I was Mistaken for a Noble Hunter – Chapter 54

Author: Cireng

Assault (15)

The gate is designated by the National Crystal Research Institute.

When Kang Ian entered it, a mission appeared before him.

Ding!

[A mission has been assigned.]

[Mission: You have come to Tibelle Village for volunteer work. Help the villagers and receive their sincere gratitude.]

[Grant the requests of 100 villagers. However, if you do not act sincerely, you will not receive their gratitude.]

[Time Limit: One week.]

[Requests Granted So Far: 0.]

The moment the message appeared, the scenery before his eyes changed.

Before he knew it, Kang Ian was standing in the middle of a medieval-style village.

A village woman approached him and spoke.

“Welcome. You’re the adventurer who came to help our village, right?”

“Uh…”

“Please come this way. There are so many people who need you.”

Kang Ian was confused.

The woman who had just spoken to him was a real person.

The sights around him, the smells, the humidity, the temperature…

Everything told him it was real.

‘Living people appearing in a mission?’

Were these really living people?

Then again, monsters also appeared inside gates.

If monsters could appear, maybe people appearing wasn’t strange either…

Still, he couldn’t help feeling bewildered.

“Aren’t you coming?”

“…I’ll go.”

However, Kang Ian quickly adapted.

Wasn’t this a world where gates and monsters existed?

Something like this could happen, too.

Hunters who had experienced supernatural phenomena were actually quicker than most to accept things outside common sense.

And Kang Ian went even further.

Didn’t he literally have a game job in reality?

People appearing in a mission inside a gate? Sure, why not!

“First, could you grant one request of mine?”

“What is it?”

“Please offer a prayer for this water.”

The woman pointed to a large container filled with water.

Kang Ian tilted his head.

“A prayer?”

“Yes. It’s water we will distribute to the sick.”

“My prayers don’t possess miraculous healing powers.”

“That’s okay. I believe sincere prayers hold power. Just put your sincerity into it.”

That didn’t seem very difficult.

Kang Ian clasped his hands and closed his eyes.

‘May healing power dwell within this water.’

He thought that silently.

Then he opened his eyes again.

But the woman shook her head.

“Please put your sincerity into it. I’m asking you.”

“?”

What?

He had definitely done it sincerely.

However, the woman remained firm.

Even when he checked the mission window, it didn’t say the request had succeeded.

Kang Ian thought about it carefully.

Then he realized something.

‘Do I need to eliminate all stray thoughts?’

Even while praying earlier, Kang Ian had inevitably been thinking about things like what the reward for completing the mission would be, or what he would do afterward.

Perhaps that was why she asked him again to be sincere.

So Kang Ian closed his eyes once more and prayed.

‘She said this will be used for sick people.’

May they recover safely.

May this prayer truly help them.

Kang Ian sincerely wished for it.

Even if the people inside this gate weren’t real, it didn’t matter.

After awakening, he had done a lot of volunteer work and met many people struggling in life.

Remembering the emotions he felt back then made it easy to focus.

Sincerely.

He wished for them to recover.

After a brief prayer, Kang Ian opened his eyes.

Ding!

[You have fulfilled the request of Village Woman #1.]

[Requests Granted So Far: 1]

A message appeared, and the woman bowed her head deeply.

“Thank you very much. This prayer will surely reach the patients.”

With a bright smile, she lifted the container of water and left.

“Hmm… So that’s how it works.”

Kang Ian muttered quietly.

He roughly understood it now.

At that moment, a middle-aged man who looked like a farmer approached him.

“Hey there, adventurer. I’m short on hands to plow the fields. Could you help? The crops need someone’s sincere care to grow well.”

This time it was a farming request.

Kang Ian thought he had drawn a very annoying type of gate mission.

He had to go around granting 100 people’s requests like this.

‘Well… it’s not like I can’t do it if I have to…’

But there was a really important problem.

Even though he had granted the request, his Nobility stat hadn’t increased at all.

At this rate, it would be better to leave and just do volunteer work outside.

After all, true sincerity required clear rewards, didn’t it?

