Chapter 2: The Beginning of the End (1)

It was November 5, 1989 when the world faced its first catastrophe. Massive earthquakes were triggered by fault lines breaking all over the world, and continents were torn apart to become a single whole. Huge waves, even exceeding the 524-meter tsunami in Alaska in 1958, hit the surviving cities and killed millions of people. At the time, people thought it was the end.

The end of humanity!

But this was a misconception. Even after such a catastrophe, mankind was able to survive and build a new civilization. Nevertheless, these efforts once again showed everyone how helpless mankind was in the face of the inevitable.

When the calendars showed July 6, 2007, humanity was once again subjected to an onslaught of monsters. Monsters emerging from the portals threatened humanity once again. But humanity had a new hope this time. When the monsters appeared, people called 'Awakened' appeared in humanity. They were gifted with various powers.

The Awakened fought the monsters. Although they could not defeat them all, they managed to kill most of them and keep them away from their new civilization. They were a gift to humanity and were called 'Hunters'. After repelling the first wave of monsters, the hunters knew that this was only the beginning, because they discovered that the portals that opened were actually dungeons.

Dungeons were spatial voids into the world of monsters, and it was observed that unless the mana in the dungeons became unstable, the monsters would not come out. Following these developments, humans discovered mana. They discovered that it was this mysterious power that gave them the ability to transcend the limits of their bodies.

Mana allowed people to transcend their limits and gain abilities. But mana was not the only thing that came into the world, as new races arrived through portals opened thirty years after the second cataclysm.

Demons, vampires, dwarves, elves and mermaids, these five races were forced to flee their homes by the chaos that destroyed their planet. Chaos was a terrifying force that devastated the lands it touched, and when it entered the bodies of living beings, it drove them to madness and turned them into monsters.

The five races formed an alliance in the hope of finding the source of the power that was destroying their planet. When they learned about the humans, they believed they too could be a valuable ally. Unfortunately, this enthusiasm soon turned to disappointment.

Proud and nature-loving elves despised humans for their selfishness. Dwarves were intelligent and hardworking beings. That's why they saw human technology as inferior and worthless. Demons, mermaids and vampires despised them because they saw them as weaker than themselves.

Each race took its own territory on the supercontinent, preferring to live in isolation and away from the chaos-tainted region.

Humans worked harder because they lost potential allies before they could gain them. Later, technology developed and five cities were founded. Deshmar on the East Sea, Guista in the West, Zeroch in the North, Python in the South and in the center of these four cities was the capital city of Armageddon.

Humans established academies in the five cities they founded to train powerful hunters. Cube academy in Deshmar, Quar academy in Guista, Rackstone academy in Zeroch, Fortress academy in Python and Hoop academy in Armageddon.

November 17, 2761

As the sound of raindrops hitting the window filled the ears of the young man lying on the floor, he blinked his eyes open. As the cold air coming in through the window enveloped and numbed his whole body, his fuzzy mind became clear.

When he opened his eyes, he found himself in a one-room apartment. He rubbed his eyes and examined the unfamiliar surroundings.

''What am I... doing here?''

He groaned and held his head with a sudden pain in his head. Memories and emotions flooded his mind, making him dizzy and nauseous. He forced himself to his feet and ran to the bathroom. After vomiting, the young man stood up, feeling mentally exhausted.

After brushing his teeth and washing his face several times, he looked at himself in the mirror with tired eyes. When he looked at himself in the mirror, his eyes widened and he took a startled step backwards, slipped and fell to the ground. But he quickly stood up and looked at himself in the mirror again.

The young man looking back at him was quite unfamiliar. He had red hair, gray eyes and a skinny body. His handsome and attractive features were hardly visible through his thinness.

"Is this... me?" the young man asked, putting his hands to his face and tugging at his cheeks. When he slapped him hard on the cheek, he grimaced and held his reddening cheek.

"I'm not dreaming," he mumbled, leaning his hands on the sink and bowing his head.

"This can't be real. I can't be Cale Rayne," he muttered in horror.

The young man stood with his head bowed for a while, his terror gone, as calm as the calm sea. He raised his head and looked at the man in the mirror. The confusion and terror he had experienced had now given way to calmness.

''I really am Cale.''

The man in the mirror was indeed Cale Rayne. The memories and emotions that flooded his mind when he woke up, and the description in the novel [The Hero Who Saved the World] that he had read before coming to this world, had no other reality than to accept that he was Cale Rayne.

