The next day.
The forest beside the church looked like a beautifully rendered watercolor painting.
Sunlight shattered through the leaves, and the songs of nameless birds rang out through the air.
Colorful butterflies danced among the wildflowers.
In the middle of that storybook scene, Sirin lay sprawled on the ground.
The image of a fairy descended from the noble bloodline of a goddess of beauty.
It would not have looked strange at all if squirrels and little birds had gathered around her in a collective trance, drawn by some enchantment.
In theory, that could have happened.
Sirin’s Charm was 180.
A face that could bewitch 100% of men and 80% of women.
Looks capable of luring even animals.
But there was a reason why birds, squirrels, deer, and butterflies weren’t just refusing to worship her—they weren’t even coming near.
“Ghhkk—hkk—grrrrgh…!”
Sirin was having a magnificent seizure.
Her entire body twisted of its own accord, limbs writhing and spasming.
Her fingers had locked into claws, raking at empty air.
Her feet had curled inward, toes clenched like fists.
Her back arched like a drawn bow, bouncing off the ground.
Foam bubbled at the corners of her mouth and seeped out from beneath her mask.
Sirin couldn’t move a muscle.
She strained with everything she had to push herself upright, but the signals her brain sent seemed to evaporate somewhere before they ever reached her spine.
“There you are.”
The crunch of a branch underfoot, and a familiar shadow approached.
Peter, the old priest of the Order of the Savior.
Peter stood with his arms folded, looking Sirin up and down in her wretched state.
His gaze drifted past her rolling on the ground to the scattered wood chips and gouged earth around her.
The traces of the sword dance she’d performed through the night.
Sword marks that any martial artist worth their salt could read like scripture.
The Plum Blossom Sword Art had done a magnificent job of absolutely demolishing the surrounding trees.
Peter delivered his assessment of Sirin’s handiwork in a single line.
“Looks like a mad spring foal went on a rampage.”
“Ghhnngh…!”
He clicked his tongue at her groaning.
“You must have a wonderful life. What a gift—to carry on like you’re blackout drunk without a single drop of alcohol. Truly enviable. Is rolling around in the dirt your new hobby?”
“Ghhnngh…!”
“I thought as much. I agree. I’ve always thought it beats a mud bath.”
“GHHHKK!!!!!”
There was a reason Peter remained perfectly calm even as Sirin convulsed like she was dying.
This wasn’t the first time he’d seen her like this.
Whenever Sirin had gone out to gather mushrooms or herbs to pay Marta for bread, she’d tested them for poison the only way she knew how—by eating them herself.
Each time, she’d seized and spasmed and then come out the other side completely fine.
Peter had witnessed it more than once.
Just as he’d expected, this time was no different.
Sirin had spent the whole night swinging her wooden sword, hovering at the threshold of enlightenment, and by morning she’d felt a touch of fatigue.
Desperate to push through to a greater breakthrough and accelerate her Body Rebirth, she’d found a yellow-capped mushroom she knew to be excellent for recovery and chewed it down.
“Ghheeeek…!”
It was a lethally poisonous mushroom that merely happened to look similar.
Sirin was now paying in full for ignoring every survival expert’s warning never to eat wild mushrooms.
—Ding!
[ DLC – Using Martial Arts in Fantasy Land (Working Title) active. ]
[ Interaction with ingested toxin detected. New system activating! ]
[ Poison Elixir Core system unlocked! ]
[ Forging Poison Elixir Core! ]
“Ghhngh…!”
The system began evolving Sirin’s body on its own terms—constructing a dedicated organ for storing toxins, much like humanity forty thousand years from now.
Well, whatever.
Thanks to that, Sirin’s convulsions gradually began to subside.
Peter watched, then held out a water skin.
Sirin snatched it and drank desperately.
“Hkk—cough—kkhh…!”
He snickered as she choked on it.
“You know, you might actually be more polite when you can’t talk at all. If you ever need to mind your manners, eating a poisonous mushroom first might be the way to go. What do you think?”
“Ugh…!”
“Right, that’s enough jokes. I have a message for you. Commander Roderick came by.”
“Hff—hff. Hff… that bureaucrat with the twitching problem?”
Peter nodded.
“Commander Roderick says he’ll vouch for your identity as promised. You should be able to receive an official Travel Pass soon.”
At those words, Sirin felt as though every last trace of the poisonous mushroom had been purged from her body.
