The room stank faintly of instant noodles and old laundry. A dim desk lamp flickered, barely pushing back the shadows that clung to every corner of the tiny dorm room. Textbooks were piled like barricades around a scrawny boy who sat hunched over his desk, his eyes bloodshot from too many late nights. His cheap glasses slid down the bridge of his nose for the hundredth time that day, but he barely noticed as his shirt bore stains of uncertain origin, his hair stuck up in tired clumps, and the dark circles beneath his eyes looked permanent.
At the center of the mess lay a worn paperback, its edges frayed and its cover bent nearly in half. The title read The Power of Heaven. He traced the letters with a finger, hesitated for a moment, then flipped the book open once again, scrolling furiously through the last chapter on his screen as well to double-check.
It was supposed to be just another web novel he had stumbled across in his endless scrolling. A world in the twentieth century plagued by dungeons, gates opening like wounds to other realms filled with monsters. Hunters, ranked from F to SS, were humanity's shield. A boy loses his family in a dungeon break, survives against all odds, and rises step by step until he becomes the strongest hunter in the world—an SS-rank prodigy blessed with the so-called Power of Heaven. An SS-rank. A legend.
The story had the usual flare—guilds rising and falling, monsters flooding out of gates, glory won with blood. In time, the boy even founded his own guild, the Lion Guild, and the world sang his name. The great hero who had risen from tragedy. The strongest hunter alive.
And then, the boy read the last lines in silence.
Marrying his best friend.
The novel carried on regardless, blind to his questions. It ended not with revelation, but with the protagonist's marriage. A happily-ever-after that felt more like a curtain hastily pulled across an unfinished stage.
The scholarship student slammed his hand against the desk, rattling an empty can of soda. "WHAT THE HECK!" His voice cracked in the stillness of the room.
As he turned each page, a thought had gnawed at him. If the main character had climbed so high, if he had wielded such monstrous power… why had he never once tried to end the dungeons themselves? Why had he never asked where they came from?
He glared at the screen. "That's it? He marries his childhood friend? After all that? Shouldn't he, I don't know, do something useful like stop the dungeons from appearing? Isn't that the obvious goal?"
His words fell flat against the clutter. No one answered.
Frustration simmering, he clicked his tongue. Then, in a fit of boldness, he tracked down the author's contact information. Grinding his teeth, he yanked open his email and typed with reckless speed. One long night of typing produced paragraphs of complaints, questions, and thinly veiled insults, filled with questions no one else seemed to ask. He hit send with more satisfaction than he should have felt.
Days later—or was it merely two minutes later?—a reply popped up. Short. Almost mocking.
The boy blinked. That was… fast.
If you want answers, why not solve the mystery yourself?That's a mystery you'll have to solve yourself.
He read it once. Twice. The words refused to change. The boy stared at the screen for a long time, then shut the laptop with a snap. "What is wrong with this author?" His mutter came out strangled with disbelief.
Irritated and a little embarrassed, he slumped back in his chair, but the glowing monitor gave him no answers. With a sigh, he dragged himself across the cramped room, tossed himself onto the bed, pushing aside shirts that had never made it to the laundry, and let exhaustion take him. Sleep took him quicker than expected, though it was anything but peaceful. His dreams twisted with images of gaping dungeons and monsters with too many teeth.
When light seeped through his eyelids, he groaned and rubbed at his face. When he opened his eyes again, the world had changed.
Something felt wrong. Too wrong.
He sat up.
No cramped dorm. No piles of textbooks. No blinking laptop light. The air smelled different. Clean. Crisp. Not the stale musk of instant noodles and old laundry. The sheets beneath his hands were soft, almost silk-like, and the room around him was impossibly tidy.
He froze.
A mirror on the wall stared back at him with someone else's face. A tall young man. Black hair neatly combed. Eyes an unsettling shade of red, sharp and alert. His nightwear looked more expensive than his entire apartment lease.
"What… in the world?" His pulse hammered. That wasn't him. That couldn't be him.
Stumbling out of the room, he found himself on a dirt road lined with unfamiliar buildings, the air heavy with the scent of smoke and iron—yet simultaneously, he was inside a sleek, modern apartment with glass windows that offered a view of a sprawling cityscape. The jarring overlap of realities settled into a terrifying truth: he was inside The Power of Heaven.
Then the sound of a television drew his attention.
"…the Lion Guild, led by SS-rank hunter Baek Hyeon, continues its domination…"
The boy's head snapped toward the screen. A news anchor spoke cheerfully, the words flowing past his ears in a blur. What mattered was the photograph displayed on the screen. It was his new face. Black hair. Red eyes. The caption beneath it read:
Beom Seok.
The name sent a chill through him. He racked his brain, flipping through every scene of The Power of Heaven he had endured. There had never been anyone called Beom Seok.
He whispered the name, testing it, hating how foreign it felt on his tongue. "Beom Seok?"
And then, with a sudden, crushing realization, his stomach dropped. He was not the tragic protagonist. He was not one of the glittering hunters that stood at the top of the world. No… he was just a nobody. A face in the crowd. A background character without a single line in the novel.
"I'm… I'm just a background character."
At least, that was what he thought.
Until a mechanical voice rang inside his head.
System: Mission unsuccessful. Host must be punished.
His heart jumped into his throat. "What… what was that?"
System: Initiate level 8 punishment. Fight until death.
The boy blinked, absolute panic welling in his chest. "What?"
But no answer came. Only the cold, terrifying silence of a world that was suddenly all too real.