Chapter 3 — The Calm Before the Fracture
Rain fell that evening.
Not a storm — just a thin, persistent drizzle that turned the streets silver and painted the world in reflections. Neon lights smudged in puddles. Tires hissed. Umbrellas bloomed like dark flowers along the sidewalks.
Kim Jae-hwan walked without one.
Water soaked through his uniform, clinging coldly to his skin, but the sensation barely registered. After being burned alive in regression eight and frozen beneath glacial wyrm breath in regression forty-two, ordinary rain had no meaning.
He liked it, though.
Rain blurred edges.
It made everything feel slightly unreal, like a scene seen through glass.
He stopped beneath the awning of a closed bookstore. The smell of paper and dust seeped faintly through the door — familiar, nostalgic in a way his heart no longer knew how to process.
Across the street stood the Hunter Aptitude Center.
Bright. Clean. Too new for the world it would soon inhabit.
Large banners fluttered over the entrance:
> NATIONAL APTITUDE EVALUATION — THREE DAYS REMAINING
Students clustered around the doors, pointing and chattering excitedly.
"I heard a guy awakened right during testing last year—"
"My cousin's C-rank already bought a motorcycle!"
"Idiot, motorcycles will be useless once Gates open."
"What's a Gate?"
"They're just rumors."
Rumors.
For now.
Jae-hwan watched them calmly.
He knew which of them would awaken. He could mark them by posture, gaze, the faint shimmer clinging to those closest to mana adaptation. He could predict who would live, who would die screaming, who would become famous, who would break quietly in hospital beds.
Three days.
Three days until the aptitude tests.
Four months until the First Gate opened in Seoul.
Seven years until the Calamity Cycle.
He could recite the timeline as easily as breathing — down to the hour of certain disasters. His life had long ago become a string of ticking clocks.
Lightning flickered faintly behind the clouds.
He felt it then — a tremor beneath the fabric of the world. A soft, nearly inaudible hum brushing along his bones. Mana, still diffuse, still unborn, gathering its courage just beyond the threshold of existence.
The future was leaning forward.
Waiting.
Hungry.
He closed his eyes.
Inside him, something shifted — not awakening, not yet, but memory aligning with inevitability. He knew how this version of him would gain power: painfully, slowly, methodically. Nothing dramatic. No sudden miracle. Just relentless accumulation.
That was fine.
He preferred it that way.
Dramatic heroes burned bright and died loud.
Architects worked in silence.
"Still standing in the rain?"
The voice came from his right.
He didn't need to turn to know who it was.
Lee Min-seok stepped under the awning, shaking water from his hair. He carried convenience store bags in both hands and grinned the same open, uncomplicated grin Jae-hwan had once trusted with everything.
"You'll catch a cold," Min-seok said.
Jae-hwan glanced at him. "That's not how viruses work."
"You know what I mean."
"I do."
Silence for a heartbeat.
Min-seok leaned against the wall beside him, close enough that their shoulders almost brushed. He had always done that — gravitated close, as if proximity alone could anchor him. Back then, Jae-hwan thought it meant loyalty.
Now he recognized it as unconscious dependence.
"You're thinking too much again," Min-seok said lightly. "Ever since the aptitude announcement, you're weirdly calm."
"Should I panic?" Jae-hwan asked.
"Well… yeah?" Min-seok laughed. "This decides our entire life path. Rank, guild prospects, everything. If I end up F-rank, I'm doomed."
"You won't," Jae-hwan replied.
Min-seok blinked. "You sound confident."
"I am."
Because he remembered.
Min-seok awakened as B-rank combat type in thirty-nine regressions. In three, he became A-rank. In one… S-rank, briefly, before dying in the Cascade Event.
Future shone around him like an outline only Jae-hwan could see.
"You'll do fine," Jae-hwan added.
"And you?" Min-seok asked.
"I'll manage."
Min-seok laughed again. "That's the most boring answer possible, you know that?"
Jae-hwan didn't respond.
He watched Min-seok instead — the crease at the corner of his eyes when he smiled, the unconscious habit of rubbing his neck when anxious, the slight unevenness to his shoulders from an old sports injury.
He recorded it all.
Every habit could be turned into a lever.
Every lever into a downfall.
"Hey," Min-seok said after a while, tone softening. "No matter what happens… we'll stick together, okay?"
It was the same line.
Regression 1.
Regression 5.
Regression 14.
Regression 22.
Regression 31.
Regression 44.
Spoken with unshaken sincerity every time.
Meaningless every time.
"Okay," Jae-hwan said.
He smiled.
It was perfect.
---
Night draped itself over the city with quiet inevitability.
The apartment lights glowed like stars in stacked constellations. Television murmurs leaked through thin walls. Chopsticks clinked. Laughter. Arguments. Life.
Kim Jae-hwan sat at his desk with the light off.
