TFN C48

Chapter 48

Wonhyo collapsed to his knees before he even had the time to curse, bowing his head.

“Uaaaahhh!”

It was a pitiful scream for a final cry, but nothing else would come out.

A fierce wind blew past. Dust rose, scraping across his skin, and then—suddenly—his breathing grew easier.

It was like stepping from a smog-choked street into a room where an air purifier roared at full blast.

Had he already crossed into the afterlife?

Wonhyo cracked his eyes open. A psychopomp would be here to fetch him—he ought to follow.

But wait—if one died inside a dungeon, would the reapers still come?

He felt no pain, so perhaps it truly had been an instant death.

Crouching, clutching his head, he peered around through a narrow slit of vision—then realized something was off.

Why was he inside a cube, its walls of black and gold-tinted currents rippling?

As though waiting for him to notice, the cube lifted smoothly from the ground.

It was just like when Cheongmun’s skill had seized him before.

Wonhyo lifted his gaze. The cube—sized precisely to fit his body—floated in a straight line through the air, heading toward the enormous cube that held Cheongmun.

Black masses lunged at it, but like before, they burned to ash and crumbled as if struck by talisman or chant.

The smaller cube bumped against the larger like a soap bubble, then popped with a soft pang, merging inside.

“Wow! Hello there!”

“Uh? Ah—hello.”

Wonhyo bowed deeply to the Special Authority’s investigation team members who had greeted him.

He had seen them yesterday at the office, but hadn’t even managed to say hello.

Sneaking a glance, he sought Cheongmun with his eyes.

There—standing not far off, Cheongmun gazed down at him with a chill that pierced.

Wonhyo straightened instinctively, knees folded beneath him, spine stiff, lips twitching in a nervous, clumsy smile.

“…When exactly did you enter this dungeon?”

Cheongmun’s voice carried a low growl. Wonhyo swallowed hard, eyes dropping.

He regretted plunging in, shoved by the General’s unseen hand—but something in Cheongmun’s anger sparked a rebellious prickling.

“…From the beginning?”

“That’s a lie.”

“Yes, it’s a lie.”

Startled by a voice behind him calling out his falsehood, Wonhyo whipped his head around.

“Oh—pardon. I’ve gotten into the habit of reporting lies immediately when I hear them during interrogations.”

“Pay us no mind. Please continue.”

A human lie detector?

Why waste such a skill here of all places?

Wonhyo turned back, eyes flicking up, then down again beneath Cheongmun’s steady gaze.

It was not overwhelming, but it was frightening enough.

“W-well… I’ve been inside for a while. The omens were dreadful, and I feared a great calamity, so I came. But I was sent here, really—by…”

“It’s true. But you say you’ve been here quite some time? How long?”

Wonhyo’s eyes darted. For someone who had just said he’d stay quiet, that lie-sniffer was meddling again.

“An hour? Two, maybe? I didn’t time it exactly… but it felt like forever, all that walking.”

He truly had walked without rest. Normally, even climbing Inwangsan repeatedly to visit his mother’s house, he never felt tired. Now his knees quivered, his legs throbbed.

“It’s been twenty-six minutes since the dungeon opened.”

“What? No—really?”

Since entering, his phone had been dead like a bricked device. He hadn’t been able to check the time. To hear it hadn’t even been half an hour made his eyes fly wide.

“You can see elapsed time in the quest window.”

“The… quest?”

He tilted his head.

Yes, at first there had been text telling him to do this and that. But he had closed it all out—searching for Cheongmun came first.

“In-dungeon time perception is often disrupted. That’s why protocol requires keeping the quest window open. Usually, you’d have learned this during training exercises.”

At Cheongmun’s explanation, Wonhyo hurriedly summoned the long-dismissed window.

He hadn’t considered it at all—last dungeon, there had been no such tricks.

Scrolling past lines of “objective” text, he found the timer.

“When’s the next training date?”

“For new Awakeners? In four days.”

Cheongmun’s glance at the deputy team leader made the others stiffen, sensing what he was implying.

“You mean… you’ve had no training?”

