Lee Min-Jae woke up before the alarm.
Not out of discipline — out of conditioned habit. Like an automated server script: trigger at 5 a.m., run until death.
He opened his eyes in the small rented room in Seoul, where the glow of an advertising sign leaked through the poorly closed blinds. The single bed creaked as he turned to grab his phone.
5:02.
He unlocked the screen and read the notifications. Another alert about an overloaded CPU on a client's server.
He sighed.
They're incompetent people. But they pay. Therefore, I fix it.
He took a sip of water from a plastic bottle on the floor. No breakfast. No shower yet. He put on his wrinkled dress shirt.
Meeting at six. Deploy at eight. That shitty patch no one tested. I'll fix it before the CTO wakes up and pretends he did.
He grabbed the laptop. Walked to the desk crammed against the fridge. Booted it up.
The fan's whirring noise started the day with him.
The first hours weren't "work" in the noble sense sold by self-help books; they were firefighting worthy of a misconfigured server, with logs spewing errors like a terminal patient coughing blood. Min-Jae read those failures like encrypted poetry—finding meter in chaos, rhyming solutions without flourish.
On Slack, notifications exploded with frantic mentions. It was as if the entire team ran in circles, banging their heads against virtual walls. He typed responses like a cold executioner:
rollback
restart
restrict access
No "good morning," no friendly emoji, no patience for the vanity of seeming nice.
They get offended? Good. Let them learn to solve problems before asking for help.
They called him a human script behind his back, knowing he'd never join the virtual coffee chat to laugh at their shared tragedies. He considered it an unsolicited compliment.
Around 9 a.m., he'd hear footsteps in the damp goshiwon hallway, colleagues heading off to more "respectable" offices. Perfectly pressed ties. Little steaming coffee cups. Empty conversations like unanswered pings.
He stayed behind without hesitation.
Thirty seconds of small talk a day adds up to fifteen hours a year. Unacceptable inefficiency.
The bathroom was communal. He avoided it. Preferred wet wipes. Less movement. Less chance of meeting someone who'd ask, "How are you?"
By 10:30 a.m., his monitor displayed stabilized graphs, the load spikes finally contained. His coworkers vanished from Slack as if there were a secret clause allowing paid naps.
He remained there.
Ate standing up, balancing a cup-ramyeon of unchanging flavor in his left hand while typing with his right, one eye on SSH, the other on corporate documentation he combed for mistakes no one else noticed.
They go out to eat together. I'll eat later. When I finish something useful.
Even when the emergencies calmed down, he didn't stop. He kept polishing automation scripts, documenting internal exploits for bug bounties, selling reports to startups desperate for security.
Money is a buff. Emotion is a debuff.
At 1 p.m., his mother insisted on calling.
He didn't pick up. Her name appeared on the screen like a low-priority compile error.
Five minutes of small talk a day equals thirty hours a year. I'd rather spend them cleaning logs.
She'd leave voicemails full of banal advice about food, health, life. He listened to them all at 2x speed. That was the most affection he allowed himself to offer.
From 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., Slack turned into a desert. The team took naps or, worse, posted selfies to their stories to look productive.
Min-Jae kept typing.
He wrote internal tools to remove manual steps. Adjusted documentation with almost pathological precision. Dissected systems like an entomologist studying insects.
Automating tasks reduces the human factor. The human factor is the biggest risk.
He sold bits of his own work on the side. Startups paid well for solutions he wrote between commits.
From 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. was the "official" support window, and he hated every second.
Clients called to explain problems they couldn't even describe. Min-Jae replied in a dry, almost aggressively functional tone.
"Hello?" Kim, from the Platinum account. I need to explain an error that...
"Send it by email. I'll fix it."
"But I'd rather talk..."
"Text is clearer."
And he hung up without hesitation.
The voice trembles. Text doesn't.
At 8 p.m. he paused, in theory. But he didn't know what it meant to pause.
He ate another cup-ramyeon—the same flavor, no surprises. His room's shelves were lined with identical boxes, bought in bulk.
Changing flavors is unnecessary cognitive cost.
From 8 p.m. to 10 p.m., he reviewed final deploys, ran staging, fixed hotfixes that appeared like roaches behind the fridge.
