Costan was flabbergasted. He put in considerable efforts to make that planet a better place and they thanked him with an apocalypse, ungrateful bastards. Then the gods of the place wanting to blame him for everything, the gall. They pawned him off on some other god that needed help with some snowmaggedon type icepocolypse.

This God was nice, straight forward, and didn't bother with ambiguous terminology. They wanted a healthy and sustainable human population to survive and have the knowledge and skills to carry on through and after the Earth freezing over for about a thousand years. The cold would be worse for the first two decades, gradually clearing over time, and there was a specific time that it would begin.

A supervolcanic eruption would happen at exactly 9:15 AM Tuesday day, the seventh of May, 2024 in the Yellowstone National Parklands of American. It wouldn't have the initial damage output expected by geologists due to an illegal drilling operation bleeding off pressure into a large oil pocket to make the oil come up faster. God seemed kind of miffed that it was going to go off later and with less bang, but also impressed at the sheer audacious greed that altered his plans by pure accident.

Costan pointed out that Murphy was hiding behind a nearby pillar and snickering. A quick who's Murphy and a check behind said pillar led to the kind of wacky, over the top drama scenario that belongs to Latino Soap Operas. Costan called them out on it because nobody is genuinely that dramatic about things, like anything.

There is no point in any of his lives when he, or anyone he knew of, was that dramatic. Even the time that an immortal dragon pretended to die wasn't half as dramatic and most of the people who saw it called the dragon out for pretending. The gods in front of Costan lied about never having seen each other before, but he let it go with "I know you are both lying, but I don't care."

Murphy was a drama queen about it, but God had questions to answer. Costan was going to get reincarnated in the body of an orphaned human in South Korea. He would be just young enough to dodge the required service at the beginning of the heavy snow.

It would take a full month for flatulent volcano to cause climate changes and Costan was expected to find a way to survive, create shelter for a few thousand people, secure food, warmth, water, and medicine for said people before the freeze. He had a big job to do, but he had all of the stuff from all the other times. God "gave" him some supposed "super skills" to help. Costan wasn't to thrilled about another building system and becoming a god tier teacher.

Grand, he was prospect to be the perfect dad with childcare, teaching, building, farming, and so many other "god-like" skills. Costan struggled to care. He was so tired of it all, everything he ever worked towards was either destroyed or taken from him. He fared the same in every avenue of life, as soon as things were in order or he started enjoying himself, everything went wrong. Perhaps it was depression that instilled the lack there of shits to give despite being able to assail the gods.

So he started his new tasks in the battered and slightly burnt body of a twelve year old. The misfortune ran strong with this body, from the starting conditions to the ill-fated name of Jin Suk. He scavenged around the burnt house of his parents for anything useful, but only found chard scrap metal bits and Jin Suk's parents remains.

He was tempted to let the depression win, but then remembered that he could do just about anything. He built a tomb and laid the parents to rest before finally putting up a tent and getting out of the rain. Costan went through Jin's memories as he cleaned himself up and treated the injuries.

Everything but the burns were inflicted intentionally by the robbers that killed Jin's parents. The fire was set intentionally to cover their tracks, but Costan wasn't having that. God had the right plan to just restart everything, but there was plenty of time and space for revenge. There was even more time and space for someone that could break time and space, so long as it wasn't to bring someone back from the dead.

He went on to temporarily stop time, getting the chance to repay the favor of the robbers. He killed them and robbed them blind. He repeated this for everyone that they knew, their bosses, friends, family, cohorts, and companions. They had a fling with a hooker? Boom, dead hooker and pimp, sans valuables.

You don't mess with someone that can look, hear, and act across space time. Nobody responded to his house burning until two days later, but Jin had cleaned up the debris and rebuilt it by dawn. He was flush with cash and jewelry, but he didn't need it. The police showed up about the reported structure fire, but Jin convinced them to leave because "there is no fire here."

They were not about to question a beaten up twelve year old that was in a house that was reported as "fallen down with fire". It was apparent that the house was standing and had no signs of damage on the outside, or to the room that they could see from the door. They asked to look around outside and Jin permitted it. They found nothing, not even scorched grass.

