Wolf had seen Zenji's kind before.
Countless times.
Men who built their lives brick by brick, blade by blade—only to let love, memory, and blood tie weights to their ankles.
People who mistook restraint for virtue, caution for wisdom. They valued family so deeply that it hollowed them out, until protecting what they loved became the very thing that crippled them.
Most ended the same way.
Yet among all those faces, one stood apart.
Rupert Redway.
The memory rose unbidden, sharp and unyielding, like a blade pulled from velvet.
Rupert Redway sat alone in his study.
The room was paneled in dark oak, the wood polished until it drank the light rather than reflected it.
Shadows clung to the corners, softened only by the low amber glow of a desk lamp whose brass arm had been adjusted countless times by a meticulous hand.
Bookshelves lined the walls—ledgers, property records, racing statistics, political memoirs—each arranged with obsessive precision.
Cigar smoke hung heavy in the air, curling lazily toward the ceiling in pale spirals.
The scent was rich and expensive—aged tobacco, faintly sweet, with a bitter undertone that lingered at the back of the throat.
Rupert himself looked carved rather than born.
His face was thin, sharp, defined by years of measured decisions and sleepless nights. Pale gray eyes sat beneath brows that had learned to remain still even when the world burned.
Fine wrinkles traced his skin—not from indulgence, but hardship—yet his complexion remained clean, radiant, carefully maintained. A pencil mustache rested above his upper lip, trimmed with near-military precision.
He wore a three-piece suit of dark blue pinstripe wool. The vest beneath was fully buttoned, no exceptions. A gold pocket watch hung across it on a Double Albert chain, glinting softly when he shifted.
On his little finger sat a signet ring, engraved with the crest of the Redway Family—custom-made, unmistakable, heavy with inherited authority.
Then Wolf entered.
He approached from across the desk, Fah gliding at his left side like a silent echo. She wore a white dress—simple in cut, immaculate in form—its fabric whispering faintly as she moved.
Wolf at that time stood near his current height, but leaner, sharper around the edges.
His eyes were wider then, more openly luminous, sparkling with an intensity that hadn't yet learned restraint. His hair was jet black—thick, slightly unkempt—and fell nearly to his waist. When he stood beside Fah, the resemblance was unmistakable, as though they had been shaped from the same shadow.
"Come on, old man."
Wolf placed both hands on the table.
The sound was not loud—but it was clean. Too clean. Like the edge of a blade biting into bone.
Though his tone was bright, almost playful, each word landed with unnerving clarity.
He leaned forward, shoulders rolling slightly, eyes locking onto Rupert's with predatory precision.
At times his pitch rose suddenly, emphasizing certain words like strikes in a duel.
"You know you have to take my offer."
Rupert didn't flinch.
He drew slowly on his cigar, exhaling through his nose before responding.
Wolf continued, voice gaining momentum.
"I could look after your son. Make sure he doesn't walk your path." His lips curled faintly.
"And I can deal with those Italians sniffing around your racetrack and betting shops. Even The Sweeney won't bother you anymore."
Wolf lowered his head, bringing his gaze level with Rupert's, eyes bright, unblinking.
"Come on. Take it. Now."
For a moment, the only sound was the faint ticking of the pocket watch as Rupert's thumb brushed its casing.
Then Rupert looked up.
A tired smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
"What a very tempting offer…" he said quietly.
His voice was calm, measured, worn smooth by years of negotiation.
"I appreciate your kindness, Mister Sawann." He paused, eyes drifting—not away, but inward. "But I'm afraid my shoes are only made for walking on the same old streets."
He shifted in his chair, the leather creaking softly.
"A sudden change of direction at this age could cause me to fall. And if I fall…"
His gaze hardened, just a little. "…I always pull the people around me down with me."
His hand tightened around the cigar.
"And my son," Rupert added, more softly. "He just graduated."
He looked back at Wolf fully then.
"You get what I mean, right?"
Wolf stared at him.
For a long moment, he said nothing.
Then he inhaled deeply—slow, deliberate—and exhaled once. The brightness in his eyes dimmed, replaced by something colder. He straightened, turned away from the desk, his long hair shifting down his back.
"You will not like what comes next," Wolf said calmly.
"Old man Rupert."
That was the last straw.
Despite Rupert's talent, despite his connections, he was shortsighted—overprotective to the point of paralysis. His love for his wife and son had become a cage he refused to step out of.
In the end, Wolf sent Fah.
