Why the hell is this a romance fantasy?
The reason why bodies like this weren't accepted in the cemetery for romance fantasy syphilis patients was simple. They were usually cremated or buried on private land. That left the corpses of poor syphilis victims with nowhere to go. With no other choice, I had to dig a grave alone in a wheat field a short distance away, worrying myself sick the entire time as I clawed at the dirt with my bare hands.
“Hey! What the hell are you doing!”
The angry owner of the wheat field came storming over, yelling. The first thought that popped into my head wasn’t an apology, but the regret that if I’d had a shovel, I probably wouldn’t have run into him at all.
“This little beggar brat is trying to bury something on someone else’s land… Wait, is that… syphilis…!?”
The body was unfortunately only half-buried, but facing each other awkwardly in the afterlife would be incredibly rude, so I bolted immediately.
“Stop right there! Don’t move!”
The deranged wheat field owner chased after me, pitchfork in hand. Thanks to the heavy labor I’d just done, my energy was completely drained, but the sheer terror of getting caught and possibly killed gave me the strength to keep running.
“Haa… haa…”
I ran for what felt like forever. I managed to lose him by cleverly slipping into a crowd. The place I ended up was the backalleys. How hilarious. Just like most people with a few screws loose, I had instinctively fled to the one place I knew best in a moment of crisis.
As I stood there in the backalleys catching my breath, I saw a man walking toward me with his hands behind his back, moving as slowly as a pigeon. I already knew a few things about that particular gait.
“Well, well~ Hey, kid. You trying to pass through here?”
“Passing through is fine, but this is our turf, see.”
“So if you wanna pass… you know what to do, right?”
A gang of thugs who extorted tolls from people passing through the alley emerged from behind me, straight razors hidden behind their backs. My filthy appearance didn’t seem to register with them at all. Not that they were in any particularly calm state to begin with. Neither was I.
“This is your turf?”
“What?”
“I have to pay money to walk through here? Who gave you the right to demand that? I’m genuinely curious.”
“What the hell are you babbling about? If you don’t wanna die, drop everything you’ve got and scram.”
Even as I watched the thug put away his razor and pull out a real knife, I kept talking nonsense.
“Do people fear you? Do they run when they see you? Don’t they ignore you like they do me? Do they actually respect you instead? How do you do it? I’m seriously jealous. I envy you guys so much it drives me crazy.”
“I want to be like you.”
I closed my eyes, reached my hands toward the sky, and prayed.
「….」
As expected, there was no answer. Not that I’d asked expecting one, so it didn’t matter. My prayer was like a message in a bottle tossed into the sea by a shipwrecked person on a deserted island—smoothed by erosion, a desperate signal for help.
…But sometimes, these things happen. The bottle thrown in desperation rides the right current, or perhaps the whim of the goddess of fate, and washes up on some white sandy beach. In other words, what people commonly call a miracle.
……
“Shut up and hand over the money already!”
The thug, unable to stand the little girl’s incomprehensible behavior any longer, smacked the back of her head.
“Ugh.”
The moment Park Chang-bong was struck in the back of the head, memories began flowing into him mechanically. He made a serious face, mumbling to himself with his lips, then soon wore an ambiguous expression that could have meant either good or bad.
“So I’ve been thrown into a romance fantasy novel whose title I don’t even know…”
Of course, it was less a memory and more a kind gift of sudden realization, and possession was definitely an appealing prospect, so he wasn’t particularly shocked. Still, being tossed without warning into a romance fantasy whose title he didn’t even know was, from the perspective of the person being possessed, an incredibly awkward and undignified way to go about it. On top of that, the “plausible hardship” they’d given him came with the lowest possible social status, and to make matters worse, he’d been shoved into the body of a tiny little girl who had just entered her teens.
“Ughhhhh…”
Upon realizing he had been transmigrated without any abilities and had lost his masculinity in the process, Park Chang-bong showed symptoms of mental derangement accompanied by mild convulsions as he clutched his head. The long platinum blonde hair that had replaced his once short and neat cut had natural waves, making it fluffy despite being hair. Park Chang-bong spent a while fiddling with the strangely soft strands, barely managing to overcome this mentally chaotic and sorrowful period.
“What the…?”
The gang of thugs, of course completely unaware of Park Chang-bong’s tragic circumstances, were utterly bewildered by this reaction. The tiny kid they’d stopped to rob had started spouting weird nonsense, and now she was having some kind of seizure. It was only natural they’d be confused.
“Shit… did I hit her too hard?”
“Yeah, you should’ve gone easy.”
“Stop talking crap and let’s get out of here, you idiots!”
The gang, sensing they might have picked on someone sickly, quickly fled the scene in case they got blamed for anything. Park Chang-bong remained squatting on the ground, completely unaware they had run off, and spent a long time trying to calm his mind and body.
