His entire body was burning hot, as though it were on fire. His head spun, and his stomach churned.
He wanted nothing more than to keep sleeping like this, but he could not. He had to embark on the hellish commute to work that took an hour and forty minutes by subway.
Since he had not heard his alarm, perhaps it was not time to get up yet. Then again, he might have slept straight through it because of his cold. Either way, he needed to get up and check the time before he could decide whether to go back to sleep or frantically get ready and bolt out the door.
“Mm……”
With great difficulty, Changin opened his eyes and stared through his blurred vision, momentarily struck by a profound sense that something was wrong.
He could blame his blurry vision on being sick, but the unfamiliar and needlessly ornate ceiling above him was more than enough to leave him bewildered.
“W-what…?”
Changin fumbled around with one hand, searching for his phone. But there was no phone there.
Instead, there was someone’s hand.
‘What in the world?!’
Changin discovered that when people were startled badly enough, they could not even scream.
It was not something he had particularly wanted to learn.
There was a person’s hand in the studio apartment where he lived alone!
“Mm…. Lord Karl…?”
Even more surprisingly, the person sleeping beside Changin was a woman.
Then again, if a man had been lying there, Changin was confident he would have screamed like a teenage girl and fled, so perhaps that part was not quite as surprising as it seemed.
With his fever-addled mind barely functioning, Changin desperately tried to remember whether he had been drinking the previous night, whether he had met a woman while drinking, and just how far things had gone between them.
But all he could remember was working overtime, enduring the hellish journey home, and falling asleep as soon as he arrived.
Meanwhile, the woman had awakened and was rubbing her eyes as she looked at Changin.
She had slightly disheveled brown hair and dull-looking green eyes.
‘She’s a foreigner!’
“Lord Karl. Are you all right?”
“W-who… are you……?”
Changin felt as though he might stop breathing at any moment. One small mercy amid this disaster was that the woman apparently spoke Korean.
At his words, a sorrowful smile appeared on her face.
“It is me. Cecile, your nursemaid.”
“…….”
Nursemaid? What was this woman talking about?
Only then did Changin realize that she had been calling him Karl rather than Changin.
And that neither of them was actually speaking Korean.
“Lord Karl, you should still be asleep at this hour. Did you have a nightmare?”
Changin was startled once again when Cecile effortlessly lowered his body back onto the bed.
Changin was not particularly large, but he was certainly not small enough to be handled so easily.
Yet as he tried to sit up again after Cecile had laid him down, Changin noticed something strange.
“W-what……?”
Perhaps it was because he was suffering from such a terrible fever, but the hand he raised into his field of vision was far too small.
The sight of those tiny, slender, pale fingers moving according to his will frightened him beyond belief.
Come to think of it, his voice was strangely high and thin as well.
That is not my voice.
“Lord Karl?”
When Changin’s breathing grew ragged, Cecile reacted immediately. Her hand completely enveloped his now-small hand, passing its warmth into him.
To his astonishment, Changin realized that the touch of a woman he had never seen before today was enough to make all his fear and panic subside.
“Shh……. It is all right. You must be tired from waking so suddenly. Drink a little more of the potion and go back to sleep.”
Her lips trembled as Cecile struggled to keep her voice gentle, bringing a small glass vial to Changin’s mouth.
But Changin refused to open his mouth, and Cecile’s expression gradually twisted with anxiety, fear, and pain.
“Who are you…?”
When Changin finally spoke through his confusion, Cecile’s haggard face crumpled uncontrollably.
In the end, she burst into tears.
Changin realized that something had gone terribly wrong.
And he desperately wished that all of this was a dream.
But even as Cecile’s hot tears fell onto the back of his hand, he did not awaken from it.
He had no choice but to accept that this situation had become his reality.
***
At the late hour, the imperial physician Milton was dragged over. Unable to conceal his exhaustion, he examined Changin from head to toe.
Only after the physician left did Cecile finally stop crying. With his condition somewhat improved, Changin listened to her explanation.
“……The Hardion Empire? And I’m the Fourth Prince?”
“Yes, Lord Karl. You are the Fourth Prince of the Hardion Empire. And please, you need not speak so formally to me. I am merely your nursemaid.”
Only after hearing the words Hardion Empire did Changin finally understand who he was and where he was.
The Hardion Empire was a nation from the novel The Iron-Blooded Emperor Rules, which Changin had been reading. It was the empire eventually ruled by Aingir, whom Changin had nicknamed Ingil.
The description iron-blooded suited Aingir perfectly. During his rise to the throne, he slaughtered every one of his siblings who might someday become an obstacle to him.
Even infants who had barely been born.
Every last one of them.
And now Changin had been dropped into the world of a novel whose protagonist was that kind of madman.
Changin desperately searched his memory of the novel, trying to recall a character named Karl, and eventually managed to remember.
Karl was nothing more than an extra who never appeared even once.
His entire existence amounted to a short passage halfway through Volume 1 stating that he had died.
Aingir only thought of him once later on while trying to cure the illness of a newly introduced character. Karl was less a character than a convenient plot device.
In other words, if events followed the story of The Iron-Blooded Emperor Rules, Changin—
No, Karl—
was certain to die.
“……How old am I?”
“You turned sixteen this year.”
Upon hearing Cecile’s answer, Karl realized that finding out his age was utterly useless.
Karl had never even appeared in the novel, so no one other than the author could possibly have known how old he was.
Fortunately, Cecile patiently explained the imperial family to him, allowing Karl to determine roughly when in the story he had arrived.
‘Good God! The story has already been underway for ages!’
The Iron-Blooded Emperor Rules began in the spring of the year Second Prince Aingir turned twenty.