Costan enjoyed watching them banging on the neighbor's door through Jin's eyes. It was evident that she called them after the fire went out. The old bitch that asked the goons to get rid of his family wouldn't be answering the door for anyone ever again. Not even her close relatives would be answering their doors. Everyone remotely involved was humanely dispatched via fusion spear through the skull, he was not some crude and cruel barbarian.

He had reached back in time and set the house up exactly how it had been before the incident, furniture and all. The documents that he stole back were very important, he still had to keep a roof over his head and go to school. He couldn't stand out too much for good or bad because they might try to contact his dead parents and then one of his distant and disliked family members would try and sell the house. He could not permit such things to happen.

He started his covert training. He would make medicine that sped up recovery by three hundred times and absolutely destroy himself every day. He had the food supply to support it, so he would go from skinny weakling to fighting fit, even if it killed him. He even dipped into some of the whakier methods of training like leveling and cultivation.

Jin payed bills, trained, and went to school. He got a couple of part time jobs to occlude his lack of parental supervision. Living in a large town had its perks, farmers don't care that you are young when the work is safe and you do a good job.

Everyone did have a hint of caution, like a small aura, the town had gotten too peaceful. It put everyone on edge, but only slightly. Jin thought back and double checked that he disposed of all the bodies and evidence, because he couldn't place what had everyone anxious. Then he asked one of the farmers.

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The place was listed as a city, but it was just big enough population wise for the classification before Costan became Jin and cleaned some things up. The farmer didn't miss any words and told Jin the truth about how almost all the trouble makers disappeared and nobody had seen them for a month. Jin did not take that into account, the expression of hopeless confusion sold the farmer on him not getting out much in the past.

The "city" was just big enough for people to not know everyone unless they went way out of their way to do so. It was also the reason he got away with telling Jin's father's boss that he went to work overseas for some weird company with shifty people. Nobody checked, not even when he told them that his mother went to Seoul for a few months.

Time went on, he started gardening on his parents small plot behind the house. Some people started to bully him because "your parents left you". Then there was another mass disappearance, but only in a small section of Seoul. Again it was trouble makers, but also all of the ATMs were robbed. Jin did nothing to the bullies except tell the teacher.

The teacher did nothing. The bullying came to an apex one afternoon as Jin cut through the park on his way home. All of the bullies were there and they tried something, but it was cut short when one boy hurt his hand. Jin's abdominal muscles were like iron and the improper punching form didn't help the kid. Jin only flexed afterwards, which tore his uniform to ribbons like some anime protagonist. The bully really needed to train or give up.

A detective watched the whole thing go down and only took notes. Jin knew he was there, and didn't care so long as they did not interfere with his life. The government was getting nosey, a bunch of people and money disappeared, robberies, and they were chasing down every clue that they could find.

They probably thought it strange that Jin's parents were out of town for a long time with no sitter or house keeper, or that Jin worked many jobs while managing school and house work, or the laundry list of "oddities" about him. He had a lot of "odd" things around him, but that was only awaiting the right person. Such a person "happened" into his life not too long afterwards.

A youthful adult female, pretending to be concerned with his well being, showed up with a request to speak with his parents. This was not possible due to them being dead. He winged it with some excuses that should not have worked. He was the multidimensional con man, so they did work. The least likely factual statements he made would be perceived as the most factual and visaversa.

She ended up taking care of guardian duties that were not doable by Jin while keeping a close eye on him and telling everything to the other detectives. It worked massively in his favor. She didn't get too involved, even when a private courier dropped off a large box of money, marked "money, keep out of public view". She noted the return address "Four Peaks Mining [REDACTED] Arkansas U.S.A.".

Jin slowly built a fortress underground beneath the failed construction site. It was supposed to be a massive luxury shopping center, but it was being built by and at the behest of crooks. Jin got the property rights to the site thanks to some nice online trading. The corporation responsible for the property was going under in a massive way and everyone was jumping ship before it was too late.

