Chapter 233

When Do-Jin arrived at the Consul’s residence to deal with the final problem, the place had already descended into complete chaos. Because the Cult of Ruin had continued sowing turmoil until the very end, more than half the people inside the residence had fallen into a state of mass hysteria.

Altos and his comrades had tried to assassinate the Consul amid the chaos. Those still clinging to blind loyalty, along with zombie-like lunatics who had completely lost their minds, were all slaughtering one another in a tangled, bloody mess.

Amid all of it, the Consul was already dead, collapsed face-down in front of his desk. Brain matter dripped from his nose, making it clear that someone had done something unspeakable to him. People were now killing and dying over a man who was already dead, with some trying to finish him off and others trying to protect him, as if they were still fighting over a living target.

In the end, however, only the corpse mattered. No matter how the dictator had died, the simple fact that he was dead was enough to start dragging this whole mess back under control.

In the midst of that already overwhelming chaos, Altos caught sight of the Consul’s body and suddenly tried to take his own life. Do-Jin never saw it coming, and with his attention stretched in too many directions, he failed to react in time.

Instead, Kate moved with a look that said she had expected this all along. She tore the gun from Altos’s hands and slammed him to the floor before he could pull the trigger.

“Do not think you get to take the easy way out by yourself!” she shouted, her voice cutting through all the chaotic noise.

Altos started rambling about how too many people had died because of him when he was younger, but Do-Jin didn’t waste a second listening. He had no time to babysit a breakdown when he still had to use the dead Consul’s body to shut down the unrest exploding across the city. In that sense, the dead Consul ended up being useful for once.

The dictator’s corpse quickly became a blunt tool to stabilize the situation, and before long, the Consul’s residence fell fully into the hands of the coup forces. The revolution, which had been dragged and twisted by the violent current of the Cult of Ruin, finally came to an end.

***

An employee from Möbius Corporation’s Monitoring Team 775 stared at a screen packed with dense numerical strings. His jaw tightened as the values continued to update in real time, making it obvious that a long-running calculation was reaching its end. When the screen chimed and locked in a result, the employee’s expression hardened immediately, and he hit the call button on his desk without taking his eyes off the display.

“Team lead!”

“What is it?” he answered with a voice that sounded like he had just woken up. However, the tension underneath made it clear he already understood how serious the situation was.

“During this quest, more than seventy percent of the system messages that should have been displayed to the player were not displayed.”

The sound of a chair scraping back came through the line, followed by hurried footsteps, and moments later the team lead entered the monitoring room and moved straight toward the screen.

“What is the exact percentage?”

“The full calculation is still in progress. However, current estimates place it at a minimum of seventy-two percent.”

The team lead’s eyebrow twitched.

“In the previous quest, over ninety-five percent of messages displayed correctly.”

“Yes. That figure excludes all messages we manually intervened with.”

The drop was too sharp to ignore, and its meaning was obvious even without anyone spelling it out.

“He’s already being assimilated...” the employee concluded.

Do-Jin was sinking into Lostania. The world had started treating him as someone who belonged to the world, not just a player passing through it. Just like native entities, system messages were now being skipped for him as well.

“No. He’s already changed too much,” said the team lead.

He turned to a second screen, where another calculation was already running, tracking how much previously fixed fate had cracked open into new possibilities, and for several seconds the display showed nothing but tangled strings of garbage data.

After some time, the result finally stabilized.The employee leaned forward before he even realized it.

“It’s crossed over fifty percent now.”

Up to now, Do-Jin had created a ridiculous number of variables and screwed with the fates of people and events all over the place, but the ending itself had refused to budge because the world’s built-in push toward a fixed conclusion had always been stronger than anything he changed.

That balance broke the moment Do-Jin altered the future of the Rumanus Republic. The fixed ending didn’t vanish outright, but for the first time, the system acknowledged a real chance that the world might not reach it.

The team lead reran the fate calculation personally, resetting the parameters and inputting the keyword for the altered world’s projected outcome.

[The newly projected ending is Ruin.]

“See?” The team lead exhaled slowly.

What mattered wasn’t the word itself, but that it was now listed as a projection instead of a certainty. Until now, the system had treated the ending as locked, with no room for deviation.

“So even after barely crossing halfway, nothing really changes?” the employee asked in a low, discouraged voice.

“The fact that it crossed halfway at all is a miracle. On top of that, gaining uncertainty this early means there is still plenty of room for far greater changes going forward.”

“But once he truly steps into the world’s fate, won’t the difficulty increase even more? The world law will—”

“That also means the payoff for surviving it will be higher. If he can push through, the system will credit him with far more significant changes.”

The team lead didn’t waste time after that. He submitted the calculated results himself, locking them into an official report, and the system responded almost immediately with a new order.

