Chapter 0
I lost everything.
I lost my money, my honor, and my family.
How on earth did things end up like this?
I had everything and was on the fast track to success...!
...I was a woodworker who had begun making a name for myself locally.
From furniture like desks and chairs to beautiful works of art. If it was made of wood, I was confident I could make anything.
A one-of-a-kind technique no one could easily imitate.
A work pace no one could match.
I wasn't quite a master craftsman, but my finished work was still respectable.
My phone was constantly buzzing with commission requests, and advertisers often reached out to me.
A woodcarving time-lapse I'd uploaded out of boredom surpassed a million views, and my YouTube channel grew enormously.
A mutant born into an utterly ordinary family. That's what people called me.
Na Ji-hoon, the woodworking genius.
It was a title acknowledged by everyone—including me—at the age of just twenty-three.
Yeah.
...That was definitely what I was called—until the world changed drastically.
But let's think about it.
What if.
Just what if.
What if a door to another world opened, and all sorts of valuables came pouring through?
Products with designs and functionality superior to human-made ones. Would my work still sell then?
And would the time-lapses I'd poured dozens of hours into still be fascinating?
From what I'd experienced firsthand,
it was 'absolutely not.'
***
"All the pigs are dead!?"
At some point, strange news began to circulate.
Things utterly impossible to comprehend by ordinary common sense.
Like a family-run pig farm being completely wiped out overnight.
Or that an elderly couple nearby had been murdered overnight and found as clean white skeletons.
But the hardest thing to accept of all was...
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Title: No beating around the bush—I brought you the Pyeongjin double-kill culprit. (Image attached)
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[Photo]
Can you see it?
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Comments
(11.522) : Yeah, I can see it. It's your mom after her heart burst and she got all skinny.
ㄴ(OP) : You fucking bastard, wanna meet?
ㄴ(OP) : Wanna meet? You fucking bitch?
ㄴ(114.53) : LMAOOOOO
ㄴ(ㅇㅇ) : Look at that instant rage, lmao.
ㄴ(63.334) : Dumbass, lol.
'Heh-heh, this bastard made the double-kill joke first, too.'
Well, even setting the joke aside, it was hardly a photo the poster could complain about being mocked for.
The photo showed a green figure against a backdrop that looked like an abandoned rural school.
A long, protruding nose and ears that jutted sharply out to either side.
It was about the size of a young child.
And crude scraps of leather wrapped around its body, along with the dagger in its hand.
No matter how you looked at it, it was a goblin straight out of fantasy.
Who could possibly believe that a goblin was standing right there in an abandoned school in the Korean countryside?
The poster later released a short video filmed from a distance, claiming to have been wronged,
but it was soon deleted along with the photo, and the poster was punished for spreading fake news.
The area around Pyeongjin Village, the source of the rumors, was closed off, supposedly so that a specialist investigative team could be sent in to find the culprit.
But this measure was bizarrely swift and excessive. Public opinion condemning the government clashed with that defending it, escalating into a political battle.
Korea's 'Monster Incident,' or 'Goblin Incident,' seemed to be fading from memory just like that.
[Breaking News, 'Panama Cryptid' Confirmed Real. Panama Government Officially Acknowledges It.]
However, the cover-up did not last long.
A Central American country officially acknowledged the existence of 'monsters' and appealed to the international community for help.
The world's attention focused on it again, and Korea's Pyeongjin Incident was consequently brought back under scrutiny.
The monsters had appeared on Isla Jicarón and Coiba, the island directly to its north,
and both islands were tourist destinations located in southwestern Panama.
They were densely forested places where rumors like those surrounding Korea's Pyeongjin Incident constantly sprang up, and tourism had gradually increased as a result.
But then, at some point, people really did begin disappearing one after another,
and although the Panamanian government belatedly dispatched police, they too disappeared without a trace amid a volley of gunshots.
This announcement from the Panamanian government spread far and wide.
The UN immediately assembled an investigative team and rushed it to Coiba. There, they encountered a goblin tribe numbering several hundred that had made its nest in an abandoned prison.
Fortunately, the investigative team suffered only minor casualties, because numerous special agents with superhuman abilities accompanied it.
The agents slaughtered the goblin tribe with an absurdly overwhelming display of force. The scene was broadcast live, as if to flaunt their power.
'Gates,' 'Monsters,' and 'Hunters.'
It was the spectacular debut of the bastards who would plunge my life into the abyss.