And on top of that, I wasn’t merely alive—I’d actually been transferred to a city hospital?
Fumble.
I placed a hand over the spot in my chest that had once been pierced clean through and checked my condition once again.
As expected, nothing had changed.
This secondhand body of mine, with a total mana capacity barely worthy of an F-rank, had been restored to structurally perfect condition.
Aside from the fact that the clothes against my skin had been replaced with a hospital gown, I looked almost exactly the same as I had when I left home.
How in the world was that even possible?
Was this a VIP ward?
There was a barrier—yes, I could sense it.
But it was nothing more than a simple defensive barrier. With something this basic, my coordinates would be completely exposed to [Searcher]’s tracking.
I sat there in stunned silence, my face blank with disbelief.
But just as I was looking around, trying to make sense of the situation, the doctor standing beside my hospital bed dropped an even more shocking revelation.
“And Hunter Kang Changho is currently waiting at the café...”
“What did you say?”
“H-here. The VIP ward has a shared lounge nearby, you see.”
The bespectacled doctor barely managed to continue, his face pale.
“Hunter Kang insisted that we notify him immediately once you regained consciousness, Kim Giryeo-ssi, but... if you’re uncomfortable with him knowing where you are, our medical staff will do everything we can to handle the situation properly this time.”
I appreciated the courage it must have taken to say that much.
But inwardly, I had mixed feelings.
“Well.”
No matter how many times I thought about it, the whole situation was absurd.
So, after pretending to consider it seriously for a moment, I told the doctor,
“Let’s speak with the person involved first.”
Just call Kang Changho.
The bespectacled medical worker flinched at my answer, then hurriedly made a call.
***
Inside the luxurious hospital room, warmly illuminated by indirect lighting at around 3,000K, a single Earthling entered from outside.
Kang Changho.
One of Korea’s top elite Hunters, with an appearance striking enough to seem almost foreign.
The S-rank Awakened opened the door and stepped inside while holding a communication device to his ear, apparently speaking to someone.
“----Yeah. I’ll be staying at the hospital on Daeheung-ro for a while. If you want to talk more, come here and meet me on the first floor...”
“You’re late.”
At first, I thought he was talking about himself.
But his next sentence completely changed the meaning.
“Honestly, I thought you’d wake up earlier than this.”
Was he criticizing me for waking up late?
Complaining to someone who had regained consciousness barely three minutes ago?
“Is it morning...?”
I had woken up in Kang Changho’s basement at around ten at night.
That meant we had probably been caught by the EX-rank gate sometime around that same late hour.
But now, the sky outside the window was already turning pale blue with dawn.
Kim Giryeo—who now had no intention of ever being called by any other name—stared intently out the window.
In his mind, he was already deciding which question to ask first in order to make the conversation as efficient as possible.
But in the current situation, there were far too many things that he, a selfish Alphaurin obsessed with magic, simply could not understand.
While the elite Hunter at his bedside was devoting considerable mental effort to making sense of everything, the mastermind behind the third kidnapping finally spoke.
“It must’ve been the perfect opportunity. Are you wondering why I didn’t just finish Hunter Kim off then and there?”
He tilted his large frame to one side, deliberately forcing eye contact like some schoolyard bully.
One hand remained in his pocket as he looked down at me from an angle.
But the intimidating posture lasted only a moment.
Kang Changho soon straightened and continued.
“Yeah. I wanted to use [Improvement]. The location was perfect, too. An EX-rank gate. Convenient place to dispose of a corpse. And right in front of me was the bastard who stabbed me in the back.”
His voice sounded exactly the same as always.
“Honestly, if it were up to me, I’d have done it a thousand times. Ten thousand.”
“But I didn’t.”
“When people go through something shocking, sometimes the way they think changes.”
“Changes?”
“I feel like I won’t be able to sleep until I clear up a few questions that are bothering me right now. So, for the sake of my health, I suppose I have no choice but to confirm the truth with the fraudster himself.”
Rustle.
As he spoke, Kang Changho reached into his right pocket and pulled out a wallet along with several documents.
The white A4 sheets the S-rank Hunter unfolded contained information that was very familiar even to the blond man.
The diagnostic report on the lungs of Korea’s fourth S-rank.
Only a few minutes earlier, a highly educated Earthling had been holding the exact same document and explaining its contents to me.
“There aren’t any biopsy results yet, but according to the doctor, it’s difficult to believe the tumor is benign. And judging by its condition, it looks like it’s already progressed quite far.”
Kang Changho also pulled out images taken by a CT scanner and showed them to me.
As an alien, I honestly wondered how anyone could extract that much information from a single incomprehensible image.
But at that moment, there was something far more important to worry about.
‘So the Enhancer really did notice the defects in this body.’
