# Episode 002
Hanguk University Library, Reading Room Three.
In that place steeped in silence, I was wrestling once again with the mountain of major textbooks piled before me.
Mechanics, fluid mechanics, mechanics of materials.
The formulas and symbols that had once been nothing but unfamiliar now lined up in my head as familiarly as entries in a ledger.
“Ujin oppa.”
Just as I was in the middle of solving a differential equation, someone pressed herself close into the seat beside me along with the sweet scent of perfume.
When I turned my head, a pretty female student with long wavy hair was looking up at me, her chin propped in her hand.
“Oppa, I heard you practically live in the library these days. It’s seriously hard to see your face.”
A coquettish voice.
Still holding my mechanical pencil, I looked down at her stiffly.
I searched through the faint memories of Gang Ujin that remained in my head, but perhaps because the bastard had lived soaked in alcohol, nothing came to mind clearly except that she was one of the countless women who had passed through his life.
“Yeah. I’m busy.”
I answered dryly and turned my gaze back to the book.
But she didn’t leave. Instead, she lightly touched my arm and whispered.
“Come on, oppa, why are you suddenly like this? We were drinking and hanging out together every night until last month. Want to go eat with me today? Or… we could go somewhere else.”
Her eyes flashed in a strange way.
Hm? Somewhere else?
I stopped moving for a moment and sank into thought.
Why would she go out of her way to take up my precious time and talk to me?
It was obvious to me what this shrewd-looking woman wanted.
‘No way.’
Exam period was approaching.
And recently, I had gained a reputation in the mechanical engineering department as the guy studying harder than anyone else.
Then there was only one answer.
“Ah, so you came because of this.”
Nodding, I rummaged through my bag.
Then I took out the core summary notes on mechanics that I had perfectly organized while staying up all night throughout the past week and placed them in her arms.
“Take them. I’ve even organized all the predicted questions for the midterm. This will be more reliable than any old exam files.”
“…Excuse me?”
The moment she accepted the notes, her expression stiffened.
Her pretty face twisted as if she was dumbfounded, then quickly turned sullen.
“Oppa, are you joking right now? Do you think I came all the way here just to borrow some notes? And we’re not even in the same department, so why are you giving me this? Are you not going to eat with me?”
“……”
The instant I saw that face full of dissatisfaction, I finally understood the entire situation perfectly.
Ah, Gang Ujin. This guy.
When I pieced together the fragments of memory again, the original owner of this body had been a man with a history with women flashy enough to rival my own past reputation.
He had wasted his days changing women every time and pouring alcohol down his throat.
‘Ha. So one wastrel entered the body of another wastrel.’
But I swallowed my wry laugh and stared at her with cold eyes.
The wastrel Elpanso of the past was dead.
Now that I inhabited Gang Ujin’s body, I had no intention of wasting even a sliver of this life on such idiotic nonsense.
“Yeah. I’m not.”
“W-what did you say?”
“Sorry, but I’m no longer the Gang Ujin you used to know. I need to study, so don’t waste my time with things like this from now on. Don’t even talk to me.”
At my firm order to leave, her face turned bright red. Huffing with anger, she got up and left the library.
With a lighter heart, I buried my nose in the book again.
Romance? Entertainment?
I had no need for such luxuries right now.
Because only knowledge could save me.
My intense academic zeal in the library soon led to practice.
My body itched to prove the engineering knowledge I had crammed into my head, so I shut myself inside the department’s student workshop and began a hobby project.
There was only one thing I wanted to make.
The heirloom of House Carnoble that had brought me to another world.
A pendant.
“I definitely remember the exterior. Dozens of gears were meshed together in the golden ratio.”
Using a CAD program, I transferred the pendant from my memory into a drawing.
For some reason, its appearance was so clear I could draw it with my eyes closed.
But I had no idea whatsoever what components had been inside it.
‘Well, I can just fill in the inside however I want.’
I mobilized all the mechanical engineering knowledge I had learned here.
A small mainspring device, an escapement, even the minute gear ratios that transmitted power—I calculated them all perfectly and packed them into the blueprint.
A few days later, on the day I assembled the parts carved out using a 3D printer and an ultra-precision CNC lathe.
When I inserted the final tiny gear with tweezers and closed the cover, the pendant was completed with a crisp click.
“Perfect.”
I couldn’t help but marvel as I looked at the pendant resting on my palm.
It looked exactly like that heirloom.
No, in terms of how the gears meshed and the quality of the finish, the one I had made was far more precise and beautiful.
‘I only made it as a hobby, but this is quite satisfying.’
With a pleased smile, I wound the pendant’s spring slightly.
Ziiiing.
Along with the faint sound of the mainspring unwinding, the gears on the surface of the pendant began to turn.
But then, at that moment.
“Huh…?”
From the center of the interlocking, rotating gears, a familiar and intense blue light began to seep out.
