Conquering Another World with a God-Tier Game
Chapter 1
A bar somewhere in Seoul.
It was a little past eight, and under the dim lighting, many people occupied the tables, enjoying themselves after work.
“Ahh. We’re really halfway to sixty now, huh?”
It was the year-end gathering where their high school classmates had met up for a farewell party to the old year. As Hyuncheol lamented to his friends, once the few remaining days of the year passed, he would officially become a thirty-year-old man. Despite his fairly likable face, he wore an exhausted expression.
“Why are you saying something like that and ruining the mood for drinking?”
Gyeongsu, sitting beside him, scratched at his expressionless dark face and picked up some snacks. Even though he had scolded him, judging by his expression, the topic seemed to bother him too.
“What? Are we really that old already?”
Across from them, Taeho rubbed the face that had looked old ever since high school and exaggerated a shocked expression. Everyone let out small snickers at that.
“It feels like I got discharged from the army just yesterday, but I’m already thirty. Seriously ridiculous.”
“Come to think of it, I’m already in my seventh year of reserve forces duty. What about you guys? Back when we had to do it, it was a huge pain in the ass, but now that I’m reporting to the local district office, it feels like I’ve become obsolete or something.”
“Damn, already seven years? Soon it’ll be civil defense duty, then. Civil defense doesn’t make you wear military uniforms, right?”
Perhaps because reaching the end of their twenties wasn’t something they could feel completely indifferent about, the other friends all chimed in with a few comments as well. But for Hyuncheol, simple sympathy wasn’t enough to shake off this suffocating feeling, and his mood quickly darkened again.
The drinking session didn’t last long. Since Hyuncheol, who wasn’t feeling particularly cheerful, refused to go for a second round, the others lost interest too, and they all dispersed. Though it wasn’t entirely Hyuncheol’s fault.
At some point, this group had already stopped going wild through second and third rounds like they used to. It was still too early to call themselves old, but they were no longer the same as they had been in their teens and twenties. Or maybe they had simply become wise enough to take care of their bodies.
“I’m heading out. See you next time.”
After parting with his friends, Hyuncheol trudged along the brightly lit night streets illuminated by store signs and streetlamps. Since the subway station was quite far away, all sorts of thoughts surfaced in his mind.
Most of them were about things from his past. Nothing especially unique.
To put it extremely simply, like many people, he had drifted through life without any real sense of purpose, then only felt the weight of reality once it was time to graduate college. After frantically running around in desperation, he had barely managed to get hired by a small-to-medium-sized company, where he had worked ever since.
And if someone asked whether he liked the company he ended up joining, the answer was no.
As if that’d ever happen.
Leaving aside the bastard Section Chief Bang, the idiot Assistant Manager Kim, and the exhausting human relationships that somehow kept limping along, the work itself was hard and the salary wasn’t great either, so he wanted to quit all the time.
But whenever he remembered desperately struggling in the job market, he didn’t even dare think about resigning. Somehow enduring day by day had become his routine, and before he knew it, he had entered his thirties.
Am I just going to keep living like this?
After returning home, Hyuncheol sat on the edge of his bed and stared blankly at the calendar on the right side of his desk. He had worked fairly hard in his own way, but imagining this same lifestyle repeating through his forties, fifties, maybe even sixties, made his chest feel stifling.
Of course, even while working, he had pursued enjoyment through various hobbies in his own way, but something still felt lacking.
The phrase “self-actualization” sounded a little embarrassing, but he wanted something that could make him feel satisfied with life. At the very least, he wanted to find something he genuinely wanted to do.
Maybe I should at least start with studying English or something.
Among themselves, they joked about getting old, but even so, they were only thirty now and could still be called young. Compared to people who had worked toward their dreams since childhood, he might have been late, but he still had plenty of life ahead of him.
That was the last thing he remembered before falling asleep while dreaming of a new tomorrow.
“But where is this?”
The place where Hyuncheol awoke the next day was a completely unfamiliar room. To begin with, the gloomy wooden ceiling in his sight and the incandescent light hanging from it were entirely different from anything in his own room.
I definitely came back to my room, showered, and lay down in my own bed. And what are these clothes?
Hyuncheol fiddled with the baggy shirt and tacky cotton pants he had never seen before while trying to retrace his memories from last night. But nothing came to mind. And he couldn’t blame alcohol, since he hadn’t drunk nearly enough to black out.
He didn’t know where this place was, but he was certain he hadn’t come here on his own. That meant someone else had brought him here, which was strange in itself.
First of all, who would kidnap someone sleeping in his own home in the middle of a major city? And after getting up from the bed and looking around, although the room was unfamiliar, it felt less like a place meant to imprison someone and more like an ordinary living space similar to the studio apartment Hyuncheol lived in.
For one thing, he wasn’t tied up, and the rough, oversized window beside the bed could be opened and closed easily. When he peeked outside through the opened window, it was only on the second floor. On top of that, it faced a large street. If he wanted to escape, it looked like he easily could.
With that, Hyuncheol’s pounding heart calmed somewhat, and he began examining the room with a more composed gaze.
The first impression that struck him was that everything felt incredibly old-fashioned. Not merely worn down. The room itself was reasonably clean. He didn’t know who owned it, but at the very least, they seemed to have hygiene standards similar to his own, so it didn’t particularly disgust him.
