Part 1
Prologue.
There are many jobs in the world.
Judge, prosecutor, lawyer, doctor—professions everyone yearns to have and looks up to. And if you include menial labor, cleaning, service jobs, and other work looked down upon, there are thousands of professions that exist in the world.
And though it could hardly be called a profession, he was an orphan.
Naturally, with parents he could not know, had the orphanage director not happened to pick him up, he undoubtedly would have died on the streets or somewhere else. Did the director take him in because she saw something special in him? That was not the case either.
In his childhood, he was a typical Korean kid with nothing particularly different from others.
But as he grew, he sensed something intangible squirming inside him. At first, he did not know what it was, but as he got older, he realized he alone possessed this ability.
When he applied that feeling to his feet, he could move faster than most animals; when he applied it to his hands, he was stronger than any of his peers. But he did not know why.
It was simply from the time his youth passed and puberty began that he felt he was different from others.
And the moment he felt it, his wandering began.
His first job was pickpocketing.
As he got older, his head became quite sharp, but even so, there were not many jobs a middle school dropout from an orphanage could choose.
Of course, he could have worked part-time or done honest labor, but nowhere would hire someone who had just graduated middle school.
Rather, it was a wonder they did not just exploit him.
He called his unique ability "Ki," and using Ki, he began picking pockets with swift feet and precise hand movements.
So precisely that the victims did not even realize their wallets were gone.
It was laughable, but it would not be wrong to say he laid the foundation of his life through pickpocketing.
He barely managed to secure a small studio apartment, and at least he could live without starving.
Of course, with other people's money.
As his youth passed, he wanted to earn bigger money and wanted to succeed. Perhaps it was only natural. Anyone can dream.
Of course, there was no legal work he could do.
The Republic of Korea had failed to become a country that brought happiness even to orphans.
He began to worry endlessly.
What method could he use to earn money drastically while utilizing his ability?
Sports star? He had learned far too little.
And it took far too long to succeed.
Other legal jobs that used strength?
The pay was not bad, but it was far too insufficient to fill the word "success."
Thus, his second chosen job was that of a contractor.
At first, he did not really understand what a "contract" entailed, but by chance, he met Giyeon.
Through Giyeon, he learned for the first time that doing favors for others could earn money. But he did not want to enter under Giyeon's wing. No matter what anyone said, he simply could not trust people easily.
So instead of joining the hand extended by Giyeon, he entered under a small private detective agency.
And after securing what they call "connections," he began working as a contractor as a solo operation.
There was nothing he had not done.
Contract killings, theft, mercenary work—thanks to his ability, he succeeded at every turn and became quite recognized in the industry.
Before he knew it, he had regular clients. Furthermore, the state heard rumors of him and, instead of throwing him in a cell, assigned him unofficial requests that the country could not handle itself.
That was how he saw the world and became an adult.
What the world taught him was the law of survival.
Until that incident, he had lived that way for a while.
End of Prologue.
★ ★ ★
“Hoo.. They’re late.”
On the 10th floor of an officetel in Bundang.
A man who seemed to be waiting for someone in his home sipped his coffee with an annoyed expression as he looked at a column on his desk.
Does magic and martial arts really exist in the world?
Such doubts are something everyone must have had at least once as a child.
This man had been the same at first.
Before he awakened to his talent for controlling ki, he had thought everyone was just like him. A talent different from others. He had never told anyone about it.
In 2022.
A quiet but enormous terror came to the world. Dungeons began appearing all over the earth. Inside the dungeons, as the name dungeon implied, there were monsters.
In American English, monsters.
Anyway, it was a term referring to something from another world that was neither human nor animal.
Of course, they could not be called aliens.
They seemed practically devoid of intelligence and were apt to attack people.
The first dungeon outbreak was in China.
When the first dungeon appeared, China controlled the media and reached a state of emergency.
China sent an advance party and witnessed the monsters inside the portal for the first time.
However, the exploration team confirmed that the monsters could not follow them outside the dungeon.
