START
Cock-a-doodle-doo-oo!
The rooster crowed. My eyes snapped wide open in an instant. The war of the morning was about to begin. Right on cue, my comrade in the next room called my name.
"Seir!"
"I'm up!"
I answered quickly.
'Seir' is my name. It's different from my original name, but that's how it sounds to the people here, so it can't be helped.
There was no time to dawdle in bed. Rubbing my sleepy eyes, I quickly opened the window and neatly folded the blanket on the bed.
Soon it would be time for the owner to come by with his bucket and bang on it with a laundry club.
If you weren't up by then, it would be, quite literally, 'a laundry club in the dead of night,' and your wages would get docked.
Cock-a-doodle-doo-oo!
Anyone who calls that a crisp, clear rooster's crow can go shove it down the toilet. Clear and clean, my ass.
That wretched noise was the fruit of the heart-wrenching efforts of an old rooster, pushed out of the struggle among the males, to hang on to its life.
After straightening my bedding, I roughly washed my face with the water in the basin I'd set beside me before going to sleep and picked the sleep out of my eyes.
Splash! Splash!
Something like soap was an unimaginably expensive luxury here, and the soap I had was so precious that I'd sealed it away long ago.
Instead of soap, what I held in my hand was a powder made by grinding fruit peels. If you put a suitable amount in your hand, rubbed it between your palms, and scrubbed your face with it, it was a bit coarse, but your face felt refreshed.
I'd thought about continuing to use it even after going back home, but as far as I knew, the fruit that went into this powder soap-I'd named it on a whim-didn't exist on 'Earth.'
Damn it all. Never in my life had I known how sad it could be not to have a supermarket in sight.
"Pwah! Ugh, it's lukewarm."
These were summer nights. Sweltering tropical nights existed here too, so I didn't have to feel any piercing homesickness where the weather was concerned, but I wasn't thrilled that the water in the brass basin turned lukewarm overnight.
According to the senior staff, the water even froze in winter, and to think I'd have to stay here until then...... Just thinking about it made me sigh.
I picked up a towel from the table in front of the window and roughly rubbed my face.
Time was short. I still had to change my clothes and finish my morning business in the bathroom.
But wasn't it a little too quiet next door? Why, you damn jerk! Did you bury your head in the bed again?!
I pounded on the wall to the next room and shouted.
BANG BANG BANG!
"Wil! Wilter! Get up!"
"Uh, huh? Seir? You're up?"
Oh, jeez. My head hurts. That guy woke me up and then keeled right back over into bed again.
I felt a considerable sense of despair that the first friend I'd made in this other world had such a scatterbrained side.
"Get up already! It's almost time for the owner to come charging up with his bucket and club!"
"What time is it?"
"Second crow!"
It was a somewhat odd unit of time, but it couldn't be helped. Clocks were luxury goods here too.
Still, wasn't it something that the other guy could understand it at all? As proof, a clattering racket came from the next room.
"Wh-What, already? Gaaah! I'm dead!"
"Oh, really? Then do your best dying! I'm going to live!"
"Traitor!"
"Shut up! Who told you to wake someone up and then fall back asleep?!"
Cock-a-doodle-doo-oo!
The third crow sounded. It was about time for the owner to make his appearance.
According to fairly reliable information, the owner got up at the first crow, and when the third crow sounded, he came out of his room with his bucket and club.
Listening to the hurried sloshing of water from next door, I decided I'd done my duty for now.
I quickly pulled on my pants and shirt, slipped into wooden clogs that still didn't fit my feet, and carried my basin to the bathroom.
The owner banged the bucket in front of the building at the fifth crow.
The bucket, its sides dented all over from who knew how much banging, boasted a tone that drove people crazy every time it was struck.
"Ugh, damn it. Chicken, crow a little later today, would you!"
I quickly emptied the basin and decided to empty the basin inside my body as well. Meanwhile, the fourth crow sounded.
Cock-a-doodle-doo-oo!
A wave of irritation surged up in me. Should I just wring that thing's neck? Well, dawn would come anyway, even if I did.
And so another not-so-refreshing morning began.
I didn't really know what month it was, or what day.
This world called 'Niaron' counted days differently from Earth.
A week was six days, and on the sixth day there was 'Cycle's End,' the equivalent of Earth's weekend.
Apparently this world's creator had better specs than Earth's. Seeing as he created heaven and earth a day faster and rested on the sixth day.
One fortunate thing was that the units of time here were the same as on Earth.
A day was twenty-four hours, and an hour was made up of sixty minutes.
What I was curious about, though, was whether the residents of this world also called the unit a 'minute.'
