The air in the Grand Seoul Vault didn't smell like ozone or magic; it smelled like burning copper and the antiseptic stench of a morgue.
At the bottom of the food chain, there is no glory. There is only the weight of other people's trash. Han Si-woo adjusted the straps of his oversized tactical rucksack, the metal buckles digging into his collarbones. Around him, the "Gold-Class" hunters—men and women clad in shimmering crystalline armor—stepped over the corpses of Clockwork Sentinels as if they were nothing more than pebbles.
"Dry-Cell! Move it!" a Hunter barked, not even looking back. "If you don't bag those mana-cores in the next three minutes, we're leaving you in the dark. The Vault is resetting."
Si-woo didn't answer. He couldn't. His throat was parched, his "Pulse" rating—the measure of a soul's resonance with the world's magic—sat at a flat 0.00%. In a world where the average civilian resonated at 5%, Si-woo was a biological anomaly. A void. A man who couldn't even trigger a motion-sensor light, let alone a magical skill.
He knelt by a shattered mechanical beast, his fingers bleeding as he pried a glowing core from its chest.
Just one more month, he thought, his heart thudding a slow, rhythmic beat. One more month of scavenging, and I'll have enough to pay for my sister's life-support. Just one more...
The Sound of the End
Then, the world stuttered.
It wasn't a roar or an explosion. It was the sound of a record needle scratching across the surface of reality. The Golden-Class hunters froze. The blue light of the Vault's ceiling flickered, turned a sickly, bruised purple, and then died.
[WARNING: CRITICAL SYSTEM OVERFLOW]
[MANA BUDGET EXCEEDED]
[INITIATING: TOTAL COLLAPSE]
The screams began instantly. The Clockwork Sentinels, previously dead piles of scrap, began to stitch themselves back together using the shadows of the hunters. The elite warriors who had been laughing seconds ago were now being unmade—their bodies turning into digital noise, their "Pulse" being sucked into the floor like water down a drain.
Si-woo stayed low. He was used to being invisible. He crawled through the chaos, gasping for air as the oxygen in the room began to vanish—the Vault was reclaiming every resource to fuel its reset.
He reached a dead end: the Altar of the Architect.
There, floating in the center of a whirlpool of black static, was an object that shouldn't exist. It was an abacus made of bone and obsidian, its beads spinning with the speed of a turbine.
"You... you have nothing," a voice whispered. It didn't come from the room. It came from inside Si-woo's own empty chest. "A vessel with zero volume. Perfect. A cup that can never be filled is the only thing that can hold the Void."
Si-woo's hand, trembling and slick with blood, reached out. He wasn't a hero. He wasn't brave. He was just a man who was tired of being stepped on.
"Give me... something," he wheezed, his lungs collapsing. "Anything."
The Awakening
As his fingers touched the Abyssal Abacus, the static stopped. The screaming stopped.
A screen appeared. It wasn't the gold-and-white interface of the World Hunter Association. It was a jagged, bleeding fissure in his vision, flashing a color that felt like a migraine.
[THE ENTROPY ENGINE HAS FOUND A HOST]
[CURRENT WORLD MANA COUNT: 99,999,999,999,999]
[HOST PULSE RATING: 0.00%]
[MATCH FOUND.]
[To grant Host +1 Strength, the System will delete 10,000 Mana from the surrounding environment.]
[Do you accept the Zero-Sum Contract?]
Si-woo looked up. A mechanical titan, forty feet tall, stood over him, its blade of light descending to cleave him in two. Behind it, the "Elite" hunters were already corpses, their souls being harvested by the tower.
"Yes," Si-woo spat, blood spraying from his lips. "Delete it all."
[CONTRACT ACCEPTED.]
[DELETING...]
The titan's blade didn't hit him. Mid-swing, the light of the weapon simply vanished. The giant's arm turned to gray ash, then to nothing. The very air around Si-woo turned cold—sub-zero—as the energy was ripped out of the molecules to fuel his evolution.
[STRENGTH +1]
[STRENGTH +1]
[STRENGTH +10]
Si-woo stood up. His ragged clothes were replaced by a shroud of pure, light-absorbing darkness. His eyes, once dull and brown, were now twin horizons of flickering violet.
He looked at his hands. For the first time in his life, he felt a "Pulse." But it wasn't a resonance with the world. It was the world screaming as he took what belonged to it.
He walked toward the exit, stepping over the ashes of the "Gods" who had looked down on him. Outside, the sky of Seoul was turning gray. The sun seemed just a little bit dimmer.
[LEVEL 1 REACHED.]
[THE SOVEREIGN HAS AWAKENED.]
[CURRENT OBJECTIVE: CONSUME THE HEAVENS.]