Kim Gong-ja

Kim Gong-ja is the central climber of SSS-Class Suicide Hunter. Beginning as an obscure hunter consumed by envy, he turns a death-triggered copying skill and a stolen regression ability into a path defined less by accumulating power than by staying with people whose suffering the Tower would otherwise reduce to a stage.

Biography

Envy, death, and a stolen tomorrow

Gong-ja begins at the bottom of Babylon's hunter society, watching Yoo Soo-ha's fame with an envy so intense that it awakens the S+ skill I Want to Become Just Like You. The skill appears useless because it activates only when its owner dies, but Yoo Soo-ha soon kills him and thereby supplies both the death condition and the first target. Gong-ja returns to the previous day with Yoo Soo-ha's Returner's Clockwork Watch, learns that dying can move him back twenty-four hours, and makes revenge the first deliberate use of his new life. (Chapters 1–3)

Rather than attempt a fair contest against a vastly stronger hunter, Gong-ja repeatedly kills himself to travel backward until Yoo Soo-ha is still weak enough to confront. The regressions are neither effortless nor emotionally neutral: he retains the memory of every death and chooses to shoulder thousands of them to reach the required date. He then kills Yoo Soo-ha, lets meadow wolves consume the corpse, buries the bloodied clothes, washes, and changes before returning to Babylon. The only skill retained from Yoo is Returner's Clockwork Watch, whose copied regression lets Gong-ja replace the future the Flame Emperor had dominated. (Chapters 3–9)

The victory establishes the temptation that will follow him throughout the Tower. Regression allows Gong-ja to erase an outcome, but it does not tell him which outcome deserves to survive, and copying rewards him specifically when another person kills him. His first campaign uses both powers for private revenge; afterward, he increasingly treats the remembered dead, failed timelines, and traumas shown by his skill as obligations that cannot be dismissed merely because everyone else has forgotten them. (Chapters 8–10)

The guild coalition and the Infernal Heavens

On the early floors, Gong-ja advances by combining information from failed attempts with cooperation that Yoo Soo-ha had treated as weakness. He bargains with Babylon's five great guilds, accepts help when Marcus Calenberry mistakes him for a mass murderer, and refuses the Devil King's offer to murder the other leading climbers for a shortcut. His choice produces a coalition that can clear the Aegim stages while preserving the people whom the scenario casts as disposable pieces. (Chapters 10–49)

The Universal Library changes the scale of that responsibility. Gong-ja enters an Apocalypse rather than reading it from outside and meets So Baek-hyang in a martial world already destroyed by disease and war. He dies repeatedly to understand her trauma and insists on learning the Infernal Heavens Demonic Art as the expression of a people whose hunger, thirst, sickness, and grief must be remembered. Becoming her disciple gives him a martial lineage, but it also makes him responsible for carrying its meaning beyond the dead world that produced it. (Chapters 50–78)

Gong-ja's solution does not restore the ruined population or pretend that the apocalypse never happened. He works with the Alchemist, Medicine King, Chen Mu-mun, and the surviving martial artists to give the world's final days form and recognition, then takes So Baek-hyang's teaching forward. This is the first sustained case in which his repeated deaths become a method of witnessing another person's pain rather than simply optimizing a victory, a distinction that later governs how he approaches Raviel, Kim Yul, and the Tower Master. (Chapters 59–88)

Raviel, the demon world, and Kim Yul

In the academy Apocalypse, Gong-ja meets Raviel Ivansia inside a story trapped in regression. He initially tries to solve the scenario as an informed outsider, but Raviel recognizes both the loop and the cost of his interventions. Their alliance becomes love only after they negotiate responsibility for the time they are changing: Gong-ja chooses to share the loop instead of rescuing her from above, while Raviel demands a commitment that survives failure, social position, and the collapse of the scripted ending. (Chapters 89–115)

