WAV 02

chapter 02

The world I originally lived in was pure chaos.

Gates.

Massive circular dimensional portals.

One day, without warning, they began appearing all across the globe, bringing with them dense black fog and endless disasters.

Earthquakes, sinkholes, tidal waves, landslides—natural disasters became commonplace.

People exposed to the black fog suffered from mysterious pain and eventually went insane.

In the end, their entire bodies rotted away and they died.

And that wasn’t all. After a certain amount of time passed, grotesque monsters would start pouring out from inside the Gates.

Humanity died helplessly before those incomprehensible portals.

Every day, every media outlet loudly proclaimed that the end of the world had arrived.

But they say even when the sky falls, there’s always a way out.

Some people survived exposure to the black fog.

After enduring long fevers and waking up, they awakened special supernatural abilities.

They could manipulate water and fire, run as fast as missiles, display monstrous physical strength…

Those people were capable of fighting against the horrific monsters emerging from the Gates.

The ordinary humans who survived revered them and called them “Awakeners.”

Human society quickly split into two classes.

Naturally, the Awakeners became the privileged ruling class.

Ordinary citizens became the ruled class, living their lives grateful to the Awakeners who protected them.

Unfortunately, I belonged to neither side.

I was stuck in an awkward position, like an abandoned stray.

The only daughter of the Supreme Commander, discarded early in life simply because I failed to awaken.

Meanwhile, my father gained public trust by adopting orphaned young Awakeners who had lost their parents.

In a chaotic world where major incidents occurred daily, nobody really cared how the neglected daughter survived.

“Me? I lived just fine.”

I resented my dead mother, wondering why I alone hadn’t awakened.

I begged my father to pay attention to me.

And when those so-called brothers—who didn’t share a single drop of blood with me—beat me up, I even wished to die.

Still, compared to children who lost their parents overnight because of the Gates, I suppose I had it better.

I studied hard, escaped that dysfunctional household, and successfully cut ties with those people.

I earned an enviable academic background and landed a respectable job.

…And I even obtained a trump card to screw over my bastard biological father.

My life wasn’t perfect, but it was satisfying enough.

<How to Save the Abandoned World>

If not for that novel.

I came across the book completely by chance.

“How to Save the Abandoned World? What a title…”

After cleansing the cover during purification work, I clicked my tongue.

They said it was the first recovered document ever found inside a Gate.

‘But the title sounds like some cheap light novel.’

Normally, items discovered inside Gates were classified military secrets and impossible to take out.

The reason this book ended up in my hands was because it had been contaminated by the black fog, making its contents unreadable.

So a special Awakened task force had entrusted our research institute with purifying it.

It was obvious they wanted to test cure-1, the black fog purification substance I was developing.

“I wish it actually contained a way to save the world like the title says…”

Flexing my aching hands after the long purification process, I opened the book.

I didn’t really need to read it myself, but curiosity got the better of me.

cure-1, currently undergoing clinical trials, was still incomplete.

If the book happened to contain anything useful, it would be a jackpot.

But—

“You’ve got to be kidding me?!”

Not even halfway through, I realized the whole thing had been a waste of time.

The title should’ve tipped me off. Since it was found inside a Gate, I’d expected some revolutionary solution or hidden secret…

But it was just a romance fantasy novel!

“Ha… What kind of lunatic carries a romance novel into a Gate mission?”

Someone had definitely dropped it and pretended not to know anything out of embarrassment.

Otherwise, there was no way a book like this could’ve been found inside a Gate.

<How to Save the Abandoned World> was the success story of the heroine, Luellyn, who became separated from her family due to an accident in childhood, overcame countless hardships, awakened her powers, and eventually saved the world.

Maybe because the world had become such a mess, everyone was obsessed with powerful and attractive Awakeners.

Fanfiction-style novels about them started pouring out everywhere, eventually becoming a whole genre of popular culture.

“Seriously. Medieval fantasy is the trend now too?”

Aside from the Western fantasy setting, this novel followed the same formula.

Gates appeared, the world stood on the brink of destruction, and handsome heroes emerged to save it.

The male leads were especially diverse.

A glamorous lineup of men with different abilities and backgrounds.

‘What do they call this these days? A reverse harem?’

The only somewhat unique aspect was the heroine’s ability.

“A Purifier…”

The reason I forced myself to keep reading instead of throwing the book away the moment I realized there were four male lead candidates…

…was because of the heroine’s power to purify the “miasma,” the black fog.

Among all the known awakened abilities discovered so far, nothing like “purification” existed.

Even Awakeners, who were supposedly more resistant to the black fog, eventually lost their minds and died after prolonged exposure.

