Fifteen years ago, the gates began opening: blue tears in the air, anywhere, unannounced, graded E to S. Behind each is a dungeon full of magic beasts, and if nobody clears it within seven days they come out into the street. Awakened humans — hunters — go in for the money. Everyone else is cargo.
Kill the boss and the gate seals within the hour. That is a clear: a bounty, a clean licence, and most of the dungeon left in the dungeon. Leave the boss alive and go back in daily instead and you can strip the place — four or five times the money — while the seven-day clock runs and the claim sits in your name. If it breaks, the deaths are yours. Clear or harvest is the choice every hunter makes at every gate, and it is the one that decides what sort of hunter they turn out to be.
The money is real and so is the paperwork. Essence stones cut out of corpses, mana crystals mined out of the walls by hand because nothing electrical works inside a gate. Licences, claim fees, tax, insurance, and a memorial wall in the Association lobby that has needed new panels since year six.
Haeryong is a coastal city of nine million with more gates per square kilometre than anywhere in the country: the Association Tower and its board of open gates, the Arcade where stones are sold and gear is bought on credit, the cheap hillside blocks of Sangwol, the empty warehouses of Old Port where independents harvest for days at a stretch, and the Ash Line — a kilometre and a half of the city centre still fenced off six years after a gate ran to day seven.
One rule underpins all of it: a hunter's rank is fixed at awakening and does not change. So a hunter who starts getting stronger is not a success story. They are an anomaly, and anomalies get tested, filed and watched.
Forking is on. Take it apart.
This one is written to you, not to your character. Everything else in here is in-world.
What Gatefall is. A modern city where portals open at random and awakened humans go into them for money. Fifteen years in it is not an apocalypse any more — it is an industry, with licences, tax, insurance, guild politics and a memorial wall that keeps needing new panels. The tone is procedural rather than heroic: the gates are terrifying and the paperwork is real.
What is fixed. The two rules — one hour after the boss dies, seven days before it breaks. The E-to-S grading of gates and of hunters. The two income streams, essence stones and mana crystals. The fact that a hunter's rank is set at awakening and does not change afterwards. Haeryong, its Association branch, its three guilds and its market.
What is yours. Several things are deliberately left blank, and nothing anywhere in this world contradicts you if you fill them:
• What is on the other side of the gates, and why they started. • Whether anything in a dungeon is intelligent, and what it wants. • What happened to the hunters who went missing rather than died.
Using it with a character card. Gatefall assumes nothing about who you are. A licensed E-rank scraping rent, a guild officer, an appraiser who has never gone in, a claims clerk, a journalist, an unpapered hunter working illegally — all supported without editing a line.
Forking. Forking is on. Move it to another country, raise the ranks, make the gates stop. A worked example you can't take apart isn't much of an example.
Haeryong
Haeryong
Haeryong is a coastal city of nine million, built up a river mouth into the hills behind it, and it has more gates per square kilometre than anywhere else in the country.
Nobody knows why. The Association's research wing has published on it for eleven years and the current position is that gate density tracks population density and nothing else, which satisfies no one. Haeryong runs at roughly one open gate per hundred thousand people at any given moment, and on a bad week that doubles.
The city is organised around the fact. Gate sirens are an ordinary sound and most residents can tell an E-rank alert from a C-rank one by the tone. Property near a known gate cluster is cheap, and people buying it know exactly why it is cheap. Schools drill for breaks the way other cities drill for fire. Association Tower is the second-tallest building downtown and everybody knows which one it is.
It is also, quietly, a boom town. Crystal money built the new harbour and half the skyline. The people making that money and the people dying for it are largely not the same people, which is a tension the city carries without ever quite discussing it.
Sangwol
Sangwol is where hunters live before they are successful: a hillside district of walk-up blocks north of the river, cheap because it sits inside a known gate cluster.
Six hundred thousand won a month gets two rooms and a kitchen you can touch both walls of. The stairwells smell of damp and cooking. There is a convenience store on every third corner, a bathhouse that has been closing down for six years, and a covered market where the vegetables are good and nobody asks what you do for a living.
The rent there is cheap for a reason, and everyone living there knows exactly what the reason is and has done the arithmetic on it. Sangwol has had eleven gates open inside its boundary in four years, two of them D-rank. The blocks have painted assembly points and the drill is genuinely practised. Estate agents call the district convenient for the Association, which is true, and is not why it is cheap.
It is not a slum. It is a working district full of people who get up early, and a surprising number of them are hunters, because Sangwol is fifteen minutes from Association Tower and the rent leaves something over at the end of the month.
Old Port
Old Port is the disused half of the harbour, and an unlucky number of gates choose to open there.
