The Key That Came Home
Welcome back to your one-room apartment.
"Aaagh... it hurts like hell, seriously...."
For a good long while I just crouched there clutching my pinky toe. Thankfully, the toenail didn't seem to be cracked. Instead, the toe had gone red, and the spot I'd banged was swelling up a little. I'd slammed my left pinky toe square into the leg of my desk. That's what I get for rushing. I was so exhausted I'd been scrambling to eat, wash up, and get into bed, and this was the carnage that resulted.
Like a man on his deathbed, I rolled around the floor of my room like a lunatic. It was only after the pain had subsided somewhat and I came back to my senses that I saw the plate of frozen dumplings I'd been warming up lying completely overturned.
"Ugh, what a waste."
Should I toss them? When had I last run the vacuum over this floor, anyway? I hadn't exactly been on top of cleaning my room lately. Such a waste. Whatever — I'll just eat them.
The deliberation took all of one second. I picked the dumplings up one by one, checked that none of them had burst, and piled them back onto the plate. Only then did my eyes drift toward the door — and I noticed it was open a crack.
Since when had it been open? Probably hadn't shut it properly when I came in. It seemed to have been standing open ever since I got back to the room. I'd been too tired to check whether the door had actually closed.
Thud.
I shut it again right away. Maybe that noise just woke Goth and Erina? Well, nothing to be done about it now. For the moment, let's just be thankful nobody caught me looking this pathetic.
Yes — as you can see, this is my home. My one-room apartment. If anyone could witness me in this state, they'd probably find it a little confusing, but strictly speaking, I am still, in fact, stranded in another world — one shaped much like medieval Europe. And to be even more precise: this room is not in that other world. It's on my original Earth. South Korea, to be exact. So can I say that I've returned from the other world to my Earth, the present world? The answer is both yes and no at the same time. To put it precisely: only this room came back.
What's that supposed to mean, you ask? Well, explaining it means telling you a little story about the past... Hm. Sorry, but this absolutely cannot be summed up briefly. Skipping over all the hell I went through? My willpower doesn't permit it.
About three years ago, I fell into this place. Fell is a funny way to put it — I don't claim to know much about other worlds, but as I understand it, this kind of surreal event is supposed to be preceded by something special and mystical first. Nobody ever wrote that into law, but that's how it goes for most people, isn't it?
Like: a blinding flash of light erupting before my eyes at the very moment death closed in. Or a warm, gentle aura wrapping softly around my body. Or, failing that, a goddess-like figure appearing — no, a goddess herself (it absolutely has to be a goddess) — to usher me into my new life in another world. Or, if truly nothing else, an NPC from one of the games I used to play announcing, "You have been reborn as the Hero! I shall now guide you through a tutorial of your available skills." (Those things usually let you just shout "Status window!" and get a neat, tidy rundown of all your stats and specs.....)
Of all those countless scenarios, not a single one applied to me. It happened in the most ordinary, most peaceful way imaginable. Everything began the moment I stepped out that door.
Hm... I remember it clearly as a blazing hot midsummer day. My outfit: a short-sleeved shirt, shorts, and a pair of three-stripe slides.
My original profession was sales. I never planned to earn my keep doing this once I got here, but there was no helping it. Do I have magic? Can I swing a sword? If I could at least cook, I'd have cooked for a living. Turns out the one and only thing I'm good at is selling things. From my early twenties on — starting with cell phones, then water purifiers, men's suits, insurance, home appliances — there wasn't a product I hadn't sold by the age I am now. Not that my sales figures in any given field were anything to write home about, so it's hardly a boast. Maybe that's why I kept bouncing from job to job, telling myself this line of work just wasn't for me.
For the record, the last place I sold at before arriving in this godforsaken world was a phone case shop. You know the kind — customers walk in with a new phone, and you fit the case and slap a screen protector on the display.
"That's our three-millimeter ultra-slim case. It really suits your phone, sir."
"Pink in that model? We're sold out, so it'd have to be ordered — could you wait a couple of days? Though the purple's selling well too. If purple works for you, go with the purple."
"The anti-fingerprint film's fine and all, but I'd recommend this one instead. Even if you drop it screen-first, only the film cracks — the phone itself stays safe."
That was my life. TMI, but I am genuinely excellent at applying screen protectors. The owner, who'd run that case shop for twenty years, said he'd never once seen anyone apply them better than me.
So anyway. In this world, a talent for applying a screen protector without a single bubble is worth absolutely nothing.
