Lee Hyun had rarely thought of himself as unhappy.
He had lived into his forties without any real relationships or dreams he wanted to pursue. Even so, he was not dissatisfied with his life.
He had once worked at a mid-sized company, but after quitting because of the stress, he took irregular jobs that earned little more than pocket money. He had some savings, and since he hardly spent anything, he managed well enough.
He almost never went outside. The world had reached a point where buying groceries, ordering meals, and purchasing anything else he needed could all be done over the internet.
Bringing in a package left outside his front door was more than enough of an outing for the day.
That did not mean he was the sort of shut-in who lived with his room buried in garbage. He cleaned up as soon as he finished eating, took out the food waste on time, had never fallen behind on his taxes, and had never disturbed his neighbors by making noise late at night.
Lee Hyun considered himself a thoroughly harmless person.
Someone who was not much help to the world, perhaps, but did not harm it either.
He figured that was good enough.
The one thing he was diligent about was brushing his teeth. Cavities hurt too much, and going to the dentist was terrifying.
On the other hand, he could not be bothered to get the free health screenings offered by the government. A screening might uncover an illness, and if an illness was found, he would have to go to the hospital.
He did not exercise either.
Watching online streams, playing games, watching dramas, and reading novels were more than enough to make a day pass quickly.
Lee Hyun was easily entertained.
If some new ramen he had bought tasted better than expected, if a YouTuber he regularly watched started playing a different game than usual, or if a new chapter of a novel he was following came out, that alone was enough to make it a pretty good day.
He could even find a certain amount of entertainment in pouring water into a pot and watching the bubbles form as it came to a boil.
That day was no different.
He opened the refrigerator, but there was nothing in particular he felt like making. In the end, too lazy to bother, he pulled a packet of ramen from the cupboard.
While waiting for the water to boil, he sat on the edge of his bed and looked at his phone. A replay of the stream he had fallen asleep watching the night before was playing.
It was a day exactly like any other.
So when his chest started to feel tight, he did not think much of it at first.
Maybe it was indigestion. The thought made little sense since he had not even eaten the ramen yet, but he figured moving around a little might help, so he stood up.
He had not even taken two full steps when the center of his chest clenched tight.
“Ugh...”
Lee Hyun grabbed the table.
It felt as though someone had wrapped a fist around his heart and was twisting it. He could barely breathe, and cold sweat instantly broke out across his forehead and back.
By the time he realized something was wrong, the strength had already gone out of his knees.
He collapsed to the floor and struck his head hard against the corner of the table. Yet he barely felt the pain. The agony radiating from his chest was far worse.
‘Could this be a heart attack?’
His phone was on the bed. It looked close enough to reach if he only stretched out his hand, but his body refused to obey him. He tried to move even if he had to crawl across the floor, but he could not properly move so much as the tips of his fingers.
The water was boiling on the induction stove.
Lee Hyun stared past the table leg toward where the pot should be and remembered that he had not put the noodles in yet.
‘It won’t start a fire... right?’
It was a remarkably pointless thought to have at the moment of death.
But nothing else came to mind.
He did not particularly regret never marrying, never making friends, or never going on a proper trip. Nor did he think he should have lived more diligently. If he had, life would undoubtedly have been more troublesome than it already was.
Still, he felt a little cheated. If he had known he was going to die this suddenly, he would at least have ordered something expensive to eat beforehand.
His vision slowly darkened.
***
The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was a wooden ceiling.
The blackened planks were covered in old stains, and there were even cobwebs hanging between the rafters.
Lee Hyun blinked and stared at the ceiling for a while.
There was no way this was a hospital. No matter how run-down a rural hospital might be, they would not let spiders build webs on the ceiling.
So was he alive?
He touched his chest, but there was no pain. He could breathe easily, and his body actually felt lighter than before.
Lee Hyun carefully sat up.
The rough cloth covering him slid down. The first thing that caught his eye was a slender hand. The palm was callused, but it looked nothing like his own hand had after he passed forty.
Looking around the room, he spotted a cracked water bowl. Lee Hyun staggered over and looked down at the face reflected in the water.
