Literature / The Dungeon Cleaning Life Of A Once Genius Hunter

"GET CLEANING, YOU MORON"

"Now then... time to wipe these shits clean."

— Junu Kim

The Dungeon Cleaning Life of a Once Genius Hunter or Clever Cleaning Life Of The Returned Genius Hunter is a comedy/action webnovel by Dalbeat and has been adapted in manhwa by Goilgoil, it's currently running on Webtoon. In a modern world riddled with dungeons and hunters, Junu Kim was the top hunter in the world, the first and only SSS class hunter. His life is sadly cut short during a carefully organized ambush by a powerful weapon. However, he is sent back 10 years in the past by the system... as a dungeon cleaner, as karma for being a massive prick. His overpowered skills are locked behind achievements, and he has 5 years to become Secretary General of the International Superpower Association or else the System will let him die for good.

With nothing but his experience, wit, and crappy personality, he attempts to unlock all his skills and regain the fame of his previous life. But between the terrible position of cleaner, the corrupt officials of the Association and the dungeons themselves, his goals are very, very far away from him.

The manhwa adaptation can be read here.

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This series provides examples of:

• Almighty Janitor: Quite literally, both as the series' main premise, and joke. Junu is stuck as a cleaner, but his knowledge, experience and talent dwarves those of hunters. And once he gets some of his skills back, he singlehandedly clears dungeons within minutes and wipes the floor with entire teams of hunters. The higher ups become both annoyed and (rightfully) terrified of him for those reasons.
• Bad Boss: The International Association puts up a legitimate front, but towards the top, they are no different from organized crime. It doesn't take much for underlings to get murdered for failing or annoying their bosses.
• Bargain with Heaven: The System has given Junu a second chance in return for carrying out various reforms in the hunters' associations on its behalf. If he fails to become the secretary-general of the international association within five years, he dies for good.
• Berserk Button: Junu gets pissed off at a lot of things, one of them being when his "OCD" passive skill triggers. But his rage reached its peak when a couple of E Rank Hunters purposely trashed dungeons with insults in monster blood on the walls, and spreading out the corpses just to spite the cleaning team for 4 days straight. With his passive going absolutely ham, he told the team to stop cleaning the dungeon, stomped his way into Seoul HQ, found the two Hunters, slapped them (and a summon) into submission, added that his team won't be cleaning up after them anymore, and if they're not happy with it, to settle this in a dungeon.
• Break the Haughty: Junu, the strongest hunter on Earth, who mastered all the classes, and has skills for everything and anything... reduced to a bottom of the ladder cleaner, and has no choice but to play with the cards he's dealt to get his skills back. He despises his predicament and wants to quit without a second thought, but being quite literally run through the dirt is slowly giving him some well needed karma and lessons to learn.
• Broken Bird: In the original timeline, Ahyoung Lee is a stoic and almost robotic woman. Junu presumes she was traumatized by the fallout when her father was plotted against, victim of a Frame-Up, and forced to resign, with her being demoted as a casualty. In the new timeline, Junu's interference prevents this from happening and she remains sociable.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Junu is rude, loud, has next to no respect for most people, and an overhaul Jerkass who only truly watches out for his own interests. He was also the best hunter in the world in his previous life with all the experience that comes with it, has tons of information and knowledge about dungeons, monsters, classes, strategies, management, fighting techniques, skills and the current status of large organizations which also carried over from his previous life, and when he finally has access to his skills... Next to nothing can resist him, from bosses to hunters. He's damn good at cleaning too.
• Character Development: One of the series' main draw is watching the incredibly dislikable protagonist Junu slowly learn his lessons, mellow out and develop some sense of sympathy for others. Starting out as looking down on dungeon cleaners like everyone else, he eventually realizes how heavy the workload for them is, as well as the crappy circumstances they are within the association. While he still mainly works towards the betterment of the team to unlock his skills, it becomes clear that his intentions towards his fellow coworkers are slowly transforming into something more genuine.
• Create Your Own Hero: In the original timeline, Junu was the World's Strongest Man and a famous hunter, but his only influence over politics was over the Korean Hunter Association, and even there, it was pretty limited. He also didn't have any interest or stake in international politics anyways. Then, someone with influence, most likely the International Association itself, assassinated him, probably out of Tall Poppy Syndrome, sending him back in time. In the new timeline, conflict between them starts with one petty incident where Junu prevents the International Association from stealing a McGuffin called the "Time Stone" like they did in the previous timeline. From there, the vendetta between him and the International Association escalates out of control when in the previous timeline, he wasn't even a player in their games.
