The All-Time Best Talent was F-Class Purification - Chapter 105

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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105
Chapter 105 – An Elite Talent Awakened as an F-Rank Purifier
Beyond the glass window lay a horrifying mountain of corpses—thirty members of my security detail, slaughtered without mercy. And behind me, standing like a phantom, was I myself.
“Ah… ah, ahhh….”
A deflated whimper escaped between the lips of Ryu Jin-hwan, the Fourth Director of Blue Tower. Though a non-combatant, his hyperparallel processing—capable of handling tens of thousands of calculations simultaneously—was now serving as the cruelest curse imaginable in this moment.
Two minutes. That was all it took for his prized A-rank Armored Guard unit to be slaughtered without triggering a single alarm. The magical principle that warped vision through thick, specialized shielded glass. And how the biometric signals transmitted through the cable embedded in the back of his neck were being manipulated.
His genius mind had decoded hundreds of variables composing this desperate situation in a single, terrible instant. And the perfect calculation his brain had reached could only lead to one conclusion.
Survival probability: zero.
“You… you people… you’re the ones on the wanted list….”
Ryu Jin-hwan’s jaw trembled violently. Cold sweat poured down his face like rain beneath his expensive tailored suit. He barely managed to move his stiffened neck, alternating his gaze between the silhouettes of his colleagues framed in the open doorway.
The chilling gaze of Han Ae-ri, gripping a dagger dripping with blood. The overwhelming presence of Park Jae-jung, his massive fists soaked in crimson instead of his usual shield. And Seo Eun-ha, her fingertips still shimmering with residual heat, with Han Su-jin standing guard behind her.
The reality that we—who had clawed our way up from hell itself—had completely seized the heart of his fortress, the safest place in all of Neo Seoul, was crushing him.
“How… how did you breach this place? The outer barrier? My quadrupedal robots and cameras?”
“We ask the questions here, Director.”
I tapped the back of his neck lightly with the cool blade of my dagger as I spoke.
“We know perfectly well that your subspace warehouse contains the illegal bioexperimentation ledgers from your dealings with Dominion Hospital and Blue Tower’s slush fund records. Open it. Now.”
At my demand, Ryu Jin-hwan’s pale face twisted. For a moment, cunning calculation flickered across eyes that had been paralyzed with fear.
“Don’t… don’t be ridiculous. You think I’d hand that over willingly? The moment I do, Blue Tower won’t leave me alone! Just kill me instead!”
He screamed, his voice thick with desperation.
“If I die, my mana core dies with me, and the subspace warehouse bound to it closes forever! No matter how many murderers you are, if I take this to my grave, you’ll never get the data you want!”
It was a typical bluff from the edge of a cliff—pretending his life was worth less than the data itself. He was banking on the system’s limitation: that the data would vanish along with him if he died.
But he had chosen his opponent far too carelessly.
“I never said I’d kill you.”
I withdrew the dagger from the back of his neck and walked slowly toward him. Then, right before his eyes, I gathered pure white mana into a perfect sphere at my fingertips.
“Your ability is hyperparallel processing, isn’t it? A skill where you concentrate mana in your brain to process tens of thousands of pieces of information like a supercomputer.”
“Wh… what are you—!”
“My ability is purification. I can annihilate any contaminated energy—mana stones, monster cores, anything tainted.”
I continued in a flat voice.
“If you won’t hand over the ledger, I won’t force you. I won’t kill you either. Instead, I’ll simply purify that proud mana core of yours.”
Ryu Jin-hwan’s breathing stopped.
“When your mana core is purified, the binding force maintaining your subspace warehouse will collapse, spilling its contents onto the floor. We’ll get the data anyway.”
I paused for a moment, then continued.
“The problem comes after that. The last time I purified a core, only the mana dissipated—but that was a relatively simple combat core. In your case, where your brain and mana are fused so deeply, I can’t guarantee what will happen when the core vanishes.”
“Wh… what?”
“You’ve spent your entire life treating the lower districts like insects, ruling through nothing but that brilliant brain and your information network. Becoming an empty shell incapable of a single thought—wouldn’t that be a far crueler hell than death itself?”
True terror finally began to frost over Ryu Jin-hwan’s eyes. Not fear of physical pain or death, but something far deeper. His exceptional mind, running on hyperparallel processing, was already calculating at lightning speed what fate awaited the fusion of his brain and mana—his greatest weapon and his very identity.
“Choose, Director. You have exactly three seconds.”
I brought the sphere of pure purification mana to just before his forehead and began the countdown.
“Three.”
Seo Eun-ha smiled with her arms crossed. Park Jae-jung silently peeled off his blood-soaked leather gloves and dropped them to the floor. Han Ae-ri’s cold gaze fixed on his throat.