It was the very same light I had seen in the mansion!
“Wait, w-why is this happening here…!”
[Conditions have been met. Returning.]
A mechanical voice struck my mind.
The blue light gushing from the pendant swallowed the entire workshop in an instant.
And once again, my vision burned white inside a massive flash of light.
Cough, cough!
A blast of acrid dust rushed into my mouth.
Coughing harshly, I snapped my eyes open.
The musty smell that stabbed my nose. An empty space.
And a hard marble floor with a chill rising from it.
It was not Hanguk University’s clean workshop.
This was the secret space of the Carnoble mansion in Pellua, where I had been sitting after having everything stripped away by creditors!
I hurriedly looked down at both my hands.
They were not Gang Ujin’s stubby hands stained with oil.
“Huh…?”
A blank voice slipped from my mouth.
Had it been an illusion?
Had I, exhausted by hunger, merely dreamed some strange dream for a moment?
However.
‘You’re telling me all this knowledge in my head is fake?’
Newton’s laws of motion, the first and second laws of thermodynamics, metal smelting and alloy ratios, the structure of steam engines, even precision mechanical blueprints.
All the knowledge of mechanical engineering I had frantically dug into in the body of Gang Ujin in that world called the Republic of Korea was engraved in my mind perfectly, without a single error.
It was not a dream!
“Haha… Hahahahaha!”
I burst into mad laughter, loud enough to shake the empty mansion.
I, Elpanso Carnoble, had returned.
With “overwhelming science” in my hands, enough to overturn this fantasy world where magic was believed to be everything!
*
“Hmm……”
I rolled the pendant around in my hand.
A miraculous artifact.
But right now, it gave no response.
I flicked the gears with my finger and wound the spring, but there was no reaction whatsoever.
That brilliant blue light had vanished without a trace.
‘Do I need some other condition to go back again?’
Resting my chin in my hand, I fell into thought.
The pendant I had designed while studying mechanical engineering as Gang Ujin, and this pendant handed down through House Carnoble for generations.
It was certain that the two artifacts had caused some kind of resonance, allowing me to cross dimensions.
If so, it might be a matter of cooldown—in other words, time.
Or perhaps it only operated when some specific condition I had yet to identify was met.
“Well, it’s not something I can figure out right now.”
Without lingering on it, I placed the pendant back into the wooden box.
For a moment, I had pondered the secret of dimensional travel, but I had a far more urgent problem before me.
This wretched poverty, where I didn’t even have a single piece of bread to eat tomorrow.
And the task of raising the name of the Carnoble Merchant Company, which had been driven into the dirt.
‘I have to turn the knowledge in my head into money. Into an enormous, overwhelming fortune.’
I began to roughly scribble words on the dusty mansion floor with a twig.
In Gang Ujin’s memories, in that world called Earth where the Republic of Korea existed, science was greater than magic.
And there had been one decisive event that explosively accelerated the development of that vast civilization.
The “Industrial Revolution.”
“The first business will be… cotton textiles.”
My eyes flashed as I looked at the words written on the floor.
The starting point of the Industrial Revolution, and a great flower of civilization’s progress.
The core reason why, in the past on Earth, a small island nation called Britain had been reborn into the Great British Empire, upon which the sun never set and which commanded the entire world, was precisely this cotton textile industry.
The current situation in Pellua, in this fantasy world, was no different from Europe in the past.
For fabric, spinners had to turn spinning wheels by hand one by one to make thread, and weavers had to sit at looms and toil for days and nights just to barely produce a single bolt.
Naturally, the price of cloth was high, and commoners had to spend their entire lives wearing rough hemp cloth or patched-up worn clothing.
‘What if I introduce spinning machines and power looms based on the steam engine here?’
A spinning machine was a machine that produced thread.
A power loom was a machine that wove cloth using that thread.
A few machines would spit out in a single day the amount of goods that hundreds of weavers would have to spend an entire month clinging to produce.
Production costs would fall to a fraction of what they were, and the Carnoble Merchant Company would monopolize the clothing market not only in Pellua but across the entire continent.
Just thinking about it made the blood boil throughout my body. It was a perfect plan.
If there was one fatal problem—
“…I don’t have money. Money.”
I clutched my aching stomach.
The perfect blueprints for designing the machines were in my head.
But to smelt iron, cut parts, and make prototypes, I had to rent a workshop and hire skilled blacksmiths.
I also had to purchase large quantities of raw cotton.
In short, I needed a massive amount of initial capital—seed money.
There was no bank or merchant company anywhere in this city that would lend money to me, a credit delinquent branded as Pellua’s greatest prodigal.
“No, there is exactly one person……”
A certain person’s face flashed through my mind.
A connection that had been terribly entangled with me since my father was still alive.
I got up, brushing myself off.
I was in no position to be picky.