The conclusion was that I had to move first.
In this situation, the longer I dragged things out, the worse it would be for me. I didn’t know whether this area was its territory alone or part of a group’s range, or whether it had a habit of calling companions with scent or sound.
If one or two more of them showed up, the calculations would get complicated, so I should end this before things got annoying.
Barehanded was a little much, though.
I scanned my surroundings.
At the edge of the trade road, I spotted a broken tree branch about the length of an arm. Since it was broken off, the end wasn’t sharp, but it was better than nothing.
I moved slowly and picked up the branch.
As if it had noticed my intention to fight, the creature crouched low, shifted its stance, then kicked off the ground and charged.
Straight on.
It was fast, but linear. When I stepped one pace to the side, it couldn’t stop and shot past me.
A second charge.
Its claws scraped the ground as it changed direction and rushed in. This time, from the left. It was a little faster than before, but not so fast I couldn’t handle it. The spike on its tail sliced through empty air.
The sound was quite sharp.
As I reset my stance, the third charge came straight on again. The exact same trajectory.
‘Wait.’
At first I thought it was hiding its pattern, but it wasn’t. This was simply all it had. If this were a web novel, it would be the kind of trash mob that appeared briefly in chapter one before the protagonist awakened, only to get swept away. Exactly that feeling.
Let’s end it.
I adjusted my grip on the branch, and the creature kicked off the ground again, charging straight at me. This time, I didn’t dodge. I stepped forward, lowered my body, and at the moment its head passed by my side, I brought the branch down on the back of its neck.
Crack.
With the sound, the creature staggered.
Just then, there was a noise from the bushes.
When I turned my head, two men appeared, one holding an old pipe and the other a modified knife, along with a woman carrying a long stick.
The woman shouted curtly.
“Move!”
Before I even had room to retreat, the man with the pipe cut into my position and swung down at the staggering creature’s hind leg. There was the sound of bone breaking, and the creature’s hind leg buckled.
Without giving it an opening, the man with the knife drove his blade deep into its neck.
With a short scream, it ended rather anticlimactically.
The three of them stood beside the dead monster, panting hard as they looked down at me.
‘Weren’t they just watching?’
What made them change their minds?
I thought they were going to follow the cliché of taking the monster and picking up some human meat. Maybe they needed a healthy slave instead.
They had been hiding in the bushes from the very beginning.
While I was trading blows with the monster, the audience had simply watched. Now they had climbed onto the stage.
A man with protruding cheekbones and dark hollows beneath his eyes nudged the dead monster with the tip of his foot. Only after confirming that it wasn’t moving did he speak.
“You were alone?”
“Can’t you tell by looking?”
The man’s eyes narrowed. Apparently, he didn’t like my answer. I should act a little more docile, but it doesn’t come easily. An occupational disease from my previous life.
“A Heukjeok(黑赤) showed up, and you were going to fight it with that?”
Heukjeok?
That seemed to be the name of the dead monster.
“Is that thing really that dangerous?”
The man and woman exchanged quick glances.
The woman, wetting her parched lips with her tongue, stepped closer as if she had made up her mind.
“We were lucky it was small and alone. If it had been medium-sized or larger, we wouldn’t have been able to kill it either.”
They still didn’t seem to have decided whether to see me as meat or as a companion, but the fact that they chose to talk for now meant there was at least no immediate hostility.
“Do Heukjeok appear often?”
“They used to show up now and then. These days, they’re seen around here often. I don’t know whether there was a large-scale migration or if there’s some other reason.”
“Some other reason?”
“You’re better off not knowing. It has nothing to do with free people like us anyway.”
The woman, whose gaze had softened compared to before, crouched down in front of me.
“Kid, do you have anywhere to go?”
“I’m looking.”
“Alone?”
“For now.”
“Want to come to our village? There’s a condition, though.”
“What is it?”
“You have to earn your meals. Age doesn’t matter.”
The woman gestured with her chin at the dead Heukjeok.