An unfamiliar young man stared back at him.
Sun-darkened skin, tangled long hair, cheeks slightly hollow from starvation. He looked no older than twenty at most. His face was ordinary, neither particularly handsome nor ugly.
When Lee Hyun opened his mouth, the young man in the water did the same.
“Ah...?”
Lee Hyun crouched in front of the water bowl and stared blankly for a long while. Every sensation was far too vivid for him to deny reality.
It hurt when he pinched his cheek, and warm sunlight streamed in through an opening too small to properly be called a window.
He went back to where he had been lying and lay down again.
He hoped that if he slept a little longer and woke up, he might return to his original world.
But when hunger became too much to bear and forced him to open his eyes again, the wooden ceiling and cobwebs were still there.
There were almost no memories left in this body.
Only a faint sense of having starved lingered. He had no idea who his parents were, where he had lived, or why he had been lying in this dilapidated thatched cottage.
Not long afterward, an old man who had come to check on the house discovered that Lee Hyun had awakened. He introduced himself as the village chief.
According to the village chief, Lee Hyun had been found collapsed on a mountain path several days earlier. A villager gathering medicinal herbs had discovered him, and the village chief had laid him down in this empty house.
“You must have injured your head badly. You remember nothing except your name?”
The village chief asked with concern. Lee Hyun thought for a moment, then nodded.
“Yes. I don’t remember anything.”
This was White Wood Village, a small settlement in the western part of the Great Yan Kingdom.
The only houses with tiled roofs belonged to the village chief and a few relatively well-off families. Most of the villagers lived in homes made of mud walls and straw. When the sun rose, people went out to the fields, and when it set, they returned home.
At first, Lee Hyun thought he had fallen into a world resembling some period of Chinese history.
He could naturally speak the language here, but he assumed that was probably thanks to his transmigration.
To survive in this place, he needed to find work.
Farming was the first thing he ruled out. Farming required a great deal of cooperation among the villagers, such as maintaining irrigation channels together and sharing seeds.
He did not want to go into trade either. That would mean having to talk to customers.
Hunting was out of the question. He did not know how to properly shoot a bow, and even the thought of encountering a wild animal in the mountains frightened him.
In the end, he chose to become a woodcutter.
He climbed the mountain, cut suitable trees, split them into firewood, and sold only as much as he needed to in the village. Lee Hyun's body was young and sturdy, and his palms already had the calluses of someone who had handled an axe before. At first, his entire body ached, but as time passed, he grew fairly used to the work.
With the village chief's permission, Lee Hyun repaired a small abandoned cabin at the foot of the mountain.
There, he began living alone again.
Compared to his past life, everything was inconvenient. There was no electricity, running water, or gas, and food spoiled quickly.
To conserve firewood, whenever he lit a fire, he had to use the same heat to cook rice and boil water. In summer, insects swarmed everywhere, and in winter, it remained cold no matter how many layers of blankets he piled over himself.
The hardest thing to endure was the absence of the internet.
For the first few months, Lee Hyun suffered from crushing boredom. Once the sun set, there was nothing to do, and oil and candles were too expensive to keep a light burning all night.
Only then did he realize how much comfort he had enjoyed in his past life.
Eventually, Lee Hyun began pulling stories from his memories and rewriting them in his head.
Paper was expensive, so he could not actually write anything down. Instead, he reconstructed the novels and games from his past life in his imagination. He changed endings he had disliked, made characters from different works meet one another, and sometimes turned a favorite villain into the protagonist.
Whenever he had time to spare, he carved wooden figurines. He made knights in armor, horned demon kings, and even robots whose exact appearances he could no longer remember.
They were not things he intended to show anyone, so it did not matter if they were ugly.
And so Lee Hyun lived in White Wood Village.
Life was less convenient than in his past life, but once he grew accustomed to it, it was not unbearable.
Lee Hyun was someone accustomed to finding small pleasures wherever he was. Sitting under the eaves and listening to the rain was pleasant enough, and on days when the wild greens he added to his soup tasted better than expected, that alone was enough to put him in a good mood.
