Jeon Moo-Hyun died on a Tuesday.
Not heroically. Not tragically. He slipped on a wet convenience store floor in Mapo-gu, hit his head on the corner of a refrigerator unit, and that was that. Thirty-two years of unremarkable existence, concluded by a puddle of banana milk someone had failed to wipe up.
He remembered thinking, as the ceiling tiles blurred above him, that at least no one had been watching.
He was wrong about that too.
He opened his eyes to the same ceiling. Same water stain shaped like the Korean peninsula above the window. Same smell of instant ramen and dust that had defined every apartment he had ever rented. For approximately four seconds, he believed in miracles.
Then the notification appeared.
It hovered in the air two feet from his face, translucent blue text floating in the dim morning light of his studio like it had every right to be there.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZATION COMPLETE.]
[Welcome, Chosen Carrier of the Eye of Desire.]
[Your unique ability set has been configured. Please note: the Vocalization Protocol is active at all times and cannot be disabled.]
[Have a productive awakening.]
Moo-Hyun sat up slowly. He read the notification three times. Then he read it a fourth time, focusing specifically on the phrase "cannot be disabled."
"What," he said, "is the Vocalization Protocol."
[SYSTEM: Vocalization Protocol — all surface-level cognitive activity detected within the carrier's prefrontal cortex will be rendered as audible speech within a three-meter radius. This feature optimizes combat analysis by externalizing threat assessment in real time.]
[Current thought detected.]
[Rendering in 3... 2... 1...]
"This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me and I died yesterday."
Moo-Hyun pressed both hands over his mouth. The words had come out in his own voice, perfectly clear, at normal conversational volume. He had not chosen to say them. He had simply thought them, and his throat had produced them automatically, like a speaker receiving a signal.
He sat very still for a moment.
This is fine, he thought carefully. This is absolutely manageable. I simply need to stop having thoughts.
[SYSTEM: Current thought detected.]
[Rendering in 3... 2... 1...]
"This is absolutely manageable. I simply need to stop having thoughts."
He put a pillow over his face.
The pillow did not help. He was fairly certain the pillow would never help. He was also fairly certain that whatever cosmic entity had decided to give him a second life had done so specifically to watch him suffer, and was currently doing exactly that, from a comfortable position, with snacks.
[SYSTEM: Thought detected — existential resentment toward cosmic authority figures.]
[Rendering suppressed. Threshold not met for vocalization.]
He lifted the pillow. "Wait. There's a threshold?"
[SYSTEM: Correct. Thoughts flagged as personally significant or emotionally charged are rendered automatically. Passive background thoughts may be filtered at the system's discretion.]
[The system's discretion is final.]
"So you decide what's significant."
[Correct.]
"And I have no input."
[Correct.]
"Great." He stood up. "Great. Perfect. This is a completely reasonable ability to give a person."
He made coffee. The coffee maker gurgled in the corner of the kitchen alcove, and he stood in front of it in yesterday's clothes, reading the remaining notifications that had queued up while he processed his existential situation.
[CLASS ASSIGNED: Eye of Desire — Rank S (Concealed)]
[Primary Skill: Desire Analysis — Passive. Displays the current deepest motivation, structural weakness, and combat vulnerability of any living entity within line of sight.]
[Secondary Skill: Artifact Resonance — Passive. Detects magical artifacts within 50-meter radius. Detection range scales with carrier level.]
[Tertiary Skill: Exponential Harvest — Conditional. EXP gain multiplied by x10,000 under specific activation conditions. Conditions currently classified. Will be revealed upon first activation.]
[Current Level: 1. Current EXP: 0.]
[Note: Carrier's class rank is concealed from external appraisal skills. External appraisal will read: F-Rank. Unawakened. Civilian.]
Moo-Hyun poured his coffee and read that last line three times.
F-Rank. Unawakened. Civilian.
He almost smiled. That part, at least, was useful. In a world where Gates had been tearing open across South Korea for the past decade and turning ordinary people into Hunters, rank was everything. Rank determined what guilds would hire you, what dungeons you could enter legally, what insurance you qualified for, and whether other Hunters looked at you when you walked into a room. An S-Rank Hunter was a celebrity, a weapon, a national resource. An F-Rank civilian was furniture.
He had spent thirty-two years being furniture. He knew how to do that.
He drank his coffee. He thought, carefully and in a very controlled manner, about nothing in particular. The system did not vocalize. Good.
He could work with this.
He was halfway through a second cup when something happened to the building.
It started as a low vibration, the kind that made the mugs rattle in the cabinet and the water in his glass shiver into concentric rings. Then the light shifted. Not went out, not flickered. Shifted, the way light did when something very large and very wrong pressed up against the membrane of normal space.
Moo-Hyun walked to his window and looked down at the street below.