And they reported this to their superiors.
With that, China grew complacent and came to neglect the matter.
And a few days later.
The area where the first portal had appeared was devastated.
The monsters from the portal had come outside.
Countless people lost their lives.
Casualties numbered in the thousands, and only then did China sense the severity and decide to deploy a large number of troops, but even the military suffered quite a lot of casualties before barely managing to exterminate the initial monsters.
And finally, they began experiments by dissecting the monster corpses.
“Swords and blades barely tear its hide?”
“Not only that, but this monster’s claws are nearly diamond-grade in hardness.”
Amid continuous astonishment, they discovered the most important thing during the dissection.
When they caught a monster, a blue-glowing stone came out from inside the corpse.
At first called various names such as blue stone and demon stone, this stone was later named mageongseok by the Magic Weapon Crafting Alliance.
Thus, centered around the first dungeon that appeared, dungeons began emerging simultaneously all over the world.
And in many countries that responded like China, many people died, and the fact that China hushed up this information even after learning it is cursed to this day.
But once it spread by word of mouth even to ordinary people, and as more people actually witnessed the portals, they too appeared just like that.
Hidden ability users secretly lurking in each country, murim warriors, mages, and others—those who could only be seen in fantasy began emerging into the world.
The amusing thing was that the ability users who emerged also had regional characteristics.
In Japan, ninjas appeared, while China mainly had murim warriors taking the stage as their field of activity.
And so, the ability users of each country amusingly began creating guilds and going around raiding dungeons.
The nations formed unions so that they could commission dungeon raids from guilds for large sums of money.
If you called it business, it was a cartel.
And in the case of mageongseok, the fact that it could be used to bestow magic and craft weapons of tremendous hardness was revealed through the mages.
“And so, even ordinary people began learning martial arts to become Hunters, and an enormous chaos descended…”
‘Chaos. How amusing. In a world that only thinks of even that as a way to make money.’
The man who had been drinking his coffee set the half-finished cup down, scrunching his face slightly as he put down the column he was reading and looked out the window.
‘The sun is already high, after all.’
A stride and footsteps suggesting a height of about 180 centimeters.
Light yet quite fast even when jogging. That meant he exercised regularly.
And this man had naturally sensed all of this at some point.
-Ding-dong!
The man set down his coffee and pressed the button installed next to the dining table that could open the front door.
-Beep beep~
“Ah, I’m late. Sorry, Jonghyeon.”
A man in a black suit came rushing in frantically.
Gasping for rough breaths repeatedly.
“It’s a newly discovered dungeon, but the approval was overturned so I’ve been arguing with my superiors on the way here.”
Jonghyeon swallowed the coffee in his mouth and spoke.
“So where exactly is it this time?”
Click.
The man in the suit opened his briefcase and placed documents on the table.
“It’s been changed to a C-rank dungeon. It’s in the North Chungcheong region, and right now about twenty members of a D-rank guild entered and only three survived… so it’s no wonder the approval was overturned.”
“Indeed. This is no ordinary job.”
“The survivor is rambling, but they say Hounds are moving in quite large packs. He’s incoherent, so some say dozens, some say hundreds, but…”
This was the agent who had woken Jonghyeon up from a sound sleep by calling out of the blue first thing in the morning claiming there was a jackpot job.
That much was fine, but the agent had said he would come by before two, then ended up arriving only when it was almost three.
Truthfully, Jonghyeon had been ready to vent his anger if it had been nothing serious.
‘But the reward seems better than I thought.’
It was understandable why he had made such a fuss.
And he was someone who “alone” cleared dungeons—an unofficial operative, so to speak.
Of course, he himself did not know how many more people like him there were.
But the country had never come to him for legitimate work.
‘So naturally, the approval was delayed.’
As Jonghyeon skimmed through the information written in the documents, he suddenly glanced at the agent who was staring at him intently.
“Do you have something else to say?”
