Chapter 1
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 1
Lee Hyun had rarely considered himself unhappy.
Then again, he’d never thought of himself as happy, either.
He once worked at a mid-sized company, but after quitting due to overwhelming stress, he took on odd jobs just to scrape together some pocket money. By saving a little and spending even less, he managed to get by just fine.
He rarely went outside. In this day and age, groceries, meals, and daily necessities could all be delivered right to his door. Retrieving the packages was more than enough fresh air for one day.
Still, he wasn’t the kind of shut-in who let trash pile up. He cleaned immediately after eating and took out food waste without delay. He never missed a tax payment, nor did he ever disturb his neighbors with late-night noise.
Lee Hyun considered himself a thoroughly harmless human being. He wasn’t much help to the world, but he didn’t cause it any harm, either.
He figured that was good enough.
The one thing he diligently kept up with was brushing his teeth. Tooth decay was excruciating, and the thought of visiting a dentist terrified him. On the other hand, he never bothered with the free government health checkups out of sheer laziness. A checkup might reveal an illness, and an illness meant a trip to the hospital.
He didn’t exercise, either.
Between watching livestreams, playing games, binging dramas, and reading web novels, the days slipped by quickly enough.
Lee Hyun had a low bar for entertainment.
A new brand of instant ramen tasting better than expected, a favorite streamer trying a different game, or a new chapter of a novel being uploaded—any of these was enough to make his day a good one. He could even find quiet amusement in pouring water into a pot and watching the bubbles rise.
That day was no different.
He opened the refrigerator but found nothing he felt like cooking. In the end, laziness won out, and he grabbed a pack of ramen from the cupboard.
While waiting for the water to boil, he sat on the edge of his bed and scrolled through his phone, watching a recording of the stream he’d fallen asleep to the night before.
It was a day just like any other.
So when his chest grew tight, he didn’t think much of it at first.
He assumed it was indigestion. It was strange, since he hadn’t even eaten the ramen yet, but he figured he’d feel better if he moved around a bit. He stood up.
Before he could take two steps, a violent tightness clamped down on the center of his chest.
“Ugh…”
Lee Hyun grabbed the edge of a table to steady himself.
It felt as if someone had seized his heart in a fist and twisted it. He couldn’t draw a breath, and a cold sweat instantly broke out across his forehead and back.
By the time he realized something was terribly wrong, his knees had already given out.
He collapsed, his head striking the corner of the table hard. He barely felt it. The agony radiating from his chest was far worse.
Could this be… a heart attack?
His phone was right there on the bed. It seemed so close, just an arm’s length away, but his body refused to obey. He tried to drag himself across the floor, but he couldn’t even twitch a finger.
The water was boiling on the induction stove.
Lee Hyun stared past the leg of the table toward the pot, only to remember he hadn’t put the noodles in yet.
A fire won’t break out, will it…?
It was a thoroughly pointless thought for a man on the verge of death.
Yet no other thoughts came.
He felt no lingering regret over never marrying, making friends, or going on a proper trip. Nor did he think, I should have lived more diligently. If he had worked hard, life would have surely been far more troublesome.
Still, he felt a little cheated. If he’d known he was going to die so suddenly, he would have at least ordered something expensive to eat.
His vision gradually darkened.
When he opened his eyes again, the first thing he saw was a wooden ceiling. Soot-blackened planks were covered in old stains, and cobwebs hung between the rafters.
Lee Hyun blinked, staring up at the ceiling for a long time.
It couldn’t be a hospital. No matter how run-down a rural clinic was, they wouldn’t let spiders spin webs across the ceiling.
Was he alive, then?
He touched his chest. There was no pain. He could breathe easily, and his body felt lighter than before.
Lee Hyun carefully pushed himself upright.
The coarse fabric draped over him slid down, revealing a pair of slender hands. Though calloused, they were completely different from his own, which had already seen over forty years.
