Chapter 4
……Seo Yi-young, you damn bastard.
The one who caused the trouble was the original Seo Yi-young from this place, but the current Seo Yi-young had to bear all the shame.
“Let’s move inside for now. This way.”
Following the man inside the yellow safety tape hung at the entrance, the police who had been restricting access cleared the way just by seeing Seo Yi-young’s face. The sensation of this special treatment was quite strange. Somehow it felt like he had become a special person. In fact, since Seo Yi-young was an S-grade Hunter, said to be so precious, it wasn’t exactly wrong either. He probably experienced this kind of thing frequently in this dimension, to the point of being sick of it rather than just being used to it.
He couldn’t handle it as naturally as the original Seo Yi-young, but still, for a first time, this was satisfactory enough.
“Hunter Seo Yi-young-nim. Hunter Choi Do-jun-nim is waiting for you.”
“What?”
Seo Yi-young furrowed his brow and asked back at the name he just heard.
“Oh, no, I said that Hunter Choi Do-jun-nim is waiting over there.”
The person who was flustered by Seo Yi-young’s reaction stuttered pitifully.
This reaction wasn’t normal. Seo Yi-young first reassured the other person.
“No, I was wondering if I heard wrong. Are you okay?”
“Yes, yes. I’m fine. Hunter-nim.”
Seo Yi-young saw the man rolling his eyes left and right as if confused by his question. The titles of the YouTube videos he had seen earlier quickly flashed through Seo Yi-young’s mind. I thought he lived well, but turns out he lived like trash. It was a bit unfair since he didn’t do those things, but if you think about it that way, his house, butler, and driver were also things he was enjoying that belonged to the original Seo Yi-young from this dimension, so he couldn’t complain.
“Where did you say Hunter Choi was?”
When Seo Yi-young asked with a smile, the man pointed in a direction with his hand. Seo Yi-young didn’t forget to leave a word of thanks and walked in the direction the man indicated.
Choi Do-jun.
It must just be the same name.
There’s no way he’d meet that bastard again in this place like this.
As Seo Yi-young tried to shake off his anxiety, a tall man came into view. He was turned away at an angle, but even at a glance he was incredibly tall, and his outfit was also incredible.
He was wearing white techwear.
He looked extremely flashy.
“How does someone wear clothes like that……”
While clothing is a matter of personal freedom, it was still too eye-catching.
He muttered quietly, but it seemed the sound was heard. The man who had been turned away turned his head.
“……Ah, fuck.”
It was Choi Do-jun.
That Choi Do-jun.
That fucking Choi Do-jun.
There was no way Seo Yi-young could forget that face.
Choi Do-jun was the lawyer in charge of Han-young Group from the dimension Seo Yi-young originally came from. That cold-blooded face. How could he forget those snake-like eyes.
‘Can’t you calculate that there’s nothing you can gain? Well, that’s probably why you made that reckless exposure. Know who you’re dealing with before you attack. Surely you didn’t think you could face Han-young without expecting at least this much.’
He couldn’t forget it even in death.
Seo Yi-young unconsciously gritted his teeth.
He knew in his head that the person in front of him and the Choi Do-jun he knew weren’t the same person, but it wasn’t easy to think of them separately. Especially since the Choi Do-jun in front of him looked even more sly than the Choi Do-jun from the previous dimension.
Seo Yi-young took a deep breath through his nose. Calm down. No matter how identical they look, they’re different people. He repeated it several times. But the more he did, the more he remembered what Choi Do-jun had done to Seo Yi-young in the previous dimension.
‘Since you don’t have parents, there’s no one to step up and stop you, so you commit such acts.’
When he was removed from his position and chased out to the corridor, Choi Do-jun deliberately came to find him and shook his head while casually throwing out those words, and unable to endure it, he threw a punch. And Choi Do-jun sued him for assault. Thinking about it again, Choi Do-jun’s face and voice from that time came back vividly, making his anger boil up.
He’s a different person. A different person. Seo Yi-young repeated only those words in his mind as if brainwashing himself.
“Are you talking to me right now?”
Wow. How can this be.
He had barely managed to repeat that he was a different person, but the moment Choi Do-jun opened his mouth, it all evaporated. Speaking informally to him. His way of speaking was exactly the same as the previous dimension’s. His blood boiled even more.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
It was a mistake. He unconsciously replied crookedly. At Seo Yi-young’s answer, Choi Do-jun raised his eyebrows. He had a look like he was wondering what the hell he had eaten wrong.
Choi Do-jun didn’t stop there and looked Seo Yi-young up and down.
He could tell that he had scanned him from head to toe. His already foul mood from that bastard’s face became even worse.
Unable to endure it, Seo Yi-young was about to say something, but Choi Do-jun was one step faster.
“You said to please take care of you before. And you came dressed like that.”
What’s he nitpicking about clothes for. Isn’t he crazy.
Isn’t it my freedom what clothes I wear.
“I didn’t know I needed permission for what clothes to wear.”
At the crooked words that popped out, Choi Do-jun slowly raised his eyebrows.
“It’s not even light-resistant gear, let alone protective clothing.”
Light resistance? What’s that.
Seo Yi-young was puzzled by the unfamiliar term. To hide his inward confusion, he narrowed his eyes and looked at Choi Do-jun. Even if he might have done something wrong, he didn’t want to be scolded by Choi Do-jun.
