Chapter 5

Jin

[ 180,553P ]

"...These pile up disgustingly fast."

One hundred eighty thousand points from two trash posts. Considering I'd already spent twenty thousand points, that meant I'd earned two hundred thousand in total.

Thinking about what I could do with these points made it even more absurd.

I could buy several secret manuals or grimoires that, if even one of them were released, could easily overturn the mortal world.

And if I wrote just a few more posts here, I would probably be able to obtain things that could truly be called materials for defying the heavens.

Of course, the problem, if it could be called one, was that using those heaven-defying materials was rather difficult.

They weren't called heaven-defying for no reason.

At my current level, they were things I couldn't even touch.

Still, I'd already decided on a way to resolve that problem to some extent.

I couldn't guarantee it would absolutely work, but at least according to my intuition, it should be more than possible.

So that wasn't the hardship I was currently facing.

"W-What business brings you here, sir?"

An elderly goblin, clearly flustered, stammered.

Originally, what he intended to say probably wasn't something like, What business brings you here, sir?

Uuugh-

A... Aah...

If the guards collapsed behind me along the path I'd come were still fine.

If I had been the one dragged in here looking like that instead of the guards.

He would surely have shouted something like, What the hell are you doing barging in here?!

"What do you think I'm here for?"

"T-That..."

It was an incredibly rude way of speaking.

But this was how mages spoke on average.

Among cultivators, mages, martial artists, and augmenters, who were counted among the four major classes of ability users, mages were considered the least human of the lot.

Meaning they were even worse than artificial humans.

I was merely remaining thoroughly faithful to that portrayal.

Of course, because of that, the old goblin's expression was rotting away after receiving a question in response to his own.

From his perspective, I was probably no different from a disaster that had fallen from the sky.

And while that goblin's ordeal continued.

'...Hm?'

At some point, I saw the look in his eyes change for a brief moment.

In that instant, I reflexively wrapped a barrier around my body.

Clang-!

Immediately afterward, a bullet fired from behind struck the partition made of my mana and fell.

With a metallic sound, the horribly deformed bullet rolled across the floor.

With that, the life-or-death ambush ended in failure.

The face of the guy who had pulled the trigger went blank in real time.

"Ha."

With a hollow laugh, I lightly waved my hand.

The mana floating in the air compressed into a single line, and following my gesture, that line severed the necks of the men sprawled behind me.

"H-Hiiieek-!"

Red lines appeared across all their throats at once, and they died.

The old goblin, witnessing the sight, immediately slammed his head to the floor and shouted.

"P-Please, just spare me!!!"

I had been planning to spare him even if he hadn't said that.

After all, I needed him right now.

Shhhhhhh-

But perhaps because his terror had gone too far, an ominous sound followed.

As I watched a yellow puddle form on the floor along with it, I seriously hesitated.

...Should I just kill him?

_____________

Cause of Death: Pissed Himself on the Floor.

Having narrowly avoided that ending, the old goblin bowed his head while assuming as submissive a posture as possible.

"A-And I have a bit of a reputation in this line of work, sir. However you found out, you've come to exactly the right place!"

I mostly ignored the goblin's empty flattery.

I had intended to handle only what I needed and leave anyway.

If he hadn't tried to block me with guards in the first place, there would have been no need to shed blood like this.

It's not like I'm some kind of killing machine.

If you had to categorize them, they were admittedly closer to villains than decent people, but killing people still wasn't exactly pleasant.

Of course, even that was a little surprising. Lee Yeonghyeon was one thing, but even when killing the others, I hadn't felt any agitation beyond discomfort.

Was it because I had gained power?

Or did everyone who used magic end up changing like this?

"Do you perhaps have an identity you were already using?"

"I do, but I'm planning to erase it entirely."

"Ah, I see. Of course, that is possible as well."

Despite his voice sounding calm at first glance, the old goblin's arms trembled as he moved between the shelves.

The trembling was so obvious it looked as though an earthquake were running through his entire body, which was absurd.

Of course, it was true that I had chopped all his subordinates to pieces.

But it was obvious this guy had killed dozens of times more people than I ever had.

"I won't kill you after the work's done."

"...?"

"Stop trembling. I'm telling you to hurry up and finish what I asked."

"Y-Yes, sir."

He didn't look like he believed me at all, but he could think whatever he wanted.

If he refused to believe me, the only one who would suffer for it was him.

In any case, the work soon began.

