An underground room crawling with mold came into view.

It didn’t smell, but just looking at it made you feel dirty.

A textbook abandoned basement storeroom.

And there was Bushkov Vladimir Dmitrievich, the one who’d summoned me, staring at me in a fluster.

What kind of bum… is this!

He might be an evil god, but a god is a god.

Since he was an evil god, I hadn’t expected much.

Thick gold chains and bracelets slathered all over him, a face tattoo stitched in with a needle—I could’ve understood all of that.

But the evil god in front of my eyes was… the king of the beggars.

He looked like he’d stolen his clothes out of a textile recycling bin.

His leather coat was patched together piece by piece.

It was such a mess that a homeless man wouldn’t wear it if you gave it to him.

The silhouette that had looked so cool in the dark was a lie, too.

His hair was matted, and his blue eyes trembled, full of fear.

His eyes were hollow and his skin was bony, as if he hadn’t eaten in a month; you couldn’t tell if he was a god or a refugee.

I hadn’t noticed while he was sitting on the rickety old chair, but he was short, too.

And…

“Kid—how old are you, if I may ask?”

He looked young.

Much younger than me, in fact.

“I-I am a god!”

“Most humans get the chance to become gods when they die. Pass!”

“The punishment of the gods will fall upon you!”

Ooh, talking back.

“I’ve already died once. Pass!”

“…”

Vladimir just blinked.

The evil god who’d first put on that damn tough-guy act and scared me stiff was nowhere to be seen.

I strode toward the self-proclaimed evil god.

“Don’t come… near me, please!”

Vladimir was terrified.

With my grin, I must have looked more like an evil god than he did.

He’d switched straight to polite speech.

“What’s with you? Is someone hitting you? How old were you when you died? You’re a rookie, aren’t you?”

I stopped right in front of Vladimir.

Grin.

I smiled more wickedly than the evil god.

It suited me a little too well.

“How old?”

I looked Vladimir straight in the eye and asked again.

“Eigh… teen.”

“What? Eighteen?”

Whoa. A kid that young could become a god? That was a shock.

“The gods of darkness don’t have an age limit?”

“No… I guess not.”

“When did you die?”

“A month ago.”

“A month? You’re a total newbie.”

“Yes.”

The ink wasn’t even dry on his divine registration, and this kid had dared to threaten me.

I wanted to make sure he knew I wasn’t a nice big brother.

“What did you do wrong to end up here? Kill someone?”

I casually walked over to where the kid had been sitting.

He must have been a well-mannered evil god, because he sprang up from the chair.

I sat down in it.

Host and guest had completely switched places.

“No. I can’t even kill an ant.”

Vladimir bowed his head.

Even I could see he was the kind of kid who’d never break a law.

“Then why?”

“Because of me… a lot of people got hurt, I think. When I was a hacker with the FSB, I hacked other people’s accounts, and I stole lists of intelligence agents and passed them on a lot. So a lot of dark karma points piled up.”

“Yeah? You did a lot of bad stuff.”

“I’m sorry.”

Vladimir stood there with his head bowed.

He was really short for a Russian.

About 170 centimeters, at a glance.

“No need to apologize.”

It wasn’t me he owed an apology to.

Even if you don’t hurt anyone directly while you’re alive, it seems you get punished like this.

Voice-phishing gang members would definitely end up like this someday.

The people who prey on those struggling at the very bottom are the worst of the worst.

The ones who con people out of hospital bills, tuition and loan money.

Hell’s too good for them.

But for an evil god, Vladimir was way too meek.

“Wouldn’t you be better off going to hell?”

“They say not just anyone gets into hell.”

“Who says?”

“I don’t know. I just died, and someone told me that.”

“How did you die?”

“I-I opened the president’s secret account because I was bored, and they caught me.”

“The president? Uncle Putin’s?”

“Yes.”

Whoa! This kid had guts.

He’d opened his own big boss’s account; the big brown bear chief wouldn’t have let that slide.

“Did you skim some?”

“…A little.”

“How much?”

“Only five hundred million dollars.”

This little shit… was dangerous.

Five hundred million dollars was only.

“That’s not pocket change. That guy works his ass off to scrape that together.”

“He’s got a slush fund of over two hundred billion dollars. He’s so petty.”

“R-right, he’s petty. That guy.”

In 2008, Russia’s foreign exchange reserves are about four hundred billion dollars.

About half of that is Uncle Putin’s emergency stash.

“How’d you get caught? You’re a hacker, and you couldn’t even hide that?”

“…A friend in the same unit ratted me out. Turned out he was… a spy the FSB planted. Jerk. I’d put a hundred million dollars in an overseas account for him, too.”

Vladimir sure was a loyal friend.

He’d sent his friend a hundred million dollars for pocket money.

He was far more generous than me.

“What’d you do with that money? I don’t think they’d just kill a talent like you.”

“I invested in futures. It went bust.”

“What? Futures investment?”

