It was, at long last, a certain day in April of 1592.
The turbulent end of the sixteenth century! The dawn of capitalism and the bourgeoisie! The beginning of imperialism! A world ablaze!
The Battle of Busanjin, the first battle of the Imjin War, had just begun! And it was one day about five months after King Henry IV of France launched his siege against Rouen, occupied by the Spanish army!
Ah, how would the day of Nemo, angel of Croatoan Island, and Kim Isang, stalwart son of Korea, begin?
Ding-a-ling.
—“Delicious multigrain rice has been completed. Please stir the rice well before eating.”
…Nothing special. It begins with slow-aging rice.
I don’t even age anymore. I have a body now that wouldn’t leave behind so much as a speck if I shoveled down white rice and indulged wildly in meat, fried food, booze, and cigarettes.
And yet here I am, eating slow-aging rice.
What kind of “Captain xMerica taking steroids” bullshit is this?
I never thought the “Nutrient-Packed 17 Grains” my mother left behind would be used like this. I only planted some as a test, but out came barley, proso millet, foxtail millet, oats, sorghum, chickpeas, and so on.
…Right. The only thing missing is rice. Like some kind of ghostly curse, I failed only at farming rice varieties like glutinous rice and brown rice.
Thus, my everyday staple is slow-aging rice. If not this, then boiled potatoes and bread. Naturally, not white bread. It tastes like shit.
Once the rice is done, I crack an organic (forced) egg into a frying pan, make a fried egg, and transfer it to a plate.
Then I put braised potatoes on the table, along with seasoned greens made from perilla leaves (organic), lettuce (organic), napa cabbage (organic), and all sorts of weeds (wild) I got from the people of Manteo’s tribe.
Manteo definitely said those weeds were tasty, but I still don’t know their Korean names. It seems like they’re plants that don’t even have Korean names. My sesame oil ran out the year before last too, so I’ve just been boiling them, then eating them with toasted sesame seeds and salt…
“Mm… the seasoning’s just right.”
They’re better than I thought.
So.
Slow-aging rice, braised potatoes, greens, and a fried egg.
…Can an everyday life where I eat this crap even be called living? Where did my pork ribs, Andong jjimdak, tofu kimchi, doenjang jjigae, braised hairtail, yangnyeom chicken, bulgogi pizza, pasta, pho, jajangmyeon, fish cutlet, and curry rice go?
Of course, they all vanished when the “Delivery Tribe,” which already had fuck-all places that delivered to me, stopped working altogether.
Why were things like Jeonju bibimbap or cucumber sandwiches upper-class foods in the past? If you come directly into the past, you understand everything.
“Heh heh…”
There is only one hope in this dreadful premodern health diet.
“Heh… heh heh heh…”
Homemade butter.
Once I add my fucking delicious homemade butter to the slow-aging rice, which was closer to fodder than food for humans, sprinkle in salt, and mix it all together, it finally starts to smell somewhat like a dish.
After I wolf down the butter rice with greens and braised potatoes like a meal fought on a battlefield, then finish washing the dishes, my day truly begins.
As soon as I finish breakfast, which teaches me the preciousness of butter and salt every single day, I head off without a moment’s rest to inspect the water pipes that supply agricultural and household water.
“Aw, come on… the hose came off again.”
Naturally, the water pipes are left running twenty-four hours a day. Not for some reason like preventing them from freezing. It’s April right now, so what freezing? This isn’t the insane climate of Korea, where snow falls even in April.
Clean water gets replicated. It’d be stranger to let that go to waste.
The water coming straight out of my house is separated into fresh water and agricultural water, then sent to the water tanks behind the farm, and from there it moves again to the villagers’ houses and fields.
Thanks to that, there’s no water shortage on Croatoan Island. If anything, it’d be nice if a drought came.
Last year, there actually was a drought, and the grapes’ sugar content shot up like crazy. When I witnessed the beautiful miracle of the God-blessed American climate, with bunches exceeding 25 Brix, I shed tears of emotion.
Seriously… the Korean Peninsula is hellfire for grape farmers… I think I understand why some rabbit princess from about 2,500 years ago, a.k.a. Dangun, settled there.
Anyway, that’s water management done. Next is…
Rumble, rumble, rumble!
“Hah, haah… I can’t even entrust this to anyone else…”
I transfer all sorts of agricultural fertilizers and chemicals into containers.
