1. Daehan Seodang
Dawn at Daehan Seodang was always serene.
A blanket of blue mist hung low over the seven academies built along the mountainside, and from the eaves of the ancient roofs, dew that had gathered overnight dripped slowly to the ground.
This was the great hallowed ground of learning—Korea's oldest, tallest, and most prolific producer of Taoist mages.
"Ugh, handyman ajusshi! This spot's still filthy!"
Of course, to the people who had to sweep and scrub that majesty every single day, the scenery stirred no particular emotion.
"Coming right up!"
Hoisting the broom clutched in his hand, Han Dohyeon rushed over at a trot. He had started cleaning this section before dawn, unmistakably, yet he simply kept sweeping in silence.
The virtues required of a laborer are few.
Move when told.
Don't stick your neck out.
In that sense, Han Dohyeon could be called the finest laborer of all.
It was only at noon, after dragging himself through the grueling schedule, that Dohyeon finally made it to the break room to pick up his lunch box—and there he found the other laborers sprawled out, resting. It was called a break room, but since it was a converted storage closet, sunlight barely reached inside, leaving the place pitch dark. Dohyeon plopped down on the one unoccupied chair.
"Ahh, I'm exhausted."
"Youngest one here, and already whining like that—what are we gonna do with you?"
A man sprawled flat on his back on the big sofa lifted his head slightly, gave Dohyeon a look, and clicked his tongue.
"Ajusshi, why are you so obsessed with having us clean since the crack of dawn? This is gonna be the death of me."
"Aigoo, listen to you, slacking off already."
When Dohyeon grumbled with a look of sheer exhaustion, the man snickered and gave him the reason.
"I happened to overhear this while passing by—the Grand Chancellor himself is visiting this academy today."
"The Grand Chancellor?"
Dohyeon's eyebrows twitched.
The Grand Chancellor.
The man who occupied the highest seat at Daehan Seodang. Simply put, he was like a university president—except here, his status was far loftier. For a laborer, he was a being one should never cross paths with in an entire lifetime.
"Why, though?"
"Hmm, word is he's coming to evaluate the research Soeun Academy's been running for the past five years."
"If that's the case, shouldn't he be busy organizing the research? Why is he rounding us up like catching bugs?"
"Probably just in a foul mood because his research won't come together. You know how the higher-ups are."
The man shrugged as if it were nothing. But hearing that, Dohyeon began to understand.
It had been the same in his past life.
When a paper wouldn't come together, the professor squeezed the PhD students, and the PhD students squeezed the master's students. And in this world, apparently, the ones being squeezed were the laborers. A truly beautiful tradition, unbroken even across worlds.
"Is the research really that stuck?"
"Hmm, hard to say."
"Aigoo, what do you mean hard to say, boss? The way I see it, it's already a lost cause."
One of the laborers sitting nearby, fanning himself in front of an electric fan, piped up. His speech was laced with dialect, and he was among the oldest hands at the place. His name was Jang Man-bok.
He'd been rolling around Daehan Seodang for over a decade—in other words, an elder of the laborer world.
"That Soeun Academy research. I saw it last year, and the year before, and it was the same every single time. They go on about how it'll work, how it'll work, and then at the end—KABOOM."
"Ah, so that's what those big explosion sounds were about?"
Dohyeon said, as if a light had gone on. Every now and then, while cleaning, a huge explosion would sound from the direction of the Central Research Laboratory at the heart of the academy. He'd always assumed it was just part of the research. Apparently it had been the sound of failure.
"So what happens if it fails?"
"What happens? Our necks, that's what. Our necks."
Man-bok made a playful show of drawing a finger across his throat.
"Five years of research with no results to show for it—you really think that penny-pinching Grand Chancellor is gonna increase funding? He'll cut it if he can't avoid it entirely."
"Hmm, but our salaries are hardly that big a chunk compared to the research budget, are they?"
"Doesn't matter. Their research comes first for those people, always. Mark my words, they'll cut our pay or trim headcount."
So that was it.
Dohyeon found himself nodding along. Research funding, subsidies, evaluation—and a structure where all that pressure rolled downhill. It was familiar. It had been the same in his past life.
The labs that claimed to dream of the nation's future were always short on money, and the labs short on money were always short on people, and the labs short on people ended up grinding down whoever was left.
Master's program in AI.
Everyone called it the core of the industry of the future, but that future had never been granted to Dohyeon. He got hit by a truck and died before he could produce a single proper result.
'And when I opened my eyes afterward, I was here.'
When he came to, he was a laborer in a world with Taoist magic, monsters, and talismans flying through the air—and his name was even the same. At first it had been fascinating, even thrilling. In his past life, he had created worlds out of equations and code; here, he could work miracles with talismans and spells.
He'd felt like he'd become the protagonist of a fantasy novel.
But living it, he came to understand: a seodang academy was practically a university and grad school rolled into one, and wherever people lived, things were more or less the same.
I am never going anywhere near a grad school in this life. Me and studying just don't get along.
The plan is to save up money steadily as a laborer and open my own café. That's the goal.
They say if you're going to be a servant, be one for a rich household—and sure enough, Daehan Seodang paid its laborers pretty well.
"We urgently need one person at the Central Research Laboratory right now. Anyone available? We'll pay extra, considering it's lunch hour."