“Two.”
Ryu Jin-hwan’s lips trembled violently. His eyes darted frantically between the white light at my fingertips and the mountain of ash-gray corpses scattered across the floor beyond the glass window.
“One.”
As my fingertips were about to touch his forehead.
“Wait, wait! I understand! I’ll open it! I’m opening it!”
At last, the paper-thin pride that the great guild’s vault keeper had built up crumbled to dust. With trembling hands, he desperately reached into empty air and pulled mana toward himself in a frenzy.
Whoooosh—
The space in the center of the isolation chamber warped, and a black vortex-shaped subspace yawned open.
“I-I’ll take it all out… please.”
Ryu Jin-hwan pleaded in a sobbing voice as he thrust his hands into the subspace. Immediately, dozens of premium mana stone cases, military-grade encrypted portable data banks, and stacks of crimson classified documents bearing the Dominion seal began pouring onto the floor like a broken dam.
“So this is… the price of a human life.”
Han Su-jin’s voice trembled as she stared down at the scattered documents. Seo Eun-ha silently knelt on the floor and grabbed one of the data banks.
But my gaze wasn’t on the ledgers spilled across the floor—it remained fixed on Ryu Jin-hwan’s crown, still slumped in the chair and shaking uncontrollably.
“Park Jae-jung, Su-jin. Please collect everything on the floor without leaving anything behind. Aeri, keep watch outside the door.”
As my colleagues gathered the items, I approached from behind Ryu Jin-hwan.
This man was the executor who orchestrated the filthy bioexperiment dealings with Dominion. He was the brain through which all information of this fortress flowed, one of the key figures at the core of Blue Tower. I had secured the ledgers and data, but a massive question still lingered unresolved in my mind.
‘Why didn’t Blue Tower’s top-tier forces move directly, despite placing an astronomical bounty of 26 billion on all of Munglade?’
No matter how strong we had become, Blue Tower was undeniably one of Neo Seoul’s Three Major Guilds. If S-rank and SS-rank Hunters had wanted to, they would have hunted us down long ago.
‘There’s something. Something far more important than pursuing us.’
Without hesitation, I placed my bare hand on the back of Ryu Jin-hwan’s neck, right beside where the mana nerve cable was inserted.
“Aaahhh! W-what are you doing! I’ve already taken out all the ledgers!”
Ryu Jin-hwan screamed and thrashed, but I didn’t remove my hand.
“I’ve received the information. But there’s one more thing I need to confirm in your core.”
I began synchronization.
It was the same method as during Han Su-jin’s surgery—tracing the flow of mana circuits. But this time was different. Han Su-jin’s circuits were warm and orderly. Ryu Jin-hwan’s core was chaos itself, with tens of thousands of calculations boiling simultaneously. The moment I probed deeper, a crushing pressure flooded my mind as if my head would burst.
‘I don’t need to go deep. Just touch the most intense afterimage lingering across the core’s surface.’
A mana core wasn’t merely an energy reservoir. Decades of accumulated memories and emotions of the ability user, especially the moments most intensely imprinted, clung to it in energy form. Even more so in Ryu Jin-hwan’s case, where his brain and mana were deeply fused.
I began decomposing the core with purification.
It wasn’t annihilation. I slowly washed away the outer layer of the core, allowing the energy afterimages condensed within to flow outward. Like cleaning a container caked with old grease, my purification waves gradually scrubbed the core’s surface.
Shhhhiiiing—
“Gaaahhhhh…!”
A scream tore from Ryu Jin-hwan’s mouth. His entire body convulsed. The optical cables couldn’t withstand the overload and were ripped away in showers of sparks.
And then, it flowed in.
Not through my brain, but through my fingertips. As the core was washed away, the released energy afterimages surged backward along the synchronization connection toward me. It wasn’t intentional. With synchronization connected and purification decomposing the core, what had been pressed inside naturally flowed out.
Fragments. Tangled and compressed shards of memory.
I grasped the largest and clearest afterimage among them.
Flash—!
My vision flickered white, and an unfamiliar landscape unfolded.
It was the depths of an endless, undulating darkness—the pitch-black abyss of Former Incheon Waters, submerged after the Cataclysm. At the very bottom, a dome-shaped facility of overwhelming scale stood with the Blue Tower emblem emblazoned across it in massive letters.
‘An underwater city…?’
Monsters infest the surface and core gas spews forth, but only in the depths of that ocean lies the sole sanctuary untouched by the wavelengths of core energy. The upper echelon of Blue Tower had discovered this fact and were secretly constructing an underwater paradise for the top 0.1 percent.
Yet the landscape within the memory’s afterimage was far from peaceful. The massive main mana tunnel leading to the underwater city lay catastrophically collapsed, and from the fissures of the fractured underwater ley lines, pitch-black corruption energy erupted like a volcanic explosion.