The fake S-rank lying in the hospital bed narrowed his eyes in thought.
The blue-haired Awakened briefly flipped through the papers, then carelessly tossed them onto a nearby drawer.
It was a simple gesture.
Yet it was more than enough to make the other person tense up for several reasons.
Immediately after finishing my conversation with the doctor, I had looked it up myself.
Thanks to recent advances in medicine and the discovery of dungeon materials, the average survival rate for ordinary cancer patients had apparently risen to an astonishing 88%.
But whether it was 80% or 90%, what difference did that make?
Kang Changho had always possessed a method with a 100% success rate for achieving his objective.
Kill the prey right then and there.
From the perspective of a living skill stone, it was only natural to worry that this S-rank Hunter might suddenly turn hostile and attack at any moment.
“Hunter... sick?”
But...
“So that was the reason.”
It happened then.
The alien hiding beneath human skin suddenly found himself dragged into a conversation he had never anticipated.
“So that’s why you accepted the idea of dying in ten years so calmly.”
Giryeo blinked.
He could not immediately understand what Changho meant.
But the real S-rank standing there did not bother waiting for the alien to finish wrestling with the Korean language.
“A lot of things make sense now.”
Let me explain.
✦ Why did Kim Giryeo accept the ten-year deal so easily?
The answer was simple enough if one took into account what various portal-site search results said about the five-year survival rate of Awakened cancer patients.
It was apparently grim.
In that case, a ten-year contract would hardly have seemed like much of a loss to the contractor.
Wait, let me ask one thing.
What if I become seriously ill before I turn thirty-four?
Looking back, the fourth S-rank had subtly brought up something like that during the contract negotiations.
Kang Changho had begun to consider the possibility that Kim Giryeo was an Awakened suffering from some severe illness that was difficult to cure.
And perhaps Kim himself had known about it all along.
Once he entertained that possibility, the strange behavior of the contractor that had puzzled him for so long suddenly began falling into place, as though he had finally found the correct answer.
✦ The Blueshell incident.
If someone were genuinely powerful, there would be no reason for them to care about such a minor booster.
But if the person acquiring the Blueshell was suffering from chronic pain caused by illness, then desperation might explain why he had sought it out as a last resort.
Buying additional supplies through the black market was certainly suspicious.
But under desperate circumstances, it was also plausible that someone might choose to undergo another re-examination despite how inefficient that would normally be.
“Now that I think about it, that was also the last time he ever tried to get more Blueshells.”
And then—
✦ Kagoshima Dragon Gate.
Grass Nest.
Back then, while pretending to be nothing more than an F-rank and even acting sickly, Kim Giryeo had suddenly shown intense interest the moment a dragon appeared.
For a while, Kang Changho had assumed it was simply another act.
But then, by pure chance, the penetrating injury had given him an opportunity to see Kim Giryeo’s lung with his own eyes after the skin had been torn away.
And there, layered over the lung tissue, he had seen something strange.
The size had been somewhat different.
Still, as someone who possessed the same type of artifact himself, Kang Changho had immediately recognized its shape.
‘Dragon’s Lung.’
A monster organ.
Its new applications had recently been discovered, sending its value skyrocketing.
Before that, however, it had once been considered worth less than a single potion.
And yet this otherworldly object had been covered in the stuff.
The Dragon’s Lung had always traded at a staggering minimum price of roughly two billion won.
Two billion.
An amount large enough to leave an ordinary person speechless.
But why did that supposedly worthless artifact—one that did not increase mana by even a single drop—consistently command such an enormous price?
‘...’
The Dragon’s Lung.
In truth, it had always been in steady demand among elderly people whose lung function had deteriorated with age, as well as wealthy individuals who were especially concerned about respiratory health.
For ordinary patients suffering from lung disease, there were far more efficient treatment methods available at the same price.
So they had little reason to seek out such an artifact.
The Hunter industry...
Since Hunters tended to be relatively young, cases like Kim Giryeo’s were rare.
As a result, the market price of the monster’s lung had remained relatively stable for quite some time.
“They say people change when they’re about to die.”
The narrow chair intended for nurses in the hospital room was hardly comfortable for a man of Kang Changho’s size and weight.
So he soon rose to his feet again and changed position.
Crossing his arms, he looked down at the other man and continued.
“Is that why you changed too?”
Much of what followed was left unsaid.
But his tone remained consistent enough that the meaning was not difficult to understand.
The chain of misunderstandings that had begun with the [White Maze].
That peculiar nerve of his, never wavering even when facing an overwhelmingly powerful S-rank Hunter.
Could the courage behind all of it have come from nothing more than a few words written on the medical diagnosis Kang Changho had obtained at the hospital?
Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!
Use arrow keys (or A / D) to PREV/NEXT chapter