People called it Awakener Rampage, and the damage it caused rivaled that of an actual Gate outbreak.

That was why countries all over the world were desperate to find a way to eliminate the black fog.

And I was one of the few people producing meaningful results in that fierce competition.

So out of all possible abilities, the heroine just happened to possess purification powers?

“This smells suspicious.”

At the moment, I was already receiving plenty of threats and interference from various organizations.

People constantly tried sneaking in to steal samples or dig into my background.

I’d even received threats from weird cultists demanding I stop my research immediately.

And when an article came out claiming cure-1 was a complete scam and that I was conning investors, it stressed me out like crazy.

“Well… if this is some kind of provocation saying my claims are basically fiction too… then maybe I’m just being paranoid.”

Yeah. Surely not.

Eyeing the book suspiciously, I kept reading anyway.

In the end, the heroine awakened as a Purifier, cleansed the Gate-infested regions, and saved the world.

She also purified the miasma consuming the male leads’ bodies, romance blossomed, and—

As a bonus, she became the emperor’s adopted daughter and rose in status.

“…How predictable.”

Normally, as a reader, watching the protagonist succeed should feel satisfying.

But strangely enough, what I felt wasn’t joy.

It was irritation.

Because the heroine’s success and love story were built on the death of a villainess.

Lady Edith Blake was a painfully cliché villainess.

Born the only daughter of a ducal family that had produced Awakeners for generations, yet the only one who failed to awaken and was consequently neglected.

Starved for affection, she couldn’t stand everyone’s attention shifting toward the newly arrived Luellyn.

After tormenting the heroine and committing countless acts of cruelty, Edith was ultimately abandoned by everyone and died miserably.

The male leads, who had grown up with her since childhood, felt guilt and shock over her death.

And the heroine comforted their exhausted hearts, deepening their relationships with them.

Objectively speaking, the villainess’s death was karmic justice.

And yet…

“Someone definitely pulled some shady crap here. Who was it? Myungha Pharmaceuticals? Dongkang Research Institute? Those bastards actually dug into my past?”

No matter how I thought about it, this wasn’t paranoia.

The villainess’s background was way too similar to mine!

Glaring at the book, I started listing all the places capable of pulling something like this.

They must have uncovered the fact that I was the Supreme Commander’s daughter who got discarded for failing to awaken.

If their goal was to make the government and military distrust me, then this was an incredibly creative and malicious method.

“This is seriously too much. Is lacking powers really such a crime? Why the hell does the girl have to die for it?”

So what if an affection-starved kid acted out a little? They branded her a villainess and killed her off.

And because she lacked powers, the duke removed her from succession and adopted the son of a dead retainer instead.

That guy was one of the male lead candidates too.

“This part pisses me off because it’s similar too. Who even wrote this thing? They didn’t even bother putting the author’s name, damn it.”

Before I knew it, I’d completely immersed myself in Edith’s perspective and started feeling wronged on her behalf.

‘Why only emphasize the villain from the heroine’s perspective? Write the villain from the villain’s perspective too!’

If Edith was the heroine’s villain, then to Edith, the real villains were the duke and the male leads.

Likewise, the villains in my life were my biological father and the bastards he added to the family registry.

Those people ruined my peaceful life, and the moment I achieved something in my research, they shamelessly contacted me talking about “family.”

If Edith—or Egypt, whatever her name was—had cut ties early like I did and built her own success, she probably would’ve been drowned in unwanted attention too.

In that sense, the fact she kept begging for affection until the very end before dying made her look pitiful and foolish.

‘What’s so important about powers anyway?’

Who cares about family members who don’t love you?

Who cares about other people?

With the status of a duke’s daughter, couldn’t she have lived perfectly well on her own?

I was just thinking that if it were me, I’d spit in the faces of the bastards who abandoned ordinary civilians during emergencies—

When I suddenly snapped back to reality.

“Crap. It’s already 4 a.m.?!”

People called me a ghost haunting the research institute, but even I preferred sleeping in a proper bed when I wasn’t busy.

Checking the time, I hurriedly closed the book and packed my things.

The moment I reached my quarters, I washed up and collapsed into bed.

‘I’m exhausted…’

Maybe that ridiculous novel had unexpectedly stirred up old trauma.

Or maybe I’d spent so long pretending to be an ordinary person to avoid my father’s attention that I failed to recognize the similarities sooner.

As I drifted into a deep sleep, I completely overlooked the most important detail in that unsettling book.

Purifier.

The trump card I had secretly hidden all this time to one day screw over my father.

The fact that the ability I awakened shortly after leaving that house…

…was exactly the same as the heroine’s.

And without realizing what kind of hell that fact was about to bring me.