For a long while, I stared stupidly at the monitor, now gone dark.
“Ha, seriously, is this right? I paid 140,000 won for this, and the computer shuts off the moment I turn it on? Just how the hell did they optimize this thing…”
Click.
Huh, the lights went out too.
This house, packed full of my father’s dreams, hopes, and retirement money, runs on solar power, too.
Talk about rotten luck.
I hurriedly threw on my coat and stepped outside. Let’s see, the breaker box, the breaker box…
Ah, there it is.
Clack!
Soon the LED bulb above my head flickered, and the lights came back on. Relieved, I returned to my room, turned on the computer, and clicked the icon for “Immortal Order: Origin”…
Once again, a black screen appeared, along with Korean subtitles and the dubbed voice.
—“Thou art sufficiently prepared.”
—“Thou art qualified to pass beyond the secrets accumulated thus far, beyond the centuries of time, and glimpse the truth.”
—“O one who shall transcend the ages and become immortal, a new world now calls to thee.”
And now it should have been time for the words “Migrate to the New World.” and “Give Up.” to appear. Thinking about it again, it was strange for there to be a “Give Up” button on the start screen.
—“Immortal, thou hast already migrated to the New World. There is no path back.”
“…”
—“This was the migration thou chose. Endure with will, endure with perseverance.”
“…”
—“May fortune lie upon thy path.”
“…”
I had no idea why, but the text that appeared had changed.
Pik.
And the game shut off again. The default Windows desktop greeted me.
Why? Did it crash because they made the game like shit again? Did these bastards pick up that nasty habit of finishing the game after selling it again? Do gamers look like a joke to them? Do consumers look like a joke?
I clicked again.
Pik.
—“Immortal, it is useless. Bear the consequences of thy choice.”
With those words, it crashed again.
Click.
—“Immortal, wilt thou become a pioneer of the New World amid infinite blessings? Or wilt thou become a slave to fate?”
Pik. It crashed again.
Click. I clicked again.
—“Immortal, dost thou not know how to face reality?”
Pik. Click.
—“Immortal, this is already the sixth time. If thou only clingest endlessly to vain hope, even what may be done shall not be done.”
Pik.
“…”
What the hell. Did they set the opening message to change every time just to make me even more pissed off when it crashed?
Tremble, tremble…
My hands started shaking.
144,000 won.
A large sum amounting to about 14.6 times the minimum hourly wage in 2024.
For some people, it was money they could make with a day or two of loading work, but for me, saddled with a debt-ridden business, it was by no means a light amount.
“Grrrgh… My 140,000 won, wasted on this shit…!”
Rage toward the developers at Hwangsuksoft, who clearly did optimization with their feet, boiled up inside me. Hatred overflowed toward the marketing team that had prettied up the packaging of an unplayable game and sold it at an insane price. I was going to rip out these bastards’ guts—
Smack.
Whew. One slap to the cheek cleared my head.
Get a grip. Why was I making such a fuss over a single game?
First, to pull myself together, I went into the bathroom to wash my face and looked in the mirror.
“Huh?”
And I noticed something strange.
Whiteheads.
Blackheads.
Dark circles.
Acne.
And all the other skin blemishes I’d gotten from suffering under the blazing sun.
They were all gone.
My skin was as clean as it had been when I’d just entered college. Even the wrinkles that had slowly started forming on my face, and the moles that had appeared here and there, had all vanished.
My face looked as if it had gone back several years.
…No way.
I briefly wondered if all of this was actually an elaborate hidden camera prank… but during my period of unemployment, I had read far too many web novels for that.
Reincarnation.
Regression.
Possession.
Transference.
I hurriedly felt my face and body. No matter how I thought about it, I hadn’t gone back to being a newborn baby, so it wasn’t reincarnation.
Looking at my face reflected in the dark monitor, aside from my skin improving, I didn’t seem to have become especially younger, so it wasn’t regression either.
Even when I blinked and looked more closely, there was no sign that my face had changed, so I hadn’t possessed someone else’s body.
In other words.
Transference.
“…H-Hey now, no way. Where in the world would something like transference exist?”
I even forced myself to whistle as I put on my hiking boots and stepped outside.
And then.
“Suuuuuck.”
The faint salty smell I sensed when I inhaled made my mentality crumble to dust.
It was the seaside. There was an ocean somewhere nearby.
Considering my farm had originally been in Goesan County, North Chungcheong Province, that was strange.
Goesan was inland.
‘…What about salt damage!’