Their wedding is also a contest over whether other powers may define the meaning of their bond. Gong-ja opposes the apostles and the fate arranged around Sylvia Evanail, fights beside Raviel and the guild leaders, and accepts a marriage that links their worlds without making either partner an accessory to the other's ambition. Raviel subsequently becomes the person before whom he most readily admits fear and uncertainty, and their relationship gives his growing family a standard based on chosen reciprocity rather than possession. (Chapters 115–121)

The Constellation Killer arc forces Gong-ja to apply that standard to a hostile identity. After Lefanta Aegim kills him, the trauma skill collides with an erased past and reconstructs the schoolboy Kim Yul. Gong-ja refuses to treat the contradiction as a technical error to be deleted; he enters the recreated school, exposes the violence surrounding Kim Yul, and uses immersion to give the Constellation Killer access to the memories he abandoned. The resulting Kim Yul is neither reduced to the victim nor excused as the killer, and Gong-ja accepts him as a person capable of choosing what comes next. (Chapters 122–152)

Civilizations, children, and the Death King Family

When Gong-ja becomes Kekerkker in the goblin world, his intervention lasts across generations rather than a single boss fight. He teaches, argues, enters dreams, and tries to prevent the goblins from turning him into an unquestionable god. The culture that grows around fire plays, the elf performers, and the memory of his rough companionship demonstrates both the power and danger of his involvement: later descendants inherit opportunities he created, but they also inherit stories that can harden into religion and authority beyond his control. (Chapters 153–205)

Uburka makes that problem intimate. Gong-ja treats the goblin champion as a son, yet Uburka's strength and ambition cannot be contained within the role of grateful child. Their clashes force Gong-ja to distinguish protection from control and to acknowledge that a child may oppose the parent who helped make his world possible. By the time Uburka becomes a commander and constellation, their bond rests on challenge, succession, and mutual recognition rather than obedience. (Chapters 168–205)

After confronting the Tower Master's trauma, Gong-ja gives institutional shape to these accumulated relationships. Estelle, Sylvia, Kim Yul, Uburka, and other retainers become the Death King Family, with roles intended to help them practice forms of relationship that none of them learned safely in their earlier lives. The arrangement is deliberately unfinished: Gong-ja tells Estelle that names such as father and daughter do not instantly create a family, and that living, working, failing, and covering for one another must give those names substance. (Chapters 206–289)

The Grand Campaign and the pillars

On the fiftieth floor, Gong-ja rejects the idea that the Magic Tower can be cleared by satisfying one constellation's isolated quest. He learns what the Warhorse, Babit, the Eye Living in the Labyrinth, and other powers demand, then combines their incompatible objectives into a Grand Campaign. His claim to be Bae Hu-ryeong's successor draws the Grey Spider into conflict, while the Assistant Writer and imprisoned followers turn rumor, faith, and local grievances into an alliance larger than any one hunter's strength. (Chapters 290–304)

The campaign succeeds because Gong-ja accepts that the Grey Spider's hatred cannot be treated as a mechanism to exploit and discard. Bae Hu-ryeong's history with her, Hamustra's abandoned followers, and the Magic Tower's dependence on its elder all have consequences after the battle. Gong-ja therefore uses victory to free and reorganize rather than merely destroy, drawing Hamustra and other former enemies into lives where they must make choices without the shelter of unchanging divine roles. (Chapters 305–316)

As conflicts among constellations and pillars intensify, Gong-ja's authority becomes the subject of judgment. He fights with the reunited Shiny, bargains in the constellation auction, and challenges the assumption that power is legitimate only when it comes from an established god or pillar. The title Sky That Gathers Screams crystallizes his answer: his strength comes from receiving the cries and histories of others without flattening them into a single voice, and his skill evolves when he commits to giving those dead and displaced people continuing agency. (Chapters 317–370)