Just then, the break room door swung open and the head laborer stuck his face in. The moment the words landed, everyone instinctively turned their heads and scrambled to avoid his gaze.
"Hmm..."
The head's gaze began to sweep slowly across the room. And then, unlike everyone else, it locked eyes with Dohyeon—who had actually been looking his way.
"Dohyeon, you're up this time. Get ready and come out quickly."
"Yes, I'll get ready right away."
Normally he'd have been dodging for his life, but right now he wanted to go. He hadn't even saved half the money for his café yet, and losing this job would be a disaster. If the budget shrank, they'd cut laborers or slash wages—and with the least seniority, Dohyeon would be first in line to get the axe.
"Aw, I could've gone, you know. Attaboy, Dohyeon."
Leaving Man-bok's teasing voice behind, Dohyeon tidied up his half-eaten lunch and gathered his cleaning supplies, following the head laborer outside—and a towering mountain came into view.
The reason everyone avoided cleaning the Central Research Laboratory, extra pay notwithstanding, was simple: unlike the other labs, it sat at the very peak of the mountain. Unlike the mages, who could simply fly, the laborers—ordinary people in every sense—had no choice but to trudge up on foot.
Seeing how high it was, Dohyeon briefly wondered if he'd made a mistake volunteering, but he had his reasons for needing this job, so he climbed in silence.
KWA-BOOM!
When he was about midway up, an explosion shook the ground.
"Ah, don't be alarmed. They're running one last check on the research before the Grand Chancellor arrives."
"So... if it makes a sound like that, does that mean it's failing?"
"Hmm... you're fine. As long as you just clean up the sections they mark after the run's over, you've got nothing to worry about."
Assuming Dohyeon's question was about a threat to his life, the head laborer answered in a reassuring tone. But what Dohyeon was thinking about wasn't the danger—it was the research results. And, more precisely, a deeply practical calculation of exactly how much of his salary would get shaved off if those results failed.
'And this time there'll be a lot of people watching, too.'
Dohyeon thought as he gazed up the long staircase stretching up the mountainside.
Could I sneak in a fix somehow?
Of course, to anyone listening, the idea of a lowly laborer fixing the research was pure nonsense. It was a spell that even the students of Daehan Seodang couldn't properly read after years of study. A project the academy's instructors had grappled with for five years without completing. And one laborer with a broom was going to fix it?
And yet Dohyeon was certain he could pull it off.
The first time he had encountered a spell after falling into this world, the emotion he'd felt was familiarity. The structure of the spell was strikingly similar to the code he'd written in his past life. No—if anything, compared to his old code, it was absurdly simple.
At first, he'd considered leveraging his past-life knowledge to become a world-class researcher here.
'But I gave up on that the moment I saw how the academic world actually worked.'
Perhaps because this was a world where monsters existed, non-combat research positions—those who couldn't properly handle spiritual power—were looked down upon. Handling spiritual power required adaptation training from childhood to develop one's spiritual organs. In other words, the structure was one where only families with both the talent and the wealth to acquire young spiritual talents shared power among themselves.
While working here, he'd seen it time and again: geniuses from ordinary families, persecuted and discriminated against purely for their lack of spiritual power. If even Korea's top academy had this kind of filth going on, he judged that the academic world as a whole would only be worse, never better.
The moment he realized that, he'd scrambled to hide his abilities. An orphan like himself in this world would, without a doubt, end up worked like a slave. So from then on, he'd played around in secret, building spells out of talisman materials students left behind and tools they'd thrown away.
He did have a bit of innate spiritual power, as it happened.
Occasionally, when the frustration got to him, he'd secretly solved assignments the students were agonizing over, or problems on the blackboard. In his past life, he'd struggled from a lack of talent; here, it almost felt like he'd become a genius. When the rumor spread that the academy had a ghost, that had been rather fun, too.
As he walked, the Central Research Laboratory came into view before he knew it. When his eyes met a student scurrying along with an armful of papers, the head laborer darted over to address him.
"We've brought one more cleaning worker, sir."
"What took you so long? You—follow me."
The student frowned, snapped a remark at the head laborer, then tilted his head toward Dohyeon without so much as a glance in his direction. The age gap between the student and the head laborer was easily twenty years, but the student clearly didn't consider it a problem in the slightest. Here, that was simply how things worked.
This was a seodang. A place where Taoist magic, not age, proved one's station—and family lineage and spiritual power decided a person's worth.
"Yes, sir."
Dohyeon knew this all too well himself, so he bowed at the waist and followed the student. Passing through the large doors, the interior of the laboratory was far more chaotic than it had looked from outside. Paper swirled through the air from every direction, the floor was a tangle of spells with hardly a place to step, and broken inkstones lay scattered about.
"Do not touch the spell formation under any circumstances. Sort the papers and stack them on the table. Clear away the broken stuff too—it's dangerous. And absolutely, absolutely do not touch the spells."
The student rattled off the instructions beside him, but Dohyeon's gaze kept drifting back to the spell formation.
He'd been involved in AI projects since his undergrad days—quite a few of them. And in Dohyeon's eyes, this spell was already a lost cause.
'No, wait.'
Dohyeon's eyes narrowed.
'That thing—it's about to blow.'