The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 108

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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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108
Episode 108. The Ether Matrix
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Outskirts of P City.
The skeletal frame of the Knowledge Industry Center, abandoned in the wake of the city’s prosperity drained away like the tide, conjured the image of a colossal beast’s corpse.
In the early days after the Gates appeared, this place had been called the heart of South Korea’s Mana Engineering.
Talented minds from across the nation gathered here, burning through sleepless nights debating innovation, while dozens of banners hanging from the building’s exterior fluttered in the wind, promising a brilliant future.
Now, all that filled my vision was sunlight seeping through shattered windows and weeds twisted into grotesque shapes from neglect.
The wide four-lane road stretched empty, not a single parked vehicle in sight.
Dry dust swirled through the cracks in the asphalt, tumbling in small whirlwinds, while the streetlamps flickered erratically with a buzzing sound, their power supply unstable.
The engine noise and human vitality that once filled this place had vanished without a trace.
The reason was simple and pitiless: capital had changed direction.
Tae Sung Energy had monopolized the “Cartridge” business—burning Mana Stones as mere high-efficiency fuel to extract vast amounts of energy—and all market investment had flowed toward this immediate source of profit.
The moment the goose that laid golden eggs appeared, people turned their backs on the scholars studying the goose’s anatomical structure.
Those who remained here had attempted to input into computing devices the geometric arrangement within the Mana Stone itself—the mysterious Mana Circuit known as the “Black Box.”
But to the capitalists of Korea at that time, it was nothing more than pouring water into a bottomless vessel, or a tale from an unrealistic science fiction novel.
I stood motionless on the empty road, taking in the sight of the vast phantom city. It was the result of such devastating shortsightedness.
While Korea grew drunk on immediate Cartridge profits and consigned Black Box research to the trash, overseas mega IT corporations and mysterious research facilities beyond the sea quietly sharpened their blades.
They had laid the groundwork to weaponize Mana Stones not as mere fuel, but as the core of a colossal AI system.
In the previous timeline, that technological gap had become an insurmountable cliff in just five years.
In the end, South Korea had devolved into a technological colony, forced to pay astronomical royalties each year to Silicon Valley’s Mana Power Core AGI for maintaining national security and the Gate occurrence prediction system.
That tragedy had begun here, in this place where the pioneers of yesterday had been abandoned.
“Hunter, is this really a place where people live? I’ve got goosebumps all over. Except for the light from that convenience store, it’s pure darkness everywhere.”
The passenger door opened and Chu Jae-hee stepped out. He pulled his collar tight and glanced nervously around.
In the pitch-black darkness, the only things radiating light were the pale fluorescent bulbs of the convenience store and a single signboard on the side, belonging to a weathered three-story commercial building.
[A.M]
Two letters of the alphabet precariously suspended on the outer wall.
The lower half of the “A” in the red neon sign was malfunctioning, flickering irritably as it cast irregular shadows across the wall. I closed the car door.
The metallic sound cut through the silence and resonated heavily. Behind that flickering sign lay the single key to preventing a catastrophic tragedy in the future—breathing rough, urgent breaths.
“We’re in the right place.”
The moment my foot touched the staircase, the acrid smell that pricked my nostrils confirmed it.
The narrow stairwell connecting the second-floor corridor to the third floor was entangled with electrical wires and copper cables like a spider’s web.
The paint on the walls had bubbled and peeled away like shed skin from moisture and heat, and the unventilated air hung thick with the acrid smoke of flux from soldering and the sharp, metallic scent of ozone that overheated electronics cry out as they exhale.
It was the kind of stench that would make an ordinary person retch, but for me, it sparked a strangely pleasant sense of reality.
I too remembered the sensation of an engineering student—tearing and reattaching thousands of Mana Circuits in the basement corner of the academy’s research building, hunting down illogical errors in the Status Window System.
Chu Jae-hee’s reaction, following behind me, was equally telling. His gaze had already fixed upon the fragments of electronic devices scattered across the floor.
“Wow, this is insane, isn’t it? Hunter, see those graphics cards stacked in that corner? That’s a custom GPU that was released in limited quantities last year and discontinued. To solve the silicon bottleneck phenomenon, they’ve been using CUDA cores—wow, my god—they’re shaving these things down this crudely and running parallel operations with the Mana Circuit? This is absolute madness.”
