Chapter 148
Theresa was already looking deflated, but Do-Jin clearly wasn’t done yet. His eyes drifted from the fallen Thornscale to his own hand.
Even after all that doping, I can still hold it together?
He flexed his fingers slowly, studying the faint tremor running through them. By his estimate, it would take another minute or so before his body and circuits completely crashed. Considering the kinds of drugs he had pumped into himself, the ones that should have shredded his nervous system, that level of endurance bordered on the absurd. It was only possible because of his monstrously high HP and Intelligence stats.
“Are you okay?” Theresa asked carefully.
Do-Jin swayed a little before he could answer. His balance was completely shot. The backlash was finally catching up to him, and the delayed side effects of the potions were spreading fast.
“What the hell did you take?!” she cried, rushing forward. “Hold on, I’ll purify it. Just hang in there!”
With a deep frown, Soso began weaving a cleansing spell, but Do-Jin raised his hand weakly and stopped her.
“Wait... I need... to test something.”
His words came out slurred and uneven, his tongue heavy and slow. One of the potions had caused numbness as a side effect, and he could barely feel his own lips.
“What are you talking about?!” Theresa shouted. “Soso, just fix him already!”
But Soso didn’t move. “He said no. Let him do what he’s doing.”
“You can’t be serious!”
“Well, he knows this game better than either of us. If he says stop, we stop. That’s how it’s always been.”
Theresa opened her mouth to argue again but froze when she saw what happened next. Soso’s eyes widened as well. Do-Jin’s right arm turned to ice and then shattered. With a sharp crack, fragments of frozen flesh scattered across the floor like shards of glass. Both women were speechless, while Do-Jin remained unfazed.
If I’m going to experiment, I might as well go all in, he thought.
He had deliberately reversed the mana flow in his circuit, forcing an overload that obliterated his own arm. He felt no pain at all, only the nauseating whirl of the world tilting around him. It wasn’t until his vision began to darken and his consciousness started to slip that he finally triggered the real test.
“Limited Reversion.”
As his Time Traveler trait activated, a golden ripple burst outward, folding reality around him. In an instant, time rewound, but only for him. His mana, which had been completely drained moments ago, surged back to full. His HP recovered, his body healed, and the arm that had shattered reformed as if it had never been lost.
“What?” Theresa breathed.
“What the hell,” Soso muttered beside her.
Not even three seconds had passed, and Do-Jin stood there perfectly whole. Both women stared blankly, trying to process what they had just witnessed.
“Hmm. It really restores everything perfectly.” His voice carried more awe than pride. He flexed his right hand again, turning it over with fascination.
“Don’t do that again!” Theresa suddenly screamed, her voice cracking.
Do-Jin flinched and spun around, startled. Why is she crying...?
She had gone from terror to relief to sheer frustration, all at once. She wasn’t just shocked but also angry that he had scared her that badly. From the party members’ point of view, knowing nothing about what he was testing, their shock made perfect sense.
Do-Jin blinked, realizing a little too late that he should’ve given them some warning. He had been so impaired by the drugs’ side effects that his judgment had completely tanked. The high had made him think that if he was going to do this, he might as well go all the way.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to go this far. I guess the drugs were too much. I’ve never dosed like that on purpose before, so I messed up.”
Even with the broken, overpowered ability of Limited Reversion, he decided he would not overdo the doping again. The lapse in judgment after the boost was far more dangerous than the advantage it gave him.
Well, as long as I don’t go all in next time, we’ll be fine.
He read the two women’s faces, waiting for their reactions. Soso, who had been glaring at him in silence, finally muttered, “I already thought he was weird, but this... this is another level.”
“I think I overdid the boosters... I’m dizzy.”
“You sound like a washed-up junkie playing the ‘I wasn’t in my right mind’ card to avoid responsibility. Next time, give us a heads up.”
With that, Soso went back to her usual deadpan expression as if nothing unusual had happened.
Theresa stared at her in a strange way. The shock over Do-Jin was already fading, but what surprised her more was Soso’s reaction just now. She had never seen her care about someone that much. Soso would normally cut someone off the instant they annoyed her.
Theresa edged closer to Do-Jin and whispered, “Did you see that? Soso actually worried about you.”
“Huh?”
“She’s not the type to freak out if someone’s arm breaks. If it didn’t concern her, she’d just glance and move on.”
That kind of behavior bordered on sociopathic, Do-Jin thought, but Theresa saw it differently. She looked at her friend with a small, proud smile.
