Chapter 1: The Life of Someone who wasn’t Me.

Originally, I aspired to be a jeweler.

Making beautiful gems even more beautiful. I thought that was the only thing I had to worry about.

I often heard thoughtless remarks about how I led an enviable life, born with a silver spoon in my mouth and doing exactly what I loved for a living.

However, after the accident that claimed the lives of my entire family except for me, no one dared to say they envied me anymore.

Back when I had been disowned by my family, they went on a trip without me and got into a car accident. I could not even properly be there for their final moments.

There must have been endless gossip behind my back.

Even at the funeral, I felt the glancing stares. But I had no room to respond to every piece of gossip.

I was a twenty-three-year-old greenhorn who knew nothing about management. I did not even know how to deal with customers.

Five years later, I had become a skilled merchant who set decent-quality gems in moderately trendy styles to sell.

What did I think when I, too, got into a traffic accident while struggling to run the shop?

That there was no one left to inherit it now. I think I had that thought.

Collapsed in a twisted posture, I slowly lost consciousness. I felt that death was imminent.

However, I did not die.

Although, by ending up in this strange world, I lost the shop I had struggled so desperately to protect.

When I woke up thinking I had died, I found myself in the body of a child.

I had been in a traffic accident in Jongno, so why did I wake up in a cabin deep in the mountains?

This body seemed to be about thirteen or fourteen years old. My body was scrawny, showing not a single sign of puberty.

Everything was a mystery, yet there was no one to give me answers.

I could feel no human warmth in the old, creaking cabin.

I filled my stomach with near-spoiled water and dried grain powder that I managed to find after ransacking the entire house. When even that ran out, I had no choice but to venture outside.

Only after walking for a long time along a narrow dirt path could I find a place where people lived.

Unlike the cabin situated in the mountains, the village was centered around a small port.

I stared blankly at the scenery before me. The shapes of the houses lining the road, the people’s attire, and even their appearances. To me, this world looked like an elaborate movie set. It was like pre-modern Europe.

In other words, I felt no sense of reality whatsoever.

My confusion only deepened when someone who seemed to recognize my body approached me.

His speech consisted of pronunciations I had never heard before. Yet, I felt like I understood the meaning of his words. That was why I could not open my mouth. I was afraid that unknown language would flow out of my own lips as well.

What finally moved me from standing there like a fool was unbearable hunger.

A sense of crisis that I might die again seized me.

The very thought that I might once again experience the wretched pain from the moment death was imminent became a source of fear.

Getting something to eat by doing whatever I could was more urgent than understanding this incomprehensible situation.

I used my wits to help out at the port, and the people gave me food. It was things like squid, octopus, and eel. I thought I was extremely lucky. I even thought the villagers were overflowing with kindness.

It was a stupid delusion.

Although they are expensive ingredients in Korea, the villagers did not eat scaleless fish. They were cursed beings. That was what the villagers believed. Things that went against nature, lacking the scales that creatures living in water ought to have.

The payment for my labor was actually garbage they needed to discard. I only learned that fact later.

Everything was just absurd.

“How dare an unlucky wretch like you touch that?”

Because I was someone who lived on cursed things, there were even people who wouldn’t let me come near them.

Negative words filled my ears.

I also learned the story of this body, piece by piece. This body’s father was a hunter. The mother was unknown.

When this body started getting sick one day, the father seemed to have gone into the mountains to find medicinal herbs. People said they heard the cries of a terrible beast around the time he was in the mountains.

And he never returned.

Although many people knew that a child was sick alone in the cabin, no one had taken care of this body.

A motherless wretch. The child of an incompetent hunter killed by a wild beast. A retard who even forgot how to speak. Those were the words used to describe me. I never heard this body’s name from anyone.

The more people spoke about this body without hesitation, the more I kept my mouth shut.

It was because I realized that even if I spoke the same language as them, there was no one who would listen.

I spent the autumn and winter like that.

It was around the time the harsh winter ended and spring was arriving. A typhoon struck.

Fortunately, the cabin near the mountain was safe, but the seaside village was devastated, swept away by the wind and waves.

Seawater flooded the fields where seeds needed to be sown immediately. The year’s farming had ended before it even began. The small boats that were the villagers’ lifeline also turned into splinters and vanished into the sea.

“At this rate, we’re all going to starve to death.”

“If only we could receive some relief aid…”

“Relief aid, my ass! Do you really think such a thing exists? Even if it did, do you think our turn would ever come? Those above will gobble it all up! Don’t talk such naive nonsense!”

“Then what are we supposed to do…”

Everyone became busy figuring out their own survival. Now, the villagers did not hide their true intentions in front of me. They had no leeway to mince words in front of a fool who had forgotten how to speak. For me, it was actually a good thing.