Sanctuary and the next ascent

Gong-ja's sanctuary is designed as a home for the people carried through Hundred Ghosts Reincarnation rather than a warehouse of summoned weapons. Creating it forces him to decide what work, rest, governance, and conflict mean for residents who have already died or lost their worlds. He consults the family, the guild coalition, Shiny, Hamustra, and the Tower's administrators, making the Netherworld a responsibility with ordinary routines as well as metaphysical authority. (Chapters 371–383)

The final confrontations revisit the people on whom his path was built. Kim Yul and Shiny face versions of their earlier identities, Sylvia must act beyond the fate she once coveted, and Gong-ja reaches the Garden of Time where waiting itself has become a wound. Rather than claim that understanding automatically absolves anyone, he keeps returning to the same practical promise: meet the person, witness the choice, and leave room for a future not dictated by the worst event in their past. (Chapters 376–395)

At the end of the supplied corpus, Gong-ja accepts appointment as a pillar responsible for the Netherworld but does not abandon his ambition to challenge the Tower Master. Their welcome drink frames the appointment as a beginning, not an ultimate reward. He has moved from wanting another hunter's shining life to administering a realm filled with other people's lives, and the next ascent will test whether that accumulated responsibility can coexist with his determination to reach and eventually replace the authority above him. (Chapters 396–400)

Appearance and personality

Gong-ja is a Korean man whose early presentation is deliberately ordinary beside the celebrated hunters he envies. The corpus more consistently emphasizes his expressive face, blunt speech, willingness to die, and disconcerting mixture of calculation and sincerity than fixed physical measurements. Other characters repeatedly find him shameless, theatrical, or impossible to classify, yet his plans depend on close attention to what people fear and want. His compassion is active rather than gentle: he provokes, fights, negotiates, and sometimes manipulates, then accepts that the resulting relationship imposes duties on him.

Abilities and skills

Gong-ja's abilities are organized around death, memory, copied power, aura, and relationships with the dead. Their strength increases dramatically, but the corpus repeatedly treats conditions and interpretation as more important than rank alone.

I Want to Become Just Like You

This S+ skill awakens from Gong-ja's envy and activates when another person kills him. After death, it presents the killer's skill cards and permits him to copy one, making access conditional on both lethal defeat and a choice among the revealed abilities. The copied skill can be extraordinarily valuable, but Gong-ja cannot simply inspect or take powers from a living target without paying the death condition, and a target who has killed him before cannot supply another copied skill. Yoo Soo-ha's murder first demonstrates the mechanic and gives Gong-ja Returner's Clockwork Watch. (Chapters 1–6)

The skill also exposes Gong-ja to the killer's trauma as its penalty develops, changing death from a transaction into forced contact with another life. Those visions can overwhelm him, omit context, or collide with powers that erase identity, as happens with the Constellation Killer. Gong-ja's later practice is therefore to treat the trauma as evidence requiring a response, not as a complete moral verdict or an automatic command to forgive. (Chapters 16–18, 59–78, and 128–152)

Returner's Clockwork Watch

Copied from Yoo Soo-ha, this EX skill returns Gong-ja to twenty-four hours before his death while preserving his memories, abilities, and statistics. It enables repeated preparation, investigation, training, and the correction of lethal outcomes, but every activation requires him to die, and the skill card warns that its penalty increases with the hunter's rank. Early on he uses thousands of suicides to travel years into the past; later regressions are more targeted, because changing time can erase relationships and choices that matter to people other than himself. (Chapters 2–9 and 330)

The watch does not grant omniscience or guarantee a better result. Gong-ja must still learn what happened, persuade others, and survive the new sequence, while people outside him lose the discarded timeline. Raviel's awareness makes that asymmetry explicit and leads them to coordinate their use of regression. By the end of the corpus, the power remains central but is no longer treated as permission to reset every painful consequence. (Chapters 89–115)

