He quietly opened his eyes.
“......What, the hell?”
He muttered, his voice filled with confusion and surprise, then sat up and quietly looked around.
It was a familiar place, and not one he particularly missed. A cramped one-room place he had lived in for a full three years.
But this was strange. This was definitely the room whose lease he had refused to renew three years ago, after getting a job at a decent place in celebration of that very employment, never looking back. The landlord’s character was worse than a beggar’s foot rag, and the place had not a single redeeming quality.
Since he had started earning more and moved to a better jeonse room, he had no reason to come back here, had never missed it, and had never even told anyone he used to live here.
So why was he suddenly lying in a place like this?
“......”
He—Lee Uju—quietly closed his eyes and tried to recall why he was here. And after two seconds, he opened them again.
“I... I should be dead, though?”
There was no need to try. The moment he attempted to recall his last memory, it came back with ridiculous ease.
“Huuu......”
Even if he had died, it had not been from growing old peacefully in bed. That did not mean he had been torn apart in a gruesome and painful way, either. It could be called gruesome, perhaps, but at least it had not been painful.
Because his final memory was being eaten by an S-rank monster that should never have appeared, an Infernal Dragon. There was no way he would have felt pain after entering a mouth large enough to swallow a five-story villa in one bite.
But did the fact that it had not hurt mean he had survived? No chance. He had definitely died. There was no possibility that someone like him, who was not even an outstanding Hunter, could have survived after entering the maw of an S-rank monster.
Even if some unknowable miracle had occurred, it was still strange. Why had he woken up in this place, of all places, in a body without a single wound?
“......Right. Why here, of all places?”
At the sudden question that came to mind, he sprang to his feet. And in the process of standing up, Uju was startled once again.
“I’m not injured.”
Uju had not simply been eaten. He had been burned by the Infernal Dragon’s passive skill, Dragon Inferno.
He had been burned, yet it was a death that had not been painful? At the very least, when he was swallowed and lost consciousness, there had been no pain, so Uju could confidently say it had not been a painful death.
And when it came down to it, he could not remember the pain either. In his head, he knew that when he had first started burning, it had been pain like hell itself, but when he tried to recall what that pain had felt like, he could not quite grasp it. That was why he was able to remain sane like this.
“No... Maybe it’s the influence of my unique skill?”
The unique skill he had awakened as a Hunter was [Absolute Mind]. According to its description, it allowed him to maintain himself in any situation, or something vague like that, but it was an excellent skill. The only problem was that the person who possessed that skill was none other than Lee Uju.
In truth, if his stats had only been average, there might have been a possibility that he would one day become an outstanding Hunter immune to all mental attacks. But Uju had awakened as a trash-tier Hunter with every stat at 1. No one would take him into a party, and since he could not enter Gates to hunt monsters, he had never been able to realize that potential.
“......Sigh.”
He stopped making guesses that yielded no answer and recalling useless memories of the past, then ran his hands over his head.
“I have hair, too.”
Amazingly, even the hair that had been reduced to ash by the flames of hell was perfectly fine.
“An elixir? No, but...”
A miraculous return to life like this would be impossible unless it was an elixir, said to revive even the dead. But what madman would use an elixir on a nobody who was essentially an ordinary person? No matter how much Uju belonged to the number one guild in South Korea, he was at the very bottom of the bottom, nothing more than one member among countless recovery teams.
—Bzzzz.
“......?”
Suddenly, he heard a sound like a smartphone vibrating. When he turned his head toward the sound, he really did see a smartphone.
A smartphone with an extremely common design blinked its screen once on the floor, then fell silent. It was the typical reaction that showed a text message had arrived. The one peculiar thing was that it was a model he did not recognize at all.
“......”
He carefully picked up the phone and unlocked it.
It unlocked.
“No, way......?”
Even though he knew it could not be possible, he carefully checked the calendar with a faint sense of hope.
“Four years ago......!”
And, amazingly, something that should not have happened had actually happened!!
“How could this happen?!”
Uju leapt to his feet.
Why had this happened? He had no idea. But did he need to know? The important thing right now was only one thing!
If this situation was not some hallucination seen right before death, if this truly dreamlike situation was reality, then it was absolutely the best!!
“Four years... What stocks skyrocketed over the last four years??”
It had been a job far too good for an uneducated orphan like him to get, but in the end, he had still been at the bottom. He occasionally ate good food and drank good drinks... and above all, since it was a high-risk occupation, once he took out expensive insurance, he had no money left.
How miserable that had been! So money. Money, no matter what! As long as he had money, there was nothing he could not do in this world...!
“Hmm, but who sent this message?”
Four years ago, he should have been in the middle of working as a Gate porter.
Four and a half years ago, young Uju, who had just awakened as a Hunter, had desperately wanted to deny the fact that he was a miraculously trash Hunter, possessing not only a completely useless ability but also stats that were all at the minimum value.
He had spent half a year wasting time, holding on to the dream that maybe he could make something of himself if he just grew, and then, because of debt, he had been forced to work as a porter.