What she’d demanded from Roderick as repayment for her debt.
A Travel Pass.
Useless out here in this backwater village, but practically mandatory for entering any walled city worth the name.
And especially essential if she intended to head toward the heart of the Empire.
From what Sirin had picked up while drifting around as a vagrant, the process of obtaining one was an absolute nightmare of bureaucratic nonsense.
“Hff, hff… hm. I suppose the Empire’s security commander isn’t a position just anyone can hold. Reward and punishment meted out with precision—that’s what you’d expect from an upright civil servant of the great Empire. I’ve always thought so.”
Sirin was laying it on thick when Peter added:
“It won’t be free, of course. There’s an issuance fee.”
“I have to pay? Where did my taxes go?”
“And when exactly did you ever pay taxes?”
“…!!!!!!!!”
Peter’s retort nearly caused Sirin’s sense of self to collapse entirely.
Civilization runs on taxes.
Sirin was not a member of civilized society.
Sirin was the barbarian!!!!!
“I’M A FREELOADER!!!!!”
“Now where did you pick up that word?”
Peter laughed heartily as Sirin looked ready to seize again.
“Don’t worry. I’ll cover the cost.”
Sirin came back to life.
The world was still worth living in after all.
“…?”
A thought struck her.
“You? Why would you do that?”
“Let’s just say I felt like it.”
“You felt like it?”
“Hm. That habit of yours—always drawing lines like that—that’s your problem. I mean this sincerely, so listen carefully.”
“…?”
Sirin couldn’t make heads or tails of Peter’s riddle.
She rolled her eyes around, trying to work out what he meant.
It didn’t come to her.
Peter watched her struggle, gave a small smile, and moved on.
“Anyway. There’s something I’ll need from you to issue the Travel Pass.”
“What?”
“You’ve never actually told me your name.”
“…”
True.
Sirin knew that Peter already knew her name, but she had never said it to him directly.
That wasn’t how it was done.
“…My name is Sirin. Seems I’m only getting around to introducing myself now.”
“Your real name?”
“Of course it’s my real name. What reason would I have to use a fake one?”
Peter smiled warmly.
“Good. And your family name?”
“…”
Sirin hesitated for a moment.
Kim becomes Kim, Park becomes Park, Choi becomes Choi—the world has a way of mangling things.
There was no chance the barbaric-primitive-medieval-fantasy-land locals could properly pronounce the complex, refined sounds of her beloved home world.
Not a chance.
And from what Sirin had experienced firsthand, the Empire’s administrative procedures had some genuinely maddening quirks.
Hadn’t they dragged out that whole trial-by-combat business and made a whole production with their scales and whatnot?
If she gave them her difficult-to-pronounce surname, Roderick would probably haul out some new piece of unnecessary apparatus and make a whole spectacle of it.
“…”
The mere thought of it exhausted her.
Sirin answered simply.
“I don’t have one.”
“You don’t have one?”
“That’s right.”
She’d never been particularly attached to her surname to begin with.
“Just call me Sirin.”
Peter’s expression became very careful.
“Are you perhaps… without a father?”
Was he really going there?
Sirin looked at him narrowly.
“…”
But she knew Peter.
His mouth could be a bit much, but he wasn’t the type to pick a fight for no reason.
She felt the familiar wave of irritation wash over her.
“Fine, I don’t have one. Consider him nonexistent.”
“Truly?”
“He doesn’t exist!”
She was a transmigrator, after all.
Just as she didn’t count dead friends, parents who didn’t exist in this world were the same as having none.
In other words, any jabs about her father were null and void.
There was no father in this world, and there was no home world in this world either.
Sirin was invincible.
“…I see.”
Peter’s face broke into a radiant smile at her answer.
“…”
Sirin was slightly thrown off.
It was the brightest smile she had ever seen on Peter’s face.
Something passed across his weathered, wrinkled features—the relief of a man setting down a burden he’d carried for a long time, or the quiet satisfaction of confirming something he’d waited years to know.
Sirin had the strange impression that it looked like the smile of a child who had finally found a lost parent.
“…”
She thought to herself:
‘The old man’s finally gone senile.
Hearing that I don’t have a father and lighting up like that.’
She sighed inwardly.
He’d always been sharp enough to read between the lines of anything she said.
And now, in the span of a few minutes, he’d gone and lost his mind.