He brought out an assortment of extremely complicated devices and began manipulating them.

He stacked three old terminals together and inserted an unidentified chip between them.

Then he pulled out the connection cable attached to the back of his neck and plugged it into one of them.

Hummm─

Dozens of windows then appeared in midair.

At first, I thought this was the process of forging an identification card.

But it wasn't.

"What's this?"

"T-The citizen network, sir."

The old goblin pushed one of the screens aside with a trembling hand.

Behind it, similar windows appeared one after another. Residence records, tax records, medical records, entry and exit records.

Those were only the ones I could recognize. The rest consisted entirely of numbers and letters whose meanings I couldn't even understand.

It was a somewhat fascinating sight.

Of course, things like this had been depicted to some extent, but honestly, my knowledge related to augmenters was comparatively shallow.

After all, past a certain point, those guys practically became something like priests of the Machine God.

Now, enter the player─!

His hand movements were little different from some hacker in a Korean crime drama shouting a line like that.

Of course, unlike that fiction, what was happening here involved actual manipulation.

"Do you really have to write down all this?"

"A person can't just suddenly sprout out of the ground, can they, sir?"

That was true.

The biography he fabricated for me at length was quite detailed.

I had supposedly lived on the outskirts of Hyeondeok City starting three years ago, then begun renting a room inside the city six months ago while taking commissions and outsourced jobs.

It was information suitable for the kind of identification I'd requested, one that would let me operate with a reasonable degree of freedom.

"All right, it's finished."

"That was faster than I expected. You didn't half-ass it, did you?"

"Such─! An utterly outrageous accusation..."

The old goblin protested his innocence with his entire body.

I let out a quiet snicker and spoke.

"Name."

"Pardon? My name is Kriks..."

"No, I need a name to put on the identification card."

Apparently embarrassed by that himself, he scratched the back of his head and asked again.

"Ah, my apologies. What should I put down, sir?"

Oz.

I almost answered reflexively, but stopped myself.

It was a familiar name, but using it came with a few complications.

Of course, there probably wasn't anyone who would hear the name Oz and connect me in the gallery to my real appearance.

Even so, using the same name still felt unpleasant.

The same went for the name Jin Sehun.

It was a common name in Haedong Nation, and also the name I'd been using for the past three years.

But it felt like bad luck itself would cling to me if I kept using it.

There wasn't a single good memory from any moment I'd lived under that name.

"Jin."

"Jin. Will that be enough?"

"Yeah."

And so, from my original name and the name of this body.

I chose as my name the one syllable the two had in common.

_______________

Madam Poppy, the owner of the Zelkins Inn, greeted the morning in a very good mood.

Judging by her puffed-up shoulders and visibly excited expression, nine times out of ten someone would assume it had something to do with a man.

And usually, that assumption would be correct.

But today was a little different.

The reason it was only 'a little' different was that a man was indeed the reason for her good mood.

It just wasn't because she'd seduced and slept with some broad-shouldered muscular man, but because the wealthy drifter who had arrived the previous night had paid more than three times the usual lodging fee.

And he was even staying long-term for an entire month.

How she'd managed to suppress the look of sheer delight the instant she'd seen that wad of bills.

In any case, having suddenly come into a tidy lump sum, she was able to enjoy a refreshing morning.

"Hm-hmm-hmm-"

She prepared breakfast while humming cheerfully.

Breakfast was provided to the guests who had paid for meals.

According to the usual rules, they were supposed to come down to the first floor and eat in the dining room, but the pale young man who had arrived the night before wanted his meals brought to his room.

What did that matter?

He was a guest casually handing over the enormous sum of five hundred thousand hwan.

All she wanted was for him to stay there for as long as possible.

And so, the madam climbed the stairs while swaying her large hips.

Then, after lightly knocking knock-knock on the door, she entered.

Kwagagak-!

"...!!!"

And at the exact same moment.

Some chunk of metal flew viciously past the side of her face.

It buried itself more than an inch into the wall and trembled, unable to contain its own force.

If it had been even an inch off to the side, she might have been badly injured or killed.

The moment she realized that, the madam dropped the plate she had been holding straight onto the floor.

Crash-!

With a sharp noise, the porcelain shattered into pieces.

And at that same moment, Jin's mind, which had been immersed in a state of selflessness, awakened.

The chaotic scene spread out before him.

Looking at the madam who had collapsed onto the floor, Jin merely shrugged.