Chapter 4 – Rift Day

April 23rd, 2023

The world was turned upside down on an ordinary day eleven years ago when thunder rumbled like the sky was falling.

People awoke to the unusually loud thunder and looked up in unison to see a huge black hole in the sky. As if waiting for a crowd to gather, or for everyone to wake up, the thunder stopped as they looked up.

From the black hole poured monsters that had never been seen before.

The rift sucked in everything around it in an instant, and the monsters crawled out of the open dungeon entrance like a swarm of ants. In their sudden invasion of life, they tore down buildings and smashed the ground. Countless people were injured, missing, and dead. Humanity’s weapons, the products of scientific civilization, were useless against the monsters.

People despaired in the face of an insurmountable supernatural phenomenon. They thought the Earth would be destroyed by nuclear war, not by a monster from a fantasy novel! Humanity was helpless in the face of this sudden catastrophe.

But there is no such thing as perishing without doing nothing, for there is a being that has paused the destruction….

A mysterious white window that looked like a status bar in a game, known as the System.

The System appeared in front of several people and awakened unknown powers. Those who came into contact with the System, awakened new powers and began to fight back against the monsters. The first generation of Erasure Awakened, the signal for humanity to fight back. This was the moment the beings who would later be called hunters appeared.

Humanity is an adaptive species, and they quickly began to rebuild their shattered civilisations and adapt to the new era. Leading the way was the United States, followed by, surprisingly, South Korea. South Korea was one of the few countries whose government and security were not paralysed on Rift Day, and it is safe to say that this was due to the comet-like arrival of J, an S-class Awakener.

The only information released was his hunter name, “J,” and his gender. The mysterious Hunter J, whose name, face, age, and everything else was hidden, made a spectacular entrance with a white shawl covering his face, slicing the Class 2 monster Sasquatch in two. He went on to save countless lives by diving into rifts and dungeons, a hero of the ages, Captain Korea himself.

[J ripped a Sasquatch (physical)]

Later, after communications were restored, J became a global celebrity when someone uploaded a video to YouTube that garnered billions of views. Although J was only the size of a dot in the video and could barely be seen, the sight of a black dot tearing apart a monster the size of a building was intriguing.

It was a heroic act from the information and communication powerhouse of South Korea, where even if the world is ending and monsters are doing sword dances, the mobile phone camera is still alive. Anyway, the world seemed to calm down a bit with J’s performance.

But this hard-won peace was short-lived.

Three years later, a Grade 5 rift opened in the waters off the west coast of Korea, and despite the efforts of the Awakeners Administration and nearby hunters to enter, all contact was lost, and the rift continued to feed greedily on time. It was predicted that if left unchecked, the fungal heat would engulf the islands of the West Sea and even Incheon.

After the government upgraded the danger level of the West Sea Rift from Level 5 to Level 1, the decision was made.

“We’re sending in S-class Hunter J, 14 more A-class Hunters, and 30 more B-class Hunters to stop the fissure from expanding.”

The dispatched hunters entered the fissure, cheered on by the people. Soon after entering, the fissure gradually stopped expanding, and a month later, it was completely destroyed. The people cheered and waited for the heroes to return, but they never did.

Three months later, after an investigation, the Awakening Administration concluded that they had been possessed by the rift. They officially announced their deaths, delivering the unfortunate news. The government erected a memorial to honour the hunters for their bravery in entering the rift. J’s name was placed at the top of the memorial.

Eight years later.

Eleven years after the first Rift, the government was actively researching the use of monster carcasses and dungeon byproducts as alternative resources, so naturally, guilds shifted their operations from wiping out dungeons once and for all to picking a main draw and closing the rift. If they were lucky, they might get a byproduct that could be processed and used.

The Great Hunter Age replaced the Fifth Industrial Revolution. Metaverse bites! The centre of the modern era was none other than the Hunters.

Korea is a country where hero film series have been popular for a long time. So it’s no wonder that Hunters, who fight like heroes right in front of your eyes without CG, have exploded in popularity. Their popularity is at an all-time high.

