Chapter 1: Thirty Years Have Passed Since the Prologue
“Ahh, an unfamiliar ceiling…….”
Kim Seon-woo muttered in a composed voice.
No—he wasn’t all that composed. He was excited to the point that his hands were trembling.
How long had he waited for this moment? An unfamiliar ceiling, an unfamiliar world. Yes. Possession in another world, transference, reincarnation, whatever it was!
He had, in fact, spent an extraordinarily long time preparing for this moment. The important part here is the “preparing” part.
Any citizen of the Republic of Korea already knows the basic conditions for reincarnation into another world. Namely, “submitting a 5,700-character critique of gratitude” and “reading through to completion.”
Take that as your starting point, push one step further, and you arrive at Kim Seon-woo’s “preparation process.”
Every novel, webtoon, and game he had read. Any work he had taken a liking to. In other words, the act of submitting a “5,700-character critique” to every single work he wished to possess.
Every single day, filled with a heart of gratitude, without rest, with a different repertoire each time, meticulously and thoroughly.
And since these were works he intended to possess, naturally he memorized the story, the settings, any possible hidden pieces or relics, the relationship charts of the major characters, and so on, down to the last detail.
5,700 characters aimed solely at breaking a creator’s spirit—until he heard the words, Then why don’t you try writing it yourself.
Of course, in most cases it ended with gutless authors laying down their pens, or with public shaming and bans across various communities. But in the end, he won.
He had, at last, possessed a body in another world.
All that remained was the question of which work this was. That, and nothing else!
“Status window!”
No colorful augmented-reality blue display appeared.
But that was fine. He wasn’t disappointed. Plenty of the works on his list of hate-comment targets had no status window either. If anything, he’d just gained a clue for crossing entries off the list.
On top of that, this was the body of a child who looked to be maybe four or five years old. Time and ability were both on his side.
The worn, threadbare cloth and the shabby ceiling were actually a plus.
A genius of this caliber, in a place like this?! A true hero, if ever there was one!! I’ll give you the throne, I’ll give you all my wealth! Just spare me!!
That the more wretched one’s childhood, the greater one’s success appears, had already been proven by every medium on Earth.
Kim Seon-woo smiled faintly, brushed himself off, and rose to his feet.
First things first—let’s start simple, with “making soap.”
***
Age 4. Week 1 of possession.
Kim Seon-woo realizes that his body carries the name “Ivan Petrovich.”
He is dismayed to learn that his parents are tenant farmers—ignorant peasants who don’t know so much as the name of their own country, let alone how to read.
After his attempt at soap-making fails, he is sternly scolded for playing around with lye.
And he learns that soap, in fact, already exists in this world.
Age 4. Week 6 of possession.
At last, Kim Seon-woo becomes able to roam the village by way of egg-delivery errands.
The moment he saw a newspaper rolling around on the ground, he began to sense something was off.
“If this is a society that can print newspapers and distribute them all the way out to a backwater like this, it’s at least not medieval?”
Most of his “list of works to possess” was deleted that day.
Age 4. Week 15 of possession.
Finally, Kim Seon-woo hears the name of the country he is living in.
After hearing even the name of the king, who until then had vaguely been called “His Majesty,” he went straight home and threw the precious “list of works to possess,” enshrined in one corner of his room, into the campfire.
Because the country was one he’d never heard of, the sovereign was one he’d never heard of, and every one of the surrounding kingdoms bore names he’d never heard of.
What mattered now was no longer “which work did I possess.”
It was “what genre is this, exactly.”
Please, anything but dark fantasy. A tenant farmer—and a modern Korean with no status window and no possession bonus at that—has a survival rate that generally converges to under 5%.
Age 8. Year 4 of possession.
Astonishingly, out of nowhere, they say a Demon King has appeared.
The war was still a tale of some far-off country, but the extra editions being scattered about daily carried nothing but grim news.
Winter of his eighth year.
Kim Seon-woo’s—no. Ivan’s father was seized by a conscription officer and taken away.
Ivan’s mother began taking on shared labor work to feed young Ivan.
It was from here that Kim Seon-woo’s sense of self began to drift slightly out of alignment.
Age 10. Year 6 of possession.
Kim Seon-woo could now follow his mother and handle the shared labor work fairly skillfully.
Age 12. Year 8 of possession.
Kim Seon-woo finally learned to read. It was the payment for six years of siphoning off eggs and delivering them to the village chief’s house.
Age 14. Year 10 of possession.
Word of his father’s death reached his village.