They had disturbed the colossal underwater ley line that slumbered beneath. The core energy detonated instantaneously within the seabed, and the surroundings of what should have been a pristine underwater city transformed into a calamitous dungeon teeming with mutated deep-sea monsters.
Within the afterimage, I could see Blue Tower’s elite forces desperately unleashing magic. At their vanguard stood an S-rank combat mage radiating tremendous mana that made the very ocean boil—Blue Tower’s Second Director.
To prevent the collapse of their ten-year ambition, the underwater city, and to monopolize the vast core energy, Blue Tower’s Guild Master and core forces had all plunged into the sea, engaging in a brutal struggle.
‘So that’s it.’
Why they couldn’t track Mun Glade directly. Why they relied on Cleaner remnants and golems. Why S-rank hunters never appeared even as their own headquarters was ransacked.
The enemy’s heart was already completely emptied, consumed by the need to contain the sudden catastrophe.
“Haa…”
I exhaled roughly and withdrew my hand from the back of Ryu Jin-hwan’s neck. A splitting headache crashed over me. The volume of information that had flowed in through synchronization was overwhelming. I wiped the cold sweat from my brow with my sleeve and looked down at Ryu Jin-hwan.
He slumped in the chair, completely limp. All the cables at the back of his neck were severed, and with the core’s outer layer purified, his parallel processing output had plummeted drastically. Yet he wasn’t completely destroyed. His face was twisted in agony, but consciousness still flickered faintly behind his eyes.
With the core’s outer layer washed away, he wouldn’t be able to use skills for some time. But given enough time, the core would regenerate. After today, he could still attempt to steal data or sell our traces to Blue Tower.
I stared at him for a moment, then slowly sheathed the short blade I held in my hand.
“Let’s leave the cleanup to the world.”
Park Jae-jung raised his eyebrow and asked quietly.
“You’re leaving him alive?”
“The moment the data we’ve taken goes public, there won’t be anywhere in this world for him to hide, no matter where or how he survives. We don’t need to finish him ourselves.”
At my words, Park Jae-jung stared at Ryu Jin-hwan for a moment, then nodded silently.
“Lee Tae-hyun! What did you just do?”
Seo Eun-ha rushed over and steadied my shoulder.
“Guild Master. We’ve gathered everything.”
Park Jae-jung approached with two massive backpacks slung across his broad shoulders. Han Su-jin also held a stuffed Boston bag, her eyes fixed on me.
“Since we’ve touched his core, part of the command center’s surveillance network should be severed too. Let’s escape before this entire building descends into chaos.”
“Right. We need to leave. But we’re not running away.”
I looked at each of my companions in turn.
“I just saw something very interesting in this man’s core.”
Even Han Ae-ri, who had been keeping watch outside, came in and listened intently.
“I found out why Blue Tower’s real forces couldn’t chase us. In the Former Incheon Waters. Deep beneath the submerged sea, there’s an underwater city they were secretly constructing.”
“An underwater city?”
Seo Eun-ha questioned in disbelief.
“Yes. But the ley lines there ruptured, and now the seafloor has become a massive spontaneous dungeon with corrupted core energy cascading like a waterfall and deep-sea monsters swarming everywhere. Blue Tower’s Second Director and their highest-tier forces are currently tied down trying to contain that energy.”
Silence fell over the room. But not from fear. Everyone instinctively grasped the true meaning behind my words.
“Guild Master.”
Park Jae-jung broke the silence with a heavy voice. Tremendous resolve blazed in his eyes.
“Surely you’re not saying we should venture into that sea.”
“Exactly.”
I drew the short blade from my waist and sheathed it again, smirking.
“That sea would be hell for Blue Tower’s elite forces, but for me, who absorbs the endless cascading corruption energy, it’s nothing but a vast hunting ground. While they struggle to survive in the water, I’ll devour that corruption and sever their leashes.”
There was no hesitation on my companions’ faces. Seo Eun-ha cracked her knuckles and sparked flames between her fingers, while Han Ae-ri silently secured her twin blades across her back.
“Then we have no time to waste here.”
Han Su-jin gripped the bag’s strap tightly as she spoke.
“We’ll need breathing apparatus for underwater combat and equipment to withstand water pressure. Should we ask Dr. Junk for help?”
“No need. We don’t have to go far.”
I smiled and gestured with my chin toward the vast Main Logistics Center and warehouse beyond the isolation chamber.
“This place is the Main Logistics Center where all of Blue Tower’s supplies flow through. Ryu Jin-hwan definitely has top-tier underwater equipment stashed here, so let’s strip the warehouse clean before we leave.”

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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