Chapter 42

With a knight winding up the finishing strike, Jinwoo is gripped by déjà vu that recalls his brush with death in the Double Dungeon and his ordeal at the Cartenon Temple, where the System once intervened. His past self murmurs that they do not want him dead just yet and fades with a promise to return. In that instant his forgotten Daily Quest lapses and he is whisked away to the Penalty Zone, landing in a boundless desert under a scorching sun and blood-red clouds, left to wonder whether luck or the System spared him.

Rather than agonize over it, Jinwoo taps the Store and buys Mana potions to ease his peak exhaustion, though he finds Health potions cannot mend his worst injuries. As he debates whether to heal naturally or through leveling, six massive Desert Centipedes burst from the sand. Dangerous though they are, they no longer frighten him at his current level. Recalling his other self's parting words, he resolves to grow stronger and embraces the pain as a means to that end, declaring that anything short of killing him will only toughen him up. He tears into the centipedes, sending several flying, and steels himself to finish off the rest with a fierce battle cry.

This Job Change Arc chapter unfolds across both the Job Change Quest Dungeon and the Penalty Zone, and was adapted as part of Episode 12. It introduces the giant desert centipedes as recurring Penalty Zone foes and reinforces Jinwoo's growth-through-suffering mindset. The chapter is collected in Volume 3.