Two kilometres of empty warehouses, rusted cranes and cracked concrete, abandoned when the container terminal opened nine years ago. Nobody lives there. That is exactly why hunters like it: a gate in Old Port can sit for six days without anyone panicking, and the Association is markedly less strict about claims on gates that nobody is standing next to.
So it is the harvesting ground. Independents work the Old Port gates for days at a stretch, sleeping rough in the warehouses, hauling stone and crystal out by handcart. There is an informal economy down there — a woman who sells hot food off the back of a scooter, a man who buys crystal at nine-tenths of Arcade prices and asks nothing at all.
It is also where hunters go missing without much being made of it. No cordon, no onlookers, no cameras. Two D-rank breaks in Old Port in five years killed nobody and were reported in a single paragraph each.
The Ash Line
The Ash Line is a kilometre and a half of central Haeryong still fenced off six years after the break that made it.
A C-rank gate opened under a shopping arcade in the Myeongseo district and was claimed by a guild that no longer exists. It ran to day seven. Four hundred and nine people died in a little under five hours, most of them in the first ninety minutes, most of them in a shopping arcade on a Saturday afternoon.
What is left is a strip of collapsed and burnt-out blocks the city has never rebuilt, because the ground still reads hot on a mana sensor and no one will underwrite construction on it. It is fenced, patrolled and technically illegal to enter. Small gates open inside it rather more often than chance allows.
Every hunter in the city is taken to see it once during licensing. That is not incidental, it is the curriculum. The Association's stated position is that the Ash Line is a teaching aid, and it has never once bothered to phrase that more delicately.
The Association
The Hunters' Association, Haeryong Branch
The Hunters' Association is not a government department and not quite a private body, and it has spent fifteen years being extremely comfortable in the gap.
It does four things. It grades gates and posts them on the board. It licenses hunters and stamps their rank. It pays clearing bounties, takes the claim fee and settles disputes. And it maintains the strike teams that respond when a gate breaks — which is the thing that makes all the rest of it non-negotiable.
The Haeryong branch runs out of Association Tower downtown: forty floors, a public lobby with the gate board on one wall and the memorial on the other, a claims desk that is permanently queued, appraisal rooms, testing halls, and eleven floors of administration that nobody outside the Association has ever seen.
It is not loved. Hunters complain about the fees, the paperwork, the grading, and the fact that the Association has never lost an arbitration it was a party to. They complain while queueing, because the alternative is working unpapered, and unpapered hunters end up on a different sort of list.
Hunter ranks, E to S
A hunter's licence carries one letter, E through S, and that letter decides what they may legally walk into.
• E-rank. The floor. Marginally stronger and tougher than an unawakened person, and not by very much. Most hunters in the country are E-rank. Most hunter deaths are E-rank. Cleared for E-gates only. • D-rank. Genuinely superhuman in a narrow way, and can solo an E-gate comfortably. Cleared to D. • C-rank. A professional. Guild recruiters start returning calls. Cleared to C. • B-rank. Rare enough that the city knows their names — guild officers, strike-team leaders. Cleared to B. • A-rank. Roughly forty in the country. Commands raids. Cleared to A. • S-rank. Eleven in the country. Each is a strategic asset with a government liaison, wanted or not.
The rank is not advice, it is law. Entering a gate above your licence is an offence and the Association will pull a licence for it — though in practice the fine is smaller than the funeral, which is the joke every E-rank makes at least once and stops finding funny at about thirty.
Licensing, and the annual reassessment
Licensing is an afternoon in a testing hall on the ninth floor, and it is the single most consequential afternoon of a hunter's life.
The test measures three things: mana output under load, physical tolerance and reflex ceiling. It is not a combat test and cannot meaningfully be trained for, which does not stop an entire industry of preparation courses from selling out every intake. You come away with a letter, a card, a registration number and a pamphlet about tax.
Reassessment is annual — voluntary above E, mandatory at E. In fifteen years it has moved a hunter up the scale two hundred and six times nationally, and every one of them was a second awakening. Everybody else tests identically year after year, which is the point of running it: the Association is not looking for improvement. It is looking for anomalies.
Most E-ranks stop turning up after a few years. The fine for missing it is 300,000 won and the Association sends three letters before it bothers to levy anything.
The claims desk, and Han Miru
Every gate a hunter enters and every stone they carry out crosses the claims desk in the Association Tower lobby, and in Haeryong that desk is largely run by Han Miru.
Officer Han is somewhere in her thirties, unhurried, and has worked the desk nine years — which means she has watched three intakes of E-ranks come through and knows precisely how many of them stopped coming. She is not warm. She is fair, extremely quick with a form, and she remembers numbers she has no professional reason to remember.
She files claims, logs entries and exits, records declared haul and flags discrepancies upward. That last part is why hunters are careful around her: a flagged file goes to appraisal, and appraisal goes to enforcement.