“Maybe Soso’s finally developing some social skills.”
“If that qualifies as social skills, then we’re not living in a human society,” Do-Jin muttered.
“You don’t get it,” Theresa said. “For her, this is huge progress.”
While Do-Jin and Theresa were whispering back and forth, Soso straightened her clothes a little and frowned. “Are we going to stay in this mess? If you’ve finished stirring up trouble, clean it up already.”
***
After the massive event wrapped up, Do-Jin slipped back into his usual routine. In real life, he worked out. In-game, he hunted, cleared dungeons, completed quests, and kept adding new spells to the Grimoire of Truth. In short, he spent his days grinding everything that could make him stronger.
It’s nice being on my own again.
After spending so much time surrounded by raid groups and other players, roaming freely and doing whatever he wanted felt like a breath of fresh air.
On MeTube, his World Boss Raid footage was still breaking records. He had chopped the original stream into edited highlights, and every upload was blowing up in views like a jet engine had been strapped to his channel.
Just like that, while he stayed busy filling every moment of his day, winter faded and spring rolled in. Before he knew it, it was already April, one of those months that the weather couldn’t decide whether to freeze or burn people. On one of those fickle afternoons, Do-Jin sat staring at the LotraNet auction page.
I’m pretty sure it was around this time...
Not long after the World Boss Raid ended, a very rare map had once sold there for next to nothing. It marked the location of a massive hidden dungeon, something that should have been worth a fortune, but it had gone unnoticed and sold dirt cheap. The problem was, he had no idea which map it was.
This feels like trying to find a relic in a thrift shop.
Dozens of unappraised maps filled the page, each one a mystery. The average price hovered around three million won apiece. They could contain anything, from the location of rare monsters or hidden resources to something completely useless, like a backyard trail. Every now and then, someone hit the jackpot, but most people lost money or, worse, pulled a total dud.
The player who had originally found that hidden-dungeon map had been just an ordinary gamer. He had belonged to a small guild that had attempted to clear the dungeon but failed. Even worse, the map itself, used as both a locator and the key, had been destroyed in the process. After that, the dungeon became completely inaccessible to anyone.
I was curious about what happened in the end... Maybe I should track those players down instead?
It seemed more feasible to contact the original team than burn cash gambling on blind maps. Do-Jin remembered that they had gone public with the information after their failure, but he couldn’t recall their names.
“Well, I guess it can’t be helped,” he muttered.
He sighed and closed the auction tab. Spending real money on map gacha with odds that low wasn’t worth it, not even for him.
***
“Team lead, you’re gonna want to see this.”
It was another day of absolute chaos at Rael Entertainment’s Content Division, where everyone was buried in work. One of the staff members hurried over to their team lead, Oh Young-Sik, who was half-sprawled across his desk like a dried squid left out too long.
He blinked wearily and groaned. “What is it this time?” His voice was heavy with fatigue and the kind of exhaustion that came from living at the office.
“It’s about Do-Jin.”
“What?”
The moment he heard that name, Oh Young-Sik shot up from his chair like he had never been tired in his life. “What happened? Is something wrong?”
Do-Jin’s rise to fame had already been explosive, but after the World Boss Raid, it had gone completely out of control. The name alone was enough to jolt Oh Young-Sik’s survival instincts awake. He had been dreaming of producing original content featuring Do-Jin, and losing that opportunity would have been a death sentence.
“Well, no. There isn’t exactly anything wrong, but...” The staff member pointed to the monitor. “There’s an email.”
Hello, I’m a big fan of Do-Jin. I happened to come across a rare-looking map, but my level’s too low to take it on. I’d like to donate it to Do-Jin so he can enjoy it in my place.
The sender went by “S” and was practically anonymous. While the message claimed they had simply “happened to find” the map, the attached screenshot told a very different story. Over a hundred maps were stacked in their inventory.
Holy crap... that’s worth millions.
Thanks to all the time he had spent managing Do-Jin’s content, Oh Young-Sik knew exactly what he was looking at. This so-called fan had easily spent tens of millions of won just to pull one map worth gifting.
“It could be a prank email though...” he muttered.
“If it were, it wouldn’t have made it to us,” the staffer replied. “The message was verified and passed through the Adventurer’s Guild’s official channel before being forwarded.”
“For real?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well then, perfect. If Do-Jin’s up for it, this could make for another killer piece of content.”
Just like that, the mysterious map, sent by an anonymous fan known only as “S”, was delivered straight into Do-Jin’s hands.