‘Now I see why that B-rank hunter who came here before gave up.’

Entering the same gate didn’t guarantee the same mission, but you usually received something similar.

The hunter who entered before probably got a mission of this nature, too.

Hunter ranks were determined by combat ability.

And in this dungeon, combat ability was useless.

In fact, if the personality matched well, even an F-rank hunter might clear it more easily.

For a mission this tedious and tricky, it didn’t matter if you were B-rank or anything else.

‘If it were exactly the same mission as mine, they probably struggled just to complete one request.’

Could ordinary hunters truly immerse themselves sincerely in helping these people and offering prayers?

They would have failed for sure.

And they’d probably be too embarrassed to even say why the mission failed.

Kang Ian quietly pulled a scroll out of his subspace and tore it.

Normally he might have saved it and tried to clear it himself, but it would waste too much time.

He might even run out of time trying to fulfill all 100 requests.

Better to finish quickly.

Ding!

[Gate Mission Ignore Scroll has been used.]

[The mission of this gate will be treated as successfully completed.]

The scenery of the surrounding village flickered and disappeared like a mirage.

Kang Ian now stood on a green meadow.

Something dropped onto his hand with a light thud.

One was a crystal stone of fairly high purity.

That was the standard reward for clearing a gate.

The other was a black stone, about half the size of the crystal stone.

‘What’s this?’

Clearing mission-type gates could randomly grant various rewards.

Sometimes they were hunter-exclusive items, sometimes skill books.

‘It looks crude… but maybe it’s some kind of item?’

Kang Ian tilted his head.

At that moment.

<Knight!>

A thunderous voice echoed in his head.

“…Sir Tezeros?”

It was the voice of Tezeros, the Captain of the Knights of Valhalla… a voice he had heard several times before.

“You’re telling me to destroy this?”

<Yes. If that leaves this place and enters your world, it will be disastrous. It is the origin and essence of demons. If it goes outside, it will corrupt your world. It must be destroyed!>

Tezeros sounded serious.

His voice was always majestic and powerful, but now it was even more forceful than usual.

If he was saying it like that, it must really be a serious problem.

“I understand.”

Kang Ian nodded and tightened his grip on the stone.

Crack

With a crunching sound, the stone shattered into pieces.

Ding!

[You have destroyed the Source of Evil.]

[Evil Souls +200]

[Nobility +200]

“????”

Seeing the message that followed, Kang Ian’s eyes widened.

‘I get 200 Evil Souls and 200 Nobility just for breaking a stone?’

“Sir Tezeros.”

Kang Ian hurriedly called out, afraid the voice might disappear.

“Where can I find more Sources of Evil?”

<Hoho. It seems you intend to actively protect your world as well. A commendable attitude!>

“……”

…No.

Actually… it’s just because it looks like an easy way to farm Evil Souls and Nobility.

But Kang Ian couldn’t say that.

If Tezeros had been standing in front of him, he might have noticed Kang Ian’s awkward expression.

Fortunately, they were speaking only through voice.

<However, I do not know where the Sources of Evil are. I only know that they are carefully hidden. You will have to find them yourself.>

“I see…”

Kang Ian clicked his tongue slightly in disappointment.

With that, Tezeros’s voice disappeared.

Apparently he had finished what he needed to say.

Kang Ian walked toward the swirling gate.

Since it had been cleared, it would soon disappear.

He needed to leave before that happened.

‘Did it take about ten minutes?’

Or maybe not even that long.

Hard to tell.

***

Since childhood, Lee Naeun had often been called a genius.

Not only did she earn her PhD in her late twenties, she also became a lead researcher in crystal stone research.

Crystal stone research had once been a highly celebrated field.

A new material that would define the future.

A new energy source!

But as researchers around the world began studying crystal stones, the research quickly reached its limits.

Crystal stones turned out to be less remarkable than expected.

They were simply stones that contained powerful energy.

They were strong enough to change the paradigm of modern industry, but there wasn’t much left to research about them.

So Lee Naeun slightly changed direction.

