Chapter 1: The Thirteenth Hour

Chapter 1

A dull ache pulsed through my head.

Han Tae-hyun sighed, rummaging through the medicine box tucked away in the corner of his desk. He found a headache pill amidst the thin, colorful boxes, plucked one out, and tossed it into his parched mouth, then sought water to wash it down. However, the only liquid in sight was a cup of intensely brewed coffee.

Reluctantly, he swallowed the now-cold coffee along with the pill. Although medication rarely took full effect on him, it was still better than nothing.

Awaiting the medicine’s onset, he massaged his eyelids with his fingers. The pressure in his eyes, intensified by the headache, made them ache as if they might pop from their sockets.

Sighing once more, he pulled his hand away from his eyes and, with a hollow gaze, checked the clock displayed in the bottom right corner of the monitor screen.

[11:56 PM]

Once again, leaving before midnight was clearly out of the question. Would he even be able to leave before 2 AM? Even if he did, going home was impossible.

His home was an hour away from the office, and his start time was 9 AM. Moreover, tomorrow he needed to be in by 8:30 AM to finalize preparations for the morning briefing. Of course, the briefing itself was his team leader’s responsibility, not his, but it was his job to ensure everything was perfectly ready before the meeting began.

Han Tae-hyun picked up his coffee cup again. The bottom was already showing.

He had lost count of how many cups he’d had today. It felt as though he was drinking twice as much coffee as water. Perhaps all the moisture in his body had already transformed into coffee.

A hollow laugh escaped him at the absurd thought, and he rose from his seat. A sudden wave of dizziness washed over him. It seemed to be a consequence of his sleep deprivation.

He staggered towards the pantry. Casually washing a cup, he brewed a fresh pot of coffee. Carrying the cup of steaming coffee, he left the pantry.

He returned to his desk, the only beacon of light in the dim, deserted office.

He took a sip of the hot coffee. As he set the cup down on the desk, a lukewarm trickle ran down his philtrum. He instinctively brushed his finger across his philtrum. It was a nosebleed.

“Tsk…”

He furrowed his brow, pulled out some tissues, and pressed them beneath his nose. He leaned his head against the chair’s headrest and waited for a moment, but the nosebleed showed no signs of stopping. The moment he briefly removed the tissues, blood gushed forth as if from a partially open faucet.

To his damnation, blood dripped onto his white dress shirt.

“Ah!”

He let out an exasperated cry, quickly grabbing more tissues to staunch the flow. In the process, a few drops of blood from his hand splattered onto the documents he had printed for tomorrow’s briefing.

“Damn it!”

‘Nothing was going right.’

He cursed, then paused as he was about to wipe the blood from the paper. First, he needed to deal with this nosebleed. He immediately rose and headed to the restroom.

He discarded the blood-soaked tissues into the trash can, then wiped his hands, nose, and the area around his mouth. When he tried to stop the bleeding again, so much blood flowed that it even trickled down the back of his throat. The metallic, rusty taste of blood made his face contort involuntarily.

‘He really wasn’t feeling well.’

He suddenly looked up and saw his reflection in the mirror. Despite his height, nearly 190 centimeters, he had lost so much weight that his physique seemed to vanish. His dress shirts, which had fit perfectly when he first started, now hung loosely. His trousers would simply slide down without a belt.

This was due to the chronic stomach ailment that had long robbed him of his appetite, preventing him from eating properly. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d weighed himself. His eyes were sunken, and his complexion was sallow. He looked like a man gravely ill. For a time, he simply stared at his reflection in the mirror, locked in a silent gaze.

During that time, his nosebleed eventually stopped. Discarding the soiled tissues and wiping away the dried blood from his face, he began to walk back to his desk. Then, abruptly, he felt something snap inside his head. Even with his eyes open, his vision darkened, and his mind began to drift away.

The moment he felt his body tilt, there was a thud.

Han Tae-hyun realized he had collapsed.

His heart thudded in his head, *thump, thump*, and his own breathing seemed unusually loud. A moment later, his vision, which had been shrouded in black, briefly returned. His face was pressed against the carpeted floor of the office.

It seemed he had disturbed the printed documents when he fell, for white papers covered in black text were scattered wildly across the floor. The mere thought of picking them up and sorting them again made him feel faint.