The young man thought back to the time before he came here. He had made a lot of bad comments on his phone because he didn't like the last chapter of the novel [The Hero Who Saved the World]. It was a lousy novel in which the protagonist won everything easily, had his own harem, and was emotional about everything, without an ounce of intelligence.

He remembered that he was going out to get something to drink because he was angry. But when he opened the door he remembered a man in a hoodie stabbing him in the stomach with a knife and running away. He lost consciousness and found himself in a field of snow. He was attacked by a monster and saved by a man in the shadows. Cale came out of the bathroom and sat on the couch with what he remembered.

''...This is bad?''

When Cale remembered who Cale Rayne was in the novel, he let out a curse. In [The Hero Who Saved the World], Cale Rayne was the extra who went mad and died from the chaos. Cale Rayne was a creature experimented on until he was four years old in a Beast Cult lab, dedicated to serving the Beast King who emerged when chaos began to threaten the world.

He was the only successful test subject who was injected with chaos and was able to accept it into his body. His days of suffering in the lab until the age of four ended thanks to an S+ level hunter who infiltrated the cult. The hunter knew at first sight that the four-year-old boy with needle marks on his arms and bruises on his body was the child stolen from him and his wife.

Hunter William Rayne was very happy to have found his stolen child hours after it was born. He took him home to his wife. But William could not tell his wife that Cale had the power of chaos, which had been experimented upon and mixed with the mana in his body.

William sealed the boy's mana with a small black earring with an SS+ level artifact in his left ear. Thus, Cale's mana was sealed and his chaos power was also sealed. Therefore, when Cale was ten years old, he failed to awaken his power at the age when every child undergoes awakening.

Things got even worse for him at the age of ten when his father was killed in an explosion in an S+ level dungeon. When his mother, Rosa Rayne, learned that her daughter Amy, a year younger than Cale, had awakened and had the potential to become an S+ level hunter, she started spending all her money on her.

As her disgust for her unawakened son grew, his sister Amy began to see his feckless brother as a burden. Cale began working in the monster factory to support his impoverished family as his mother spent all her money on his sister.

As Cale's days passed in this way, he grew thinner day by day due to sleepless days and malnutrition. One day he returned home exhausted and found himself in an abandoned house.

His mother and sister went to Fred Donovan, who had a seat in the League. Fred Donovan was one of the eleven SSS level eleven manhunters in the world who was a spear user. When Amy awakened her powers, Fred found out that she was a spear user like him and decided to make her his heir. This is why Amy's mother married Rosa to his son Jack Donovan.

Cale, on the other hand, had begun to resent his mother and sister for abandoning him, but since he was not strong, he wanted to find a demon and make a deal with it. But the demon recognizes the artifact in his ear and tells him that its mana is sealed. The demon forces him to make a deal by telling him that if he makes a deal with him he will break the seal.

Cale, desperate for power, agrees and signs a contract with the demon. The demon breaks the sealed artifact with all its energy, but the mana and chaos energy that suddenly floods Cale's body is so great that Cale cannot cope with it and dies of mana poisoning.

''I can't believe I'm the character at the beginning of the novel who contributes nothing to the plot and is killed by the author at the end,'' Cale laughed nervously.

''This has to be a joke!''

Cale rubbed his face. Cale, now fifteen years old, had taken over Rayne's body. He touched his hand to his left ear and took a deep breath when he realized that the earring was still there. The fact that the earring was still there meant that the seal had not been broken.

''At least he hasn't met the demon. But that also means that my powers are still blocked. What should I do? I've been reincarnated into a world based solely on power, where the weak have less than 1% chance of survival, and in the future, after the third cataclysm, the chaos energy will increase and the Beast Kings sleeping in chaos will wake up.''

The Beast Kings were five monsters that came with chaos. Even one of them was enough to destroy a planet, but in the future, five of them would wake up and try to destroy the whole world.

''On the other hand, if I break the seal, there is a high probability that I will die as a result of two forces attacking my body at the same time. Even if I survive, it increases the likelihood that I'll run into the main character who's always getting into trouble, and there's a chance that I'll be executed if someone notices my chaos energy. Either way, my chances of survival are very low.''

If chaos energy was discovered, it would again increase the chances of being used as an experiment or being killed outright because of the risk of turning into a monster. Cale ruffled his hair in frustration. He thought about his old life but realized he had nothing to miss. He had no family, no friends, no lover. He was just living. He was living in spite of everything.

''Well, it looks like I have no choice but to gamble on the option with the highest probability of survival. If I don't break the seal on my ear, even if the Beast Kings wake up in the future, the main character will save the world anyway. So I just need to make sure I'm not among the people who die then. Yes, let's live a new life away from the plot.''