Orphan Joseph
Kim Jinwoo was a realistic man. Or rather, he was a man who had never been given the luxury of being anything else. Growing up in an orphanage in a small provincial city, clinging to childhood innocence had been an impossibility from the start.
And so he had clawed his way forward with everything he had — desperate to escape hell and seize a life that actually resembled a human being's.
But a man born at the bottom remains dust on the roadside, no matter how much hope he carries. There was a ceiling to how high he could climb.
Jinwoo. A name that meant "advancing rain." True to it, he had been blown this way and that, never once steering his own course. In the end, his life pooled at the bottom and was sucked down into the gutter.
What a fucking miserable life.
But Jinwoo's consciousness did not end there.
Whether it was another world or merely a dream, he opened his eyes in a place that felt both familiar and entirely new. When his mind cleared, he found himself a scrawny, ragged child in some rural village.
Kim Jinwoo was living a new life under the name Joseph.
Not that this one was any less of a shitshow.
Unfortunately, a second life was no guarantee of hope. Even here, Joseph was scraping along the bottom, surviving one day at a time.
The place he had landed was an unremarkable mountain village called Bari Village, perched on a hillside with nothing whatsoever to recommend it. No famous local product. No abundance of game. Just a scrap of highland plain where the villagers eked out a living from meager farmland.
The village was so small it had neither a general store nor a smithy. Few people had any money to speak of. If not for the occasional visiting merchant or tax collector, the residents would never have known what the world beyond their ridge even looked like.
In this backwater with no infrastructure of any kind, Joseph was a complete orphan. Both of his parents had died of illness when he was still small, and a child not yet ten years old had been thrown into the world alone.
Fuck. I reincarnated and I still get nothing? Would it have killed them to throw me a bone?
Joseph grumbled to himself now and then, but it never lasted long. If complaining had ever changed anything, his previous life would have turned out a little less wrecked.
I finally got a second shot at life. I'm not dying here.
The one mercy was that Joseph's mind was older than his body. The moment his parents were in the ground, he went straight to the village chief, bowed his head to the dirt, and begged for work. His calculation was simple: they would not let a young boy — a future laborer — starve to death.
Fortunately, the chief took him in, offering food in exchange for whatever work he was given. From then on, Joseph lived on a half-collapsed house lot and trudged to the chief's home every day to labor.
What he had failed to account for was that this world had no compulsory education — and no such word as "human rights." In a rural village where almost no one could even read, there was no one to cry out for a child's welfare. As an orphan, Joseph was naturally swallowed into a cycle of brutal labor.
"Clean the house."
"Yes."
"Have the laundry done by evening, too."
"...Yes."
"And don't forget the pigsty."
"...Understood."
Housework, laundry, mucking out the livestock pens, splitting firewood — he was a slave in all but name. In return he received a bowl of watery soup with a scrap of hard bread, which never filled a growing boy's stomach. If the work ran late, even that disappeared.
"...Couldn't I rest a little while I work?"
"What?"
Once, early on, he had muttered a small complaint about the excessive labor. That day Hayra, the village chief's son, had beaten him like a dog on slaughter day, and he was given no food at all. Only after two days of starvation was he allowed to work at the chief's house again.
Making a fuss over a meal had seemed absurd, but that was the village, and that was the age. He had nothing, so he had to cling to whatever he could. Whatever else, it beat starving to death.
Die now, and they would just dig up his parents' graves from a few years back and toss him in on top. That was an end even worse than his previous life.
Of course, Joseph had not simply let himself be worked like a slave. Drawing on memories of his past life, he had tried a few things. Once, while splitting firewood, he had spotted an insect, secretly roasted it, and eaten it — a bid to supplement his meager protein.
The problem was that this place was not the world he had come from. Joseph spent the entire night cycling through high fever and vomiting, hovering at the edge of death, and survived only by luck. When he finally dragged himself outside around sunset the next day, he found the villagers digging up the grave where his parents were buried.
"...What are you doing?"
"Huh? What the— you're alive?"
"...Excuse me?"
"Hey, who said the kid was dead? We wasted our strength for nothing."
"......"
Joseph understood, all over again, what kind of world this was. Memories of a previous life were only useful in a modern society with actual infrastructure. Here, they were worthless.
This place is a genuine nightmare.
That day, Joseph resolved to leave the village no matter what. He had no idea what kind of hell waited beyond it. But listening to the stories the chief liked to boast about, and the talk of merchants who came in from outside, it seemed at least better than here.
That did not mean he could simply walk out. He needed to be able to protect himself first.
Which means I have to get out of this life somehow.
A life of earning just enough to survive the day had no future. To leave, he needed to climb from the chief's slave to something like Resident A of Bari Village.
Easier said than done.
