A Clever Life in the Boondocks
A shabby little village on the western fringe of the Europa Continent, out in the Oxyca Region.
Asty, the youngest daughter of Cooper — a poor freeholding farmer with four sons and three daughters — made a special wish on her eleventh birthday.
Goddess, oh Goddess. Please make me someone special, like the heroes in the fairy tales...!
And the Goddess granted Asty's wish.
She awakened the memories of a past life still lingering in the girl's soul, turning her into something rather like a reincarnator.
In the process, however, a minor problem arose. No — a serious one.
Asty was a little kid who had only just turned eleven. Her previous life, Cheon Si-jun, had been a full-grown man of twenty-five.
So here is the question.
What do you suppose happens when a child whose sense of self is not even finished forming absorbs twenty-five years' worth of memories all at once?
"Damn it."
Ta-da. The girl's ego vanishes, and all that remains is a castaway from the twenty-first century, sitting there alone.
Asty, who had collapsed in the middle of her birthday party, never woke up again.
She had been unable to withstand the sudden flood of twenty-five years of memory, and she had simply ceased to exist.
Strictly speaking, it wasn't a complete erasure — there seemed to have been some partial fusion — but as far as I was concerned, this kid was still a stranger.
As long as I, the one occupying Asty's body, regarded her as someone else, then whatever the process had been, her self had to be considered gone.
"Why me, of all people?"
I felt wretched.
This was not a situation I had asked for.
I had clearly died in the corner of a cramped studio apartment, and I hadn't been particularly attached to the world of the living.
And yet here I was, not only resurrected in a little girl's body, but having effectively killed the body's original owner in the process.
Call it reincarnation all you like — this was basically a traffic accident.
I was depressed.
I had not wanted a second life.
And I wanted one even less if it meant hijacking someone else's.
But the damage was already done, and Asty's self had been completely snuffed out.
What remained were a family who would never stop believing in their beloved youngest daughter's recovery — and the criminal who had ended her life.
So what was I supposed to do?
How, exactly, was I supposed to wash away a sin I had never wanted to commit?
"...I could really use a cigarette."
No amount of thinking was going to produce an answer right now.
I smacked my lips and lay back on the pile of straw.
Times like these, a little suffering on the lungs usually settled the head — but unfortunately, this body was eleven years old, which meant forced abstinence for the foreseeable future.
...Though if this really was medieval Europe, there might not be any tobacco at all.
So I was looking at a lifetime of involuntary quitting?
"Maybe I should just die again."
The gloom came rushing back.
This grown man needs his nicotine...
The next morning, faced without nicotine — effectively the first day of my second life.
"Asty, are you feeling any better? I've brewed you a medicine that's good for the head. Don't spit it out just because it's bitter — swallow it right down."
Agnes, Asty's mother, fretting over the youngest daughter who had fainted on her own birthday, was now recommending adolescent drug use — which was even worse for a teenager than smoking.
I am not joking about not being able to have a cigarette.
The medicine Asty's mother had prescribed was none other than the infamous poppy juice.
Classic Middle Ages. Hard mode from the jump.
If this were the modern world, I would have called the police on the spot. Astonishingly, in this era it was a household staple.
If someone was gasping for breath or burning up with fever, you boiled up some poppy the way you'd run to the corner pharmacy for ibuprofen.
Naturally, no amount of my fretting and lecturing about the evils of opium was going to land. There weren't many alternatives, and almost nobody here even used the stuff as a recreational drug.
Which also meant that putting my mouth to this poppy decoction wasn't going to turn me into an addict overnight.
"I'm all right. I was just... a little startled, that's all. I'm sorry for worrying you."
Even so, I couldn't simply go along with a medieval prescription.
Drawing on Asty's memories, I refused the drug treatment as politely as I could.
No matter how normal it was in this age to treat poppy as a first-aid staple, the fact remained that it was still poppy.
I wasn't actually running a high fever with no other options, and I had only just started a new life. Was I seriously going to start sucking down poppy juice?
"Well, if you say so, I suppose there's no need to force you..."
Agnes let the sentence trail off and looked at me.
Her eyes were so full of worry for her beloved youngest that I couldn't help a sudden surge of emotion, and I looked away.
"So you were lying about being fine. If you don't want a scolding, sit still and drink it."
Wait. That wasn't how this was supposed to go.
I frantically rummaged through Asty's memories.
Had this kid been a habitual liar? Why was she pulling out mind-reading just because I glanced away?
