It had been quite a while since I first felt hunger.

I knew well enough now what happened if I left that hunger unattended. I also knew where the nearest place was where I could hunt monsters to replenish it.

Anyone else—anyone with the same combat experience and skills I had—would have gone hunting the moment hunger hit.

And in fact, that was the safest, most predictable method.

Even so, I resisted it for as long as I could.

The reason was something I had read one day, killing time with the e-books I kept stocked inside the bunker. It was the story of a certain scientist.

A great scientist, they said, would not hesitate to endanger his own safety for the sake of discovery—some even used themselves as test subjects.

The famous case of the Helicobacter bacterium: the researcher who discovered it personally swallowed a cultured sheet of the bacteria, proving that it could survive stomach acid and cause various gastric diseases.

That kind of sacrifice struck me—not heavily, but with a steady resonance.

My life’s purpose had grown dim, and with it, my will to keep living had waned. In a way, this was the most dangerous time since the war began. And so, it occurred to me:

I would observe how hunger changed my body.

It might put my housemate at risk, but I figured I had more self-control than most people.

It was the fifteenth day since I’d last hunted monsters when hunger set in.

Before, I could go a month without noticing anything strange. Back then I had been hunting periodically under Dies_Irae’s command, and besides, the place I was in was too loud and bustling to reflect seriously on myself.

Now, it was quiet as a grave.

One person and one animal had been added, but both were quiet by nature.

The creature that resembled Gold—Mark Two had named it.

“Baduk.”

I wasn’t satisfied with the name.

I’d considered calling it “John Nae-non II,” but I never said it aloud.

Gold’s grandson was going to be raised entirely by Mark Two. He seemed to like it, and the pup clearly preferred him over me.

As a side note, Baduk seemed to be a Mutation.

He was smaller than the others, which made me hope for something—but he was just a rare small variant among the mutated.

In most ecosystems, a runt is either abandoned by its parents or eaten by its siblings.

Silver must have known that when it brought the creature to us. It knew, surely, that it and its family were doomed.

Even Mutations seem to sense the end of the world.

The important thing in an apocalypse is to not be swept away with it—to keep one’s resolve.

Maybe the reason I decided to record the changes in my body was because of that creeping sense of crisis I felt.

A month of hunger passed.

Other than a deepening emptiness inside, I felt nothing unusual. My appetite was normal, my condition decent.

But the next day, a crushing lethargy took me over.

I lost interest in everything. My senses dulled.

Having a housemate helped in times like these.

“How do I look?” I asked Mark Two.

“Sorry? What do you mean?”

“Do I look healthy? Or not?”

“Hard to say. You look the same as always, Hunter Park.”

Mark Two—no surprise—was like Woo Min-hee in that he only focused on what interested him.

Right now, all he cared about was Baduk.

With a wry smile, I continued my observations.

And I reminded myself: the war wasn’t over.

The front had moved back, but Jeon Si-hoon and Sejong kept up their pointless fighting around Seoul and Gyeonggi.

Sejong, maybe because it was commanded by a former elite unit, leaked little over the radio. But from Jeon Si-hoon’s side, though the reception was worse, private chatter still filtered through.

And recently, their conversations had been openly dripping with disappointment and hostility toward their leaders—enough that even I, a third party, found it worrying.

“What the hell are they thinking? Look, starting it, fine. With no king left, I get it—removing Sejong made sense. It was the last nest of fanatics. But when it’s not working out, you’ve got to know when to stop, don’t you?”

Conversations like that were becoming common, openly repeated by many mouths.

At first some tried to rein it in, but as the weather warmed, even that stopped. Mockery of the high command dominated the airwaves.

And then I overheard an interesting thread.

“No one knows what he’s thinking.”

“He’s obsessed with that tower. I went by Jamsil recently—looked like they’d dressed the bare skeleton up again, pretty convincing this time.”

