Why Is This Showing Up Here?

• Published: 9 months ago •

He had experienced text becoming corrupted once before when his wisdom and mental stats increased dramatically.

But this time was on a completely different level.

In the past, only the text in the level field became corrupted, but now specific error messages were being displayed.

Yuseong swallowed dryly as he waited for the next message to appear.

Though he had no idea what exactly was happening, all he could do now was pray for the error to resolve itself safely.

‘If there’s a system problem and I can no longer do quests…’

He would no longer be able to grow stronger.

In the current world, that was tantamount to a death sentence.

A user’s abilities were absolutely essential for survival and protecting Earth.

[User Han Yuseong does not possess divinity.]

[User Han Yuseong does not possess authority.]

[User qualification and privileges maintained due to not meeting conditions to reach divine status.]

“Haah.”

After confirming the final message and even putting on the goggles just in case to verify quests were displaying normally, Yuseong let out the breath he’d been holding.

All his energy had drained away in less than a minute.

“Mr. Yuseong…”

“Thanks.”

Accepting Alice’s support to sit on a nearby rock, Yuseong gave a brief word of thanks and turned his attention to the messages before him.

Just a few short lines of text.

But the information contained within was by no means trivial.

‘Divine status? Is this different from transcendence? The Karma Operation skill, or rather an EX-rank skill must be one of the conditions for reaching divine status. Divinity and authority? Failed to meet conditions to reach divine status? I get divinity but what’s authority? Looking at the error, rather than obtaining these three things separately, you’re supposed to get all three at once normally?’

All he knew was that obtaining divinity allowed one to become transcendent.

None of the information received from users or stories told by transcendents contained anything related to these current messages.

However, one thing was absolutely certain.

“User qualification and privileges maintained due to not meeting conditions to reach divine status?”

It was a meaningful phrase open to various interpretations.

Why would one lose user qualifications and privileges upon reaching divine status?

Because at that level, the goggles’ abilities would no longer be needed?

Yuseong thought differently.

‘What if the goggles’ purpose is to create divine beings? What if you can no longer use the goggles because their purpose has been achieved?’

Yuseong stared down at the goggles in his hand with sharp eyes.

Who exactly made these goggles, and with what intention?

Somehow the more he learned, the more questions arose.

‘Would reaching divine status answer these questions?’

Yuseong realized what he needed to do now.

* * *

-You want to do a quest?

“Yeah.”

-But why are you telling me?

“Because it’s the rules between users? Isn’t it a rule that you have to tell other users before doing a quest?”

-Following rules? You? With me?

After nearly causing a massive monster wave incident last time, Yuseong had studied the common sense of the current Earth and rules users needed to know.

Users were essential to Earth’s defense in a way that couldn’t be replaced by Contractors or the military.

Even clearing quests as quickly as possible, due to the arbitrary time ratios of other worlds, there was no telling what might happen on Earth while away.

So a rule, or rather an implicit understanding, was established that users should at least inform other users before doing quests.

Of course, being just an implicit rule meant there was no real enforcement, and Yuseong, who despite his abilities had been a user for less than a year, was subtly treated as an outsider, so no one would have said anything if he didn’t announce his quests.

However, after nearly causing a major incident with the monster wave due to careless actions, Yuseong decided to start following the rules to avoid making mistakes again.

-…I’m not someone who cries easily, but this brings tears to my eyes.

On the screen, Kang Changseok wore an expression like a father seeing his prodigal son return.

After pretending to wipe away tears, Kang Changseok cleared his throat at Yuseong’s sour gaze.

-Ahem. How long do you think it will take?

“Won’t know until I try.”

-Hmm. That’s true, but…

“Is there some problem?”

After the undead incident, no events requiring user intervention had occurred on Earth.

Though the collapse of Europe had caused major social and economic shocks, the world was slowly regaining vitality as ability users produced by the International Contractors Association and academy began taking to the frontlines.

Yuseong, who had expected immediate approval, tilted his head at Kang Changseok’s apparent hesitation.

“Is it because of your last proposal? Sorry, but that plan was too unrealistic. If you really want to do it, we could maybe fit enough capsules for a few hundred people, but installing enough for hundreds of thousands is impossible.”

-No, it’s not that. It’s because of Japan.

“Japan? Why? Is there some problem with Japan?”

What problem could arise in Japan, universally acknowledged as the safest country in the world?

-Seeing it would be faster than explaining.

After scanning through the materials Kang Changseok sent, Yuseong’s eyes lit up.