The room was swallowed in darkness except for the faint glow from the streetlamp outside. Rain traced slow paths down the windowpane, distorting the city beyond into shifting patterns of light and shadow.
On the desk in front of him lay:
old textbooks,
mock exam papers,
a cracked pen,
and a blank notebook.
He opened the notebook.
The first page was empty.
He had never used notebooks before in regressions — memory alone had been more than enough — but this time, he felt a faint, clinical curiosity about externalizing the architecture inside his head.
On the first line, he wrote:
PROJECT: COLLAPSE
His handwriting was neat.
Unhurried.
He divided the page into columns — names, leverage points, projected emotional trajectories, maximum tolerance thresholds. It looked less like revenge and more like research.
He began with Min-seok.
Core desire: recognition
Primary insecurity: being left behind
Emotional anchor candidates: future spouse, younger sister, public admiration
Breaking point: cognitive dissonance between self-image and reality
Ideal downfall timing: post-peak achievement
Preferred method: betrayal by mirror-self narrative
He filled the page.
Then the next.
Names slid from memory to paper with ruthless precision. Seo-yeon's section was long. His family's was shorter, but his pen paused there once — just for a moment — before continuing.
He wasn't angry.
He was thorough.
Hours passed unnoticed.
The world beyond the glass faded to deeper darkness, rain easing into silence. His room felt suspended — a small island cut off from time, lit only by streetlight and the glimmer of paper.
When he finally set the pen down, the notebook was half-full.
He leaned back in his chair.
His body ached faintly from sitting too long. His eyes were dry. His mind was clear — not peaceful, not restless, simply functioning at its optimized state.
He looked at his hands.
Nineteen-year-old hands.
Innocent to anyone else.
Tools to him.
He flexed his fingers slowly, feeling tendon and bone move beneath skin. He had broken these hands in caves and on battlefields more times than he could count, watched them burn, freeze, shatter — but they always returned to this state in the beginning.
A reset button carved into flesh.
He whispered into the dark:
"This world will not end by accident."
Not this time.
If apocalypse must come — and he had long since accepted that it must — then it would arrive sculpted, refined, deliberate.
The clock on his wall ticked softly.
The ceiling crack above his bed looked back like a map of branching timelines.
He lay down.
Sleep came quickly, not because he was tired — fatigue was a trivial sensation compared to the centuries he carried — but because dreams no longer touched him.
His mind, even resting, remained a quiet, lightless sea.
---
He stood in a corridor of mirrors.
He had been here before.
Not in the physical world — in that half-place between death and return, where time coagulated and memory gained weight. The mirrors stretched endlessly in both directions, each reflecting a different him.
Some were covered in blood.
Some wore armor.
Some laughed like madmen.
Some wept.
Some were monstrous.
None were happy.
He walked past them.
The mirrors whispered as he passed, voices overlapping.
—you died here—
—wrong choice—
—try again—
—again—
—again—
—again—
He didn't speed up.
He didn't slow down.
At the center of the corridor, where there should have been a wall or a door or something with shape, there was only darkness — vast and slow-breathing.
He felt it watching.
Not benevolent.
Not malicious.
Merely curious.
The same presence he had sensed near death, in the cracks between lives. The unseen observer. The one constant besides himself across every regression.
"So you're still there," he said quietly.
No reply.
Just a faint ripple through the dark, like the surface of water disturbed by distant thunder.
"Enjoying the show?" he asked.
Silence.
He smiled thinly.
"I won't give you what you want."
The darkness thrummed — not offended, not angered, just attentive.
"I won't despair," he continued. "I won't break. I won't scream for you anymore."
He placed a hand against the void.
It was cold.
He leaned forward, voice dropping to a whisper.
"I will become boring."
The darkness pulsed.
For the first time — maybe it was only imagination — something in that incomprehensible presence seemed to hesitate.
Then the corridor collapsed.
---
Morning sunlight spilled into his room.
The alarm rang.
He opened his eyes.
The dream slipped away like fog burned off by daylight, leaving only a faint echo of cold. He sat up, switched off the alarm, and felt the familiar weight of existence settle across his shoulders like a well-fitted coat.
Another day.
Two days until the aptitude test.
He stood, dressed, washed his face, and walked to the kitchen. His mother greeted him with sleepy warmth. His sister complained about exams. His father read the news and frowned at the economy.
It was all so normal.
So breakable.
He ate his breakfast in silence.
He left for school.
The sky was clear.
No one else knew that the world's fracture line was already drawn — thin, invisible, stretching beneath the surface of reality, waiting for the precise moment pressure became too much.
Kim Jae-hwan slipped his hands into his pockets, felt the faint weight of the notebook there, and walked forward with steady steps.
Iteration forty-seven moved toward its first irreversible point.
The calm was ending.
The fracture was coming.