“Well, guess the old government really did hoard supplies. They’re burning through them like that, and there’s still plenty left.”

“They say all the stockpiled goods are being moved into that tower now.”

I couldn’t verify it, but word was Jeon Si-hoon was repairing a pre-war landmark tower and transferring the government’s vast stored resources into it.

It wasn’t just one or two people saying it; I heard it often enough to cross-check.

The war, to me, looked like nothing but a pointless war of attrition.

Gunfire cracking, drones buzzing in, an occasional mortar round, or all-or-nothing night raids.

Sejong had tried another night raid—the kind that had worked for them before—but this time they were counterattacked and suffered heavy losses.

And so another week passed.

Watching the ice melt with the coming spring, I felt my body changing too.

...

I had no appetite at all.

My stomach didn’t feel empty.

The lethargy had deepened; even my thoughts barely turned.

The truly terrifying thing was how naturally this chronic numbness spread through me—without warning, without burden—as if it had always been there.

Like dementia.

Even Mark Two, who normally paid me little mind, noticed something off.

“Hunter Park? You okay?”

“...Yeah.”

I wasn’t.

Inside that thick shell of numbness, I still felt fear vividly.

Was this the price of the so-called gift, the state in which monsters couldn’t perceive me?

If I’d been alone, I might have kept watching myself for longer.

But I couldn’t.

The fear in a child’s eyes was enough to shake even my dulled spirit. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

And above all, Mark Two was Woo Min-hee’s charge. That had to mean something.

She still bore resentment toward Kang Han-min.

Looking back, it made sense: staying at the lab, making paths between rifts in Paju, even Jeju—it was all maybe to finish her vengeance against him.

Kang Han-min had become something beyond comprehension.

Even Jeong Dae-kyung had transcended material form into a rift-like being. No body, yet he could think, communicate, even perform miracles.

And the seal in my mind still hadn’t been undone.

Sometimes I wondered if it ever would.

Maybe my dwindling will was just the result of such burdens piling up unresolved.

I would stop resisting hunger here.

Observation was fine, but too dangerous.

With a nod to that great scientist, I readied my weapons.

*

In this body, hunting monsters was hardly a challenge.

It was one less risk to my life.

That alone might be counted as luck.

The radio chattered on.

“Colonel Yoo Joon-woo’s Sejong 1st Division has advanced to the gates of Seongnam, crushing Jeon Si-hoon’s forces.”

So the tide had turned again.

No surprise. Seoul’s army wasn’t weak.

They still had strength.

The problem was Jeon Si-hoon.

What did he want? His own soldiers and officers didn’t know. He started the war, but gave no orders or support afterward.

The pointless war ran on without purpose, and in the end, the side with stronger will prevailed.

This battle was over, but not the war between Seoul and Sejong.

Jeon Si-hoon still controlled the capital, while Sejong had to be content with merely breaking free of its grip.

It was natural that no Awakened had been deployed in this small-scale clash.

Maybe even my racing thoughts were just rebound from hunger.

I saw a building slumbering in the dim distance.

An unfinished skyscraper, its gray walls enclosing what humans never finished.

Step—

I could hunt monsters even in this state.

I was numb, changed, but my combat ability wasn’t impaired.

I spotted a monster asleep in the distance. Its underlings slumbered too.

Shhhk—

I drew my axe.

I could have used firearms, but I wanted to sharpen my dulled senses.

This wouldn’t be the kind of life-or-death hunt I once faced.

Crack!

I struck.

The monster jolted awake with a shockwave.

I looked up.

Just a common spider-type.

I threw my weight behind the axe and struck again.

Crack!

One leg shattered, its body lurching.

I didn’t stop.

Crack!

I felt the impact through my fingertips, breathing steady with each blow.

Yes.

This was the feeling.

I understood now why that man regained his senses in front of a monster nest.

Even before killing, he was already returning to himself.

And now I knew.

Maybe it was bound to my changed identity.