He adjusted his glasses and approached the precarious heap of discarded parts stacked in the corner of the stairwell.
“I hunted everywhere for that model back in the day—Yongsan and Akihabara, turning the place upside down.”
“Is that so.”
“Yeah, I didn’t win the lottery draw, and I was devastated for days. But seeing it treated like scrap metal here—tears of blood, really.”
An unusual gleam ignited in Chu Jae-hee’s eyes.
Beyond a simple emotion-reader who sensed magical fluctuations, he was a nerd pathologically obsessed with the fusion of magical engineering and cutting-edge hardware.
Only the same breed could recognize the products born from a nerd’s obsession. I was confident my judgment in bringing him here had been sound.
That was when we reached the iron door on the third floor.
“Seo Tae, you son of a bitch! Live like that for the rest of your life!”
A deafening roar tore through the closed iron door.
Bang!
The heavy iron door screamed open. A man in a checkered shirt burst out, his face flushed crimson.
He spotted us standing on the landing, hesitated for a moment, then shoved my shoulder roughly with a vicious motion and bounded down the stairs.
“Damn it, you worthless stone.”
As he thundered down the stairs, diodes and capacitors spilled from the cardboard box he was clutching, clattering to the floor.
Chu Jae-hee instinctively moved to bend down at the sight of the components scattering across the floor, but I caught his shoulder and held him back.
A partner’s desertion. Financial ruin. And failure stretching endlessly into the future.
It was the most common and tragic scene that unfolds when a startup teeters on the brink of bankruptcy. Through the half-open doorway, I glimpsed the abandoned interior of the office.
There was no need to knock. I pushed the half-open iron door and stepped inside.
For a moment, the suffocating heat of a dry sauna assaulted my lungs.
An office sprawling hundreds of square meters. Yet it contained almost no desks, no chairs.
Only hundreds of bare motherboards, stripped even of their casings, spun within massive racks in the center of the office.
Whiiiiiing—!
Hundreds of cooling fans crushed the air and expelled it in a roar that numbed the eardrums.
On the floor, thousands of optical cables and wires lay coiled like snakes, stretching toward the center.
It was like the interior of some grotesque organism, metal veins supplying nutrients to a massive heart.
And at the center where all those cables converged, on a raised platform, it waited.
“They’re spinning a Mana Stone like that?”
Chu Jae-hee murmured, as if entranced. On the platform stood a device protected by special alloy and transparent vacuum casing.
In its core, within a space where a powerful electromagnetic field had formed, a fist-sized blue Mana Stone floated in silence, defying gravity.
It wasn’t a premium-grade Mana Stone. Just a common C-Rank stone with ordinary purity, the kind you’d find anywhere on the market.
But that commonplace pebble was devouring the vast computational data streaming from hundreds of computers.
The Mana Stone vibrated faintly, radiating a soft blue glow, and each time it thrummed, the numbers on the monitors erupted in wild fluctuation.
“W-who are you? You shouldn’t be in here···.”
A hoarse, cracked voice cut through the cooling fan’s din. A man stumbled into view from behind a wall of stacked monitors.
“Are you Seo Tae-gyeong?”
“Ah, yes. I’m Seo Tae-gyeong. But what is this about···?”
His long hair hung matted, as if he hadn’t washed it in days, carelessly tied back with a yellow rubber band that made him look almost pitiful.
Beneath eyes that had lost their focus, deep dark circles sat like decorations, and his gaunt fingers nervously pushed at horn-rimmed glasses that kept slipping down.
I stared at him intently. The man before me was far more broken than the Seo Tae-gyeong in my memory. A flash of recollection from my past life swept through my mind.
The first place I’d encountered that name wasn’t at some glamorous technology expo. It was a brief item in the 9 o’clock news scrolling across a subway display on my commute home.
[Promising young developer Seo succumbs to despair over failed investment, throws himself into Han River.]
The Seo Tae-gyeong on screen had been far more neatly dressed in a suit then, but his eyes held the same light as now.
I glanced at the desk calendar on the table. The date from that news article was drawing dangerously close to the current timeline.
