Former Ranker's Newbie Life

Testing his new heart made one thing painfully clear: his physical specs had been buffed to an absurd degree. Mana Heart had already been a strong trait with solid synergy alongside Mana Delay, but dragons stood at the very top among mana-based lifeforms. With a dragon’s heart beating inside him, Do-Jin’s mana recovery had become downright ridiculous. His body had effectively taken on a dragon’s innate ability to draw in and absorb the world’s mana.

That trait stacked with the recovery effects he already had, pushing his natural regeneration to absurd levels. Mana refilled at a ridiculous pace, and even his HP came back faster. Before, his healing had been useful but nothing extraordinary. Now, as long as he could stay on his feet in a fight, his survivability was bordering on the inhuman.

If I stack Psychokinetic Artistry with Limited Reversion... I can be a literal zombie.

In his previous life, he’d been called a glass cannon with absurd damage output, but now that he had sustained firepower, his survivability wasn’t even in the same universe.

“So yeah, that explains this mess.”

Do-Jin looked around at the wreckage he had left behind. The chunks of flesh scattered across the ground were all that remained of the master of an instance dungeon above Level 150, a monster that stood at the very peak of the current endgame. And it wasn’t just this place. He had cleared five dungeons for testing alone. Any one of them would have pushed even a well-balanced party to the brink, yet he had soloed all of them without ever putting himself in real danger.

He’d been saving the Transcendence and Limited Reversion combo for emergencies, but he never needed it. In the end, he only burned it during the final dungeon boss fight so it wouldn’t go to waste.

As Do-Jin took in the changes, it suddenly hit him that he’d only logged in to check his rewards. Somehow, he’d ended up snapping back to reality after running five dungeons in a row just to test them. Then again, it wasn’t exactly surprising. Who could look at a trait called Dragon Heart and just log out as if it were nothing? Any RPG player would’ve done the same.

“I should go and rest, like, right now.” Do-Jin sighed.

If he stuck around any longer, Chun Ji-Hyun would definitely chew him out. He quickly logged out as if he were making a clean escape.

***

Life in the game returned to normal. One week passed, then another, and after that, time kept dragging on. Throughout it all, Do-Jin kept a close watch on the changes around him. More specifically, he was watching for anything different within Lostania itself. But nothing stood out.

Galante was a pretty big fucking deal...

If that thing had really been revived, the conspiracy behind it would have been enormous. From the Cult of Ruin’s perspective, having that plan crushed meant crashing flat on their faces.

Do-Jin fully expected reactions to start popping up all over the place, but there was absolutely zero news about it. Sure, the Church of Creation and other factions were being crushed under the Laws of the World, so silence there made sense. But since the Cult of Ruin had taken a direct hit, they should have been thrashing around or making some kind of move by now.

What, am I supposed to go poking around again?

Tracking the Cult of Ruin wasn’t easy, even for Do-Jin. The moment someone became a believer, they swore an oath and entered a contract with the stars, which branded them in a way that made interrogation almost completely useless. That was the biggest reason their secrecy had held up for so long.

Even after ripping off one of its main limbs, the cult still has no intention of showing its core.

Those bastards would have stayed hidden forever if all he did was harass them with half-hearted attacks. He had been lucky enough to grab one of their major limbs and rip it clean off, so he figured the main body would finally show itself. It seemed he had underestimated them. Their patience ran deeper than he had expected.

What the hell do I do now?

The only reason for this dilemma was the achievement reward he had received after killing Galante. They had said something would come looking for him, yet nearly a full month had passed without the slightest sign. Staying on edge while wondering when it would appear, or what form it would take, was only sustainable for a week or two. By now, Do-Jin was starting to feel worn down.

“Damn it... maybe I should just eat.”

While moving from one dungeon to the next, Do-Jin changed direction toward a column of smoke rising in the distance. Smoke like that meant there was at least a small settlement nearby.

Once he got there, it was obvious this wasn’t a village at all. It was an inn for passing adventurers and merchants. If he had to compare it to something modern, it felt like a sketchy roadside motel off an American highway.

When he opened the door, a hinge that hadn’t tasted grease in far too many years made an ear-grating squeal. The man who looked like the owner glanced at Do-Jin. He frowned, not like he was seeing a customer, but like he had spotted an annoying piece of trash. The mage outfit he was wearing probably didn’t help.

“Are you an adventurer?”

When Do-Jin nodded, the owner let out a tired sigh. “Walking around alone in a place like this is dangerous.”

“It is a dangerous area,” he replied.

