#001.
Feluah, the city of trade.
A dazzling city where all the gold coins of the continent were said to gather.
The name “Carnoble” was, in itself, credit and power.
And I, Elpanso Carnoble, was the sole heir to the immense Carnoble Trading Company.
My father was a legendary merchant of Feluah.
A self-made man who had started with nothing and built his trading company into one of the greatest on the continent.
But though my father may have been the perfect merchant, he was not the perfect father.
He had miraculously gained me, his only son, at the late age of over fifty, and he raised me by doing nothing but indulging me and holding me close.
And what was the result?
Naturally, I grew into an unprecedented, irredeemable wastrel in Feluah’s history.
“Hey, smash every one of these wine casks! Tonight, I’ll compensate this tavern for all its losses in the name of Carnoble!”
“Ooh! As expected of Young Master Elpanso!”
“Young Master’s generosity is the greatest on the continent!”
Back-alley thugs, third-rate mercenaries, and flatterers sniffing after my money always surrounded me.
I spent the trading company’s vast wealth as though drawing from an inexhaustible spring.
Whenever the company members racked their brains and my father sighed, I would only snort in disdain.
‘It’ll all be my money anyway. What’s the big deal about spending this much?’
It was the height of arrogance.
The golden age of Carnoble, which had seemed as though it would last forever, began to decline rapidly when my father suddenly collapsed from illness.
The moment of my father’s deathbed.
My father’s face, as he lay on the bed gasping for breath, was gaunt and wasted.
I was inwardly shaken by the fact that my father, who had seemed so upright and immense, could look so small.
But what shook me even more was this.
In the final moment of his life, the hollow eyes with which he looked at me, and the one sentence he left behind.
“……I.”
“Father, please speak. I will lead the Carnoble Trading Company well. Do not worry.”
“……I brought you into this world.”
That was the end.
With that incomprehensible sigh as his last words, my father breathed his last.
Before sadness, I felt fierce rage.
I brought you into this world? What was that supposed to mean?
Was it resentment toward a son who had spent his entire life idling and feasting?
Or was it distrust in my abilities?
How could he leave words that seemed to deny the life of his one and only son as his will!
“Just watch, Father. I will make the Carnoble Trading Company the greatest on the continent! I will prove to you, clearly, that you were wrong!”
At the funeral hall, I made that vow inwardly, veins bulging in fury.
Elpanso the wastrel was dead.
From now on, the era of the great head merchant Elpanso would begin.
But reality was cruel.
Exactly one year after I seized full authority over the company and stepped forward with confidence.
The Carnoble Trading Company fell apart.
“Young Master Elpanso—no, Guildmaster. Uncle Barto fled in the night with the ledgers!”
“W-what?! That man was a founding pillar who built the company alongside Father! That can’t be!”
“All the merchant ships sent along the southern route were plundered by pirates! The captain of the guards was colluding with the pirates!”
“T-that can’t be……!”
Failure, betrayal, and fraud.
Those who had bent so deeply before me while my father was alive that their backs might have snapped turned into packs of wolves baring sharp fangs the moment my father was gone.
The traps hidden in the cunning contracts they had prepared.
The collapse of the mine I had invested in so ambitiously.
Even embezzlement by insiders.
For the Carnoble Trading Company, which had seemed like a massive fortress wall, one year was enough to crumble.
“Haha…… Hahahaha…….”
Sitting on the floor of the empty mansion, where dust had piled thickly, I laughed like a madman.
The mansion’s once-splendid furniture and artworks had long since been swept away by creditors.
All that remained were the clothes I wore and my stomach, empty from days of hunger.
Only then did my father’s final words fly into my mind and lodge there like a dagger.
[I brought you into this world.]
I finally understood what they had meant.
It was neither resentment nor anger.
It was regret.
My father had regretted it.
The despair of having brought into the world, with his own hands, the very person who would destroy everything he had built with his blood and sweat.
It had been a bone-deep lament for himself, who had indulgently raised a fool who would starve the company’s people and throw the company into the gutter.
“Aah…… Aaaaaaah!”
I slammed my fists against the floor and wept.
You idiot. You piece of trash.
I had ruined the name of Carnoble, to which my father had devoted his entire life.
I clawed at the floor until my fingers tore and bled, but there was no taking back spilled water.
After several days of clutching my hungry stomach and shedding tears of regret day and night.
I barely managed to grasp my fading thread of consciousness.
‘I have to live. I have to live first…… and do something, anything.’
Dying would be easy, but if I died like this, I would not have the face to meet my father even in the afterlife.
I crawled toward a hidden secret space in the mansion.
There, there was a small wooden box passed down through generations of the Carnoble family, one even the creditors had failed to discover.
Click.
When I opened the wooden box, inside lay a strange keepsake of unknown identity.
It was a pendant shaped like a mechanical device made of metal, countless parts intricately interlocked.
Even my father had not known what it was used for, but it was an heirloom among heirlooms, one said to have been kept since the family’s founder with strict orders never to sell it.
“I am sorry, Father. I am sorry, ancestors. But…… I do not even have a single piece of bread to eat tomorrow.”
With trembling hands, I picked up the keepsake.
If I handed this over to a pawnshop, I could at least obtain several days’ worth of food.
