COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO—
The medieval morning began not with the alarm of a smartphone but with the crowing of a rooster somewhere in the distance.
"Ugh... it's cold."
A groan slipped out before I knew it. The chill of the stone wall bored into the shoulder that stuck out from under the blanket. A single sheet of thin linen sleepwear was nowhere near enough to block this cold.
When I curled up, the coarse blanket scraped against my bare skin. The charcoal I had put in the brazier last night had turned to white ash and lost its warmth long ago.
Musty dust with every breath.
The acrid smoke of half-burnt firewood.
The stench of the waste that had piled up in the chamber pot overnight.
'Goddamn it. Is this really a place fit for people to live?'
If the air quality of this room were measured right now, it would certainly come back with fine-dust readings at disaster level.
Holding my creaking back, I raised myself up from the bed.
'The bedding is the worst part....'
A bed in this era was closer to an enormous sack stuffed with goose feathers. There was a splendid canopy at the head, but the softness was inferior even to the cheap latex mattress I used to have. When I woke up, my whole body ached.
But the biggest problem was fleas. Dried herbs said to drive off insects had been laid beneath the bedsheet, but the effect was negligible. I had to wake several times through the night from the itching.
The one consolation was that today I seemed to have been bitten less than yesterday.
'Ah, I miss my apartment.'
The air conditioner that kept the temperature and humidity pleasant.
The double-glazed windows that blocked out noise and cold.
The flush toilet that made filth disappear at the press of a button.
I longed for the conveniences of the great civilization of the twenty-first century. Desperately.
Knock knock—
Along with a light knock, the old oak door opened from the outside.
"Excuse me~"
Perhaps fifteen years old? Šárka, the maid with a young freckled face and blond hair braided into two plaits, came into the room.
Her worn wool clothes were covered in soot and dust from the kitchen, but the girl's expression alone was as bright as the morning sun.
"Good morning, young master! It looks like the day is going to be very clear!"
The moment she came in she threw the window wide open. The earthy smell peculiar to the countryside and the smell of livestock dung mixed with the cold air and came surging in.
Šárka breathed that air deep into her chest as if it were some refreshing fragrance. It was a sight I could not understand at all.
"Do get up! Just as you instructed yesterday, I've even brought washing water that has been boiled once, you know?"
Faint steam rose from the brass basin Šárka held out triumphantly.
Washing water boiled hard during the night and kept warm beside the kitchen hearth. This alone was enormous progress I had achieved since arriving here.
On the first day I opened my eyes, she had brought, without a second thought, water freshly drawn from the river below the castle, cold as ice.
River water from an era that had no water treatment facilities, let alone any concept of hygiene.
Just imagining how many germs and parasites teemed inside it made me want to retch. I would rather die than wash with that.
I answered as indifferently as I could, in the solemn manner of speech the owner of this body would likely have used.
"Very well, set it down there."
"Yes, young master!"
The manner of speech still did not sit naturally in my mouth, but if I did not do this, Šárka would only be more flustered. The invisible wall of a class society was higher and harder than I had thought.
While I dipped my face into the lukewarm water, Šárka picked up the chamber pot from the corner of the room and approached the window. Then, without hesitation, she poured the contents out the window.
SPLOOOSH—!
Along with the sound of heavy liquid pouring down, someone's thick cursing rose faintly from the courtyard below.
"Hmm, hmm-hmm—"
But whether she had not heard it or simply did not care, Šárka hummed a cheerful tune and carried the empty chamber pot back to its place.
"......."
Watching that scene, I shut my eyes tight.
'Never mind everything else, the water and sewage system has to come first. At this rate it won't be the Black Death that kills us, it'll be every waterborne disease there is. That filth ends up flowing through the moat into the river, and then we drink it as our water supply!'
The structure of the privy was even more absurd. It jutted out from the exterior of the castle wall, so that when you relieved yourself it dropped straight into the moat below the castle.
We were living on top of a sewer, quite literally.
I came to feel keenly that the absence of basic hygienic sense was the chief culprit eating away at the average lifespan of the people of this era.