“We just saw what you can do.”
To be honest, my answer was already decided. In my current situation, I had no reason to refuse an offer that could solve both information and food at the same time. The condition was reasonable too. Work in exchange for food. What contract could be clearer than that?
“I can decide later whether I’ll live with you or not, right?”
“That’s enough.”
After the woman swept her gaze over the surroundings once, she took the lead and started walking. The two men dragged the Heukjeok corpse behind her.
I followed after them.
To summarize what I learned on day seven in this world:
In this area, monsters called Heukjeok appeared frequently. Small ones could be killed by three people, but medium-sized or larger were difficult. There was a boundary between free people and those who were not, and free people were reluctant to talk about that boundary. And lastly: even in a world like this, people lowered their guard toward a pretty girl faster than expected.
Was that only natural?
No, if it were me, I would have found it even more suspicious. If a girl stood confidently in front of a monster holding nothing but a tree branch, suspicion would be the normal reaction. It would mean she either had something to rely on or no brain at all.
Well, thanks to that, things worked out.
The place I followed them to was the Park family’s village.
The man who had stepped in front of the Heukjeok in my place was Mr. Go, and the woman was Ms. Park. At first, I intended to read the situation for a few days and then leave.
On the third day after I entered the village, Ms. Park called me to the kitchen. While stirring pumpkin porridge, she asked without turning around.
“What’s your name?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Your age?”
“I don’t know that either.”
Ms. Park stopped the ladle she had been stirring with. She slowly turned around, looked me up and down, opened her lips once, then closed them again.
Well, I suppose she must have thought, What kind of child is this? I’m frustrated too. I’m genuinely curious who I am.
She rested her chin on the back of her hand and remained in thought for a while.
The silence was fairly long. I waited quietly. Ms. Park’s pumpkin porridge was good, after all. I had come back to the village late yesterday and hadn’t been able to eat. My stomach growled against the kitchen floor, but I pretended not to notice.
Ms. Park’s gaze suddenly drifted toward the wall. An old calendar hung there, its corners curled up and its numbers faded until they were almost unreadable. It looked like something someone had hung there long ago and forgotten.
Her gaze stopped somewhere on the calendar.
“Today is the seventh day of the first month. By the lunar calendar.”
“Huh?”
“They say in the old days there were seasonal divisions. When spring came, people sowed seeds; when autumn came, they harvested. They believed the world moved according to that flow.”
I said nothing. I had no idea where this conversation was going, so I only blinked.
Ms. Park rested the ladle on the pot and wiped her hands on her apron as she spoke.
“Good. From today on, you’re Ire.”
“Ire?”
“The seventh day. It’s easy to remember. Your age will be nine. If you’re any younger, I’ll look too shameless making you do perimeter guard duty.”
“That standard is a bit strange.”
“I don’t think a nameless child is in any position to say that.”
I couldn’t refute her. Ms. Park picked up the ladle again and added,
“Your birthday will be today too. You don’t know anyway.”
“Isn’t that too careless?”
“Ire.”
“What?”
“This is really good pumpkin porridge. Are you eating or not?”
That was how I got my name.
In front of a bowl of pumpkin porridge, before an old calendar, in five minutes while Ms. Park wiped her hands on her apron, my name was decided. Ire. Choire.
My name in my previous life was Ian. My name in this life, Choire. Ian, Ire. It felt like not much had changed, yet somehow it was different. Well, since my name had at least gotten a little longer, maybe I would live longer in this life than I had in the last.
That was how I passed winter, saw spring, let summer go by, and stood at the threshold of winter again. Somehow, a year had passed.
The village was small. Not large, not impressive. A settlement of about twenty households rooted inside a shabby wooden fence. The people took turns using a single communal well, shared the raising of a few chickens, and lived by handing each other a bowl of food whenever the smell of cooking drifted over the walls, with no one needing to be first.