The moment my thoughts reached that point, I immediately started running toward the vineyard. The Shine Muscat vines? Were they all safe? And the “things” I’d expanded with recently!
“…Haa, huff, they’re… safe…”
Black Sapphire.
A new variety I’d hastily brought in after the tanghulu craze exploded in 2023.
Likewise, the other substitutes I’d made a big decision to bring in after the Shine Muscat trend had started cooling down.
They were only in their first year after grafting, so they hadn’t borne fruit yet, but I could already see the bunches of grapes that would be hanging in clusters next year.
These guys were my future livelihood. At least while the tanghulu craze kept blowing, they were filial products that would slowly pay back my debts… Huh?
‘You don’t even know what strange place you’ve fallen into, and you’re worrying about debt and new varieties first?’
…Seriously, I’m emphasizing this again and again: don’t get into a business where large sums of money come in all at once. Your brain gets soaked in dopamine, and you can’t escape it.
In any case, even as I remembered that fact, I couldn’t wipe the pleased smile off my face as I left the vineyard.
Then I began taking a full lap around the house and farm, about 4,000 pyeong in all.
I only looked around briefly, but I could roughly tell the result.
Dense forest had grown only beyond the exact boundary of the land I owned. Beyond the green iron fence separating our farm from the other farms, everything was an unknown woodland.
No, to put it more accurately, it felt as if our farm had intruded into a space that had originally been filled with a lush, dense forest.
“…”
It felt as though I was an uninvited guest in this space.
This alien feeling, as if I had been dropped into a completely separate spacetime.
‘Transference.’
Forcing down the ominous feeling that surged up again, I resumed my inspection of the farm.
First, the warehouse.
Creak. Creeeak.
When I pulled up the aluminum shutter, the inside of the warehouse came clearly into view.
For now, the excavator sitting off to one side (not mine) and the used Damas van (mine) were safe, and the stacked pesticides, portable generator, and various materials and equipment were all in place as well.
Then, after leaving the warehouse and carefully closing the shutter, I headed toward the small chicken coop…
Cluck. Cluck cluck. Cluck cluck cluck.
“Your owner is this anxious… and yet you lot have it easy, don’t you?”
Inside the wire mesh, the hens and rooster were leisurely pecking at feed together.
Ever since I got them from the neighbor, I’d somehow gotten attached and couldn’t bring myself to slaughter them, but their numbers had been increasing like crazy, so lately they’d been my number one worry.
Lastly.
Creeeeeak!
The sacks of potatoes and bags of corn stored in front of the low-temperature warehouse.
These were also burdens the neighbors had dumped on me, saying they didn’t know what to do with them, but for some reason, at this moment, they felt reassuring.
…Why did they feel reassuring? Weren’t those things I’d shoved in front of the low-temperature warehouse because even I had no use for them?
‘Well, I wonder why?’
Forcing that ominous feeling down again, I returned home. The tomatoes, peppers, and so on that my mother had been growing in the vegetable garden greeted me in front of the house.
Thud!
“Haaa… For now, the farm is safe, but…”
Lying sprawled on the sofa, lost in thought, I could no longer keep up my mental victory. Reality left me with nothing but sighs.
“…Where the hell is this place?”
As I looked around the farm, I kept glancing at the forest beyond it, but the types of trees were unfamiliar, and the neighboring houses I usually saw were nowhere to be found.
No matter how I looked at it, this wasn’t Korea.
Then was it safe outside? A strange place where a forest of unknown dangers stretched out, and where salty winds that would surely be fatal to farming were blowing?
‘…No, I still have to go out.’
Well, what if it wasn’t safe?
I had to know what dangers were out there in order to respond, didn’t I? If I holed up here in fear just because the inside of the house was safe, who knew what might come out of that forest?
With a sigh, I began changing clothes.
I put on work clothes, the sturdiest outfit I owned, wore my hiking boots, and just in case, I even took a sickle and machete for self-defense. Ah, I forgot a flashlight and backpack.
And when I took one step outside the house, the salty wind struck my face again.
“This is… scary as hell.”
Muttering to myself like that for no reason helped ease my tension. I awkwardly drew the machete and pretended to swing it this way and that, then swallowed dryly and started walking again.
Now that I thought about it, why had I brought a machete? What, was I going to slice up a bear if one showed up? What if a person appeared? Was I going to kill them?
Me? Someone who had lived in the Republic of Korea, a country that not only recorded the fingerprints of each and every one of its fifty million citizens, but even assigned them identification numbers and monitored them? Me, who had lived in a country where the public security was so good it almost felt terrifying?