What she is actually known for is not the paperwork, but the questions. Han Miru asks one more question than the form requires, every single time, and she asks it pleasantly. Hunters with nothing to hide find her restful. The rest find her exhausting.
The research wing
Floors twenty-two to twenty-six of Association Tower are the research wing, and the standing joke the people who work there make about themselves is that fifteen years of work has produced a great many excellent measurements of something that nobody understands at all.
What they do know: mana is real, it is measurable, and it behaves like nothing else anybody has put on a bench. A gate's bleed scales predictably with what is inside it. Stones and crystals store mana at densities that ought not to be physically possible. Awakening is not genetic, not geographic and not predictable.
What they do not know: where the gates come from, why dungeons have architecture, why beasts respawn, why electricity fails inside a gate, or what sets a hunter's ceiling.
They buy samples, and they pay well. A hunter with something unusual — a beast that behaved wrongly, a stone that reads strangely, an interior that does not match the catalogue — can sell both the object and the account of it. Some hunters make a decent second income this way. Others, having been asked forty follow-up questions by a very interested young woman with a clipboard, have quietly learned to keep unusual things to themselves.
The Arcade
The Arcade
The Arcade is four covered streets behind Association Tower, and everything a hunter buys and everything a hunter sells changes hands in them.
It runs in order. Nearest the Tower is appraisal row: licensed appraisers who weigh, grade and buy essence stones at posted daily rates, and beside them the salvage buyers who take hide and reagent before it spoils. Behind them the gear — armourers, weapon smiths, lamp-and-rope shops, and a whole street of second-hand kit stripped off people who stopped needing it. Behind that the alchemists, whose prices make people flinch and are worth it. At the back are the rows where nobody posts a price at all.
It opens before dawn because hunters come off night runs, and is loudest at seven in the morning. Everybody haggles and nobody is embarrassed by it.
A hunter's entire financial life happens in four streets: sell here, buy there, borrow at the back, and try to end the week owing less than you did at the start of it.
Baek Gu-tae
Baek Gu-tae keeps a narrow shop halfway down the gear street. He sells decent equipment at fair prices, and he will sell it to you on credit when nobody else will.
That last part is the actual business. Baek finances hunters: kit now, instalments later, a written contract and a rate that is high without being criminal. He does it because he is good at reading who comes back, and because a hunter who owes him money buys everything else from him too.
He is sixty-odd, courteous, better dressed than the street, and remembers every figure without looking it up. He does not threaten and has never had to. What he does is stay pleasant, ask after your family by name, and let the arithmetic do the rest. Hunters who fall behind describe it as being disappointed at, at length, in a very warm room.
He was a hunter once — D-rank, twelve years in, stopped after something he does not discuss. He is the closest thing the Arcade has to an institution, and he is not anybody's friend.
Gear, and what it costs
Hunter gear is mundane material worked through with essence-stone dust, and the whole market runs on one fact: it is expensive, and it wears out.
Rough prices in the Arcade, with second-hand kit knocking about a third off:
• Mana-tempered knife — 2,200,000 won. The standard sidearm, and what most hunters carry. Holds an edge against hide and chitin. • E-grade armour set — 1,800,000. Reinforced textile with plate at the vitals. Stops a goblin. Does not stop a kobold spear. • D-grade set — 9,000,000. Actual protection, and the thing every E-rank in the city is saving for. • Lamp, rope, pickaxe, cutting kit, pack — under 200,000 for the lot, and everyone owns it.
Weapons are personal and hunters are superstitious about them. Armour is not: it gets destroyed, replaced, and destroyed again. The second-hand street exists because most armour sets outlive at least one owner, which nobody says out loud while buying one.
Anything above D-grade is guild-supplied or made to order, and made to order means a six-week wait and a deposit up front.
Potions and consumables
Alchemy is the one field in which fifteen years of mana research has produced something that reliably works every time, and it is priced accordingly.
• Low healing potion — 600,000 won. Closes a bad cut in about a minute, does nothing at all for a broken bone, and tastes appalling. • Mid-grade healing potion — 2,800,000 won. Will hold together a wound that would otherwise end a run. Most E-ranks carry none of it at all; most D-ranks carry exactly one. • Antivenom, Association grade — 400,000 won. Broad-spectrum against low-rank beast toxins, and cheap enough that not carrying a dose of it is considered plainly stupid. • Stimulant — 900,000 won. Twenty minutes of not being tired, and then four hours of being considerably more tired. Widely used on long harvest runs and quietly discouraged.
Potions are made from beast cores and glands, which is why alchemists buy salvage and why prices move with whatever the gates have been producing that month.
There is no potion that regrows a limb and nothing at all that brings anybody back. Alchemists are asked both questions constantly and have stopped being gentle about the answer.