"Young master, I shall prepare your clothes."
The clothing Šárka brought was rough linen, so the texture against the skin was like sandpaper. Even with underclothes on, the scratchy sensation was distinct.
The leather doublet worn over it had not been broken in yet and was stiff, and a stench that stabbed at the nose had soaked deep into it.
"......."
I knew the identity of that stench. The smell of the ammonia used in tanning leather.
To put it more bluntly, it was the smell of thoroughly rotted urine.
No matter how much it was washed and dried in the sun, this smell did not come out easily. Covering the stench by spraying on expensive perfume was the only solution.
Once all the preparations were finished, Konrad, the castle's chief attendant and steward, came to find me.
Konrad was a loyal retainer who had served the house of Šternberk since the days of this body's grandfather. His graying hair and the deep creases carved into his face spoke of the years he had spent in this castle.
"Young master Ulrich, are you awake? Breakfast has been prepared."
As always, he greeted me with his back held straight and an expressionless face that betrayed no emotion.
Breakfast took place in a small dining room used only by the lord's family. But being the lord's dining room did not make it any cozier or cleaner than my room.
On the table were one loaf of hard-baked black bread, a few pieces of sheep's milk cheese, and a cup of thin ale drunk in place of water. That was all.
Even as the heir of this castle, eating soft white bread made of wheat flour every morning was impossible. That was a luxury reserved for someone on the order of a king or an archbishop.
'To think that a loaf of bread you could buy at a supermarket for a few thousand won in the modern age costs more here than a commoner's week of food....'
I soaked the stone-hard bread thoroughly in the ale and took a bite. A sour smell of fermentation rose from the sodden bread. The taste was, of course, terrible.
The water quality in medieval Europe was so poor that drinking clean water was as good as suicide, and so even children drank low-strength ale or wine instead of water.
So I understood drinking alcohol in place of water, but drinking lukewarm, flat ale from the morning was considerable torment for the palate.
'Please, just let me have one cup of coffee.'
But to the Europeans of this era, coffee was an unknown indulgence whose very existence was not yet known.
I thought that one cup of the fragrant americano I used to drink every morning might be worth more than all the wealth of this castle combined. And I thought so quite seriously.
After forcing my way through the dreadful meal, I followed Konrad to the study.
As the heir of the house of Šternberk, I had to handle a mountain of work piled up every day.
"Young master, this is the accounting for last month's income from the domain."
The parchment Konrad spread on my desk was packed densely with Roman numerals in a cursive hand that was hard to make out.
A non-intuitive notation with no concept of place value, like 'IV' and 'VI', made even simple addition slow and difficult.
'How on earth do they do multiplication or division with numbers this complicated? If only they had Arabic numerals and the decimal system, calculation time would be cut by a factor of ten.'
In medieval Europe everything was inefficient, illogical, and unreasonable.
After wrestling with the ledgers all morning and finishing the desk work, I left the castle with Konrad to make a round of the domain.
In my previous life I had been a prodigy who never once lost the top rank in the entire school throughout my student years, and naturally my knowledge of history was more extensive than the average person's.
The history I had learned was not a mere listing of which countries rose and fell, but included in detail the process by which technology changed eras and advanced civilization.
And the fields of the tenant farmers spread out before my eyes showed the limits of medieval agriculture, which I had only seen in books, all too plainly, and made my insides boil.
'That's the three-field system. They're just letting a third of that precious land lie fallow? How horrific a loss of yield is that? No wonder the harvests are pitiful, and one bad year is all it takes for people to start starving to death in droves.'
I let out a sigh as I looked at the fallow land, abandoned like wasteland.
'If they just planted clover or turnips on that fallow ground, they could restore the soil's fertility and get fodder to feed the livestock through the winter besides.'
My heart was heavy the whole time I toured the domain.
The pastoral scenery I had looked down on from atop the castle wall was a deception. Modest farmhouses and the fields adjoining them. The scenery itself was like a painting, but the farmers digging in the soil within it were all bent deeply at the waist.
Hands dirty with earth, ragged clothes worn through, and hollow eyes ground down by life.