When he finally closed Slack, his eyes burned. His back complained like a server about to crash.
Pain is an alert. Alerts are to be ignored if they're not critical.
At 10:10 p.m. he switched stations. Adjusted the plastic chair, powered on the other laptop—the gaming one, older, louder, more beloved.
Custom keyboard. Mouse with DPI tuned to the edge. Cold light illuminating a messy desk covered in empty cups, stacked ramen boxes, notebooks scribbled with builds, formulas, theories.
There, he took a deep breath.
He smiled.
His first smile of the day.
Now it begins. The part that matters.
He logged into BloodRealm Online. A famous Korean MMORPG known for punishing mistakes like mortal sins. PvP, a cutthroat player-driven economy, skill trees more complicated than a bank contract.
For the weak, it was a nightmare. For him, it was a system to be dissected.
BloodRealm Online wasn't a game to him.It was a testing ground.
Min-Jae had multiple characters on his account, all meticulously designed to squeeze every advantage out of the game.
A Shadowblade abusing animation frames to cancel enemy attacks.
A Runeseer with borderline-broken buff combinations.
A Warlord tanking five opponents in PvP just to humiliate them.
A Soulweaver specialized in DOTs that couldn't be cleansed.
Even a Merchant Prince dedicated to manipulating the auction house.
Each of these characters was a walking exploit. He studied logs, compared cooldowns, simulated encounters in spreadsheets.
There's no weak class. Only lazy players.
Except, of course, for one.
The so-called Beast Tamer.
Or, as he called it himself, the embodiment of design failure.
Tamed monsters lost half their power.
Gained extra weaknesses.
Dumb AI, no manual commands.
Absurd cooldowns.
No scaling.
Zero PvP utility.
A dead end. No exploits. No advantages to leverage.
Even so, he had a Beast Tamer on his account.
Eren Vale.
Low level. Trash gear. No real goal.
A monument to his own stubbornness to test everything, even what he despised.
That night, he logged in on him.
Not because he believed. But out of habit.
The screen showed Eren standing in a dark field, the virtual wind rippling the grass in silent waves. He opened the inventory, checked cooldowns, read notes about spawn rates.
He still kept spreadsheets for him—even with no real reason.
The game says you need high DPS. But that style makes no sense. The best thing to do is distribute points for absolute control. But that doesn't exist here.
Yawning, he copied logs into Notepad, tested idiotic combinations just to confirm they didn't work, killed weak mobs to measure minimum damage.
Sleeping now is a waste. I only need less than 4 hours of sleep per day.
When the clock hit 2 a.m., his eyelids felt like they had crashed. His forehead rested against the keyboard.
Just a little longer...
The server gave off the flat sound of an automatic logoff.
The screen went gray. Character frozen in an empty field, no NPCs, no monsters.
Only wind.
His chest rose. Fell. Stopped.
At that moment, Lee Min-Jae died there. Died of exhaustion, barely even noticing his own death.
Died without drama. Without a scream. Without anyone to notice. The last image before dying was Eren Vale, standing alone, waiting for orders that would never come.
────────── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──────────
The moment Lee Min-Jae's breathing stopped in that cramped room, silence was absolute. No alarm went off. No Slack message pinged. No coworker noticed.
But something continued.
It was hard to say if it was consciousness, memory, or a processing error. Somewhere remote in what he'd have called a "mind," a spark refused to go out.
Instead of eternal darkness, he found himself surrounded by total white—a fog-like opacity lit from nowhere. A light with no source, no heat, no shadows. He couldn't feel his body.
For a moment, the peace almost convinced him.
So... this is it? A server shut down. Finally no alerts.
That was when the light dissolved.
Min-Jae blinked.
Opened his eyes.
This time there was color. Blue. So much blue. An endless, intense sky with clouds so clear they looked hand-painted.
He widened his eyes and took a deep breath—fresh, cold air with the scent of damp earth. He coughed. The shock of it made him roll to the side, finally feeling something solid under him. Grass. Uneven soil.
By reflex, he dug his fingers into the ground. It was damp. The sensation was so real he shivered.
The sky actually exists... My mother was right, after all. But if she was right, then I probably shouldn't be in hell? That's a contradiction. I'll need to verify.
It took a while for him to force himself to sit up. He was dizzy. His eyes darted, struggling to adjust to the brightness. He brought a hand to his forehead. Felt oily scalp, warm skin—confirming he had a body, at least.
The wind blew through him, lifting messy strands of hair.
Okay. I'm not in my chair.
He looked up again. The sky was still there, vast, unyielding, almost mocking in its over-the-top beauty.
All around him, vast fields of tall grass swayed in the wind. Mountains covered in dark trees rose in the distance. Strange-colored flowers sprouted everywhere, too vibrant for any city park.
Farther ahead, something moved—a four-legged, furry creature with horns. Nothing familiar.
Lee Min-Jae took a deep breath.
He tried to stand all at once but staggered. His legs buckled. He fell to his knees, feeling a sharp pain in his thigh.
Shit. I'm... dizzy. Why?
He wiped his forehead again. Feverish. Heart racing.
Altered physiology? High latency? Am I dreaming?
The question echoed like a logic error. Just to be sure, he slapped his own face.
The sound cracked. The pain was sharp, vivid.
Nothing changed.
I'm not dreaming. Or it's a really expensive dream.
He breathed slowly, trying to assess. His eyes darted everywhere, analyzing with a precision that would irritate any psychologist. He noticed patterns: the wind had a constant direction, shadows shifted with moving clouds. The terrain had natural topography, none of that lazy "copypaste" you saw in game maps.
But there were flaws in reality.
The grass moved in too-perfect cycles.The ambient sound had an almost imperceptible loop.The flower textures repeated a pattern.
This is rendered.
He held his breath. The shock burned his throat.
I know this.
That was when he felt a click—not in his bones, but somewhere invisible around him. The air seemed to vibrate.
In front of his eyes, something flickered.
A translucent, light-blue rectangle appeared in the air.
Min-Jae's eyes widened.
[Status]
Name: Eren Vale
Level: 1
Class: Beast Tamer (Class E)
HP: 120 / 120
MP: 40 / 40
Strength: 6
Agility: 7
Vitality: 8
Intelligence: 10
Monster Mastery: 1
Skills: None
He leaned forward, nose nearly touching the floating window as if checking if it was a hologram.
The text glowed with a familiar blue. All too familiar.
BloodRealm Online.
He didn't need anything else. He knew exactly where he was. He recognized the UI style, the font used, even the exact color—he'd spent entire nights with his face glued to it.
The realization hit like a hammer.
I'm... in the game.
His eyes darted wildly. The field around him was too bright for an urban map. The vibrant flowers matched the palette of the starting continent. The creatures on the horizon were low-level mobs he recognized—it was the beginner biome.
He tried moving his hands. They responded well despite the weakness. No lag. No keyboard HUD.
All physical.
So that's it. Reincarnation. Isekai. Whatever.
For a moment, he felt a pang in his chest.
I... died?
It was a logical hypothesis.Probable, even.He remembered his own body slumped over the keyboard.The server giving that dry logoff beep.The chest that stopped.
He shook his head. Tried another slap, harder. His cheek stung. Nothing disappeared. No black screen. No exit button. He looked back at the floating panel.
Class: Beast Tamer (Class E).
That hurt more than the slap. He scoffed, rage bubbling like acid.
Beast Tamer. Class E.
Lee Min-Jae remembered every damn detail of the system.
The worst class.No scaling.Monsters weakened when tamed.AI that ignored orders when you needed it most.Absurd cooldowns.No burst.No sustain.No exploits.
He bit his lip until he tasted blood.
I'm stuck... with the most useless class in the game.
He shut his eyes tight. The grass tickled uncomfortably against his neck.
This isn't a dream. This isn't heaven. It's hell.
He laughed. A harsh, broken sound. Joyless.
Worse than dying. Worse than dreaming. I'm condemned to play this trash.
He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself.
But the status window still hovered in front of him like a bankruptcy notice.
[Status]
Name: Eren Vale
Class: Beast Tamer (Class E)
The wind blew again, as if the world wanted to remind him he was alive—and stuck there.
He closed the status window with an unconscious gesture.
Even without meaning to, his brain was already working. Looking for variables. Exploits. Exits.
Nothing came to mind.
No exploit. No broken build. Just trash.
The sun began to dip below the horizon. The light turned orange, casting long shadows over the grass.
Lee Min-Jae—or Eren Vale—sat cross-legged, staring at a world that should have been beautiful.
For him, all that remained was the bitter taste of failure.
────────── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──────────
Eren Vale sat for a long time in the grass, arms resting on his knees, watching the sunset in this place that refused to be just a game.
Slowly, the light dissolved into burnt-orange tones, transforming the sky into a dark-blue canopy spangled with stars that twinkled with absurd clarity. More real than any 8K graphic.
He drew in a slow breath. Cold. Alive.
An entire day passed. Must be a 24-hour cycle here. 1:1 simulation. Total immersion.
He started inspecting his own body carefully. He squeezed his arm. The skin texture was natural, with pores, tiny scars. His hair fell over his eyes, oily as always—he hadn't been granted even good looks.
He flexed his fingers, checked the range of his shoulders, felt the weight of his legs as he stood up.
No logout interface. Zero graphics options menus. Zero latency. Perfect touch. Adaptive temperature.
If this was a dream, it was meticulously built to fool him.
He clenched his jaw and mentally analyzed the variables.
I'm not feeling hungry or thirsty. I'm not sleepy either. But... I think I could sleep if I wanted. Optional physiological needs system.
He made a cynical face.
Better quality of life than in Korea.
He sighed and reopened the status screen.
[Status]
Name: Eren Vale
Level: 1
Class: Beast Tamer (Class E)
HP: 120 / 120
MP: 40 / 40
Monster Mastery: 1
Skills: None
"Monster Mastery: 1."
A cruel joke.
He knew exactly how this damn class worked. It was supposed to tame wild creatures and turn them into allies—but the system brutally penalized any success.
Tamed monsters lost half their original power.Gained extra vulnerabilities.Had to be fed.Refused complex orders.Could betray the tamer if the bond was weak.
At higher levels, the taming skills gained some appeal—but the costs climbed with them.
It's not a learning curve. It's a wall. Without legendary gear or absurd pacts, it's impossible to progress.
He spat on the ground.
Congrats. You reincarnated with the tutorial set to hell mode.
As the sky darkened, Eren Vale got up and followed a small dirt road. He recognized the map layout—even if everything looked more organic and less "copy-pasted" than in the old game.
He walked until he reached a village that reminded him of the server's starting towns. Small wooden houses, thatched roofs, barrels and crates stacked messily. Everything smelled of manure, smoke, and bad beer.
NPCs? Humans. Perfect actors. Old women selling bread, blacksmiths hammering iron, kids running and screaming.
They're breathing. They have smell. They're not scripts. They're... alive?
He watched carefully. The animations were too fluid for standard AI. Spontaneous interactions. Crooked smiles. Muttering.
Either this is fifth-generation AI, or they're players.
Either way, he had nothing to do there.
The area was a "Safe Zone." No PvP. No aggressive monsters.
The HUD confirmed it: a shield icon glowed in the top-left corner of his vision.
No loot. No XP. No danger. No progress.
He sighed and kept walking.
He ended up spending the entire day in that starter town, wandering aimlessly. He checked item prices at stalls, talked to a few merchants—simple phrases, no branching dialogue trees. Everything felt so real it hurt.
This simulation has no logout. And I have no plan.
When night truly fell, he noticed oil lanterns lighting up, casting warm shadows on the muddy streets. The temperature dropped slightly, making the wind cut deeper.
No bed. Not enough money to rent a room.
He checked his pocket. Inside were a few basic coins—the starter cash every player received.
Not much.
Not even enough for an iron sword.
He walked toward the brightest, noisiest spot in the village: a tavern.
The sign swung in the wind, creaking. It had a wooden mug carved on it, foam painted white.
Nothing more human than drowning your sorrows in alcohol.
He went in.
The smell hit him like a slap: fermented beer, sweat, lamplight smoke, something that reminded him of poorly cleaned piss.
Long tables crowded with men, women, and... things.
He froze, tense.
There were creatures in there. Humanoid monsters.
A lizard-woman with red scales laughed loudly, slamming her mug on the counter. A man with feline ears licked his lips, rolling dice with two human farmers.
They didn't show up like this in the game. The skins were censored.
He advanced carefully, finding a stool in the corner. Pulled it out and sat, watching the crowd.
They're mixed. Humans and monsters. No combat warnings. No aggression icons.
He called the bartender.
A fat, bearded man in a stained apron stopped in front of him.
"What'll it be, traveler?"
Eren Vale pulled the coins from his pocket.
"Something cheap."
The man laughed and served a mug of something amber. Eren took a gulp. The taste was awful. Strong, biting. But effective.
As he drank, he kept analyzing.
I have no skill. No pet. Nothing.
He mentally opened the status again.
[Status]
Class: Beast Tamer (Class E)
Monster Mastery: 1
I should be able to tame creatures. But with this? Even a sewer rat wouldn't obey.
He sighed, staring at the drink.
I'm stuck. Weak. What a joke.
The bar got busier as the night wore on. The lute music sped up, accompanied by clapping. Conversations grew louder.
Until the tables started clearing out in a curious way.
People were slipping off toward the back—a corridor lit with candles. Moans began to echo. Stifled laughter.
Eren raised an eyebrow.
... Seriously?
A couple stumbled out of the hallway, laughing like drunks. The woman—human, with her hair tied in a messy bun—had her breasts out, bouncing freely while he held her by the waist, fucking her without any shame.
"Ahh... deeper..." she panted, clawing at his back hard. "Come on, shove it all in, fuck!"
He kissed her, tongue plunging hungrily into hers before pulling back just to watch her flushed face.
"Scream for me. I want to hear you beg, bitch."
She let out a sharp, raspy moan, almost a scream:
"Fuck me! Fuck me like an animal!"
He obeyed, the thrusts hitting with wet, obscene sounds that echoed through the hall. No one seemed to care. Some even raised their mugs in a toast.
In another corner, a group laughed while watching two women—a human with short hair and a half-monster with a scorpion tail—taking turns giving oral to a big mercenary.
The human licked the base of his cock slowly, smiling mischievously:
"Hmm, you like that?"
He growled in pleasure, his hand tangled in her hair.
"Fuck, suck it right. I want to cum in that mouth."
The scorpion-woman ran her forked tongue over the swollen tip, letting out a lewd hiss.
"Let me taste him too..."
She took almost all of it down her throat, her tail twitching behind her in a spasm of excitement, while the human woman sucked his balls with wet noises.
Moans, smacks, and laughter mixed together. The smell of sweat, alcohol, and sex filled the air like a hot fog.
Eren watched it all without showing much reaction.
Didn't know there was this kind of thing in the game.
He analyzed everything. Moans echoed. Tables thumped against the floor. Glasses broke. Someone yelled for more wine while thrusting into a blue-skinned elf from behind.
Although Lee Min-Jae had never had sex—not with humans, let alone with monsters—he was fascinated by all of it. In real life, sex had never mattered to him; it was just a big waste of time, and the only advantage was having kids.
But having kids in Korea was asking for a horrible life. The cost of living there was too high, and kids were only for the rich. The poor shouldn't reproduce—at least, that was what Eren thought.
His eyes locked specifically on one guy with a single horn holding a beast-woman's head down while he fucked her doggy-style.
... That's weird.
But even though his analytical gaze made it impossible to feel any real arousal, something inside him simmered. Curiosity? Instinct?
The bartender watched him with a crooked grin.
"It's your first time here, huh, Tamer?"
Eren frowned.
"Why do you say that?"
The man laughed, wiping a glass with a filthy rag.
"Because you've got that face of someone who's never seen a tit."
In truth, Min-Jae had never seen breasts in person.
"Man, you Tamers... you're all the same," the man went on. "Buy monsters just to sell them to brothels. Or use them yourselves."
"I don't do that."
"Yet," the bartender corrected with sarcasm. "But you'll learn."
Eren Vale stayed there, drinking his drink while analyzing everything. In the hallway, coming in with someone, he saw a monster-girl—grotesque body, but massive breasts—giving him an inviting smile as he kept staring.
I don't think I should waste my coins on that.
His reason won out. He turned away and started thinking about the whole situation.
A world where people can do whatever they want, without limits. Maybe selling monsters isn't such a bad thing, if its profit. Maybe that's the exploit of this class?
Maybe... this was his chance to get what he really wanted.