WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Dionysus

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Xianxia Cultivation with a Dragon Heart ◈

Chapter 1: Awakening My Superpower

──────

An ordinary old, cramped studio apartment.

Han Yujin was lying on his bed, fiddling with his smartphone, when he opened his messenger app out of habit and saw the “Friends with birthdays today” section.

A familiar name was there.

She was a middle school classmate, his first love, and someone he had loved from afar. She had been so pretty that she was immensely popular. He even remembered gathering up the courage on graduation day to ask her to see a movie with him, only to be gently turned down.

“...”

It had already been nearly ten years since then. He had never contacted her, but she apparently had not changed her number either. They were still listed as friends on the app.

Nostalgia for the past moved his hand on its own. As Han Yujin looked through her profile photos, his eyes gradually widened.

Every photo showed a life beyond his imagination.

There was a photo taken in an elegant art gallery, another with a grand foreign mansion and swimming pool in the background, and one of a birthday party she hosted for her parents at the country’s only six-star hotel. There were quite a few pictures from golf courses he would never have any connection to in his life. Even in photos that seemed casually taken, expensive luxury brands were everywhere.

‘She wasn’t this rich before, was she...?’

Then one particular photo caught his eye. She was posing with some guy, and he happened to recognize him.

He had gone to the same middle school and had been fairly close to him at the time. Around the time he had just started high school, the guy had suddenly awakened a superpower and entered a Hunter vocational school, so they had naturally drifted apart.

There was an enormous gap between ordinary citizens and Hunters who had awakened superpowers. From income to reputation, it was too vast to measure point by point.

‘They must be dating.’

The moment he came to that conclusion, a strange and uncomfortable emotion filled him with enough force to surprise even himself.

Han Yujin turned off his screen and squeezed his eyes shut. He lay still for quite a while, doing nothing, because he was busy trying to understand what he was feeling.

It was probably envy. There might also have been pity for himself mixed in with it. There might also have been resentment toward something he could not put a name to.

In truth, high school had been the unhappiest period of his life. It was when his perfectly normal family had fallen apart.

It was a sad story, but one that was surprisingly common.

His father had been scammed, destroying the family finances. His mother, overwhelmed by stress, had divorced and run away. Left all alone, he had been taken in by relatives, constantly walking on eggshells until he could not take it anymore. He started working part-time jobs and barely managed to become independent.

Naturally, his once excellent grades had dropped to merely average, and he had not gotten into a good university. He was still stubbornly attending college on student loans because he believed he needed a degree to find work, but looking at society these days, it felt like a diploma might as well be useless.

Meanwhile.

His middle school classmate, who had once been in a similar position and hung out with him as an equal.

It looked as though his life had opened onto a golden road after the immense stroke of luck that was awakening a superpower. Dating the woman who had been Han Yujin’s first love and unrequited crush, as well as the first love or crush of countless other classmates, was surely only one small part of that golden road.

Of course, the guy probably had his own pain and hardships, and sometimes shed tears too...

‘When you cry in a luxury car, I’ll be crying on a bicycle.’

And no matter how hard Han Yujin pedaled, he would never catch up to the speed at which that guy could casually press the accelerator and pull ahead. He would be lucky just to see his back.

Life was unfair.

He thought he understood that well, but every now and then, it would suddenly stab him like a knife and make him realize it all over again. He could not help but feel drained every time.

‘Surely I wasn’t worse than you.’

At least, that had been true when they were middle school students hanging out together.

‘If only I could awaken too...’

It had been his dream since childhood. Rather than fading as he grew older, it had only grown stronger.

But that wish was now little more than a dream.

Statistically, the odds of anyone awakening were about the same as winning the lottery, and even that low chance rapidly declined as one approached thirty.

He was already twenty-five. There were almost no people who awakened at his age. Most awakened in their mid-teens, like his middle school classmate.

If he did awaken, what sort of power would be best?

Lying there listlessly, indulging in such fantasies, Han Yujin felt fatigue wash over him, perhaps from the stress. He immediately got ready for bed. In his current state, he had no desire whatsoever to work on his overdue assignments.

After some sleep, he would probably feel better.

Nothing would change, but he would somehow keep living, stubbornly finding little moments of happiness.

If one did not know how to accept and resign oneself to reality’s unfairness, one could not be called an adult. Was that not life, where certain things remained forever out of reach no matter how desperately one wished for them?

With those stray thoughts in his mind, he lay down neatly. Before long, he began breathing evenly.

It was an ordinary night’s sleep, just like always.

However, what happened during that sleep was anything but ordinary.

* * *

Han Yujin stood somewhere unknown amid pitch-black emptiness. He did not even know how he could be standing in a place like this, yet strangely, he felt no discomfort at all.

His attention naturally turned to the “door” before him.

