Volume 1

The Prologue is a flash-forward. A clear young woman’s voice speaks in the narrator’s head, a notification hangs in midair, and he prays it is not the same one again. It is: the daily quest, Strength Training, a hundred push-ups, a hundred sit-ups, a hundred squats and a ten-kilometre run, with an appropriate penalty for failure. “Dammit... How many times do I have to do this?!” CBR’s reviewer heard a tribute to One-Punch Man in the regimen.

Chapter 1 drops into the third person and into winter. “E-rank hunter Jinwoo Sung. That title followed him around everywhere.” He has hunted for four years, all of them at E rank, barely sturdier than a civilian and always carrying some injury; he has been brought back from the brink of death more than once. He stays for the Hunter’s Association’s health insurance, without which he could not keep his mother, who lies in a long sleep, in hospital at all (even with it her bills cost him several hundred thousand won a month), and because a man in his midtwenties with no employable skills has nowhere else to go. He gave up college for lack of money, and he wants his sister to go.

A gate has opened, and the Association’s hunters gather over coffee an employee hands round. Kim tells Park, who quit but is back because his wife is expecting their second child, that the Association calls fewer raids now because the guilds are grinding harder. Then he hails Jinwoo as he passes and, once he is out of earshot, reassures Park: “Jinwoo Sung’s here. That means it’s safe.” The Association never gives its weakest hunter a hard job. Jinwoo hears every word, asks for a coffee, and the coffee has just run out.

Inside, in a roughly D-rank dungeon, more than a dozen hunters fight easily and Jinwoo gets hurt. Joohee Lee, barely twenty and one of the Association’s rare B-rank healers, patches him up and asks why he keeps doing this. It’s his hobby, he says. His one kill is worth less than 100,000 won; a C-rank stone would fetch over ten million. Then a hunter finds a hidden second entrance, and Song, the party’s grizzled de facto leader, ten years a hunter and a fire mage by trade, throws a flame down a passage with no visible end. It is a double dungeon. The gate is still open, so the boss must be inside; protocol says report it and wait, but another party would take the kill. Seventeen hunters vote. Song votes to go in, the count ties eight to eight when Joohee apologetically votes no, and Jinwoo, thinking of the money and his sister, raises his hand and breaks the tie.

Forty minutes down the tunnel, Kim’s phone flashlight upstages Song’s cupped flame, and at the rear Joohee lets fly about the wounds she has healed on Jinwoo, then softens and suggests that, if he is really sorry, he could take her out to dinner. Before he can answer, the front reaches two giant doors. Song will not go back empty-handed, the rumours of double-dungeon treasure win the rest, and Park thinks of postnatal care, tuition and rent. Song pushes; the doors swing open as if on a mechanism; and Jinwoo pulls Joohee in by the wrist.

Torches along the walls light themselves. The hunters stand in an ancient, damp sanctuary, moss in every crack, under a dome bigger than several Seoul Olympic Stadiums together. At the far side sits a male statue of unimaginable size on a throne even bigger than itself, and Jinwoo thinks of the Statue of Liberty. Along the walls stand stone sentries a little taller than a man, holding weapons, books, instruments and torches; Song finds a divination circle at the centre of the floor; and in a corner stands the only statue with wings, holding a slate carved in runes that only a magic-type hunter can read. Song, a mage, reads out the laws of the Cartenon Temple.

There are three: worship God, praise God, prove your faith, and whoever breaks them will not leave alive. As Song reads, Joohee whispers that the god’s eyes have moved. The doors slam, and the hunter who first voted to turn back stalks off to leave and is struck down by one of the stone guards at the door. Then the god’s black eyes turn red. Jinwoo feels the danger and screams for everyone to get down a moment before beams of light sweep the hall and burn the hunters they touch to ash; of seventeen, eleven are left. Song has lost his left arm, and Jinwoo helps him bind the stump. A man who makes a dash for the doors dies too, and Jinwoo, the weakest man in the room, starts asking the useful question: why are any of them still alive?