But the window frames, floor, and ceiling were all constructed out of wood in a way that absolutely didn’t match modern styles. And the wood itself wasn’t the bright-colored kind used for modern interior design, but rather a heavy, dark tone that felt unmistakably like real wood.
The small table beside the bed, the little wardrobe, and the bookshelf attached to the wall all looked incredibly old-fashioned too.
If not for the electric lights and appliances, he might have thought he had somehow time-slipped a hundred or two hundred years into the past.
But even those appliances didn’t look ordinary. There was a TV, refrigerator, washing machine, telephone, and all the essentials, but they were absurdly outdated.
They looked less like old models and more like exhibits that belonged in a modern history museum. When he saw the metal rotary dial telephone sitting on the shelf beside the bed, he genuinely doubted his eyes for a moment.
What the hell is this place?
Come to think of it, he vaguely remembered hearing somewhere that some elderly people living alone kept using extremely old appliances for decades. Hyuncheol briefly imagined the white-haired owner of the room.
After looking around the room, Hyuncheol headed for the bathroom. He was curious what the bathroom in a room like this would look like, and since he had just woken up, he figured he should wash up too.
Just in case, Hyuncheol knocked before opening the door. There was nobody inside. Since it was dark, he flipped the switch near the entrance, and the light turned on, though it wasn’t very bright. It didn’t seem to be LED lighting.
Not too bad, actually?
The bathtub on one side and the oval mirror hanging there instead of a full wall mirror still gave off a feeling that didn’t match the modern era. But at least the walls and floor were tiled, and most importantly, there was a white toilet, so it didn’t feel too alien.
When he turned the faucet, cool water poured smoothly into the sink. Hyuncheol washed his face with a crudely made bar of soap and then looked at himself in the mirror.
Then he froze for a moment.
What? Something’s different.
It was definitely his own face, but it looked far too different from usual. It wasn’t simply the unfamiliar feeling of looking into someone else’s mirror.
As he stepped closer and examined his reflection carefully, he realized the source of the discomfort.
Young! No, younger!
The face reflected in the mirror was his own from around high school, a face he could barely remember anymore. It was impossible. So Hyuncheol inspected himself closely, wondering if maybe his skin had simply improved, but the difference between thirty-year-old him and teenage him was unmistakable.
Hyuncheol looked over his body in confusion. As he tried to make sense of the situation, he suddenly recalled one of the common settings from the web novels he occasionally read.
What the hell? Don’t tell me I returned to the past or something, like in a novel?
Even while thinking it, he found the idea absurd. Yet at the same time, he couldn’t help considering the possibility. Come to think of it, the atmosphere really did feel strangely old-fashioned.
But simply assuming he had returned to the past didn’t fully make sense either. No matter how hard he thought about it, there had never been a room like this in his past. Moreover, his current appearance looked to be in his late teens, meaning only around ten years separated it from his original age, but this room didn’t feel ten years old. It felt fifty years older.
And that wasn’t the only strange thing. After leaving the bathroom and examining the appliances again, he realized the brand names attached to them were completely unfamiliar.
No, it wasn’t simply that he didn’t recognize the brands. The very letters used to write the names looked unfamiliar. If it had been English, he obviously would have recognized it. But it wasn’t Japanese or Cyrillic either.
Yet the truly strange thing was that he could naturally read the unfamiliar script.
Dilrai? Was there ever a company like that?
It wasn’t just the brand names. The words written all over the antique-looking TV with its wooden outer frame were the same. Hyuncheol absentmindedly read words equivalent to channel, volume, power, and the like before belatedly realizing he was reading letters he had never learned, sending chills down his spine.
“Fuck! What the hell is this!?”
Faced with one bizarre phenomenon after another, curses automatically burst from Hyuncheol’s mouth. The thought even crossed his mind that perhaps he had been abducted by aliens and had language abilities implanted into his brain without his knowledge.
But his panic didn’t last long. Partly because he had already witnessed and accepted the shocking abnormalities in the bathroom, but mostly because none of these things seemed harmful to him.
No, but if I’ve become younger and can read an unknown language, then objectively speaking, isn’t this a benefit?
Of course, he couldn’t simply celebrate thoughtlessly when all of this had happened without his knowledge. There could be side effects or something. But cowering in fear seemed far worse than trying to think positively about it.
Still, he was curious what country this script belonged to. Hyuncheol’s knowledge wasn’t particularly broad, and he only recognized a few foreign writing systems, so his imagination wandered across different parts of the world.
Southeast Asia? Europe? But Europe probably uses alphabets, right? Then Arabic script… no, doesn’t seem like it. Maybe Africa?
As Hyuncheol thought about how to confirm it, the internet naturally came to mind. But there wasn’t even a smartphone in the room, let alone a computer.
Come to think of it, figuring out what kind of script this was wasn’t the only issue. He needed information. Most urgently, he needed to know where this place was. Not just in terms of location, but in terms of time as well.
Click.
Hyuncheol immediately pressed the switch on the TV in front of him. Aside from books, which were nowhere to be found in the room, this TV was his only possible source of information.
The TV crackled for a moment, flashed once, and then the broadcast began playing. The protruding screen distorted the image slightly, but surprisingly, the picture quality wasn’t bad.