“When are they coming?”

“In three days.”

“Then the compensation money will be split equally…”

The villagers had found a way to survive this crisis.

In a situation where every penny counted, they planned to sell off the children who had lost their parents.

Including this body of mine, which had been an orphan even before the typhoon. Perhaps even their own children.

“If only that punk could speak properly, we could get a better price. His face is quite decent, too.”

“Still, he does what he’s told quite well. Let’s explain that he’s not a complete waste.”

As I was returning with the discarded fish as usual, I heard the sounds of their plotting from behind my back. I wanted to turn around and see what kind of faces were spouting such words, but I had to endure it. I had to be someone who heard nothing.

I quickened my pace toward home little by little. By the time I left the village, I broke into a run.

I used clothes that were too big for my body as a wrapping cloth to pack my things. I layered on worn-out clothes, took the fish I had dried over the winter and the dyeing berries, and left the cabin.

The reason I hurried even though I had two more days of preparation time was to follow the traveling troupe camped at the foot of the mountain.

I did not even know the local geography properly.

I only knew from eavesdropping that the nearest village was two days away, and the next one was five days away.

Regardless of how many years I had actually lived, this body was that of a child. It was better than when I first woke up, but it was still a scrawny body.

Wandering the streets like this meant freezing to death, starving to death, or being mauled to death by wild beasts.

I had set out because I didn’t want to be sold, but I had no intention of committing suicide either.

Perhaps heaven thought it was too much to kill a guy who had barely survived death again after just a few months, as it seemed to have quietly opened a path for me to live.

“The atmosphere in this village is unsettled, too. If we set up stage, we’re likely to get beaten up.”

“We should just rest quietly and leave. It looks like we’ll have to go all the way up to the capital to even touch a coin this year. Earnings are absolutely terrible.”

It was I who had shown the mountain’s water source to the traveling troupe that couldn’t even enter the village.

Since the journey seemed to have been quite arduous, there were those among them with fevers, making them a group that could not enter the village even more so.

After rubbing the dyeing berries on my face, I followed at the tail end of the group.

I recalled the experience where the deep blue stain on my hand lasted a whole month after I touched them the wrong way.

I dyed half my face. So that even if I met the villagers, they wouldn’t recognize me. It was also to keep the traveling troupe from knowing my real face. It wasn’t out of boundless compassion and benevolence that they let me follow them.

Accepting orphans was a method for the traveling troupe to maintain their numbers. The first thing they did to me was take away the food I had gathered over the winter.

Only a single bowl of fishy, tasteless soup, made by soaking and boiling all the dried seafood at once, returned to me.

On the way to the capital, I had to train to pick pockets without making a sound from clothes with bells attached, or to throw punches at people.

When we encountered a village generous enough to let us set up, I walked around with a hat collecting coins while the troupe performed.

When the leader of the group clicked his tongue looking at the large stain on my face, it gave me goosebumps.

Because I could more than guess the reason behind the people entering and leaving the tents every night and the noises coming from within.

I resolved once again to break away from the group as soon as we arrived in the capital. Even though I had intended to use them as guides to the capital from the very beginning.

Noberten, the capital of Henia, a city meaning ‘New Land,’ which we arrived at after a long walk, gave me a sense of déjà vu.

Brick-paved roads. Stone buildings. A wide plaza. A magnificent and imposing colossal structure standing at the end of the plaza. It was a landscape both familiar and unfamiliar.

How did I end up in a place like this? In another person’s body, not my own.

The question I had buried rose to the surface again.

A road where carriages ran instead of cars.

A place far more bustling than the fishing village where I spent autumn and winter, yet lit by gas lamps instead of LED lights.

“Hey, Spotty! Stop looking around like a bumpkin and get to work, if you don’t want to starve!”

The punk acting as the leader of the children smacked the back of my head.

“You little shit, are you laughing?”

Seeing the laugh that leaked out from my disbelief, the punk swung his hand again.

When I momentarily lost my balance and stumbled, he tripped me to the ground. Kicks followed. I curled my body up. Suddenly, I felt like tears were about to fall. Before switching bodies, I was twenty-eight years old.

Being beaten by a punk who looked barely fifteen, I couldn’t help but laugh.

My parents had said they would never see me again. My older brother felt sorry for me but couldn’t understand me. Only after losing my entire family could I set foot in my parents’ jewelry shop.

I struggled to keep that shop, but in the end, I lost everything. Even my own body.

To be revived in another world. I had never once harbored such a cliché, novel-like wish.

Nevertheless, I still wanted to live. Even in this strange world that resembled a past I had never experienced.