Indolent Luid
This life was a failure.
"Maybe I'll start with that line."
It seemed like a decently interesting opener.
"Next sentence... hmm."
Luid blinked his eyes open, then flung the pen away with a flick of his wrist.
"Forget it."
He'd meant to write his way into the life of a bestselling author, but come to think of it, he had never once kept a diary in either of his lives.
What a waste.
The story of his past self would have been an absolute hit, no question about it.
So instead, he decided to lie back and do a little thinking. He stretched out on the soft grass as if it were a bed.
"Eh."
Luid opened his eyes.
His vivid blue eyes caught the sunlight and gleamed with a dazzling light. Sitting up awkwardly, he retrieved the pen stuck crookedly into the ground near the lake and lay back down. He spread open the journal enchanted with the Never-Ending Pages spell and leaned over it.
A suffocating pressure pressed against his chest, but he resolved to endure at least this much.
"It's not like I have anything better to do. And someone might be curious someday... Fine, I'll just write it."
And so he began a diary that held the story of his past life.
This Life Is Ruined
My father ran off after ruining the business, and my mother lost the will to live, drifting through her days in a haze.
Even so, they were my parents. I couldn't just let them starve.
"Mom, I got a job. You don't have to worry anymore."
Taking a leave of absence from school and earning the living expenses was the only option I had.
I worked myself into the ground. I'd never once truly tried at anything in my life, but the moment circumstances cornered me, I found myself doing anything that paid — deliveries, hauling furniture, whatever it was.
Still, I began to wonder if this was what they meant by pouring water into a leaky jar.
Nothing got better.
Three years passed, and nothing had changed.
I was wearing down, little by little. And just when I wanted to give up on all of it...
"Are you Ms. Lee Ye-ja's guardian?"
My mother had passed away.
"Cause of death: cardiac arrhythmia brought on by extreme stress."
It was Hwa-byung — fire illness, the sickness of a heart left to smolder.
The doctor said she had simply kept too much bottled up inside, for far too long.
I didn't shed a single tear during the three-day funeral. It didn't feel real. I saw her body when it was laid out, and she looked exactly the way I'd always known her. Even that left me numb.
But then, at the columbarium, holding her urn in my arms, the tears came without any warning at all.
I cried for a long time. In front of every relative we had. Embarrassingly so.
The funeral ended.
I went back to my one-room apartment.
I hadn't cried since the columbarium. Instead, a devilish thought had bloomed up from somewhere deep inside: maybe now, I can finally live my own life.
I sat slumped where I was, drowning in self-loathing, then dragged myself to school the next day and filed my reinstatement application.
And that was how I found out.
I needed tuition. I looked into a student loan, and I couldn't get one.
Because of my grades. I'd been a slacker. If I'd known it would cost me even the loan, I would have tried a little harder.
I checked my bank account. I'd assumed I could just barely cover a semester's tuition.
Something was wrong.
I had worked part-time for three straight years. Not some café gig — I ran two jobs, then three. I sent home more than three million won every month.
I'd sent it, breaking my body, believing that if I only sent enough, she would come back to her senses that much sooner.
I never imagined she would spend it all.
There was no tuition money.
I opened the Korea Student Aid Foundation website to figure out my options.
And there it was, plastered across the main page:
Student living-expense loan balance: 31,300,000 won.
That was the moment reality hit me, all at once.
Third year of university.
Age twenty-eight.
Twenty-nine by the time I graduated.
At a no-name local college, no less.
The face reflected in the monitor looked gaunt and worn.
Even so, right up until that moment, I hadn't let go of that straw-thin hope.
I was an orphan now. The news kept saying we'd become a developed nation, so I figured if I searched around, some kind of welfare would be waiting.
There was. Except — because my father was alive, legally I wasn't an orphan at all. A father who couldn't be reached. A father who hadn't even come to Mom's funeral. That's just how the law works, apparently.
File a missing persons report, or sever the family register. Surely there was a way.
If I just looked... yes, if I just looked it up—
I was tired. Honestly, I was. Suppose I swallowed my pride, took handout after handout from the state, and somehow managed to graduate.
What would be left for me then?
A diploma bought with forty million won of debt?
There was no future.
People live on their dreams.
They don't have to be grand career dreams, either.
Owning a home. Buying something you want. You live on those small, modest dreams, letting them be the engine that carries you forward.
I had none of that. Forty million won. To some people it's a fortune, but it isn't a sum you can't survive under — and yet to me, it was crushing.
A long, cold clarity settled over me.
Part of me wanted to die. To give up on everything at once and simply let go of the rope.
But I didn't even have the courage for that.
So I became a shut-in.
I'd loaf around until the money ran dry, then go haul freight. Over and over, the cycle repeated.
I played games. I watched anime. Web novels, light novels. Anything I could enjoy from inside my room, I devoured without discrimination.
It was escapism. I had run away from reality.
Then one day.
I was on my way to another freight-hauling job.
And I collapsed.
It was a strange experience.
I was unconscious — and yet I clearly heard the doctor say I had died of overwork.
That was the first I learned you could work yourself to death even just playing games.
Not that it was much of a surprise.