‘Crystal stones come from gates. Could there be something even more special inside those gates?’

Gates were still an unknown phenomenon.

She decided to research them.

Inside gates flowed special energy and wavelengths not found on Earth.

After long research, she discovered that.

And purely by coincidence, Lee Naeun managed to develop a technology capable of detecting a specific wavelength coming from gates.

Even she didn’t know how it worked.

It just happened.

Science was often the result of coincidence.

She wanted to learn more about the wavelength she had discovered.

So she worked on it for a long time and eventually created a device capable of detecting only that wavelength.

Using it, she began investigating gates all over the country.

The problem was that the device never reacted.

It was supposed to detect special wavelengths from inside gates, but it remained completely inactive.

Years of research were on the verge of going to waste.

Then, purely by chance, she found a gate that triggered the device.

It was the C-rank gate right in front of her.

Since she was a talented researcher with good achievements, several companies sponsored her.

Using funds from those companies, she requested a gate raid.

What on earth inside that gate had triggered her device?

She even offered a rare treasure… the Dungeon Escape Scroll, for the request.

“…Nothing came out? Other than the crystal stone?”

“Yes.”

“…Ha.”

For a moment, she had been stunned by Kang Ian’s incredibly fast clear speed.

But then she rushed over and asked what he had obtained inside.

The only thing Kang Ian could give her was the crystal stone.

After all, he had already destroyed the Source of Evil.

“So… my research just failed after all…”

Lee Naeun sighed, looking dejected.

Watching her, Kang Ian tilted his head.

Even the crystal stone alone was quite valuable, yet she showed no sign of happiness.

He asked cautiously.

“Is there a particular reason you’re so disappointed?”

“Sigh… Well…”

Lee Naeun hesitated, then sighed again and calmly explained.

Normally it was confidential, and she would have kept her mouth shut, but at this point, everything had already collapsed.

She felt she had to speak just to shake off the sense of loss that had just hit her.

She explained the research she had been doing and what it meant.

Kang Ian listened quietly.

After hearing everything, he was deeply shocked inside.

‘Wait… then the device this researcher invented… is it detecting the Source of Evil?’

It had to be.

Inside that gate, the only things he obtained were the crystal stone and the Source of Evil.

Lee Naeun’s device had almost certainly been detecting the Source of Evil.

“Sigh… But I guess my research really failed. I worked on it for years, and it was all for nothing.”

“That’s not true!”

“?”

Kang Ian shook his head.

“There’s no such thing as research that’s completely wasted! They say success comes from countless failures. So please don’t feel too discouraged.”

He couldn’t tell her the truth about the Source of Evil, so he hid it.

But her research hadn’t failed.

At least Kang Ian knew that.

The Source of Evil must not leave the gate.

If he told her the truth, she would likely continue her research.

In that case, it was better to hide it.

But…

He also didn’t want to see her so discouraged.

“……”

Lee Naeun stared blankly at Kang Ian.

She could tell this wasn’t just empty words meant to comfort her.

His sincerity was clearly conveyed.

“…Now I understand why the media talks about Hunter Kang Ian so much.”

Thinking Kang Ian was comforting her, Lee Naeun smiled softly.

“Do you really think my research wasn’t a failure?”

“Of course!”

“Then I’ll give you this as a gift, Hunter Kang Ian.”

Lee Naeun handed him a small mechanical device from her pocket.

“It’s the wavelength detector I made. Since the research failed, I was planning to discard it, but I’ll give it to you as a gift since you acknowledged my research. It’s basically just junk now, but please don’t throw it away.”

She shrugged.

“I-Is it really okay for me to take this?”

“Of course. I can’t continue this research anyway. The companies sponsoring me constantly pressure me with projects… This was just my final personal curiosity and stubbornness.”

Lee Naeun spoke as if she felt relieved.

She extended her hand again.

“Please take it.”

“Alright.”

Kang Ian accepted it politely with both hands.

His hands were even trembling.

A wavelength detector.

‘So… this can find the Sources of Evil?’

He would have to test it.

But if it really worked, this would be a legendary treasure.