He got almost full interest in the company and had to make serious moves to keep it floating. He managed to start turning profits within a year on top of his success on the markets. Jin did hit a snag when the bank didn't believe his identity. Two nites in jail was not pleasant, but everything was sorted out and the bank apologized. The apology did not stop Jin from moving his money to a different bank.

The lady cop, Kwan maybe, the one that was pretending to care about Jin, was still doing her thing. She had a lot more information to go through than she could handle and some more people from the different agencies had to be inserted into the various aspects of Jin's life. The permits for the luxury shopping center were discarded and new ones were obtained for a bigger, swankier, and longer lasting hyper luxury tower mall hotel hybrid monstrosity with a subway station and a lot of other things.

The government was getting tired of running down cold leads and dead end clues. Jin's parents had both seemingly fled the country and left him there. The long list of people what had bad relations with them had been disappeared.

These two facts led the government to suspect something akin to a foreign government agency acting in secret or a terrorist organization being behind it all. The working theories were that either Jin had nothing to do with it and no knowledge of it, or they purposely left him as a plant or sleeper cell. They chose to act within the guidelines of the first theory until proof of the second could be uncovered, with close supervision because nobody is just that good at business.

Every action, trade, business deal, and employee was investigated, but it turned up no evidence of malicious or insidious plans. Jin didn't even have foreign contacts or investors. The government ramped things up even more, resulting in a lawsuit when a mirror that had been tampered with to hide a video recorder fell on Jin. They had cut away most of the fasteners and didn't replace any of them. The lawsuit was for property damage and minor lacerative injury, not the blatant spying.

Eventually, the government throttled back with the investigating. Jin took every moment to troll them, nothing major. It was mostly just magic "tricks" and dumb stuff. They tried to get him committed because they had a recording of him setting himself on fire and just standing there ablaze. It was an illusion and their concerns went nowhere.

Everything else went smoothly, until the volcano didn't go off. Everything was ready for the apocalypse, but it didn't happen. Things went way off the rails from what God had planned, cough Murphy cough cough. The EPA found out about the drilling, but took an ass backwards route to something that actually helped the environment and Trump had been reelected in 2020.

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine spiralled out of control and caused knee jerk reactions. America was involved, China backed the North Koreans in invading South Korea so that the Chinese could take Taiwan. It was a mess and a half, the one drilling operation in Yellowstone expanded to multiple. Jin ended up being part of the military and fighting against the NKA and Chinese.

It was a shit show. The enemy was deficient in almost every way, or at least the ones he fought seemed to be. Then came an order to surrender, from the guy only two ranks above Jin. The order was ignored because Jin was about to produce a lack there of people to surrender to and someone further up had ordered everyone not to surrender for any reason. Jin did his thing and kept at it until he radioed back from Pyongyang about the city capture. He'd nabbed the leadership along the way.

He was a big damn hero, but then they stripped him of that for disobeying an order and desertion. His argument of "nobody to surrender to" and "I didn't desert, I advanced" got him a lot of leniency. He still ended up as a random beggar, but he had options.

He applied for citizenship within the U.S.A., he was considered. It ultimately fell to Jin applying to the U.S.M.C. via the Japanese U.S. naval base, where they didn't want to take him until he said "my last CO gave an order to surrender when victory was but a word away". Then he was off to a Marine boot camp and nobody expected him to speak perfect English.

They did a full debrief with Jin Suk and almost had to threaten Korean with becoming fully neutral with them to get his full documentation. Everything matched up, so it came down to why he was stripped of everything. It was conflicting orders, guy on top said no surrender, guy near bottom said surrender, and Jin said surrender to my adamantine balls as he rolled North Korea up like a towel. Not even a carpet or even a wet towel, he won hearts and minds by building roads and digging wells and shit while pushing their shit in over the two days that he was AWOL.

America said YES. Uncle Sam wanted the economical genius version of Rambo. Jin did eight years with the US Marine Corps and solved some things for the the country, but the apocalypse was still not happening. Korea eventually realized its monumental screw up, way too late.

Then God smote him and sent him back in time. The goal was to keep everything on track. It was fine by Costan, he had already hoarded everything he could buy, take, or pry up, putting it all away in yet another space. He refused to be without good food.