Global Descent: I Alone Can See Hidden Evolution Paths

Jun-ho stood over the small pile of gray ash, his hand still tingling from the sudden, violent rush of new muscle memory. The air in Room 7 felt thin, hot.

He had four attribute points left floating in his peripheral vision. They blinked in that same dull, unhurried gray script.

[Unassigned Attribute Points: 4]

’ if 1 point gives me 100 Strength’, Jun-ho thought, his eyes tracking the remaining two goblins shivering against the concrete wall, then putting all of this into physical stats right now is a mistake.’ I need balance. If I move too fast for my brain to process, I’ll break my own neck just trying to dodge’.

In his past life, he had been a Vanguard. He knew the numbers by heart. A Tier 1 Hunter usually started with 10 points across the board: Strength, Speed, Endurance, and Mana. To reach Tier 2, you needed to get those stats to 50. Most people spent two or three years of grueling, dangerous dungeon raids just to crawl up that hill.

He didn’t have two or three years. He had forty-seven minutes before the room flushed, and less than forty-eight hours before Min-ah’s raid.

"Two points into Speed," Jun-ho whispered, his teeth grinding against the phantom taste of the supplement. "Two points into Mana."

[Attribute Allocation Detected: 2 Points to Speed, 2 Points to Mana.]

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

[Speed increased by 200.]

[Mana increased by 200.]

The reaction was instantaneous, but it didn’t burn like the strength had.

Instead, the world simply slowed down. The flickering fluorescent bulb on the ceiling, which had been buzzing at a regular, annoying interval, suddenly became a lazy, sputtering strobe light. He could count the individual drops of sweat falling from his own forehead.

Then came the mana.

A cold, heavy sensation settled deep into his stomach, right below his navel. For a Tier 1 Vanguard, mana was just a tiny reserve used to trigger basic skills like Provoke or Iron Skin once or twice a raid before running dry. Now, Jun-ho felt like he was harboring a deep, frozen lake inside his ribs. The ambient energy in the room—the faint radiation from the dungeon walls—began to pull toward him naturally, swirling around his boots in a microscopic, invisible current.

He looked back at the two gray goblins.

They didn’t look like monsters anymore. They looked like small, pathetic toys.

One of them, driven by its hardcoded survival program, made a desperate lunge at his ankles with its broken knife.

Jun-ho didn’t even lift his shield. He simply took a half-step to the left. To the goblin, it must have looked like he vaporized. To Jun-ho, he had just walked normally, though the concrete beneath his boot cracked open from the sheer kinetic force of his movement.

Before the creature could even register that its target was gone, Jun-ho reached down, grabbed it by the back of its leather collar, and slammed it face-first into the concrete floor.

The floor didn’t just dent; it cratered. A two-foot wide web of fractures blew outward, throwing up a cloud of gray dust and stone chips. The goblin didn’t even have time to shriek before it vanished into a thick cloud of black ash.

[Target Neutralized: Low-Tier Gray Goblin.]

[Total Experience Gained: 100 XP.]

[Level Up!]

[You have reached Level 3.]

[You have received 5 Unassigned Attribute Points.]

The third goblin didn’t even try to attack. It dropped its weapon, its small green knees knocking together until it collapsed sideways, its AI brain completely frozen by the terrifying level of threat standing in the room.

Jun-ho didn’t look at the notification. He looked down at his right hand.

It was covered in fine, gray concrete dust, but there wasn’t a single scratch on his skin. His skin felt like iron plate, his muscles like tempered steel cables.

’Level 3’, he thought, his heart beating with a slow, heavy rhythm that felt entirely non-human. ’two kills, and I’ve already surpassed the base stats of a Tier 5 Guild Leader. If Sang-woo tries to use his fire spells on me Sunday... they won’t even singe my clothes’.

He walked over to the last goblin, his boots crunching on the ruined floorboards. He lifted his foot and brought it down with a heavy, deliberate thud.

[Target Neutralized: Low-Tier Gray Goblin.]

[Total Experience Gained: 100 XP.]

The gray text box blinked again, but this time, a new notification appeared beneath it.

[Chamber 7 Clear.]

[Calculating Clear Reward...]

[Standard Reward: 500 Won & 1 Low-Grade Mana Stone.]

[Applying 100x Multiplier...]

[Total Reward Received: 50,000 Won & 100 Low-Grade Mana Stones.]

A metallic thud echoed next to his feet.

A leather pouch, swollen to the bursting point, materialized out of thin air and hit the cracked concrete. Jun-ho knelt down and unzipped it. Inside, piled high like regular gravel, were dozens of small, polished blue crystals. Each one was a low-grade mana stone—the basic currency of the Hunter world.

Normally, a single stone was worth about 10,000 Won on the open market. Hunters saved them up for weeks just to buy a piece of uncommon gear.

Jun-ho had a hundred of them sitting in a dirty training room floor.

He slowly closed the bag, his hands steady despite the sheer wealth sitting in his lap. Fifty thousand Won in cash was nothing, but one hundred mana stones? That was a million Won. In less than ten minutes, he had earned more than his monthly salary at the distribution center.

He stood up, slinging the heavy bag over his shoulder. The weight didn’t even register against his new strength.

He had thirty-five minutes left before the room’s auto-flush system turned on, but there was no point in staying here. Gray goblins couldn’t give him anything more than raw stats, and his stats were already reaching a level where the cheap, mass-produced gear he owned would break if he flexed too hard.

He walked back to the heavy steel door, pulled it open, and stepped back into the fluorescent-lit corridor.

The bored clerk at the front desk was still chewing on a toothpick when Jun-ho walked out of the locker room. The clerk casually glanced up, expecting to see another exhausted, bruised rookie looking for a band-aid.

Instead, he froze.

Jun-ho looked exactly the same, but the air around him felt different. It was heavy. Every time Jun-ho took a step, the floor tiles gave a tiny, almost imperceptible groan. The heavy leather bag over his shoulder clinked with the distinct, unmistakable ring of high-density mana crystals.

"You..." the clerk started, his toothpick dropping out of his mouth. "Did you... did you find a hidden chest in Room 7?"

Jun-ho didn’t stop. He tapped his card against the exit turnstile, his face completely expressionless.

"Just a lucky drop," Jun-ho said, his voice carrying a deep, quiet resonance that made the clerk’s skin prickle. "Have a good day."

He walked out into the bright Friday afternoon sun, leaving the clerk staring stupidly at the computer screen, which was currently blinking with an error code:

[Warning: Structural damage detected in Chamber 7. Immediate maintenance required.]

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