That day, too, I dragged my exhausted body home after work and, like always, was in the middle of nuking an instant rice in the microwave for a lazy dinner when I noticed the fridge was out of water — so I was just about to head to the convenience store nearby to buy some. While I was at it, some ramyeon, and might as well grab a few snacks and a bottle of soju. Only three more days to payday — a little splurge today couldn't hurt. That was the thinking.
"Huh?"
At first, I thought I was dreaming. The space that should have spread out beyond that door was the third-floor corridor of the run-down Rose Officetel — five years in the same building, familiar to the point of boredom.
What actually lay beyond the door was a pitch-black, foreign countryside night without a single point of light. Right in front of me, a filthy dirt road. The stink of sewage and manure drifting on the air. The smell of grass, the chirr of insects. In the distance, desolate paddies and fields, meadows, hills, a scattering of houses. And far off, the faint silhouette of a pitch-black forest. The cool night breeze on my bare arms and legs was far too vivid to be a dream...
Aha! I'm asleep right now! I'm so exhausted my brain has dozed off while my body thinks it's still awake. Most people call this sleep paralysis. With roughly that thought, I stepped out the door without thinking at all.
Looking back on it now — truly, truly, truly a thoughtless thing to do. I should have stayed inside, absolutely should have, until I understood what on earth was happening. And then I promptly committed thoughtless act number two: I shut the door behind me.
There's no other way to describe it — unconscious, purely habitual behavior. Live alone long enough, and checking that the door is properly closed, properly locked, every single time you step out falls to you and you alone. Back then, I must have assumed it was a dream, and the sheer wonder of it probably outweighed everything else. I'd wake up soon enough and it would all be over, so I probably figured I might as well enjoy the dream while it lasted.
"Huh? Why does the door look like this?"
It was when I turned back to shut the door that I realized it had changed. The door at my back wasn't the steel door of my studio — it was something else entirely. In today's terms: the place I'd first stepped out of was a rotting, long-abandoned farmhouse quite a distance from the village of Greenhill, and the door was the wooden door of its barn. A wooden door, at that — rotted and split, one panel torn away. Different from my apartment's steel door in both size and shape, so, genuinely unsettled now, I opened the door I'd come through and looked again.
Screeeech.
Through that grating, ear-offending squeal, the wooden door swung open again — and what met my eyes wasn't my room, but rotting sacks of grain and a few old farm tools and nothing else.
"What the... why? Where's my room?!"
Truly a strange, bizarre dream. Right up to that point I'd kept believing it was one, and my composure had held. The first thought that this might not be a dream came only after I'd walked a long, aimless way down the dirt road that stretched on and on.
I hadn't wanted to leave that place. But no matter how many times I closed the door and opened it again, my room never came back — and the prospect of staying alone in that collapsing wooden house felt like an invitation for a ghost to pop out. At the very least, I decided, I needed to find someone and get help. Keep heading toward town, and surely there'd be a police station somewhere.
My smartphone, of course, got no signal here. From that moment on, the thing was demoted to a rectangular, light-emitting flashlight and nothing more. Still, back then even that was enough to find my way in the dark. Thinking about it now, not running into wolves or bandits and losing my life that night was nothing short of divine luck. However desperate the situation, as long as you're alive, you can do anything.
"How long does this road... go on?"
I walked a long, endless stretch down that dark, empty road. Once the sweat started pouring, my feet began to ache, and my throat went dry, the conviction began to grow that this was no dream. Only after nearly two hours of walking did I finally spot a dwelling. That was my starting village — the proverbial starter town, Greenhill. For three years, I lived in that lunatic backwater of a burg.
As I approached the edge of the village and saw medieval-style guards armed with spears and padded armor, one thought hit me immediately: this was absolutely not some cosplay. Cosplay is something you do for other people's eyes. Every suit of armor those men wore was caked with the grime of daily life. And they all carried that particular smell — sweat laced with cow dung.
"Halt."
"Ex... excuse me. Where is this?"
I was thankful, at least, that the language worked. Ahh — thinking about it now, I hadn't come away with zero boons after all. At least I got the language patch skill. Well, obviously! You get sent to another world, of course they give you that much! Otherwise you can't even talk to anyone!
"Quit spouting that nonsense, you beggar bastard. And what a peculiar getup you've got on."
"Been rolling around in the cow dung? And what's with that hair color?"
"Eyes look wrong, too."
The guards held their torches up to me, scrutinizing my black hair, my dark eyes, my shorts-and-tee getup. At the time, my entire worldly possessions amounted to exactly two things: my smartphone and my house key. In a small village like that, an unfamiliar outsider is suspect number one — and to those men, I was no ordinary suspicious character.