I hadn't slept a single proper night since my mother passed.
The insomnia was vicious.
Closing my eyes hurt too much, so I stayed awake until they fell shut on their own.
Two days at the least, three at the most — that rhythm of sleeplessness repeated itself endlessly.
That day, too, I had pulled my third all-nighter in a row and was heading to work.
I'd expected my health to give out eventually. I just never imagined it would actually kill me.
Just when I believed that was the end of everything—
something entirely beyond my expectations happened.
A world I had never seen.
And I had become someone else entirely.
At first, I couldn't believe it.
Was this truly reality, or was I deep in some dream?
But that doubt lasted only a moment.
They say man is an animal of adaptation, and I sized up my situation.
I realized I had transmigrated into a web novel.
It was a novel I'd read often, so it didn't take long to figure out.
The one I'd followed out of sheer habit until, before I knew it, I'd caught up to chapter 1,000.
The title was...
I'd read so many things just like it that, strangely enough, the title simply wouldn't come to me. Everything else, though, was vivid.
The character I possessed was Luid Christopher Windsor.
The youngest child of the Ducal House of Windsor.
Classified within the story as Out-of-Spec — the author's officially acknowledged strongest being in the entire setting.
And in practice, his abilities were downright cheat-tier.
One day in. I was already confident I could go head-to-head with God himself and win.
But the best part of all was this:
I was rich.
And handsome, too.
Still, perhaps because God had made him a touch too perfect, He gave him exactly one flaw.
He was small.
This was, I believe, what people would call a shota character.
...He'll grow, won't he?
That was the one and only thing I was looking forward to in this life.
Anyway.
It's not like I don't know the story.
Who the mastermind is, who the main characters are, what each of them likes — all of it.
I even had the power to resolve every crisis that would come crashing down on the protagonist.
"Yeah. You guys handle it."
Not interested.
I've become a rich layabout — why on earth would I care about any of that?
Catching up on all the sleep I never got last life is far more productive.
Luid's eyes fluttered halfway open, bleary with sleep.
Now that it was all written down, it read like garbage.
"Time for a nap. Writing just isn't for me."
He gave up, clean and decisive, and flung the pen into the lake. The notebook he left where it was — after all, it was written in Korean. No one here could read a word of it.
"Haaam."
Pillowign his head on the very book he'd just been sweating over, Luid drifted off to sleep.
Truly, it was a blissful existence.
He was currently 58,000 percent satisfied with his new life.
Within the House of Windsor, Luid was loved to an extraordinary degree.
The first two children had been girls, and only the third — Luid — was a son.
The Windsor family prized ability above all, so there was never any discrimination between sons and daughters when it came to naming an heir. But perhaps because the current head of the house was a Duchess, her love for her son ran uniquely deep.
Even the woman they called the Iron-Blooded Grand Duke of the North became endlessly tender in front of Luid.
Normally, a lazy good-for-nothing born into the Windsor household would have found life very difficult indeed — that much was a given. Yet Luid had been coddled and indulged from birth.
Of course, part of it was that Luid was a genius beyond precedent. Effort is the act of striving to gain ability — and if the ability is already there, forcing someone to strive loses all meaning.
But here.
Amelia Windsor, the second daughter of House Windsor, saw things a little differently.
"He's asleep again, isn't he."
The weather was beautiful.
He was without a doubt lounging around taking an afternoon nap at Delin's Lake, just like always.
It was behavior no one could believe from a new student at the Academy.
"We've spoiled him far too much."
Amelia worried a great deal. Her love for Luid was every bit as real as anyone else's, and yet...
...isn't this going too far, even by our standards?
Her little brother was lazy to a degree that defied belief.
At this rate, he might never make a single friend — and the thought alone was enough to fill her with anxiety.
Amelia resolved that this time, at long last, she would rip out that rotten work ethic of Luid's and rebuild it from the roots up.
"Luid!"
Sure enough, he was asleep by the lake.
"...And without even a blanket."
Amelia let out a small sigh as she approached him.
A boy of small stature. Soft golden hair brushed against his porcelain-pale skin.
Amelia forgot entirely that she had come to scold him, and simply stared down at her little brother.
...He's adorable, isn't he.
Her firm resolve to reprimand him properly... her resolve...
melted away completely.
Crouching down, Amelia spoke gently.
"Lui. Wake up."
"...Mmgh?"
Luid sat up, rubbing his eyes.
"What's Sister Amelia doing here?"
A full year had passed since he'd transmigrated into this world. The matter of what to call each other within the family had long since been sorted out.
"What did I tell you I was here for?"
"Uh..."
Luid answered mid-yawn.
"You called my name...?"
"Besides that!"
"Then..."
Luid seemed to ponder it deeply — then began nodding off, head bobbing.
Amelia's face went blank with disbelief.
And yet.
"Well... never mind, then."
Amelia smiled warmly and stroked his head.
"As long as you're healthy, that's what matters."
She rose to her feet and turned back the way she had come, wearing an expression of complete satisfaction.
She had almost made it out of Delin's Forest when—
she froze mid-step and looked back over her shoulder.
"...I couldn't say a single word to him. Again."
That made eight failures in a row.