“I guess that means you’re that confident? I’ll get a proper look at that precious ability of yours this time.”
Without giving Seo Yi-young a chance to respond, Choi Do-jun left only those words and moved to another location.
How can even his way of speaking be so annoying.
Seo Yi-young wasn’t even fazed.
He had tried hard to think of him as a different person from the Choi Do-jun of the previous dimension. No matter how much he tried to think positively, Choi Do-jun’s first impression was the worst. Someone who had been watching from the side approached Seo Yi-young.
“Ah, hello. Hunter Seo Yi-young-nim. Nice to meet you for the first time. I’m Kim A-rin from Sewung.”
When he turned his head, two people were standing there.
Seo Yi-young tried to experiment whether he could see the two people’s status windows, but failed. In novels he had read in the previous dimension, when you cross dimensions you usually become able to see other people’s status windows or ability values, but it seemed Seo Yi-young didn’t have such privileges.
“Hello. I’m Seo Yi-young.”
Perhaps because of the bleak atmosphere from earlier, the two people who had been speaking hesitantly were busy reading the mood despite Seo Yi-young answering kindly in a completely different tone.
The atmosphere had definitely been bad just before, but he had no intention of being like that to people he was meeting for the first time.
He had been sharp with Choi Do-jun, but that was because it was Choi Do-jun. Even if he didn’t know about the previous Seo Yi-young, the current Seo Yi-young’s personality wasn’t that ruined.
The two people’s names were Jo Yeon-woo and Kim A-rin respectively.
Jo Yeon-woo, who had exchanged a few more words with Seo Yi-young, rubbed his cheek and said.
“This is the first time I’m entering the same dungeon as Hunter Seo Yi-young-nim, so I was really nervous. But you seem kinder than the rumors, so that’s a relief.”
“……Hey.”
“Ah. Uh. ……No, well……”
Kim A-rin elbowed Jo Yeon-woo in the side. At that moment, Jo Yeon-woo realized what he had said and his face went pale. Watching him stutter and turn white, unable to find words to say, was pitiful enough to naturally evoke sympathy. Seo Yi-young could roughly guess how terribly the previous Seo Yi-young had lived. He had made a slip of the tongue, but seeing him tremble to that extent, he didn’t feel like saying anything.
“It’s okay. Anyone can make mistakes. What’s your impression after seeing me in person?”
“What? No. ……No. I’m sorry.”
Seeing Jo Yeon-woo showing such a stiff expression that he couldn’t even laugh at his joke, Seo Yi-young changed his attitude again. He didn’t know he was so nervous that jokes wouldn’t work.
“I’m sorry. It was a joke. It’s really okay. Don’t be like that.”
“……Uh, ……yes. Yes……”
Even while answering, he was reading his mood.
At this point, he felt sorry about the past that he hadn’t even committed.
“But hasn’t information about this dungeon come out yet? When will it come out?”
He subtly turned the conversation elsewhere. He had a feeling that continuing small talk would make the situation more tangled rather than better.
“Ah. Not yet. The preliminary investigation Team 1 just came out and only told us the dungeon type. Team 2 is scheduled to come out in 30 minutes.”
“Is that so?”
Talk about dungeon types came up. That meant some information about this dungeon had already been revealed. Since Seo Yi-young didn’t know that information, he casually brought it up.
“What did they say this dungeon type was?”
“It’s a New-type, Hunter-nim.”
Jo Yeon-woo answered quickly to Seo Yi-young’s question.
A New-type dungeon.
It was a moment when the YouTube he had watched while coming in the car was helpful.
The dungeons in this world were largely divided into two types. Original dungeons and New-type dungeons.
Original dungeons were the type that had been seen since dungeons first appeared in the world, and their interiors were natural environments familiar to people.
New-type dungeons were a type that had appeared about 6 years ago, and were dungeons centered around boss mobs with an artificial feel.
The difference between the two dungeons was items. Original dungeons had miscellaneous items that dropped every time you killed mobs other than boss mobs, allowing for small pocket money, while New-type dungeons had almost no items from other mobs but you could obtain minerals after defeating the boss.
At first, people didn’t know the value of those minerals and treated them like garbage, but when an elementary school student’s prank accidentally revealed that they were tremendous energy masses, their value was reevaluated. With just 50g of that mineral, you could obtain a month’s worth of energy used throughout Korea.
It was a truly innovative energy substitute that could provide energy without any pollution or contamination.
Hence the name given to it, NEO-CORE.
Generally, the neo-core that could be obtained from one New-type dungeon was about 80g.
Even that amount alone was traded for hundreds of billions. Moreover, neo-core wasn’t just a simple energy source. When combined with items, it was also a material that upgraded items by one grade.
C, D, E, F grade equipment was abundant enough to trip over. The problem was that when you went up to B grade and above, items decreased significantly. The higher the item grade, the harder it became to obtain.
Moreover, since there were no people who could craft B-grade and above equipment, in the current situation where you had to rely only on low-probability drops in dungeons, the fact that you could upgrade equipment grades just by combining with neo-core was truly welcome news for high-level hunters.
Therefore, competition among hunters trying to enter New-type dungeons also became fierce.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
