The fluorescent light above aisle three had been flickering for two weeks.
Cha Junho had put in a maintenance request on day one. He had put in another on day five. On day nine he had written it down in the little notebook the manager kept behind the counter, because apparently that was the system now. The light was still flickering. Nobody had come. Junho had accepted this the way he accepted most things — quietly, without making it anyone else's problem, and by simply not looking directly at it.
He pushed the cart down the aisle and restocked the ramyeon shelf on autopilot. Shin ramyeon on the left. Buldak on the right. The off-brand stuff in the middle that nobody bought but management kept ordering because the margins were better. It was 3:18 in the morning. Outside, Seoul was doing what Seoul did — rain on concrete, headlights smearing through wet glass, the occasional taxi cutting too close to the curb and not caring even a little.
Junho liked the night shift.
That probably said something about him as a person, but he had stopped examining what things said about him as a person somewhere around age nineteen. It was quieter at night. Fewer customers. Fewer conversations he had to figure out how to have. Just him and the hum of the refrigerators and the flickering light in aisle three.
He finished the ramyeon shelf and checked his phone. 3:21. Three hours and thirty-nine minutes until the morning guy showed up. He did the math on the remaining stock automatically, decided he could do the drinks refrigerator last, and went to go eat the triangle kimbap he'd bought at the start of his shift.
The drunk came in at 3:34.
Junho heard him before the door sensor even chimed — the particular quality of footsteps that meant someone was working harder than usual to appear sober. He put down the kimbap, wiped his hands on his uniform, and watched the man navigate the entrance with the careful concentration of someone defusing a bomb.
The man was maybe forty. Suit jacket, loosened tie, the specific kind of tired that came from a company dinner that had turned into a company second-bar that had turned into a company third-bar that had turned into him being alone in a convenience store at 3:34 AM staring at the drink refrigerator like it had personally wronged him.
Junho waited.
The man grabbed a canned coffee, turned around, and seemed surprised to discover there was a counter. And then a person behind it. He squinted.
"You," the man said, pointing with the coffee can. "You're young."
"Yes," Junho said.
"How old?"
"Twenty-one."
The man nodded slowly, as though this was deeply significant information he needed a moment to process. "I was twenty-one once," he said. "I had dreams."
"That'll be fifteen hundred won," Junho said.
"You know what I wanted to be?" The man leaned on the counter. Up close he smelled like soju and barbecue. Not unpleasant exactly, just very present. "A musician. I wanted to play guitar."
"Fifteen hundred won," Junho said.
"Do you have dreams?"
Junho looked at him. The man looked back with the earnest intensity of someone who had genuinely forgotten they were supposed to be paying for something.
"I had a scholarship," Junho said. "That's sort of like a dream."
The man considered this for a long moment. Then he put two thousand won on the counter, took his coffee, and walked back out into the rain. The door sensor chimed behind him.
Junho put the change in the take-a-penny dish. He picked up his kimbap. He kept eating.
His name was Cha Junho. Twenty-one years old. Second year at Hanyang University on a partial scholarship, which meant he needed the rest. Hence the night shift. Hence the three hours of sleep he averaged on weekdays, which his body had at this point just decided was its normal setting.
His parents were alive and working. His father drove a delivery truck. His mother did bookkeeping for a small construction company. They were not bad people. They were tired people, which was a different thing, and they had their own version of that exhaustion that didn't leave much room for his. He had stopped putting his problems in that room at around age sixteen. It was fine. You made it fine.
He had played baseball through middle school and most of high school. Pitcher. He'd been good — not good enough for the programs that mattered, but good enough that his coach had seemed genuinely disappointed when the arm injury ended things second year of university. Junho had been less disappointed than expected. Maybe that said something too.
He had one friend. Kim Jiwoo, from high school, who texted him memes at two in the morning without any apparent understanding of the concept of time zones, despite living in the same city. Junho always responded eventually. It was the kind of friendship that did not require maintenance and therefore survived.
That was about it. That was the whole inventory.
Not depressing, exactly. Just… compact. His life was compact. He'd gotten used to compact.
4:55 AM. The stock was done. The floor was swept. He'd wiped down the coffee machine and refilled the napkin dispensers and reorganized the snack display that customers kept wrecking, and now there was nothing left to do except exist for the next two hours and four minutes until the morning shift arrived.
He sat behind the counter and pulled out his lecture notes. Structural engineering. Not because he found it riveting but because the exam was in four days and he could not afford to fail it in the literal financial sense, not just the abstract academic one.
The rain picked up outside. The fluorescent light in aisle three flickered twice and settled.
Junho read the same paragraph three times without absorbing any of it. He put the notes down. He looked at the rain.
He was tired in a way that sleep didn't fully fix anymore. He wasn't sure when that had started. It was just background noise now — a low hum underneath everything, the kind of tired that came from doing the right things for so long that you'd stopped remembering what you were doing them toward.
His head was heavy. He propped his chin on his hand.
The refrigerators hummed. The rain hit the glass. The light in aisle three flickered once more and went still.
Junho closed his eyes. Just for a minute. Just to rest them.
He opened them and the ceiling was wrong.
It took him four full seconds to understand that he was not at work.
The fluorescent lights were gone. The counter was gone. The refrigerators and the rain and the structural engineering notes were all gone. He was lying on his back on something that felt like stone and staring up at a sky the color of dried rust, streaked through with clouds the shade of a bruise, and it was not raining here but the air smelled like it had been, a long time ago.
