The bank took forty-five minutes and the mild hostility of a branch manager who kept looking at the incoming transfer amount and then back at Moo-Hyun's pavement-dusted jacket like he was solving an equation that refused to balance.
He opened the account. The money arrived. He left.
He bought new shoes on the way home because his foot needed the support and because three hundred and fifteen million won had a way of making practical decisions feel less painful. He ate at a gimbap place on the corner, the kind with plastic stools and a television mounted too high on the wall, and he was halfway through his second order when the television became relevant to his life.
The chyron at the bottom of the screen read: VIRAL: UNIDENTIFIED CIVILIAN DEFEATS C-RANK GATE SPAWN IN MAPO-GU. FOOTAGE BELOW.
Moo-Hyun put down his chopsticks.
The footage was not good quality. Phone camera, shot from a third-floor window, shaky in the way of someone filming with both excitement and the reasonable concern that a monster was directly below them. But it was clear enough. Clear enough to show a man in a dusty jacket running at a C-Rank Gate Spawn with no weapon and no armor. Clear enough to show the kick. Clear enough to show the rubble coming down and the man limping away from it.
Clear enough, unfortunately, to capture audio.
"I am going to be very, very rich."
The anchor was speaking but Moo-Hyun had stopped processing the audio from the television. He was processing instead the number in the corner of the screen indicating the view count on the original upload.
Forty-one million.
He paid for his food and walked home faster than his foot wanted to allow.
His new phone, purchased thirty minutes ago with the first cash he had withdrawn from his new account, had no social media accounts connected to it. He intended to keep it that way. He intended this for approximately four minutes, which was how long it took him to sit on his bed, search his own name out of a compulsion he could not rationally justify, and find that Jeon Moo-Hyun was currently the top trending search term in South Korea.
The comments under the original video were not uniformly kind. A representative sample:
Is he insane or just stupid.
F-rank civilian one-shots a C-rank spawn with a SHOE. Someone check this man's actual rank.
the way he just walks up to it. zero fear. either he's S-rank concealed or he has absolutely nothing to lose.
"I am going to be very very rich" bro really said that over a dead monster. king behavior actually.
he's kind of.
The last comment had four hundred and twelve thousand likes and had been left unfinished, which the internet had interpreted as a complete artistic statement.
Moo-Hyun closed the search.
He opened it again.
He closed it again.
He lay on his back on his bed and stared at the ceiling water stain and thought, very carefully, about whether there was any version of the next several weeks that ended with him remaining anonymous. The system, for once, did not vocalize his conclusion, possibly because it recognized that some thoughts were too bleak for public broadcast.
His new phone rang.
Unknown number. Seoul area code.
He answered because he had made an error in judgment and would spend the rest of the novel living with the consequences of it.
"Mr. Jeon." The voice was female, low, precise. The voice of someone who did not call people to chat. "My name is Kang Seo-Yeon. I'm the director of the Cheongryong Guild. I watched your video this morning."
Moo-Hyun sat up slowly. Every Hunter in South Korea knew that name. Every civilian who watched the news knew that name. Kang Seo-Yeon, SS-Rank, Cheongryong Guild Director, the woman who had cleared the Jeju Island S-Rank Gate three years ago with a team of four and come out with zero casualties and an expression like she had run a mildly challenging errand.
"How did you get this number," he said. "I bought this phone two hours ago."
A brief pause. "I have resources."
"That's concerning."
"Mr. Jeon. I'd like to offer you a meeting."
[SYSTEM: Current thought detected.]
[Rendering in 3... 2... 1...]
"She sounds like someone who considers 'offer' and 'inform' to be synonyms."
The silence on the line had a specific texture. Not offended. Recalibrating.
"Your system ability," she said. "I've read the preliminary reports."
"There are preliminary reports."
"There are always preliminary reports when something unusual happens inside city limits." Her tone did not shift. "The vocalization aspect is noted. I'm choosing not to take the observation personally."
"Most people do."
"I'm not most people." A pause that felt deliberate. "Tomorrow. 10 AM. Cheongryong headquarters in Yeouido. I'll send a car."
"I haven't said yes."
"You haven't said no." Another pause, shorter. "The car will be there at nine forty-five, Mr. Jeon. I'll see you tomorrow."
She ended the call.
Moo-Hyun looked at his phone. The screen showed the call duration. Forty-seven seconds. In forty-seven seconds, the director of the most powerful guild in South Korea had obtained his brand-new private number, called him, and scheduled a meeting he had not agreed to attend.
He was going to attend. He knew he was going to attend. The system knew he was going to attend.
[SYSTEM: Thought detected — "She's either going to offer me something genuinely useful or this is the beginning of something I cannot predict."]
[Rendering suppressed. Insufficient emotional charge threshold.]
For once, he was grateful.
He set the phone down and opened his laptop, intending to research Cheongryong Guild's standard recruitment contracts. He had the page open for three minutes before a different problem made itself known.
The problem announced itself via the television he had left running, which was now showing a live stream feed rather than a news broadcast. He had not changed the channel. The building's shared cable service had a deal with several streaming platforms, which meant the television cycled automatically to high-viewership live content after a period of inactivity.
The high-viewership live content currently running was Han Da-Eun's stream.
Han Da-Eun, S-Rank Hunter, celebrity, owner of the nation's most-watched dungeon stream, was sitting in front of her camera in full combat gear looking like she had been personally insulted by the laws of physics. Behind her, a donjon gate pulsed in slow purple rhythm. Her stream counter read two point three million concurrent viewers. The donation ticker was moving too fast to read.
She was holding up a phone. On the phone screen was the Mapo-gu footage.
"Watch this part," she said to her audience, with the precise diction of a woman operating at the outer edge of her patience. "Watch. This part. Right here."
She played the clip. She paused it at the moment Moo-Hyun's system had vocalized.
Across two point three million screens, his voice said: "I am going to be very, very rich."
"This man," Han Da-Eun said, setting the phone down with controlled force, "has been trending for six hours. This man, with no rank, no guild, no weapon, just shoes, some kind of deranged confidence and apparently a system that ANNOUNCES EVERYTHING HE THINKS, has forty-one million views." She leaned toward the camera. "I have been doing this for four years. Four years. My best clip has nine million views and in it I am fighting an A-Rank dungeon boss with both arms and it nearly kills me." A pause. "He kicked a rock."
The chat was moving faster than reading. From what Moo-Hyun could parse:
DA-EUN IS JEALOUS LMAOOO.
she's been refreshing his view count all day.
"just shoes" I'm crying.
someone find this man.
Han Da-Eun pointed at the camera. "I'm not jealous. I want to be extremely clear. I am not jealous of a man who talks to himself in public and fights monsters in civilian footwear." She picked her phone back up. "I just want to know who he is. For professional reasons. Because someone with zero apparent combat training should not be able to one-shot a C-Rank Gate Spawn, and as a professional Hunter I find that suspicious." A brief pause. "That's all."
that's all she says.
"professional reasons" said while staring at the clip for the sixth time.
da-eun really said i am normal about this.
Moo-Hyun watched her replay the clip a seventh time.
[SYSTEM: Current thought detected.]
[Rendering in 3... 2... 1...]
"She's going to find me before Kang Seo-Yeon's car arrives tomorrow."
He closed the laptop. He looked at the ceiling. He thought, without any particular drama, that his second life was going to be considerably more complicated than his first.
His phone buzzed. Text message, unknown number, different area code from Kang Seo-Yeon's call.
Found you. Don't run. Running is rude. — HD
He stared at the message for a long time.
Then another buzz.
Also your system is hilarious. I've watched the clip fourteen times. Don't tell anyone I said that.