Time really was a cruel, heartless thing.
“…!”
A sudden chill ran down her spine. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
What if this senile old man wanted to become her new father?
Fortunately, Peter didn’t pursue the subject any further.
“Hm. Very well. I’ll handle the Travel Pass, so you just focus on what you need to do.”
“What is there for me to do.”
There was, actually.
Sirin still had martial arts training to finish.
#
Sirin didn’t get much training done.
Partly because she kept looking for shortcuts and trying to coast on easy gains—but also because, contrary to her expectations, the Empire’s administrative machinery turned out to be far faster than she’d anticipated.
Roderick came to find her in person before three days had even passed.
The hollowness around his eyes suggested he’d had quite a stack of paperwork to get through.
Sirin felt not even a flicker of guilt about that.
Roderick came straight to the point the moment he saw her, extending his hand without so much as a greeting.
“This is your Travel Pass.”
It was a round metal disc about the size of a palm.
An unusual engraving marked the center.
A figure with a human head—the back of the skull sliced off and a second face attached in its place.
Two faces, and nothing else.
Deeply unsettling.
Sirin thought of a film she’d seen back home.
‘That’s the British lightning-scar wizard movie, first installment.
Looks like He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named became a god here.’
Roderick explained in a tired voice.
“This token borrows the divine authority of the God of Gates and Two Faces to serve as an Empire-certified Travel Pass. You must seal your ownership by letting your blood fall onto it. After that, when passing through a checkpoint, present this Travel Pass along with a single strand of hair, and the Resonance Plate at the gatehouse will verify that you are who you claim to be.”
Blood and hair.
Primitive, but effective.
A thought occurred to Sirin.
‘What about bald people?’
She turned to Roderick with an expression of pure intellectual curiosity—which somehow made it even more insufferable.
“So the Pantheon priests can have a Travel Pass and still not get around. They’d hate to waste what little hair they have left.”
“…Pantheon priests are their own credentials by virtue of their existence. They have no need to prove themselves through something as mundane as hair.”
“What about other bald people?”
“…”
Roderick had no answer.
The Empire’s administrative system had apparently not gotten around to considering the rights of the follicularly challenged.
Sirin nodded sagely.
‘Discriminating against people based on appearance.
Barbaric, as expected.’
She had cleanly forgotten that she herself had insulted Heres and Gordo based on their physical characteristics.
Sirin was constitutionally incapable of objective self-assessment.
It was a tragedy.
She clicked her tongue and held out a finger.
A slender, pale finger.
She pricked the tip with the small needle Roderick provided, and a red bead of blood welled up.
She let it fall into the shallow groove on the back of the disc.
The blood seeped into the metal, which glowed faintly for just a moment before going dark.
Nothing else happened.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
The moment the formalities were done, Roderick turned to leave with the air of a man who couldn’t get away fast enough.
“Then I’ll take my leave.”
“Hold on. Commander.”
“What?”
Sirin smiled.
“Those swords. The ones Heres and the big lug were carrying. They don’t have any value as evidence anymore, do they?”
“…No, they don’t.”
“I’m leaving the village soon, and someone as delicate as me—a delicate person—can’t exactly wander around defenseless. It’s dangerous outside the village. Don’t you think?”
She held out her hand, shameless as ever.
“…”
Roderick was speechless.
If he had to name the most dangerous individual in the vicinity, it would be the woman standing in front of him.
He wanted nothing more than to hand over the swords and be rid of her, but it wasn’t that simple.
Heres’s sword was junk, but the longsword Bjorn had left behind was another matter entirely.
It was an Imperial Legion sword.
Not something to be handed over carelessly—it was practically a sacred object.
“…”
But Bjorn himself had abandoned it.
He’d relinquished ownership.
Roderick had no grounds, as a third party, to argue over the disposition of something its owner had discarded.
He exhaled shortly.
“…I’ll send someone with it.”
With that, Roderick made his escape at a pace that could only be described as fleeing.
“Heh heh.”
Left alone, Sirin held the Travel Pass up to the sunlight and snickered to herself.
Peter spoke from beside her.
“You seem pleased.”
“Obviously. Now I can finally get out of this backwater—”
The words died in her throat.
Sirin’s eyes had locked onto the back of the Travel Pass, where her name had been engraved.
Her name, as inscribed on the Travel Pass.
[ THIRIN ]
“…Thirin?”