It was the moment I wiped away the dust piled atop the pendant with my sleeve.
Ziiing—!
“H-huh?!”
All of a sudden, the gears of the pendant began spinning like mad.
At the same time, an intense blue light burst from the center of the keepsake, so bright I could not open my eyes.
The light swallowed the dark mansion in an instant, and I felt a tremendous buoyant force, as though I were being sucked into the vortex of light.
[Conditions have been met. Awakening will commence.]
A mechanical voice echoed inside my head.
And then came pain, as if my entire body were being torn apart.
My consciousness was falling into an endless abyss.
“……Hey! Aren’t you getting up? We have a thermodynamics exam today!”
Along with a shout that struck my eardrums, someone roughly shook my shoulder.
With a gasp, I sucked in a breath and snapped my eyes open.
“Haaah! Haaah!”
Unfamiliar air rushed into my lungs.
This was not the mansion that smelled of dust and mold.
What I saw before me was a white, rectangular ceiling and a long glass tube glowing strangely.
‘What…… is going on?’
I sprang up and looked around.
A small but tidy room.
On the desk lay rectangular glowing panels I had never seen in my life, and the walls were plastered with papers covered in letters I could not recognize.
“Are you insane? I knew this would happen when you were chugging booze all night. Hurry up and wash! We’ve got thirty minutes before the exam!”
Before me, a strange man wearing glasses was spitting out incomprehensible words as he hurriedly packed his bag.
With a dazed expression, I looked at the mirror in one corner of the room.
Reflected in the mirror was not Elpanso, the blond-haired wastrel of Feluah, but the face of an unfamiliar young man with black hair and a deeply exhausted look.
At that moment, unfamiliar memories surged into my head like a waterfall, as sudden as a lightning strike.
To summarize briefly.
[Name: Gang Ujin.]
[Affiliation: Third-year student, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Hanguk University.]
[Current status: A university student in danger of academic probation in an unfamiliar world called the Republic of Korea.]
Amid pain that felt as though my head would split apart, I absorbed the entirety of the twenty-some years of memories lived by the owner of this body.
An alien nation called the Republic of Korea.
A place where overwhelming knowledge called “science” and “machinery” ruled the world instead of magic.
And this young man named Gang Ujin, into whose body I had possessed, had entered Hanguk University, said to be the best prestigious university in the country, but had failed to adapt, living every day soaked in alcohol and collapsing into indolence.
Just like…… me.
“Hey! Ujin! What are you doing? Hurry up and come out!”
My friend shouted from outside the door.
I ran my hand down the face in the mirror—no, down Gang Ujin’s face.
I did not know whether this was an illusion, an afterlife after death, or a miracle created by my family’s keepsake.
But one clear fact struck my heart hard.
‘Once again, I have entered the body of someone who lived in indolence.’
And there was knowledge floating clearly in my mind.
The academic discipline called mechanical engineering in this place was strangely connected to the ancient knowledge of the Carnoble family contained within the pendant.
If I could make this world’s knowledge entirely my own.
If I could only understand the power of this incredible civilization!
My heart began to beat again.
‘Why did this happen?’
I did not know the reason.
But if this was the second chance given to me.
“……I’m coming. I’m heading out now.”
Spitting out the unfamiliar language, I picked up the thick major textbook lying on the desk.
After that day, a small rumor began to circulate through the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Hanguk University.
It was the rumor that Gang Ujin, the perpetual last-place student and regular academic probation case, had gone mad.
Except for the time I spent eating and sleeping, I shut myself in the library for every waking hour.
At first, calculus and engineering mathematics had seemed like alien languages, but perhaps thanks to the sense for vast ledger calculations I had acquired at the Carnoble Trading Company, they were sucked into my head like water into a sponge.
‘No, to begin with, this guy Gang Ujin has an excellent mind.’
He was someone who had entered the best university after competing in the college entrance exams against hundreds of thousands of students.
There was no way he was stupid.
With that brain, I worked until I nearly bled.
There was no day or night.
The veins in my eyes burst, my hair grew greasy, and I roughly filled my meals with triangular kimbap in front of my desk.
But it was not difficult at all.
No, rather, I was filled with joy.
Honest numbers that would never betray me.
The laws of mechanics and thermodynamics that produced results exactly according to what was input.
Because I keenly felt that every piece of this knowledge was a weapon that would make me stronger.
One late night, at the central library.
I was alone in the empty reading room, frantically drawing design blueprints on paper.
The classmate who had been taking care of me placed a canned coffee on my desk and asked.
“Ujin.”
“Yeah.”
I answered with my gaze fixed on the blueprint.
“What on earth is up with you these days? Did you start believing in some cult or something? Or did something huge happen at home? They say people die when they suddenly change, but you’re seriously only studying, to a frightening degree.”
My friend’s voice was full of worry.
Only then did I set down the mechanical pencil in my hand.
Outside the window, the splendid nightscape of Seoul, something unimaginable in Feluah, glittered like starlight.
Why was I clinging on so desperately?
Quietly, I turned my head and looked at my friend.
Still engraved in my mind were the dust-covered mansion and the lonely look in my father’s eyes at the very end.
“……Anymore.”
“Huh?”
Wetting my dry lips, I answered in a low, subdued voice.
“I don’t want to regret anything anymore.”