WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ I Returned as a God ◈

Chapter 3: Kang Hangyeol (2)

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I looked around. The building I'd just come out of, the Korea Hunter Association's Seoul branch, sat right in the middle of a forest of buildings in Jongno.

"I probably need to get a better grip on the situation."

It would've been nice to have access to the possessed kid's memories, but no such luck.

Nothing to do but go through things one at a time.

I pulled a worn leather wallet out of the bag. Along with a hunter ID, there was a resident registration card.

The address on the registration card was about an hour away by subway.

I tapped a disposable card at the turnstile and it beeped.

Riding the subway again after so long felt nostalgic, but also strangely unfamiliar.

Aside from the whole dungeon and hunter business, it was pretty much the modern world I remembered.

I sat down in an empty seat, set the bag on my lap, and pulled out my phone.

It would take a while to get home, so I had plenty of time to look things up.

This is way better than the first time I got dimension shifted, at least.

Back then I'd been thrown into a forest with zero information whatsoever.

It took three months living in that forest before I even found out it was the so-called Devil's Forest, a den of monsters.

On top of that, my identity hadn't been clear either, so I couldn't count how much trouble I went through just to get settled at first.

If I hadn't met Luciel, it wouldn't have been strange at all if I'd just lived out my days in that forest without ever learning a thing about saving the world.

[The next stop is Geumjeong Station.]

The announcer's voice rang out overhead, and I hurriedly grabbed my bag and got off the subway.

I walked about ten minutes from the station into a residential neighborhood.

Going by the address on the registration card, this was a semi basement unit in one of these houses.

I dug through the bag and found a faded key. I stuck it in the hole and turned it, and the door opened.

Bingo.

I took off my shoes, stepped inside, and turned on the light. Mold had bloomed across the wallpaper in the corner of the room.

If I'd still been the person I was before experiencing the continent of Arbelisia, a room like this might've made me recoil.

Not that studying was ever easy, but in a world where money was everything, being given an environment as a kid where all you had to do was study inevitably meant your family had at least some financial breathing room.

My parents had actually both been professors.

Not that any of that mattered now. Old history, useless to bring up.

I pulled a notebook and a ballpoint pen out of the bag.

Old habit from my studying days, and since the continent I'd lived on didn't have anything like smartphones, writing things down on paper was still far more natural to me.

I started jotting down the basic facts in the notebook.

Twenty four years old, Kang Hangyeol.

Living in a semi basement unit, bank balance around three million won.

Rank D, unaffiliated hunter.

That covered the basics.

Next came what I'd looked up on the way home.

This world resembled the modern era I remembered from right before I got summoned, but it wasn't the same.

The biggest difference was the existence of hunters, called awakened, and dungeon gates.

Gates leading into dungeons appeared randomly all over the world.

Inside a dungeon were various missions including monsters, and clearing a dungeon earned rewards.

Conversely, if a dungeon wasn't cleared within a certain number of attempts, or in some cases regardless, a phenomenon called a Break occurred, where monsters from outside the gate spilled into reality.

People granted special abilities through awakening became hunters, clearing dungeons and holding back the monster invasion. That was the gist of it.

Awakened people had a status window, like in a game, that let them check their own abilities and skills.

"Next, the Association and the guilds."

The place I'd woken up in, that was the Association.

Simply put, the Association was closer to a public corporation, and guilds were closer to private companies.

"And then there's affiliation."

Something I'd read online summed it up roughly like this.

[Question. Why do unaffiliated awakened people get so much crap?]

└anon1412: Is going unaffiliated even possible? lol

└anon42758: Honestly the unaffiliated ones don't really deserve to call themselves hunters

└(OP): No, I'm not an awakened myself, so, um, what I mean is, why is unaffiliated bad? I have a friend who's awakened, and they say unaffiliated people aren't even human. I've got 0% compatibility, so I'm a civilian. Does that make me livestock then. -_-

└anon784: Damn, that friend went too far lol

└anon42758: Let me explain it simply. Not all awakened are the same. Think of it like a game. Awakening gets you the login credentials, and affiliation is your job class. Unaffiliated is unemployed. No job means you're weak, obviously.

└(OP): Then what about Choi Suhyun? Isn't he unaffiliated?

└anon158: lol OP really is a clean slate when it comes to hunters, lol lol, the comment above was just an analogy, reality can be different. Choi Suhyun wasn't unemployed from the start. He's a special case, yeah. Normally other gods just won't take unaffiliated people. Nobody knows why, but a few of those guys exist. From what I know, if Choi Suhyun ever said he'd join somewhere, they'd basically be begging him to come. MVP isn't MVP for nothing lol

.......

└anon548: Whoever came up with the unaffiliated unemployed analogy is a genius lol Choi Suhyun is an S rank unemployed guy lol agreed

Every awakened person needed an affiliation, and the abilities they could use differed depending on that affiliation.

