GM Ch1 – Prologue

A gentle breeze touched his cheek.

Kim Minjun opened his eyes with a nervous twitch. A panoramic view of an ordinary city under an azure sky with white clouds floating around greeted him.

The season was fall. The ginkgo trees lining the streets between the skyscrapers were turning yellow while colorless cars drove slowly along the eight-lane boulevard. Even though it was the middle of the day, there were quite a few cars on the road.

After watching the traffic light change colors for a while, Minjun realized that he was standing on top of a skyscraper in the city center.

And that quickly turned into a feeling of thrill.

“I’m back…”

A drained tone escaped his lips, and his hands that were hanging by the side were shaking but he didn’t realize either.

It was the winter of his twenty-sixth year when Minjun was transported to another world. In a desperate situation, he used a skill called Black Star, but lost control and was swept up in a warp of space and time. The exact mechanism was unknown. Even the mages of the other world said that they had never seen anything like it.

In any case, Minjun adapted well to the other world. He gained great power and fought for peace there. He spent the next eight years working as a renowned demon hunter in the other world, but for various reasons, he was unable to settle there permanently.

Among others, the biggest problem was that he had been cursed with “Existence Dilution” before his dimensional shift. It was originally a curse that caused a person to vomit blood and die on the spot. Fortunately, he resisted the curse somewhat, but the fact that it was a curse of death did not change in the end.

In essence, Existence Dilution constantly loosened the bonds between Minjun’s soul and body. Once the soul and body were separated, death was the natural consequence. Existence Dilution, which was so horrific that it could make even a renowned curse sorcerer shake their head at it, stubbornly refused to leave Minjun, even with the blessing of a holy priest. His only options were to kill the caster of the curse or destroy the medium of the curse.

In the end, Minjun brought all of his wealth to the Lord of the Mage Tower to find a way to return to Earth.

“That damned Lord of Mage Tower.”

Even as he was overwhelmed with emotion of returning to Earth, Minjun cursed the lord he had become close with.

Dimensional travel magic was theoretically possible, but it would take a miracle to specify a particular dimension. However, because Minjun was originally from Earth, he was able to experiment with many things.

All of Minjun’s immediate family was dead, but a distant relative he didn’t know helped him return home. To put the mage lord’s words into understandable terms, the existence of Minjun and his distant relatives on Earth was akin to radio waves with similar wavelengths emanating from the exits and entrances of a huge, complex, three-dimensional maze.

Unfortunately, the strength of the radio waves was weak and the distance was too great. They had to repeat the experiment with more expensive materials to increase the chances of return. Alas, all the money he had saved in his eight years in the other world was stolen from Minjun by the mage tower lord. Still, the important thing was that he made it back to Earth safely.

With time to spare, Minjun strained his eyes to read the sign on the building. He recognized the several Hangul letters.

“It’s Korea…”

His mind raced with all the things he needed to do next.

Ever since he decided he was going to return to Earth, he had been making plans. As he watched the mage lord experimenting, he fleshed the plans out in his head over and over again.

The most important thing was breaking the Existence Dilution curse, followed by a leisurely retirement. These were two of Minjun’s goals.

The problem at hand was that his current identity was ambiguous. When he was swept into the other world, the spirit stones he possessed mixed with his body, thereafter changing his appearance considerably. Apparently, it wasn’t common in the other world, but it happened sometimes. Minjun didn’t think much of it either.

But now that he was back on Earth, he could not prove he’s Kim Minjun with his changed appearance. Even his fingerprints had changed.

If he claimed to be Kim Minjun when his appearance and fingerprints were different, he would be labeled a lunatic. With no immediate family or known relatives, it would be impossible to prove it through DNA. Perhaps the fused spirit stones had even changed his genes.

There was a good chance he wouldn’t be able to get his original identity back, but Minjun wasn’t too worried. He figured he might as well create a new identity if he was going to keep a low profile. If he said he had been in an accident and lost his memory, he figured it would work out somehow.

Of course, he was a little disappointed in the wealth he had accumulated in the past. He also remembered the single-family home he bought as soon as he made bank when he became an S-class hunter.

If he had known this would happen, he would have listened to the other guys when they told me to open an anonymous account. He regretted not creating a back pocket for himself in the past, but he quickly decided to let it go. He just needed to make more money.

He made a plan in his head; to go down the building, figure out how much time has passed, find out if his original identity had been declared dead, go to the government office, and then get a new identity. Ah, no, first, he should get some kimchi stew… or is soup rice a better option?

At the thought of kimchi stew and soup rice, Minjun’s mouth started watering. Everything was good in the other world, but the food was too sweet and greasy. In the other world which lacked kimchi, gochujang, or miso, he made pickles by hand, and pretended a pheasant was a chicken instead, but his Korean soul still was not satisfied.

“I have cash.”

Standing on the roof of a building, wondering what to eat, Minjun fumbled in his pocket for his wallet. He’d carried it in and out of the dungeon as an emergency fund, and afterwards, he’d kept it with him in the other world, just in case.

“Let’s go with soup rice.”

With an old wallet in hand, Minjun decided on his menu and started looking for a soup rice restaurant. He didn’t see any signs along the boulevard, but then he spotted the word “gukbap” (soup rice) behind an intersection in the distance.

Spontaneously jumping for joy, Minjun leapt from one building to the next to rush to the restaurant.

Landing safely on top of the next building, Minjun tilted his head at the status window that popped up in front of him out of nowhere. The status window, or system board as it’s called overseas, was a bluish, square window that gave him an objective view of the situation.

It was the first notification he had ever seen in his four years as a hunter in Korea and eight years as a demon hunter in the other world.

“The first believer?”

He did not understand a word. Minjun looked at the status bar, then at the sky, then at the status bar again.

The words did not change at all.

“Whatever.”

With no one to explain the situation, Minjun decided to worry about it later and turned off the status window, running full speed toward the soup rice restaurant.

T/N: Hi friends, I have a casual discord server for my translation projects! Feel free to join and chat!