He sat up slowly.
He was in a wasteland.
That was the only word for it. In every direction, cracked grey earth stretched out flat and featureless, broken up by clusters of jagged rock formations that jutted up like broken teeth. No grass. No water. No buildings. No road. The light was dim and directionless, like the sun was behind something, and the silence was the kind of silence that made you aware of your own heartbeat.
Junho sat very still and looked at it.
"Okay," he said, to no one.
His voice came out steadier than he felt. He was still in his convenience store uniform — black pants, white shirt with the GS25 logo on the chest, the cheap work shoes that gave him blisters on long shifts. His phone was in his pocket. He took it out. No signal. No bars. The time read 4:57 AM and then the screen went black and when he pressed the button again it did not come back on.
He put the phone away.
He looked at the sky again. Rust and bruise. No sun. No moon. Something that might have been a star in the far distance, or might have been something else entirely.
He thought: I'm dreaming.
He thought: this is a very detailed dream.
He thought: my back hurts in a way that dreams don't usually include.
That was when the window appeared.
[ SYSTEM NOTIFICATION ]
TUTORIAL INITIALIZED
Welcome, Summoned. You have been selected for transport to a new world. Before entry, all Summoned must complete the Tutorial.
OBJECTIVE: Survive. Reach Level 20. EXIT CONDITION: Defeat the Tutorial Boss.
Good luck.
[ TUTORIAL IN PROGRESS ]
Junho read it three times.
It floated about a meter in front of his face, slightly translucent, glowing faintly purple at the edges. Real enough to reach out and touch, though when he did his fingers went through it like it wasn't there. The text stayed perfectly still even when he moved his head.
He read it a fourth time.
Selected for transport to a new world. Tutorial. Level 20. Tutorial Boss.
"All right," he said slowly. "So this is real."
The window didn't respond. It just floated there, patient and glowing and completely indifferent to the fact that he had been awake for over twenty hours, that he was wearing a GS25 uniform, that he had an engineering exam in four days and absolutely no business being in a rust-colored wasteland.
He stood up. His legs were steady, which surprised him a little. His heart was going faster than normal but his hands were still. That was interesting. He'd always been decent in actual emergencies — it was the anticipation that got him, the space before something happened. Once it was happening, his brain seemed to just… shift gears.
He looked around again. Cracked earth. Rock formations. Empty sky.
No monsters visible yet. No boss. No other people.
He looked back at the system window. It had minimized itself into a small glowing icon at the edge of his vision, like a notification he hadn't dismissed. He focused on it and it expanded again. Same text. Same cheerful indifference.
"Reach Level 20," he read out loud. "Defeat the Tutorial Boss."
Somewhere to his left, behind one of the rock formations, something moved.
Junho heard it — the scrape of something on stone, a weight shifting, a sound that was not wind. His eyes went there immediately. His body was already half-turned. The baseball instinct kicking in, nine years of tracking fast movement, knowing where to look before you knew why.
Nothing visible yet.
He crouched, slowly, and picked up a rock from the ground. It fit in his hand. Sharp edge on one side. Decent weight. Not a weapon, exactly, but closer to one than nothing.
The scraping sound again. Closer.
Something came around the edge of the rock formation.
It was roughly the size of a large dog. That was where the similarity ended. It moved on four limbs but they bent at angles that didn't match anything Junho had seen before, joints in the wrong places, the gait lurching and wrong in a way that made his eyes want to slide off it. Its skin was grey like the earth. Its head was too wide. It had too many teeth.
It saw him.
It stopped.
They looked at each other for one long second.
Then it charged.
Junho threw the rock.
Pitcher's release. The muscle memory was so deep it bypassed thinking entirely — weight shift, rotation, snap of the wrist, the rock leaving his hand at the exact moment the mechanics said it should. Except it was a rock. And the thing coming at him was not a batter.
It hit the creature square in the wide, wrong head.
The thing stumbled. Lost a step. Shook its head like it was clearing water from its ears.
Junho was already moving. He grabbed another rock with his left hand, a jagged piece of stone with his right, and when the creature lunged again he was not where it expected him to be — he'd stepped left, the same way he used to step off the mound, the movement so familiar his body just did it.
He brought the stone down on the back of its skull. Hard. Then again.
The creature went still.
Junho stepped back. He was breathing harder than he'd like. His hands were shaking slightly — adrenaline, not fear, though the distinction felt thin right now. He looked down at the thing on the ground. It was already dissolving, edges going hazy, particles of grey drifting upward and vanishing.
A new window appeared.
[ COMBAT RESULT ]
Grunt Hound defeated. EXP gained: 45
LEVEL UP! Cha Junho → Level 2
[ STAT INCREASE APPLIED ]
He stared at it.
Level 2.
He looked at the spot where the creature had been. Just cracked earth now. Like it had never existed.
He looked at his hands. Still shaking slightly. He breathed out through his nose, slow and deliberate, the way he used to do between pitches when the game was close.
"Okay," he said again, quieter this time.
Somewhere in the rocks, something else moved. And then something further away. Multiple somethings, shifting in the dark spaces between the formations, drawn by noise or heat or whatever these things used to find prey.
Junho picked up another rock.
He had eighteen levels to go.
— End of Chapter 1 —