Translator: Min999, Editor: Spade
Proofreader: Sapphire
It was the first time the boys, who had just turned 17, had experienced an encounter with death.
The boys who been chatting and laughing happily a moment and lost everything the other, had no one to turn to but each other.
The few adult relatives they had felt too burdened by the sudden responsibility to take care of 17-year-old youths. And the Daehan Guild that was completely destroyed, lost all of its elite Hunters after their tragic failure to clear the S-class dungeon. They paid a large sum of money for the damage, but it wasn’t enough to restore the entire city.
It was thanks to the national disaster relief effort that the boys were finally allowed to live in a provided apartment, but the attention and outpouring of aid that was mostly directed at the casualties, stopped only after half a year.
Their little group had to rely on a small allowance, which they would receive only until they reached adulthood. They fought, despaired, and cried a lot during their first year of living together, but eventually came to terms with the fact that all they had left was each other.
Once they reached 20, they all went together to get the Awakening test. It came as a pleasant surprise that all seven of them had Awakened, and most shocking of all, was that Yisun’s restoring abilities were evaluated as S-class. He was the first S-class ever to appear among Restorers.
After the initial shock wore off, they laughed happily as they looked at Yisun’s ability evaluation report.
“I thought you’d make a name for yourself as Healer, but you turned out to be Restorer?”
“Okay, it’s a good setting towards fame, I approve.”
“Ahh, enough with that already!!”
Other than the S-class Yisun, all six of his friends were C-class and D-class Hunters. The group of friends were soon brimming with eagerness, anticipation, and expectations for a bright future, yet they soon found their dreams shattered by the harsh reality that fate had in store for them.
“Hello students, you have some debts you need to pay.”
People showed up at their apartment door, and handed them their business cards. They claimed to be from the Honshin Guild, and told them about the debt that they had inherited from they parents. Apparently, since they hadn’t disclaimed their inheritance within three months of their parents’ deaths, they ended inheriting a huge sum of debts along with their small inheritance.
The Honshin Guild was not really a guild at all, but rather a loan-sharking business acting under the cover name of a guild. The guild leader told them that the parents of six out of seven of them had borrowed money from the Honshin Guild, and that they had been lenient enough to spare them until they reached adulthood, but now, they had to pay what was due. The sums they were told totaled well over a hundred million, and for these 20 years old youths, the sums were beyond unrealistic.
“But since this time, every single one of you guys is actually an Awakener…”
The guild leader offered them a deal with a smile. If all of them were willing to join his guild and work for him, he would lower the interest rate on their debts. Some of his friends protested on behalf of Yisun, who had no inherited debts.
The six friends proposed to remove him from the list of people whose income would be garnished, yet he insisted on helping. But even then, they still argued that as an S-class Restorer with a bright future ahead of him, he shouldn’t have to go into Honshin to repay the debts.
At that moment, the guild leader’s face, which had been smiling and talking kindly until now, changed. The people around him immediately raised their knives and threatened them.
He then warned them that if he didn’t get all seven of them to sign a contract with Honshin Guild, they would never allow them to sign with any other guild, and threatened to add on the three years of interest they had been sparing them from before they reached adulthood. Since it was only a gesture of goodwill from his part and not their right, he said, adding it would increase the amount of money they owed.
With no adults around them to turn to for advice, the youths who had only reached 20 years old had no choice but to sign the contract. They could barely distinguish the lies and the threats mixed in with the truth.
The contract they ended up signing was a complete fraud.
For the next four years, they would work for the Honshin Guild, all the while keeping the whole thing a secret from Youngjoon’s uncle, the only adult they had any contact with, because they didn’t want to cause him unnecessary worry.
At first, they were confused and saddened by this reality, but they quickly grew out of their worries. Yisun’s abilities were beyond their imagination.
With just a touch of his hand, he could restore a collapsed building back to its former glory, and many worshiped him as if he were the embodiment of a god. While many people were in awe of the dungeon-clearing Hunters, what they saw was usually from videos recorded within the dungeon, but Yisun was the first to demonstrate his outstanding abilities outside of the dungeon.
He was the first Awakener in the entire world to be evaluated as an S-rank in restoration abilities, and his very existence was considered a miracle. His guild, Honshin, was a very small guild, but as soon as he began his activities, Honshin Guild became more known for its Restorers than its Hunters. Some even called Yisun a walking one-man guild.