The farmers' faces were full of deep wrinkles. Born the son of a farmer, living a whole life as a farmer, destined to become fertilizer for these fields. They seemed unable even to imagine another life.
"......."
That sight made me uneasy. It was not simply out of pity.
The vast waste produced by that listlessness and inefficiency ceaselessly provoked my science-and-engineering brain.
The situation at the smithy was no different. As I drew near the smithy by the castle gate, the foul smell of coal smoke and the regular, dull sound of hammering came to me.
The moment I stepped inside, a scorching heat rushed over me. The blacksmith, stripped to the waist and drenched all over in sweat, was gasping as he worked a crude leather bellows with his feet.
"Huff, huff...!"
The bellows made a groaning sound, but the volume of air it blew into the furnace was absurdly small. The air intake was far too inefficient for the labor put in.
Naturally the temperature of the furnace did not rise evenly, and even the color of the red-hot iron was uneven. Temperature control and carbon content adjustment were, of course, nonexistent.
'Improving the structure of the bellows alone would raise the air intake efficiency threefold. Just introducing the concept of firebrick for the furnace walls would prevent heat loss and let them stably reach higher temperatures. Then they could mass-produce stronger steel of uniform quality, and that ties directly to the productive power and military strength of the domain!'
Everything within my sight was inefficient to me, and a target for improvement.
After finishing my rounds, I headed to the training grounds for my next appointment.
As the heir of the lord, sword training was likewise an indispensable part of the daily routine. At one side of the training grounds, my attendant János greeted me.
"Young master, you've come?"
János was a boy five or six years younger than I was, having just turned twenty.
He was originally from a small noble family in Hungary, but had come here as a squire in the name of exchange between houses and was receiving his knightly training.
His face was still boyish, but his sun-browned, sturdy build and clear gaze carried a toughness rarely found in children his age.
And in fact he was far stronger than I was.
CLACK, CLACK!
"Young master! If you grip the sword like that, your strength won't be properly behind it! You have to use your waist, not your wrist!"
"Ngh... I am using it!"
Swinging a wooden sword while wearing heavy armor was hard labor close to torture. After clashing swords a few times, my breath was already up in my throat.
'How am I supposed to fight wearing this? In war, the organization of a well-trained army matters far more than an individual's martial strength. Once gunpowder weapons develop, the knight will become a relic of a bygone age anyway....'
"Hah, hah... János, let's rest for a moment."
"Tired already? Young master, you must build up more stamina! On the battlefield, no one will wait for you to recover!"
My body was already at its limit, yet János pressed me without a trace of fatigue.
But to me, a man chained to a desk in my past life and in this one alike, this sword training was nothing but meaningless suffering carried out in the name of a noble's duty.
The lunch that followed the hellish training was the most abundant meal of the day, at least.
In the center of the long table in the great dining hall sat a whole roast boar, steaming.
But the strong smell of spices that stabbed at my nose felt less like something meant to stir the appetite than an attempt to hide the gaminess soaked deep into the meat.
'An era when a single peppercorn is worth a silver coin. Spices must serve to display wealth more than to prevent spoilage.'
I cut the coarse boar meat roughly with a knife and picked it up to eat with my hands.
'The tableware is a knife and a spoon, and that's it? Well, forks only became common after the eighteenth century, so at present even nobles eating with their bare hands is ordinary. And naturally there's no notion of hygiene like washing your hands with soap before a meal.'
The small bowl of water set beside the table was not for drinking but for rinsing the fingers. I finished my meal quietly, trying to grow accustomed to such primitive dining etiquette.
In the afternoon I had to preside over court as the lord's deputy. With my father away, having answered the king's call for the crusade, handling the affairs of this domain, great and small, fell entirely to me.
I sat in the castle's great hall, in the high seat where the lord sat, and listened to the petitions of the people of the domain.
The hall was crowded with people who had come to watch the proceedings and those waiting for their turn.
The first petitioner was an old farmer bent at the waist. He lamented tearfully that his neighbor had secretly moved the boundary stone of his field in the night and stolen his land.