“I.. I know you work alone. But this time it’s so dangerous that I actually hesitated for a long time about whether to give it to you. I pushed to bring it to you even though the approval didn’t come out… but are you really going alone?”
Leaving aside the matter of money, Jonghyeon fundamentally hated working with people he could not trust.
People were more untrustworthy than monsters.
He’d rather trust money.
“I’ll go alone. You know that too, agent. That’s all.”
With these final words, Jonghyeon turned his head back toward the window, beginning to sip his coffee again as if there were no need to talk further.
It was clearly a sign to leave.
The embarrassed agent, as if resigning himself, looked at Jonghyeon a few more times and prepared to leave.
“Then I’ll be going. The rest is well explained in the materials. If you ever think of forming a team or affiliating with the state, please let us know anytime. We’d welcome someone like you, Jonghyeon.”
The agent delivered this meaningful final remark and left through the same door he had entered earlier.
Of course, none of it reached Jonghyeon’s ears.
Since he handled everything alone, Jonghyeon’s compensation was quite high, and that suited him more than stability.
And most importantly, he had the confidence and skill that he wouldn’t die in a mere low-rank dungeon.
Suddenly grimacing quite heavily as he looked at his coffee cup, he put down the column he was reading, muttered that he couldn’t drink this anymore, and threw the plastic cup straight toward the sink.
Some people now called his third job a troubleshooter.
★ ★ ★
“Well, well. This is troublesome.”
Clicking his tongue once, Jonghyeon stopped the car and turned off the engine.
At twenty-five, Jonghyeon drove a rather nice car for his age.
Perhaps compensation for working with his life on the line.
‘Anyway, this damn country can’t do a single thing right.’
He had put the address from the documents into the navigation, but there was no dungeon to be found—only a wide road with a daycare center and a church next to it.
‘The rest is all rice paddies and fields!’
Scratching his head, Jonghyeon considered calling the agent, but it was obvious he’d get an “I don’t know” answer.
Since the agent hadn’t come to check the address on the documents himself.
Getting out of the car and looking around, Jonghyeon was debating whether to head to the rice paddies behind the daycare.
There was no portal to be seen.
Then, there was a tree about 4 meters tall in front of the daycare, and above it, he suddenly noticed a faint light swirling.
A strange gleam flashed across Jonghyeon’s eyes.
“Do portals have stealth functions these days?”
As if he had finally found it, Jonghyeon snorted briefly in derision, concentrated ki into his feet, and kicked off the ground.
Tatatadak-!
Running up the tree with both feet at a speed no one could perceive, Jonghyeon threw his body straight into the portal that appeared to be the dungeon entrance.
Sssk.
The portal sucked Jonghyeon in and disappeared from that spot.
When Jonghyeon’s eyes went dark for a moment and brightened again, a long corridor made of yellowish-brown bricks appeared before him.
“Uh…… uh?”
If his five senses were still working properly, the rear was definitely blocked!
“Huh? What is this. Don’t tell me there’s no exit!?”
Jonghyeon scrunched his face to the fullest and looked around.
---------= Author’s Afterword ---------=
In the case of the somewhat long tutorial, you may in fact read it lightly.
It contains the process of the protagonist gaining his power and the contemplation contained therein…
If you do not like such content, you may simply skim through it and move on to Part 26.
And since this is my first work, there is quite a bit of messiness in the early parts.
I do plan to revise, but even posting two parts a day is tight…
I would appreciate it if you could bear with it while reading ^_^
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Hello. I am the new author Eunchotdae.
It is an honor to serialize my work like this.
I ask for your interest and love.
In the somewhat long tutorial, I wanted to explain why and how the protagonist’s thoughts would change as the story progresses.
From “The Troubleshooter! Making a Name” onward, it will be a form more familiar to readers, so I ask for your love.
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As I kept writing and reread the first part based on Part 26, it definitely… gets more interesting toward the later parts…… ㅠㅠ
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I dare say if you read past Episode 30, you will fall for the charm of my writing! (Groundless confidence)