Scanning the room, he spotted a cracked water bowl. Lee Hyun staggered over and peered at his reflection.
An unfamiliar young man stared back.
He had sun-tanned skin, messy long hair, and hollow cheeks pinched by hunger. He looked twenty at most. It was an ordinary face—neither handsome nor ugly.
When Lee Hyun opened his mouth, the young man in the water mirrored him.
“Ah…?”
Lee Hyun squatted before the water bowl, dazed. Every sensation was far too vivid to be a dream. When he pinched his cheek, it stung. Warm sunlight streamed through a hole too small to be called a window.
He returned to his spot and lay down again, holding on to the faint hope that if he just slept a little longer, he might return to his world.
Yet when he next opened his eyes, driven by an unbearable hunger, the wooden ceiling and its cobwebs remained unchanged.
Almost no memories remained in this body. Only a lingering sensation of starvation. He had no idea who his parents were, where he had lived, or why he was lying in this dilapidated thatched cottage.
A short while later, an old man who came to check on the house found Lee Hyun awake. He introduced himself as the Village Chief.
According to him, Lee Hyun had been found collapsed on a mountain path several days ago. A villager gathering medicinal herbs had discovered him, and the Village Chief had brought him to this vacant house.
“It seems you struck your head hard. Do you remember nothing besides your name?” the Village Chief asked with concern.
Lee Hyun hesitated for a moment before nodding. “Yes. I remember nothing.”
This place was a small settlement called Baekmok Village, situated in the western part of the Great Yeon Kingdom. Tiled roofs were reserved for the Village Chief’s home and a few other well-off families; most villagers lived in houses of mud and thatch. They went to the fields at sunrise and returned home at dusk.
At first, Lee Hyun assumed he had fallen into a world resembling some era of Chinese history. He could speak the local tongue naturally, a benefit he chalked up to his transmigration.
To survive, he needed to find work.
Farming was the first thing he ruled out. It involved too much cooperation with others, like maintaining waterways and sharing seeds. He disliked the idea of commerce as well, since it required making conversation with customers. Hunting was out of the question; he had no idea how to shoot a bow, and the thought of encountering wild beasts was terrifying.
In the end, he chose to become a woodcutter.
He would climb the mountain, chop suitable trees into firewood, and sell just enough to get by. His new body was young and sturdy, and his palms were already calloused, as if used to holding an axe. Though his entire body ached at first, he grew accustomed to it over time.
With the Village Chief’s permission, Lee Hyun repaired an abandoned shack at the foot of the mountain and began living alone once more.
Compared to his past life, everything was inconvenient. There was no electricity, running water, or gas, and food spoiled quickly. To save firewood, he had to cook his rice and boil his water at the same time over a single fire. Insects swarmed in the summer, and in winter, it was freezing no matter how many blankets he layered on.
Hardest of all to bear was the lack of internet.
For the first few months, Lee Hyun suffered from agonizing boredom. Once the sun went down, there was nothing to do, and oil and candles were too expensive to keep lit all night. He belatedly realized just how many luxuries he had enjoyed in his previous life.
In the end, Lee Hyun began pulling stories from his memory and rewriting them in his head. Paper was too costly to write on, so instead, he reassembled the plots of novels and games from his past life. He changed endings he disliked, made characters from different works cross paths, and sometimes even turned a favorite villain into the protagonist.
Whenever he had spare time, he whittled wood into figurines. He crafted knights in armor, demon kings with horns, and robots whose appearances he could barely recall. They weren’t for anyone else to see, so it didn’t matter how crude they were.
And so, Lee Hyun lived in Baekmok Village.
It was more inconvenient than his past life, but once he got used to it, it wasn’t unbearable. Lee Hyun was a man well-suited to finding small pleasures anywhere. Sitting beneath the eaves on rainy days to listen to the patter of drops wasn’t so bad, and on days when the wild herbs in his soup tasted better than usual, that alone was enough to brighten his mood.
