Chapter 73
The Victory of Human Baek Jemin
The hideout Goryeoha led us to wasn't very far from the student union building.
After pushing through the fog for a short while, a building around ten stories tall came into view.
As someone who'd never even set foot near a university campus, I couldn't help frowning.
I'd been thinking this ever since we entered Konkuk University.
Weren't universities unnecessarily huge?
All you had to do was sit at a desk, open a textbook, and listen to a professor.
Why did they need so much space?
This wasn't some inferiority complex from being a high school graduate.
No.
This was the reasonable opinion of a provincial man advocating efficient land use in absurdly expensive Seoul.
At this size, you'd probably need a bus just to get around campus.
As I grumbled internally, Goryeoha suddenly blinked and turned around with a bright smile.
"Military gentlemen, come to think of it, this is your first time at Konkuk University, right? The place we're heading to is the New Engineering Building!"
"The New Engineering Building?"
"I graduated from Mechanical, Robotics, and Automotive Engineering! Third year!"
Goryeoha puffed out her chest proudly and planted her hands on her hips.
Naturally, there was one person who couldn't tolerate that.
The most dangerous variable in Operation Blue Pill.
The greatest troll among the Supreme Mages.
Lee Sejun.
"Tch."
"Hm? Mr. Soldier, do you have a question?"
"I said 'tch.'"
"Hey!"
I quickly waved a hand in front of Sejun's gas mask.
"Mr. Sejun. Cut the crap and play along."
"So now you're taking the side of that crazy woman because she's pretty?"
"You crooked little bastard."
I wasn't usually the sort of guy to start throwing punches.
But Sejun was making me want to flick him in the forehead with all my strength.
Fortunately, before Goryeoha could pay too much attention, the pastor's enthusiasm saved us.
"Oh my. Miss Goryeoha is smart too. So where have you been staying?"
"Pastor, honestly. I've moved everything useful down here. Facilities, equipment, anything I could carry. You said you needed military communications, right? Some soldiers who joined us brought radios. You should be able to receive transmissions with those."
"Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful."
As the pastor beamed proudly at her, the timing was perfect.
Operation Blue Pill.
The rest of us—me, Shin Nain, and Hamza—immediately surrounded Sejun and started scolding him.
"Mr. Sejun. Stop being difficult. She's gone insane gracefully. Let's at least treat her gracefully."
"I listen to Mr. Sejun's thoughts twenty-four hours a day and even I haven't pointed a gun at her. Why can't you endure it?"
"The way you treat Miss Goryeoha is disgusting. It's like a wife jealous of a concubine. Or cats fighting over their owner's affection. A cat fight."
At that exact moment, I couldn't endure the comparison.
Smack!
I flicked Hamza in the forehead.
"Aagh! Mr. Jemin, why?!"
"You little shit. If you're going to make comparisons like that, don't talk at all."
The very premise was nauseating.
Goryeoha, who'd gone insane after losing every survivor.
Versus Lee Sejun, a twenty-four-year-old former sergeant whose dream was becoming a cute TS girl.
And Hamza wanted to call that a cat fight?
Absolutely not.
Even Shin Nain seemed offended.
He glared at Hamza.
"If Mr. Jemin hadn't hit you, I would've smashed your head with my rifle stock."
"Thank you for using your fist, Mr. Jemin."
Yet Sejun seemed genuinely aggrieved.
"You're all being blinded by her appearance. Think about it. Clean water is scarce. Hygiene is difficult. Yet look at her. Why does she still look like that without makeup? It's obvious. She's maximizing the impact of her first impression so armed soldiers and threatening men unconsciously become friendly toward her. This isn't paranoia. Maintaining distance and caution around someone like that is common sense."
The frustrating part was that he wasn't wrong.
The pastor smiling like an idiot around a clearly unstable woman was the strange thing.
Sejun was technically making the rational argument.
If I weren't suffering from the Ear Tier 1 penalty...
If I couldn't hear the true motive behind his words...
I might've admired his insight.
Instead, I reinforced the importance of Operation Blue Pill.
"Mr. Sejun. You're not wrong."
"Mr. Jemin...! You understand?!"
"But even if we were at full strength, we wouldn't fight her."
I held up one finger.
"First, we're low on ammunition."
A second.
"Second, we still don't know all her abilities."
A third.
"Third, she's the only mage we've met who's actually had contact with the Sixty-Six Society."
A fourth.
"Fourth, she's the reason the military sent us here in the first place."
I held my hand directly in front of his gas mask.
