Volume 7

The volume opens in a boardroom. More than thirty leaders of the Hunter’s Association of Korea, the vice president and the director of every branch among them, have met to replace the late President Gunhee Go, and the vice president names Jinchul Woo. It is the first Jinchul has heard of it; his head whips round. The case for him is laid out like a file: Go valued him; he chose the Association over the big guilds; and with a slightly higher magic-power reading this top-tier A-rank would have been its second S-rank after Go himself.

Then comes the reason that makes the room uneasy. Jinwoo Sung, Korea’s strongest, has proved himself in Korea, Japan and America, and the vice president says plainly that “the Hunter’s Association will not be able to function smoothly without him.” A national-level hunter can mobilize a whole country, and Jinwoo has brought one to his knees: what hold can an association have on a man like that? Jinchul protests:

“I’m lacking in several areas needed to fill this role.”

Many others outrank him, he says, and isn’t he too young? The next scene settles it: far away, Jinwoo sees Jinchul’s name trending, fears bad news, finds a headline naming him president, and sighs with relief.

Far away is Japan, where the gates keep breaking. Jinwoo’s shadows are taking care of raids all over the country, and the flood of magic beasts has been a boon to his levelling. An ant soldier carries his luggage now, Jinho Yoo being too busy running the guild, and when it barely catches a tossed phone Jinwoo tells it, “Your predecessor did a much better job.”

A dungeon break has grown a veritable forest of tree-type magic beasts with faces, swinging their branches like fists. Jinwoo dodges, stabs one again and again with a Demon Monarch’s Dagger and watches it die spewing putrid sap, but he knows what they really fear. He summons Fang, the high-orc spellcaster raised in Volume 3, with three mage soldiers; Fang enlarges his body, they rain fire, and the trees scream and burn. Afterwards his status window reads Level 133, most stats past 300, and the daily quest still runs.

Meanwhile an interview with Jinwoo has aired, and some of the world’s top hunters come to Korea in secret to consult him. One is Lennart Neirmann, Germany’s strongest, a humble, perceptive man who reckons he would have no chance against whatever has been killing S-ranks. At Incheon Airport, on his first trip to Asia, he beams at the customs officer: “Is this the land of Jinwoo Sung?” A hulking man behind him loses patience. Lennart turns to make him say it to his face, and the man, a head taller, takes off his sunglasses. It is Thomas Andre, the Goliath. Lennart freezes, Thomas shoulders past, leaving his secretary Laura to apologize, and at the desk he asks the officer the very same question.

In Japan, Beru, leading the ants far from his king, asks telepathically for prey to be driven his way: he can feel a level coming. Beru already holds the highest rank in the army, general, and Jinwoo wants to see what comes after it, so he calls the whole army in from across Japan and tells Beru that the two of them will finish the magic beasts together: power levelling, a gamer’s trick. The army assembles before him: the knights, Fang with the high orcs, Jima with the nagas, No. 6 with the giants, Tank with the ice bears, Greed with the rest. Igris kneels as he always does, a sight Jinwoo finds he has missed. Some shadows are elsewhere, assigned to guard his mother and sister. Sprouts are already rising from the ash of the burned trees.

At ten past four that afternoon Thomas has been sitting unannounced at the Ahjin Guild office for over two hours, and Jinho and the staff are dying inside. Then the automatic doors open on Jinwoo, his clothes showing the day’s hunting. Thomas, whom Jinwoo beat in America, does not seem to hold a grudge. So why has he come? At home, meanwhile, Jinah creeps up on her mother at the dishes.

From here the page follows the webtoon’s sequence, the novel’s text being out of reach. In the webtoon Thomas has come to repay a debt, for Jinwoo spared his guild’s lives, and at the end of a meal he hands over Kamish’s Wrath: twin daggers made from the largest fang of the dragon Kamish, whom five S-ranks, Thomas among them, once brought down; the fang had lain unused in his guild’s basement. The novel’s searchable opening pages run through Thomas’s visit without a word about daggers or dragons, so in the book the gift comes later. Their blades are ice-white, and Jinwoo can make them as light as a feather; they are the daggers he will carry into the last war.

