Kang-jun’s whole life fits inside a goshiwon room barely wide enough to stretch out in, working the graveyard shift at a convenience store, still feeling the old accident in his body some mornings, and watching his paycheck disappear before the next one shows up. Then one night he finds a corpse under his bed, which shouldn’t be possible, and the corpse talks.
It offers him something called Hwanmong, not demonic exactly but tangled up with black magic all the same, and the terms are simple, take it and finish a hundred missions he knows nothing about, or refuse and forget the whole thing happened. He’s got nothing worth protecting by staying safe, so he takes it.
For a while nothing changes, same shifts, same empty bank account, until strange messages start appearing that only he can see, and small things around him stop making sense, enough that he knows the corpse wasn’t a dream he had. Right as he starts asking real questions about what he agreed to, his job disappears, his rent problem gets worse, and people start treating him like someone they can push around, and instead of folding he starts digging into what Hwanmong actually is.
His apartment turns out to matter more than any cramped room should, and progress in the missions bleeds directly into his real life, one shaping the other, so surviving one world means surviving both. What started as a way out of poverty turns into something closer to a war he has to think his way through, planning as much as fighting, chasing the one thing he’s never had, some say over what happens to him.