Face reality.
"Let's say we kill her and somehow escape. The military asks whether we met Goryeoha. What do we tell them? That she was insane, so we killed her?"
"They'd probably think she was crazy too."
"No."
I shook my head.
"We disappear for over a week. Then suddenly reappear after killing the one person who consistently cooperated with military communications. Anyone with a functioning brain would suspect we'd defected to the Sixty-Six Society or betrayed them somehow."
Even someone as dense as me could reach that conclusion.
The fact that Sejun kept causing problems despite knowing this was maddening.
Actually, he probably knew.
He was just letting his bias blind him.
"Sejun."
I sighed.
"That's life. Some people struggle. Some people get lucky. Just live with it."
"Haa... Mr. Jemin... this is so unfair..."
"I'm feeling pretty cheated too. Let's both endure it."
The fact that I was the one who had to convince Lee Sejun almost brought tears to my eyes.
The little incident outside the New Engineering Building drained my mental strength considerably.
But Sejun finally accepted it.
Operation Blue Pill immediately became much more stable.
Then Goryeoha waved cheerfully at us.
"Gentlemen! Come on in~"
"Coming."
We reformed our group and followed her through an emergency stairwell leading underground.
It was then that Pastor Park slowed down and fell into step beside us.
If he'd already guessed something was wrong with Goryeoha...
I wanted to share information calmly.
So I asked.
"Are you method acting right now?"
"What acting? Did you find something strange?"
"No."
This church nutcase was genuinely running on [Soteriological Certainty].
Just to be sure, I looked at Shin Nain.
His telepathic response was immediate.
'He genuinely doesn't know.'
"Hey. Baek Jemin. Shin Nain. Lee Sejun. And Muslim."
The pastor looked at us suspiciously.
"You young men haven't seen a woman in over a week. Why are you acting like eunuchs? What's with all the whispering?"
His eyebrows twisted naturally.
His eyes were completely innocent.
Despite the wrinkles around them and every prejudice I held against fanatical religious people, Pastor Park had consistently demonstrated surprising intelligence.
Except this time.
Not at all?
'Not at all,' Shin Nain replied.
'To him, Miss Goryeoha is simply a hardworking young student bravely protecting people.'
Two months ago, that might've been true.
It was a shame.
If the pastor had met her back then, he might've actually known that version of Goryeoha.
Fortunately, her underground hideout was cleaner than expected.
After leading us down the stairs, Goryeoha spread her arms proudly.
"Ta-da! This is where I stay."
"Miss Goryeoha, what was this place originally? There's a lot of equipment."
"A laboratory. There were too many machines and facilities to move, so I ended up staying here."
The pastor remained glued to her side like a doting father.
Goryeoha seemed to genuinely enjoy the attention, smiling brightly while explaining every little detail.
Which conveniently allowed the rest of us to inspect the room.
The first thing I noticed was the lighting.
A single LED lamp.
Set to an extremely dim brightness.
Given how precious electricity had become, conserving power was the obvious choice.
Nearby sat industrial equipment.
A drill press.
A welding machine.
Toolboxes on the floor.
The scent of metal filled the room.
Several workbenches had been repurposed for daily life.
Supplies piled on top.
Wet laundry hanging to dry.
Without sufficient power, most of the equipment seemed abandoned.
In one corner sat a makeshift mattress assembled from blankets and curtains.
Spare masks lay scattered in front of a cracked mirror.
On the furthest workbench rested dented water bottles.
Spent candles.
Empty military ration packages.
Tied plastic bags stacked neatly nearby.
Thankfully, there were no signs of human waste.
Even if Goryeoha had lost her mind, she'd clearly maintained basic hygiene and planned for long-term survival.
But the thing that caught my attention most was a particular workbench.
Unlike the others, it looked completely disconnected from modern science.
Artificial light illuminated the rest of the room.
This one stood partly in shadow.
At the edge of the bench, a candle fixed in place by melted wax burned softly.
Its faint flame flickered in the darkness.
Looking closer, I noticed she'd cut an aluminum can in half and was using it as a candle holder.
Goryeoha seemed far more meticulous and cautious than I'd initially thought.
Following the candlelight with my eyes, I spotted various items.
A plastic bag containing a small amount of yellowish powder.
A glass mortar stained dark red inside.
Scissors and tiny scraps of leather.
Beside them sat five spools of thread—blue, red, yellow, white, and black—scattered without any apparent organization.
They looked completely out of place in an engineering laboratory.
