Is this debt yours?
Whether it was the wear of years or if the door had simply been built like that from the start, it was riddled with so many gaps that even a robber might shake his head and walk away. Helen lingered in front of it for a long time. But the sky was already darkening, and her memories warned her that the night visitors in this neighborhood were rarely merciful. As if to prove the point, the sound of nearby shops slamming their doors shut one after another echoed down the street. Caught between those bangs, Helen had to decide quickly—step into the shack-like house or find some miraculous third option.
“E-excuse me…”
Of course there were no options. Helen shuffled inside, hesitating. She had always been fairly brave, but this sudden environmental whiplash left her no choice. At least her romantic attempt to run away from home had been thoroughly canceled. In what was probably the entryway—judging by the cracked mirror that looked like it had taken a fatal blow—Helen quietly removed her shoes, only to spot a cigarette butt on the floor and immediately slip them back on.
“What a fucking dump…”
She made her way down the narrow hallway, sighing at the forest of empty bottles and glasses sprouting from the floor. No one had ever considered ventilation; the liquor stench that had lingered in the closed space had fermented into a special, indescribable reek. She had expected it, but the place was still far from normal. The only bearable path was straight up to the second floor, where the stench was marginally less suffocating.
After wrapping up a day that smelled of mildew, Helen jolted upright in the attic-like second floor—or was it a half-floor? Some useless corner room anyway. “Ugh… c-cold…”
The bed had springs poking out like it was better suited for torturing potato sacks than human beings. The icy draft snapped Helen awake instantly. She shivered, glancing around, and finally noticed the wide gap right beside where she’d been lying, letting in a constant gust of frigid air. The wind carried a distinctly autumn crispness that might have been refreshing under different circumstances, but everything else about this situation disgusted her. Paradoxically, she was starting to think homelessness might have been the better deal.
Helen suddenly felt the full weight of the world’s unfairness crash down on her. The exact details were fuzzy, but she knew what romance fantasy usually meant. Great houses, boys-meet-girls, high society, girl-crush energy—the whole package. Even if the tropes were a little contrived for genre satisfaction, they still carried a certain majestic flair. Of course, transmigration fantasies didn’t need to be logical. They didn’t require airtight world-building or precise cosmology. The only real requirement was that the new life had to be better than the old one in some way. That was it. And Helen’s current world was failing the assignment miserably.
Sniffling, she straightened the bedding.
“Whine…”
Anyway, after hurriedly tidying the blankets with a quick swish, Helen’s stomach let out a loud growl. She carefully descended the rotting stairs—each step ready to send her straight to the afterlife if she misplaced a foot—and reached the first floor. Standing in the middle of the living room, she slowly turned her head.
Morning sunlight squeezed through the cheap, practical bamboo blinds, brightening the entire space. Only now could she see the full horror of the house that darkness had hidden. The source of the stench that had filled the first floor became painfully obvious, and Helen uttered a very famous exclamation often quoted by great literary masters.
“Oh my god.”
She remembered a TV program from her boyhood days that featured eccentric people. One man had collected trash until his house was buried in it. The scene had looked exactly like this. At her height she should never have felt lost inside a house, yet the piles of junk everywhere made her feel trapped in a labyrinth. Even a junkyard would have looked tidy by comparison.
In an environment that barely qualified as a home anymore, Helen began throwing out trash as if in a trance. While cleaning she constantly worried a pile might collapse and crush her, but she figured she’d die of lung disease first, so she worked without hesitation.
“This goes here… that goes there…”
In a world without proper recycling, Helen diligently sorted burnable and non-burnable trash with her small, chubby hands.
BANG BANG!
The sudden knock made Helen jump nearly two centimeters off the ground before landing hard on her backside.
“Oof.”
Rubbing her sore bottom, she debated whether to respond. It didn’t sound like a polite knock so much as a demand for confirmation. The kind of knock that said whether anyone’s home or not doesn’t matter because this door is opening anyway. Before the enthusiastic pounding could shatter the already precarious door, she hurried to the entrance.
“How long are you going to pretend nobody’s home? Open up before I set this place on fi—”
“Just a second! Stop knocking!”
Grabbing the rattling doorknob, Helen yanked the door open and found herself face-to-face with a scary-looking man wearing a flat cap. With his thuggish clothes and the bundle of papers tucked under his arm, he looked exactly like a loan shark.
“Wh-who are you…?”
Bread Hat tilted his head at the rumpled girl who had appeared.
“Then who the hell are you?”