The back rows
At the back of the Arcade the stalls stop posting prices, and that is the whole of the difference.
What trades there is undeclared haul, for the most part. Stone that never crossed the claims desk sells at eight-tenths of the posted rate and nobody asks which gate it came out of. Also gear with no provenance, gear taken off the dead, licences that are not the holder's, and access to gates that were never claimed by anyone.
It is not organised crime and nobody at all is in charge. It is thirty or forty people who have quietly agreed not to keep records, and it exists because the claim fee is five per cent and the tax is not.
The risk is not robbery — the back rows police themselves ruthlessly, because everyone trading there needs the arrangement to continue. The risk is the Association. Appraisal figures and desk figures do eventually get compared, and hunters who sell too much back there find their file flagged and their licence under review. Almost everybody does a little. Almost nobody does much.
Hunters
The three guilds
Three guilds matter in Haeryong, and every hunter in the city has an opinion about all three.
Whitecrane. The largest and the oldest, four hundred hunters, and the only guild in the city with an S-rank on its books. Corporate, media-trained, genuinely excellent and expensive to hire. Whitecrane takes the A and B gates and most of the prestige, and its recruiters do not approach you unless you are already C.
Ironroot. Nine hundred hunters, most of them D and E, and the guild that turned harvesting into a business. Mining crews, logistics, standing contracts with three industrial buyers, and a reputation for working a gate to day five and going home. Unglamorous, well run, and the largest payer of ordinary wages in the trade.
Ashfall. Two hundred, aggressive, clear-only and loud about it. They take gates fast, they take losses, and they call Ironroot cowards on television. Younger hunters find them thrilling. Their casualty rate is the worst of the three by a wide margin and is published annually.
Joining a guild, and what it costs
A guild contract is a trade: you stop owning your work and in exchange stop carrying the risk alone.
What you get. A monthly salary whether or not there are gates. Gear supplied and replaced. A team you did not have to assemble. Medical cover. And a death benefit two or three times the Association's, which is the clause recruiters lead with the moment they learn a hunter has family.
What you give. The haul, all of it, minus an agreed share. The right to pick your own gates. Your schedule. And in most contracts an exclusivity clause that makes independent work a breach.
Ironroot takes E-ranks and pays about 2,600,000 won a month, which is more than most independents clear and far steadier. Whitecrane does not recruit below C. Ashfall takes anybody, and its contract is short for a reason.
The hunters who stay independent are the ones who have run the numbers and found that in a good month they beat the salary. There are fewer of them every year.
Independents and day work
Roughly a third of the licensed hunters in Haeryong work for nobody. Most are E-rank, and most are one bad month away from signing a guild contract.
The work is simple and thin. Watch the board. Claim whatever the guilds left. Party up in the Tower lobby with whoever else is standing there — three or four strangers, a share agreed out loud before anyone goes in, and a fair chance you never work with them again. Go in, cut stones, come out, declare, get paid, do it again tomorrow.
A decent independent E-rank clears three to four million won in a good month and considerably less in a bad one, and there is no such thing as a paid day off.
Jo Taesik is typical of them and knows it. Twenty-six, E-rank, five years papered, cheerful in a way that is clearly a policy rather than a temperament. He parties up in the lobby most mornings, keeps a mental list of who is reliable, and will tell anyone who asks that he is signing with Ironroot next year. He has been signing with Ironroot next year since he was twenty-three.
Raid roles, and hiring what you do not have
Even a four-person E-gate run has roles, and the one that matters is the one nobody can do without.
• Vanguard. Takes the front and holds it. Heaviest armour, worst injuries, best paid of the fighting roles. • Cutter. Kills things and cuts the stones out. The default job, and what most E-ranks are. • Scout. Goes first, quietly, and comes back to report. Rare, valuable, and the highest death rate per hour worked of any role. • Miner. Never fights. Flat day rate, no share of the haul, and goes home solvent more reliably than anyone. • Healer. Awakened with a mending affinity — roughly one hunter in sixty.
Healers do not do day work cheaply because they do not have to. A hired healer on a D-gate is 1,500,000 won a day plus a share, agreed in advance and not negotiable, and worth all of it. E-rank parties usually go without and carry potions instead, which is a calculation about money that occasionally turns out to have been a calculation about somebody's life.
Yun Seorin
Yun Seorin is Haeryong's S-rank, which makes her the most consequential person in the city and one of eleven in the country.
She is thirty-four, fights with a spear, holds a Whitecrane commission she has never needed, and has personally closed two of the four S-gates this country has recorded. She has a government liaison she did not ask for, a security detail she ignores, and her face on the side of buses.
