The pain of structural regeneration was entirely different from the pain of destruction.
As Min-jae lay paralyzed against the tire of the parked sedan, the golden light of the Overmaster System bled into his flesh. It didn't feel like the cool, soothing wash of a high-tier Priest’s Heal spell, which used mana to artificially sew cells back together. Instead, it felt like a furnace ignited inside his bone marrow.
[Initiating 'Rebirth through Rupture' protocol...]
[Targeting torn muscle groups: Deltoids, Biceps Brachii, Rectus Abdominis, Gastrocnemius.]
[Utilizing accumulated 'True Ki' and vital essence to forge dense muscle fiber lattices.]
Min-jae’s body twitched rhythmically. Inside his limbs, the torn, bleeding muscle fibers were being forcefully re-knitted. But they weren't just returning to their original state. The system was weaving them tighter, packing the cells closer together until his muscles beca denser, leaner, and exponentially more resilient. It was the biological equivalent of a blacksmith repeatedly folding high-carbon steel under a heavy hamr.
Inhale. Hold. Exhale.
The Breathing of the Primordial Core locked his lungs back into its rigid, deep cycle, pulling in the ambient air. It filtered out the synthetic mana entirely, extracting only the raw, baseline oxygen and converting the physical stress of his survival into pure kinetic potential.
Within ten minutes, the trembling stopped.
Min-jae opened his eyes and slowly pushed himself up from the concrete. The agonizing weakness that had plagued him monts ago was entirely gone. When he stood at his full height, he felt a strange, solid density in his core. He hadn't grown bulkier—if anything, his fra looked slightly more streamlined—but his body felt remarkably heavy to his own perception, like a solid block of iron wrapped in human skin.
He rolled his shoulders, listening to the satisfying, deep pop of his perfectly aligned joints.
[Protocol Complete.]
[Your vessel has successfully adapted to the 'Mortal Flesh (Stage 1)' threshold.]
[Attributes Updated:]
Strength: 6 - 11 (Surpassed average adult male)
Agility: 7 - 12
Constitution: 4 - 10
True Ki: 0 / 10 (Completely expended during forced extraction)
Min-jae stared at his status screen. His eyes lingered on the Constitution stat. It had more than doubled. In the logic of martial arts, Constitution wasn't just a health bar; it was density. It was the thickness of his skin, the tensile strength of his tendons, and the hardness of his bones. At 10 points, his body could now naturally deflect a low-caliber blade or absorb a blunt impact that would normally shatter a civilian's ribs.
"My attributes increased without leveling up," Min-jae muttered, his voice carrying a deeper, more resonant undertone. "This is true physical evolution."
But his satisfaction was cut short.
A loud, frantic shouting echoed from the main avenue just beyond the mouth of the alleyway. Min-jae stepped out, his eyes instantly scanning the chaotic scene unfolding on the four-lane road of the district.
The world had devolved into absolute madness. Dozens of cars were jamd together, their hoods smoking from sudden engine failures caused by the electromagnetic pulse of the Convergence. People were running in every direction, screaming, crying, and tripping over themselves.
But they weren't running from the sky. They were running from the Gwanghwamun Gate down the road.
From the center of the avenue, a massive, swirling do of purple energy had manifested—an official D-Rank Gate. Min-jae knew this gate. In his previous life, this specific gate was supposed to be an E-Rank "Goblin Settlent." It was supposed to be a slow, manageable zone where the first batch of governnt-sanctioned Awakened Hunters could test their magic skills.
But as Min-jae looked at the swirling vortex, his eyes narrowed.
The color was wrong. It wasn't the pale, stable blue of an E-Rank gate. It was a deep, turbulent violet, shot through with crackling sparks of black lightning.
A Mutated Gate, Min-jae realized, a cold sweat breaking out on his neck. The tiline has already altered.
Because he had eliminated the Splinter Rift scouts so quickly and caused a Core Collapse, the spatial anchor of the local area had fractured unequally. The ambient mana hadn't settled smoothly; it had compressed, forcing the nearby Gwanghwamun Gate to mutate and violently upgrade itself before the world was ready for it.
"Help! Soone help !"
A piercing scream shattered the air nearby.
