Han Yoojin/Synopsis

Childhood
Han Yoojin was born five years before his younger brother Han Yoohyun. Since childhood, he'd dreamed of being a lazy, rich bum. As a high school student, he used to be quite good at English.

The Han parents died early due to unspecified causes, and Han Yoojin had to drop out of high school to support his younger brother, eventually achieving a GED to complete his education. As far back as his early 20s, he spent more time with (in his words) "factory ahjussis" than he did with people his own age, feeling out of place in locations popular with his own age group. He would sometimes come home drunk. By age 25, he'd completed military service.

When Han Yoohyun Awakened, he became a professional Hunter and cut contact with Han Yoojin. Han Yoojin desperately tried to get back in contact with him, but was frequently turned away by Haeyeon staff. He started to become bitter over the distance, and when Han Yoohyun would repeatedly call him, he eventually blew up at him and told him to stop calling, blocking Yoohyun's number afterwards.

Hoping that he could also be successful and rejoin his brother if only he Awakened as well, Han Yoojin resigned from his job and pulled all his money from his bank accounts including his severance pay and savings, preparing to pay off an Awakening broker to sneak him into a dungeon in the hopes that he might Awaken.

Original timeline, pre-regression
Originally, Han Yoohyun caught wind of Han Yoojin's deal with the Awakening broker and immediately had his people bring him to the Haeyeon Guild headquarters, confronting him about the danger of Awakening brokers. Frustrated, Han Yoojin had yelled that he could take care of himself and to stop bothering him, and had stormed off.

Han Yoojin ended up Awakening a few months later that same year, at age 25. When the Awakening Centers were opened by the Korean Hunter Association, people contacted him, hoping that due to his younger brother's high rank, Han Yoojin would also Awaken at a high rank. Believing their words, Han Yoojin had gone out on the first day of the Awakening Center's opening; however, despite expectations, he Awakened as an F-rank. Due to the high expectations of the media who'd seen him go in, the public was hugely disappointed when Han Yoojin turned out to be low-ranked, and they turned on him almost overnight, accusing him of having manipulated the public for his own benefit. In particular, the journalists Kim Seungjoon and Bak Haeshin spearheaded this effort and twisted his words.

Some of the people that Han Yoojin had been in talks with at the time of going to the Awakening Center backed out on contracts they'd made with him, leaving him in a great amount of debt. Having resigned from his job earlier that year and unable to produce sufficient funds quickly enough, Han Yoojin resorted to dungeon diving in order to pay his debts off. Because of his poor reputation from the Awakening scandal, he was forced to use Han Yoohyun's name in order to recruit a party, essentially scamming them. His first dungeon was an F-rank, but even so, because his skills were just limited support skills, he almost died trying to get through. When his recruitment scam was exposed, his reputation plummeted even further to the point where being called trash was standard.

Han Yoojin's Caregiver title could have brought him some acclaim to combat public hatred against him, seeing as he was one of the "rare few" possessing it (in truth, he was the only person on Earth with the title ), but he did not reveal it for fear of being kidnapped, tortured, or otherwise used for his skills, since as a stat F-rank he was unable to defend himself. Particularly in the Hunter world, his poor stats put him at a major disadvantage, and he had to resort to other methods for survival, sometimes committing illegal acts including murder. These methods carried with them high risks. In at least one incident, Han Yoojin was arrested, or possibly merely handcuffed. A different encounter with the Gosan team a year after his Awakening resulted in him being tortured by them for hours; he managed to kill them somehow and escape.

Regardless of his strife, his "unclean" acts were used by Haeyeon, and particularly Seok Simyeong, to target him further on top of the scamming scandal. The resulting public backlash made Han Yoojin so depressed, furious, and bitter that he lost sleep from the stress.