Feeling cornered, Wonhyo fidgeted with his fingers.

“I… I did four weeks online…”

He trailed off, recalling what he had once admitted to Cheongmun before. He couldn’t bring himself to finish.

“Online? That’s F-rank level only… Good heavens. We rejoiced to have a priest among us, and I’ve brought an F-rank into an S-rank dungeon? My conscience must be collapsing.”

“But—but he was fighting those monsters outside so well! How is that F-rank?”

“Wait—so shamans count as priest-class?”

“If not priest-class, then what?”

“Yoon Wonhyo is not a Hunter at all. He’s a production-class Awakener.”

Cheongmun’s brief declaration left the others staring blankly, as if reality itself had cracked.

He turned his gaze back to Wonhyo.

“Had no trouble reaching this far?”

“Eh? Ah—aside from thirst, no. Talismans, chanting… that was it. By the way, may I drink something? My throat tastes of iron from all this talking.”

The thought of thirst, shockingly forgotten in the trauma of Cheongmun firing at him, surged back. His voice cracked, dry, followed by ragged coughs.

Seeing this, Cheongmun retrieved a bottle of water from his inventory and handed it over.

“Oh, but—I have water myself—”

“It would be better to drink this first.”

Rejecting rejection itself, he twisted the cap and pressed it into Wonhyo’s hand.

Forced to accept, Wonhyo tilted it back and drained it in one pull.

The scratch of his throat eased; his cracked lips moistened.

『You have consumed Life Water. For one hour, thirst and hunger will not afflict you.』

…Huh?

He blinked down at the plain, unlabeled bottle.

“This…”

“When you’re done, hand the empty back.”

He had no training, no field experience—but he knew enough to grasp the value of such an item.

It was the stuff of endless HunterNet chatter:

Why hadn’t they made hamburgers into edible buffs yet? Weren’t people tired of chocolate-flavored bars? Wouldn’t grilled pork belly make a better buff than steak?

Even if such threads were half-jokes, the hunger was real.

“Ah—thank you. Truly.”

Wonhyo bowed deeply, a hand pressed to his belly.

Cheongmun caught his arm and pulled him upright. Wonhyo’s legs cracked and popped as he straightened, numb from kneeling too long.

“Yoon Wonhyo. Talisman-making is your skill. Do they function here, in a rank this high?”

Wonhyo’s eyes flicked toward the masses pressing against the cube.

“Who? Oh—those shades? They worked on them.”

Though he’d leaned more on divine power than paper, the fact was, he had defeated them. He straightened with pride.

“Shades? The system calls them ‘Blind Fury.’ Did yours say shade?”

Wonhyo flinched, recalling that deputy he had once been introduced to, and quickly answered.

“I call them shades because they aren’t true spirits. Just husks with a scrap of underworld energy—empty shells.”

“And that one? That wraith?”

The deputy pointed toward a form thrashing amid the black masses—vaguely human.

“That one’s the same. Just a bag of air in another wrapper.”

“Can you exorcise it?”

“Eh? Exorcise? Isn’t destroying it enough?”

Exorcism—that was for true possession, when a soul had been bound into flesh. That required consecrated grounds, probing of the entity’s history, proper rites. It wasn’t something done with a snap of the fingers.

“Ah, so merely destroying. Then—since you’re here, could you look at Kim from our team?”

Wonhyo blinked, confused—then noticed the man sprawled on the ground.

Yes. He had seen this. Back when he first borrowed divine sight, the vision had shown him legs lying on a floor.

He had wondered at the time why—but it was for this.

“Earlier he was attacked, knocked unconscious. We dealt with the thing, but when he woke, he turned on us, as if possessed.”

Wonhyo opened his mouth, then shut it, crouching to study the prone man instead.

For one assaulting his comrades, he looked surprisingly… clean.

There was a foreign, impure aura clinging inside him, but not crushing—more like drunken stupor than full possession.

Wonhyo rummaged in his inventory and pulled out an old item he had once used: a straw doll.

“Oh? A curse doll?”

“No.”

It did resemble one, but this was no voodoo effigy for hammering nails and ending lives.