Then the sky over Seoul opens. The back cover calls it a colossal gate looming over the city and reads it as a declaration of war; in the webtoon Thomas, who reckons it far bigger than the one Kamish crawled out of, stays to help clear it for nothing. Jinwoo flies Kaisel up to its face to go in first, and in the webtoon finds the way barred. Whatever is inside will come out in its own time. Meanwhile, says the back cover, the Monarchs are picking off the top hunters one by one: Christopher Reed, Brazil’s Jonas and President Go are dead, and at the end of Volume 6 three Monarchs agreed to join forces and kill Jinwoo.

Haein Cha, Korea’s S-rank swordswoman, trains at the dojo of Chiyul Song, the veteran who lost his left arm in the Double Dungeon in Volume 1; the fan wiki, citing the novel, calls her his disciple. Jinwoo calls to ask her out. The webtoon gives them a whole day together that ends with a flight on Kaisel and a night under the stars; how the novel stages it could not be checked.

In the webtoon the date ends with a call from Jinchul. Days after the gate opened, a beast in human shape has appeared right outside the Hunter’s Association and killed hundreds. This is Rakan, the King of Beasts, whom chapter three is named for. The fan wiki dates his first appearance in the novel to here, and Querehsha’s to just after; the webtoon had shown both much earlier.

In the webtoon Thomas Andre takes him on first and holds his own until the King of Beasts lets part of his true body show; then the strongest hunter in the world goes down. Lennart blinds the Monarch for a moment, Jinwoo arrives the way only he can, trading places across the city with one of his own shadows and driving the King of Beasts head-first into the street, and Lennart gets Thomas to the healers.

The fourth chapter’s title, “The Monarchs’ Pincer Attack,” says what happens next. The Frost Monarch, President Go’s killer, arrives, and with him Querehsha, Monarch of Plagues and queen of the insects: three Monarchs come at Jinwoo at once. In the webtoon the insect queen lays claim to Beru, calling herself his mother and holding him helpless when he is summoned against her; Jinwoo frees him and cuts her down, and she accepts her end and crumbles to dust.

Then, in the webtoon’s telling, the Frost Monarch shows his own true form and drives Jinwoo to his limit, and while all of Jinwoo is turned on that fight, the King of Beasts strikes him down from behind. The Shadow Monarch’s vessel dies on a Seoul street. In the webtoon the whole world watches it live, his mother and sister and Haein among them, and so does a man who has only just arrived in the city.

Dying meets a condition Jinwoo was never told about. The one dated review of the Yen Press volume calls what follows an interlude in mid-battle in which Jinwoo watches the original Shadow Monarch’s past. In the webtoon it begins as a too-perfect replay of his first day with the System, until he sees through it and demands that whoever is behind it show himself. It is Ashborn, whose power he has been carrying all along.

What Ashborn shows him is the war behind every gate. In the beginning there were only light and darkness. The Supreme Being (Volume 8’s term) split the light into the Rulers, Volume 8’s Fragments of Luminosity, and the darkness into the Monarchs, and set the two against each other. When the Rulers rose to kill the god who used them as pawns, Ashborn, the strongest of them, alone stood against the rest; Volume 8, in the novel’s own words, has Bellion remember it. Left for dead, Ashborn found the darkness hidden in his own body and became the Shadow Monarch, and came back too late to save his master.

Feared by both sides, he threw in with the Monarchs, and two of them betrayed him: the King of Beasts and Balan, whose copy waited atop the Demon’s Castle in Volume 3. He killed Balan but lost almost all of his army. Each time the Monarchs overran the human world, the Rulers turned time back ten years with a relic called the Cup of Reincarnation, and the world was destroyed whichever side won.