I kept spouting nonsense, so they must have taken me for a beggar and a lunatic. They were on the verge of running me straight out of the village when — on the grounds that I was wandering after dark without a torch — they confiscated my two possessions, and I spent the night in the village's underground jail.
"What's this rectangular thing?"
The guards took an interest in my smartphone, but thankfully I'd powered it off right before handing it over, so they quickly lost interest. What seemed to bruise their guardly pride instead was that I had no story to offer and barely responded at all.
And so my first night in the other world was spent in the frigid underground jail of Greenhill. One small mercy: it was summer, and underground, so at least it was cool.
"Out. This is no inn for the likes of you to sleep in."
"You have to give my things back!"
"Your belongings are confiscated for the time being. No ruling has been made on whether you can be trusted."
When morning broke, my meager possessions still not returned to me, I began my first three months living as a beggar with neither roof nor coin. Just how desperately broke was I, that I went so far as to name my alias in this other world Luciel Gathergold?
Going home was, of course, my dearest wish, so I returned to that isolated farmhouse any number of times afterward — but no matter how many hundreds of times I opened and closed that barn door, my old room never appeared. As those wretched days repeated themselves, eventually even the longing to go home faded away. All that occupied my head was food to fill my hungry belly right now, and a warm bed to lay this body down in.
I could have walked out of that beggarly village as I was. But owning nothing, I couldn't see anywhere else treating me any better. And there was no such thing as a bus here. Getting to the nearest city meant hours on foot, or renting a carriage or a horse — and renting a single horse for half a day cost a small fortune, never mind a carriage.
So I knelt along Greenhill's main road and begged, living the beggar's life on repeat. I took plenty of kicks for no reason at all. Too dirty. Too smelly. Too funny-looking. Or they'd had a bad day and I happened to be right there. People walking past would boot me just for kneeling there with my hand out, and featherbrained kids threw stones at me... Ha. Honestly.
Frankly? It was a garbage-heap of a town. If I got to choose my starting point in this other world today, I would never, ever pick Greenhill. If I had, it'd be somewhere like Stonefield, the commercial hub with its thriving market district, or Strongfin, the port city where every kind of cargo converges. Or maybe even Golden Circle, Helion's capital, where the royal palace stands... Anyway — maybe because the village was so poor that people couldn't eat properly, dress properly, or enjoy a single thing, the folks there were ignorant and hard-hearted across the board.
Even so, a few charitable souls in that village kept me alive. Without those few angels, I'd certainly have starved or frozen to death within the first three months. It wasn't much — I managed roughly one meal every two days, if I was lucky (though what I ate was some vomit-colored soup of unknowable contents) — and I stole my sleep too, drifting from one stranger's stable or barn to the next. Get caught, get beaten again.
Powerless as I was in this place, what I desperately wished for wasn't some tremendous strength, or magic. Just money. Money, money, and more money.
About six months into surviving on alms, I landed a job and could finally earn a little. Even a beggar, if he keeps his head down for three months, causes no trouble, goes nowhere, and simply endures in one village, becomes a familiar face to the local merchants.
My first job was at the village mill. I cleared away the chaff left over from the milling, packed the flour into sacks, and hauled them on my back to wherever the buyers wanted them. Half a day of bone-grinding labor for exactly two coppers!
Looking back now, I was the only one being paid two coppers. The other laborers got five. When I finally confronted the miller about it, he said he'd paid me that because he'd figured I might bolt with a sack of flour. Naturally, I got an apology later, along with everything he owed me.
What came after that? Work at the ranch. My starter town, Greenhill, lives up to its name — endless green pasture rolling out to the horizon is its whole identity. Put kindly, the air is clean and the water clear, fine for rest and recuperation. Put bluntly, aside from livestock farming, there's nothing the place has going for it.
Most of my days went to herding cattle and shoveling dung. I shoveled so much of it that no amount of scrubbing in the stream after work would ever fully wash the smell of cow manure off my body. The reason I stuck with that job longest was simple: a full day's work, dawn to dusk, paid up to seven coppers. Lots of cows meant lots of dung meant plenty of work, but it was so filthy that most people avoided it — hands were always short, so I could show up any time and find work waiting. That was a bonus, too.
Since I kept at it, they eventually raised my pay to nine coppers. That, I was genuinely grateful for.