I blended in well enough too. During the day, I left the village and roamed here and there. At night, I closed my eyes wherever someone gave me a place to sleep. Saying I grew attached in my own way makes me cringe, but no other words come to mind.
But.
“I wiped out every Heukjeok in this area, so where the hell did these crawl out from?”
Today, that village disappeared.
A pack of Heukjeok had come. I don’t know when. I hadn’t been able to return to the village yesterday. By the time I came back early in the morning, everything was already over. Ash had piled up where the communal well had been, and only a single clothesline remained as if by miracle. One old piece of underwear hanging from it swayed quietly in the wind.
“Damn it. One day. How could they not hold out for one day?”
It didn’t look as though the Heukjeok had come to fill their bellies. It looked like they had simply swept through. Asking monsters for a reason was meaningless, but even so, this was too much. Just one night. People who had endured for over ten years had all been swept away in a single night.
“Why is the ground so damn hard?”
Every time I drove the shovel down, the impact traveled through my palms. The winter earth was hardened like stone, as if refusing to let anything living enter it, and I had to put my whole weight into it down to my elbows just to dig out a handspan at a time. Since the shovel had been dragged out of a half-burned barn, its handle was charred here and there, and the smell of burning rubbed into my palms whenever I gripped it.
“Fuck, this is hard. Damn it.”
I know now what happened to this world. Thirty-three years had passed since Ian of my previous life died, and in that time, the world had changed into something completely different.
They say it began one day when a curtain-like light seeped in from beyond the horizon. Masses of light fell from the sky, enormous rifts formed at every impact site, and monsters poured out from within them. Society collapsed, governments dissolved, and the survivors gathered in giant cities.
When I saw this kind of thing in web novels in my previous life, it didn’t leave much of an impression. It was a common cliché, after all. The part in chapter one where the worldbuilding gets explained and then passed over. From a reader’s perspective, it was the section you quickly scrolled through.
Though I did get pissed off when I learned I hadn’t died from a nuclear blast in my previous life, but had been annihilated by a lump of light.
What followed was obvious too. When chaos reached its peak, mages appeared. Centered around them, people built walls around cities, trained other mages, and created a balance. It followed the genre formula. The problem was that I was living inside that cliché.
The only fortunate thing was that this body was different from other people’s.
I could handle ten ordinary adult men barehanded, I ran faster than the village dogs, and even if I got hurt, I was completely healed by the next day. Even by this world’s standards, I was abnormal.
If there was one thing lacking, it was mana. The people called mages drew out mana to use as weapons, made it into shields, and sometimes even changed the world itself. In the end, their power was what sustained the cities inside the walls.
If I knew how to use mana, I could become stronger than I was now, but I didn’t know how to draw it out. It felt like there was something inside my body, but I couldn’t grasp it. Like reaching out into fog.
At first, I had no intention of digging graves.
When I saw the village was gone, I tried to just leave. I judged that there was nothing more to gain here and thought it would be better to find a way into a city.
But my feet wouldn’t move.
The pumpkin porridge Ms. Park used to make. The hands that held out steamed potatoes to me. The houses where the villagers had taken turns letting me sleep. The faces of people whose names I couldn’t all remember.
That was one year.
Including my previous life, had there ever been anyone who simply fed me and let me sleep? When I thought about it, not really. Maybe that was why my feet wouldn’t move.
“Fine. I’ll bury everyone before I go.”
I started digging as I muttered to myself when the Starshine was pale, and I finished when the Starshine had deepened.
This world has no sun. No, it can’t be seen. A veil called the Starshine hanging in the sky covers everything. When the purple light of the Starshine grows faint, it is day; when it deepens, it is night.
Each time I dug a pit, I didn’t worry about how deep it should be. I decided it was enough if beasts couldn’t dig it up, and using that standard, I dug as many pits as there had been villagers. There were some remains whose shapes could no longer be recognized. I didn’t check whether they had been human or animal. I just buried them. Everything that could be buried.
