After spending the rest of the day tending to the Mindbloom Herb, Joo-Hee still couldn't shake off the weight of her confrontation with the chairman.
Her mind remained disheveled, thoughts looping endlessly until she finally forced herself to sleep.
After all, the next day was important—it would be her first solo dungeon raid.
Morning arrived swiftly, sunlight piercing her room as the alarm blared. Joo-Hee groaned, her body still aching with fatigue, both mental and emotional.
She sluggishly sat up and cast [Healing Touch] over her entire body, sighing in relief as the magic alleviated some of the lingering exhaustion.
"Whew… I seriously want some rest," she muttered to herself. "Yesterday really took a toll on me. Let's just hope that Go Gunhee reconsiders my proposal. And please—let today's raid go smoothly… I don't think I can handle any more stress."
...
After almost two hours of preparation and commuting, she finally arrived at the entrance of the dungeon.
Her eyes scanned the familiar place—the same dungeon she had first entered not long ago. A massive three-meter-tall gate, glowing with a deep blue hue, stood before her.
She paused and stared at the gate, her breath catching slightly.
"This… It's different from last time…"
The mana that cloaked the gate flickered and danced wildly, twisting and curling like intertwining serpents.
"Incredible… it is more mesmerizing than before…"
But her moment of awe was cut short when a nearby Association agent called out to her.
"Ms. Lee Joo-Hee?"
She blinked and nodded quickly, snapping out of her trance. "Yes, I'm here."
'The body enhancements from the system evolution… It's beyond amazing. To think I can now discern the mana as thin threads of energy,' she thought.
"Now… let's see how well my current abilities fare in actual combat."
At the nearby reception, she handed over her Hunter ID to the agent. The agent scanned it, processing the details for her rental of the D-rank [Goblin's Hideout] dungeon.
As Joo-Hee waited for her dungeon entry to be processed, a group of beginner hunters and a few veterans huddled nearby, speaking in low, but not exactly subtle, voices.
"Hey, isn't that the reawakened healer? I saw her on TV," one muttered, squinting in her direction.
"Now that you mention it, yeah… that is her," another chimed in, eyebrows raised in recognition.
"I wonder how strong she is now…" someone else whispered, half-curious, half-skeptical.
But then, a man chuckled arrogantly, loud enough for her to hear, "Strong? Please. She's a healer, and a girl on top of that. Doesn't matter if she's A-rank now, she'll still be dead weight in any raid team."
Joo-Hee didn't flinch or look their way. She just let out a slow breath as the agent finally handed her back her Hunter ID.
"My gosh, that was plentiful," she thought with a groan.
"How many authorizations do they need just to let someone walk into a dungeon? Now I totally understand why the author of this world skipped over this part, it's boring as hell. Can't they just trust that I am who I say I am?"
She clapped her cheeks softly to focus herself, then rolled her shoulders.
"Well, what's done is done. Time to enjoy what's finally coming~"
With a grin, she stepped toward the gate, its blue hue glowing ominously and flickering with mana. She was just a few centimeters away from entering when suddenly—
Zzzzt—!
A jolt ran through her hand.
"What the…?!"
Thin, nearly invisible golden threads emerged from the gate, twining around her extended index finger.
Before she could even recoil, the threads surged forward, merging with her skin, her mana, her soul.
And then—
FLASH.
A flood of memories that weren't hers.
Goblins.
Their lives.
Their families.
Their joys, their grief, their wars, their home.
She saw an entire goblin civilization. They weren't the mere monsters humans hunted—they were socially inclined beings, fragmented from something greater. A shattered realm. A splintered world.
And then, right before she could see who or what broke their world—
SNAP.
The vision ended. Her breath hitched, and she staggered back, panting as sweat trickled down her temple.
"W-What in the world was that…? That was just like…" she clutched her chest.
"Just like the day I inherited Joo-Hee's memories…"
Just as Joo-Hee was trying to catch her breath from the strange vision, an entirely unfamiliar orange notification appeared before her eyes—one she had never seen before.
[The host has been identified as alone.]
[...]
[The dungeon will now reform.]
[Reconnecting the boundaries of the dungeon.]
[...]
More and more notifications flooded in, blinking, flashing, stacking over each other—dozens of them in mere seconds.
"What the hell is this?!!" Joo-Hee thought in a panic, eyes darting across the messages.
"I was just hoping for that restrictive quest since the system's gone radio silent lately, and now this?! And how do they expect me to read any of this?!"
She tried to swipe through them, but they kept coming like an overflowing dam.
Suddenly, the dungeon gate before her twitched. Its structure started mutating, and the once-fluid blue glow now turned unstable.
Lines of wild, pulsating mana lashed out like whips, growing more violent and chaotic by the second.
The gate was growing.
The fluctuation of mana intensified, so much that even the air around them began to ripple and hum.
Panic broke out behind her.
"Call the Association! NOW!" one agent shouted into his earpiece.
"..."
"Contact the nearby guilds—anyone with a C-rank and above!"
"It's gonna be a dungeon break!" a hunter screamed.
"What about the guys who went in before?! Will they be trapped inside?!"
"..."
The crowd was spiraling into chaos. Most of them were D and E-rank hunters, far too weak to handle an anomaly like this.
"Damn it, why today?! I just wanted to farm essence stones!"
"Screw this, I'm out!"
"Wait, is that gate... evolving?!"
But Joo-Hee wasn't listening. She couldn't.
A new series of glowing system prompts froze her blood:
[The Minor World has been found.]
[Boundary Reconnection will now temporarily commence.]
Her eyes widened. Her legs refused to move.
"What the hell are you making me walk into, Thoth...?!"
The blinking orange messages were suddenly overwritten by blindingly green circuit-like lines.
They raced across the ground, even the dungeon gate, engraving glowing symbols into the air itself as if rewriting reality.
The entire dungeon shimmered.
Then—
BOOM.
A massive surge of light erupted from the gate. Not an explosion—an implosion. Reality bent inward and pulled everything toward the center like a vortex.
And Joo-Hee, standing right at the threshold, was sucked in.
"Crap, this SYSTEM—can you at least make the warnings slower and readable—!!!"
FLASH.
She was gone as the last notification emerged.
[You have entered the minor world, Kinobgral]