backpacks, so there is nothing to worry about. Muhwahahahaha."
The 1st Assault Corps Leader laughed heartily.
'This lunatic!'
Han-eol wanted to sew the 1st Assault Corps Leader's mouth shut with a needle.
Han-eol and his fellow recruits moved to Gangnam Station, which was connected to the building's basement, and boarded the Line 12 subway.
This Line 12 was a special line that departed from Gangnam Station and traveled nonstop to the secret platform at the bottom of the Han River north of Yeouido.
It is said that Line 12 was opened in Mid-Land Seoul about fifteen years ago.
Naturally, since Line 12's purpose lay in sending the Shinseong Group's ability-holders into the Highland, ordinary citizens could not ride it.
Han-eol had also learned only now the fact that the Seoul subway extended all the way to Line 12.
While the subway carrying the new employees ran along the dark rails rattling and clanking, no one opened their mouth. Everyone wore anxious expressions and did nothing but chew at their lips.
'Please.'
Han-eol too quietly closed his eyes and mastered the surge of emotion in his chest.
The time it took for Han-eol's group to depart from Gangnam Station and arrive at the secret platform north of Yeouido was under ten minutes.
"You have already been through it once. Stop dawdling and submerge."
The 1st Assault Corps Leader pressed the new employees coercively.
"We will submerge."
Han-eol and his fellow recruits forced down their expressions of chewing on shit and entered the blue mist one after another.
In the meantime, the 1st Assault Corps Leader gave information of no particular help to the backs of the new employees' heads.
"The watches issued to you will guide you to Base Camp No. 1 on the Eighth Continent. Upon arrival, take the watch hand as your compass and rally at Base Camp No. 1. Understood?"
"Understood."
The forty new employees shouted in voices full of desperation and then sank completely into the blue mist.
Han-eol merely moved his mouth as though lip-syncing and did not actually produce any sound.
It was Han-eol's own timid act of rebellion.
In the midst of that, another worry suddenly settled into Han-eol's mind.
'Last time I was the only one who failed the guided transfer and landed somewhere wrong; what if it happens again this time?'
When they had been sent into the Highland the previous time, Han-eol's fellow recruits had been transferred to a relatively safe region.
Han-eol, by contrast, had failed the guided transfer and landed somewhere wrong.
'They say the probability of the guided transfer failing is quite low...... Haa, surely I will not be the only unlucky one again this time? That would be no good.'
Inwardly, Han-eol's worries had grown.
Pi-iing―.
Dizzying vertigo shook Han-eol's brain.
Presently Han-eol appeared abruptly in the middle of a wasteland cracked and split like the bottom of a cauldron. Across the wasteland, where not a single blade of grass grew, a desolate dust-laden wind lashed.
Beneath Han-eol's feet, blue mist gathers like an oasis and shimmers.
Han-eol quickly checked his watch first.
'Shit.'
Han-eol drove a curse inward first.
It was because the watch hand could not find a direction and was rotating round and round.
This time too, it seemed Han-eol had failed the guided transfer and landed somewhere wrong rather than at Base Camp No. 1 on the Eighth Continent.
'Why does this keep happening? Isn't there some other cause?'
Han-eol felt like leaping straight back into the blue mist right then and returning to Mid-Land Seoul.
But if he did that, the 1st Assault Corps Leader would clearly raise hell with him.
'Haaah. For now, let us look for something here. If I collect even one kilogram of mana crystals, the 1st Assault Corps Leader should not bitch at me about it. Failing the guided transfer is not my fault either, is it?'
Han-eol first buried a transmitter at his current location.
Doing this would make it easier to find his way back later to the spot where the blue mist had gathered, while watching the receiver.
Next, Han-eol tightened his backpack straps firmly and settled on a direction.
In that direction, a single mountain was faintly visible.
***
It is said that in the center of the Highland there exists a mountain of a size beyond imagination, and the territories are divided according to the distance to that mountain.
That was how Han-eol had learned it during his training hours.
In any case, the mountain was said to be so enormous that it could be seen from every region of the Highland, and in this respect it was rather like Jeju Island.
On Jeju Island too, can Mount Halla not be seen from anywhere, east, west, north, or south?
However, comparing the Highland and Jeju Island one to one was a stretch.
It is said that the area of the Highland humanity has explored over the past several decades, added up, exceeds five times the Earth's surface area.
And yet humanity had not even confirmed one several-thousandth of the Highland. Perhaps it was not one several-thousandth but one several-ten-thousandth, or one several-hundred-millionth.
However, there existed one fact humanity had grasped in the course of this.
First, humanity named the doughnut-shaped continent situated at the outermost edge with the Highland's central mountain as the reference point, that is, the region farthest from the central mountain, the Ninth Continent.
To put it a little more precisely, humanity had not even uncovered on its own the fact that the Ninth Continent had a round doughnut shape.
That was because the size of the territory humanity had finished surveying was truly and pitifully small compared with the Ninth Continent's total area.
Then how had humanity been able to learn the Ninth Continent's shape?
This was nothing more than a case of some ability-holder long ago reading the memories of a winged-beast-type demon beast and thereby learning the rough form of the Ninth Continent.
Furthermore, according to what that ability-holder learned, the Ninth Continent was said to be the safest place within the Highland. The account was that the closer one went to the central mountain, through the Eighth Continent, the Seventh Continent, the Sixth Continent, and so on, the steadily stronger the demon beasts became.
Afterward, the cities of Mid-Land concentrated first on pioneering the Ninth Continent.
The region to which the Shinseong Group had guide-transferred the interns when it first sent them into the Highland last time also belonged to this Ninth Continent.
Next, the region adjacent to the Ninth Continent but closer to the central mountain than the Ninth Continent was the Eighth Continent.
The Eighth Continent was still unknown territory to humanity.
Among Mid-Land's various great cities, the number that had established base camps on the Eighth Continent was barely enough to count on five fingers.
Mid-Land Seoul was included among these five great cities.
Frankly, that Mid-Land Seoul's Shinseong Group had been able to subjugate the powerful demon beasts of the Eighth Continent and secure a base camp was entirely to Lee Hyeon's credit. Had there been no Lee Hyeon, the Shinseong Group would never have dared even to conceive of advancing into the Eighth Continent.
Dangerous as it was, in exchange the Eighth Continent handed the Shinseong Group mana crystals of correspondingly superior quality, astonishing new materials, and even relics powerful enough to stop one's breath.
Herein lay the reason why the Shinseong Group, after securing sites for three base camps on the Eighth Continent, sent the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Assault Corps into the Eighth Continent.
'This had better be the Ninth Continent. Surely it is not the Eighth Continent?'
Worry came first for Han-eol.
Fortunately, the wasteland was merely brutally hot and no demon beasts were in sight. It was only that the dust that swept over from time to time was a nuisance.
When no demon beast appeared even after he had walked for several hours, Han-eol worried about something else.
'At this rate am I not going to be able to collect anything? What usable new material or medicinal herb would there be in a wasteland like this? There does not seem to be a mana crystal mine either. Damn it.'
Han-eol quietly clenched his back teeth.