Global Descent: I Alone Can See Hidden Evolution Paths

The walk back through the dark transit tubes took forty minutes, and nobody spoke a single word the entire way.

Up ahead, the two hired vanguards had Sang-woo slung between them like a sack of laundry, his expensive leather boots dragging uselessly through the wet gravel, leaving two parallel tracks in the mud. Min-ah trailed behind them.

Her head was bowed so low her chin touched her collarbone, and her shoulders gave a violent twitch every time a train rumbled on the active tracks a few levels above them. She didn’t look back at Jun-ho once. She didn’t dare to.

Jun-ho stayed a few paces behind the group, right next to Eun-bi. The extra energy from his skill had completely faded, leaving his bare right arm feeling cool in the damp draft blowing from the ventilation shafts. The torn remains of his shirt sleeve fluttered against his ribs with every step.

"Your phone is vibrating," Eun-bi said, her voice cutting through the steady squelch of their shoes. She didn’t look up from her utility basket, using both hands to steer the wheels over a pile of loose stone ballast.

Jun-ho reached into his pocket and pulled the device out. The screen was smudged with dirt, flashing with three missed calls from the night-shift manager at the logistics center. He didn’t answer. He tapped the power button twice, shutting the display down until the glass went completely black.

"Not planning to log into the warehouse scanner tomorrow?" she asked, her tone dry but missing its usual sharp bite.

"No," Jun-ho said, dropping the phone back into his pocket. "I think my logistics career ended about an hour ago."

"Good. You look like you were terrible at it anyway," she muttered. She reached into the deep pocket of her medical apron, pulled out a small, crumpled brown paper bag of dried persimmons, and extended it toward him without looking. "Here. Chew on this. Your skin is turning that lovely shade of curdled milk again."

He took a piece of the fruit. It was cold, tough, and tasted intensely sweet, far better than the cheap sugar packets she had thrown at him earlier. As he chewed, he watched the small, rhythmic bounce of her clipboard against her hip. "What happens when we reach the surface desk?"

"The usual bureaucracy," Eun-bi said, her pen tapping a neat, steady beat against the wooden board. "I submit the standard medical extraction log. I write down ’mechanical failure due to lack of municipal inspection.’ The emergency gate jammed because the secondary brackets were rusted through. Sang-woo got careless with his casting distance, took the full recoil blast from the monster’s charge, and broke his own mana channels. His shiny little contract with the Sun God people is dead before the paperwork even hits the district office. They don’t hire mages who blow up their own circles."

"And Min-ah?"

Eun-bi stopped the basket for a brief second, turning her head just enough to catch his eye through the dim yellow safety lights of the tunnel. Her sharp gaze searched his face, checking his expression for any lingering hesitation or regret.

"She’ll be lucky if the ministry auditors don’t pull her license entirely for leaving a vanguard behind without a recovery anchor. But that depends on what you tell them during the debriefing."

"I don’t have anything to say to them," Jun-ho said.

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the glowing red sphere he had snatched off the ground after Sang-woo hit the wall. The Tier 3 dungeon core was the size of a billiard ball, pulsing with a warm, thick crimson light that cast long, liquid shadows across the damp concrete walls around them.

As his fingers settled around the crystal, the familiar gray subtitle text flickered into the bottom of his vision, silent and unhurried.

[Item Detected: Tier 3 Volcano Core.]

[Standard Market Valuation: 5,000,000 Won.]

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

[Yield Option 1: 100 Tier 3 Volcano Cores.]

[Yield Option 2: 1 Primal Core of the Fire King.]

Jun-ho focused his mind entirely on the second line. The red sphere in his hand didn’t shatter, and it didn’t multiply into a mountain of gravel that would split his jacket pockets. Instead, the crimson glow rapidly pulled inward, condensing toward the center of the stone until the entire crystal turned a deep, solid ink-black color. Right in the very middle of the dark glass, a single thread of pure white flame began to dance, casting no light but radiating a strange, freezing heat against his palm.

Eun-bi glanced down at his hand, froze, and immediately yanked her utility basket sideways, using her body and the crate of bandages to block the view from the vanguards walking ahead.

"What did you just do to that stone?" she whispered, her voice dropping into a tense, rapid murmur.

"I changed the reward," Jun-ho said, keeping his fingers loosely curled around the black gem.

"That thing looks like it could buy an entire block of apartments in Gangnam," she said, her eyes wide as she stared at the white flame dancing inside the black glass. "Jun-ho, if you take an unregistered primal object through the public scanner at the turnstile, the alarms will trigger the district defense grid. The high-rankers from the main guilds will be down here with an extraction team before you can even reach the street level."

"Then we don’t use the turnstile," Jun-ho said. He shifted his gaze toward the side wall of the transit tunnel, where an old, dented emergency door painted with faded yellow stripes sat half-hidden behind a stack of rusty replacement rails. "That exit leads up to the old alleyway behind the market, right?"

Eun-bi stared at the black stone, then up at his calm, unbothered face. A short, sharp chuckle escaped her lips, and she immediately kicked the loose wheel of her basket, turning the cart toward the yellow door.

"The locking mechanism on that door has been broken since the subway floods three years ago," she said, her sneakers crunching fast over the gravel as she led the way. "Follow me. But you’re buying a real dinner once we get above ground. If I have to look at another triangle kimbap from the convenience store today, I’m going to lose my mind."

"Alright," Jun-ho said, stepping through the rusted side door right behind her, leaving the rest of the party to walk toward the scanners alone.

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