The problem was that affiliation.

"It comes down to which god you serve."

Hunting monsters or achieving something no one else had done raised something called merit points.

Gods competed using those merit points, and the more merit an awakened person built up, the more power they could be granted. That was the structure.

Awakened people living in this reality treated merit points like experience points in a game, and didn't seem to care much whether actual gods were really competing over that stuff.

Not that I had solid proof either way.

But if it was the gods I knew, it wasn't hard to imagine they'd absolutely do something like that. It was more inference than fact.

"There's no rule saying one god has to manage exactly one dimension. But isn't this kind of strange? Well, let's set that worry aside for now too."

Hunters had a rank system running from D to S. Higher ranks got access to more information and tougher dungeons.

Up to rank B, you just had to clear certain qualification requirements.

Above that, level and merit points and a bunch of other factors went into the evaluation.

Naturally, whatever was going on with the gods didn't matter much to me right now, possessing the body of a semi basement dwelling twenty something rank D awakened. It wasn't a problem I could solve today.

"Being unaffiliated feels like it could be good or bad, honestly not sure."

Affiliation wasn't really anything special. If I had to put it into words, it was basically closer to religion.

"And then there's the fake names on top of that."

The god's name I'd seen in the news, Luce, wasn't a true name. It wasn't like I knew every single god's name either. But that wasn't really about the name itself.

A name carried uniqueness. Without a name, my own significance as an existing being would vanish.

Humans in particular were far more sensitive to names than gods were.

There was a kind of power you could feel the moment a god's true name left someone's mouth, the moment it was spoken aloud.

Except for Luce, out of the countless gods I'd searched up online, not a single one gave off any real sense of divine power.

That was why I figured the names of these publicly known gods were fake.

Regardless of how badly this world looked down on unaffiliated hunters, I actually felt a lot more comfortable being unaffiliated.

Someone who'd run away from the gods signing up under some specific god made no sense to begin with.

Once I'd more or less worked out the situation, I finally opened up my status window.

[Kang Hangyeol]

Strength: C (0%)

Vitality: D (0%)

Mana: D (0%)

Healing Power: D (0%)

Skills

Talents

Achievements

"You've got to be kidding. There's nothing here?"

This was way worse than I'd expected.

I'd said I could do anything as long as it meant escaping the gods, but this was basically like abandoning my main character and starting from scratch on some throwaway alt.

I got up off the floor and threw a punch into the air. Then a kick. Then another punch.

I hadn't even moved much, and I was already out of breath.

For a decent looking face, the stamina attached to it was bad. Really bad.

I figured I needed to start working out, then sat back down on the floor. I searched the name Choi Suhyun on a portal site.

Choi Suhyun, Public Official

Affiliation: Korea Hunter Association

Career: Youngest ever awakened

- Over 1,000 dungeon clears

- 3 SS rank dungeon clears

.......

- Former member, Cheongwol Guild Premier Team

- Former affiliate of Servia

- Hunter Education Division, Seoul Branch, Korea Hunter Association

"That's a pretty stacked resume."

Come to think of it, that same post asking about unaffiliated hunters had a comment section that lit up over Choi Suhyun's name too.

Even someone like me, still figuring out the situation, could tell he was some kind of elite.

I pulled Choi Suhyun's business card out of my pocket.

White paper with a red stripe, just a name and phone number printed on it. A personal card.

Choi Suhyun was currently unaffiliated.

According to rumors floating around online, he supposedly survived a certain dungeon alone, abruptly left his guild, walked out of Servia, and chose the path of an Association hunter without joining anywhere at all.

I had no idea what had happened to Kang Hangyeol's body before he collapsed, but whether it was worth Choi Suhyun going so far as to hand over a business card over it needed a bit more thought.

"Don't tell me he felt some kind of sympathy since we're both unaffiliated?"

Even so, that didn't quite track.

I'd been unaffiliated from the start, while he'd kicked his own affiliation away on purpose. Different situations entirely.

Someone at that rank, an elite like him, handing over a business card, there was probably a reason behind it.

"Someone at Choi Suhyun's level probably knows something."

Information was life. I'd learned that back on the continent of Arbelisia.

Even if I could only ever pick one option in the end, having ten choices was always better than having one.

I had no plans to contact him right away, and no decent excuse to reach out even if I wanted to, but knowing the option was there put my mind at ease, just a little.

I picked the pen back up and organized my to do list. The first thing on it.

"Working out, obviously."

* * *

While working out at dawn like usual, the phone in my pocket buzzed.

[Hunter Trainee Kang Hangyeol,

'Basic Hunter Studies Lecture,' Thursday, October 23rd, 7:00 AM, Korea Hunter Association Seoul Branch, 3F Classroom 201.]

A message telling me to attend class had come in.

Footnotes:

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