The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 47

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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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47
Chapter 47. The Black USB
***
The night view of City G framed by the window was so silent it seemed unreal.
Thousands of artificial strands of light tangled like spiderwebs, forming the skeleton of a massive metropolis, yet none of that noise reached the eightieth floor penthouse.
Beyond the reinforced glass, the world looked like a muted image on a screen.
I stood in the center of my new room, staring down at a duffel bag. The dull thud of it hitting the marble floor of the empty living space echoed hollowly through the air.
The place was far too spacious, and just as cold.
“Sigh.”
I exhaled the stale air that had settled in my chest. I was just setting a soiled short dagger down on the nightstand beside the bed when I meant to call that unpacking done.
Bang.
Without warning or courtesy, the door shattered the silence. It was my sister, Kim Min-seo.
She blew past the lock on my door as if it didn’t exist, hurling herself onto the bed still wrapped in plastic. The springs shrieked in protest.
“Hey, Kim Do-jin.”
She glared at me with her arms crossed. The way her eyes tilted upward made it clear she’d come here with something on her mind.
“Knock next time. Did you forget this isn’t the old place?”
“Is that really what matters right now? You dodged the question earlier on the phone—finish what you were about to say. I’m so curious I can’t sleep.”
I turned to face her. In Kim Min-seo’s eyes, the stubborn persistence of a journalist mixed oddly with casual younger-sibling meddling.
Everything about Jeong Se-hee had already been filed away in my mind as a closed matter.
Deciding to protect her had been a strategic choice, nothing more. Further emotional expenditure was unnecessary.
“What happened with those Osung Electronics shares, anyway?”
“What? What?”
Kim Min-seo’s shoulders visibly flinched. The confidence that had filled the room deflated like a punctured balloon. Her eyes began wandering into empty space.
The telltale gaze of a guilty suspect.
“I was clear about this last time. Hold onto them until I give the signal—don’t touch them. You still have them, right?”
“Uh? Y-yes… Of course. I mean, your sister, queen of stocks built from the ground up, wouldn’t—don’t worry.”
Her voice wavered slightly at the end. She avoided my eyes, fidgeting uselessly with the bed sheet. I noticed her fingertips trembling with anxiety.
“You sold them.”
My short, sharp statement cut through her excuses like a blade.
“No—that’s! I didn’t sell them because I wanted to! It was the circumstances that forced my hand!”
Kim Min-seo bolted upright and waved her hands frantically.
“I don’t understand how you manage to lose money no matter what.”
“That’s not it! It went up five percent in a week! Do you know how big five percent is in the stock market? Taking profits early is always right. So I locked in the gains cleanly, and since there’s been all this buzz lately about penny stocks, I just dipped my toes in for a quick trade, and—”
“And wiped out completely.”
At my dry summary, Kim Min-seo’s mouth fell open like a fish. She finally slumped, her shoulders sagging in defeat.
“…I’m sorry. I forgot for a moment that I’m basically a human money shredder.”
“It’s a talent. Your gift for burning cash is genuinely impressive.”
A bitter laugh escaped me, and she, stung in her pride, started pointing an accusing finger.
“Hey! Is that what you say to your sister?! Getting cocky now that you’ve made some money? This is family betrayal!”
“I didn’t make ‘some’ money. And it’s not betrayal—it’s a reality check.”
“That’s the same thing! You little brat!”
She huffed indignantly, forcing her breathing back to normal. Then her eyes flashed again as she tried to steer back to her original purpose.
Her instinct as a journalist was winning out over her embarrassment.
“Don’t change the subject with stock talk! I asked you about Jeong Se-hee—what’s your actual relationship with that woman? Be honest. A guy like you doesn’t ask someone to dig into a woman’s background unless it’s serious. Are you flirting? Or already dating?”
“I told you, she’s just a colleague at work.”
“Please. How many years have I been doing this? Don’t expect me to swallow that.”
“Your overthinking is getting out of hand.”
I exhaled lightly and moved toward the window. If I didn’t intervene, this meaningless interrogation would go on all night.
To silence her, I needed to dangle something bigger and more sensational.
“The Gate Management Bureau.”
The moment those words left my mouth, the temperature in the room plummeted. Kim Min-seo’s expression hardened instantly.
The foolish sister’s face was replaced by the cold, sharp mask of a society section journalist.
“The Bureau’s been unusually quiet about the Club Arabian drug scandal. What do you think the reason is?”
I posed the question and watched for her reaction.
During the Goblin Gate crisis, the Bureau had descended like hyenas, claiming the Ability Management Department was overstepping its authority.
Yet with this drug scandal that had turned City G upside down, they hadn’t sent a single agent into the field—not while police, the Drug Enforcement Division, and even the Hunter Association were scrambling to grab their cut.
The very agency that should have controlled Gate byproducts remained silent as a grave. This was no mere negligence. It was deliberate exclusion.
Kim Min-seo lay still, staring at the ceiling for a long moment. I could almost hear the sound of thousands of information fragments clicking into place in her mind.
“…Have you ever heard of the ‘Special Operations Division’ under the Bureau?”
“Heard of it. Their attack dogs.”
The Gate Management Bureau is fundamentally an administrative institution. But beneath that facade exists an elite unit capable of projecting force unilaterally, without recourse to external guilds.
That unit is the Special Operations Division. A collective of true killing machines, operating on an entirely different plane from the administrative drones we’d encountered at the Goblin Gate.
Even in my memories before the Regression, the Special Operations Division had been shrouded in mystery.
Powerhouses comparable to S-Rank Hunters were said to be stationed there, and dark rumors circulated that they engaged in extralegal acts without hesitation, answerable to no oversight.
