A Clever Life in the Boondocks
It had already been two days since an unwanted reincarnation dumped me into this medieval backwater.
I was gradually adapting to this era of no dreams and no hope.
First thing every morning, I rose early to help Mother with the housework, then carried a mid-morning snack out to Father in the fields. On the way back I would snatch up a handful of nameless roots and herbs. After lunch at home I sat weaving hemp cloth to prepare for summer.
For reference, if you roll up the leaves of the hemp plant that supplies this cloth and set them on fire, you get marijuana.
In this age the stuff was a pathetic, unimproved strain—only the stalks were used for fabric and the rest discarded—but through the eyes of a twenty-first-century modern person, the village outskirts looked like a drug farm hanging heavy with product.
Just sitting still was enough to give me a nervous breakdown.
I was not joking. I meant it.
No, seriously—poppies were blooming in our front garden and cannabis was growing in the backyard.
Even knowing that neither was used as a narcotic in this era, my thoroughly law-abiding twenty-first-century soul could not help but flutter with anxiety. I half expected a drug-enforcement squad to kick down the door tomorrow, torch the house, and leave.
Your Honor, these drugs were grown by my mother, not me. So please just take her and let me go, sob sob.
"Thief! There's a thief! Villagers, come out and catch the thief!"
"Don't worry! I've got him!"
"What a murderous little bastard—daring to steal in our village?"
Of course, the Middle Ages had no drug squads, not even a tiny police box. The very concept of police did not exist. Investigating crime and keeping the peace was the job of the courts and guards in the cities. And our village sat on a frontier the local lord had long since abandoned.
Watching the neighbors thrash the unlucky thief they had caught, I quietly let out a sigh.
Thirty middle-aged men with zero combat experience, armed with hoes and axes, plus a single layer of fence about as tall as an eleven-year-old girl.
Amazingly, that was the sum total of our village's military power.
A pack of wolves would wipe us out.
Looks like my first invention is going to be barbed wire.
"What? Stick iron on the fence? Kid, do you really think that makes any sense?"
"Yes. If you draw the iron thin and attach sharp barbs, you get barbed wire…"
"Aigoo. In all my years I've never heard anyone suggest decorating a fence with iron. Do you even know how much iron goes into the hoe your father uses?"
My grand plan for securing the village's safety collapsed before it even began. The village's one and only blacksmith grandfather dismissed the proposal outright, declaring he had no iron to waste on such nonsense.
Ha. Seriously. I'm speechless.
How dare he dismiss barbed wire? A modern invention whose value has been proven everywhere from ranches to the middle of battlefields, treated like pure nonsense?
As expected, a boondocks blacksmith is hopeless.
Well, what would some washed-up old man stuck in a backwater village tinkering with farm tools know about revolutionary inventions? If he had that kind of talent he would have started a personal streaming channel or collected intangible cultural heritage grants while training apprentices… ah, right, this is the Middle Ages. No more internet broadcasts for me.
Anyway, thanks to Grandfather Blacksmith I learned that medieval technology was far more pathetic than I had expected. If even a simple request for long iron wire with a few barbs attached—not even the fancy twisted kind—got rejected for lack of materials, just how abysmal was the production capacity? One wrong step and we would regress to the Stone Age.
Still, if I could reach a city I might somehow secure materials. The problem was that I had no money.
What great fortune could the youngest daughter of a poor rural farmer possibly possess?
Asty's entire fortune consisted of a cute face, a healthy body, a few sets of medieval children's clothes, and the sewing kit Mother had given her. Oh, and a leather cap for winter.
And that was enough to place her in the top ten percent of the Middle Ages, if not the top one percent. No debts, after all. No diseases either.
"Damn it. Isn't there anywhere I can scrape together some quick cash? Even a startup needs capital to make a prototype…"
I sat on a convenient rock and organized my thoughts.
In this hopeless, uncivilized world, every form of housework ultimately reduced to pure manual labor. No dishwasher, no detergent—there wasn't even such a thing as a sink. To find a faucet in this era you had to go to a noble's mansion.
Naturally laundry meant hauling everything down to the river or stream, and the clothes being washed had been stitched stitch by stitch at home. In effect every domestic chore was hard labor.