“I put everything into Canadian dollar FX margin, and some bastard closed out his position right before I sold. So I got stuck holding the bag, and the three billion dollars I’d squirreled away got sucked dry.”

“D-didn’t you hack it?”

“It’s real-time trading, so you can’t hack it. If I’d had the time, I would’ve liked to try…”

“!!!”

Suddenly it hit me like a blow to the head.

The Canadian-dollar-linked FX margin I’d been happily sucking the honey out of.

Some of that money must have been this kid’s rainy-day fund.

“Th-that must’ve been recent, huh?”

I felt a stab of guilt as I asked.

It felt like I’d sucked up all the money this kid had risked his life for.

“Not long ago. I was short on money, so I hit the president’s account again and got caught. After I died, I found out that intelligence agents from other countries were really mad at me too. I’d cleaned out a lot of their secret accounts, too.”

“Yeah… I see.”

This kid had every qualification to be an evil god.

He hadn’t just robbed Uncle Putin’s account—he’d picked other countries’ agents’ pockets too.

He’d been sacrificed as the price.

A big deal among the intelligence agencies of several countries to kill one dangerous kid.

“What’s with the cigar and the lighter? They yours?”

I changed the subject.

“My father’s. They asked what I wanted as a perk for becoming an evil god, so I picked these.”

Bringing his father’s keepsakes to the gods’ world—he was an unusual kid.

An old Zippo lighter and a few cigars sat on the desk.

Items full of memories, it seemed.

“And your father?”

“…He died when I was four. He was a nuclear physics professor… he was assassinated by some unknown assassination group. My mom was in the car with him, too, at the time…”

Poor kid.

“Wh-where’d you grow up?”

“A state-run nursery. I got rated gifted there and started specialized training at seven.”

“Ah!”

His family must have been incredibly smart.

The father a nuclear physicist, the son a genius hacker.

“You smoke?”

“No.”

“Then why were you smoking a minute ago?”

“The guys at the FSB told me the first rule of torture is to make someone feel terror in the dark. So I even smoked to look threatening, but…”

He cut himself off.

Nice things they’d taught a kid.

“You’re good at programming, right?”

With the background check done, I got down to business.

The kid had talked about his past without any feeling at all.

He’d lost his parents and been raised like a machine.

Even so, the fact that he’d held on to his father’s keepsakes showed he had a good heart.

But even good-hearted people become evil gods.

“Yes! Developing special algorithms and doing all kinds of programming is my hobby. I’ve mastered every development tool, too. I even built a few myself. I wrote all the firewalls for Russia’s important agencies. Hehe.”

The kid laughed brightly, like a boy.

He really seemed to be a genius.

By taking the life of a kid like this, Russia had proven itself a damn fool.

Or maybe they’d been scared.

A kid who’d built the firewalls for Russia’s government agencies could do anything he set his mind to.

A kid who’d rob even the president’s piggy bank was, by any measure, a bomb.

I humbled myself.

Even before I regressed and got my abilities, I’d lived in the same world as monsters like him.

The world is wide, and there are just as many crazy-talented people in it.

Even now, geniuses like Vladimir are at work somewhere.

“Vladimir.”

“Yes…”

“I’ll just call you Mir, for short.”

“Whatever you like.”

The kid nodded meekly.

“Have you eaten?”

“…I didn’t have any points, so I’ve been starving.”

“Aren’t there other gods out there?”

“It’s really scary here! If you look weak, you get dragged off and your karma points get taken. If you borrow from a loan shark, they say you’re forced to beg until your soul melts away.”

“I-isn’t this the gods’ world?”

“It’s where the evil gods live. Whoever’s strongest is the boss.”

“I see…”

Just thinking about it made me shudder.

If I’d harbored evil thoughts after regressing and made my first contract with evil gods, my life would’ve been done for.

The good gods at least trade fairly.

But the evil gods, from the look of it, start by beating you up.

“How do you earn dark karma points?”

“You help humans who want to use the power of darkness through a god’s abilities.”

“Then why haven’t you earned any? Someone like you could pull off one big score, I’d think.”

The world is full of hackers.

Nobody knew how much money they stole every day.

“My conscience bothers me. That’s what got me killed, and doing it again doesn’t sit right. So I starved and waited. For a good human to call me.”

There couldn’t be many white-hat hackers.

But the problem was that Vladimir was an evil god.

Common sense said no white-hat hacker would pay dark karma as a deposit to get Vladimir.

Except for a special human like me.

“What were you going to use my karma points for? Don’t tell me you wanted to become an even bigger evil god?”

This was the crucial moment.

I looked Vladimir straight in the eye.

“Hyung… please give me some points!”

The kid suddenly dropped to his knees.

He slammed his head on the floor.

And then…

“Sob, hyung! I hate this hellish place! Use the points to make me a good god! Hyuuuuung! Please, save me!!!”

What kind of nonsense is this now!

A moment I couldn’t make sense of.

— Would you like to exchange the evil god’s dark karma points for good karma points?

An unfamiliar voice rang in my ear.

(End of Chapter 120)