Aura and the Infernal Heavens Demonic Art

Gong-ja learns aura control and swordsmanship under Bae Hu-ryeong, then becomes So Baek-hyang's disciple. The Infernal Heavens Demonic Art turns remembered forms of suffering into martial images: hunger, thirst, disease, fire, and grief are not cosmetic names but the emotional and sensory foundations from which its sword forms operate. His ability depends on comprehension and visualization, so repetition without the underlying image produces an imitation rather than the complete art. (Chapters 59–78)

His later mastery combines those images with movement, copied skills, ghosts, and the shared aura of his family. In mass formations, a common story allows many practitioners to project an environment that affects perception and inflicts real harm; the Burning Grave and the rain of grief demonstrate how collective belief can become battlefield authority. These techniques remain dangerous precisely because they weaponize suffering, a fact Gong-ja must balance against his desire to preserve its memory. (Chapters 243–250 and 299–316)

Hundred Ghosts Reincarnation

The ability begins as Hundred Ghosts Summon, an SS skill Gong-ja copies when the Devil King of Fall Rain kills him. He upgrades it with the clear reward for floors eleven through nineteen before finally killing the Devil King, creating Hundred Ghosts Reincarnation. It summons the souls of people he directly killed, but the dead do not ordinarily retain the abilities they had while alive. The retained ghost called Preta, later reborn as Estelle, demonstrates that a summoned person can preserve memory, preference, loyalty, and conflict rather than becoming a mindless projection. (Chapters 33–46, 59, 361, and 378)

The upgraded skill initially permits summoning only once per week. Gong-ja explicitly removes that restriction when the skill becomes SSS+ in Chapter 363; the change does not make him an unrestricted master of every dead person. Physical revival and the dead's ability to continue forming memories depend on the separate Earth Bone Dragon's Skull, while Gong-ja's bodies, assigned roles, and eventual sanctuary give the retained souls a social life beyond combat. The latest state supports the Netherworld under his pillar authority, with access still bounded by those accumulated relationships and linked structures. (Chapters 206–239 and 350–383)

Divine swords and combined tactics

Gong-ja carries the sentient Five Guardian Swords, whose divided forms can act independently and later reunite as Shiny. He uses their autonomous movement to create multi-directional attacks, defense, and divine manifestation, while Shiny's own judgment remains part of how the weapons operate. The swords are therefore equipment-derived capabilities and a partnership with a generated character, not innate extensions of Gong-ja's will. (Chapters 53, 275–281, and 325–339)

Across the corpus he combines regression, copied skills, aura, teleporting allies, constellation quests, and family support rather than relying on one technique. This adaptability is his most consistent tactical advantage, but it also imposes preparation and social conditions: consent limits Anastasia's transfers, ghosts and swords retain agency, and coalition plans fail if he cannot persuade people with incompatible objectives to act together. (Chapters 31–49, 171–205, and 290–316)

Power progression

Relationships

• Bae Hu-ryeong: His ghostly teacher, argumentative companion, and model of martial dedication.
• Raviel Ivansia: His spouse and the partner who most directly challenges how he uses regression and responsibility.
• Anastasia: A guild leader, political ally, and trusted confidant who helps turn his interventions into institutions.
• Bambolina: His student and family member, whose unusual emotional life tests Gong-ja's assumptions about morality.
• So Baek-hyang: His martial master and the source of the Infernal Heavens Demonic Art.
• Uburka: His son, challenger, commander, and eventual constellation.
• Kim Yul: A rescued identity mirror who becomes a retainer without being reduced to either victim or weapon.
• Ja Soo-jung: The Tower Master he opposes, learns from, serves under, and ultimately intends to challenge.
• Sylvia Evanail: A former antagonist who becomes his dependent daughter and advisor.
• Shiny: A sentient divine companion whose weapon-vessels accompany his ascent.

Items

• Five Guardian Swords: Shiny's divided and reunified weapon-vessels, carried and wielded by Gong-ja without reducing her sentient identity to property.