The laughable part was that the official notice had been issued two years earlier.
Taking a few coins in exchange for the price of a life, he looked at his sobbing mother and two thoughts came to him.
The first was that this world’s genre was probably a strategy simulation.
No wonder it felt so granular. If it were an RPG, this many countries usually wouldn’t show up. Isn’t it standard not to implement backgrounds the player will never experience?
But it wouldn’t be a novel or a webtoon either.
The settings were far too subtle for a run-of-the-mill isekai story, and the proof was this world where simple gunpowder weapons and steam engines, knights and mages, a Demon King and other races all coexisted.
Write a worldview like this as a novel and you’d get comments like What the hell is this, weeb and There he goes again, talking about stuff only he knows, with a free-serialization mid-run abandonment as the obvious ending.
In that case, he naturally had to head for the front. If he lived and died as a tenant farmer in a backwater that was undeveloped, he’d end without ever setting foot in the main story.
Strategy simulations generally end with world conquest, and shouldn’t one avoid the ending where you’re conquered by the Demon King’s army without ever knowing a thing?
And the second thought that came to him was—
“Don’t worry, Mother.”
He stroked the hair of his mother, who had cried herself to sleep, and handed his enlistment application to the recruiting officer. The annual pay was 15 copper pieces. He signed a contract to remit every last coin of it to his mother.
“Ivan Petrovich” wished that this woman’s hands would never again be chapped raw.
It was less some filial devotion that had abruptly sprung up in him, and more pity for a great woman who threw her whole body into living for the sake of someone who was, in truth, a complete stranger to her—
—and guilt, because in taking over the body of a young boy named “Ivan,” he had, in effect, killed her only flesh and blood.
Age 18. Year 14 of possession. Year 4 of military service.
Aided by small military merits and minor strokes of luck, Ivan’s status was converted from “conscript” to “regular soldier.”
He realized that Ivan’s body had more talent for fighting than expected.
Age 22. Year 18 of possession. Year 8 of military service.
When the front line was pushed back to a fatal degree, and half of the Allied Nations went up in flames—
A Hero appeared.
At this point, Ivan finally grasped this world’s genre.
This was a Hero story. That is, an orthodox RPG.
But the Hero was nothing more than a tale from a distant land, and the front Ivan had deployed to was still being driven back in miserable fashion.
Age 28. Year 24 of possession. Year 14 of military service.
The Hero’s Party intercepts the Demon King’s Army’s commanders one after another, and the tide of war reverses.
Ivan is now assigned to the “Reclaimed Territory Control and Hostile Element Detection Unit.”
Simplified, that long name came out like this.
The Annihilation Corps.
It was a special operations unit deployed when the Hero’s Party killed an enemy commander and the enemy lines collapsed into chaos.
From this point, for roughly a year, Ivan moves alongside the Hero’s Party, sharing the same encampments.
Age 30. Year 26 of possession. Year 16 of military service.
The Hero’s Party killed the Demon King.
Ivan decided to wait for the ending now.
All he felt was the desire to escape this dreary world.
Age 32. Year 28 of possession.
Two years after the Demon King’s death, there was still no ending.
In that time, the Annihilation Corps’ numbers had been reduced to a fifth.
The moment they stopped replenishing him with new recruits, Ivan realized that command was trying to dissolve them.
After carrying out one final mission that was as good as a death sentence, Ivan—regarding this whole situation as an interminable epilogue—applies for discharge.
His mother back home had already died ten years earlier, so he was left entirely alone.
He established an orphanage near the capital and took in war orphans.
It was a small hypocrisy.
Age 34. Year 30 of possession.
Still, even now, even to this day.
The ending credits are nowhere in sight.
***
The thought that perhaps this hadn’t been an RPG after all—
—turns into certainty by way of a single visitor to the orphanage.
“Fuck.”
“Pardon?”
“Fuck. This was an academy story?”
“Senior……?”
The visitor looked at the orphanage director (war hero, 18 years of military service, formerly of the Annihilation Corps, personally acquainted with the Hero’s Party) as he abruptly spat out a curse, and smiled awkwardly.
The visitor, dispatched from the royal court, broke into a cold sweat as he recalled this orphanage director’s many nicknames.
The Great King’s Executioner. The Logging Machine. The Man Who Butchered the Seven Dragon Generals. The Undying. The Reserve. The living legend of the conscripts.
And since a man that fearsome looked ready to split him with an axe if he so much as misspoke, the visitor held an uncomfortable smile and quietly held his breath until the orphanage director’s fury subsided.
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