Originally, I’d wanted to be a gem cutter. Making a beautiful stone look even more beautiful. I thought that was the only thing I needed to care about. I even heard my share of easy words about how enviable it was to be born with a silver spoon and live a life where your passion and your work were one and the same.
After the accident that killed everyone in my family but me, there wasn’t anyone left who said they envied me to my face.
Back when I’d been cut off by my family, they’d gone on a trip without me and gotten into a car crash. I hadn’t even been able to be there properly at the end.
There must have been countless things said behind my back. I could feel the sidelong glances even at the funeral. But I had no room to respond to every last whisper.
I was a twenty-three-year-old kid who knew nothing about running a business. I didn’t even know how to deal with customers.
Five years later, I’d become a deft merchant who set stones of decent quality in styles that were decently in fashion and sold them.
When I was scrambling to keep the shop running and then I got into a car crash myself—what did I think then? There’s no one left to inherit now. I think it was something like that. I collapsed in a twisted posture and my consciousness slowly slipped away.
I felt death right in front of my nose.
But I didn’t die. I lost the shop I’d guarded with life and limb, because I ended up in this strange world.
When I came to, sure I was dying, I was in a child’s body. I’d been hit by a car in Jongno—so why did I wake up in a hut in the mountains? This body was, what, thirteen at best? Skin and bones, with no sign at all of secondary sex characteristics—that was my body. Everything was full of things I didn’t know, and there was no one to give me answers.
In the rickety, old hut, there was no trace of a human’s warmth.
I scoured the whole house and barely staved off hunger with water that was on the verge of going bad and some dried grain flour. When even that ran out, I had no choice but to go outside. Only after walking a long while down a narrow dirt path did I find where people lived.
Unlike the hut, which had been in the mountains, the village was gathered around a small harbor.
I stared blankly at the scene before my eyes.
The shapes of the houses lining the road, the clothes people wore, even their features. To me, it looked like a meticulously built movie set. Like Europe before the modern era. It didn’t feel the least bit real.
When someone who seemed to know this body of mine approached me, the confusion only grew worse. What he said was a pronunciation I’d never heard even once. And yet I felt like I knew what his words meant. So I couldn’t open my mouth. I was afraid that unknown language would come spilling out of my own mouth, too.
What finally moved me, who’d been standing there like an idiot, was unbearable hunger. The sense of crisis that I might die again seized me. The very thought that I might have to suffer once more the brutal pain from when death came right up to my face turned into fear. More urgent than understanding the unknown situation was doing anything at all to get food.
I used my head and helped out with work at the harbor, and people gave me food. Squid, octopus, eel, that sort of thing. I thought I was very lucky. I even thought the villagers were warm-hearted. It was a stupid mistake.
Expensive ingredients in Korea, but the villagers didn’t eat fish without scales. They were cursed things. That’s what the villagers believed. Things that lived in water ought to have scales; if they didn’t, they were against the order of things. The reward for my labor was trash they would have thrown away.
I only learned that later. It was all just ridiculous.
"Where does bad luck like you get off touching things?"
There were even people who wouldn’t come near me at all, since I was a brat who ate cursed things.
Negative words filled my ears.
I also learned, bit by bit, things about this body. The father of this body had been a hunter. No one knew who the mother was.
At some point, this body of mine had started getting sick, and it seemed the father went into the mountains, probably to find medicinal herbs. Around the time he was in the mountains, some said they heard a terrible beast’s cry. And he didn’t come back.
There were plenty of people who knew a child had lain sick alone in that hut, but there wasn’t a single one who cared for that body of mine.
Motherless brat. Child of an incompetent hunter who got himself killed by a wild animal. A stupid wretch who even forgot how to speak. Those were the words that referred to me. I didn’t hear this body’s name from anyone. The more carelessly people talked about this body, the more tightly I pressed my lips together. I realized that even if I spoke their language, there wasn’t a soul who would listen.