The Gate was approximately four meters tall and shaped like a wound in the air. Purple-black at the edges, pulsing like something on the other side was pushing against it. They always looked like that, according to every news broadcast he had ever watched. He had seen them on screens his entire adult life. Twice, from a distance, in person.
Never from directly above.
Never with the knowledge that no Hunter response team was going to arrive in under six minutes, that the Gate was already open rather than forming, and that the monster currently pushing its head through the tear in reality was looking directly up at his window.
It had too many eyes. That was his first, professionally useless observation. Far too many eyes, distributed across a face that had not committed to any particular shape, and all of them were pointed at him.
[SYSTEM: Entity identified. Classification: Gate Spawn, Stone-Type. Rank C. Primary threat: physical impact force. Structural weakness: exposed mana crystal, left knee joint, accessible during the 0.3-second window following a forward strike.]
[Combat recommendation: do not get hit.]
"Profound," Moo-Hyun said.
He grabbed his jacket from the hook by the door. He grabbed his keys. He stood in the doorway of his studio for exactly one second, doing the math on whether he could simply go back to bed and let this become someone else's problem.
The monster put its fist through the exterior wall of the building two floors below him. Concrete dust rose in a white cloud. Someone on that floor started screaming, and then the screaming moved rapidly in the direction of the stairwell.
Moo-Hyun went down the stairs.
He was not, he told himself firmly as he descended, doing this out of heroism. He was doing this because his apartment was on the third floor and the thing was already at the second, and going down was the direction of the exit. The fact that he ended up in the street at ground level, fifteen meters from an active C-Rank Gate Spawn with no weapons, no armor, and no combat experience whatsoever, was simply geometry.
The monster turned its too-many eyes toward him.
[SYSTEM: Desire Analysis active. Current primary motivation of target entity: hunger. Secondary motivation: destruction of structural obstacles. Tertiary motivation: none detected.]
"At least it's not personal," Moo-Hyun said.
The monster swung.
He moved. Not skillfully, not tactically. He moved the way any person with functional legs and a strong opinion about their own continued survival moves when three tons of stone-encrusted fist comes at their head. He threw himself left, hit the pavement with both hands and one knee, felt the impact travel up his arms like a struck bell, and rolled.
The fist hit the street behind him. The concrete cracked in a six-foot radius. Car alarms activated on both sides of the street.
[SYSTEM: Optimal strike window — left knee crystal — opens in 1.8 seconds following enemy recovery phase.]
He scrambled to his feet. The monster was pulling its arm back, reorienting. He could see the knee, could see the dull purple gleam of the mana crystal set into the stone joint like a badly installed lightbulb.
He had no weapon.
He looked down. He was wearing the shoes he had died in yesterday. Rubber-soled, slightly worn at the heel, entirely inappropriate for dungeon combat. He looked at the crystal. He looked at the window closing in his system's display.
[SYSTEM: 0.9 seconds remaining.]
Moo-Hyun ran at the monster's leg and kicked the crystal as hard as he had ever kicked anything in thirty-two years of avoiding physical confrontation.
The pain that went up his foot was extraordinary. He had time to think, very clearly and with complete conviction, that this had been an objectively terrible idea.
Then the crystal shattered.
The monster did not die dramatically. It did not roar or collapse in slow motion. The mana simply left it, and the stone that had been a creature became stone that was rubble, and the rubble came down fast and heavy and Moo-Hyun was already moving before he had consciously decided to, stumbling backward out of the fall radius on a foot that was reporting serious complaints.
The dust settled.
The street was quiet except for the car alarms.
[SYSTEM: Combat complete. EXP awarded.]
[Standard EXP: 0. Adjusted EXP: 0. Reason: Exponential Harvest conditions not met.]
[Note: You did kick a C-Rank monster to death with a rubber-soled shoe. The system acknowledges this.]
Moo-Hyun sat down on the curb. He looked at the rubble. He looked at the Gate, which had collapsed when the spawn died, leaving nothing but a faint chemical smell and a discoloration in the air.
He looked at his foot.
Then he noticed, half-buried under a slab of former monster, a faint light pulsing in a slow, regular rhythm.
[SYSTEM: Artifact detected. Classification: unknown. Rarity assessment pending proximity scan.]
He limped over. He moved the piece of stone aside, which hurt, and picked up the object underneath.
It was a ring. Plain-looking, dark metal, slightly warm to the touch. No visible markings.
[SYSTEM: Artifact identified. Spatial Ring, Grade A. Internal storage capacity: 50 cubic meters. Current market value: approximately 340 million Korean won.]
Moo-Hyun looked at the ring for a long time.
He put it on his finger.
He looked at the rubble around him, the cracked street, the building with the hole in its wall, the spreading circle of phone flashlights from people filming from their windows.
He thought, very clearly, in a manner the system immediately detected and vocalized at full volume to the three residents now cautiously approaching from the sidewalk:
"I am going to be very, very rich."