Global Descent: I Alone Can See Hidden Evolution Paths

The public training ground in the Yeongdeungpo district looked less like a fantasy dungeon and more like a dilapidated, gray municipal gym.

Jun-ho stood at the turnstile, his shoulder aching slightly from the weight of his cheap shield. The air inside the lobby smelled of old floor wax, damp towels, and the faint, bitter tang of low-grade mana discharge. A sign above the counter flickered weakly: District 4 Public Monster Pen. Tier 1 License Only.

A bored clerk in a wrinkled blue uniform didn’t even look up from his computer screen as Jun-ho tapped his hunter registration card against the scanner.

"Room 7," the clerk muttered, his voice flat. "Basic gray goblins. Weakened variants. You have fifty minutes before the auto-flush system cleans the chamber. Don’t leave your trash inside."

"Thanks," Jun-ho said.

His voice sounded different to his own ears. It was steady.

As he walked down the narrow, fluorescent-lit concrete corridor toward Room 7, he kept his eyes locked on his own reflection in the cracked vending machine glass. He looked like a ghost. He looked like the man who had died forty minutes ago, but his veins were still buzzing with that terrifying, artificial heat from the convenience store supplement.

Fifty-two minutes left on the timer, Jun-ho thought, his fingers twitching against the leather grip of his shield. One hundred points of Endurance. If I don’t turn this temporary boost into permanent stats before the time hits zero, I’m just a dead man walking on Sunday.

He stopped in front of the heavy steel door labeled 07.

In his past life— two days from now—Jun-ho had entered these public pens with a completely different mindset. He had been terrified. He had practiced his positioning for hours, memorising how to take a blow on the thickest part of his shield so he wouldn’t bruise his ribs. He had done all of that because Min-ah needed him to be a perfect shield. She had told him that a vanguard who felt pain was a liability to the team.

"If you get hurt, Jun-ho, the line breaks," she had said to him over a cheap dinner of instant kimbap. "If the line breaks, the Mage can’t cast. You’re doing this for us. For our future."

Jun-ho closed his eyes, a dry, bitter smile cutting across his face. "Our future," he whispered to the empty corridor. "You already had your contract with Sang-woo’s family back then, didn’t you?"

It all made sense now. The sudden interest from the Sun God Guild hadn’t happened overnight. Min-ah had been feeding them data. She had been using Jun-ho as a free, disposable testing dummy to gather combat logs, showing how well she could manage a front-line defender before discarding him when a better option—Sang-woo—came along.

He pushed the door open.

The chamber inside was a twenty-meter square box made of reinforced concrete, stained with old black blood and deep gouges from claws. In the center of the room, three small, sickly green creatures with oversized ears and jagged teeth turned their heads. They were gray goblins—the lowest tier of monster allowed in civil areas. Their iron daggers were rusted, and their movements were sluggish from the neural dampeners installed in their collars.

The moment the door locked behind him with a heavy pneumatic hiss, the goblins snarled, their yellow eyes fixing onto his boots.

[Stamina Supplement Status: 49 Minutes Remaining.]

"Let’s see how much this system can carry," Jun-ho said aloud.

He didn’t lift his shield. He didn’t drop into his standard defensive stance. He just walked forward, his boots clicking loudly against the concrete floor.

The first goblin lunged. It was fast for a normal human, but to Jun-ho’s current perception—boosted by the massive influx of physical stats—the creature looked like it was moving through thick syrup. He could see the rust bubbles on its knife. He could smell the sour, dead-meat breath coming from its jaws.

The rusted knife slammed directly into Jun-ho’s unprotected forearm.

A sound like a pebble hitting an iron anvil echoed through the room. The goblin’s rusted blade didn’t pierce his skin. It didn’t even leave a scratch. Instead, the sheer density of Jun-ho’s multiplied Endurance caused the metal blade to shatter into three pieces, the recoil snapping the creature’s wrist with a sickening pop.

The goblin shrieked, clutching its broken arm and stumbling back.

Jun-ho didn’t wait. He stepped into the space, raised his shield like a massive club, and brought the edge straight down onto the creature’s skull.

The goblin collapsed instantly, its body dissolving into a puff of black ash—the standard decomposition of a Tower-regulated training construct.

[Target Neutralized: Low-Tier Gray Goblin.]

[Experience Gained: 1 XP.]

[Applying 100x Multiplier...]

[Total Experience Gained: 100 XP.]

[Level Up!]

[You have reached Level 2.]

[You have received 5 Unassigned Attribute Points.]

Jun-ho’s breath hitched in his throat. He froze, his shield still dripping with ash.

One kill. A single, weak training monster that usually required a novice hunter to grind for an entire week just to see a single percentage point increase on their status bar, and he had leveled up from one hit.

The other two goblins hissed, backing away toward the corner of the wall, their primitive instincts finally realizing that the meat shield in front of them wasn’t normal.

Jun-ho didn’t look at them. His mind was racing, calculating the sheer absurdity of what had just happened.

"Five attribute points’, he said, his heart pounding in his chest. "If I assign them normally, that’s +5 to Strength or Speed. But if the multiplier applies to rewards... does it apply to the allocation too?" No, the text said ’resources gained’. Points are a resource.

He took a deep breath, his mind focusing on the internal interface.

"Allocate 1 point to Strength," he murmured under his breath.

[Attribute Allocation Detected: 1 Point to Strength.]

[Applying 100x Multiplier to Resource Value...]

[Strength increased by 100.]

A sudden, violent tremor shook Jun-ho’s muscles. The heat from the supplement was nothing compared to this. It felt like his muscle fibers were being torn apart and re-woven with steel cables in the span of a microsecond. He let out a low, muffled groan, dropping his shield as his right hand gripped his thigh. The stone floor beneath his boots began to spiderweb with tiny, radiating cracks from the sheer weight of his shifting physical presence.

He lifted his hand. It looked exactly the same. But when he flexed his fingers, the air between his palm let out a sharp pop from the sudden compression.

He looked at the remaining two goblins. They weren’t snarling anymore. They were pressed flat against the concrete wall, trembling violently, their brains completely overwhelmed by the sudden aura of a monster far greater than themselves.

"Two days," Jun-ho said, his voice dropping into a quiet, dangerous whisper as he walked toward them. "In two days, Min-ah... you’re going to open that door. And I’m going to make sure you stay inside with me."

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