Not only did they get birthday billboards like idols, but they were also showered with love from the advertising industry, and there were so many films and dramas with hunters as the main characters that he lost count. There are even hunters who are models, and do double jobs, like Honeybee.

The world is full of people who admire hunters and dream of awakening. A world where more than 80 per cent of children say they want to be a hunter, where dungeon slime ASMR videos are trending, and where a leisurely hunter broadcasts parcel unboxing with an A-grade longsword. That was the Korea of today.

‘Is this… right?

But to Cha Ui-jae, a man of eight years ago and still adjusting to life in the age of the Great Hunter, it was all just… a lie. As he stared at the books on display in the bestseller section of the bookstore, he frowned.

1st place, [Hunter is also new to hunting]

2nd place, [Noryangjin Hunter Civil Service Academy’s Star Instructor’s Secrets to Finishing the Exam in Half a Year!]

3rd place, [I’m a Hunter Because I’m Sick]

:

:

What the hell does it mean to be a hunter because you’re sick, if you’re sick, you’re a patient. Ui-jae made a shuddering face and shifted his gaze to the bottom of the list. Of course, when he saw the titles of the books below him, his expression crumpled even more. They’re putting hunter on everything that doesn’t need it… That’s pretty lame.

I glance away, pretending not to see, and my eyes meet again, this time with a mild-mannered man in a suit giving me a thumbs-up
wearing a suit and holding up a thumbs-up sign.

‘Hotline 777 for Awakened registration inquiries, 555 to report unregistered Awakened and Awakened crime!’

Even as he tore his gaze away from the bestseller list, his scowl refused to lift.

Nine years ago, when the dungeons and rifts were relatively stable, the government, plagued by crimes committed by Awakened who had nothing better to do, was contemplating the creation of a government agency to manage Awakened. Just then, news reached the ears of officials that a police academy student had awakened as an S-class Awakened.

This was a heaven-sent opportunity. The government seized the opportunity and immediately set up the Awakening Management Bureau and pushed the newly awakened police academy student into the bureau with special privileges.

He was the man on the billboard, Hunter Jung-bin, an S-class civil servant.

Cha Ui-jae also bumped into Jung-bin a few times when he was playing as J. They didn’t have a personal relationship, but they still exchanged pleasantries. At the time, there were only two S-class Hunters in the entire country, so there was a certain inner closeness.

‘How did you end up like this?’

What the hell has happened to you in the past eight years? There was even a hint of bitterness in his eyes.

To add to the lie, Jung-bin showed his face to all existing public service advertisements. As far as Ui-jae was concerned, he was a civil servant, so it was easy to recognize him.

Just yesterday he was promoting smoking cessation in a TV advert, the 33-3 brushing rule in a bus advert I saw the other day, and here he was promoting the Awakening registration. He’s probably the most recognizable hunter in Korea.

As Ui-jae was mourning the loss of his former colleague, a young girl with her hair tied up in a ponytail walked by, a star-shaped name badge clipped to the zip of her backpack.

Park Ha-eun, Grade 2 Class 2, Saetbyul Elementary School. Underneath the crooked but firmly pressed handwriting, the phone number and address of Haejang-guk house were clearly written.

“Uncle, I chose all the books.”

At the title of uncle, Ui-jae naturally turned his head towards her. Of course, they weren’t really uncle and nephew; Ha-eun was the only granddaughter of the grandmother, and Ui-jae’s entire family had died on the Rift Day.

But at some point, Ha-eun started calling him uncle, and he never corrected her. Just like her relationship with her aunt in the past.

“What did you pick?”

“This.”

[What? The Day of the Crack]
(Note: The ‘What?’ here is written in English on the raw.)

The cover of the comic book Ha-eun held out to him showed a few cute, glorified monsters and a masked young man. It was a children’s learning manga series that Ui-jae was familiar with.

The world could have ended, but these learning cartoons still come out. The face of a young man in a painting suddenly appeared in front of U-jae’s inwardly admiring eyes. Aside from the black hair and white shawl, the mask over his face was all too familiar. He must be…

‘Isn’t this a violation of my right of publicity?

…because it was a mask that Cha Ui-jae had worn to conceal his identity when he was J for many years.