Most of Bari Village's residents lived out the year farming. With no infrastructure, there were almost no opportunities for anyone to rise in station. Joseph, who owned not a single patch of land, was hardly going to become Resident A overnight.
He considered asking the chief for a scrap of unused ground, then shook his head. He did not know how to farm. The adults who might have taught him were already dead. And even if he had known, where was the time for that when he could barely scrape together his next meal?
In the end, it all comes down to a trade.
That had been true in his previous life, and it was true now. Learn one real skill and you will not starve. A competent craftsman will be fetched at a premium — an unchanging law.
The trouble was that every skill one could learn in Bari Village was a hard one. The village's only tradesmen were the herbalist and the hunter. Both held relatively high standing, but few people actually wanted to become either of them. Even in a world where life was cheap, not many were eager to throw themselves into danger of their own accord.
Roaming a steep mountain with nothing but your own body meant you could die at any moment, so volunteers were scarce. On top of that, knowing the mountain well meant being summoned by the chief whenever trouble arose.
For Joseph, who needed to become Resident A, it was still the best option he could think of.
Hunter's out of the question.
He was already weak from never eating properly, and he had no idea how he would even catch anything. He did not know how to set traps, and he was in no condition to wander out and fight a wild animal.
That'd just be a dog's death.
Without a second's hesitation, Joseph decided to become an herbalist. "Herbalist" was a generous word for it — gathering mountain greens was closer to the truth.
Using firewood collection as an excuse, he went beyond the village and began sorting plants he could eat from those he could not. Drawing on scraps of knowledge from his previous life and the villagers' talk, he picked grasses and mushrooms that looked plausible, boiled them, and ate them. He left insects alone. He had no desire to nearly die twice.
After a few years, he could feel that his frame had filled out a little. A good sign. Better than anything else, the starving days had grown fewer. He had also learned of an herb that settled an upset stomach — a plant that, simmered in boiling water and swallowed a few times, warmed the gut with remarkable effect.
"You gathered these? From where?"
"I picked up whatever I saw while collecting firewood."
"Huh..."
Joseph gathered a few edible plants and herbs and brought them to the chief as well. The first time, the man had dismissed it as luck. After it happened a few more times, the look in his eyes changed. It was the face of a man who had stumbled onto something useful in an unexpected place.
"Go up the mountain once every two days."
"Yes."
From then on, herb-gathering became Joseph's daily work. On the days he brought back herbs and greens, he was fed even without doing chores. No cleaning, no laundry, no firewood, no pigsty. And the food was twice the usual amount.
That was the worth of a skilled tradesman in a place like this.
Chewing a small chunk of meat from his soup, Joseph felt, just a little, that he was finally carving out a place for himself.
Then, one early autumn after a rain had passed through, the accident happened.
"Fuck..."
They said the more familiar the work, the greater the risk of an accident. He had failed to notice that the earth of a path he walked every day had given way. Joseph tumbled down the mountainside in a wretched, bone-jarring roll.
His consciousness cut out and came back. He had no idea where he was, or how much time had passed. There was no sensation in his arms or legs. His vision had gone milky, and he could not even see the state of his own body. The cold crept in.
Am I dying again? Seriously?
A hollow laugh escaped him. From a miserable previous life to this shitty current one — the thought of dying after spending the whole time doing everyone else's dirty work was so absurd he did not know whether to laugh or scream.
Just when things were starting to look up, this shit again.
So what had the second life even been for? Was wanting to live like a human being really that much to ask? If he was going to die like this, they might as well not have bothered making it look promising.
Thoughts of that kind cycled through him, and then something inside him seemed to snap. His consciousness plunged into darkness all at once.
Joseph stared, stunned, at the bizarre sight unfolding before his eyes.
When his vision had suddenly flared bright, he found himself standing alone in a city he had never seen. It was enormous — dozens, even hundreds of times the size of Bari Village. Brick houses packed densely together, and at the city's heart a vast fountain poured water without cease. Unknown flowers bloomed thickly along every street, and a breeze carrying their scent brushed the inside of his nose.
It was a strange city, one he had never seen in either of his lives. Stranger still, there was not a trace of human presence anywhere. It was as if every living soul had vanished in an instant, leaving Joseph alone in a silent city.
"Uh..."
His thoughts could not keep up with the situation. He simply looked around like a man who had lost his mind.
"Who are you?"
Someone spoke to him. He turned his head and found a stone statue of a Knight, a full head taller than himself, looking down at him.
Where did that come from? It wasn't there a second ago.
"A mage, then?"
Joseph shook his head in alarm, and the statue straightened. It glanced once at the sky, then lowered its gaze back to him.
"A Knight, then?"
"No..."
"...Then what are you? How did you get in here?"
How the hell would I know...