I spent the fall and winter like that.
When the brutal winter ended and spring was about to come, a typhoon hit. The hut near the mountain was fortunately unharmed, but the seaside village was ravaged by wind and waves. Sea water surged into fields that needed to be sown right away. The year’s farming ended before it began. The village’s lifelines, the little boats, also turned into splinters and disappeared into the sea.
"At this rate we’re all going to starve to death."
"What if we get relief…"
"Relief, my ass! Think that even exists? And even if it does, you think our turn will come? The lot on top will eat it all up! Don’t say naïve crap that won’t fly!"
"Then what do we do…"
Everyone got busy trying to save their own skins.
Now the villagers didn’t hide their true feelings in front of me. They had no leisure to watch their tongues in front of a mute fool. For me, that was almost a good thing.
"When do they come?"
"In three days."
"Then the compensation gets divided fairly among everyone…"
The villagers found a way to get through the crisis. Since they were in a state where every penny mattered, they planned to sell off the children who’d lost their parents. Including this body of mine, who’d been an orphan even before the typhoon. Maybe even their own children.
"If that brat could speak properly, he’d fetch a better price. Face is decent enough, too."
"Still, he follows instructions well enough. Let’s explain he’s not a completely rotten kid."
On my way back carrying the usual discarded sea creatures, I heard them scheming behind my back. I wanted to turn around and see what faces they were making while they flapped their mouths, but I had to endure it. I had to have heard nothing. I picked up my pace a little as I headed home.
By the time I left the village limits, I was outright running.
I used a garment far too big for this body as a bundle cloth and packed my things. I put on layers of worn-out clothes, gathered the dried seafood I’d saved through the winter and a handful of dye berries, and left the hut.
Even though there were still two days before the planned time, I hurried my steps to follow a traveling troupe that had set up at the foot of the mountain.
I didn’t even know the local geography properly. I only knew by hearsay that the nearest village was two days away, and the one after that five days.
No matter how many years I had actually lived, this body was a child’s. Better than when I’d first woken, but still thin. If I wandered the roads like this, I’d freeze to death, starve to death, or get dragged off and killed by a beast. I set out because I refused to be sold, but I wasn’t thinking of suicide. Maybe heaven hadn’t been completely idle if it went through the trouble of letting a dead man live again—maybe it cracked a tiny door open for me.
"This village’s mood is jumpy too. If we lay out a show, we’ll get beaten."
"Then we lie low and move on. This year we’ll probably have to go all the way up to the capital to even touch a few coins. Pickings are miserable."
I was the one who told the troupe, who couldn’t even enter the village, about a water path through the mountain. The travel must have been tough; some had come down with fevers, so they couldn’t enter the village either.
I rubbed dye berries on my face and followed at the tail of the group. I remembered how, when I’d handled them wrong, the blue stain on my hands hadn’t faded for nearly a month. I dyed half my face. So even if I ran into villagers, they wouldn’t recognize me. And so the troupe wouldn’t know my original face either.
They weren’t leaving me alone out of bottomless mercy and compassion. Taking in orphans was one way a troupe kept its numbers up.
The first thing they did to me was take the food I’d saved all winter. All I got back was one bowl of foul-smelling, bad-tasting broth, made by throwing all the dried sea creatures into water at once to soak and boil.
On the way to the capital, I had to train to pick pockets without making the bells on my clothes jingle, and to punch people. If we ran into a village generous enough for us to lay out a stage, then while the troupe performed I went around with a hat collecting coins.
When the leader clucked their tongue at the big blotch on my face, I got goosebumps. Because I could more than guess why men slipped into tents every night and what the sounds inside were for.
I hardened my resolve once again to get away from the troupe the moment we reached the capital. I’d only meant to use them as guides to the city to begin with.
After a long journey on foot, the capital of Henia—Noverten, a name that meant “new land”—gave me a sense of déjà vu. Brick-paved roads. Stone buildings. A wide plaza. At the end of the plaza, a colossal structure, grand and oppressive. A scene both familiar and alien.