[Mission update for Möbius Monitoring Team 159: All personnel previously assigned to monitoring LOST player Do-Jin are to shift to special management of player Do-Jin.]

After that, a long list of detailed items began to scroll down the screen.

[1. The team will substitute for auxiliary system functions, including the generation and display of system messages intended for the player.]

The sharp drop in the number of system messages shown to Do-Jin meant the system’s support functions were no longer operating properly. As a player, he was bound to start running into real inconvenience, and there was only one way to fix it. They would have to throw manpower at the problem.

“Are you saying... we’re supposed to manually write and push the missing messages in real time whenever they should appear?”

The team lead placed a hand on the employee’s shoulder. “That’s what we’ve been doing already.”

Do-Jin had already been a user with slightly over four percent of system messages missing. Someone had to fill those gaps, and by someone, it meant the people in this room.

“Th-that was only during major quests. Even then, we didn’t cover everything. We only stepped in when something critical was missing, and we handled it case by case...” the employee said, voice rising as he looked ready to beg for his life.

“Now more than seventy percent are missing! In cases like this one, where he’s triggering quests that weren’t even in the original structure, the missing rate is over eighty-seven percent! And if this keeps getting worse...”

Hope was fine in the abstract, but didn’t it make sense for him to have some of his own too? Something simple, like the hope of actually getting some sleep tonight. Trapped in an endless loop like this, the whole situation was absurd.

Seeing the employee on the verge of tears, the team lead spoke in a calmer tone. “I’ll request a manpower adjustment so that at least two people, preferably three, can handle this together. If we split the workload, we should be able to manage it to some extent.”

“Do you think that will really be approved?”

“It probably will.”

The team lead answered while looking at the word “Projected” that still remained on the screen.

“This is the first time we’ve seen results like this at such an early stage.”

In other words, the team lead was telling him to forget about everything else and figure out how to write the missing messages first.

***

Even as Do-Jin handled the aftermath, something felt off. The more the cleanup wrapped up, the more that feeling grew.

Why were there so few notifications in this quest?

Thinking back, it wasn’t just strange now. He had been too immersed to pay attention at the time, but looking at it again, hardly any quest messages or other system alerts had appeared during this entire run.

LOST always has weird system messages and inconsistent formats, but still...

This was the kind of game that always showed messages when it really mattered, so Do-Jin kept checking his message log, which was almost barren. Even the quest itself hadn’t been properly updating from stage to stage. At this point, it almost felt like a system error.

Then, out of nowhere, a message popped up.

[You have been playing for an extended period of time. Excessive gameplay may affect normal daily activities.]

What the hell?

He had expected something related to the Fate Quest, but instead, this was all he got.

While Do-Jin stared at the message in disbelief, Kate approached him. “I heard you’re leaving.”

Indeed, after expelling the Cult of Ruin and finishing off the quest, he had planned to leave quietly. However, it looked like word had spread, probably after he said something to Denik earlier. The political chaos and problems that would follow the coup were not his responsibility to clean up.

“Yeah, I am,” he said curtly.

“It hasn’t even been a few hours since the battle ended.”

“There’s nothing left for me to handle.”

“After everything you did, you should at least stay long enough to see things start to look normal again.”

“And how long do you expect me to wait for that?”

Rumanus was nowhere near stability. No one had even been decided as the next head yet, and people were already watching each other, trying to figure out where to stand. This country had not been saved. It had merely been given a chance to save itself. Do-Jin had no intention of getting involved that deeply.

“What about Altos?” he asked.

“He’s calmed down. He agreed to take responsibility until the Republic stabilizes again, and after that, he said he’ll leave because staying here would only turn him into a source of conflict.”

From the look in her eyes, Do-Jin could tell she was probably planning to leave with Altos. Even if he had fought alongside the resistance, the dictator’s son sticking around would never end well. It would be better for him to testify about his father in court and then disappear.

“Well, thanks for everything you’ve done for us,” Kate blurted out.

The timing caught Do-Jin off guard, and after a brief pause, he gave a half-awkward reply. “Take care of yourself, wherever you go. And... sorry about burying you. You know that was just self-defense...”

Kate stared at him like he had completely lost his mind. Did he think that was appropriate for him to tell her now?

At that moment, Do-Jin’s companions called out to him. “Do-Jin, we’re ready to go!”

With that, he quickly turned around and started walking toward them. Kate watched the back of the mage who had changed their fate.

Suddenly, a crowd of resistance members came rushing in at once. The culprit who spread the news was Denik, mixed in among them.

“What do you mean you’re leaving already? There’s no way!” he yelled.

“Shit...” Do-Jin let out a breath and got ready to run.