Soon enough, and even if his friends didn’t know exactly how much a Restorer of such caliber earned, they quickly realized that they had signed a fraudulent contract.
“Well, this month would be the last one, then this hell would finally end.”
“It’s a good thing we caught that bastard trying to sneakily extend our contracts, or else we would’ve been enslaved again.”
That day, Yisun had to go repair the damage done by a C-Class dungeon. Technically, the dungeon had yet to be cleared, but it happened to be right in front of a company building. When a dungeon is triggered, an explosion will blow up in a 10 meters radius, which will undoubtedly cause the building to collapse.
The Guild boss asked Yisun to repair it the instant the explosion happened, so Yisun decided to wait for the dungeon to be cleared nearby.
Ever since Yisun became the main cash cow of the Honshin Guild, his every move has been monitored by the guild’s people, well, its thugs. Even the Guild Leader, a C-class Hunter, would follow him. But now, Yisun and his friends were no longer as naive as before.
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
They always gathered around him and escorted him like bodyguards, occasionally shouting insults in the guild leader’s direction. While the latter rarely entered dungeons and didn’t have much practical experience, on the other hand, they were still full-fledged and practiced C-class and D-class Hunters.
“Seriously, we would’ve been done for if it hadn’t been for Uncle Taesik’s help…”
“I know, right?”
Won Taesik was the team leader of the Honshin Guild’s Restorer team. He was also someone who had been forced into signing a contract because he owed the guild money, and he always felt sorry for Yisun and his friends. He would secretly buy them food and meet them outside to avoid prying eyes.
He said he would soon pay off his debts and leave the guild. He told them that he was able to end the contract because it wasn’t as vicious as the one Yisun and his friends had signed, and that he had secretly seen some papers in the room he entered when he paid off the balance the other day, and they looked like they were about their contract extension.
He also told them that there was a rights protection center at the Awakening management headquarters and to report it to them. It was thanks to his advice and guidance that they were finally able to get out of the horrible contract.
“I wonder how much money they’ve stolen so far. It must be in the billions.”
“A few billion? It should be well over ten billion!”
“Wow, really… It’s decided, we’re moving to the best apartment in Seoul as soon as next month. Where’s the most expensive place? Daepo-dong? Gangnam?”
“I don’t think we can afford that in a month. Housing prices there are no joke…”
“Dude, we don’t need your realistic output here…”
“Hey, why are you guys deciding that we’re buying an apartment as you please, we should ask for Yisun’s opinion first!”
The friend’s words caused a collective sigh. They felt bad towards Yisun because they owed the Honshin Guild money, and because Yisun, who was an S-rank, had to suffer without being paid properly. They had been apologizing to Yisun endlessly for the last three years when they realized that the contract they had signed was actually a big scam.
“Sorry…”
One by one, they suddenly started apologizing to him. Yisun, who was listening to the conversation, couldn’t help but laugh at the sudden apology and shook his head.
“Forget about it, this is the last month anyway, and we should start thinking about where to move next month.”
At Yisun light-hearted response, his friends glanced at each other, burst out laughing, and immediately started looking for a new place to live. The dungeon happened to be near Yongin anyway, so they planned to go back home once Yisun finished Restoring and look for a new place together.
Then once they heard that the dungeon was about to be cleared, they all headed to the company. Near the dungeon gate, several Gongdae Guild members who had entered the dungeon were gathered.
Usually, Hunters would stop when the dungeon is at a 99% clearance rate. A dungeon is 100% cleared when all the monsters inside are killed, after which the dungeon gate is closed, so they would deliberately beat the lowest monster in the dungeon into a state of near-death after killing the boss monster, after which, a group of miners and collectors, would come and pick up the magic stones in the dungeon. It was the main ingredient for the weapons used by the Hunters. Occasionally, boss monsters would even drop rare items, but this one was just a C-class dungeon, so there would be no rare item drops from boss monsters. And even if there were, they could only be low-grade.
Depending on the difficulty of the dungeon, the amount and quality of magic stones that can be mined inside varies, but in this dungeon, the miners were few and far between, and soon enough, the rest of the Gongdae team came out as well.
The gate turned blue and gradually shrunk in size as all the monsters in the dungeon were killed.
