Chapter 3

Chapter 3

So what exactly was a scavenger?

Simply put, it was the term for Awakened who picked up valuables in ruined areas like this and sold them off.

Normally, when someone awakened, people assumed they would become a Hunter.

‘After all, hunting monsters means risking your life. It’s dangerous, and if you don’t have talent for combat, it’s brutally hard, isn’t it?’

Not everyone fought on the front lines.

That was why some Awakened chose to make a living rummaging through ruins like these instead of working for the government.

The world called such Awakened scavengers.

‘Ooh, lucky! The door’s already open!’

Grinning from ear to ear, Haejin ran over to the convenience store and cheerfully pulled the door open.

Dust that had accumulated over years of abandonment came cascading down.

‘It’s cleaner inside than I expected.’

Apparently, no other scavengers had been through here.

He headed straight for the register and, drawing on his experience working part-time, began searching it thoroughly.

And a moment later.

“Th-this is?!”

Deep inside one of the lower drawers, he found a bundle of cash.

Against all odds, he had actually hit the jackpot.

Ten-thousand- and fifty-thousand-won bills were bundled together with rubber bands.

When he counted them, the total was far larger than expected.

‘A whole 1.51 million won... Kyaa! So sweet, I’m gonna rot my teeth at this rate!’

Not only had he recovered the one million won he had spent as his investment(?), he had made another 510,000 won in pure profit.

They said people in rural towns used cash a lot, and he had already struck gold.

The residents had evacuated long ago, and even the government had abandoned this town.

With no hope that anyone would ever return, he didn’t feel particularly guilty.

‘All right, next up.’

He searched around some more, but only managed to find things like cigarettes and loose change.

After carefully putting the bundle of cash into the bag he had brought, he left the convenience store and looked around for his next target.

‘Ooh? I definitely have to check that out!’

As he scanned the surroundings, Haejin spotted something and his eyes widened.

[Yeonggwang Jewelry]

He had found a jewelry store packed with luxury goods.

He smelled money—no. Gold.

Clutching his pounding heart, he immediately ran over.

But.

“Tch... It’s already been looted once.”

From a distance, it had looked intact, so his hopes had been high.

Up close, however, the glass at the front entrance had already been shattered, and every display case inside had been smashed apart.

Other scavengers had clearly beaten him to it.

‘Well, I guess. It’s not like this neighborhood is insanely dangerous.’

Cheorwon had not yet completely transformed into a Demonic Realm.

It had merely been abandoned because monsters appeared frequently and supporting the area from the defensive line was difficult.

That also made it an ideal place for scavengers to operate.

Someone else had already thought of the same thing as Haejin.

Of course, that didn’t mean he was about to just walk away.

‘Still, it’s a jewelry store. There has to be something left, right?’

He stepped inside, crunching over shards of broken glass.

Wearing thick gloves, he began searching through the jewelry store.

Perhaps because the glass doors had been completely shattered, the place was in much worse condition than the convenience store.

Still, surely something had to be left somewhere.

Ignoring all the cabinets that had obviously already been cleaned out, he began searching drawers hidden away in the corners.

He found drawers containing hundreds of cases for rings, necklaces, and watches.

Naturally, every single one was empty. But after stubbornly opening them one by one without giving up.

“Niiice! Jackpot!!”

Had heaven truly rewarded Haejin’s persistence?

He found a single gold bracelet still sitting inside one of the cases.

It was fairly small, but surprisingly heavy, and most importantly, it glittered beautifully.

‘This... is real gold, right? How much would it be worth? Tch, I don’t really know anything about gold prices.’

But he knew one thing for certain.

Gold was expensive.

He slipped the bracelet into his backpack and continued searching in case anything else remained when.

Grrrr---

“Hup!”

In this quiet, eerie place, he heard the sound of some other ‘thing.’

The moment he heard it, he instinctively hid.

Crouching behind a display case, he carefully peeked his head out and looked around.

Sure enough, a huge dog had entered the jewelry store.

Calling it a dog made it sound almost cute and harmless, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth.

For starters, it was so massive that it looked more like a wolf than a dog.

On top of that, nearly half its body was rotten. It looked like a zombie, yet its sharp teeth remained perfectly intact.

Garbage Dog.

He was pretty sure that was the monster’s name.

‘A trash mob... Well, this is an area where monsters appear.’

The place had been deserted for years and was relatively safe because it was near the defensive line.

Still, it was also true that he had gotten far too careless and had been running around in excitement.

‘I’m screwed. I don’t have anything on me.’

Naturally, he had no combat abilities or skills, and worse still, he didn’t even have a weapon.

Even if it was just a trash mob, a monster was still a monster.

It was more than capable of tearing a Hunter apart.

Haejin cursed himself for being an idiot.

He should have brought at least some kind of weapon, or at the very least prepared a way to escape.

‘No, wait.’

Just as his entire body was trembling, a memory flashed through his mind like lightning.

[Safe Property]

-Safely protects real estate owned by the user.

-Prevents monsters from invading and keeps unauthorized individuals from entering.

-In addition, the user becomes invincible while inside property they own.

He had no combat skills, but he did have a defensive skill.

Safe Property.

Inside real estate he owned, he became ‘invincible’!

