A World Where You All Are The Villains - Chapter 2.1
The world I originally lived in was chaos itself.
Gates.
Massive, circular dimensional doors.
One day, without warning or sound, they appeared all over the world, accompanied by thick, dark black mist, bringing with them all manner of calamity.
Earthquakes, sinkholes, tsunamis, landslides—natural disasters like these became commonplace.
People exposed to the black mist suffered from inexplicable pain and went insane, rampaging uncontrollably.
Eventually, their entire bodies would rot away, leading to death.
As if that weren’t enough, after a certain amount of time, monsters with maddening appearances would pour out from inside the Gate.
In the face of these mysterious Gates, humanity was helpless and died in droves.
Every day, the media raced to announce that the end of the world had come.
But as the saying goes, even when the sky falls, there’s always a hole to escape through.
Some people survived exposure to the black mist.
After a long, feverish illness, those who awakened gained special abilities.
They could emit water or fire, run as fast as missiles, or display superhuman grip strength, and so on……
They were able to go head-to-head with the grotesque monsters pouring out of the Gates.
Ordinary humans who survived began to revere these people, calling them ‘Awakened’.
Human society quickly split into two distinct classes.
Naturally, the Awakened became the privileged and ruling class.
Ordinary citizens, who became the ruled class by default, simply lived gratefully under the protection of the Awakened.
Unfortunately, I was in an awkward position—neither a protector nor someone being protected, but more like a duck egg on a riverbank, left out and stranded.
As the only daughter of the Supreme Commander, I was abandoned and neglected from an early age, simply because I didn’t awaken.
Meanwhile, my father earned people’s trust by adopting young Awakened children who had lost their parents……
In the midst of a world plunged into chaos, where major incidents happened every day, no one really cared how the abandoned daughter managed to survive.
‘Me? I did just fine.’
There were times I resented my late mother, wondering why I was the only one who couldn’t awaken.
I even begged my father for a little attention.
There were times I wanted to die, being beaten up by those so-called siblings who didn’t share a drop of blood with me.
But at least, compared to orphans who lost their parents to the Gates in an instant, I lived pretty well.
I studied hard, escaped from that train wreck of a family, and managed to cut ties with those people.
I had academic credentials to be proud of, landed a decent job……
And I even had one card up my sleeve to get back at my damn father.
It wasn’t perfect, but they were days I was more or less satisfied with.
< How to Save a Forsaken World >
If only it hadn’t been for that novel.
I came across that book by pure chance.
“How to Save a Forsaken World? What a title……”
When I saw that cover after my purification work, I clicked my tongue.
They said it was the first document ever recovered from inside a Gate.
‘Sounds just like the title of a light novel.’
Normally, any item retrieved from inside a Gate is classified as military confidential and can’t be taken out.
But the reason this book was in my hands was because it had been contaminated by the black mist, making its contents unreadable.
So, the special task force made up of Awakened had entrusted our lab with its purification.
No doubt, they wanted to test ‘cure-1’, the black mist purification agent I was developing.
“If only it really had a way to save the world written in it, just like the title……”
Flexing my hands, sore from the purification work, I opened the book.
There was no real reason I had to read it myself, but I did anyway, just in case.
The cure-1 currently in clinical trials was still incomplete.
But if there was anything in the book that could help, that would be a jackpot.
However.
“Are you kidding me?!”
Not even halfway through, I realized it was pointless.
The title, the fact it was found inside a Gate—I’d thought there might be some kind of amazing solution……
But it turned out to be just a romance fantasy novel!
“Ha…… Who the hell brings a novel on a Gate mission?”
It must’ve been dropped by someone and then left behind out of embarrassment.
Otherwise, there’s no way this book could have actually been found inside a Gate.
<How to Save a Forsaken World> was the story of the protagonist, Llewellyn, who, after losing her family in an accident as a child, overcomes hardships, awakens, and ends up saving the world.
Maybe it was because the world had become such a mess, but everyone was obsessed with strong, charismatic Awakened.
Fan fiction about them began to flood in, and before anyone realized it, this became mainstream popular culture.
“Seriously? Now even medieval settings are trendy?”
In any case, except for its Western background, <How to Save a Forsaken World> was no different.
Gates appear, and heroic protagonists rise to save a world on the verge of collapse.
Even the male characters in the book were all over the place.
A dazzling lineup of male leads, each with different abilities and specs!
‘These days, they call it a reverse harem, right?’
The only somewhat unique point was the protagonist’s ability.
“A Purifier, huh……”
The reason I ended up slogging through half of a book I would’ve tossed aside the moment I realized there were four male lead candidates.
It was because of the female lead’s ability to purify the ‘miasma’, as the black mist was called in the novel.
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