Immediately after, the accused neighbor rushed out and shouted at the top of his lungs that he had done no such thing, and that on the contrary it was the old man who was coveting his land.
There was no evidence. There were only shouts laced with curses at each other and oaths sworn to God.
'This is when you carry out a survey. Set a reference point, measure the distance, and it's over... is there no land register or certified copy of title?'
Trials in this era had no presumption of innocence, let alone any principle of evidence. The lord's word was the law, and a verdict could change according to the lord's mood.
With a sigh, I wrapped it up by threatening both sides and reconciling them well enough.
The next case was more troublesome. A farmer appeared and complained that the widow next door had cast a curse to dry up the milk of his dairy cow.
He even added the far-fetched testimony that he had seen her turn into a cat each night and slip in and out of the cowshed.
'A witch, my foot... has he even fed the cow proper, nourishing fodder? Is the sanitation of the cowshed even decent?'
I pressed hard at my throbbing temple.
'It's obviously malnutrition or illness caused by poor management. But a widow with no husband is an easy target, and if you drive her out as a witch and kill her, there's even a reward, so it's a vulgar scheme to pin it on her first and see what happens.'
Medieval Europe was an age ruled by superstition and fanaticism. The reason and common sense of a modern person did not work here at all.
What would happen if I dismissed that farmer's claim as unscientific?
I would be not a wise ruler enlightening his foolish subjects, but might rather fall under suspicion as a heretic shielding devils and witches.
After a moment's deliberation, I delivered my verdict with a sigh.
"That widow shall be sternly warned. And as for the cow, summon a priest and have it blessed. Furthermore, from now on feed the cow bean husks and dry grass more generously. The more an animal is blessed by God, the better it must be fed, for that is how the grace is doubled."
"Thank you, young master!"
The people believed a priest's prayer more than any scientific basis, and lent their ears to talk of devils and witches more than to any rational solution.
So rather than reveal the knowledge I possessed outright, I had no choice but to give my instructions indirectly, at a level the common people of this era could understand and accept.
When the sun set, the low clouds plunged the castle into pitch darkness in an instant.
To a modern person, night was the start of another day, but here night was the hour when all activity ended.
A world where torches and candles were the whole of light. It amounted to most members of society wasting half of every day in darkness.
'When was it that Edison invented the incandescent bulb? What's certain is that if I wait until then, I'll have died of old age.'
I stood at the window and gazed up at the night sky.
Above my head, countless stars I had never seen, hidden by the lights of the city, flowed on in a vast river.
The medieval night sky was clearer and deeper beyond any comparison with the sky of the Seoul I had lived in.
"The sky is this beautiful, so why is the world beneath it so horrific and inefficient?"
I sat at the desk and spread out parchment. Then I took up a piece of charcoal and tried to record the knowledge I possessed.
Basic chemical element symbols, designs for a waterwheel, the structure of a distillation apparatus, and the like.
Teaching them nothing more than a simple method for making soap would halve infant mortality. Teaching them nothing more than the basics of crop rotation and selective breeding would free them from starvation.
'...But the moment this knowledge becomes known to the world, I will either become a saint who works miracles or be branded a heretic in a contract with the devil and end up at the stake.'
I crumpled the parchment I had been writing on a moment ago and threw it into the embers in the fireplace. The parchment burned away slowly within the flames.
I had no wish to end up in the fire like that paper.
When I laid my body down again on the cold, damp bed, the countless inefficiencies and absurdities I had seen over the course of the day churned through my head in disarray.
Water and sewage systems, agricultural technology, steelmaking methods, public hygiene, the legal system... everything about the medieval world was horrific, uncomfortable, and uncivilized.
There was no romantic fantasy of the kind I had imagined here. There was only the real medieval Europe, where even surviving to get through a single day was harsh.
But the truly worst situation arose the very next day.
The soldiers of the house of Šternberk, who had departed in answer to the king's call for the crusade, finally returned.
But in the long, weary procession of survivors, there was one man who should rightfully have been at the very front holding the banner of the house.
The master of this house, Petr von Šternberk, was nowhere to be seen.