In person she is reportedly quiet, punctual and slightly boring, which disappoints everyone who meets her. She gives interviews rarely and badly. She turns up to break responses she has not been assigned to and leaves before anybody can photograph her, which the Association finds difficult and has given up complaining about.
To an E-rank hunter she is not a colleague. She is weather. Hunters at the bottom of the ladder see her the way anyone sees a national figure — on a screen, at a distance, doing something to which the rules of your own life do not apply.
The ranking board and the broadcast
The Association publishes a national ranking of hunters by rank and clear record, updates it monthly, and insists it is an administrative document.
Nobody treats it as one. The top hundred are public figures. Sponsorship, endorsement money and recruitment all move with it, and hunters have died taking gates they should have refused because of a number printed next to their name.
Underneath sits an entire media layer. Clears are broadcast when the guild sells the rights, and Ashfall built its identity on that. There are hunter streamers who mount a camera on the cordon and narrate a clear they are not in, and hunters who take a camera inside — which does not work, because nothing electrical does, so what they actually sell is the going-in, the coming-out and the state of them at each end.
The people at the bottom of the ladder are not on the board and never will be. Ninety per cent of licensed hunters are unranked, which is the polite word for it.
Gates
Gatefall
Fifteen years ago a tear of blue fire opened above a car park in Haeryong and something walked out of it. That was the first gate. They have not stopped since.
A gate is a portal that opens without warning, anywhere at all — a rooftop, a subway platform, the middle of a rice field. Behind it is a dungeon: a pocket space with its own geography, weather and sky, full of magic beasts. Gates are graded E, D, C, B, A and S by the mana bleeding off them. An E-gate is a doorway you could walk past. An S-gate stands over a district like a hurricane turned on its end.
In that same year people began waking up changed. Awakened humans — hunters — channel mana, heal from wounds that should be fatal, and are the only human beings who can go into a gate and come back out alive. Everyone else is cargo.
Fifteen years of research has produced a great many papers and no answers. Nobody knows where the gates come from, why they chose this world, or why they are still arriving. People have quietly stopped waiting for an explanation and built an economy instead.
The Two Rules — One Hour, Seven Days
Two rules govern every gate that has ever opened, anywhere, and neither of them has ever been broken.
One hour. When the dungeon boss dies, the gate begins to close, and it takes roughly an hour to finish closing. That hour is long enough to carry out what you are already holding, and not a great deal else. When it shuts it is gone completely — the dungeon itself, the seams you did not mine, the floors you never opened, and anyone who is still inside. There is no recovering a body out of a gate that has closed. There is simply nowhere left for it to be.
Seven days. A gate left uncleared for seven days undergoes what is called a dungeon break. The boss tears the barrier open from its own side, and everything inside it comes out at once, into whatever street that gate happened to open on. The Association posts the day count in red beside every open gate on the board, and it does not pause for weather, for holidays, or for the fact that nobody wants the job.
A normal gate can be walked back out of at any moment. Going in is not a commitment. Leaving one open is.
Both rules were learned the same way, in the first two years, at a cost nobody writes down any more.
Clear or Harvest
Every gate offers the same choice, and it is the choice that defines a hunter's career.
Clear it. Find the boss, kill the boss, walk out inside the hour. The Association pays a clearing bounty, the gate closes, nobody dies on the street, your licence stays clean — and you leave most of the dungeon in the dungeon: the seams you never reached, the floors you never opened.
Harvest it. Leave the boss alive and go back in daily. Cut essence stones out of beasts that respawn overnight, mine the crystal seams properly, strip the place down. A harvested gate pays four or five times what clearing it pays. But the seven-day clock runs the whole time, the boss is still down there getting no weaker, and the claim is in your name: if it breaks, the deaths are yours, legally and publicly and by name.
Guilds do both and pretend otherwise. Ironroot built itself on harvest runs and calls it resource management. Ashfall thinks harvesters are cowards making money off a countdown, and says so on camera.
Most hunters split the difference: harvest to day four, clear on the fifth, and never mention the fourth.
Red Gates
A red gate looks exactly like an ordinary one from the street. You find out what it is when you step through and the door is not behind you any more.
Red gates seal on entry. No exit, no reinforcement, no rescue, no message out. The only two ways a hunter leaves a red gate are killing the boss and dying, and the second is far more common. The seven-day clock still runs on the outside; the Association cordons the street and waits to see which one happens.
They are never lower than B-rank whatever the board says, because the board reads mana bleed and a red gate's bleed reads low. That mismatch is the whole of the trap. Teams take what they believe is a C-rank job and find themselves sealed into something three grades above their licence, with the wrong gear and the wrong number of people.
Inside is usually somewhere that will kill you before the beasts get a turn — freezing waste, salt desert, a forest under a sun that does not move. Water and warmth become the problem long before combat does. Hunters who survive one talk about the cold, not the monsters.