“There’s talk that the Special Operations Division has been making under-the-table contact with the Red Blood Alliance.”
“…What?”
The Red Blood Alliance. Asia’s largest criminal cartel, and the driving force behind this Booster incident.
The moment that name—one that had been gnawing at me—was spoken in the same breath as the Bureau’s shadow organization, a chill traced down my spine.
“Why would they?”
“Honestly, I don’t have the full picture either. This is still tabloid-level hearsay, hasn’t been fact-checked. I heard it through the grapevine from an information broker I know, so I’m being careful about it.”
Kim Min-seo lowered her voice and leaned closer to me.
“But if this is true, the pieces fit together perfectly. The Bureau didn’t withdraw from this incident—they were backing the Red Blood Alliance from the start, watching the situation spiral while they covered their tracks. Doesn’t it make your skin crawl?”
It made sense. Collusion between the heart of the state and a criminal cartel. This wasn’t mere corruption. It was evidence of a malignancy metastasizing through the state system itself.
That subtle distrust Kim Dae-han had shown at dawn—it had likely been pointing to this very thing.
“What about the Gate Cult?”
“Oh, actually, I’m obsessing over the Gate Cult even more than the Red Blood Alliance right now.”
Kim Min-seo scratched her head, her eyes bright with intensity.
“I’ve got a sense that something massive is about to surface…but the puzzle pieces still don’t fit. Once I have solid connections, I’ll bring it straight to you.
Thanks to you, I’ve been drowning in material lately. My head’s spinning.”
“Let me know the moment you have something concrete. This is business.”
“Got it—just don’t forget to wire me per arrangement, okay? My bank account’s been looking pretty thin with all my stock trading lately.”
“Starting tomorrow, I’ll have you pay separate rent.”
“Ugh, you cheap bastard. You really won’t let anything slide!”
Kim Min-seo laughed in exasperation and left the room.
***
Dinner was served on the living room floor.
In the center of a vast marble floor in a penthouse worth hundreds of billions, we sat on newspaper and ate Chinese food—a surreal sight if there ever was one.
Yet the warmth that emanated from within that scene far exceeded the chill of the rest of the house.
My mother kept gazing around the apartment in wonder, laughing as though she couldn’t believe it was real, while my sister chewed on sweet and sour pork while reciting a list of appliances to be purchased tomorrow.
I ate in silence. Whenever Kim Min-seo started to bring up Jeong Se-hee, I set down my chopsticks and fixed her with a steady gaze.
A single cold look was enough to silence her excitement. I didn’t want to drag the bloody stench of warfare into this peaceful table.
After dinner, when everyone had dispersed to their rooms, the time was 1 a.m.
The world was silent as a tomb, yet my neurons burned with startling clarity. Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, I finally got up.
An unresolved lead adrift in my mind made sleep impossible—an obsessive compulsion honed over decades of treading the line between life and death. An occupational disease of the Mage.
I grabbed my car keys and quietly left the house.
My destination: the Ability Management Team Office 4th Floor, my private workshop.
Click, beep-beep-beep.
The triple-layered security system—recognizing my newly registered fingerprints, iris pattern, and subtle mana signature—disengaged with a heavy mechanical groan.
The interior of the pitch-black workshop flooded with white light all at once. Cold metal furnishings glinted sharply in the brightness.
Five high-spec monitors on the desk powered up sequentially, casting blue light across the room.
I sank deep into my chair and withdrew a finger-sized Black USB from the inside pocket of my jacket.
A viper hidden in the most secret port of Chang Yu-cheong’s office.
The moment I inserted the USB into the port, a red warning window appeared on the central monitor.
[WARNING: ENCRYPTED DRIVE DETECTED]
[ACCESS DENIED]
[Master. This drive is protected by 256-bit AES encryption with dual-layer security.]
[Shall I activate my computational processes to decrypt it?]
Airi materialized in midair, fluttering her butterfly wings. To her, this level of encryption would be kindergarten arithmetic.
“No.”
I declined, bathed in the blue light of the monitors.
“I’ll do it myself. Let my touch dull, and the edge dulls with it.”
I moved my hands toward the keyboard. But it wasn’t the keys I intended to manipulate.
I drew out the finest threads of mana from my fingertips. My mana traveled along the metal contacts of the USB port, penetrating directly into the internal circuitry.
Into the digital world of ones and zeros, the alien energy of magic surged.
It was a realm inconceivable to ordinary Mages. But I had been a core executive of the Status Window Improvement Advisory Committee before the Regression.
I understood the interplay between modern digital logic and the mana system of the otherworld more perfectly than anyone. The essence of Ability Engineering had always lived within me.
The flow of data felt through my fingertips was cold and precise. I adjusted my mana’s vibration microscopically, warping the logical circuits of the firewall.
I forced mana into the gaps between the encryption algorithm’s logic, violently rearranging the internal structure.
Crackle.
Not the sound of keys. The faint electrical friction generated as mana overcame the circuit board’s resistance.
Merely three minutes. The security technology of this world still hadn’t factored in the variable of direct magical interference.
Beep—
[ACCESS GRANTED]
The red warning window faded, replaced by green. At last, the directory structure inside the Black USB appeared on the monitor.
“Is this all there is?”
A single folder existed on the screen—unnamed except for a single Chinese character, “Heaven,” marking it.
I moved the mouse and opened the folder. Inside lay only one text file, its size barely four kilobytes.
[2024_Project_Genesis_Subject.txt]
As if spellbound, I double-clicked the file. Notepad opened, and the screen filled with a list of dozens of names, dates of birth, and ranks.
At the very bottom of that list, one name highlighted in red seized my gaze completely.
Beside that name, unlike the others, lay a single line of notes.

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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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