She stood before Rupert later, her white dress unstained, her posture relaxed. Her Infantry Officer's Sword caught the light as she raised it effortlessly.
"Think of it as mercy," Fah said, her voice energetic, almost cheerful. "You don't have to live to see another world war."
The blade fell.
And Rupert Redway's head parted from his body in a single, flawless arc.
Wolf allowed one of his own to step into Rupert Redway's vacuum.
Quietly. Methodically.
Within a decade, that man—and the network Wolf had threaded through him—held a decisive share of influence in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Not through crowns or parliaments, but through rail contracts, shipping insurance, labor unions, and the invisible arteries that fed the state.
By the time the public noticed anything amiss, the system had already learned to breathe with Wolf's lungs.
That was later.
Much earlier—long before names like Redway or Sawann carried weight—Wolf had been nothing.
He was born in 1911, three years before the Great War ignited the world.
An abandoned child.
His mother left him at the edge of a forest, where the undergrowth thinned into rough farmland and the earth smelled of damp rot and old leaves.
No note. No prayer.
Just a bundle placed where she hoped fate would make the decision for her.
Fate did.
An old man found him while foraging—bent-backed, sinewed, his hands scarred by years of traps and thorns.
The man stared at the infant for a long time before lifting him, as if weighing more than flesh.
The village was hidden—not by magic, but by intent.
Three households. All related by blood or marriage.
Families who had cleared land far from roads and records, choosing isolation over exploitation.
Some had fled taxes. Others had sought land of their own after the abolition of slavery reshaped ownership.
They lived without machines, without protection, without mercy from nature.
They took the child in for many reasons.
They spoke of karma. Wandering spirits. Fate repaid in kindness.
But the truest reason was simpler.
Children were the future workforce.
In a world without welfare or surplus, people were the most valuable resource.
One more child meant more hands in five years. More eyes at night. More strength if illness or accident took someone away. An extra life reduced the chance of a family ending altogether.
Wolf grew up among them.
He learned to gather firewood before he could read. Learned to recognize animal tracks, to ration grain, to sleep lightly.
He was a curious child—too curious. Always asking questions. Always wandering when he should have been still.
When news of the Great War reached them, it was already a year old.
To the village, it sounded like a fable. Their reality was mud, hunger, and claws in the dark.
War across the sea meant nothing—until conscription notices came.
The younger men left.
All of them.
The village hollowed overnight.
What remained were grandparents in their 80s, parents in their 50s, and children who suddenly had to carry the weight of survival.
It was then that Wolf first felt it.
Something unlocking.
The idea of a world larger than trees and soil.
Conflicts vast enough to reshape nations.
Systems, power, movement. His questions multiplied—but the answers never came.
No one there knew enough. No one there wanted to know.
The unease grew.
Day by day, the village felt smaller. Tighter. Like a cage built from good intentions and fear.
This place is holding me down.
The thought settled as conclusion.
What followed was not rage nor panic.
It was planning.
He chose a day when the humidity hung heavy and the rice stalks were high enough to swallow a body.
Wolf approached his father first.
He suggested they split up to cover more ground, claiming it would make the harvest faster. The man, proud of the boy's initiative, turned his back. Wolf gripped the sickle, its curved blade glinting. With a sudden, primal surge, he swung the tool low and hard.
The blade tore through the man's groin, severing the femoral artery and the genitals in one horrific, jagged motion. The father collapsed into the mud, his screams muffled by the thick wall of rice. Wolf watched with cold curiosity as the man bled out in seconds, then dragged the heavy corpse deeper into the stalks, hidden by the Ear of Rice.
He moved with the silence of a predator. He found his mother near the edge of the clearing.
The sickle swung again, a mirrored strike that left her gasping and dying in the dirt.
He tracked down the grandfather and grandmother. They were fragile and slow.
They didn't even have the strength to look up before the steel found them.
Within an hour, the three households of the Hidden Village were silenced, the only sound being the buzzing of flies and the rustle of the wind through the grain.
Wolf returned to the empty houses. He felt no remorse.
By dawn, the houses were empty. By noon, smoke climbed into the sky, carrying with it fields, livestock, and memory alike. Resin-fed flames devoured wood and straw with equal hunger.
By the time the fire died, nothing remained worth returning to.
Wolf did not look back.
He walked toward the direction the soldiers had once come from—the ones who spoke of the Great War with unfamiliar words and distant eyes.
It took him three days to find another settlement.
During those days in new settlement, he learned how to live unseen.