Then I noticed something beyond the workbench.
A bulky object covered with thick cloth.
The candle flame wavered as I moved, causing the shadows to shift just enough for me to glimpse its outline.
That was all it took.
Lee Sejun spoke through his gas mask.
"999K. A military radio."
"Soldiers made it this far?"
"Looks like it."
He pointed toward the shadowed corner.
Annoyingly, Sejun's tendency to become hostile whenever attractive women were involved had revealed something we'd missed.
Beyond the workbenches and equipment, hidden in a blind spot that would've been difficult to notice without proper lighting, several military uniforms had been folded neatly.
The absence of corpses bothered me.
"Nain. Think your Ear Tier 3 can talk to those uniforms?"
"They aren't corpses."
"Right."
I, future Archmage Baek Jemin, immediately started thinking.
Hostility toward soldiers was the default attitude among Seoul's survivors.
Yet Goryeoha had somehow obtained military radios and stored them separately.
And the uniforms had been folded neatly.
If she'd intended to loot them, there would've been no reason to preserve military clothing.
Not in Seoul.
Military uniforms practically painted a target on your back.
Wearing one was suicidal.
Which created an interesting contradiction.
Hadn't Goryeoha been judged by the military outside the quarantine zone as one of the friendliest people inside Seoul?
She was completely different from the Dubai Sticky Witch or the Ski Goggle Mage who immediately screamed for soldiers to die.
Even after losing her mind, she didn't attack soldiers on sight.
Gradually, my suspicions shifted.
Maybe Goryeoha had cooperated with the military.
Not the military outside.
Military survivors inside Seoul.
Even then, if she'd effectively acted as their leader, the civilian survivors would've resisted.
The way she kept commenting on our uniforms suggested she'd experienced something similar while those survivors were still alive.
"...Tch."
A sense of regret washed over me.
I remembered the dried corpses in the student union cafeteria.
The ones slumped against walls like mummies.
To know for certain, we'd need to investigate that graveyard of a cafeteria.
I felt genuinely sorry for the dead.
But I also felt a growing need to disturb their rest.
If military survivors had existed on campus, the quality and quantity of information we could obtain would be entirely different.
The Threshold Break.
January 6th.
What happened before it?
What monsters appeared when Seoul's military units were being annihilated?
The soldiers' corpses might hold those answers.
Normally I only used Eye magic for combat.
But with assistance from Tongue Tier 1, I could modify Eye Tier 1 into a crude form of past-sight.
If I used past-sight and Shin Nain spoke with the dead, we'd be able to verify everything.
There were only two problems.
First.
Looking several months into the past would produce horrific magical backlash.
To minimize the cost, we'd need to determine exactly when the survivors died.
Second.
We'd be touching Goryeoha's red pill.
"Absolutely not."
"I know."
Even after hearing Shin Nain's firm answer, I couldn't help feeling disappointed.
Still.
Understanding how Goryeoha had acquired military equipment and radios was enough for now.
I led the Supreme Mages back into Operation Blue Pill.
Hamza still looked uncomfortable.
Lee Sejun still looked wronged by the universe.
Shin Nain continued sighing heavily.
None of them inspired confidence.
Trusting people like this was insanity.
I had to keep my head on straight.
With that resolution, we rejoined the pastor and Goryeoha.
"Miss Goryeoha, perhaps it's time we had a productive discussion."
"Ahaha. Of course! Though wouldn't it be better if you took off your gas masks? It's easier to talk face-to-face."
"Right! Right! I completely forgot."
Before I could answer, the pastor removed his gas mask.
Keeping ours on any longer would've made things awkward.
So I removed mine as well.
The pastor, meanwhile, looked delighted for some reason and even started clapping.
"How's this? This is Baek Jemin—the young man I was considering for youth group leader. If you cut his hair, make him use lotion, stop him from glaring, force him to maintain a forty-five-degree handsome angle, and keep his mouth shut so he can't say anything stupid, he's actually a decent-looking guy."
"Pastor, that's a lot of conditions for a compliment."
"Ahaha..."
Seeing Goryeoha laugh awkwardly made me sigh.
Of course.
If you removed all my inner virtues and judged me purely on appearance, that reaction was only natural.
Ignoring the pastor's nonsense, I got down to business.
"Miss Goryeoha. We're Aphorism, a civilian operations team composed of two doctrinal mages and three alteration mages."
"Huh? That's weird. Why aren't you calling yourselves Supreme Mages today...?"
"We're Aphorism."