During this time, the guild used the clearance progress meter to check if the dungeon was completely cleared. The measurement took quite a while, and it took an hour or two for the gate to completely disappear.
Since the boss wanted the building to be restored as soon as the gate disappeared, Yisun decided to check the status of the building in advance.
However, as he was approaching, he heard other voices. They were the other guild members who were waiting outside.
“Are we supposed to restore that building?”
“I heard that the company president contacted Honshin.”
“Is it Jung Yisun again?”
“He always gets to monopolize all the work for himself.”
As they kicked at the stones on the pavement and muttered irritated curses, they were surprised to see Yisun in front of them. His friends glared at them, but Yisun didn’t show much reaction.
His appearance had shaken the position and status of Restorers within the guild, and some were inevitably jealous of him. Since Yisun was able to completely restore a whole building all by himself, there was less work for the other Restorers to do.
Yisun didn’t pay much attention to them, partly because he was too stoic, and partly because there was nothing he could do about other people’s complaints. He wouldn’t stop working just because they were displeased, he had debts to settle.
Yisun looked around the company building with his friends to get a sense of the extent he had to use his abilities. There was yellow safety tape all around the area that had collapsed due to the dungeon outbreak, so people could only watch from behind the yellow tape.
The raid Hunters had already cleared the dungeon, and so they headed back. Ordinary folk who wanted to steal a glance at the dungeon’s gates sneaked around, and a few members of the Gongdae Guild stayed behind to keep them under control.
However, word had spread that a member of the Honshin Guild was here, and even more people flocked around the collapsed ruins to see Yisun. There were quite a few people who wanted to see the S-class Restorer. The video of him restoring a building had quickly garnered over 1 million views.
The other guild member, who was caught cursing by Yisun earlier, secretly checked his clearance meter. He felt unnecessarily insulted and humiliated after Yisun, who had clearly made eye contact with him, hadn’t reacted. He also felt irritated that there were so many people coming to watch Yisun’s restoration.
So, he could only pray that the measurement would end soon. Once he made sure that the dungeon clearance was at a 100%, he would tell Yisun to start restoring, then immediately leave the premises. He had no intention of watching his restoration, it would only make him feel inferior.
The sky looming over the site was overcast and gloomy clouds hung over their heads, it seemed as if rain would start falling at any minute. The guild members walked around impatiently with their gauges.
100%.
Finally, with a beep, the long-awaited number appeared on the meter. He quickly moved to announce the clearance, but he had barely taken a couple of steps, when the meter suddenly changed.
99%.
Puzzled, he shook the meter for a moment, then backtracked a couple of steps and paced around where he had been standing. Still, the number didn’t change from 99%.
But the dungeon gate had already disappeared. It took an hour for the gate to disappear, and there were no anomalies to indicate the appearance of other gates in the area. He figured that it was just a broken meter, and a functioning one would probably show a 100% clearance anyway.
“You can start restoring now.”
He said to Yisun and then left in a hurry. The rest of the guild members started removing the yellow tape that had been placed near the gate, and Yisun, as well as his friends, slowly approached the building.
The sky where you couldn’t see even a trace of sunset was getting even darker.
Yisun’s friends joked around.
“Should we try doing something like s next month? ‘Yisun’s restoration LIVE’.”
“We could get a drone to broadcast it and get tons of views.”
” Yisun has never been interviewed by anyone so far, right? If we do a BJ, you’ll give us an exclusive interview, riight ~?”
“You guys are so cheap, treating Yisun like a walking ATM…”
“Wasn’t that an established fact? “
“Yes… In fact, we’re all going to ride on the Yisun coin machine towards a better and richer future!”
Kang Youngjoon, the only voice of reason in this group, chided, but all his friends nodded as if it were a matter of course. They looked at him as if he was challenging an academic orthodoxy, and eventually Yisun who couldn’t hold it in anymore, burst out laughing. His friends stared at each other for a moment before joining in the laughter.
Then, Yisun who belatedly remembered that there were actually other people watching them, approached the building.
Finally, his hand touched the rubble.
“Huh, that, what’s that, what the fuck is that.”
“Wait, Yisun!”
“Hey… no!”
Suddenly, the space in front of them started swirling. There was a gust of wind, and then the atmosphere distorted and began to crumple like paper as if the very fabric of space itself was warping. It was an incredibly strange sight, and it shocked everyone.
