Chapter 31
Chapter 31
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>Translator: Lord First
>Chapter: 31
>Chapter Title: A Night of Counting Stars (5)
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*
“Shall we go around and introduce ourselves? I'm Yevgeny. Yevgeny Novikov Karamzin. Or rather, I'm Kim Yujin, currently occupying the body of the son of the Karamzin ducal family!”
Yujin spoke as he wrote his name in Hangul on the clubroom's whiteboard.
He stood before the terrified girl from the Knight Division, the elf with an inscrutable, languid expression, and the murderous Santa Claus-hyung whose mere presence still made his knees weak.
“The last novel I read was titled [The Northern Grand Duke's Delinquent Sword Prodigy], and I'm currently enrolled in the Theology Division, walking the path of a priest! Oh, and I can see a status window. Anyone else here see a status window?”
He threw up a hand, hoping to build some lighthearted camaraderie, but everyone just glanced around at each other.
Is it just me?
Could the status window be something really special...? Yujin lowered his hand awkwardly and continued.
“Um. Hmm... Anyone have any other questions?”
“The ending.”
“...Excuse me?”
“Explain the ending, setting, and storyline of the novel you read.”
Yujin paused to think. Where should I even begin?
Typically, a long-running novel meets one of three fates.
One, a proper conclusion.
>Two, it gets dropped.
>And finally, it gets milked for eternity.
The novel Yujin had read was one that had been milked to its very core. A super long-running series with over a thousand chapters.
The kind of story that was easy to read on his commute, something to empty his mind with, that flowed smoothly without any real roadblocks and had very little substance.
So, it didn't really have an ending. The protagonist just went to an academy, collected hidden pieces, started fighting a family of evil mages, and then suddenly a world war broke out...
The kind of story that extended its lifespan by repeating the sentence, "The mastermind was actually so-and-so," every hundred chapters or so...
A novel where even the author had probably given up on ever imagining a conclusion.
“Um...”
As Ivan listened to Yujin, he thought to himself. This was definitely a story he didn't know, a novel he'd never heard of.
After all, Ivan—that is, Kim Seon-woo—had been ‘serious’ about his novels.
That meant he had strict standards for choosing what to read. He had the pride not to read long-running, no-romance, cash-cow novels with a hint of BL that were prominently displayed on the main portal's front page.
“Next.”
At Ivan’s cue, Oswald hesitantly stood up.
“Oswald Eastvelpen. I'm the second son of the Eastvelpen viscounty. My father is a current member of the Privy Council, and as you can see, I'm a Kalion elf. My Korean name was Park Jae-young. The novel I was reading was, uh, um... um.”
Oswald squeezed his eyes shut and forced the words out.
“*The Genius Mage the Villainess is Obsessed With*... that was it.”
“Ooh, romance!”
“Sh... Shut your mouth.”
Oswald gritted his teeth at Yujin’s interjection.
“I didn't even read thirty chapters! The story was bad, the misery arc was over by then, and after that, it was just one forced, frustrating plot point after another!”
“Ooh, an expert.”
“Shu— Shut! Your! Mouth!”
“How old are you? I was thirty-one in Korea, and I've been here for four years!”
“...I was twenty-seven in Korea, and I've also been here for four years.”
“You're undeniably my junior! Feel free to call me hyung, will you?”
“Wow, hey, Mr. Ivan? I can't work with this bastard.”
So this one doesn't know the ending or the plot either.
Ivan ignored the two bickering men and nodded.
“Next.”
“Eek!!”
Yuri, who had been shrinking in her seat the whole time, struggled to her feet.
“I'm Yuri... Franck. In Korea, I was... Lee Yuri. I was an illustrator.”
“Whoa! A working professional!”
“I-I, um... was twenty-nine... and I've been here four years... I don't have parents.”
“Gasp! Immune to parent insults...!”
“Is that bastard actually insane?”
The successive appearance of transmigrators his own age had Yujin's excitement cranked up to the max. He seemed thrilled just by the fact that there were more people to share information about his homeland with in this godforsaken, pre-modern otherworld.
Yuri, on the other hand, remained withdrawn.
“I-I didn't mean my parents are gone, I meant this body's parents are gone... I'm called Yuri Franck...”
“The original work?”
“Hic!”
Yuri flinched at Ivan's question and averted her gaze.
A moment of silence fell as everyone focused on her.
“What's this, a riddle? Let me guess! Let's see. Academy genre, angst and regret, so this must be a gender-bender...! That's the usual flow! W-Were you actually a guy back in Korea...!”
“No!!”
“Or maybe it's a streaming-fic... Ah, or it could be a surprisingly traditional fantasy...!”
“I-It's just that...”
“Quiet, Yujin. Now, Miss Yuri Franck. I shall cast a spell to calm you.”
Oswald raised his hand with a warm smile. He was a practitioner of Mind Sorcery, a school of magic focused on mental spells.
Meaning, he could use buffs like [Grant Courage] or [Guide Wisdom].
As a mysterious purple mana began to swirl, Yuri shrieked and leaped back as if she'd been electrocuted.
“H-Hypnosis!! Nooo!!”
“...What?!”
“W-What are you trying to do with that! Y-You all know, don't you? You all know what this is about! You rapists!!”