Min-jae snapped his head toward the source. A young woman was pinned beneath the rear wheel of a overturned delivery truck. Less than twenty yards away from her, a creature paced slowly across the asphalt.
It wasn't a goblin.
It was a Mutated Shadow Wolf. The beast was the size of a small sedan, its fur completely black and shimring like liquid ink. Its eyes burned with a malevolent, glowing crimson light, and from its jaws dropped a thick, acidic saliva that hissed loudly as it ate through the paint of a nearby sedan.
A D-Rank monster. On day one of the Convergence.
The people running past the trapped woman didn't look back. They were too busy staring at their own blue translucent status screens, panicking over their level-1 stat sheets and trying to figure out how to cast a basic Mana Bolt or Lesser Shield. They were civilians. They didn't know how to fight.
The Shadow Wolf let out a low, vibrating growl that shook the glass windows of the surrounding storefronts. It lowered its massive head, its powerful hind legs tensing as it prepared to spring forward and tear the trapped woman to pieces.
Min-jae didn't hesitate.
He didn't have a weapon, and his True Ki pool was currently sitting at an absolute zero. Against a D-Rank beast that possessed natural magic armor and a speed that could outrun a sports car, a normal level-1 human was nothing more than an appetizer.
But Min-jae wasn't a normal human anymore. He was a veteran who had survived ten years in the absolute depths of the at grinder. He knew the precise structural weakness of a Shadow Wolf.
He drove his foot into the concrete, his new Agility stat of 12 kicking in.
[Active Skill Initiated: 'Formless Step'.]
This ti, the movent was even faster. Min-jae didn't just blur; he practically vanished from his position, his running shoes cutting a clean line through the dust and debris of the sidewalk. He closed the thirty-yard distance in less than three seconds, his body completely horizontal to the ground as he maintained a low, aerodynamically perfect profile.
The Shadow Wolf sensed the sudden, rapid approach of a human threat. It aborted its leap toward the woman, its massive head snapping toward Min-jae with a ferocious snarl. It opened its jaws, a ball of compressed, dark shadow-mana beginning to form deep within its throat—a Shadow Breath volley.
"Too slow," Min-jae muttered.
In the logic of magic, every spell required a activation sequence. Even for a monster, casting an energy blast required the mana to travel from its core to its mouth. It took exactly 0.8 seconds.
To a martial master, 0.8 seconds was an eternity.
Before the wolf could unleash the dark energy, Min-jae slid across the asphalt, passing directly beneath the beast’s massive, fur-covered chest. He twisted his torso, using his left hand to grip the wolf's thick collar fur to anchor himself, while his right hand coiled back into a tight, compact fist.
He didn't have True Ki to reinforce the strike. He had to rely purely on the chanical physics of his own body.
He locked his hip, rotated his spine, and drove his fist straight upward into the soft, unarmored patch of skin right beneath the wolf's jaw—the exact location of its secondary nervous cluster.
BA-BANG.
The impact was devastating. The sheer physical force of his 11 Strength, delivered through a single, mathematically perfect point of contact, generated a shockwave that traveled straight up through the wolf's skull. The ball of shadow-mana building in its throat detonated prematurely inside its own mouth.
BOOM.
A muffled explosion rocked the inside of the wolf's jaws. Smoke and purple blood erupted from its nostrils as the giant beast was lifted clean off its feet by the dual force of Min-jae’s punch and its own backfired magic. It slamd heavily onto the roof of a parked sedan, crushing the tal fra completely.
The wolf thrashed violently, its crimson eyes wide with frantic, unadulterated shock. A re human had broken its stance with a raw, physical blow.
Min-jae rolled out from beneath the car, his knuckles bleeding slightly from the impact against the tough hide, but his expression remained entirely cold. He knew the beast wasn't dead yet. A D-Rank monster’s vitality was imnse.
He took a deep, heavy breath, his eyes locking onto the wolf's massive, pulsing throat.
The first mishap is here, Min-jae thought, his heart rate rising in perfect sync with his breathing. The tiline is broken. The gates are stronger. If I want to survive this first hour, I have to kill this thing right now.'
He closed his fists, his body entering the stance of the Formless Style, preparing for a brutal, drawn-out battle of attrition against the universe's first anomaly.
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