Fertilizer, pesticides, and even antibiotics like the medical-use streptomycin sulfate Mr. Jeong from the produce auction market foisted on me to mix with gibberellin—I still don’t know if that’s legal—are all treated as consumables, so they regenerate at midnight.
They’re things that’ll all be replenished at midnight anyway. Naturally, I should move them elsewhere and stockpile as much as possible.
Once I move Mr. Hwang’s experimental chemicals of unclear origin and the agricultural antibiotics that need refrigeration into the cold storage, that task is done too.
But the “consumables” in my house don’t end there.
I thought the only place aluminum would come from in my house was aluminum foil. But I was wrong.
Paper clips.
Staple refills.
All sorts of screws.
Twist ties, wires, and so on.
All kinds of seemingly insignificant metal consumables are copied infinitely. The absolute amount produced each day isn’t much, but if I scrape them together day after day, it becomes quite a lot.
After dumping them out, I sweep through them with a magnet to separate iron and aluminum, sort copper, stainless steel, ordinary iron, and the rest, then head to the forge of Mr. Brown, the goldsmith.
“Mr. Brown? Please take care of these.”
“Ah, wonderful! Hasun! Wake all the other blacksmiths! Work has come in!”
“Yes, Father!”
A twenty-first-century Rose Knife is stronger than a medieval famed sword. In other words, no matter how trivial a metal consumable might look, it is still the product of highly advanced twenty-first-century metallurgy.
When Mr. Brown and his Native adopted son, Hasun Brown, strike the gong, blacksmiths pour in from all over the workshop like a horde of zombies that has spotted a human, then carry off the precious aluminum, steel, and copper.
Aluminum is especially important. In this era, metal-form aluminum comes only from our Croatoan Island.
And naturally, the procession of consumables doesn’t end here.
“Lord Nemo! The people have gathered here!”
“I’m coming now, Eleanor!”
The multivitamins in my house seem to be classified not as food or drink, but as medicine… which means they, too, are “consumables.”
In other words, even if I hand out hundreds of tablets, by tomorrow they’ll all be replenished again.
“Please take only one tablet each. From two onward, it’s actually harmful.”
“You there! Don’t be greedy, take just one!”
In the early days, before we first got the potato farming going, Eleanor and I handed out supplements in case people became malnourished. Somehow, that has become part of daily life.
Well… in any case, thanks to that, not a single person here has starved to death or fallen ill, so for now, I’m continuing it.
After finishing the supplement distribution with Eleanor, I return home again.
Rattle, rattle, rattle!
I dump out all the emergency medicines from the medicine chest, package them with the vacuum sealer my mother used when storing kimchi, and bundle them up tightly.
This thing… I remember when my father was flabbergasted and asked my mother, “Are you going to open a butcher shop?” when she bought it.
Though it’s still a mystery why someone so cautious when buying a single appliance went and poured his severance pay into setting up a 4,000-pyeong Shine Muscat farm.
Father, Mother, please watch from afar as I reap the fruits of every dumbass thing you did.
Anyway.
As for what I use the vacuum sealer for…
“Miss Lawrence! Miss Margaret Lawrence!”
“Ah! I’m here! Good heavens, there’s this much today?”
“I couldn’t come for a few days because I was busy. Please start with the headache medicine and put it in the boxes.”
“Understood! There are hardly any patients today, so I’ll begin organizing the medicines first!”
I use it at the “hospital.”
Another thing I learned after coming to this era:
In an age where the standard treatment is to feed people opium instead of painkillers, cut off their limbs, then sear them with fire for disinfection, even I become a fairly capable doctor as long as I have emergency medicine and basic first-aid skills.
When I first arrived here, I taught Miss Lawrence, who had given Mr. Hewett’s leg emergency treatment, some simple first aid and how to use medicines. The result was a clinic that heals people better than most hospitals in Europe.
…What the hell? If you use Tylen*l and aspirin properly, you become a master physician who saves lives? If you use only distilled water during treatment and sterilize instruments in boiling water, people who would have died survive?
Just how… how much blood and how many corpses was twenty-first-century medical knowledge built upon? I can’t even imagine.
Thank you always… Why? First Aid. I shall always live in gratitude to the Korean educational comics market of the 2000s…
By the time I get back home, it’s about 12:10.
Now the morning schedule, which began around five in the morning, is roughly complete. I turn on my phone, play some music, and switch on my Ninxndo Switch.
The music I listen to is CCM and hymns.
The games I play are Animal Crossing and Zelda.
