Should I just pretend I didn’t see it?
He felt the urge to feign ignorance about karma as he had done so far. After pondering for a moment over the very sweet impulse, Sa-yoon tapped the status window with his fingertip.
To be honest, he was quite curious.
He wanted to see what kind of amazing shop it was that required ten million karma just to open.
It took ten million just to open it. Then, the items inside must be rare things that definitely couldn’t be obtained as gate rewards or would be useful for clearing gates.
How much would he gain if he could sell or use them?
“Tsk…”
It seemed he would only feel satisfied if he opened it after all.
Even if he wanted to give up, he was too curious to endure it.
Was this how a fish felt when it thoughtlessly bit the tasty-looking bait on a fishing hook despite knowing it would die? After speculating, Sa-yoon boldly checked his infamy value. To reduce meaningless karma loss from now on, he had to start managing his infamy.
Reputation: 10,390,091 (Infamy)
“…”
Damn it.
It’s over ten million.
“Are you telling me to just give up?”
He was astounded that it piled up that much karma for him. What did he do so terribly to accumulate that much infamy? It was beyond unfair.
After checking how much infamy he needed to maintain to avoid karma deduction, the upper limit was seven million. Realizing he had to cut three million through good deeds, he felt dizzy. It was an absurd shackle.
A villain performing acts of kindness to prevent karma reduction. Could there be a more contradictory relationship?
Sa-yoon, barely holding onto his sanity that made him want to toss everything and just curse at the system, took deep breaths and set his priorities.
For now, opening the karma shop was a matter of the distant future. He hadn’t even gathered half of ten million karma yet, so there was no reason to fixate on the shop from the start. Obsessing over something he shouldn’t would only make him suffer.
The immediately important thing was opening Eyes of Catastrophe.
That was the priority.
Sa-yoon, regaining his composure, checked the remaining status window with lucid eyes.
Indeed, befitting the value of what he obtained after 10 years, each item was astonishing, so he had only checked the disposition, unopened skill, and karma so far. With much information left unviewed, Sa-yoon lowered his gaze and examined the titles section, finding a point of confusion.
‘Watched by the Gods (?)’
‘Could I Be a Descendant of God? (?)’
‘Follower of the Evil God (?)’
Unlike most of Sa-yoon’s titles, these were ones he had no memory of directly obtaining. If there was a commonality, it was that they all included God, so when he pressed them, detailed information was blocked. Sa-yoon, making a fed up expression at the ‘Cannot be viewed’ window he saw who knows how many times a day, tried to keep his heart light.
Well, when did he not know he was being toyed with by the gods? He had already experienced it firsthand.
Through that very benefit.
His eyes that deliberately avoided the benefits section turned chilly as they glared at the forced execution written there.
Scoffing that he didn’t expect that forced execution to be his own benefit, Sa-yoon moved his finger. He wanted to check exactly what it was, but like the others with question marks on their rank, detailed information for forced execution was also unavailable.
Making it impossible to check in detail meant it was information that should not be viewed. The gods who pushed him into a damn destiny were messing with his status window too.
His ears burned with rising anger, but he endured, knowing that was the result the gods wanted. However, Sa-yoon’s suppressed emotions exploded when he checked another benefit with L-rank attached.
‘To You Who Will Be Most Unhappy (L)’
A benefit with an oddly unpleasant name from the start.
[To You Who Will Be Most Unhappy (L)]
- The gods bestow pity upon you who were born with an unfortunate fate. Luck stat fixed at A- in any situation.
Thinking it would require karma consumption again this time, he was about to flip the status window and everything, but a preposterous benefit popped up. Wondering what kind of L-rank benefit this was, Sa-yoon got angry but soon lost his words after checking his stats.
‘Luck: A- (F-)’
According to the Eyes of Catastrophe skill description, the value in parentheses was likely his luck’s maximum growth. Let’s emphasize again. Not the base value, but the ‘maximum growth.’
“Ha…”
Sa-yoon let out a hollow laugh.
The despairing laughter continued to flow out. Later, he laughed madly with only his shoulders shaking silently, looking indistinguishable from crying or laughing if viewed from behind, then abruptly raised his bowed head and turned serious.
Clang!
He kicked the table beside the bed, shattering the crafts placed on it. If Jongsik saw, it would be a sight to shed tears of blood, but Sa-yoon continued kicking with enough force to break even the table. It was a scene where no excuse could be made even if others misunderstood him as a madman with anger control issues.
Bang, bang, bang!
Sharp and loud noises filled the room. Many things were broken and shattered, but Sa-yoon, his anger still unresolved, exhaled a breath heated by rage.