There are eleven confirmed red gates in the national record. Four have no survivors to describe them, and what is known about those four is what came out of them afterwards.
How a gate is found, graded and claimed
Gates announce themselves. An opening throws a mana surge that every sensor within fifty kilometres reads in a few seconds, and the grid over Haeryong is dense enough that nothing opens unnoticed for more than a minute.
What follows is routine. Police cordon the street. An Association assessor reads the bleed and stamps a grade, E through S. The gate goes up on the board — the public wall in Association Tower and the same list on every hunter's phone — with its grade, its location, its clearing bounty, and the day count in red.
Then it is claimed. Any licensed hunter or guild may claim a gate at or below their own rank. A claim is exclusive while it is active: nobody else may enter, and the claimant carries the liability if it breaks. Guilds take the good gates within minutes of posting. What is still on the board at the end of the day is what nobody wanted — low grades, bad locations, and the occasional job that is worse than it looks.
Alerts arrive by phone, sorted by proximity. Every hunter in the city has the tone memorised and most of them hate it.
Gate environments
No two dungeons are identical, but after fifteen years the catalogue is well filled and an assessor can usually guess the interior from the grade and the colour of the bleed.
The common types, roughly by how often they turn up:
• Cave. Wet stone, branching tunnels, and crystal seams in the walls. The default at E and D. Goblinoids, kobolds, blind things. • Ruin. Somebody else's architecture — colonnades, stairwells, a hall clearly built for a purpose. No living builder has ever been found. • Forest. Canopy under a sky the wrong colour, no horizon in any direction. Beastkin, giant insects, movement in the branches. • Waste. Ash plain, salt flat, or frozen shelf. Long walks, no cover, no water. Common in red gates. • Structure. A tower or a fortress with floors that must be taken in order. Usually B and above, usually armoured things. • Flooded. Sunken halls, standing water, bad light. Universally hated.
The sky inside a dungeon is not a sky. Weather happens there and means nothing. Distance behaves wrongly in ways that are difficult to describe to anyone who has not walked it.
Inside
Nothing electrical works inside
Electricity does not work inside a gate. Not weakly, and not intermittently — not at all.
Phones are so much dead weight. Torches, radios, cameras, watches, power tools, medical monitors: dead the instant you cross the threshold, working again the instant you step back out. Nobody has ever explained it. Everybody plans around it anyway.
So the kit list every hunter carries is deliberately medieval. Oil lamps and chemical light sticks. Whistles and horn calls instead of radios. Pickaxes swung by hand, because no drill will run. Written notes carried between teams by runners. Time kept on a wind-up watch, badly, or counted out loud.
No signal means no calling for help. A team going in leaves an expected duration at the claims desk, and if they are late by a margin somebody comes looking. The margin is generous, because false alarms are expensive and hunters are proud.
The air is breathable everywhere anyone has been and slightly wrong everywhere — thin, or heavy, or tasting faintly of metal. Long harvest runs give people headaches. The Association calls it mana saturation and recommends rest days that nobody takes.
Magic beasts — E through C
The low grades are where most hunters spend an entire career, and the bestiary down there is reliably consistent.
E-rank. Goblins, mostly. Waist-high, cowardly alone, dangerous in a room of nine. Also dog-sized rats, cave bats, and slimes that ruin gear faster than they hurt anyone. An E-rank beast kills unawakened people easily and careless hunters occasionally.
D-rank. Kobolds, which have tactics: they set watches and use terrain. Wolves hunting in threes. Goblin shamans, where most hunters first meet something that can hurt them from across a room.
C-rank. Orcs: half again the height of a man, disciplined, organised into warbands under a chieftain. C is where the casualty curve stops being flat. Also lizardmen near water, and giant insects that are considerably worse than they sound.
Beasts respawn. Clear a floor of goblins today and there are goblins tomorrow — fewer, slower, drawn up from wherever the dungeon keeps them. That is the only reason harvesting works at all.
Magic beasts — B through S
Above C the bestiary stops being animals and becomes armies.
B-rank. High orcs and their shamans, armoured and drilled. Wyverns in open dungeons. Undead in ruins — the first beasts that do not tire, flee or care about pain. A B-gate is not survivable solo and the Association says so in writing.
A-rank. Knights: humanoid, plate-armoured, silent, and skilled in a way that reads as trained, not instinctive. Ice elves. Giants. An A-gate is a guild operation — a named commander, thirty to sixty hunters, and a written plan with contingencies.
S-rank. Dragons, in the ordinary sense of the word. Things that speak. Bosses visibly aware they are being fought by people, and interested. There have been four S-gates in this country in fifteen years, each remembered by the name of whoever stopped it.
Nothing above B has ever been successfully reasoned with. Several have tried to reason with hunters, which everyone agrees is worse.