It was a bizarre door that changed in countless ways whenever he tried to make sense of it. One moment, it seemed to be a medieval Western stone door. The next, it became an ancient Eastern wooden door. Whenever he tried to form some impression of it, it would become a completely unfamiliar style of door made of glass and jewels.

Moving like someone under a spell, Han Yujin reached out and touched it. The endlessly shifting door settled into a single form and began to vibrate softly.

Wooooom...!

Accompanied by a resonant hum, it had become a modern emergency fire door. Silvery letters shimmered over the rusty surface of the fire door, chillingly spelling out:

Earth After the Apocalypse.

Still moving as though spellbound, he opened the door and went inside. Just after taking a few more steps.

“...Gasp!”

As though waking from a dream, he suddenly came to his senses and turned around.

He had definitely passed through a door to get here, yet there was nothing behind him but empty air. Beyond it stretched a desolate city that looked as if it had been abandoned for decades, utterly devoid of people.

“...”

For some time, he simply stood there without saying a word. Keeping calm in this sudden, surreal situation was already more than he could handle.

‘Is this a dream?’

To verify his first thought, he pinched the back of his hand. Sharp pain shot through him. The reality he felt against his skin was far too vivid to mistake for a dream.

Steadying his gradually trembling body, he looked around.

Everywhere he looked was a city that seemed to have been abandoned for at least several decades. Abandoned cars littered the roads, and buildings were cracked or collapsed in places. Every window had been shattered, and every piece of metal was rusted.

Strangely, there was not even a single common weed in sight. It was as if all life had been wiped out.

The wind gave him goosebumps, making him shrink in on himself. Then Han Yujin suddenly realized he was wearing the tracksuit he usually liked to wear. He definitely had not been dressed like this when he fell asleep, and he did not remember changing clothes.

‘Did I black out?’

All he could remember was falling asleep in his studio apartment bed, then standing in that pitch-black space with a peculiar door.

‘Wait...’

The moment he recalled once more that he had arrived here through the door, his body trembled. This was a slightly different sort of trembling from before.

‘Did I awaken? No way...’

A superpower could explain this situation to some extent. No, it was not merely an explanation. He could not think of any other hypothesis.

But there were quite a few problems with simply celebrating.

‘Earth After the Apocalypse.’

Those were definitely the words that had appeared on the door just before he entered.

If this barren city really was Earth in a future after the apocalypse, the first thing he needed to figure out was how to return to the time and place where he had originally lived.

Han Yujin circled the spot where the door he had passed through should have been. But, naturally, all he could see was empty air.

To make matters worse, perhaps because evening was approaching, the already gloomy sky began to grow darker. Strangely, the temperature dropped sharply, and his breath came out in white puffs.

‘Changing seasons?’

But this level of temperature change was abnormal, no matter the season. He was naturally afraid of how much colder it would get once night fully fell.

That led him to wonder how this Earth, whether it was the future or a parallel world, had come to an end.

‘That’s not something I should be focusing on right now.’

It seemed he needed to find a way to preserve his body heat first.

After looking around once more, he began moving in earnest, hoping to find some clothes inside a building. A few minutes later, after walking briskly, he spotted a ruined jewelry store.

Yet the items inside remained in the glass display cases almost undisturbed, as if the world had never ended.

Despite the situation, his steps came to a stop. After hesitating briefly, he told himself he would only spend a few minutes and squeezed through the glass door, which was more than half broken away.

‘How much is all this worth...?’

As he stared at the gold items filling the display cases, many thoughts passed through Han Yujin’s mind. He thought about their price, of course, but also about why they had been left here in such good condition. The thoughts were shallow, but varied.

It seemed that war or an epidemic had not caused the apocalypse. If it had been that kind of apocalypse, these gold items could not have remained here untouched.

Then what kind of apocalypse could leave such gold items preserved without anyone laying a hand on them?

“...Hmm.”

After thinking a little longer, he examined the glass display cases from various angles. Soon, he figured out how to open them and grabbed whatever he could.

He put on several gold necklaces, several gold bracelets on each wrist, and gold rings on all ten fingers. Once he had stuffed his tracksuit pockets full of gold items as well, his heart pounded and he felt hot despite the low temperature.

‘This is enough for now. I need to find clothes again.’

Now, all he had to do was endure the cold somehow and find a way back. The haul he had already obtained was enough to turn his life around. If he could visit this ruined world again, he could continue exploring and become rich.

He could see the possibility of achieving the financial freedom he had dreamed of.

Then.

A small, strange sound reached his ears.

His head turned toward one corner of the jewelry store on its own. In that instant, he saw a pitch-black hand silently swooping toward him.

Crunch!

With the chilling sound of something tearing and breaking, his consciousness faded before pain could even strike him. All he could see through his one remaining eye was bright red blood and chunks of flesh scattering through the air, along with the black figure that had clearly attacked him.

That was the last thing he saw before his vision went dark.

- You have died.

Mysterious silver letters appeared in the endless darkness.

- Select your harvest.

Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried