The sixth morning broke over Busan. Han Joon-seong left the apartment early, jogging pants and a fitted shirt, moving through the streets toward Ascent Athletic Club while Ervin drifted behind and above, watching the city wake up.
The streets were busy but unhurried. Ervin found himself studying the people they passed. Not deliberately, at first. He was still trying to figure out what Intuition actually did, and so his attention snagged on details he might have ignored before.
From his watching, he noted that almost no one on this street was dressed for a job. The clothes prioritized style over function — soft fabrics, careful colors, nothing with a corporate logo or a name tag. Even the few people carrying briefcases seemed to be heading toward cafés rather than office buildings.
Saturday, Ervin realized. It had to be a weekend. The thought surfaced without conscious effort, a conclusion assembled from a dozen tiny observations he hadn't meant to make.
He filed it away and let his perspective drift back to Han Joon-seong's shoulders. The glass facade of Ascent rose ahead, and the automatic doors slid open with their pneumatic hiss.
Seok-ju was behind the reception desk, rising from his chair as Han Joon-seong approached. The motion caught Ervin's attention in a way it never had before. Seok-ju planted his right foot, leaned into that side, then pushed himself up with the armrest. The left side of his body moved with less commitment. His right shoulder dipped slightly as he straightened, a subtle compensation that spoke of habit rather than injury.
Ervin noticed it. He couldn't be sure it meant what he thought it meant, but right there, a thought fully formed: Seok-ju slept on his right side. All his weight on that shoulder.
Han Joon-seong stopped in front of the desk and spoke. "Coach. You should stop sleeping on your side. Your shoulder will thank you."
Seok-ju froze mid-step, one thick eyebrow climbing toward his hairline. "What?"
"Putting all your weight on one shoulder all night," Han Joon-seong said. "It's bad for the joint. You'll wake up stiff."
Seok-ju stared at him for a long moment. Then he rolled his right shoulder, a reflexive, self-conscious motion, and something flickered across his face — surprise, maybe, or the uncomfortable feeling of being seen too clearly.
"...Right," he said slowly. "Thanks for the tip." He didn't ask how Han Joon-seong knew.
Ervin, watching from above, felt a quiet click of understanding. Intuition! It was working.
They climbed the stairs toward the free weight floor. A woman was descending at the same time, her legs trembling with the telltale wobble of a brutal leg day. She gripped the railing loosely, her footing uncertain.
Ervin looked at her, and his mind immediately concluded, "She's going to fall." The conclusion was immediate, based on nothing more than the angle of her descent and the speculated fatigue in her quads; he predicted she would misjudge the next step before she'd even taken it.
Han Joon-seong stepped to the side.
Her foot caught the edge of the stair. She pitched forward. And Han Joon-seong caught her by the shoulders before she could hit the ground, steadying her with a firm, easy grip.
"Careful," he said. "The stairs after leg day are dangerous. You don't want to take a fall."
She blinked up at him, her expression shifting from shock to something warmer as her brain caught up with the face in front of her. A faint, pleased smile touched her lips, the satisfaction of being rescued by someone absurdly good-looking.
"Thank you," she said, and continued down the stairs with a small wave over her shoulder.
Ervin let the word surface in his mind as Han Joon-seong resumed climbing. "At this level... isn't this closer to Foresight?" That was what it felt like. Not supernatural level — he certainly couldn't become a prophet. But from just accumulating small, subconscious details — the tremor in a muscle, the shift of weight, the angle of a foot — he had already assembled a prediction faster than conscious thought could manage.
Intuition: the capacity to gather fragments of information too subtle for the conscious mind and weave them into a conclusion, then hand that conclusion upward as if it were a feeling. And when the pieces were sufficient, in the right situation, it could look very much like seeing the future.
It was a good characteristic. Better than he'd hoped.
---
The training session itself was unremarkable in the way that routine always was. Han Joon-seong moved through his sets with mechanical precision, the Auto Pilot executing commands while Ervin drifted in and out of focus. The burn of exertion arrived as data, nothing more.
[Strength has gained experience (25/80)]
[Speed has gained experience (12/80)]
[Endurance has gained experience (46/160)]
When the vigor bar finally emptied and the cooldown timer appeared, Han Joon-seong was drenched in sweat, his chest heaving, his arms trembling with the pleasant ache of work well done. Seok-ju appeared at the end of the bench, towel over his shoulder.
"Good workout, kid. You're consistent, I'll give you that."
Han Joon-seong nodded, still catching his breath. "Thanks, coach."
He sat there for a moment longer, letting his heart rate settle. The gains were still coming, but they were slowing down. Three points in strength. One in speed. Four in endurance. Respectable, but nothing like the explosive progress of the first few days. He'd expected the curve to flatten eventually. Every game worked that way. The early levels came fast, and then the grind set in.
He exhaled, a long, slow breath, and stood up. If the training was losing its edge, he'd just have to push harder. Longer sessions. More days.
He showered, changed, and walked out into the afternoon light, the city now fully awake and humming around him.
---
The apartment was quiet when he stepped inside, exactly as he'd left it. He locked the door behind him, kicked off his shoes, and stood in the center of the small living space, suddenly aware that he had absolutely nothing to do.
No missions demanding immediate attention. No messages on his phone. The gang situation was still slow-burning. And he didn't feel like walking anywhere else.
His eyes fell on the PC in the corner.
The setup was identical to the one from his old life. Same monitor, chair, desk, and the ugly faded mousepad with the frayed edge. He crossed the room, sat down in the worn desk chair, and pressed the power button. The screen blinked to life, and the familiar desktop materialized. It had been a while since he had seen this wallpaper and these desktop icons.
His game library sat in the corner of the screen. He scrolled through the list, and there it was, near the top. *Eternal Ascension Online*. The last game he'd played in his old life. The last thing he'd been doing before everything changed.
He launched it.
The loading screen filled the monitor, a sweeping vista of floating islands and ancient ruins. His character appeared — a mid-level warrior in mismatched gear, frozen in the last pose he'd left him in. The guild chat window blinked in the corner; it was completely empty. A sense of loss came over him. He remembered the weeks of banter and strategy and late-night conversations he'd had with his guild mates. Now completely lost...
He stared at the screen, and the memories of that day surfaced.
That night. A week ago, he'd come home from work — no, not work. He'd come home from being fired. His boss had called him into the office, fed him some line about restructuring and budget cuts, and sent him out the door with a severance check that barely covered his rent. He'd walked back to his apartment in a daze, sat down at this same desk, and logged into *Eternal Ascension* because it was the only thing he could think to do.
The guild voice chat had been active. A few of the regulars were on — people whose real names he'd never learned, whose faces he'd never seen, but whose voices he'd spent more evenings with than any of his actual friends. They'd been talking about some dungeon run, gear drops, the usual. He'd joined the channel and said nothing for a while, just listened.
And then, somehow, the conversation had turned. Someone asked how his day was. He'd meant to give a short answer, brush it off, move on. But as the other members engaged and the others began talking, he... simply let himself go.
"My life is utterly pathetic," he'd said, and the bitterness in his own voice had surprised him. "I just got fired from a job I hated, my bank account is empty, and I'm sitting here at eleven o'clock at night playing an MMO because I have literally nothing else to do. No girlfriend. No prospects. No plan. I'm twenty-seven years old and I've accomplished exactly nothing."
The channel had gone quiet. Then someone, he couldn't remember who, had said something gentle, something meant to be comforting. He'd barely heard it. He'd been too busy spiraling.
"If I had an honest-to-God chance," he'd said, his voice cracking slightly, "I could be exceptional. I know I could. I just… I've never had the opportunity. Never had the resources, the connections, the luck. I've been treading water my whole life, and I'm so goddamn tired of it."
He remembered the silence that followed. He remembered muttering something about needing sleep and logging off. He remembered staring at the ceiling until dawn.
Han Joon-seong's hands rested motionless on the keyboard. Ervin, somewhere behind his eyes, sat with the memory.
Who else had been in that call?
He tried to picture the voice channel list. A few names came easily — the guild leader, the healer who was always complaining about her internet, the rogue who never showed up to raids on time. But there had been someone else. Someone whose name hovered at the edge of his memory, refusing to come into focus.
He tried to remember that person, to pull their name or their voice or anything solid out of the fog, and the fog simply thickened. The effort was like trying to grip water.
But alas, it was a person of absolutely no importance whatsoever, and if the attempt to recall them only left him confused, he might as well not recall them. Whoever they were, they were not worth remembering. Not in the slightest.
The confusion passed. Ervin stopped trying. The name, whatever it had been, slipped away entirely, and the thought dissolved like it had never existed.
He closed the game and sat back in the chair, his eyes drifting to the apartment's ceiling.
An honest-to-God chance. He'd begged for one, hadn't he? Spilled his pathetic heart out to a chat room full of strangers and wished, with every fiber of his miserable being, for a way out.
And now here he was. A new body. A system. A city full of gangs that were already circling him, already offering him a path upward. He didn't believe in fate, or any kind of cosmic justice or answered prayers. But the coincidence was hard to ignore.
And these three gangs, scrambling for power — surely there was some gap he could exploit in all this mess.
He didn't want to be a criminal. Doing what these trash did, he couldn't see himself doing what those men did — loan sharking, threatening innocents, casually terrorizing an innocent girl who'd done nothing but fall behind on a debt. He would not become that. He refused to become that kind of person. The very idea made his imaginary stomach turn.
But he didn't have to join them to use them.
For now, he had no plan to realize this; though the general direction was settled, he would need to flesh it out better. But for now, that was enough.
What was strange — genuinely, profoundly strange, if anyone had stopped to notice it — was what Ervin did not think about. He was, by nature, an over-analytical and obsessive man. In his old life, he had been the kind of person who lay awake at night turning over unanswered questions, who couldn't rest until he understood the why of things. And yet, he had easily gone over the why of him being in Korea, why his consciousness had been separated from his body, why money regenerated in his bank account like a game mechanic, or why a blue interface hovered in his vision, or who, exactly, had put it there. The curiosity that should have consumed him simply did not exist. It was as if the question itself had been walled off. And if that seemed odd — well. It was.
[Day Finished, awarded points [106 Points]]
[[System]
Player: Ervin Mandor
Character 1; Han Joon-seong
[Characteristics:
Adaptation(Perfect)
Talent(Perfect)
Auto Pilot(Perfect)
Money(Perfect|Middle-class)
Intuition (Lvl. 1)
Looks(Lvl. 5)
Speed(Lvl. 4)(12/80)
Strength (Lvl. 4)(25/80)
Endurance (Lvl. 5)(46/160)
Vigor (Lvl. 5)(10/160)
Intelligence (Lvl. 3)(6/40)
[Tasks:
[Street Policing — End the Contraband Market in Sangdo-dong. Reward — 200 Points]]]