After living like that for a year, he had luckily gotten into a monster dismantling team. And not just any team, but an on-site dismantling team inside Gates, which paid well.
In any case, that was a story from one year in the past from now, and at this point, when he was working as a porter, there was nowhere he would be getting a message from. He had been avoiding even things like delivery as much as possible... and he had repaid his debts diligently every time, so he had not received collection texts either. What could it be?
“No, wait. Is this before I started working as a porter?”
Looking at it now, the timing was ambiguous. He only remembered it roughly as a few years ago, not the exact month when he had started working as a porter. So perhaps this was still before he became a porter, and it was a debt collection text.
‘Then does that mean I don’t have any money saved up? Do I have to work as a porter and then invest in stocks... Even if I know for sure they’re going to skyrocket, borrowing money to invest in stocks is such a loser move that it feels kind of wrong.’
Thinking that things had become troublesome, he checked the contents of the message.
“......?”
Fortunately, it was not a message related to that. But the contents were incredibly strange. Faced with something he could not understand at all, Uju quietly rubbed his eyes and checked again, but even then, the contents did not change.
“Hmm, is this a prank text? Or a game ad?”
In the end, that was the conclusion he reached. If the first line of a message said something like “contract killing request,” it was only normal to think that.
“......Ah, right.”
The mention of games made him remember something. Equipment, to be precise. If he was currently in the middle of working as a porter, then his porter equipment should be damaged.
One might wonder what kind of equipment a porter needed... but that was said by people who knew nothing. Precisely because one was a porter, equipment was absolutely necessary.
You had to carry heavy loads, quickly and efficiently retrieve the items that needed to be recovered, then go chase after the Hunters who had already gone far ahead and were fighting. And in case aggro splashed onto you and you were attacked, you needed armor to survive.
Back then, not knowing his place and insisting he would be a Hunter, he had taken out a loan to buy Hunter equipment, then ended up using it as a porter. So if there were signs of use on it, that meant he was working as a porter......
“......??”
But in the place where the equipment should have been, there was no equipment. No, the storage place for the equipment itself was gone.
“What the hell, don’t screw with me.”
This was seriously screwed up. Since the items were quite expensive, he had secretly dug up the floor and illegally made an underground storage space to hide them. But now, that underground storage space itself did not exist.
Had he gone back to before he awakened?
No, that could not be it. He had definitely lived in this one-room place even before he awakened, but this was not that. He might be mistaken about other things, but there was no way he would mistake the time when he had awakened. He had been so happy back then.
“Don’t screw with me!!”
—Click.
“Huh?”
He was so worked up that he was feeling around the place where it should have been when suddenly, a strange sound rang out.
—Whirr.
A small mechanical sound could be heard, and then the floor began to open automatically. And from within the floor, which should have been dark, light spilled out, clearly revealing what was inside.
This was strange. Even if it was an underground storage space, he did not know how to make something this elaborate. It had just been a shabby thing he had made by digging up the ground and roughly giving it shape! More importantly, why were these things inside instead of Hunter equipment...!
“No, no, no, no...... Don’t screw with me.”
In a slightly trembling voice, Uju denied the reality before his eyes. But no matter how many times he closed and opened his eyes, quietly rubbed them, slapped his cheek, or tapped his head, the truth before him did not change.
“......Seriously?”
He carefully reached out and touched the contents.
“......”
It was heavy. He had never touched a real gun before, but considering this weight, he was certain. This was not a toy gun that fired BB pellets. It was real.
“What the fuck is this supposed to be??”
Amid his confusion, a suppressor caught his eye.
Uju carefully picked up the suppressor. Since he had never handled a gun before, he should not have known how to attach a suppressor either, but he recalled what he had seen in movies and fumbled around, trying to attach it to the front of the muzzle, and managed to get it roughly into shape.
“......Um.”
He wondered if this was right, but he simply could not hold himself back. No matter how he looked at it, it seemed real, but since he had never actually seen a real one before, he needed to confirm it.
He gripped the pistol with both hands, aimed at the floor, and fired!
—Pew!
“Wah, fuck!?”
Startled by the louder-than-expected sound, he dropped the gun. After staring blankly for a moment at the hole in the floor, he carefully picked the gun back up.
“No, don’t screw with me. Seriously. Why is something like this here? Where did my equipment go?”
Faced with a phenomenon he could not understand at all, he placed the gun back into the storage compartment with trembling hands and clutched his head.
“You’re telling me I didn’t come back to the past? No, but this is my voice, these are my hands, and this is the time when I lived here, right?”
As Uju lowered his head, a single notebook suddenly entered his sight. The only item in the weapons storage that was not a weapon.
Perhaps something that would help him understand this situation was written inside.
“Haha...... Crazy.”
Thinking that, Uju examined the book and burst into laughter. The moment he flipped the book over, a truly absurd title was written there.
“What the—no, what the hell is ‘My Precious Assassination Diary’ supposed to be?”
Something had gone wrong. Very, very wrong.