How to steal without being caught. How to listen without being noticed. Each theft taught him something—about people, about routes, about the shape of the outside world.
He learned about trains.
Iron machines that crossed countries in hours. That connected cities like nerves in a body.
One night, thin and patient, he slipped into a rail yard.
And disappeared into motion.
After the train carried him farther than the forests ever could, Wolf drifted through streets that smelled of coal smoke, damp stone, and human closeness.
He wandered for hours—scavenging scraps, watching people, memorizing rhythms—until the shape of a familiar institution emerged from the haze.
An orphanage.
Its gates were iron but unguarded. Its walls were old brick, worn smooth by decades of weather and children's hands.
When he stepped inside, no one asked his name at first. They only saw a thin boy with sharp eyes and a silence too practiced for his age.
He was taken in.
For the first time in his life, he learned to read.
Letters became doors. Words became worlds. Books stacked higher than his chest, and he devoured them with a hunger deeper than any he had known in the village.
History, geography, mechanics, stories of war and empire—each page felt like oxygen.
His chest felt full in a way it never had before.
Fulfillment.
Joy.
A rare, dangerous contentment.
For a brief moment, Wolf believed he had found a place that could hold him without suffocating him.
Then 1918 arrived.
The Spanish Flu swept through cities like a silent executioner.
Children fell ill overnight. Caregivers collapsed at their posts.
The orphanage became a place of whispered prayers, soaked cloths, and hurried footsteps.
Death was no longer distant—it was constant.
Wolf watched teachers weep in corners they thought unseen.
Watched beds empty and remain empty.
Watched books go untouched as grief consumed time and strength.
And with each loss, something colder grew inside him.
If this continues I will stop learning.
The idea was unbearable.
Knowledge was movement. Knowledge was survival. Knowledge was the only thing that had ever truly fed him. To lose access to it—to be trapped again by circumstance—was unthinkable.
So he chose erasure.
This time, there was no hesitation.
He was bigger now. Faster. Smarter.
He knew how systems worked—how attention moved, how panic spread, how absence could erase presence.
When the orphanage vanished from the city's map, so did his identity.
By the time smoke curled into the night sky, Wolf was already walking away.
Or so he thought.
Footsteps followed him—light, confident, unafraid.
He stopped beneath a flickering streetlamp and turned.
She stood there unscathed by ash or fear, her posture relaxed, her eyes sharp with curiosity rather than accusation.
There was strength in her stance—trained, instinctive. Not a child who survived by luck.
"You move like someone who doesn't intend to die young," she said casually.
Wolf studied her in silence.
Interesting.
She had followed him without hesitation. Had read the situation and chosen pursuit instead of safety.
That alone placed her outside the ordinary.
He didn't object when she kept walking beside him.
When she finally asked, "What's your name?" he glanced at her, then deflected smoothly.
"What's yours?"
She grinned—bright, unburdened, almost defiant.
"My name is Fah!"
Wolf laughed. A real laugh, sharp and sudden, startling even himself.
"My name is Sawann."
Fah clapped her hands together. "Fah and Sawann, huh?! Sky and heaven! That's a bonded name if I've ever heard one! I like it!"
She laughed endlessly, her voice cutting cleanly through the night.
Wolf smiled.
For the first time since the village, he didn't walk alone.
From that moment, he decided something fundamental.
To gain knowledge without limits, one must never stay still.
Their journey began in 1918—moving through cities, borders, languages, continents.
They learned by listening, observing, inserting themselves into the cracks of the world.
Wolf absorbed systems. Fah mastered execution. Together, they became something sharper than survival.
By 1926, Wolf founded his first organization—not for power, but for reach. Information, talent, influence. A web designed to gather the world and feed it back to him piece by piece.
Much later—after he was summoned to another world—he tried to recreate that structure through Klion.
Only to discover the truth.
And when the truth revealed itself, the plan had to change.
And this time—
It failed.
Now Wolf's thoughts no longer drifted aimlessly—they circled a single, increasingly sharp suspicion.
The system.
It had been bothering him for a long time, gnawing at the edges of his awareness like a splinter lodged too deep to ignore.
He let his breath slow as the familiar translucent interface hovered faintly before his inner sight, its cold precision standing in stark contrast to the chaotic weight of his memories.
It measured him.
But not him.