It was a dungeon break.
Usually, dungeons have at least 30 minutes of forewarning before they happen. But this dungeon break happened out of the blue. It was unlike any dungeon break people had ever seen before. The gate appeared in the same space where it had been cleared an hour earlier, then swirled around violently like a vortex.
Then the people who had been frozen into sculptures from the unfathomable scene playing out in front of them, watched as the gate exploded and swallowed everything in its vicinity.
Every single person on the scene was pulled helplessly into the dungeon.
***
Entering the dungeon without a properly prepared raid party was no different than committing suicide. When the gate opened, the only Hunters around were Yisun’s friends and the guild leader of Honshin, who had been following them.
In the blink of an eye, dead bodies were lying everywhere. Yisun couldn’t think straight; he just ran frantically through the dungeon, holding on tightly to his friends’ hands. He had only ever worked as a Restorer, and had rarely been near the gates, let alone inside a dungeon.
“Ha, hang in there, just a little longer!”
“It’s the first time a dungeon has appeared right after another one has closed, so the big guilds are definitely going to make a move soon. We just have to hold out and survive until the Gongdae team comes in.”
The two friends kept trying to calm Yisun down, and although he could vaguely sense that they were far more frightened than he was, he still nodded stiffly. 80% of those pulled into the Dungeon were already dead, and while two of his friends protected him, the other four tried to protect the other survivors.
Since the previous dungeon was C-class, they thought this one would be C-class as well. However, the monsters were too difficult to hunt, even for a group of six friends with some experience in actual dungeons. In fact, even running away proved to be struggle.
The Honshin Guild leader had already become food for the monsters a long time ago. He was the only one who had drunk an invisibility potion. Yet, because the potion was only of low to mid quality, it couldn’t hide his shadow and so, he was still found and killed.
Exhaustion started eating away at the six Hunters. They had no way to communicate with the outside world from inside the dungeon, so they couldn’t even call for help. And so, they held on, believing that a Hunter team from a big guild would soon come to save them, but as two hours passed and no raid teams in sight, that hope was getting slimmer and slimmer.
The only way they could escape was to find the gate, but no matter how much they searched, it was nowhere to be found, yet the Hunter friends didn’t mention this fact. In this situation where everyone was already frightened, there was no need to cause a frenzy by telling them grim information.
“Hey, Yisun-ah, Jung Yisun… You should stay here and hide. The two of us should probably go and help the rest.”
“What do you mean, don’t you see the monsters outside?”
“I can see them, but if we don’t go out and help them now, it would only be a matter of time until everyone out there is wiped out… Hey, don’t make that face. We’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“They’re probably crying because we’re not there with them.”
The friends soothed Yisun’s anxiety before leaving. The dungeon branched off into two paths, and Yisun was hiding on the left. His friends said went down the right side, and told him that he shouldn’t come out until they told him it was okay to.
Despite his doubts, Yisun had no choice but to trust them, not only because they were Hunters, but because he had lived with them for seven years. No matter what they faced, they’d always come through together, so he knew they could do it again.
But reality was never kind to him.
Yisun felt that the more he got his hopes up, the more he believed things would work out, the more the world laughed at his face. It trampled on him, as if showing him the futility of holding onto hope in the face of despair. Yisun tried to think of just what and when exactly things had gone so wrong, but there was no answer. He tried to blame it on his own insignificant wish, but that wasn’t it; he wasn’t so great that the world would laugh at him, he was just a man who would one day crumble to dust.
“No, no, no… No, that can’t be right…….”
The direction in which his friends disappeared had gotten too quiet. There was a constant commotion before, but at some point, a strange silence has descended. Yisun thought it might be because they had finally defeated the boss monster, but there was not one sound coming from the dungeon. His friends had told him that a dungeon would start shaking when you reached 100% clearance.
(T/n: cw: heartbreak, sadness, and corpse shenanigans…)
The dungeon was too quiet. Eventually, he cautiously went in the direction of the right fork, and what greeted him were the bodies of his friends, lying dead.
He couldn’t believe the scene in front of his eyes. Some of his friends had their arms torn off, others had their legs blown off into the distance. The sight of the large puddles of blood was so shocking that he thought he might faint at any moment.
“No…….”