Once my name got around, I worked at the butcher's shop too, and did odd jobs at the village inn. Whatever the job, I threw myself into it. However strange I looked to the people here, I wanted to be remembered as an honest, hardworking young man. Only then would they keep an outsider like me around — and I'd eat tomorrow, and land the next job after that.
And even so, saving money was never more than a dream. Save up dust, and in the end all you have is dust. A day's wage from shoveling cow dung: one copper for a rock-hard barley loaf, another copper for a bowl of soup. And since I couldn't just sleep rough in a different spot every night, three coppers for a night at the cheapest flophouse, with a wash. Rough jobs wore out clothes and shoes, so now and then I'd scrape together a copper or two for the cheapest secondhand clothes and footwear. Cheap, used things fell apart fast... so I'd have to spend again...
An endless loop. Living here, it turned out, wasn't so different from living back home.
Then one night, after working myself into a proper fever, I lay down on the ice-cold floor of a barn, and the thought came to me out of nowhere. It was about a year after I'd arrived in this world. If things went on like this, I'd probably live here until I died of old age. No — long before old age, I'd ruin my health with work and die of that first.
My parents died in an accident when I was little, and the grandmother who raised me — the only family I ever had — is gone from the world now too. I hadn't had many friends in the modern world, so if I vanished from it, hardly anyone would come looking or shed a tear. At best: the phone-case shop owner, suddenly cut off and forced to hire someone new, and the old landlord, sulking over his unpaid building fees.
I didn't much miss anyone from my old world. But having no place to lie down in comfort, no home of my own to collapse into after a brutal day — that was almost more than I could bear. God, I missed my bed, in that room where I'd never wanted for a thing.
Just as a single fat tear slipped, unbidden, down my cheek — a thought flashed through my head like a bolt of lightning.
Hold on... could it be?!
It was absurd. A fool's notion. But I decided it was worth a shot. After all, the fact that I'd ended up here in the first place was already beyond all reason.
At first light the next morning, I made for the barracks where the guards were quartered, and demanded my belongings back — boldly, to their faces.
"What? We never gave them back?"
It had been so long that even the guards had forgotten all about it. And truthfully, I'd never thought to reclaim them — I knew perfectly well that a smartphone and a house key were useless here, so why bother. And so, a full year later, I got my things back.
"By the way, Luciel. What in the world is this? It's small, but it looks like a key. And this rectangular thing?"
"My lucky charms, sir. Where I come from, every last person carries one."
"Is that so? How dull."
By then I was just another day laborer, a vagrant doing odd jobs around the village — even the captain of the guard didn't suspect a thing. I realized it late, but over that first year I'd gained something that not even the special powers of a fantasy novel could have bought me: the trust, and the hearts, of this village's people.
That day, I skipped the job office — my usual morning routine. Instead, I turned straight down the country road toward that very farmhouse where it had all begun. I hadn't set foot there once since giving up on going home six months before.
Hah... hah....
Walking that long road I'd traveled dozens of times, I still felt like an idiot the whole way — but I remember my chest swelling, that time alone, with a strange, taut kind of hope. If, just maybe... by some miracle, I could go back. Just imagining it made me happy. And when the barn door of that isolated farmhouse stood before me again, the tension doubled.
"I know it's not going to work. But. You never know."
I drew out the key I'd been clutching in my hand. A modern key — small and thin, made of steel, unlike anything in this world. The keyholes here took great copper keys nearly a hand-span long; mine was never going to fit them. And sure enough, the barn door's keyhole was so large that my little key would simply slide straight in, catching on nothing.
I took a deep breath and slowly slid my house key into that huge keyhole. And then—
Wh-what?!!
I felt it, unmistakably, through my hand. The door — the keyhole — felt alive. Like the muscle of a living creature flexing, the keyhole was contracting, little by little, from left and right, above and below — closing around the key in my hand! I wasn't fitting the key to the keyhole. The keyhole was shrinking to fit the key!
"This is insane...!"
Shocked as I was, this time — this once — I didn't pull the key out or run, even though something no sane person could explain was happening before my eyes. I kept the key in place and waited, stubbornly, until it was all over. And then, at some point, came the moment I felt the key settle into the hole — a perfect fit.
Now. Without stopping to think, I turned the key.
Click.
A satisfying metallic ring sounded out — the lock releasing.
Creeeeeeak.
A welcome warmth. And light.
"Ah...... aah.... aahhhh....."
When the door swung open, I stood rooted to the spot for a long, long while. My room. My precious one-room apartment — the place I'd ached to return to for so long — had finally revealed itself before my eyes.