…Why?
If I went back to listening to heavy metal while playing Doom, wouldn’t that make me the one who isn’t human?
Anyway, I find myself doing the bizarre thing of getting sick of managing a real-world island and devoting myself to managing a cyber island (creditor: Nook Inc.), and before I know it, it’s two in the afternoon again.
Since it’s two in the afternoon, it’s about time…
Thump! Thump!
“Lord Nemo! We have arrived!”
That’s right. Vicente Gonzalez’s voice.
When I open the door, Vicente grins and bows his head.
“We have come to retrieve the transparent shields and iron bars.”
That’s right. I need to gather the PC sheets to use as construction materials, the copper pipes for heating, and the steel square tubes.
I’m squeezing every last thing I possibly can out of this farm.
Copper pipes, every single aluminum clip, I hand over to the blacksmiths; every single Tylen*l tablet, I carefully gather and send to the hospital.
Besides that, Mr. Hewett keeps saying he’s short on paper, so I take copy paper from the printer and distribute it, and I draw out fountain pen ink to hand over to Shakespeare and Bacon, who say they’re short on ink.
Even after raising this much hell, I’m still at the point of eating slow-aging rice three meals a day. If I want to maintain a twenty-first-century lifestyle and feed the people around me, I have to put in at least this much effort.
“Then let’s go.”
“Understood, Lord Nemo! Now, now, everyone, prepare yourselves! Attach the carts behind the Damas!”
Here on Croatoan Island, the only vehicle we can use for transport is the Damas. But as you know, the Damas is a compact vehicle, so its payload has limits.
Clank! Clank!
But even here, we found a method. No… calling it a method might be a bit too stupid.
Basically, like hitching up an ox cart, we attach several carts to the Damas and drag them along like a train.
If you do something like this, it’s only natural for the Damas to go to hell—but naturally, my Damas does not! Since it even washes itself at midnight, it’s still perfectly fine even after doing this for over a year!
Once Vicente and I climb into the Damas, the Spaniards who entered the materials warehouse each carry out PC sheets and steel square tubes, then stack them neatly onto the carts attached behind the Damas.
And when I start the engine, the inline three-cylinder engine begins its ferocious rampage!
Go, Damas! Show us your power!
Putter, putter, putter…
…The Damas starts up like the sigh of an old man about to die, then barely begins inching forward.
“No matter how many times I see it, it amazes me! This cart is so powerful! To think that a cart which eats oil, burns it, and moves by that power could exist! It is truly marvelous!”
“…Is that so?”
Well, even this much output is far better than this era’s latest vehicle, the ox cart. It’s true that this one guy does the work of several oxen all at once.
And so we move slowly toward the coast along the well-maintained road. Then, gradually, the new vineyards and greenhouses situated here and there come into view.
…They were all built with this.
If we haul materials like this every day, we get enough to complete about one greenhouse every few months.
When the Damas stops at the coast, the Spaniards rush in and carry the PC sheets, steel square tubes, all sorts of insulation, and subsidiary materials to be used as construction materials into the coastal battery-slash-logistics warehouse.
“Phew, it must be around five now. Time for dinner.”
“Excellent! Lord Nemo, I was thinking of having a company dinner with my men from now on. Might you perhaps be willing to join us…”
“Ah, I have something to do now. I’m afraid that will be difficult.”
“Pardon? The sun will set soon, so what task could you have?”
“Ah… I…”
Suddenly, I gaze beyond the distant horizon with melancholy eyes and say,
“I intend to survey how the kingdoms of this earth and humanity hereafter shall spend the next several hundred years. Is that not the duty of one who possesses even a little more power, and knows even a little more knowledge?”
“As expected… Lord Nemo…!”
For some reason, Vicente looks up at me with sparkling eyes. Don’t look at me like that… it’s burdensome…
In any case, I wasn’t lying.
—Europa Universalis V
—Crusader Queens IV
…Since I’ve fallen into history, this isn’t being addicted to games or killing time. It’s unavoidable “study.”
I am merely “studying” world history.
Of course, in the game, Poland suddenly forms Germany and France gets invaded by the Aztecs… but that’s just a means of cultivating flexible thinking in me, who has fallen into the butterfly effect of history.
Yes.
I’m not wrong…
Even though, since I fell here, my playtime in those two games has increased by a thousand hours each.
I-I’m not wrong.
I’m…
And so, before I know it, it is one in the morning.
My day ends.