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Chapter 3




Psychopath (1)
“Wake up! Team Leader?!”
Someone was lamenting.
‘Team Leader? What team leader?’
It was a long time ago when I had heard this word being called out, it took me some time to fathom it. It was a word that held meaning, all until civilization on Earth collapsed.
“Stop!”
Darkness split along the grain. The light shook over the closed eyelids.
My body’s sense began to awake to perception gradually.
‘Wait, sense?’
Something was amiss. My fingers were close enough for me to feel their sensation.
It felt like I was lying on a very soft mattress. But will Riga remain on Earth?
No, before that, what was this power passing over my body?
“Oh, do you know you’re already awake? The sound of your breath has changed. Pretending that you’re still asleep won’t work! The Guild Leader asked me to call him right away!”
The day I had lost my age, I felt the same vitality and vigor course through me. Strange, instead of my body, I felt the discomfort of overturning a shell.
“Oh really, Byung-ho. Have patience. You can’t do that now. Stay calm. Don’t get too excited. Think of these things when you want to beat it.”
[Monthly Rent]
[National Pension Plan]
[Special Defense Tax]
[Urban Reconstruction Fund]
[Community Stabilization Fund]
The man who spoke the mesmerizing word eventually lost it.
“Oh, it’s not happening! Your dad is so tough that you called me!”
Then…Jiying!
I felt a mind-shattering pain. An aching sound exited my mouth.
“Keuup!”
In this instance, when every feeling, emotion, and touch are distastefully estranged, a simple message resonates in the mind.
-Inconsistency between the memory preserved in the soul and the memory recorded in the biological brain!
-The system starts forced reconstruction.
These system messages have been haunting me ever since I underwent my awakening as a hunter.
But this time, the message was unfamiliar.
And…
‘Gagging!”
My ears were not prepared for what came out of my mouth. This was not the time to care.
“Ouch!” I yelled.
It was excruciatingly painful.
“Oh damn! I am shocked! Why are you yelling!? I haven’t been here in a while!” The person spoke in a fit of exasperation.
Hot liquid flowed from my nose and mouth. I could barely open my eyes. A man was observing me with distress.
Two dark brows frowned. I mumbled something with great difficulty.
“Darn it! This time, I guess it’s real! You’re not faking a disease or a sickness.”
I struggled.
“Great!”
ChoiSeunghyun’s memories were infusing in my mind, each memory fragment blending and flowing, uncountable instances.
However, before I could find my way and sift through the strange assortments, it faded, and a new one arose.
Just like rain blocks vision clarity, no memory settled in my mind, and that made my head ache.
“Oh, hello? Yes, I think you need to send someone quickly. No, this time, I’m serious. My nose and mouth were both vomiting, and I was upset. Is this self-harm? No! Do you have the ability to bleed without a trigger? No matter how promising it may be, hasn’t the public awakened?”
The man left in a hurry, so he didn’t hear the message from the system. It kept ringing inside me.
-Soul and body memory match… 0%!
-Confirmation of vigorous rejection between spirit and body. Mental collapse is may be imminent.
-Skill [Successor’s Eye (Rank: EX)] is activated to protect the user. No mana cost upon activation.
The pain which was tearing my body and spirit was now fading.
-The effect of the skill [Successor’s Eye (Rank: EX)] reduces the impact of physical memory on the soul and slows the pace of coordination.
-Skill [Successor’s Eye (Rank: EX)] helps the soul’s memory take over the ego instead of the biological brain.
Indeed, as it appeared in the message, the memories of a third assailant who was not ChoiSeunghyun became prominent. The fragments flashed through my mind, steadily slowing down.
Owing to this, I was able to carefully observe the memories that ChoiSeunghyun’s inexperienced memories.
I learned who the owner of the memory was.
I sat up and raised my upper body, shaking off the pain.
“Okay!”
Because of the unheard-of unique skill, I revived the contents of the document I saw briefly as a definite ‘ChoiSeunghyun’s memory.’
The contents of the documents and much of the information we just witnessed from a stranger’s memory matched.
My body quaked. I grabbed the bedsheet with both hands. I shouted with a crackling voice.
“This is Seongjin-wook, Seongjin-wook…”
This specific portion of the memory was of a man named Seongjin-wook.
The man speaking on the phone gave me an exhausted glance and then continued to respond to the other side.
“Have you heard the self-introduction right now? It’s not ‘I’m Seongjin-wook’ but ‘This is Seongjin-wook.’ He’s a regular guy, but this time the genre is different. Soon, a 19-year-old man will be destroying his essential grammar, which is less than a five-year old. Send the doctor immediately.”
My eyes turned to the huge mirror hanging on the wall. In the place of an elderly man’s face, there was a youth in his 20’s glaring back with a pale, bloodied look. It was hand-in-hand with the photos I had seen in the papers before.
Seongjin-wook, heir to Seogyu-cheol, the Cheonryong Guild Leader, the first S-rank hunter in Korea.
Yet, there was a lingering suspicion.
‘Seongjin-wook…’
I remembered! Seongjin-wook was a man who had died long ago, much before SSS dungeon collapsed.
*
The second party seemed reluctant to send a doctor. A doctor came after many exchanges of endangering threats to the other side.
During the checkup, I kept running to the toilet to vomit.