Worship: the beams, he finds by standing up once and barely dodging one, hunt anyone upright, so he has them all bow down, Song first, and the red light fades; then the god rises from its throne. Praise is worse. A hunter who once sang in a church choir tries a hymn and is crushed underfoot; the god runs amok, and the sentries along the walls cut down anyone who flees to them, Park among them. Jinwoo sees that praise must mean the statues with instruments, and each survivor runs for one; Song’s begins to play a harp. A drummer will not play for two, so Jinwoo leaves Joohee there and runs on, mistakes a shield for an instrument, loses his right leg below the knee, and crawls to a statue holding a book, which begins to sing. The god returns to its throne. Six of the seventeen are left. The floor’s circle rises into an altar. Prove your faith: Kim, sword drawn, insists that Song, who led them in, be the sacrifice, and Song steps up. A red flame lights for each person standing on it; only when all six are aboard does a ring of thirty-six blue flames appear, going out one a minute, and the doors swing open. Now the statues creep closer whenever no one is looking.

Each one who steps off the altar puts out a red flame and narrows the doors, but gets through. A man on the far side runs first, then the man who has been holding Jinwoo up, then Kim, apologising, unwilling to stake his life on Jinwoo’s guess. Joohee, burned out from healing Jinwoo, cannot stand. Song offers to stay; Jinwoo sits down and makes him take her instead, pressing his one E-rank essence stone into her hand to pay for that dinner. Song knocks her out and carries her through. Alone, run through and beaten down by the statues, Jinwoo finds that he does not want to die. Everything slows, and a voice speaks in his head: he has met the conditions of a secret quest, and his heart will stop 0.02 seconds after he refuses the right to become a Player. He accepts. Yen Press put what follows on the back cover:

“PING! [Congratulations on becoming a Player.]”

He wakes in a hospital bed four days later with every wound healed and his leg restored. Rescuers found the temple stripped of its statues, with only Jinwoo inside, so Jinchul Woo, an A-rank of the Association’s Surveillance Team with close-cropped hair, sunglasses and a black suit, comes to test him for a reawakening, the rare second awakening that can lift a hunter’s rank, using a measuring device built round a pitch-black crystal worth a fortune. The reading says he is still barely a hunter. His sister Jinah arrives and punches him, cries, and nags for over an hour. She is in high school, in her school’s top ten without a tutor, and wants to be a doctor because of their mother.

Only Jinwoo can see the windows now opening in the air, or hear the voice that comes with them, and one of them is a daily quest. He tries the push-ups, writes the rest off as a hallucination and sleeps; at midnight the room crumbles into sand, and he is in the Penalty Zone, a desert under a black sky, with four hours to survive against giant poison-fanged centipedes whose heads rear almost five storeys high. He survives, and in the novel the System even rewards him for it. After that he does the quest. It works like a game: stat points, a full recovery and a Mystery Box for every completion, a stat screen, an inventory. He spends his points in fives so that the numbers match. When a nurse wants a signature he pulls a pen out of his inventory, and one Mystery Box holds a key to an instance dungeon.

The key opens a dungeon meant for him alone, at Hapjeong Station in Seoul, and once he is in he cannot leave until it is cleared. Lycans, wolves with steel fangs, hunt him in packs; he levels on them and earns the title Wolf Assassin, which raises all his abilities by forty percent against animal-type monsters. The boss, Kasaka, a blue serpent the size of a house, shatters his blade, and he finishes it with his hands and his new strength. Its reward, Kasaka’s Venom Fang, becomes his dagger.

Outside, a D-rank gate has broken and a stone golem as big as a building is loose; a few hunters are stalling it (the novel names their tank, Hansoo Lee). Jinwoo throws his broken sword through its face, and the others finish it. Meanwhile the daily quests go on working on his body.

No Association raid has come since the double dungeon, and money is short. So when Dongsuk Hwang, a C-rank, phones with work as a porter for his strike squad, Jinwoo takes it: carry the gear, no fighting, no share of the battle drops. Making up the eight-hunter minimum is Jinho Yoo, a rich D-rank rookie in conspicuously expensive gear, who promises to look after the E-rank. The dungeon is C-rank and full of bugs; Dongsuk’s partner Gyuhwan is a mage. In the boss room a giant spider sleeps among mana crystals, and Jinho points out that crystals are not battle drops, so the porter is owed a share.