Everything reaching my ears was Korean, and I was speaking Korean.
But strictly speaking, they and I were conversing in an unidentifiable language called 'the Common Tongue.'
My eyes, mouth, and ears were enchanted with magic that interpreted and translated language.
The words that left my mouth were converted into the Common Tongue and reached the ears of Niaron's people.
If I wanted to read writing, I could do that too. When I read the script, which felt like something between English cursive and Chinese grass-script calligraphy, its meaning surfaced in my head.
For reference, writing wasn't much of a problem either. If I kept the thought of writing in the Common Tongue in mind while I wrote, my hand would naturally be writing in the Common Tongue.
So the four stages of communication, listening, speaking, reading, and writing, posed no obstacle at all.
How, ev, er!
That doesn't mean this world is any good!
In other words, I want to go back to the Earth I lived on, to South Korea, to my home!
I had to meet that so-called Archmage person first, as soon as possible.
Where is he, you ask? Well, that irresponsible, ridiculous, venerable Archmage......
"Seir! The plate!"
"Aah! Whoa-whoa!"
I barely managed to catch the plate that was sliding off beside me. See, this is what happens if you let your mind wander even a little.
"Phew, saved."
I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand and let out a sigh of relief, and Wilter beside me let out the same sigh of relief.
How much would it cost if I broke one of these? Our restaurant's plates are pretty expensive, you know.
"Be careful. Payday's coming up soon."
"Ah. Right. Wilter."
Wilter grinned and pricked up his tail and ears at the same time.
This friend, with his striking eyes that glowed yellow-green, was said to be a member of the Demon Wolf Branch, one of the factions of the Demon Beast Race.
I vividly remember how startled I was when I first saw him. I fell on my butt and tried to crawl backward.
Think about it. A wolf standing upright like a person, with triangular ears on top of its head and a gray tail twitching at its back.
On top of that, its face was covered in gray fur, eerie yellow-green eyes glowed, and a strange 'creature' with a nose shaped like a canine's was wearing a shirt and pants and looking at me.
A living werewolf. It wasn't a shock you could easily forget.
Even after that, for about five or six days, I had to hunch my shoulders every time I saw him.
Still, Wilter was one of the better ones. At least he had a form that I, an Earthling, could easily wrap my head around, didn't he?
"Yoo dhere! Yoo dwo! Arh yoo koing dho kheep yhakking like dhad?!(You there! You two! Are you going to keep yakking like that?!)"
'Hilgas,' the most senior of the kitchen hands, chittered.
I still couldn't look that Demon Insect Race face straight on, because it reminded me of old horror movies every time.
They had bodies like insects inflated to human size.
And though I had no idea how they were built inside, they could speak the Common Tongue. Their accent became incredibly strange, though.
It seemed even the language-conversion magic couldn't fix their atrocious accent.
Hilgas, who hailed from the Beetle Type and looked like a beetle blown up hundreds of times in size, chittered and glared at Wilter and me, and we quickly went back to the dishes. I washed, and Wilter put them away. That was our morning routine.
When I glanced at Hilgas, he was moving all four of his arms, upper and lower, doing the work of two people by himself.
With two arms, he was wiping plates with a dry dish towel, and with the other two, he was neatly folding napkins.
It was a truly efficient sight, but no matter how long I looked at those giant insect legs moving behind that gleaming outer shell, I just couldn't get used to it.
A giant bug working in a kitchen. What kind of gag was that?
I threw myself into washing dishes again.
Thanks to those compound eyes, Hilgas had a wide field of view. If I looked away, he'd nag me again in that hard-to-understand accent. Not to mention he'd probably sense my movements with his antennae anyway.
The place I was currently staying was a restaurant called 'Parus Pan.'
It was a fairly large restaurant specializing in serving multiple races, and it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say you could see every race living in this world among its customers.
Of course, as the lowest-ranking kitchen hand, I had no reason to ever meet the customers. I was just the dishwasher here, earning wages as a useful worker.
In Niaron, there were eight races in total.
Broadly speaking, they were divided into eight races, and when necessary, they were subdivided further, like Wilter or Hilgas.
That humans were included among them was, in a way, a fortunate thing. At least I wouldn't be treated like an alien.
THOOM. THOOM. THOOM.
Then, at the sound of a mobile earthquake coming from the street side, I let out a light sigh and gripped my plate firmly. Because among the eight races, there was one that made sounds like this as a matter of course.
Wilter clutched a plate with both hands and grumbled.
"Tsk, this is why the Giant Race......"
He pricked up his ears and clicked his tongue lightly.
That's right. Among the eight races there was also the Giant Race, and you could picture what they looked like from the name alone.