“I'm failing to follow the flow of this conversation. Mr. Ivan, what do we do about this?”
Ivan considered for a moment.
She was hesitant to reveal the original work and was unusually frightened despite their ordinary appearances.
She reacted the same way to Yujin, a conventionally handsome noble youth, and to Oswald, who always wore a gentle, kind-hearted smile.
A certain 'ideology' suddenly occurred to Ivan, and his eyes widened in horror.
‘A feminist...?!”
As Ivan, who had barely managed to recall a word from Earth of thirty years ago, reeled from the shock, Yuri squeezed her eyes shut and stammered.
“I-I was working on an illustration... when I was dragged here! Th-The original work was... d-de... de...”
“Aha! I got it! Degradation fic!”
“Uwaaaaaah!!”
Yuri buried her face in her hands and slumped to the floor. *I want to go home, I hate everyone, I'm scared...*
She'd never once wanted to attend an academy with a golden-tanned sleazebag, a squinty-eyed hypnotist, and a suspiciously strong gardener...
While Yuri was sniffling, Ivan suddenly muttered.
“You've all been here for four years.”
“Ah, and as for this hyung-nim here, he's a thirty-year veteran.”
“How old is he this year...?”
“He's thirty-four in this body!”
“Oh... my.”
Oswald looked at Ivan's beard and sighed grimly. Just how hard has it been for him...? He decided he should try to be more understanding, even when Ivan did something crazy, and nodded to himself.
“Come to think of it, we all arrived around the same time! What happened four years ago? Hmm...”
“The Demon King died.”
Ivan scanned them with a serious gaze.
“The Hero killed the Demon King four years ago. And both of them were transmigrators.”
“Uh...”
“There are no ‘stories’ in this world.”
Because this was reality.
Ivan barely managed to accept this fact before continuing.
“But individuals have their ‘stories.’ Their own personal stories... just like the ‘original works’ you all came from. Maximilian, who must have come from a traditional hero story, became ‘the Hero.’ The same must have been true for the Demon King.”
“Oh, then...”
“The delinquent sword prodigy of the northern grand duke.”
Ivan gestured to Yujin, then turned his finger toward Oswald.
“The genius mage the villainess is obsessed with.”
“Hmph...”
Oswald shook his head with a sour expression.
“...And. An unnamed degradation fic...”
“Hwaaaaaah...!!”
Yuri began to wail.
“You all started your stories in settings similar to your original works. The duke's delinquent son, the mage a noble lady has a crush on, and an unnamed degradation fic...”
“P-Please stop emphasizing it...!”
“Right. But the rest of the story is different.”
Ivan's eyes grew deep.
“A woman who knew the previous generation of transmigrators once told me something.”
-Live your story and end your story. The ending it will meet is not for fate or the world to decide. That is for you to decide.
-At the end of each story lies its own conclusion, and the path to that conclusion is not necessarily determined by a set destiny.
“There is no fate. Here or on Earth, life is not trapped within a story set on rails.”
-Do not wait for fate to end your story. My student. Turn your own pages. To the very end.
Ivan recalled Enrique's words and nodded.
“After spending thirty years in this world, meeting the Hero's Party, and now seeing you all, I have formed a hypothesis.”
Ivan walked to the whiteboard.
“While fate may not determine a person's future, I believe it does, at the very least, intervene in a person's past, in their ‘beginning.’”
Let's assume the world wanted a Demon King and a Hero, so it transmigrated them into those roles.
And here, right after the Demon King's death, three other transmigrators appeared.
Each of them transmigrated through entirely different stories, yet, surprisingly, they all had ‘starting points’ similar to their original works.
And all of them gathered here, at Saint Yansk University. An incredible coincidence? No, this is some kind of ‘design.’ It must be.
In other words, it's possible that there is a prevailing narrative trend that the world desires.
What we can infer at this point is...
“It's an academy story.”
“I knew it! Heck yeah!”
“And we have the ability to grasp this ‘officially recognized’ flow in real time.”
Ivan gestured to Yujin.
“That one has a ‘status window.’ It presents the direction of the story in the form of quests. The kind that changes fluidly to reflect the current situation.”
“Oh...”
“So from now on, we...”
Ivan began to write in large letters on the whiteboard.
-What story do we all need?
>-What ending will we all reach?
>-What must we do in this world?
“We band together to figure this out. We will understand our own stories, analyze the world's currents, and advance toward our ‘ending.’”
“Ooooh...!”
“Ah, wait a moment.”
Just as Yujin was cheering, Oswald raised his hand.
“We haven't heard what your story is, Mr. Ivan.”
“Oh, right! I don't know either. What was your story, hyung-nim?”
“...I don't know.”
“Huh?”
Ivan looked over all of them with a solemn gaze and spoke calmly.
“I left malicious comments on over thirty different works in order to get transmigrated.”
“Oh... Ooh.”
“My goodness...”
Madman.
Three red lines were drawn under Ivan's name in the minds of the other three.
*
That night, all of them climbed to the highest spire of Saint Yansk University and gazed up at the sky.
“Alright, Korean Patriot Group, let's move out!”
“I told you, it's the Returnee Party.”
“I'd rather we just didn't have a name.”
Ivan, meanwhile, was internally settling on the name 'Volunteer Club'.
*