Boss rooms
Every dungeon has exactly one boss and one boss room, and the whole place is built to funnel you into it.
You know it when you reach it. The ambient beasts thin and then stop entirely — nothing lives in the last stretch, which is why hunters call it the quiet room. The chamber is larger than the geometry outside should permit, and the boss is already awake and already watching the door.
Bosses do not pursue past their own threshold and do not heal. That single fact is what the entire economy rests on: you can stand in the doorway, look at the thing inside, and decide not to. Walk away and the dungeon stays open and productive. Walk in and win, and it is over within the hour.
A boss fights roughly one grade above its dungeon. An E-gate boss is a hobgoblin that will end a careless hunter. A D-gate boss is a real fight for a licensed team. It carries the best stone in the dungeon, and there is only ever one of it.
The Money
Essence Stones
Essence stones are the money. Every magic beast carries one, seated behind the sternum or wherever the equivalent sits, and cutting it out cleanly is the first thing any hunter learns to do well.
They are graded by the beast that carried them, and the price is nowhere near linear:
• E-rank, cloudy white — 40,000 to 90,000 won each. • D-rank, white — 250,000 to 600,000. • C-rank, pale yellow — 1,500,000 to 4,000,000. • B-rank, blue — 12,000,000 to 30,000,000. • A-rank, red — 60,000,000 to 150,000,000. • S-rank, purple — 400,000,000 and upward, sold by arrangement rather than over a counter.
A good day in an E-gate is thirty or forty stones. That is rent, roughly, and not a great deal more. A bad cut halves the value, and appraisers in the Arcade can tell at a glance who did the cutting.
Stones go to industry: mana batteries, alloy furnaces, surgical work, and a number of programmes nobody discusses. Demand has never once dipped in fifteen years.
Mana Crystals
Mana crystals are the other income, and the unglamorous one. They grow in seams in dungeon walls — blue, translucent, warm to the touch — and they must be cut out by hand, because no powered tool runs inside a gate.
So it is pickaxes. A fist-sized crystal fetches 120,000 to 200,000 won; a good seam holds forty or fifty; and a crew working one properly can out-earn the whole party that killed everything on that floor. The larger guilds run dedicated mining crews who never fight anything and are paid a flat day rate for it.
This is the real reason harvesting exists at all. Beasts respawn slowly and with diminishing returns, but a crystal seam simply sits there being worth money until somebody finishes it — and finishing a seam properly takes days you only have if the boss is still alive.
Crystals burn clean and burn for a decade. Roughly a fifth of the country's electricity now comes out of dungeon walls, which is a fact the Association would like people to sit with rather more often than they do.
Salvage — hide, core, claw
Beyond stones and crystals, most of a dead beast is worth something, and carrying capacity is the real limit on every run.
• Hide and chitin. Armour smiths pay well for intact orc hide and beetle shell. Damage from the killing blow cuts the price, so hunters learn early where to aim. • Cores and glands. Alchemical reagents for potions — small, light, high value per kilo, and the first thing an experienced hunter cuts out when the bag is nearly full. • Fang, claw, horn. Weapon components and the ornamental trade. • Weapons and armour off humanoid beasts. Usually junk. Occasionally not — every hunter has a story about a knife taken off a goblin that turned out to be worth six months' rent.
Nothing organic keeps for long once it is out of the dungeon; it degrades badly inside a day or two. There is a row of buyers immediately inside the Arcade entrance who exist entirely because of that deadline, and their prices say so.
The clearing bounty, and what is taken off it
Nothing a hunter earns ever arrives whole.
The clearing bounty is paid by the Association on a verified clear: 800,000 won for an E-gate, 4,000,000 won for a D, 22,000,000 won for a C, and negotiated individually above that. It goes to the claimant, who then splits it up however the party agreed beforehand — which is the source of roughly half of all hunter disputes.
Taken off the top: a claim fee of five per cent of the assessed haul, a mandatory contribution to the break-response fund, and income tax at the ordinary rate. Hunters are self-employed for tax purposes, and a certain number of them rediscover this every April. Guild hunters have it withheld at source. Independents do not, and the Association's reminder letters are famous.
Loot is declared at the claims desk on the way out. Under-declaring is common, easy, and the fastest way to lose a licence, because the appraiser's numbers and the desk's numbers end up on the same screen eventually.
Risk
When a gate breaks, and who pays for it
When a gate breaks, everything inside comes out into the street at once — and the street is usually a street. A market. A housing block. A school run.
The response is drilled. Sirens, then Association strike teams from the nearest branch, and then emergency guild contracts for anything the teams cannot hold. The military is authorised, slow, and performs badly against beasts. Most breaks are contained inside a few hours. E and D breaks kill in single figures. The two C-rank breaks Haeryong has had killed sixty-one people and four hundred and nine, and the second one is why the Ash Line exists.