“I’m Helen.”
“…? Oh. Nice to meet you, I guess.”
Bread Hat moved the fist he’d been ready to smash the door with to the back of his head and scratched awkwardly.
“Any relation to Isabella?”
“She was probably my mother.”
“??? I see. Is your mom home?”
“She died the day before yesterday. Who are you, exactly?”
“I’m the guy she owed money to.”
“Money? You mean debt?”
“That’s right. And since Isabella’s dead… looks like you’ll have to pay it back.”
“Excuse me? Me? Why?”
“Because you’re her daughter.”
“Ah.”
Helen let out a tiny sigh—so small no one could possibly have noticed. She really hadn’t known the Stirling family was in debt. Come to think of it, she’d felt it since yesterday: her memories were full of holes. They would surface clearly only to go blurry at the exact moment she needed them, making them generally unreliable. Like a diary that had gotten soaked, leaving the important parts too stained to read. In this case, the debt.
Anyway… absurd as it was, the man who looked like a loan shark really was one. Suddenly saddled with responsibility she took no pleasure in, Helen internally hurled every curse word she could think of. But she had some immunity to situations like this. She quickly adjusted her attitude, squared her shoulders without shrinking back, and shrugged as if the answer were too obvious to even say out loud.
“I’ll renounce the inheritance within a few days. That should settle it, right?”
“Renounce the inheritance? What’s that?”
“Huh?”
Helen was slightly thrown by the ridiculous response. How could a debt collector not know about renouncing inheritance? Still, she quickly regained her composure and explained the process. It was a rather personal topic, but since she had gone through the procedure once before, she was able to describe it quite accurately.
“So, renouncing inheritance means… well, in legal terms…”
“…”
Her short tongue mangled the pronunciation, but she managed to convey that the heir had the legal right to refuse both the deceased’s assets and their debts. Bread Hat pursed his lips, creating triple chins, and kept digging at his ear until he finally cut off her lengthy explanation.
“Kid.”
“Yes?”
“If there were a law like that in this world, I’d borrow money in some scarecrow’s name and bury him myself.”
“Ah.”
Helen slapped her knee. Bread Hat’s answer struck her as the fundamental principle behind lease fraud. Not that she was planning to commit it—she had simply realized that the concept of renouncing inheritance didn’t exist in this romance fantasy world. Honestly, if she had paid even the slightest attention, she would have figured it out immediately. If she had been the author of this story, she would have spent her time describing the heroine instead of bothering with legal details. That much was obvious.
Still, she had only transmigrated yesterday. She hadn’t had time to reorganize her life, mourn, or study this damned novel world. Expecting deep reflection from her at this point was asking too much.
“Anyway, that means you’re the one who has to pay the debt.”
“…Fine. When do we start the debt succession procedures?”
“What?”
“I’m asking because you seem ready to skip the asset inventory, witnesses, residency rights, minor guardianship, and everything else to collect the debt immediately. We have to follow proper procedure.”
Helen began chattering away, mobilizing every bit of experience and knowledge she possessed. Her plan was roughly this: (assuming this romance fantasy world had even basic common sense) no matter how powerful he was, he would still have to operate within the law. While he wasted time on procedures, she would quickly run away to somewhere no one could find her—
“Kid.”
“Yes?”
“Do you know what this is inside my coat?”
“A knife.”
“It’s not just any knife. It’s extremely specialized for cutting out long tongues.”
“I see. Not a simple knife, then. How much is the debt I need to repay?”
“Thirty.”
“Thirty shillings?”
“Sovereigns.”
“Thirty sovereigns… let’s see…”
One, two, three, four… Helen wiggled her still-chubby fingers, trying to calculate the value of thirty sovereigns. “Hmm… one shilling is four coppers, one sovereign is twenty shillings, so…”
Explaining the copper-shilling-sovereign currency system here would be too boring and pedantic, so converting it to modern won while accounting for inflation put the amount at roughly 21,600,000 won. That was why Helen’s expression gradually darkened after she finished the mental math.
“You’re lying. If we’d borrowed thirty sovereigns, there’s no way we’d be living in this collapsing mansion.”
“Want me to show you the ledger?”
“You obviously forged it! It’s all lies! Every bit of it! You damn swindler…!”
“Kid. Have you lost your mind?”
“Ah, sorry. Could we possibly settle the debt with this house instead?”
“Even you must realize that’s not going to work.”
“I suppose. But there’s no other way. As you can see, I’m too young to work.”
“Young?”