How did I end up in a place like this? In someone else’s body, not my own.
The question I’d buried rose again.
Streets where carriages ran instead of cars. Far more bustling than the fishing village where I’d spent fall and winter, but lit by gas lamps instead of LED.
"Hey, Spotted-Face! Stop gawking like some country bumpkin and work if you don’t want to starve!"
The punk who played leader of the kids whacked me on the head.
"You laughing, you little shit?"
The one who caught the laugh that slipped out of sheer disbelief swung again. I lost my balance for a second and staggered, and he hooked my leg and knocked me over. The kicking followed. I curled up.
Suddenly I felt like I might cry. In my old body I’d been twenty-eight. Getting beat up by some kid who looked maybe fifteen—it was almost funny enough to laugh.
My parents had said they wouldn’t see me again. My brother had felt sorry, but he hadn’t understood me. Only after losing my whole family could I set foot in my parents’ jewelry shop. I’d struggled not to lose that shop, but in the end I lost everything. Even my body.
Coming back to life in another world? I’d never once nursed such a wish, like some common novel.
Even so, I still wanted to live. Even in this unfamiliar world that felt like a past I’d never experienced.
※
On the day the troupe that had scored once in the capital set out again, I slipped into the maze of back alleys. The paths I’d learned while roaming for barkers’ work helped.
I also managed to get hired at an inn I’d marked in advance. I wouldn’t be paid, I had to eat little, I had to sleep in the stable, and on days when the stable was full I had to sleep outside it with just my head tucked under the eaves—but I got in.
Even so, the innkeeper was praised as very charitable for taking in an orphan with no identity. Sure.
Up to that point, he was the most charitable adult I’d met. Sure.
My lot at the inn began to change once word got around that I could judge the exact weight of coins. I’d spread the word on purpose, of course. I needed to raise my own value.
"This won’t do. You’re short by two pinier."
If you weighed a silver coin with the rim shaved down in your palm, it was always short. I had never once seen a customer do the math right in one go. All the more so if it was a mercenary who’d ordered fried fish and a beer and was occupying a table all day because he’d blown his job.
At the inn I could hear a lot of talk. Most of it wasn’t worth listening to. Most customers had their tongues so twisted I couldn’t even make out their words, or they were so full of bluster they babbled about magic or whatever.
I figured their alcohol-pickled brains were praising street tricks with the word magic. Hard labor made me let their puffed-up talk go in one ear and out the other.
Only the talk about the number system and coin values was worth lending an ear.
The one-dinang silver coin was the most commonly used coin, and every rat had gnawed on them so there wasn’t a sound one left. If I accepted short money, my already rat-tail-small dinner would get smaller. I had zero room to do anyone a favor.
"You little bandit! It’s exactly nine pinier!"
Even if you explained it politely, there wasn’t anyone who understood. The scale that should’ve been on the counter became my personal tool.
"Look—these ten marks here equal the weight of one one-dinang silver coin. So one tick is one pinier. But see how it’s tilted by three ticks right now? That means you’re short by three pinier. Which means it’s seven pinier, so you need to put down two more."
"W-what are you on about? Damn it, what a jinx!"
If I explained it slowly like I was teaching a preschooler, the mercenary customer would, despite his loud bluster, obediently put two one-pinier coins on the table and then spring to his feet. Non-mercenary customers showed a similar pattern. Because behind me stood the innkeeper—Mr. Billy—who was even more burly than any mercenary riffraff.
Still, after I’d “educated” the regulars once each, settlement got easier. They trusted the weight sense in my hand. Naturally, the pointless squabbles vanished and table turnover sped up. I also served as a scale for the boss during tallying, so my sleeping spot moved from the stable to a little room under the stairs.
People even started using my coin-weighing knack for wagers.
"You’re quite a useful kid, you are."
I figured he was one of those types.