• Death-Activated Superpower: Junu unlocks the "Karma" hidden skill after the System confirms his death, sending his mind back in time by ten years and rewriting his past to make him a cleaner.
• Declining Promotion: Junu wants nothing more than to quit the Korean Association, but most assume that all his stunts are a way for him to expand his influence and get promoted to better posts. When Ahyoung Lee straight up ask him how big he wants to become in the Association, he turns it all down and says that he doesn't have any plans of pushing someone out of their seat or upturning the Association.
  • Subverted when it happens again after the Chairman comes back. With the Korean Association having made an enemy out of the International Association by refusing a merger, Junu wants to quit even more, and hands out his resignation letter to the Chairman. But the Chairman makes him Director of the Strategy Team while adding that Junu can't just quit after handing out his resignation letter as it's a violation of the Standards Labor Acts, forcing Junu to take the job for at least a month before quitting.
• Defence Mechanism Superpower: Without their skills activated, hunters are just as fragile as normal humans, meaning the best way to kill them is to ambush them in their civilian lives. Generally speaking, hunters cannot have their skills constantly active. After being successfully assassinated in this way once, Junu has to go out of his way to acquire a passive defense skill that activates automatically when he is in danger.
• Depower: Junu Kim retains all of the skills he earned in the previous timeline, but they have been locked by the System, which will only return them when he succeeds in various achievements or reforms on the System's behalf.
• Dungeon Crawling: This series takes place in the typical "dungeons in the modern day" webnovel setting. With dungeon gates popping up with varying difficulties, and hunters whose strength is ranked by class who clears them in raids, with a game-like system with skills, classes and the like. However, the twist is that there is no Everything Fades. When a dungeon boss is killed, the dungeon closes in two hours. And when the dungeon respawns, the corpses left inside will stay there and rot, creating a toxic gas fatal to humans. Hence the dungeon cleaners, who clean up the dungeon after the raid is over.
• Extraordinary World, Ordinary Problems: The biggest source of danger to an average hunter's life isn't the Boss Battles in the dungeons, but the sheer greed, corruption, and scheming in the associations intended to hunt them.
• Face of a Thug: Hyeyeon Song tells Ahyoung Lee that upon meeting Junu, he sacred the hell out of her with his Death Glare, and that the scar on his nose makes him look like a gangster.
• Fair-Weather Friend: The corrupt officials treat one another well when their schemes are going well, but as soon as they are confronted with justice, they turn on one another immediately.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: With the danger that comes with the job, plenty of Hunters have scars. Yubin Han has a small one over her left eye, fitting as a battle hardened berserker, and is on the good guy's side. Meanwhile the Guild Leader of Ares Jang has a huge stitched scar across the center of his face, and his introduction scene is rejecting Junu's contract offer. But turns out he's actually a pretty good guy. Junu himself has one straight over the bridge of his nose that pre-dates his hunter days, which accentuates his Face of a Thug and funnier expressions.
• Hidden Villain: Who assassinated Junu in the original timeline? On the one hand, his obnoxious personality has made him so many enemies that he doesn't know where to start in his list of suspects. On the other hand, none of the people with actual grudges against him are likely to actually have the resources to pull off an operation on that sheer scale.
• Irony: In the original timeline, Junu played a minor role in aiding The Coup against the Korean Chairman of the time. In the new timeline, a fight between him and the international organization pushes him into a leading role on the opposite side, where he gives the Chairman the opportunity to win.
• It's All About Me: Junu's motivation is this and this only. At least at first. Everything he does is to further his goal of unlocking his skills, survive and get back to his previous life. However, along the way he betters the conditions of his coworkers, purges corruption, and is damn good at what he does. Leading to the massive misunderstanding that he's some kind of champion of the weak.
  • Junu applies that logic to other people as well. He is baffled when the cleaning team risk being trapped in a dungeon to save his life, and even more when they don't snitch on him intercepting dungeons, even if it meant being transferred to a better team.
• Jerkass: The fact that Junu was, and still kind of is, a massive douchebag is not hidden in the slightest. He looks down on the weak, and only truly watches out for himself. He threw Geuntae Park at a wall and tells him to "stop overeacting", and thinks handing out an Aproval of Retirement to a hospitalized hunter after an injury has worsened (which they had already spoke up about but got brushed off) is "being considerate". While he's not actively evil or malicious, his massive ego and horrible temper makes a huge prick. At least, before his Character Development.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Junu is a selfish jerk, but he is occasionally capable of recognizing when he is in the wrong and prefers to keep his teammates alive. Funnily enough, in the new timeline, the people around him repeatedly misinterpret his motives and think he is being a Jerk with a Heart of Gold when he actually has other reasons for his actions.