He tried to get up. Though his mind urged him to rise, he couldn’t. He succumbed to sleep, like a slowly dying ember.

He was overwhelmingly sleepy.

His vision went dark once more.

His consciousness faded into a haze, like a slowly dying ember.

****

Someone shook Han Tae-hyun’s body. That action pulled his consciousness to the surface.

‘Just let me sleep a little longer.’

He pleaded internally. Regrettably, the other person, oblivious to his inner plea, shook him even more violently.

“…! …sir!”

The urgent voice calling Han Tae-hyun sounded somewhat terrified.

Only then did Han Tae-hyun recall collapsing during his overtime work. The one waking him was probably Assistant Manager Lim from the neighboring department, who always arrived at the office first.

‘Lim, you’re diligent as ever today.’

He felt a pang of guilt for having startled them so much. More importantly, ever since he regained consciousness, the back of his head had been throbbing as if it would split open. This was a physical pain, distinct from his headache.

Had he hit his head when he fell? He had no recollection of it.

It wasn’t just his head that hurt. His entire body ached as if he’d been thoroughly beaten; there wasn’t a single spot that didn’t throb. He was so weak that he couldn’t even twitch a finger. The air reeked of a sickening metallic scent, as if rusted iron had been melted down and turned into a diffuser. It was accompanied by a foul, gamey odor, one that usually emanated from beasts. Gasping for air, he opened his mouth. As he inhaled, dirt entered his mouth, causing him to choke.

“Cough, cough!”

“Gah! Master, are you awake?!”

His head rang with the cough. But the title he was being called by felt strange.

“Are you alright? Master, are you badly hurt?”

‘Master?’

Han Tae-hyun’s eyes snapped open. The first thing to enter his blurry vision was a corpse with its forehead caved in above the eyebrow. One eyeball had popped out, starkly revealing the red flesh within the orbital bone.

“Gah—!”

He gasped in horror and bolted upright, only to accidentally ram his face into someone standing before him.

“Ah!”

“Ugh!”

The other person clutched their forehead, while Han Tae-hyun grabbed his now-pounding nose, falling back flat onto the ground. It hurt so much he wondered if it was broken.

“M-Master! Are you alright? Oh my god, I’m so sorry! I’m truly sorry!”

The boy said, his voice laced with panic.

Han Tae-hyun was utterly dumbfounded. Enduring the pain, he looked at the boy before him. The boy wore a turban on his head and had his face obscured by a cheap black mask. Through the eyeholes, his pupils gleamed a vivid green. Parts of his face, not fully concealed by the mask, were scarred by burns, the flesh having melted away.

‘Who is this kid?’

He appeared to be a mere child, perhaps twelve or thirteen years old.

Han Tae-hyun spun his head around, taking in his surroundings. He was disoriented.

‘What in the world is happening?’

His heart hammered wildly from shock, and his breathing grew ragged.

‘I was just in the office a moment ago, what is this place?’

The more he surveyed his surroundings, the deeper his confusion grew. There appeared to be at least twenty corpses littered around him. One even lay right by his head. He had, in fact, been lying with his head on that very corpse’s belly just moments before. At his feet, a man in armor lay dead, his back torn open, eyes wide and staring.

And that wasn’t all.

Nearby, the corpse of a wolf-like monster lay motionless, an axe embedded in its head, its tongue lolling out. The creature’s name naturally surfaced in his mind.

‘Asteria’s Wolf.’

It was a magical beast with ash-gray fur, four red eyes, and three horns.

As he recalled the magical beast’s name, other memories also began to resurface. Simultaneously, he realized:

‘I’m dead.’

That ‘Han Tae-hyun’ had died. Of overwork, no less. Given the snapping sensation in his head, it might have been a cerebral hemorrhage. In any case, it was utterly absurd.

‘I was supposed to quit in two weeks.’

And a sense of injustice washed over him.

‘What about all the assets I accumulated? What’s going to happen to them?’

‘What’s going to happen? They’re all gone. I’m ruined.’

Han Tae-hyun exhaled a shaky breath and ran a hand over his face. When he swept his hair back, an unknown sticky fluid clung to his fingers. It might have been the beast’s saliva. He grimaced, rubbing his palm against his thigh to wipe it off.

“What in the world happened?”