High-level monsters spawned here regularly, but they meant nothing to Do-Jin. The owner didn’t bother asking what he wanted. He just slammed down cold soup, bread, and boiled meat like he was tossing scraps.

For a moment, Do-Jin wondered if he should have just eaten the preserved rations in his inventory instead. Still, he ate what was put in front of him without saying a word. If he was going to rest anyway, doing it under a roof beat sitting out in the wilderness.

“Phew...”

While Do-Jin ate in a corner, the innkeeper sat with his eyes fixed on the entrance, puffing on harsh tobacco and letting out one long sigh after another. It had all the makings of a quest about to go sideways. From experience, Do-Jin knew that talking to NPCs acting like that almost always led to trouble.

Do I talk to him or not...?

He chewed the cold meat, its smell buried under enough spices to make it tolerable, and weighed his options. At that moment, the sound of galloping hooves came rushing in from the distance.

The innkeeper heard it too and rose awkwardly from his seat. A strange tension spread through the inn, and Do-Jin found himself staring at the entrance as well. Then the sounds came in quick succession. A horse went down, its rider tumbled across the ground, and a moment later someone burst into the inn, flinging the door open hard enough to nearly rip it off its hinges.

“Max!” A woman with long black hair spilling down to her waist burst in.

It wasn’t a modern firearm, but a magitech gun that applied magic principles to a ranged weapon. In imperial lands where traditional magic still dominated, weapons like that weren’t common at all.

“Deneve, what the hell happened?!” the innkeeper shouted.

“What do you think happened? We got fucking spotted.”

She stumbled inside, knocking over a table as she went, yanked out alcohol, and poured it straight onto her side. Then she did the same with a potion.

“Damn it, how bad is it?”

“It’s nothing. Just get ready to fight.”

“You bitch, we’re going to kill you!”

Five men rushed in through the broken doorway. The one in front had a left wrist hanging at a sick angle, and it didn’t take a genius to guess that Deneve’s gun had done that.

What the hell kind of mess did I walk into?

Do-Jin stayed in his corner and kept eating as he watched. He needed to get a read on the situation before deciding whether to step in.

“Who the hell are you?!” one of them shouted at Do-Jin, hurling a dagger at him.

Do-Jin reflexively knocked the blade aside with his gauntlet and said, “So you’re the bad guys, huh?”

That made things easy. He was just about to move when a loud bang echoed through the inn. At the same time, one of the men flew straight out the door.

“Your fight is with me!” Deneve fired her Mana Pistol.

The barrel turned red-hot and was clearly on the verge of overheating. If she fired it again, it would explode and there was no doubt about that. Even so, Do-Jin could clearly see mana being forced into the pistol as she got ready for another shot.

“Seriously...” He let out a short sigh.

His Magic Circuits immediately split into multiple tasks. He fired a Gale Arrow at the gun in her hand, flared Psychokinesis through his body, and wrapped Lightning around his right hand. Her scream and the burst of blue light hit at the same time.

“Who the hell do you think you are—” the woman tried to shout in anger after Do-Jin’s spell knocked the gun from her hand. However, she stopped mid-sentence when she saw that the men who had been threatening them moments ago were dead on the floor.

“What the hell...”

Deneve stared at the man who had ended everything in an instant. In the chaos, she hadn’t even gotten a good look at him. Now that she did, she realized he was a mage. She wondered why he seemed more confused than anyone else.

Do-Jin answered that question for her by muttering to himself, “What the hell? I barely zapped them. Why are they all dead?”

It was his first time fighting NPCs since obtaining Dragon Heart, and he had completely failed to control his output.

Deneve and her companion Max both tensed up at that line. A man who had just fried five people alive was casually wondering why they died so easily. She clutched her bleeding hand where the spell had struck. She slowly bent down to retrieve her gun, afraid he might attack them too.

At that moment, Do-Jin tossed her a potion. “Is your hand okay?”

She gasped and caught it before she even realized she was doing so. The air in the inn finally eased just a little.

“If you fired that again, your hand would have been completely blown off.”

Do-Jin spoke while watching Deneve and Max, who were still clearly on edge.

“If you have calmed down a bit, I would like to hear more about this situation. At the very least, I should know what kind of people I’ve accidentally killed.”

“That’s not information we should be telling outsiders, but I can promise you this. They are not the kind of people you need to feel guilty about killing,” Deneve said.

Do-Jin pulled out his adventurer pendant and Elthomagia emblem. He held them up for her to see, then looked back at her face. That was when it hit him. She looked familiar. Her appearance was so different that he hadn’t recognized her at first, but he definitely knew her.

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