• Laser-Guided Karma: A running theme, after all, the skill that sends Junu back in time as a cleaner is named "Karma". With Junu himself being forced into a job he looked down on, nearly every character gets their commupance one way or another. Examples include:
  • The American Branch try to use the Loop Dungeon raid to steal the Time Stone within and the USB key containing evidence of embezzlement from Yubin Han by letting her use her skills (and thus force them on Cooldown) against a boss, and then attack her. Too bad Junu just finished helping Minju defeat the other boss, shows up, and beats everyone into submission using the same skill as Yubin to boot! He then takes the Time Stone, sends the evidence to a journalist, and destroys the control team leader's leg to set an example. In just a short while, the embezzlement is made public, and the entire branch is being investigated.
  • The Executive Director Cheolsik Song, the head of Seoul HQ Minchoel Suh and their collaborators get hit hard with this. They find out that Junu has no relation to the Chairman Inbeom Park (whom has been off the map for 36 months), and think it's time to dismiss the Chairman through a vote by the board of executives, getting rid of his influence permanently. They perform their vote in full confidence, already thinking about who is going to get whose post... when the Chairman himself strolls in, adding that a certain cleaner told him about it. He proceeds to take over the meeting, form a new department and kickstart extensive restructuring of the organization, nuking the entire plan from orbit. Minchoel Suh can only crawl at Junu's feet in apology following the incident, and his subordinate Suyong Lee blows the whistle on all the corruption to cover for himself.
• Living on Borrowed Time: In return for turning time back before his death, the System has given Junu five years to carry out a list of favors for it. If he fails, he dies for good.
• Master of All: Junu focuses on melee, but in theory, at full strength, he's multi-classed.
• Neat Freak: Upon regressing, Junu gains a passive skill called OCD (which doesn't behave like actual OCD, and is clearly meant to be a joke at Junu's expense) with the effect description being: "GET CLEANING, YOU MORON". It triggers when Junu is somewhere dirty, and gives him an intense urge to clean by pissing him off at how dirty everything is.
• Nebulous Criminal Conspiracy: The hunter associations' corruption is far from isolated. To varying degrees, all of the hunter associations have ties to organized crime of all kinds on an international scope, whether it be corrupt politicians, corporations, assassins, or mafia. The Korean hunter association is only different in that it was founded by patriots who had protected Korea when no one else would, and therefore hold sufficiently key positions to clean house thanks to Junu's interference.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: As soon as Junu manages to get his hands on Yang Minho, he beats him into a bloody pulp, shatters his ego by adding Yang is only 1st Ranked because Junu hasn't registered yet, and tortures him with his bloodsucking skill to use his screams to threaten his boss over the phone.
• Nominal Hero: Junu is not evil, but he's not really good either. He's purely motivated by the rewards that will come with any action he does, and is actually baffled when people interpret it as selflessness. At the start at least.
• Oblivious to Love: A total of three woman have shown signs of crushes on Junu in the new timeline, but he has yet to notice.
  • Soyeon Mun has been nursing a crush on Junu since early on into his career working as a cleaner, which Minju figured out within a day. Months later, which the majority was spent working with her and the rest of the team, the possibility hasn't even remotely crossed Junu's mind.
  • Minju herself has also shown the occasional Crush Blush. Though in her case, it might be more understandable for Junu to not notice as they had a very bad working relationship in the previous timeline.
  • Ahyoung Lee has also shown some interest in the new timeline, but he hasn't noticed. It probably doesn't help that he has described her previous timeline self as a person who wouldn't let him into her house if the world ended, so he has probably subconsciously ruled her out as even a possibility.
• One-Man Army: As an SSS rank hunter and the World's Strongest Man, Junu is capable of taking out armies of lesser hunters. Having said that, he isn't invincible. Skills cannot generally be active full time, and without them, superhumans are every bit as vulnerable as civilians, so he is at risk if caught by surprise. After being killed in this way once, he managed to mitigate this somewhat via a Defense Mechanism Superpower. Even so, his stamina will not hold out forever, so he can still be worn down.
• The Perils of Being the Best: While Junu's obnoxious personality has made him a lot of enemies, it is more likely he was assassinated for his threatening talent than all the grudges he's earned.