Personally, I thought they were a very easy race to understand.
Ah, our first encounter didn't go very well. When I came face-to-face with a giant who looked to be around four or five meters tall, munching on a slab of jerky the size of my thigh, I honestly nearly pissed myself.
The big bushy beard, the dark greenish skin that looked sunburned, and the heavily scowling expression, maybe from the sunlight beating down on his face, made it seem as if he was declaring he'd catch me and use me as several days' worth of food.
Well, to someone like me seeing races other than humans for the first time, anything would be shocking.
If you think about it one way, it could be seen as the same as living in a far-off foreign country.
The process of being shocked by or newly accepting an unfamiliar language and culture would be more or less similar.
Is this what they call culture shock?
Even so, when it came to races whose very appearance differed, and the cultural differences that came from that, it was almost impossible to endure with my sanity intact.
Just looking at the dishes this restaurant served, there were far too many that were hard to get used to.
"One monkey!"
"Khirik! Kho dho dhe phen!(Girik! Go to the pen!)"
The order 'one monkey' wasn't some kind of code. It literally meant you bring out one monkey. That completed the 'dish.'
As for why an uncooked monkey counted as a dish, go ask the owner who made the menu.
All I could do was guess what race had ordered that dish.
"Oho, that's unusual. It's pretty rare for the Shadow Race to come to a restaurant."
At Wilter's words, I nodded and said,
"Tell me about it. They must be pretty worn out."
The Shadow Race was a race made of shadows.
A race that couldn't even be seen properly at night, formed from 'darkness' clumping together.
Their forms varied, they could change them at will, and on top of that, they could even exert physical force.
There was a saying that even the strongest of the Demon Beast Race could get beaten up by the weakest of the Shadow Race, so they seemed like a race that was practically cheating.
Anyway, the Shadow Race replenished their nutrition by absorbing the shadows of living creatures.
A shadow starving to death would be a pretty funny story, but apparently they actually knew hunger and could even starve to death.
So they'd have no choice but to come into a restaurant and absorb the shadow of a live animal.
Monkeys were a prime example of lively animals, so it would get plenty of strength from one.
As you can see, they were unsettling in appearance, had terrifying eating habits, and couldn't be seen properly at night, but I liked them.
Why? Because cleaning the animal pens wasn't my job or Wilter's, and so there were no dishes to wash, hahaha!
I washed the last plate and handed it to Wilter.
"That's the last of it. Anyway, that's one customer's worth of plates I don't have to wash."
"Heh! Right? Don't you feel like we could get along with the Shadow Race?"
"If we could shake hands with them, sure. Ugyaaah...... My back's throwing a fit."
"Take a little break. It's going to be slow from here anyway, right?"
At Wilter's words, I glanced back at Hilgas.
That senior kitchen hand with the glossy carapace had surely heard every word of our conversation.
He showed no reaction, and I decided to take that as tacit approval.
As expected, you should judge people by their character rather than their appearance. Mm-hm.
I lightly patted Wilter on the shoulder.
"Then I'm going to go loosen up a bit."
"Again? You're the first human I've seen who works out as hard as you do."
"Your body's your fortune, isn't it? I'll be in the backyard of the staff dormitory, so call me if it gets busy."
"Don't overdo it. We've still got the evening shift left."
I smiled and nodded. Of course. It's not like I've only worked here a month or two. I've got a rough grasp of how things run.
I spoke to Hilgas.
"Supervisor! Mind if I step away for a bit?"
"Dhon' ashk me aboud efry lidl dhing. Jhusht dhon' ofer-dhoo id.(Don't ask me about every little thing. Just don't overdo it.)"
"Naturally, sir."
And with that, it's free time!
I came out the kitchen's back door and ran toward the staff dormitory right in front of me.
If you passed straight through the front and back doors of the staff dormitory, you'd come right out into the backyard!
"Seir! Watch out!"
"Haha! Sorry, Salain!"
Salain, who, like Wilter, belonged to the Demon Wolf Branch of the Demon Beast Race, had been carrying a tub full of laundry and shouted, startled by me suddenly rushing past.
In the backyard, laundry hung from lines strung between poles, fluttering in the wind. White, brown, and green laundry all billowed in the same direction.
I passed the spot filled with the damp water smell of freshly washed laundry and walked over to where the junk and exercise equipment were.
"Which one should I do first? Hmm...... Let's start with sit-ups."
I lay down on a wooden board with straps for hooking the ankles, hooked my ankles in the straps, and laced my fingers behind my neck. Having gotten into position, I lifted my upper body with all my strength.
Trying not to think of anything at all, I began counting in my head.
One, two, three......