He mumbled, almost a groan, and the boy replied:

“A magical beast rammed into the carriage you were standing on, Master! You didn’t see it coming and fell right off. It could have been really terrible! If it weren’t for the Deputy Captain of the Camburn Mercenaries, you might have been torn apart by the beast.”

The boy, who had been speaking loudly in his excitement, trailed off somberly at the end. The boy’s gaze fell upon the corpse at Han Tae-hyun’s feet. That corpse was the Deputy Captain of the Camburn Mercenaries.

That wasn’t what he truly wanted to know, but it no longer mattered. His confusion was gradually subsiding thanks to the memories flooding his mind.

He took a deep breath, puffed out both cheeks, and exhaled slowly. He now clearly remembered who ‘he’ was.

Hay Styles, thirty years old.

A mercenary from the Kingdom of Chea Fell on this land, the Eastern Continent, he was a Spirit User who wandered from country to country.

‘A mercenary. Right, I was working.’

Turning his head, he saw the carriage the boy had mentioned, lying half-destroyed and overturned a short distance away. Before losing consciousness, he had been standing atop that carriage, using spirit magic to fight against the attacking magical beasts. His last memory was the moment he had just riddled a wolf with dozens of holes using .

‘Master, behind you!’

Hearing the boy’s urgent cry, he instinctively deployed behind him, but the magical beast had still rammed straight into the carriage. The pain in his head was probably from being thrown off and hitting the ground. It was a miracle he hadn’t died. He truly almost had.

“You saved me, then.”

Hay offered a smile he didn’t quite feel and patted the boy’s shoulder. The praised boy looked down, fidgeting nervously, and scratched at his neck.

“I-It was nothing.”

The boy’s name was Renki. He was twelve years old. He was a young s*ave, bought three months ago from the s*ave market in the city of Mejitun.

Hay offered a wry smile and withdrew his hand.

‘A s*ave.’

Suddenly, the very concept felt profoundly uncomfortable and alien. On the Eastern Continent, ‘slaves’ were a common sight, not at all unusual. Yet, this discomfort likely stemmed from Han Tae-hyun’s memories and consciousness.

‘Anyway, did I hit my head and kiss the grim reaper or something? Why are memories of my past life suddenly surfacing?’

To call them ‘past life memories’ felt strange, as collapsing from overwork felt as vivid as if it had just happened. Moreover, he still existed as ‘Han Tae-hyun,’ while ‘Hay Styles” consciousness seemed to have receded. No, it might be more accurate to say that the two consciousnesses had merged. After all, ‘Han Tae-hyun,’ with his weak stomach for such things, wouldn’t possibly be calm after witnessing a scene drenched in blood. At the very least, he would have fainted or fallen into a panic. Yet, now he was merely a little surprised, otherwise completely unfazed.

“Master?”

Perhaps because he had been staring blankly, Renki called out, sounding puzzled. Even though he was wearing gloves, he kept rubbing his palms against his thighs. He seemed anxious. His mind was a jumble of thoughts due to the sudden influx of past life memories, but to reassure the boy, Hay smiled. He was just a kid, after all.

“How about you? Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine. Thanks to hiding in the trench you made, Master. Oh, and this.”

Renki handed over a staff lying on the ground. It was Hay’s staff, made of white oak wood imbued with the power of spirits. He took the staff and examined Renki’s body. Aside from being covered in dust, he seemed perfectly alright.

“Right, you don’t seem to be hurt anywhere.”

“No, I’m truly fine.”

Renki said with a bright smile. To be able to smile amidst all this, he must have quite a strong heart, Hay thought.

“Styles.”

Just then, a mercenary approached. He was a man from the Camburn Mercenary Guild, tasked with escorting the merchant caravan on this journey, which had begun in Mejitun. Except for Hay, who operated solo, everyone else here belonged to either the caravan or the mercenary guild.

“I was worried that our valuable Spirit User might have kicked the bucket, but it’s a relief to see you alive, isn’t it?”

“It’s a relief you’re safe as well.”

As the mercenary always spoke with a sarcastic tone, Hay replied in a familiar, unperturbed voice.

The mercenary snorted and said, “The Captain and the caravan leader are looking for you. Go quickly. Can I borrow that s*ave kid for a bit? We’re short-handed and could use some help clearing away the corpses.”

As the mercenary gestured towards Renki with his chin, Renki stared intently at Hay.