He intended to live modestly here until he grew old and died.
One spring day, as Lee Hyun was bundling firewood, the village dogs began barking furiously. Shouts followed as villagers rushed out of their homes, all looking up at the sky.
Lee Hyun casually raised his head as well.
A ship was gliding through the air, cleaving through the clouds. An azure cloud pattern was emblazoned upon its white sails.
As the vessel came to a halt above the village, figures in long robes glided down through the air. Beneath their feet hovered swords, leaves, and round, disc-like objects.
“It’s the Immortal Teachers of the Cheongun Sect!” someone shouted.
At the cry, the villagers dropped to the ground in unison. Reading the room, Lee Hyun bowed low as well.
That day, the cultivators from the Cheongun Sect tested the village children for their spiritual roots. One by one, the children placed their hands on a transparent sphere. For most, nothing happened, but for a select few, a red or blue light flared within the orb.
It was said that children with spiritual roots could enter an immortal sect and cultivate the Dao.
Though the parents had wished for their children to be chosen, tears streamed down their faces when the time came for the little ones to actually board the ship.
Watching the scene unfold, Lee Hyun finally understood what kind of world he had landed in.
It was a xianxia world.
His heart didn’t leap with excitement. Instead, a cold sweat broke out.
Lee Hyun had read quite a few xianxia novels in his past life. While their settings differed, they all shared one thing in common: they were brutally dangerous. A novel’s protagonist might overcome countless perils to stand at the pinnacle, but Lee Hyun wasn’t optimistic enough to see himself as any kind of protagonist.
The Village Chief urged him to get tested, too.
“Who knows? Perhaps you have a spiritual root.”
“It’s been several years since I came to this village. Aren’t the Immortal Teachers looking for young children?”
“True enough. It might well be too late for you to enter a sect.”
Entering a sect meant having to cultivate. It meant competition, and the risk of being dragged into Secret Realms or sent on dangerous missions. To Lee Hyun, who only wanted to live quietly, such a future held no appeal whatsoever.
After the Cheongun Sect’s ship departed, Lee Hyun resumed his life as always.
Years drifted by without incident.
In spring, mountain mist gathered; in summer, the streams swelled. In autumn, the leaves turned red, and in winter, snow blanketed the shack’s roof.
The snot-nosed children who used to run around the village soon took wives, and wrinkles formed on the faces of young men who were once Lee Hyun’s peers. The villagers occasionally joked that he remained remarkably youthful. Whenever they did, he would just brush it off, saying his body must have a youthful constitution.
Lee Hyun never gave much thought to his appearance. He had no mirror and no reason to examine his own face. When his hair grew long, he hacked it off or tied it back. When his beard grew, he shaved it with a sharpened knife.
It was one day, twenty years after his arrival in Baekmok Village, that he realized something was wrong.
Lee Hyun had gone down to the village to sell firewood when he crossed paths with an unfamiliar man standing in front of the Village Chief’s house.
The man stopped in his tracks upon seeing Lee Hyun’s face. After a moment, he approached with an astonished expression.
“Could you be… Uncle Lee Hyun?”
Lee Hyun didn’t recognize him. The man looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place where they might have met. As he hesitated, the man pointed to his own chest.
“It’s me, Jang Sam. The boy who used to follow you around, getting those wooden figurines…”
Only then did the memory surface. The little boy with the runny nose who used to trail him on the mountain path. The child who, after receiving a carved wooden bird, would come running every day to beg for another.
“Ah, Jang Sam. Look at you—you’ve grown so much I barely recognized you,” Lee Hyun said with a smile.
But the warmth vanished from Jang Sam’s face. He stared intently at Lee Hyun’s features.
Under that gaze, an ominous feeling belatedly crept over Lee Hyun.
“What is it?”
“Uncle…” Jang Sam lowered his voice. “You look exactly the same as you did when I was a child.”