He never belonged among them. With the Architect, who built the System, he went looking for a human vessel, and chose Jinwoo: the weakest hunter there was, always within death’s reach and always surviving for his family’s sake. Then he decided not to take the man’s body but to give him his power. That is what the System of Volume 1 was for. Now, in the webtoon, he offers a last choice, to stay in a peaceful dream or to go back and finish the fight, and Jinwoo goes back.

In the webtoon the black heart Jinwoo brought out of the temple in Volume 5 starts to beat. The King of Beasts and the Frost Monarch understand what is waking in his body and lunge to finish it, and a man steps in their way. Ilhwan Sung, Jinwoo’s father, vanished in a dungeon ten years before the story began; he came back as one of the Rulers’ vessels, sent to kill the new Shadow Monarch, and found that it was his son. He holds off both Monarchs at once; in the webtoon the King of Beasts runs, and the Frost Monarch, left alone, raises a storm of ice over the city before Jinwoo stands up.

He comes back as the Shadow Monarch in full. The limits the System kept on him are gone, and his shadows reach their true strength at last: Igris and Beru rise to marshal grade, and Igris, silent since he was raised in Volume 2, speaks. The fan wiki cites the novel’s own chapters for Igris’s promotion and his power of speech, and Volume 8 opens with Beru a marshal too. His father, seeing that his son can finish this, slips away.

Jinwoo hunts down the King of Beasts, the Monarch who once betrayed Ashborn, and kills him. Then he comes back for the Frost Monarch, who murdered President Go and is no match for him now, and the body the Monarch has borrowed breaks apart into light. All three Monarchs who came for Jinwoo are dead.

Ilhwan has spent more power than a human body can hold, and his is coming apart. Jinwoo finds him and asks why he disappeared without a word. His father tells him what happened after he was trapped in the dungeons and how the Rulers found him and gave him their mission; in the webtoon he tells his son he has grown up well, apologizes for not being a better father, and dissolves into light. The novel’s reviewer counts the mystery of Jinwoo’s father, open since the first volume, as resolved here. In the webtoon their mother, as if she knows, agrees at last to Jinah’s wish to move house, and then Jinwoo walks in alive.

The Korean title of the seventh chapter means, plainly, the legacy of the previous Monarch, and Ashborn leaves Jinwoo more than his power. The gate over Seoul finally opens. In the webtoon hunters from around the world have gathered beneath it, Haein among them, ready to meet whatever comes out. What comes out is Bellion, Ashborn’s grand marshal, at the head of Ashborn’s old army, and they pledge themselves to Jinwoo while the hunters watch the monsters they came to fight kneel. The fan wiki dates Bellion’s first appearance in the novel to just after the battle, and the reviewer sees Jinwoo’s minions arrive in the closing chapters.

In the webtoon Bellion proves his rank by beating Beru in a spar. Jinwoo gives President Jinchul Woo his memories, so that the man running Korea’s hunters knows what the Rulers and the Monarchs are and what is coming; Volume 8 opens with Jinchul carrying exactly that knowledge. Giant gates open around the world, and Jinwoo warns everyone what is about to come through them.

Canada’s strongest hunter, Jay Mills, seventeenth in the world, calls the warning nonsense, insults Jinwoo for warning the public at all, and means to defend his country’s gate himself; the fan wiki cites the novel for his rank and his scorn.

Far away, the Dragon King stirs. Volume 8’s opening recalls that his heart, which seemed to have turned to stone in his long wandering of the gap between dimensions, began hammering again when the Shadow Monarch revealed himself, and that he took it as a declaration of war. He is the Monarch of Destruction, by the fan wiki’s account the strongest of them all. In the webtoon he steps out of the Canadian gate in the shape of a man and asks the humans where their king is, and Jay Mills, not knowing whom he means, answers that it is he. Whether Volume 7 ends on that arrival or runs on into what follows, by the first page of Volume 8 a whole country has been wiped out, and the Shadow Monarch is about to take up arms.