If luck was even E-rank, bizarre things happened to the point of making one wonder how they were alive. Among E-rank luck holders, there was someone who faced a risk of death eight times and bankruptcy twice in a single day.
Yet his was F-. Not just F, but with a minus attached.
The point Sa-yoon found unfair wasn’t simply because his luck was low. It was that he had lived an ordinary life until the world underwent upheaval.
Until gates appeared, Sa-yoon lived normally. He lived affluently in a harmonious family. It was a life far from the word misfortune.
So this luck stat wasn’t something Sa-yoon was born with, but merely the system’s, no, God’s trick to impose the disposition of humanity’s evil on him.
After doing that, what? Born with an unfortunate fate?
If they intended to make his faith fall, it was extremely successful. He thought there was no need to make something nonexistent fall this much in the first place.
Sa-yoon, feeling even more unpleasant than when he realized karma was required to open Eyes of Catastrophe, repeated the breathing technique Jongsik had taught him, saying it was good to try when angry. Inhaling and exhaling deeply a few times, his anger barely subsided. Feeling the heat that reached the tips of his hair cool down, Sa-yoon waved his hand as if seeing something filthy and dismissed the blue window.
If they had given him transfer of the system window instead of the status window this time, he might have cried tears of joy. Then he would have started praising the gods he used to curse like a routine and became their fervent believer.
However, as hypotheticals tended to be, abstract assumptions based on fantasy were difficult to realize.
Seeing as his wish to return to 10 years ago had never been granted, system transfer was also just nonsense, so Sa-yoon lay down on the bed with a tired face. It felt as if the system had stuck an unlucky person label on his forehead. It was a fantastic feeling.
“I’ve been damn unlucky indeed.”
Since becoming a hunter, he had been so unlucky that if he walked through a minefield, he would only step on mines. As he was recalling that time with a futile feeling, something knocked on Sa-yoon’s window covered by a blackout curtain, tap tap, tap tap.
Sa-yoon waved his hand to draw the curtain and checked the source of the knocking sound.
A crow.
A crow sitting elegantly on the window sill with its wings neatly folded was knocking on the window. As their eyes met, the black bird’s eyes turned red.
“…Is it Jongsik?”
Seeing as it sent a crow, it could be the other guys. Since he could only check after letting it in, Sa-yoon got up from his spot and unlocked the window latch. As soon as he opened it, the bird that had been waiting nobly until now flew in flapping and rubbed its body against his face.
“St-, St-, Stop!”
Caw caw!
“Did you even wash?”
Caw?
“…I’m going crazy, really.”
Still, it must have tidied up to some extent, being the cleanest among the crows Sa-yoon cared for. Despite knowing that, the sensation of wings rubbing against his face was oddly unpleasant. When he grabbed the crow’s neck and lifted it, the bird flapped its wings happily.
“Don’t get excited and report first.”
As he calmly reprimanded it, the crow relaxed its body. Sa-yoon lifted the docile creature with both hands and made eye contact with it.
Its eyes turned red. With a tingling pain, the memories the crow had seen were shared with Sa-yoon as well.
The Night Rats guild, named after the saying that mice hear night talk and birds hear day talk.
Sa-yoon didn’t name the guild Night Rats for nothing. It was named so because there were snakes to act as mice and crows to act as birds.
It was no exaggeration to say this ability to control snakes and crows and share their vision through communication and sharing skills made Night Rats the world’s top information guild.
In the crow’s memory, there was a scene of Night Rats guild members kidnapping a Chinese guild member and dragging him to a torture villa. The last memory was of the guild members, after obtaining the desired information through torture, grabbing the crow and telling it to report to the guild master, so Sa-yoon closed his eyes.
A mild headache surged in as an aftereffect of using the skill. Since it was at a level he could ignore, Sa-yoon blinked a few times and patted the crow that finished reporting.
“Well done. Eat a snack before you go.”
Caw!
When he spoke while pointing to the door outside the bedroom, the crow nodded and flew away. Sa-yoon sat back on the bed, seeing off with his gaze the bird that went to the crow snack storage on its own.
A quest completion window popped up with good timing.
<‘The true evil of humanity tortures someone once a day.’ achieved! 300 karma will be awarded as a reward for periodic torture.>
- Current Karma: 1,000,089
It surpassed a million.
Sa-yoon, able to safely open the Eyes of Catastrophe skill, inhaled, even forgetting his previous unpleasantness. He pressed skill opening with anticipation.
<Will you spend 1,000,000 karma to open the skill? ( oᵔ▽ᵔ)o>
Having no reason to hesitate, the moment he immediately accepted-
“Cough! Ugh…”
Sa-yoon collapsed from the pain that assaulted him without warning.
Drip drop.
Red blood flowed from his right eye, staining the bed sheet.