Name: Anantawat Thiphavong
Gender: Male
Race: Human
Age: 23
Height: 178 cm
Titles: First Looter, First Hand, The Brutalist, The Apex Feaster, The Hundredfold Hand, Relentless Hunter, Fatemaker's Logic, Mad Shadow of Seizing
Level: 35
Stats:
STR: 45 (+1) | SPD: 31 | AGI: 35 | STA: 34 | END: 30 (+3) | POW: 30 | LUCK: 20
Mental Stats:
INT: 23 (+13) | CHA: 20 (+13) | FORTITUDE: 20 (+10) | EVILNESS: 50 (+14)
Alignment: Evil
Active Skills: Red Tide, Thousand-Kill Toll, Kinetic Accumulation, I-SCS, Hysteria Outbreak, Madman's Grip
Passive Skills: Adaptive Nutrition, Artisan's Instinct, Analytic Sight, Flawless Strike, Shadow Parasite, Madness Synchronicity
Twenty-three.
Wolf's eyes narrowed slightly.
That number alone was already a lie—or rather, a deliberate omission.
It was not his real age. Not even close. It was the age of this body, nothing more.
Flesh, bone, ether circulation—purely physical parameters. No past. No accumulated centuries of blood, fire, knowledge, and movement across worlds.
The system only acknowledged what stood here.
Not what had walked before.
Wolf exhaled quietly through his nose, the corner of his mouth twitching—not quite a smile.
Wolf leaned back slightly, the surface beneath him cool against his spine.
He let the interface fade.
The age it showed—twenty-three—was already proof enough. The system did not recognize continuity of existence. Only the current vessel. Only the measurable now.
But more important than that…
The quests.
Wolf's brow furrowed.
There had been many moments—many—when a quest should have appeared. Turning points. Decisions heavy enough to bend fate. Conversations that reshaped lives. And yet… nothing.
Not once.
Since arriving in this world, no quest had ever triggered after he was already here.
Which meant the quests were not divine instructions.
They were not fate.
They were not guidance.
They were—
"Communication," Wolf murmured softly, the word barely disturbing the air.
Yes.
That was it.
The quest system was merely a communication path—a one-sided channel formed when direct understanding was impossible.
The Hornmaw boss.
That first quest had not been a command—it had been a conversation. A declaration of intent between predator and predator, translated into system language because no other medium existed.
And Lenmi…
Wolf's eyes dimmed slightly.
For Lenmi, the quest had not come from her.
It had come from Lysander.
Deep within that man's soul was a yearning—a desire for a disciple, for continuation, for meaning beyond his own decay.
The system had merely given shape to that unspoken wish.
Which meant—
With Moritz, Solina, Zenji.
There had been no need.
They spoke. They listened. They understood.
So the system remained silent.
Wolf let out a slow breath.
Only if That's how it really works…
His thoughts drifted back to Zenji.
Why had Rupert surfaced in his mind the moment he saw him?
Wolf's gaze unfocused, memories overlapping like reflections on warped glass.
Was it because he sensed the same fault line?
Someone strong. Someone capable. Someone shackled by love, fear, and the weight of what they refused to risk.
"Perhaps," Wolf admitted quietly.
But that no longer mattered.
What mattered now was rebuilding.
An organization was not a structure—it was a convergence of wills. And for that…
I need Fah.
Not sentimentally. Not nostalgically. But functionally.
If the system truly worked the way he believed… then Fah—who had walked beside him since childhood, who had grown through war, blood, and ambition without ever losing her hunger—
"She'd be absurdly strong by now…"
A faint, dangerous glint passed through his eyes.
As for the others from his old organization…
Wolf had never bound them with chains. Never demanded loyalty through force.
He had let them chase their own desires, their own truths.
That freedom was precisely why he had never searched for them.
Would they return?
He didn't know for certain.
And he wouldn't decide for them.
Fah was different.
She had always been different.
And Lenmi—
Yes.
He would use Zenji's people to search for both Fah and Lenmi in the Quinthall Kingdom.
Quietly. Methodically.
No ripples large enough to attract House Vento's gaze.
Everything had to be completed within five years.
No more.
Any later, and the value of Hyung-woo's memories would begin to decay—tactical relevance, temporal advantage, psychological leverage.
Time was a blade.
"…Such a long way to go," Wolf muttered, his voice carrying neither complaint nor fatigue.
Then, slowly, he smiled.
"Well," he said softly, almost fondly, "that's what makes human life so enjoyable, isn't it?"
His eyes sharpened with resolve.
"We were born as humans."
"Therefore, we should live as humans!"