"I can hear your eyeballs rolling from over here. You want a thrashing?"
No, seriously, that wasn't it. I was just trying to dig up a memory...
And what kind of mother uses language this violent? Was it just me, or did "You want a thrashing?" sound an awful lot like "You want to die?"
The moment I told myself this was probably just average medieval child-rearing, my head started to spin.
And alongside it, my guilt toward Asty lightened — just a tiny bit.
Dropping a twenty-first-century modern person into an era like this was basically torture, wasn't it?
If I thought of myself not as the murderer who stole her body, but as the victim she had cast adrift in the Middle Ages, I stopped feeling sorry and started getting a little angry.
Really just a tiny bit, though.
"I— I'll go run an errand!"
Even as I marveled inwardly at medieval home education, Agnes's gaze only grew sharper.
In the end, I had no choice but to take the shortsighted option: run.
I'd catch a beating when I got back. Still better than drinking the poppy juice.
Conveniently, I had a solid excuse in the form of delivering the mid-morning snack. If I used the chance to talk Cooper around, I might free myself from the poppy-juice threat altogether.
"I brought the snack!"
Whether I could actually persuade this stubborn man was another question entirely.
A farmer's morning always started early.
It was an industry that ran on simple labor and hard-won experience; if you weren't diligent, you went under.
And Cooper, Asty's father, was out in the fields again today, faithfully tending his crops.
"You're earlier than usual today."
Asty's older brothers weren't out in the fields yet.
The family's plot wasn't all that large, so the boys were only called in at sowing and harvest; the rest of the time they helped on other farms or practiced carpentry.
It was easiest to think of them as living halfway like tenant farmers, simply because the land they owned was so small.
At this rate, every son except the eldest was on track to become a full tenant farmer anyway.
Digging through the memories, I found that the first and second sons had even fought over this scrap of land.
They were dirt poor. And even this was relatively well-off by local standards.
"Asty. What are you thinking so hard about?"
I was just freshly realizing that the Middle Ages really are a worthless pit of poverty.
How is scratching in the dirt for a mouthful of food the entirety of economic activity? The thought of having to live in a world like this is already making me feel hopeless.
I wasn't expecting modern first-world infrastructure in a medieval country village, but this doesn't even clear the bare minimum.
What exactly did I do wrong to end up suffering in a primitive backwater like this? The crime of reincarnating?
No matter how I look at it, there's no answer. I think the real victim of this reincarnation traffic accident isn't Asty — it's me.
"Um... may I say something? It might sound a little strange..."
But thanks to all that, I had a rough sense of how I needed to live.
I would set aside the identity crisis and the guilt over Asty for now, and start by improving these poor medieval people's standard of living.
Using a modern person's knowledge to make the Middle Ages richer and more beautiful.
That would be the greatest contribution I could make to this world — and the finest repayment I could offer the girl who had loved her family.
I had no idea what some supernatural being who may or may not have been a goddess intended, but I was certain this was the royal road I was meant to walk.
"Go on, then. This father of yours is very curious what our youngest is thinking. It's that Hans boy next door again, isn't it? I'll break that brat's legs right—"
"N-no! I was wondering how we could farm more comfortably. That's what I was thinking about."
I headed off Cooper's sudden acceleration and took the first step of my grand design.
He would almost certainly dismiss my intellect. But he would also find the sight of a daughter fretting for her father's sake adorable.
Then I would unpack the odds and ends of knowledge I'd picked up in the modern world, one piece at a time, astonish him, infect him with that universal parental delusion — my child is a genius — and, in the long run, pull the whole village into supporting me—
"Haha. So our little one was having such a cute little daydream! But you don't need to worry. Baron Montpellier only takes half the harvest, so as long as we don't hit a bad year, we've nothing to fear about putting food on the table. How merciful is that?"
...?
Half the harvest?
A base tax rate of fifty percent?
What could this tiny field even produce that he'd skim off half of it?
And that was considered low compared to other fiefs?
No — as if the tax collectors of this era would ever stop at the official amount out of the goodness of their hearts.
Once they'd skimmed extras under the name of surcharges and the Church had taken its tithe, what was even left?
"Oh dear, you're still too young to understand talk like this. That's all right. You'll learn in time. I've already set aside your marriage tax for certain, so you just focus on getting ready to marry—"
Ah.
What was left was serfdom.
Hmm.
This really wasn't going to be easy.