• Refuge in Audacity: Junu does this so much (showing up at the Head's office asking for a raise, intercepting dungeons, etc) despite being at the bottom of the ladder that the higher ups figure out something's up. They believe there is no way someone this skilled would stay a cleaner without a definite purpose, like being a snitch for the Chairman for example, leading them to let Junu get away with it, fearing the potential consequences. In truth, Junu has nothing to do with the Chairman... at first.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: With the Association being a giant corruption fest, many higher ups discard consequences or get rid of obstacles using their connections. Minchoel Suh, the head of Seoul HQ, deliberatly put his own connections as his subordinate after his promotion to expand his influence. He also started the belief that Junu has a connection to the Chairman because of his vast knowledge of the Association's inner workings, his incredible combat skills, and having the guts to ask for outrageous things as a cleaner. In truth, Junu just remembers what happened in his past life, and is ballsy enough to show up at higher up's offices to ask for a raise. Right when the higher ups do a background check on Junu and realize there is no way he has any connection to the Chairman... Junu shows up at the Chairman's doorstep and tattles on everything.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man: Soyeon naturally disliked Junu at first, but he unintetionally won her over through working hard, being good at his job, having a sense of responsibility, and having more accurate information that the control team. She naturally grows fonder of him when he saves her from poison by using his skill to get her at a hospital in time.
  • In an Ironic Echo, Minju also grows fond of Junu when he covers her insurance after the Loop Dungeon Raid, and reassures her she did her best and a good job. Again, he has no idea.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: There is a 'lot' of cursing in the series, but Junu stands above them all, as he likes to drop F-bombs and the like even when just remotely annoyed. Which happens a lot.
• Student–Master Team: Minju practically forces Junu into one of these. After he gives her a tip to better her swordsmanship and avoid injury that turned out to be correct, she seeks him out and eventually begs to become his student. She trusts him greatly and takes all his advice to heart, and is the first to try and clear his name when he takes the blame for an accident (really a trap). As for Junu, he says he hates it, but his phone's contact name for her is Idiot Pupil, and he clearly trusts her abilities. Although the two don't exactly "fight" together most of the time, with Junu staying in the back giving her advice and info, defending himself if attacked, or pitching in if the situation becomes dire.
• Tall Poppy Syndrome: The International Association assassinates any hunters they fear they cannot control. It is implied that this is why Junu was murdered in the previous timeline, just for the mere possibility he might pose a threat to them as the World's Strongest Man.
• This Cannot Be!: After Junu beats Minho to a bloody pulp, Minho keeps repeating that he is the first rank, having trouble accepting that he was beaten by a glorified janitor with some hunter skills.
• Truth in Television: Dungeon cleaners are underpaid, overworked, and looked down on by the rest of the Association for being weak and doing the dirty work, instead of the flashy hunting of the Assault Team or life saving support of the Support Team. Some hunters deliberately make the work of cleaners harder just for shits and giggles. All of this are sadly behaviors that reflects the mistreatment of maintenance workers, whose work are taken for granted when, just like the dungeon cleaners, their contribution is key to the well being of the organisation.
• Underestimating Badassery: Even with most of his skills sealed by the System, Junu is still a highly experienced veteran. People repeatedly underestimate him, since learning how to fight is generally too much of a luxury for your average cleaner to learn. Even those that do recognize that something is weird do not know how strong he is, let alone the fact that he is a One-Man Army, causing lots of assassination plots in the second timeline to fail.
• United Nations Is a Superpower: The International Hunter Association has become equivalent to this trope. They are a global organization that has bought out and integrated most of the national hunter associations in the world. Their chairman is considered to be the highest official position of political power in the entire world. And that's just what is on the surface. Behind the scenes, their power is even greater.
• World's Strongest Man: In the previous timeline, Junu Kim managed to become the number one ranked hunter as the first SSS ever. In the new timeline, it doesn't take long for him to unlock most of his skills and become the top in Korea, though as the remaining locked skills are some of his strongest, he still isn't quite at the top worldwide.
• Wrong Assumption: Isn't it suspicious that a man with high-level combat skills and lots of inside info is working as a cleaner when he could get a much better one as a hunter? The real reason is that Junu has experience from the previous timeline and needs to do some cleaning-related favors on the System's behalf in order to unlock some of his skills. However, his situation is unusual and outside the common sense of the world. Most people assume that he is in the line of some big shot, like the Chairman, and is keeping a low profile to monitor the association's performance. Minju thinks it's because he actually likes cleaning.

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