And if I went home now I would be sucked straight into that cycle of drudgery.
A talent who had arrived from centuries in the future, wasting time on mere errands. That would not be my misfortune alone—it would be the misfortune of this entire era, and by extension the world.
Imagine Einstein or Tesla dying illiterate because they were too busy doing hard labor. What a terrifying, catastrophic loss that would be.
Of course my intelligence was nowhere near true genius level, but I possessed something better: the answer key I had brought from the twenty-first century.
An answer key that recorded the path humanity would walk for the next several hundred years.
It might well be more precious than a hundred geniuses.
Therefore, to prevent the hope of human civilization from being sacrificed to evil medieval child-labor exploitation, I executed a rapid evasion maneuver.
"Asty! Are you ditching work?"
"…Hans."
I was absolutely not skipping chores and refusing to go home because I hated running errands.
Hans from next door plopped down beside me without the slightest hesitation.
According to Asty's memories the two of them had been fairly close, but to me he was just an ugly Western brat.
The problem was that this ugly neighbor kid was my arranged fiancé.
I had roughly figured it out yesterday when Asty's father started talking about the marriage tax.
This bastard… no, this brat is my future husband.
The adults of both families had already agreed long ago, and every resident of the village recognized them as a prospective newlywed couple. The whole village knew; only Asty herself had been in the dark.
"It's hot, so move over a bit."
"Don't wanna. We're gonna be stuck together for life."
How did she not know? Did the kid hit her head or something?
"I won't say it three times. Move."
"Hehe, you say that but you don't actually push me aw—"
I had said I wouldn't say it three times.
Like a good adult who keeps her promises, I jabbed Hans in the side.
Struck by a technique packed with modern intellect, Hans screamed and tumbled away, then immediately revived and tried to grab my hand. Another side jab exploded.
"Ow ow ow… okay, okay. I'll stay away while we're under the blazing sun."
Hans quickly admitted defeat and offered a compromise.
Tch. Persistent little shit.
I'd prefer he stayed away for life, but even so that would be difficult.
From my perspective, completely shoving this kid away carried serious risk. In this era, starting a household and having children was simply common sense. The rigid skulls of medieval people had no room for the concept of remaining single.
If I suddenly pushed away my arranged fiancé and announced I didn't particularly want to marry, the village adults would lock me in a room with this brat and tell us to just get it over with.
They weren't especially immoral. That was simply the average for humans of this age—and a survival strategy proven optimal over hundreds and thousands of years.
This was not a safe, systematic modern society. In a place where self-reliance was the constant and banding together as a family unit was common sense, insisting on remaining single was about as deviant as dropping out of elementary school in twenty-first-century Korea and declaring yourself a homeless meta. You wouldn't be persuaded; you would be disciplined.
And Asty's parents were not cold enough to stand by while their child went down the wrong path. They would beat their beloved daughter if necessary to set her back on the "correct" course.
If I hated it that much I would have to run away and enter a convent. Whether any convent would accept a little kid from a remote rural village with no identity guarantee was another question.
"Hans, I don't like you because you're ugly."
So for now, buy time and think.
I needed to maintain a distance far enough that the betrothal ceremony could not take place, yet not so far that the engagement completely fell apart, while desperately scraping together money. Both escaping the village and developing technology ultimately required capital.
And if the betrothal ceremony happened before I earned that money, a bed ending was essentially locked in.
Not a Bad ending—a Bed ending. Living out my days as Hans's wife in a shabby rural village until I grew old and died was absolutely not an option I would accept.
"Let's not be close anymore."
"What are you talking about. Like you're so pretty yourself."
I firmly initiated social distancing.
"Huh? Huh? Wait a second! Wait!"
The clueless Hans belatedly tried to grab me, but I shook him off with another rapid evasion maneuver. I did not forget to stamp my foot as if I were sulking.
Push too hard and the engagement might break completely. Hans had to keep drinking the empty water until I secured my escape route.
The sorrow of Hans, whose role had suddenly switched from fiancé to meat shield…
So what?
Asty herself had never liked him much either, saying he looked like a steamed bun.
Later, when you meet a pretty older sister, I'll set up a blind date for you.