Faced with such a cruel scenario, Yisun was out of his mind, and so he thought; his friends weren’t dead yet. He could still save them. He used his tear-stained and blood-soaked hands to put together the remains of their corpses, and for the first time in his life, he used his restoration abilities on a human being’s corpse.
However, a Restorer was only able to restore ‘things’ and not ‘humans’.
Ever since there were cases of animals turning abnormal after the use of restoration on their corpses abroad, the Awakeners’ Management Headquarters strictly forbade Restorers from ever restoring living things, saying that the outcome was too abnormal, and it would be even more horrifying to use it on humans.
Still, Yisun had no choice but to use it. Perhaps he was lulled into a false sense of security, a shallow expectation that since he was an S-class, maybe the outcome would be different, maybe he could create a miracle and save his friends.
The bodies, with broken bones, crushed ribs, and torn arms and legs, were slowly restored.
Yisun was elated, but soon reality poured cold water on that short-lived joy.
His friends were moving, but they were no longer “human beings” who could recognize their surroundings.
They were like moving corpses. Yisun was stupefied, but he didn’t have time to check out his friends’ abnormal condition. The monsters that had retreated after wiping out everyone in sight, had returned.
Overwhelmed with fear, Yisun hid behind a wall nearby. He tried to lead his friends to hide as well, but his zombified friends just wouldn’t follow him; they just stood there making grotesque noises, and then fell to the monsters’ attacks once again.
However, Yisun was bewildered to find out that…… his friends were able to use about half of their Awakener abilities. And their corpses lying on the ground, although they clearly suffered deadly wounds, were still stirring. It was a phenomenon caused by Yisun’s restoration.
They became immortal.
To his own horror, Yisun felt a strong urge to survive, it was a compulsion that came less from his own will to live and more of from human instinct. He was panicked in the face of his friends’ deaths, and his mind scrambled to deny the fact that they were already dead. He also felt compelled to check their abnormal condition properly from the outside, and so, he came to the conclusion that in order to do so, he would need to clear the dungeon first.
So, he restored the corpses scattered on the floor then hid behind the wall, and when they were beaten by the monsters, he restored them again, and again, and again…
It went on and on until eventually, the dungeon was cleared.
In the dungeon that shook in a sign of a 100% clearance, Yisun saw the walls crumbling and only then did he finally come to his senses. His mind felt all so clear all of a sudden, and as he took in the reality in front of him. His pupils, dilated with shock, trembled uncontrollably.
He couldn’t even remember how many times he had restored the corpses. Hundreds? Thousands? He clamped his hands over his mouth, then instantly ripped them away, disgusted by the foul smell. His hands were sticky with blood, and he gagged as he stood against the wall with his stained hands.
“Ugh… Hah… Urk…”
However, no matter how hard he tried to vomit, there were some feelings he couldn’t get out. The fear he’d felt in the first dungeon he’d entered, the terror he’d felt at the monsters he’d encountered, the overwhelming trauma at the jarring sight of his dead friends’ bodies.
And the horrible disgust he felt for himself for eventually restoring them.
He wanted to throw up, but nothing came out. And the lump of violent emotions in his throat made it difficult to breathe. With a fumbling hand, he groped at his own throat while coughing. He felt even more sick of the fact that he had to struggle to breathe.
Eventually, he collapsed against the wall, in front of him were his wandering friends, still making bizarre noises. Their bodies were pale, their faces were bloodless, and their eyes were glassy.
“… You guys, please…”
Yisun didn’t dare ask them for forgiveness. All he could do was call their names and sob, but none of them ever answered. Eventually, he had to face the reality of his situation and the terrible things he had done.
It felt like he was suffocating, choking on his own disgusting life.
Min: This chapter, is sponsored by “There is a Light that never Goes Out-The Smiths” and “Curl up and die- Matt Maltese” because I indeed wanted to curl up and die while translating it…
Thank you for reading~<3
That was awful—but horrifically/amazingly he solved the way out for his dead friends and himself… Thanks for the update ❤️
Riight? It’s both heartbreaking yet brilliant… but now he has to deal with severe trauma, survivor’s guilt, and the 6 moving corpses of his friend ;-; oh- and Sa Hyeon
His past is so tragic. I don’t dare imagine how I’d react in his situation.
Frrrr like he’s soo strong for that, i would’ve broken down and did horrible things to either myself or my friends, but he still did everything just to find a cure for them ;-;
thank u for translating <33