He intended to live quietly enough here until he grew old and died.
***
One spring day, Lee Hyun was tying bundles of firewood.
Suddenly, the village dogs began barking frantically, and shouts from the villagers soon followed. Everyone rushed out of their homes and stared up at the sky.
Lee Hyun looked up without thinking.
A ship came flying through the clouds.
A blue cloud emblem was painted on the white sail of the wooden vessel.
When the ship stopped above the village, figures in long robes glided down through the air. Beneath their feet floated swords, leaves, and round discs.
“They’re Immortal Masters from the Azure Cloud Sect!”
At someone's shout, the villagers all prostrated themselves on the ground.
Lee Hyun took his cue from them and bowed at the waist.
That day, the people from the Azure Cloud Sect tested the village children for spiritual roots.
One by one, the children placed their hands on a transparent orb. Most produced no reaction, but beneath the hands of a few children, red or blue light appeared.
They said children with spiritual roots could enter a sect of Immortals and cultivate the Dao.
The parents hoped their children would be chosen, yet when the time actually came for those children to board the ship, they shed tears.
As Lee Hyun watched, he finally realized what kind of world he had fallen into.
‘So this was a xianxia world.’
His heart did not race with excitement. Instead, cold sweat broke out across his skin.
Lee Hyun had read quite a few xianxia novels in his past life. The settings differed from one story to another, but they all had one thing in common.
Most of those worlds were brutally dangerous.
A protagonist in a novel might overcome countless crises and eventually rise to become the strongest, but Lee Hyun was not optimistic enough to think he was the protagonist.
The village chief suggested that he get tested as well.
“Who knows? You might have a spiritual root too.”
“I’ve already been in this village for several years. Aren’t the Immortal Masters looking for young children?”
“That is true. I suppose you may already be too old to enter the sect.”
Entering a sect meant cultivating. It meant competing with others, and he might even be dragged into secret realms or sent on missions. To Lee Hyun, who only wanted a quiet life, none of that sounded remotely appealing.
***
After the Azure Cloud Sect's ship departed, Lee Hyun returned to his old way of life.
The years passed without incident.
In spring, mist gathered over the mountains. In summer, the streams swelled. In autumn, the leaves turned red, and in winter, snow piled softly atop the cabin roof.
The children who had once run around the village with runny noses eventually married, while wrinkles appeared on the faces of the young men who had once been around Lee Hyun's age.
The villagers occasionally joked that Lee Hyun's face hardly seemed to change. Whenever they did, he brushed it off, figuring this body must simply have naturally youthful features.
Lee Hyun did not pay much attention to his appearance.
He had no mirror, nor any reason to study his own face closely. When his hair grew long, he roughly cut it or tied it back, and when his beard grew out, he shaved it off with a sharpened blade.
He realized something was strange one day, twenty years after arriving in White Wood Village.
Lee Hyun had gone down to the village to sell firewood when he encountered an unfamiliar man standing in front of the village chief's house.
The man stopped when he saw Lee Hyun's face. A moment later, he approached with a startled expression.
“Are you Uncle Lee Hyun?”
Lee Hyun did not recognize the man.
His face seemed familiar, but Lee Hyun could not remember where he had seen him before. When he hesitated to answer, the man pointed to his own chest.
“It’s me, Zhang San. When I was little, I used to follow you around, and you’d give me wooden figurines...”
Only then did Lee Hyun remember.
He had been the little boy who sniffled as he followed Lee Hyun along the mountain paths. Lee Hyun had carved him a wooden bird once, and after that, the child had come by almost every day, pestering him to make something new.
“So you’re Zhang San. You’ve grown so much I barely recognized you.”
Lee Hyun spoke with a smile, but the delighted expression disappeared from Zhang San's face. Zhang San stared intently at Lee Hyun.
Only then did Lee Hyun feel a sense of foreboding under that gaze.
“What is it?”
“Uncle...”
Zhang San lowered his voice.
“You look exactly the same as you did when I was a child.”