Aphorism handled miserable jobs.
Supreme Mages handled awesome jobs.
I'd established that distinction internally.
"We were extremely impressed by the magic you've demonstrated. We'd like to begin by sharing information regarding our respective paths and levels. Would that be acceptable?"
"Huh? Most people ask about the Sixty-Six Society first. That's what soldiers usually do."
"We're civilians. That's a lower priority. Survival comes first."
"That's true. Hmm~ But people inside Seoul don't normally talk openly about their levels. Even if they do, they lie. Or they only tell people they completely trust. Maybe you didn't know that since you're from outside!"
"There must be a reason..."
There was.
A lot of reasons.
Destroying the remains of a mage stronger than yourself could lead to advancement.
Anyone moral enough to ignore that possibility probably died already.
I immediately understood.
"Very well. Shall I begin?"
"Nope. I really like you military gentlemen. Hehe."
"Oh wow! Did you hear that? She likes us! Our Aphorism finally has a woman member!"
At that exact moment, I, Shin Nain, Lee Sejun, and Hamza probably clenched our teeth simultaneously.
Pastor.
That's not a female member.
That's a bright red bomb.
But as the commander of Operation Blue Pill, I suppressed the urge to scream.
Sometimes truth was more beautiful when hidden behind ignorance.
"I'll go first. I'm Goryeoha. Direct Alteration Hand Tier 4. Direct Alteration Heart Tier 2. According to the Sixty-Six Society's classification, I can also use Spirit Sight—the doctrinal ability shamans possess—and a form of spellcraft taught by the Society."
"...What?"
I asked reflexively.
Had I misheard?
Goryeoha proudly placed a hand over her chest.
"Ahem. Spirit Sight gets weaker when you focus on Alteration, of course. I can't identify specific monsters anymore. But I can still tell whether something is a monster. And when I use Spirit Sight, monsters target me first, which makes it easier to protect people. Oh! You were curious about these gloves too, weren't you?"
"Very."
"They're called Fire-Marquis Hands. By borrowing the power of Fire, Metal, and the Fire Virtue True Lord from the Five Elements Path, they let me launch rounded stones or beads. Since guns and ammunition are limited, they're useful for limited ranged combat through hand seals. Of course, they consume talismans and my own blood..."
Crrrk.
Someone's teeth ground together.
Operation Blue Pill had entered its most dangerous phase.
Lee Sejun grabbed my shoulder and whispered urgently.
"Mr. Jemin. Calm down. You said some people have easy lives."
"B-But... how... the hell..."
I stared at Goryeoha.
She continued chattering happily, completely unaware.
What?
She inherited spiritual sensitivity from a shaman family, allowing her to use Spirit Sight?
She possessed Hand Tier 4.
Heart Tier 2.
Spellcraft.
She used Spirit Sight to draw aggro and hunt monsters?
This...
This...
A magic trust-fund baby!
"Urgh..."
"Mr. Jemin!"
My vision spun.
I stumbled backward.
Was this how cultivators from the lower realms felt when staring at immortals born into heavenly lineages?
It was so unfair.
So incredibly unfair.
Even I, who'd endured Sejun whining endlessly about becoming a TS girl, felt my blood pressure spike in the face of such overwhelming privilege.
Then—
At the brink of collapse—
The reason of Archmage Baek Jemin finally spoke.
Jemin.
Get a grip.
Only third-rates let jealousy consume them.
You have stumbled onto a priceless opportunity.
Hand Tier 4.
An opportunity to learn that realm.
Spellcraft.
A truth that a washed-up high school graduate like you could never have reached outside.
Are you really going to throw that away because you're jealous?
Is that all you are?
Baek Jemin.
Your dream of becoming an Archmage can't overcome even this much jealousy?
Crunch.
I bit my lower lip.
And conquered myself.
Human Baek Jemin had overcome jealousy—the strongest inner demon of all.
He stepped forward.
Stood before Goryeoha.
"Master!"
"Huh? I was explaining how cinnabar combines with the five-colored threads and—"
"Please accept me as your disciple!"
I dropped to my knees.
Ready to bow fully.
Lamenting someone else's magical privilege was what amateurs did.
I, Baek Jemin, was fully prepared to bow my head before a woman much younger than me.
"Please... please teach me magic!!!"
If this humiliation was the price of magic, I would gladly pay it.
My pride.
My dignity.
My reputation.
Before the nuclear fireball of fate erased my path to magic—
If I could reach magic first—
I would throw every one of those things away without hesitation.