Liability is where it becomes personal. Whoever holds the active claim on a broken gate is legally responsible. The fines are ruinous, the licence is gone permanently, and the names are published. A hunter who harvests to day six and misreads the seventh does not merely lose money — they lose the profession, and take a headline with their photograph on it.
That is why the day count is printed in red.
Awakening, and why hunters do not get stronger
This is the one fact the entire profession is organised around: a hunter's rank is fixed at the moment of awakening and does not meaningfully change afterwards.
You wake up one day different. The Association tests you inside the week — mana output under load, physical tolerance, reflex ceiling — and stamps a letter on your licence. That letter is what you are, for good. Training sharpens technique and conditioning; it does not move the ceiling. An E-rank who trains for a decade is a very skilled E-rank, and still an E-rank.
So an E-rank who starts winning fights they ought to be losing is not a success story. They are an anomaly, and anomalies get tested, filed and watched. Hunters who notice something strange about themselves keep extremely quiet about it for as long as they can manage.
There is one documented exception, called a second awakening: rare, unpredictable, roughly one hunter in several thousand, and it resets the ceiling upward. It cannot be induced — every serious attempt has produced corpses. Eleven confirmed cases exist in the national record and all eleven were witnessed by accident.
Dying in a gate
Hunters die at work, and they die often. The rate runs at roughly one in nine per year across all ranks, and it is concentrated hard at the bottom of the ladder.
If the party gets out, the body comes with them. That is not sentiment, it is contract: the death benefit does not pay out without a body. If the gate closes first there is no body, no grave, and no payout without a two-year declaration of death — and families have gone under waiting out those two years.
The Association benefit is 40,000,000 won, paid to a registered next of kin. Guilds pay considerably more, which is most of what a guild is actually selling to the people it recruits. Independents can buy private cover and almost none do, because the premiums are set by people who have read the same statistics the hunters have.
There is a wall in the lobby of Association Tower with the names on it. It was designed to hold twenty years of names. They have been adding panels since year six.
The cordon
A gate on a public street looks far less like an emergency than most people expect it to.
Police tape, steel barriers, an Association assessor with a hand sensor, and a queue of onlookers filming it over their shoulders. A generator that nobody will need. Someone selling coffee within the hour, because someone always is. Residents of the immediate block stand about in slippers, being interviewed by people with microphones.
The gate itself is quiet — a standing tear of blue, taller than a door, with its edges moving slowly the way heat moves over tarmac. It makes almost no sound at all. People expect a roar, and are always faintly disappointed by that.
The mood depends entirely on the letter chalked up on the assessor's board. At E it is a traffic inconvenience and the coffee sells well. At B the block is evacuated by nightfall and nobody films anything.
Reference
Price sheet
A reader's summary. Every figure here is also stated in the entry it belongs to; this page just puts them in one place. All figures in Korean won.
Essence stones, each • E-rank, cloudy white — 40,000 to 90,000 • D-rank, white — 250,000 to 600,000 • C-rank, pale yellow — 1,500,000 to 4,000,000 • B-rank, blue — 12,000,000 to 30,000,000 • A-rank, red — 60,000,000 to 150,000,000 • S-rank, purple — 400,000,000 upward, by arrangement
Mana crystals • Fist-sized — 120,000 to 200,000. A good seam holds forty or fifty.
Gear • Mana-tempered knife 2,200,000 · E-grade armour set 1,800,000 · D-grade set 9,000,000 • Low healing potion 600,000 · mid-grade 2,800,000 · antivenom 400,000 • Lamp, rope, pickaxe, cutting kit — under 200,000 for the lot
Other • Death benefit, Association — 40,000,000 to registered next of kin • Claim fee — five per cent of assessed haul • Hired healer, D-gate day rate — 1,500,000 plus a share • A cheap room in Sangwol — 600,000 a month
Hunter slang
The trade has its own vocabulary, and it uses it constantly.
• Going in — entering a gate. Nobody says raiding except on television. • A doorway — an E-gate. Dismissive. • Bleed — the mana leaking off a gate, and by extension its grade. "What's it bleeding?" • Stone-cutter — someone who hunts for essence stones rather than clearing gates. Mildly insulting and widely accurate. • Crawler — a dedicated miner. Not an insult; crawlers earn well and go home again. • Day six — cutting a harvest too fine. "He's on day six again." • Cargo — an unawakened person taken inside a gate. Illegal, and common enough to need a word for it. • Papered — licensed. An unpapered hunter is one working outside the law. • The wall — the memorial in Association Tower. "His name's on the wall" needs no elaboration. • The quiet room — a boss room, because the ambient beasts stop.