The entire time I shoveled, I tried not to think about anything. I knew that if stray thoughts crept in, my hands would slow. Emptying one’s mind isn’t actually easy, but strangely enough, today it worked. My body moved like a machine. Drive down, scoop out, cover. Drive down, scoop out, cover.
It was time to bury Uncle Go, who had been the first to speak to me, and Auntie Bak, who had brought me to the village and given me my name.
Both had had their throats cut.
Heukjeok bite, rend, and maul. A clean, single cut to the throat like that isn’t the way a monster kills. A blade. It meant someone else, someone who knew how to wield one, was out there.
I stood there for a moment.
I remembered the day Uncle Go told me about the monsters.
"As you know, the dominant species around these parts is a thing called Heukjeok, with black flesh and several red eyes; but the rumor going around is that Heukjeok originally have blue eyes."
"I've never seen anything but red ones."
"They say a Heukjeok's eyes turn red when it's subjugated. The fact that you only see red-eyed ones around here means someone has the entire local Heukjeok population under their control."
"Who?"
"Word is it's the Main."
"Main?"
"They're ones who have taken monsters into their bodies. If a Seongyakja borrows the power of a god, then a Main borrows the power of a monster."
"If you're talking about Seongyakja, aren't they the mages who rule the northern city of light, Vessel?"
"That's right. They say in Vessel, they teach that Seongyakja are on humanity's side and Main are humanity's enemies. Well, I don't really know. We don't have the luxury to split hairs like that around here. Whether it's Main or Seongyakja, as long as they don't steal our food, that's all that matters."
Uncle Go, sitting astride the wooden porch and smoking a cigarette, glanced around once and lowered his voice.
"If a pack of Heukjeok swarms, avoid them no matter what. Especially if there's a big one mixed in, don't even think about fighting—running is the answer. Because when those things move in a pack, there's always a Main behind them."
After covering them with the last of the dirt, I slapped the clumped soil from my knees. My back was sore and the insides of my shoulders felt tight. No matter how strong the body, a full day of hacking at frozen ground with a shovel left its mark.
Standing there, I gazed at the spot for a moment.
There were no gravestones. I couldn’t remember all the names. Even the names I did remember, I could hardly be sure were correct. Still, I had buried them all. I decided that would have to be enough.
"You’ve done well, everyone."
My muttered words scattered into the ashen air.
I found one house that was still more or less intact and went inside. The walls were scorched, but the roof had held, and the door still closed. A single mirror remained inside. It was a cracked mirror, and my face reflected in fragments across the splintered surface into several pieces.
A year.
Long, if it was long; short, if it was short. Either way, I had grown quite a bit in that time. My chest seemed to have gotten bigger too, but checking was tricky. My pride still wouldn’t permit me to stare seriously into a mirror.
Anyway, what was supposed to grow had all grown. The problem was that my rate of growth had far outstripped my expectations.
‘How am I going to survive this winter?’
I knew my body was sturdy. I felt the cold less than others, and I could endure hunger longer. The fact that I was currently getting through this winter in a T-shirt and shorts was proof of that.
But it wasn’t as if I had no limits. Surviving winter in the wilderness wasn’t a matter of stamina, but a matter of supplies. You had to eat, sleep, and drink. Honestly speaking, securing all of that alone in these desolate fields was not sustainable.
I looked around the house.
Fortunately, the storage shed was intact. A sack of potatoes, a few handfuls of grain, a jar of salt, and scraps of cloth to use as kindling. From the barn, I also found an undamaged canteen and a leather belt. Along with a small hand knife—its edge had been set against a stone, so its performance was below expectations, but every single item was precious. I wrapped my ankles in cloth torn from a mattress and draped a thick tarp over my shoulder.
Lastly, I looked back at the village once more. Underwear on a clothesline was still fluttering in the wind. I didn’t know whose it was. I just left it.
"Time to go."
I muttered to myself and was about to step out the door when, at that moment, I heard a voice. From somewhere in the ashes, a low, hoarse voice.
"Hm? So there was someone still alive."