Dongsuk’s crew are lizards, hunters who leave weaker partners behind the way a lizard drops its tail, and they seal the two of them in with the waking spider. Jinwoo kills it and gains the skill Sprint. When the lizards come back for the loot they tell Jinho to finish off the porter, and Jinho refuses. The System posts a quest: kill them, or die. Jinwoo kills the whole crew, Dongsuk last, takes the skill Bloodlust, and walks out with Jinho and a story about monsters. From here on, as CBR’s reviewer notes, the novel’s Jinwoo acts with a growing detachment, and the hunters in this book can be as dangerous as anything in a dungeon.

Jinho calls and meets him at a café across the street from Jinwoo’s apartment building. His father, Chairman Myunghan Yoo of Yoojin Construction, will make him a guild master if he proves himself in raids, and if Jinwoo will clear them with him Jinho will give him a building worth about thirty billion won and keep quiet about his strength. By the time Volume 2 opens the deal stands, and Jinho calls him boss. Jinwoo also finds that a passive blessing from the System shields him from poisons and ailments; in the novel he discovers it over a beer that will not make him drunk.

Doing more than the daily quest asks unlocks a hidden reward: the key to an S-rank instance dungeon, the Demon’s Castle. Beyond its gate lies a ruined, burning city, and the gatekeeper is Cerberus, a three-headed black hound that very nearly kills him. Potions, the venom fang and the System’s recovery barely turn the fight. His prize is the key to the castle beyond, and pressing on now would be suicide. He will be back. Song, meanwhile, is working again with one arm, and runs into Jinwoo while shopping: he is stunned at the change in him, and at the leg he lost in the temple.

An Association C-rank goblin raid reunites the temple’s survivors, Song, Kim, Jeongho Kang, Joohee and Jinwoo, padded out with three handcuffed C-rank convicts serving for reduced sentences and overseen by B-rank Taesik Kang of the Surveillance Team. Joohee is overjoyed; Kim and Jeongho cannot meet Jinwoo’s eyes. At a three-way fork the party splits, Jinwoo, Song and Joohee one way, Kim and Jeongho another, Taesik and the convicts a third.

Taesik is a killer for hire who enjoys the work, and he turns on the convicts. Kim and Jeongho stumble on it: Jeongho is killed and Kim mortally wounded. In the novel Taesik then fakes an injury to draw Joohee, the healer, within reach, and Jinwoo catches his arm. Kim, beyond Joohee’s healing, apologises at last for running from the altar, and dies. Song holds Taesik off with his fire. Taesik decides Jinwoo must have reawakened; the System orders the kill; Joohee strengthens Jinwoo with her magic. Taesik vanishes into Stealth and cuts him, Jinwoo heals before his eyes, and Bloodlust freezes the assassin long enough for the dagger. A rune stone gives Jinwoo Stealth of his own.

Then Jinwoo sends Song and Joohee out, drags the one surviving convict to the boss room, lets the hobgoblins have him, and kills the boss: the brutal scene CBR singled out in the novel. Song tells the Association that he killed Taesik, to protect Jinwoo; in the novel Jinchul Woo does not come to the scene. Jinwoo rates himself a high B, and others reach the same verdict, more than once; CBR’s reviewer could have done with fewer.

Joohee gives back the E-rank essence stone Jinwoo once gave her, which she never sold, and tells him she is quitting to go home to Busan. In America, the S-rank Dongsoo Hwang hears from his secretary, Lola, that his brother Dongsuk died in a dungeon whose only survivors were Jinwoo and Jinho, and swears revenge; Jinwoo is warned that Dongsoo may come for him and that the law cannot touch an S-rank: one more reason to get stronger. The Association issues him a new hunter’s phone, and he ignores the texts from a nurse.

Jinho buys the rights to C-rank gates and hires misfit low-rankers purely to make up the eight-hunter minimum. Only the two of them go in, and a C-rank dungeon falls in about thirty minutes; one of them, in the novel only, is full of zombies. Speed like that is noticed. At the White Tiger Guild, Sangmin An, the young manager of the second administration team, and his deputy Kichul see that this E-rank has walked out of the double dungeon, the lizards’ dungeon and the goblin raid alive, and begin to suspect a reawakening. The volume leaves that suspicion hanging, and Volume 2 opens with the two of them staking out Jinho’s gates.