WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Oblivious

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◈ The World Is Not a Game ◈

Chapter 1

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Prologue. Shattered Hope

Everyone makes mistakes.

And now and then, people look back on the past with regret. “What if I’d handled it this way?” “What if I’d tried a little harder?” Those thoughts are utterly useless, but everyone has indulged in such fantasies at least once.

Yes, fantasies.

Time had already passed, and the results were there. Unless you could turn back time, dwelling on it would only leave you chewing over ever-deeper regrets. It did nothing to help you live your life. That was why Gil Hyeokjin would shake his head and try to focus on the present whenever those fantasies stirred up his mind.

Of course, it rarely worked.

After all, he escaped into those fantasies because he didn’t want to face reality. Whenever he forced himself to focus on the miserable reality before him, it only triggered another round of fantasies. Anyone who had lived in the same place and time as Hyeokjin would have found it impossible to stop.

Yes, that was the kind of age it had been.

An age without winners or losers, where all that remained was regret over the golden opportunities of the past. Of course, some people might have felt differently. But at least among the people Gil Hyeokjin knew, everyone lived with regrets, large and small. They simply didn’t show it.

‘To think I’d miss those days when all I had was regret… How ironic.’

After a dry chuckle, Hyeokjin looked out at the scene before him.

A white desert. A beautiful Milky Way, the kind one might see in a movie, stretched across a clear, clean, dark blue night sky without a trace of pollution. A white crescent moon hung to one side, its diameter appearing more than ten times that of the moon in the real world. It was a dreamlike, beautiful sight.

But behind that beauty lurked a malice that did not exist in the real world.

‘It’s only been five minutes since I put in the filter, and it’s already shot. Ordinary equipment without any resistance to warp energy just can’t keep up.’

Feeling something sticky inside his mouth, Hyeokjin removed the filter canister from his gas mask and spat out the slime. Then he immediately took a spare filter from an inner pocket of his black long coat and fitted it into place.

The white sand and dust that swirled in the occasional breeze were not ordinary dust. They were a kind of poison.

An unnatural substance that turned into sticky ectoplasm when it touched a living creature’s saliva, then slowly built up in the lungs. It was commonly called “invisible death.”

An ordinary person with no resistance to warp energy would start coughing within five minutes of breathing it in. Breathing would grow harder and harder, until they suffocated within thirty minutes.

‘Even someone who can use warp energy can only last so long in this environment without special training. I need to find her quickly.’

Pulling his coat’s hood low over his head again, Hyeokjin hurried after the footprints in the sand.

They belonged to someone who had passed through before him. Judging by their size, a child.

The rounded toes and deeper impressions at the heels suggested a girl wearing low-heeled shoes. Taking the firmness of the ground and the depth of the prints into account, she weighed about thirty-five kilograms.

Common sense said that a girl who had entered this place would already be dead.

Without proper survival equipment, death was inevitable here. That alone made it dangerous enough, but this place also held deadly monsters that should not exist in reality.

Considering that the girl had been missing for more than four days, the chance that she was still alive was close to zero.

Yet Hyeokjin did not give up hope. He silently continued after the small footprints.

Was he doing this to find a dead girl’s body, bring her back to her parents, and honor her memory?

No. Hyeokjin was neither stupid nor sentimental enough to risk his life searching for a corpse.

If he had been looking for an ordinary girl, he would have decided she was already dead and never entered this dungeon in the first place.

The reason he had personally come into this hellish place to search for her was that the owner of these footprints was not an ordinary person.

She was a savior.

A hero who would save humanity through her blessed talent and sacred sacrifice. That was why Hyeokjin believed she was still alive.

Her talent for warp energy was among the greatest in all humanity. Though this environment was hostile, someone with her talent would use warp energy by instinct. That would allow her to survive these extreme conditions for a while.

And that was not all.

In the last scene Hyeokjin remembered from the future, she had been beside him. Which meant…

‘She might have regressed too, just like me.’

One year ago, a pointless fantasy that should never have come true had become reality for Hyeokjin.

Like a videotape rewinding, the world had returned to forty-three years earlier. Hyeokjin had become a boy, and the regret-filled past had all become the future that lay ahead.

And he alone was aware of it.

No, perhaps he was not the only one.

Hyeokjin still had no idea why he had experienced the regression. Nor had he met any of the people who had been near him just before he returned to the past to ask them about it.

In any case, since such a miracle had happened to him, it could have happened to her as well.

‘She must be alive. Maybe she’s even working to close the dungeon. Her body might be young, but she’d have the perfect combination of talent, knowledge, and experience. No, even if she hasn’t regressed, she still has a good chance of surviving. She can instinctively control dark warp energy, so…’

Hyeokjin was nodding to himself as he thought about the owner of the footprints when he suddenly stopped.

The reason lay right in front of him. The footprints, which had been evenly spaced until now, had abruptly become scattered.