“Woo-e-eh-ek!”
The doctor, who patiently completed the procedure, disappeared, and left an ambiguous diagnosis in his trail, that I might survive.
There remained one particular woman in the room who had been with me from the beginning (the doctor called her Secretary Kim).
She was to take me to Seongjin’s father immediately. For a moment, I thought I should stop trying to get well.
“So, Secretary Kim, you heard all the conversations I had with the doctor, did you understand anything?”
Kim’s expression was distorted.
“Oh, do you suspect temporal amnesia due to the concussion?”
Frequently vomiting seems to have had its effect.
“Yes, as I said, the memories are flashing and fading now. I think it will prove a bit difficult to see my father right away.”
She stared at me with a face bare of descriptive expressions
“Secretary Kim Byung-ho. That’s your name, right?” I keenly asked her.
Secretary Kim frowned, touching the rough ring on her index finger. It had a mana pattern on it. Quite a handy artifact.
She asked with suspicious uncertainty, “It’s awkward. Would you like to call me Secretary Kim, or would you like to call me by my full name?”
Tracing Seongjin-wook’s memories was not an easy task. Everything was still jumbled and infused together. It was difficult reliving the memory I sought. This is going to be tedious in the time to come.
“So, what was it originally called?”
Then, Secretary Kim began uttering curses underneath her breath without shifting from her greasy unattended look.
Most of them were simple words, combining the alphabetical figures of the words’ bottle’ and ‘ho’.
I grasped the spirit of being absent and restrained the extinction listed by Secretary Kim.
“Oh, it’s good. I just had to stop.”
“Bob squirrel, bottle beetle, bottle taste squash…. Oh, shall we stop?”
“Yeah.”
I let out a faint sigh.
Listening to the previous call, I opined Seongjin-wook must be 19 soon.
Seongjin’s birth year was 2019. This means he and I possibly had a conversation. The year was 2038.
‘It’s 2038’
It was 40 years ago. 40 years ago, since ChoiSeung-hyun’s final moments. Taking that into account.
‘I must be going crazy’
As ChoiSeung-hyun, I can recall the man called Seongjin-wook, a person out of my sphere of interests in the past. There wasn’t anything overtly explicit that I had encountered.
Therefore, what I know of him are only some momentous events. Before turning 20 in Korea, he used to in-charge of the exploration and support Team 6 of the Cheonryong Guild.
‘Due to his awakening as a hunter and his age, he must have been made Team Leader’
However, we didn’t know what circumstances Seongjin-wook was in.
For example, how was my relationship with my father, the Guild Leader?
Who was searching for me?
Is the position of support six-team leader the father’s favor, test, or punishment for the eldest son?
Moreover, the document was accompanied by a strange evaluation of Seongjin-wook, even though an unconfirmed rumor was associated with it.
It was confusing.
The memory of Seongjin-wook’s brain was not yet organized properly in my mind, so it was difficult to judge how to deal with the current situation.
‘I need more information’
I looked at Secretary Kim.
“Are you busy now?” I asked her.
“Yes, I am busy. You must be aware that the Guild Leader doesn’t like to be kept waiting. We have to make haste.”
“Can we stall a little? You heard the doctor’s diagnosis. I am suffering from memory loss due to a concussion.”
“It isn’t a conclusive diagnosis, just a conjecture.”
The doctor went out to report it. The story must have already been told to the Guild Leader.
It was said that I was lying in bed in the middle of the day because of a massive shock to my head.
“A concussion? What happened?”
Secretary Kim shook her head, sighing, “I can’t believe you really can’t remember.”
“There was disorderly conflict between Seongjin-wook and the Team Leader of Exploration 2. Naturally, the cause of the inevitable conflict is…”
She responded, pointing to me.
“I’ve been struggling? If you are the head of Exploration 2…”
<ol>
The name came naturally. It wasn’t dependent on memory recall, but pure skill.
“Park Chang-hee?”
“Yeah. You remember that?”
Park Chang-hee Hunter is a class-A hunter who had survived for a long time, and now gained a famous reputation.
Conversely, Seongjin-wook, son of the Guild Leader, was given Support Team Leader, but who was, nevertheless, an awakened man who had not attained a hunter’s qualifications.
That would have been just before I pretended.
‘But you were fighting?’
“If it’s fertilization, How? Why?”
“At the meeting, the head of the team, Seo Chang-hee Park, asked, ‘why do you open your eyes and look at me, and still you don’t like it?’”
I suddenly felt dizzy. It was upsetting.
“Seo Chang-hee, the leader of the team, felt upset for being ignored”
“Did I ever swear?”
“No, you didn’t swear.”
“It’s a good thing.”
“Listen closely. According to eyewitnesses, Chief Seo is enraged. He jumped onto the large rectangular table in the boardroom of the executive boarding board, kicked the documents and plaques on the board, sprinted, and shove them down the chairman, Park Chang-hee, who was seated at the other end of the table.”
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‘Non-Awakening to A-Class Hunter?’
I covered my face with both hands.
I came up with an anxious phrase describing Seongjin-wook in a document I read as SeunghyunChoi.
-Rumors of severe borderline personality disorder, impulse control disorder, delirium, and schizophrenia spread among a small number of hunters. Still, none have been confirmed until the time of death.