Han Yoojin later hypothesizes that the year-long campaign against him was too pointed to be natural, and that he was targeted (possibly by the government, the Association, or rival guilds) in order to drag Haeyeon down, in response to which Haeyeon would have had to denounce him to save face. He also notes that he Awakened during the initial Hunter boom brought about by the Awakening Centers, a chaotic time for the country, which meant that Yoohyun would anyway have been too overwhelmed with work to subtly protect him from said campaign.

As a Hunter, he favored spears as his main weapon, standing at the back of the party and doing simple combat while buffing others. In the case of his party members dying, this position left him enough time for Last Repayment to kick in and grant him skills he could use to defend himself and any survivors; he lost a lot of party members early on. 2 years after his Awakening, however, the Hunter situation stabilized slightly, with MKC falling and Haeyeon taking the position of the country's top guild. Around this time, possibly due to secret intervention from Han Yoohyun, Haeyeon's denouncement of Han Yoojin decreased in intensity, and he was able to establish himself as a Hunter, saving team members more reliably and forming a regular party.

At some point, the repeated loss of party members and Last Repayment's memory transfer effect (possibly in combination with the prior stress from the public opinion of him) resulted in Han Yoojin becoming severely depressed, to the point of developing a severe alcohol problem.

From age 25 to age 30, Han Yoojin lived in the same house. After Awakening, he got his driver's license and bought a car. He had zero romantic luck, not being in any relationships from the Awakening broker conflict right up until Han Yoohyun's death. Once, he attempted to confess to a woman, but she slapped him in lieu of a response; he later suspects it might have been due to his reputation and relation to his brother.

In addition to his spear, he carried a dagger on his person. Unlike most Hunters, he did not obtain any new skills upon rising to 10 or 20 levels, subsisting only on his two initial skills, Strength Up and Agility Up. Only at level 30 did he gain a new skill. As he leveled up, he also found that his alcohol tolerance grew. He changed his phone numbers and cards on a yearly basis after learning about Do Hamin's tracking abilities, and at some point changed his phone itself.

Perhaps due to his younger brother's nature as a high-rank Hunter, Han Yoojin conducted a lot of independent research into Awakening-related topics, reading and watching almost any dungeon- and Awakened people-related material he could get his hands on, including topics such as the laws of dungeon formation. He also focused on material relating more closely to his brother, rewatching the S-Rank Hunter feature series from the Hunter special channel over 10 times. While he later admits his low rank means he couldn't predict the intricacies of higher-rank interactions, his observations from rock bottom as well as his research left him with an excellent understanding of the general trends of the Hunter world (incomparably so, once he regressed).

At some point, he was involved in an altercation that resulted in multiple severe injuries, including his left leg being shattered. He asked Han Yoohyun for help, but as his younger brother was still trying to distance himself from Han Yoojin himself, he rejected the request for assistance and refused him healer support. In the end, he gave him monetary support and coldly told him to stop fooling around and take the money. Han Yoohyun also did not visit him while he was in the hospital. This incident was the last time they properly spoke.

Original timeline, pre-regression
5 years after the Awakening broker incident, for reasons unknown, Han Yoojin makes his way into a D-rank dungeon. Due to Diarma's meddling, the three-headed Tier 1 dragon Rauchitas appears in the dungeon, a monster that could very easily kill him. However, Han Yoohyun manages to break into the dungeon with Diarma's assistance and attacks the Rauchitas to get it away from his brother, becoming fatally injured in the process. He survives long enough to pass a Gate Stone to Han Yoojin and advise him on how best to escape, before succumbing to his injuries and falling into his brother's arms, dead. Han Yoojin receives his abilities through the Last Repayment skill. Devastated by his little brother's death, he uses his borrowed skills to slaughter the Rauchitas, planning to let himself die in the dungeon as well rather than have to face the public, who would assume he killed his brother with his own hands. One of the rewards for killing the Rauchitas, however, is a Wish Stone. The immoral people forcibly alter its description to temporarily read that it cannot resurrect a dead person, and believing the edit, Han Yoojin asks for it to send his memories back in time to five years ago and promises to live quietly this time. With a flash of light, he regresses.

New timeline, post-regression
TBD