Crack!

Suppose the rifts and monsters were a cosmic-scale ecosystem.

To them, Earth was prey, and most living things just obstacles in the way.

Humans were the most stubborn obstacles of all.

Awakened and Mutations were organisms transformed under the rifts’ influence.

Even Kang Han-min admitted it—he’d become one of them, to destroy them from within.

Then what about me?

I wasn’t like Kang Han-min, close to the rifts.

The opposite.

Yes.

A virus.

Crack!

Scientists say viruses are strange—they can hardly be called alive. They only act when inside living cells.

That fit my state exactly.

That unlucky man, Park Ha-eun—mad for so long—regained himself at the monster nest.

When he killed the monster, he was no longer broken, but fully Park Ha-eun again.

Yes.

I too needed a monster—a rift’s cell—to exist.

Crack!

The monster collapsed to the floor.

Boom!

It spasmed with shockwaves, yet never noticed me.

Truly, I was virus-like.

I’d never thought of it that way, imagining myself unique.

But if others like me existed—an entire classification called Agwi—then maybe I too was just one element of this incomprehensible world of the rifts.

Boom!

The monster fell.

Its body burst into beautiful golden particles, feeding me, returning to me the soul of Park Gyu I’d lost.

“...Phew.”

And I wondered:

How long could I keep this up?

Could I preserve myself forever with hunting alone?

Or would I become something hunting could no longer fix?

Doubts rose. Few were positive.

Mostly dark projections.

And that was fine.

Waiting idly for the world to end wasn’t an option. Not for me.

I had to return to the rifts.

But first there were problems: Woo Min-hee’s child. The war at hand.

With those heavy thoughts, I returned to the bunker.

Mark Two greeted me in the dark with Baduk.

“You’re back?”

Baduk barked once and wagged his tail.

“...Yeah.”

Even that—being welcomed home—was a small comfort as I felt myself spiraling downward.

I wished there were one more here, but maybe that was a dream I’d never reach.

Before everything faded, I had to make my own choice.

And as I stepped into my room, a familiar but unignorable signal blinked on the radio.

Beep—beep—beep—

A call by personal ID.

Personal ID: A_FOOL.

Kang Han-min.

A thousand thoughts ran through my mind.

Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe someone else. Maybe a hack, faking his ID.

But how could I ignore it?

That man, Kang Han-min, was bound to my existence itself.

“....”

No—it wouldn’t be him. He wasn’t human anymore.

But someone of his, surely. That woman who adored him fanatically, maybe.

I answered.

“...Kang Han-min. Is that you?”

The voice that came wasn’t the one I wanted to hear.

“As expected. You pick up when it’s through this.”

Jeon Si-hoon.

He had contacted me using Kang Han-min’s personal ID.

As questions filled my mind, Jeon Si-hoon explained himself.

“Brother Kang Han-min left me his radio. Said you’d always answer if I called with it.”

“...Really?”

“Well, all kinds of things have happened, but—you did save me, Hunter Park.”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t know. Just...”

A moment later I heard a muttered “Shibal” through the receiver—he must have spoken with the mic away.

That wasn’t what mattered.

“I’m lost. I don’t know what’s what anymore. Ah...”

That, more than anything, summed up Jeon Si-hoon.

A man who didn’t know what to do or what he wanted.

Fueled only by a vague hatred of the world, he’d wielded power far beyond his worth and hastened the collapse of this dying country.

Of course, he hadn’t reached out to me just to pour out life’s worries—using Kang Han-min’s radio, a cheat code of sorts.

“I keep dreaming I’m turning into a monster... Really. Ha... Often. So damn vivid. Like it’s calling me.”

I nodded.

A piece of the puzzle in my soul clicked.

This was why Kang Han-min left everything to Jeon Si-hoon.

He foresaw his successor would become a monster.

“Shameless as it is, could you come here?”

In a sense, Jeon Si-hoon already was one.