The moment he remembered those words, only one thought filled his mind.

‘If I can somehow make it back to the pension... I can survive!’

There was a way out.

Haejin immediately held his breath and began watching the Garbage Dog’s movements.

Grrrrr-!

Fortunately, it didn’t seem to have spotted him yet.

Keeping low, he slowly crept toward the entrance.

He desperately hoped he could escape like this.

Grrr- Bark--!

Perhaps even half-rotten undead dogs were still dogs.

It sniffed the air and instantly located Haejin.

At this point, there was no turning back.

“Aaaaaagh!”

He burst out of the jewelry store and sprinted like mad toward the pension.

It wasn’t that far away.

When he glanced back, the Garbage Dog was charging after him at full speed.

It was clearly faster than a human.

“I’m not dying like this... Not like this!!”

Clenching his teeth, he ran without looking back.

“Whew... That was close.”

The Garbage Dog had leaped at his back from directly behind him.

Its jaws tore the hood from his sweatshirt, but he had barely made it to safety.

He panted for a while, catching his breath.

Once he recovered and looked forward, a rather ridiculous sight unfolded before him.

-Grrr, bark! Bark bark bark!!

“So this is what ‘invincible’ means.”

The Garbage Dog glared at Haejin, frothing at the mouth as it tried to force its head forward.

But right at the boundary of the pension grounds.

It was stuck there, unable to enter as though an invisible wall stood in its way.

Curious, Haejin waved his hand around.

He couldn’t feel anything, but some kind of barrier that prevented monsters from entering seemed to be active.

“Wahahaha! You bastard. I’m a God-Tier Landlord, higher than even the Creator!!”

He gave the Garbage Dog a triumphant sneer.

As though it understood human speech, the creature thrashed around even more violently, but it wasn’t frightening in the slightest.

What are you going to do about it?

This is my house.

‘Wait. Speaking of which.’

Now that the tension had eased, his brain started working again.

An idea suddenly occurred to him.

‘Monsters can’t come inside, but I can freely cross the boundary. Doesn’t that mean I can just attack them?’

Haejin’s property was essentially a one-way street.

A place governed by rules that allowed only Haejin to freely come and go.

Looking around, he spotted a pipe lying nearby.

A heavily rusted, yet still sturdy, iron pipe.

With a heave-ho-, he lifted it up.

-Bark! Bark bark bark!!

He stared at the Garbage Dog, which was still going berserk without showing any sign of tiring.

Then he gripped the pipe tightly and thrust it straight forward.

Thwack!

-Yelp!

The iron pipe struck the Garbage Dog squarely in the mouth.

One solid blow sent the Garbage Dog collapsing to the ground.

‘D-did it really die? I killed it?!’

What he had only imagined actually worked in reality.

While he stood there stunned, a fanfare rang in his ears.

[You have defeated a Garbage Dog!]

[Level Up!]

“Holy shit...”

The Garbage Dog might have been a trash mob, but it wasn’t exactly weak.

It was dangerous enough that Hunters who had moved beyond the beginner stage usually formed parties to hunt one.

Maybe because he had managed to kill one while only Level 1.

He leveled up immediately.

But Haejin barely even noticed that.

‘Wait, this invincibility mode... isn’t it way more broken than I imagined?!’

He had thought he possessed no combat skills at all.

Strictly speaking, that was still true.

‘I can just lure monsters over here, stay invincible inside my property, and kill them.’

He had discovered a hunting method unique to himself, something no one else could imitate.

It was so ridiculously overpowered that even Haejin himself could hardly believe it.

Still holding the iron pipe, he let out a dazed chuckle.

* * *

“Ughhh... Damn, if I’d known this would happen, I would’ve worked out a little.”

For now, he dragged the Garbage Dog’s corpse into the yard.

It was larger than an ordinary big dog, so it was fairly heavy.

‘It can’t enter while it’s alive, but once it’s dead, I can bring it inside? Okay, learned something new.’

Killing monsters granted experience, and once enough experience accumulated, your level increased.

But no Hunter killed monsters just for experience.

The real value lay in the corpse.

Monster corpses were simply worth money.

Equipment manufacturing, magical research, alchemy, and so on and so forth.

Regardless of species or strength, they all had uses.

But.

‘The problem is, where do I even sell this?’

Using ‘Go Home,’ bringing it back to his rented room wouldn’t be difficult.

But the important part was that to sell monster remains, he had to go to a specialized exchange.

Carrying a corpse weighing more than twenty kilograms all the way there was absurd.

If he had a car, maybe, but there was no way someone as broke as Haejin owned one.

‘Hmm... No. Think like a landlord.’

This incident had taught him something.

He needed to abandon the mindset of an ordinary little citizen and adopt the mindset of a landlord.

That was the most important thing if he wanted to properly exploit this ability.

‘Why should I go through all the trouble of carrying this to the exchange? Now that I think about it, why not just rent a building near the monster exchange?’

Oh.

That actually made perfect sense.

He had a teleportation skill, so couldn’t he just pay for a place and travel back and forth?

‘Hah, seriously... Hehehe.’

There was a mountain of things to do from now on.

He was going to be busy, but he felt absolutely fantastic.

“Time to go make some money.”