A man stripped of the chance to prove his technology. Betrayed by his colleagues. His last shred of pride trampled beneath the weight of money.
What lingered in his eyes now was something beyond fear—a vicious defense mechanism and despair.
Instead of answering, I walked toward his workspace. The main monitor displayed an endless stream of text in a black command prompt window.
The processing speed of Mana data passing through the Mana Stone’s internal structure, splitting into tens of thousands of branches before recombining into one.
“To pull off this level of computational efficiency using just a low-grade Mana Stone as the core. Impressive.”
I spoke flatly, keeping my gaze fixed on the log data scrolling across the screen. It wasn’t mere flattery.
It was clearly surpassing the processing power that major corporations had invested trillions of won to build into their silicon mainframes.
Based on even a cursory scan, it was over 150 times more efficient than existing systems.
This was nothing like the fifty-fold multiplier rumored in cheap promotion pamphlets. This was the bare truth of an original prototype that Seo Tae-gyeong had yet to surrender to anyone—not investor-friendly marketing language.
And this was still only a prototype.
If capital, that lifeblood, were injected here? If the hardware’s limitations vanished? Five hundred times, even a thousand times the efficiency—that was no fantasy.
“Wow··· insane. Absolutely insane.”
Chu Jae-hee stepped closer and checked the numbers, then let out a hollow laugh.
“The Mana fluctuation numbers are this stable? How did you solve the data bottleneck between the silicon components and the Mana Stone? Did you force-control the Quantum Tunneling Phenomenon of Mana particles through a software algorithm?”
“H-how··· did you figure that out at a glance?”
Seo Tae-gyeong’s pupils quivered as if an earthquake had struck. His expression mixed bewilderment with a strange exhilaration.
“But··· what good does it do to understand? Just maintaining this computational power costs tens of millions in monthly maintenance fees. The Mana Stone burns out in days from overload, and the boards short out constantly from the heat.”
“Yes, that does seem like a problem.”
At my words, Seo Tae-gyeong bowed his head even lower.
“You just saw it yourself. My only business partner called it madness and fled. This is··· a cursed technology that can’t be completed.”
Deep self-loathing bled through his voice. Innovation was powerless before money.
“So, where are you two from? The National Tax Service? Or maybe loan sharks?”
“We’re not strange people. We’re civil servants.”
Chu Jae-hee quickly pulled out an ID card, but Seo Tae-gyeong’s complexion turned even paler.
“Civil servants? Are you arresting me for illegal Mana Stone modification? Or is this building being foreclosed and you’re telling me to leave?”
He positioned himself defensively in front of the server racks in the corner, his gaunt arms trembling like a parent protecting his children—these machines.
Without a word, I pulled a Document Envelope from my inner pocket and tossed it lightly onto Seo Tae-gyeong’s grimy work desk.
A dull, weighty thud rang out clearly even through the noise.
At my signal, Chu Jae-hee placed the Titanium Briefcase she’d been holding onto the table.
Click—
The moment the lock disengaged and the briefcase opened.
The stifling, sauna-like air inside the lab froze instantly. No—it wasn’t a physical change in temperature.
The overwhelming concentration of pure Mana tingled against the skin.
“Gh··· ghhh···.”
Inside the case lay ten Mana Stone Cubes of the highest grade—zero impurities—the kind that could barely be harvested from the deepest layers of an S-Rank Dungeon.
The absolute heart of computation that no overload would ever dim.
The luminous blue radiance pouring from them lit up Seo Tae-gyeong’s vacant face and dust-covered monitors in brilliant light.
“My God··· this isn’t possible. How could you possibly obtain Mana Stones of such purity?”
Seo Tae-gyeong’s knees buckled and he gripped the desk as he sank down. For the first time, his eyes filled with something living—a hunger that bordered on greed.
I looked down at the man on the verge of losing consciousness and spoke with clinical precision.
“We haven’t met before. I’m Kim Do-jin, Hunter with the Ability Management Team.”
Mana Stone Core AGI.
It was time to swallow whole the overwhelming technological prowess that would seize dominion over the future—something no one yet recognized the true value of—at this pivotal moment.
“I’m not interested in chasing the Director’s failed dreams. I want to invest in the future of the Ether Matrix.”

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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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