……
Thanks to his abundant hair, Park Chang-bong… no, Helen Stirling finally managed to escape her menhera state and began to take stock of the situation she was in.
“Mom’s a prostitute. No idea who Dad is. So starting today, I’m an orphan.”
But situation be damned—she let out a deep sigh at the catastrophic family environment she now faced. The surroundings were just as bad. The alley floor where Helen stood was a puddle mixed with horse urine and some unidentifiable ooze. The sky was filled with smoke billowing from factory chimneys. The stench that assaulted her was so vile that even feces would have been preferable. If she pinched her nose and breathed through her mouth, her throat burned.
Overwhelmed by this truly hopeless situation, Helen felt a headache like she was pressing twin pistols to her temples.
“F-first, I need to get out of here… and then… g-go home.”
Grabbing her forehead in distress, Helen hurried away before she could run into any more delinquents. As she walked through the winding, sloping alleys, the stench gradually faded. However, the entire way she had to endure the harassment of people who were clearly prostitutes, wrapped in rags to hide severe skin conditions, haggling with customers before turning their attention to her.
“Hey, little girl. How about 20 coppers? I’ll be gentle.”
“Huh? What? S-soup with rice?”
“Never mind. Hurry home, sweetie.”
Most people simply licked their lips at Helen’s pure reaction. But the minority who didn’t felt a strange, hard-to-describe impulse toward her lovely appearance, her peach-colored skin kissed by the sun, and her small, thin frame. That minority usually turned aggressive.
“You little brat, already acting like you’re too expensive? When I’m offering a fair price, you’d better come quietly!”
“Eek.”
The man roughly grabbed Helen’s fragile wrist and tried to drag her into a dark alley.
“W-wait…! What are you doing!? Let go!”
Helen resisted the pull with all her body weight. But her tiny frame, which looked like it belonged with a school backpack and indoor shoes, had its limits.
“Hehe… Softening her up with a little rough handling is a treat in itself.”
After being dragged for quite a while, they arrived at a rather bizarre place. Its structure was oddly narrow like a crevice, more like some kind of private property with no visible entrance than part of the backalleys.
“Get over here!”
The moment they reached that gloomy spot, the man laughed so loudly it seemed his ears would split, thinking of the pleasure that was about to unfold.
“Y-you…!”
Helen, who would rather be beaten to death than be violated by a man, made a heroic decision. She put all her strength into a punch aimed slightly below the right side of the man’s ribcage.
“Fuck!”
-Thud!
“Guhhhhhh…!?!?!?”
The man who took Helen’s liver blow—or rather, liver blow—directly experienced tunnel vision for a moment before collapsing on the spot. Helen left the man sprawled on the ground exhibiting symptoms similar to vasovagal syncope and hurriedly escaped the alley.
……
Having wisely overcome the crisis that had struck right from the start, Helen left the backalleys and emerged onto a street that was at least somewhat tolerable.
“Ah! Thief! Stop right there, you son of a bitch!”
“Who told you to do business here? Hey! Flip everything over!”
“Hey mister, you need any medicine?”
Of course, “tolerable compared to the alleys” didn’t mean it was a normal street. In some ways it was even worse than the alleys. The most notable difference was that the alleys were so thick with gloomy despair that almost no one had the energy to shout.
“Why does the Empire allow filthy capitalists to spread vain delusions like stocks and suck the blood of honest citizens! This is clear proof that our world has become corrupted by gold, and our god will bring about the end of this world to purify everything!”
“Crazy person.”
Helen avoided the gaze of the mad clown shouting communist and apocalyptic theories mixed together right in her face, instead focusing on leaves that looked like rabbit feet as she trudged along the brick-lined path. She turned left at the corner, walked down the winding gravel road, passed a noisy blacksmith’s shop filled with the sound of hammering that was seriously chaotic, and walked just a little farther…
“Is this it?”
At last, Helen’s house came into view. After fumbling through her hazy memories to finally reach the front of the house, Helen couldn’t hold back an exclamation as she stared at the “charming” home designed to fully enjoy nature’s deep ambiance.
“Ugh… is this a house or a shack?”
As her exclamation suggested, calling it a house felt slightly embarrassing. It was so bad that the word “hovel” floated around in her head more naturally than “house,” looking like something a toddler who had just learned to walk might have slapped together out of scrap wood. Still, since it was the place she had lived in—and would have to continue living in—the most elegant description she could come up with was “dilapidated ruin.”
Helen sighed as she passed through the rusty fence that looked like it could give you tetanus just by looking at it. She held onto the faint hope that maybe this wasn’t the right place. But on one of the barred front windows, the owner’s surname Stirling was clearly written in cursive. The name was made by bending black wire. The particularly infuriating detail was that the dots on the two i’s were decorated with white nail heads.