My teeth chattered. Even as I locked the fence gate and activated the security system, I couldn’t relax.
One more step, and it would be the unknown forest.
I didn’t know whether this was Korea or somewhere else, and I couldn’t be sure whether whatever person or beast I encountered from now on would be friendly.
From this point on, the only things I could trust were my own physical strength and the machete in my hand.
Rustle.
And so I stepped on nameless grass and advanced forward. Soon, thick green shade blocked the hot sunlight and limited the view before me.
Countless trees swayed gently in the wind, confusing me. The extreme tension I had experienced only in adventure novels or games had become reality, and it was hard to endure.
It felt like my head was going to explode. Strength entered the hand gripping the knife handle.
Rustle. Rustle. Rustle.
After walking a few more steps like that, I was completely in the forest.
“Huuuuuup.”
First of all, the air was… clear.
In other words, there was no pollution at all. The thought that this was air difficult to experience in Korea cast a deep shadow over my heart.
Good heavens, to think I’d miss air full of fine dust.
On top of that, the shapes of the birds flying here and there and the squirrels scampering around were very different from what I saw every day on the hill behind the neighborhood.
How many minutes had I walked through the forest like that? So far, I hadn’t encountered a single person or large animal. I didn’t know whether that was fortunate or not.
I felt like I could summarize the results of my observations in one word.
Unknown.
In truth, aside from the sky being blue and the sun hanging to the south, nothing was familiar. Ah, still, that meant this was the Northern Hemisphere, so at least one thing was reassur—like hell it was.
Swish! Slash!
The machete, which I had pointlessly avoided drawing because bladed weapons were scary, was now being swung briskly as I walked, cutting away branches that got in my way.
Stupid thoughts like, ‘…What if all of this is actually a hidden camera prank after going this far?’ helped a little in driving the fear from my heart.
Childish actions like crouching as if I’d become an adventurer, striking poses, and whistling to myself also helped ease my fear.
In any case, even after walking for quite a while, there was only the salty smell of the sea, and the forest showed no sign of ending. It seemed my house was fairly deep inland.
Oh, at some point I’d become able to make rational judgments like this. I suppose I’d grown somewhat used to this unfamiliar land now—
“S-S-Save… me…”
A human voice?
And Korean at that?
At that single phrase from somewhere, I felt my heart suddenly grow lighter. And at the same time, the fact that the voice sounded half-dead made me anxious.
“Please… save… me…”
Moreover, judging from the content of the words, someone was clearly asking for help!
I hurriedly held my breath and strained my ears, trying to judge the direction the voice was coming from. It hadn’t been shouted loudly, yet it reached my ears, which meant the person wasn’t far away.
“Someone… someone, please save… me…”
Left!
I hurriedly dashed forward, cutting down the obstructing trees before me. Thorns scratched my arms and legs a little, but first I had to save the person!
“Where are you! Where are you!”
As I drew closer to the direction the voice had come from, I shouted for the first time since entering the forest. Amid the sound of startled birds flapping up at my cry, a desperate shout came back.
“H-Here! I’m here!!”
Right behind me. I turned around, spread the thick underbrush with both hands, and leaped through.
And then.
“…Huh?”
“A-A p-person… someone… save…”
For a moment, my body froze.
The sight illuminated by my flashlight was horrific.
Around thirty people, roughly speaking.
People so emaciated that their eyes were sunken lay on the ground, writhing as if they had no strength to stand, or had completely passed out.
And just one person.
“H-Here…! There are people here…!”
One young woman, the only one still conscious, weakly waved her arm and mumbled as she turned her head toward me.
“God, I can hear English…! English…! At last, the rescue fleet has come…!”
And when she saw me, she too froze.
What I had heard had definitely been natural, fluent Korean.
But the young woman whose eyes had just met mine… was white. And she was dressed in clothes that looked like they belonged in some kind of period drama.
No matter how I looked at her, she wasn’t some reenactment actor from a public TV program.
Only then did one sentence come to mind.
—“In the 16th century, England, ruled by Queen Elizabeth, sought to establish its first permanent colony in North America…”
The introduction written on the back of the package for “Immortal Order: Origin.”
—“…and sent settlers to Roanoke Island. ‘In our world,’ that attempt is known to have ended in a disastrous failure.”
And then.
—“Immortal, wilt thou become a pioneer of the New World amid infinite blessings? Or wilt thou become a slave to fate?”
Even that mysterious phrase from when the game started.
Only now did I realize the true nature of my “transference.”
And where this place was.
This was North America.