Over the past month, incidents and accidents had begun rapidly increasing across Japan.

-As you can see, there’s no way this is happening naturally. Someone, or some organization, is definitely behind this.

“Is it the work of intelligent monsters?”

As seen with Lucifer’s case, incidents of intelligent monsters infiltrating human society to cause discord weren’t particularly rare.

Though not revealed to the public to avoid panic, there had been cases of doppelgangers replacing an entire small nation’s leadership to turn the country into their den, and elves had tried to devour the African continent by deceiving people with their benevolent image and love of nature.

If intelligent monsters had infiltrated Japan and were plotting something, it wouldn’t be good for a user living in neighboring Korea to be absent.

-That’s a bit unclear.

“What do you mean unclear?”

-We haven’t found any evidence of monster involvement.

No matter how intelligent and well-disguised, once humans grow suspicious and begin thorough searches, monsters inevitably leave traces.

Unless it was a country where the government wasn’t functioning properly.

If intelligent monsters were really involved in these incidents, it would be impossible not to find traces in Japan, which had preserved its administrative and military power and had high population density.

“I think I saw an article about Japan having headaches from the massive influx of European refugees recently. Could it be human-caused rather than intelligent monsters?”

-The circumstances suggest that, but there are some suspicious aspects that make it hard to dismiss as just human activity, so we’re continuing to investigate for now.

“Then my quest…”

-You’ve been doing fine until now, so why ask permission now? Do whatever you want.

Just as someone who only shows bad behavior looks different when showing kindness even once, when Yuseong, who had consistently been uncooperative until now, showed cooperation, Kang Changseok nodded with a bright smile.

After ending the brief conversation, Yuseong muttered while looking at the materials.

“This definitely does seem suspicious.”

Violent crimes like Contractor crimes, terrorism, and indiscriminate killings had increased more than tenfold, and thousands had gone missing.

Adding homeless people who couldn’t be tracked when they disappeared, illegal residents, and unreported incidents, the scale of damage was unimaginable.

Though there was no evidence, the possibility of monster involvement was very high, and if not, it meant there were humans causing harm to society comparable to monsters, which was problematic in its own way.

“Well, it’s not my concern.”

If it was happening in Korea that would be different, but his situation wasn’t relaxed enough to worry about incidents in other countries.

Currently, Yuseong’s mind was entirely focused on quests.

‘I’ve grasped how to control karma, but there are many difficulties using it in actual combat.’

There were various issues like difficulty of operation and mental power consumption, but the biggest problem was having no way to obtain karma when needed.

The karma released when living beings die was too miniscule, and while the karma gathered through the Sun-Moon Ritual was sufficient in quantity, it had the fatal flaw of requiring setting up an altar and waiting.

After days of contemplation, Yuseong had finally found a clue to solving this.

“Karma received from clearing quests.”

[Current Karma: 351,100,000]

Yuseong currently possessed about 351 million karma points.

Though he wasn’t sure exactly how much 351 million karma was, considering it was enough to bring back S-rank skills and items classified as divine arts and techniques, it definitely wasn’t a small amount.

The only problem was that he couldn’t even guess where all that karma was located.

‘I’ve killed countless monsters until now but the karma number shown in the shop window hasn’t changed. In other words, karma absorbed from killing living beings and karma received as quest rewards are treated separately. Then where exactly is the karma shown in the shop window stored?’

He couldn’t find it because though he could see it, he couldn’t feel it.

There was only one way to verify.

Catching the moment when karma was acquired as a quest reward.

“Let’s do any easy quest.”

Since his goal was finding out where karma was stored, there was no need to do a difficult quest or worry about clear rank.

He planned to choose any noticeable E-rank quest and clear it as quickly as possible using whatever skills or items necessary.

After organizing his thoughts, Yuseong took out the goggles from subspace and put them on.

And immediately made a twisted expression.

[Accessing multi-dimensional exploration system.]

[Successfully observed quest.]

[Successfully observed special quest.]

[24-Member Suicide Squad Wanting to Escape from Demon Realm]

-Civilization Classification: B-02

-Civilization Grade: 2.02

-Difficulty: A+

-Demons invade the continent at any time. Enraged by accumulated damage, all intelligent races of the continent gathered the entire continent’s strength to strike at the demons’ base in the demon realm by deploying a suicide squad, but due to certain circumstances, the squad failed to achieve their objective and are now wandering the demon realm while being pursued by demons. Please help them return to their original world.