Aingir, who had previously shown no interest in anything in the world, awakened after the death of his mother, the Imperial Consort Minerva.
From there, the main story began in earnest as Aingir investigated the secrets surrounding Minerva’s death and came into conflict with Emperor Madius.
But it was autumn now, and Minerva had apparently died in the spring of the previous year.
A full year and a half had already passed!
In other words, the story had already entered the middle portion of Volume 1, and before long, Karl’s death would pass by in the form of a few insignificant sentences.
‘Fourth Prince Karl, who had been wasting away from a fever, died. He had never posed any real threat to begin with, but Aingir decided there was still some value in having one less rival. Not bad.’
That would be the end of it.
“Do you remember anything about your mother, Lady Viole?”
“I don’t remember anything at all.”
Cecile looked not merely disappointed by Karl’s answer, but utterly devastated.
But there was nothing he could do about it.
In the novel he had read as Han Changin, a person named Viole had never even been mentioned. There was simply no way for him to know anything about her.
Cecile continued telling him one thing after another, almost as though she were praying that some fragment of Karl’s memories might return.
Karl only half listened while desperately thinking through his situation.
‘Damn it! I should have read the whole thing straight through to the ending!’
Karl did not know how the novel ended.
By Volume 5, Aingir had become emperor, war had broken out with the neighboring countries, and the story had begun hinting at the existence of some suspicious organization.
That was everything Karl knew.
If he had known this was going to happen, he would have stayed awake all night if necessary and finished the entire novel…….
But after working overtime the previous day, Changin had not reached his studio apartment until nearly midnight, and he had needed to wake up before dawn the next morning to go to work. He had had no choice but to sleep.
He had to work to earn money, and he had to earn money if he wanted to make a living and enjoy novels as a hobby in the first place…….
‘How am I supposed to survive between Emperor Madius, a monster obsessed with politics, and Aingir, a completely deranged psychopath?’
Just as Karl anxiously bit down on his lip, his vision suddenly swam.
“Lord Karl.”
When Karl squeezed his eyes shut and grimaced, Cecile, who had been speaking softly beside him, reacted instantly.
She swiftly uncorked a glass vial and brought it to Karl’s lips.
“You’ll feel better once you drink the potion. Here, quickly.”
Karl could do nothing as his fever abruptly surged.
The pain was horrific, as though every cell in his body were being painstakingly set ablaze one by one.
It was difficult to believe that a human being was even capable of experiencing such agony.
Karl could not breathe through the pain. He curled up like an infant and trembled uncontrollably.
Cecile soon realized that his condition was far more severe than usual, and panic seized her.
“Please bring Lord Milton! Quickly!”
Karl heard Cecile’s piercing scream as she called for the imperial physician.
He knew that he needed to drink the potion immediately, but he truly could not move a muscle.
It was a terrifying disease.
Just before Karl completely lost himself to the agony, Milton came rushing back and suddenly poured ice-cold water over Karl’s body.
The pain vanished instantly.
No.
It had not vanished.
Compared to the agony from moments earlier, which had felt as though he had been thrown into a blazing hell, this pain was merely bearable enough that he had mistaken it for disappearing altogether.
As the agony eased slightly and Karl regained just enough presence of mind to think, what came to him was none other than his life flashing before his eyes.
Karl learned yet another thing he had never wanted to know.
When the pain was severe enough, even your life did not flash before your eyes.
Yet what was truly horrifying and despairing was that Karl felt absolutely nothing as he watched fragments of the life he had lived as Han Changin.
It was like watching a dull, low-budget independent film.
The exhausting life Changin had spent doing his very best to survive was simply boring.
And so it did not matter to him that he could no longer remember his parents’ faces.
It did not matter that he could not even remember their names, that he could no longer feel the love they had given him, or that Changin’s desire to repay that love had vanished without a trace.
And that was precisely why it was so terrifying.
Why it hurt so much.
Everything that had made up Changin’s life had been discarded as though it were worthless.
A human life had come to a meaningless end.
Just as Karl’s life had ended in a single brief sentence, Han Changin’s life had ended just like that.
Which only made Karl more desperate.
“Karl. Quickly, please…. Please…….”
Cecile’s trembling voice sounded as though she were pleading.
Praying.
Her hands trembled as well.
Shaking violently, Karl barely managed to open his mouth and drink the potion.
“Cough! Gasp! Haaah…!”
Karl gasped for breath before collapsing limply onto the bed.
As the pain receded and he finally became capable of thinking again, only one thought filled his mind.
‘I have to survive!’
Emperor Madius, the protagonist Aingir…….
He had no time to concern himself with any of that!
Karl believed that according to the story, he still had roughly a month before his death.
But in his current condition, it would hardly be strange if he died right now.
Everything else had to wait.
Karl’s immediate objective was to cure this disease!
There was only one problem.
Karl’s illness had never been discovered before. It did not even have a name. No one knew why the symptoms occurred, nor when or how it would kill him.
It was a completely mysterious and incurable disease.
Even the imperial physicians had given up after searching for information in the Imperial Archives, where all the knowledge in the world was said to lie dormant.
But there was one person.
Only one person in the entire world who knew how to cure it.
A cure would be discovered in Volume 3, four years later according to the story.
And Han Changin, who had read The Iron-Blooded Emperor Rules, knew what that cure was.
Or rather—
Now, Karl was the only one who knew.
The sound of Cecile bursting into relieved tears rapidly faded beyond the edges of his consciousness.
Even then, Karl stubbornly repeated what he had to do in his mind, determined not to forget.
‘Get the medicine. Survive.’
For now, that came first.