Their depth varied wildly, and the strides had more than doubled in length. Farther ahead, he could even see signs that she had fallen once.

He immediately pulled back his hood, lifted his gas mask, and took a deep breath through his nose.

There was none of the musky odor characteristic of living creatures. Nor were there any visible traces of one on the ground.

She had most likely been attacked by a floating monster. And considering the sticky dark warp energy scattered all around…

‘Damn it!’

Hyeokjin put his gas mask back on and quickened his pace.

He crossed the first sand dune and climbed the second. From its top, he spotted a small figure lying on the stretch of sand ahead.

After slowly descending the dune, Hyeokjin stopped a short distance from the fallen figure and looked down at her.

The body of a girl, shriveled like dried fish.

There were no obvious external wounds. At the sight of her, Hyeokjin realized he was biting his lip hard enough to draw blood.

“Goddamn it.”

Unable to contain his frustration, he finally swore and raised his head to look at the dungeon’s night sky.

It was the first curse he had spoken aloud since returning to the past. That was how awful he felt.

Yes, to be honest, Hyeokjin had more or less suspected she was dead from the moment he entered this place.

If she had regressed, she would have left somewhere like this on her own long ago. No one would even have reported her missing.

Yet he had come looking for her, clinging to the empty hope that the miracle he had experienced might happen once more… But contrary to his wishes, there had been no second miracle.

“Nikki Malkova. Master of Black Magic. Hope in the Darkness. The Black Witch.”

Slowly lowering his head, Hyeokjin looked at the shriveled remains and spoke in a measured voice.

According to the original course of history, she would have become one of the eight heroes who saved humanity thirty-eight years from now. She was dead.

So absurdly.

In such an insignificant place.

Not as an irreplaceable hope for humanity, but as a helpless twelve-year-old Czech girl.

For a while, Hyeokjin stood where he was, breathing harshly in and out like someone hyperventilating.

Before the regression, endless battles and the abuse of psychoactive drugs had left his emotions damaged beyond repair. Or so he had thought. Now, for the first time in ages, they boiled with anger and bitterness.

‘If only I hadn’t dragged my feet. If only I’d realized a little sooner. If I’d acted just one month earlier… No, if I could just do it one more time…’

He clenched his fists and chewed over his regrets. Then a thought struck him. A moment later, Hyeokjin realized what he was thinking and let out a low, bitter chuckle.

Regression. In other words, time reversal, or time regression. That cruel miracle had shattered the salvation that should have come, yet here he was, wishing for another miracle. Apparently, becoming young again had made him quite a bit stupider.

After laughing briefly, Hyeokjin’s face went completely cold. He looked down at the body of the savior who had never had a chance to bloom.

Yes. He wanted no more of that fucking miracle.

‘…Stay calm. Focus.’

After licking the metallic blood seeping from the wound inside his mouth, Hyeokjin chewed and swallowed the pill he had placed beneath his tongue before putting on his gas mask.

As the pill burst, a substance that did not exist in reality seeped through the lining of his mouth and invaded his brain in an instant.

He did not stop there. Hyeokjin took a small ointment tin from his coat pocket. With his index and middle fingers, he scooped out a generous helping of thick black oil and spread it over the blunt edge of his practice sword.

Black Silver.

An oil named after silver, which folklore held could kill evil things. A masterpiece that the girl lying dead on the ground should have gone on to invent. Once he had applied the oil, Hyeokjin immediately swung his practice sword at the shriveled corpse.

Some of the warp energy inside his body flowed into the sword, gathering along its blunt edge and forming a sharp cutting edge.

The practice sword sliced through matter as smoothly as a well-sharpened kitchen knife.

As Hyeokjin’s sword cut through the girl’s neck, her shriveled head let out an eerie shriek. Black smoke burst from its mouth.

‘Trim away the scraps.’

Hyeokjin rapidly tensed his muscles and unleashed a series of sword strikes at the evil spirit that had revealed itself.

The black smoke was cut into chunks like bundles of straw used for cutting practice. An object coated in Black Silver could strike spiritual entities that physical attacks could not normally harm.

Without warp energy, the supernatural power flowing out of dungeons, even superior modern firearms could do nothing against such monsters. Now they were reduced to creatures that could be beaten to death with weapons.

This one oil, devised by a genius, had made the world twenty years from now a much safer place by comparison.

But she was dead, so that would no longer happen.

‘Next, a shock wave.’

Before the severed pieces of black smoke could gather together again, Hyeokjin thrust out his left hand, his fingers twisted into a strange shape.

At the same moment, the air in front of his left hand burst with a deep rumble.

It was as though compressed air had been released all at once. The sudden shock wave sent the girl’s dried-out body flying far away along with the white sand. The black smoke writhing in the air scattered in an instant.

And as the black smoke dispersed, it revealed a pair of dark red masses of light, each the size of an eyeball.

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