North White Chef (1)
Fire and water.
These days both are easy enough to come by, yet in ancient times people treated them as symbols of the divine and deified anyone who could command them.
Even a simple ember had once belonged to the gods; Prometheus stole it and gave it to mankind, and for that he suffered eternal punishment. As for water, mastering it was called flood control and counted among an emperor’s greatest labors.
Remarkably, both East and West demanded this of their rulers with equal severity. In the East a king might be hanged for failing to manage the waters; in the West a pharaoh, as descendant of the sun god, was held responsible when the floods went wrong.
Responsible, in every possible sense of the word.
The reason I brought the subject up was simple.
“We’ve secured fire. Next comes water.”
This world had no rental water purifiers and no delivery riders who would drop bottles at your door.
So how were people supposed to get water?
How? You go fetch it yourself, of course.
Being born here was already a hardcore medieval lottery ticket set to hell difficulty. And in the North—the spiciest corner of that hell—even fetching water was a full-time ordeal.
Every village had to send people to a river two to ten kilometers away, fill buckets by hand, and haul them back. That alone was enough to make anyone’s vision go dark. What made it truly vicious was that the ones doing the hauling weren’t sturdy adult men, but children.
“There’s no other way, my lord. The men must go out hunting, and the women must manage whatever game their husbands bring home.”
In the modern world it would have been a child-abuse scandal. In the Middle Ages it counted as relatively humane child welfare. They weren’t sending the kids out into a blizzard to hunt wolves, nor forcing them to stitch frozen leather with numb, needle-pricked fingers. Compared to those jobs, water-fetching was a cushy posting.
Relative cushiness, that is. Reports still landed on my desk with grim regularity: children lost to blizzards and found as frozen corpses, or dragged off by wild beasts and never seen again.
I could not simply look the other way.
But how?
“It’s no easy problem, my lord. The villagers do what they can—they put an older child in charge as guide and send them out in groups, because a child alone is as good as missing. Even so, disappearances still happen.”
Medieval people weren’t fools, and they loved their children no less than anyone else. The reason grown men risked their lives hunting in this murderous cold was precisely so those children could eat. Yet there was no real solution in sight.
I racked my brain for alternatives, but living without water was not an option. The road ahead looked bleak.
“And we can’t exactly dig a well for every single house.”
My ancestors had done exactly that, or so the stories claimed. At first everyone trudged to distant streams. Then someone dug a private well, the idea spread like wildfire, and soon every household had its own.
There was even a legend about General Kim Yu-sin: marching past his own home during a campaign, he ordered water drawn from the family well, took a sip, and declared, “Ah, nothing beats the water from my own well.”
But that would be impossible in the North.
The soil of Joseon might have been mixed with stone, yet it was still soft earth. The North was frozen permafrost. Digging through that without heavy machinery…
“A well for every house?! What a brilliant idea!”
Max, who had been listening quietly, sprang to his feet on the spot.
“Pardon?”
“You’re absolutely right! If a river flows nearby, there must be an aquifer under the ground. I remember hearing it once—anywhere near a river, dig about ten meters and you’ll hit water!”
“Ah… well, yes, that sounds correct.”
The principle was fine. The problem was the how.
“Then order them dug at once.”
“Order whom, exactly?”
“My lord? Isn’t it obvious?”
Max looked at me as though I were the one being dense.
“The thirsty people dig them themselves.”
They say that in the land of the one-eyed, a man with two eyes is the monster.
I, Logwell Wintershield, roughly one month into my transfer to this medieval fantasy world, was living that proverb.
In my world it was simple common sense: no matter how thirsty a man might be, a single shovel and frozen ground would always win. Just as a human, however trained, could never fly.
And yet.
And yet…!!
Why is this actually working?
“Hahahaha! We did it!!!”
“Water!!!”
“Khhh… ice-cold and perfect!”
Max had gathered the people of Jemili Village, insisting it could be done. With me trailing behind, still half-convinced the whole plan was madness, he announced that by my order every household was to dig its own well.
I had expected fierce resistance.
“What? How did anyone think of that?!”
“Is the young master a god? Is the young master a god? Is the young master a god?”
“Why didn’t we think of this years ago?”
Instead the sturdy men of Jemili Village wore the expressions of people who had just been clubbed full-swing across the skull. Then they sprinted home and began shoveling like madmen. In a day and a half every house had its own well.
“What the fuck… how is this even possible…”
I had forgotten.
Medieval people—especially fantasy northern medieval people—were an entirely different species from soft twenty-first-century moderns. Each of them was a born alpha male who could go toe-to-toe with wild wolves and mountain demons; every last one was the kind of frontline ace a company commander would fight to keep.
Of course, if we got into the finer details, I had contributed a little something myself.
“It’s thanks to the ondol Your Lordship invented.”
“…Pardon?”
“Even northerners as tough as we are could never have smashed through frozen earth for hours on end the old way. But the moment our hands turned to ice we simply stepped onto the warm floor, thawed out, and went straight back to work. That’s what made it possible.”
…Was that it?
It wasn’t entirely without merit. Back in my Cheorwon days the worst part of digging frozen ground had been that every stroke of the shovel packed the earth harder. Pressure from above plus time plus the cold turned the soil into concrete; without heavy equipment you hit a wall. Combine ondol with northern constitution, however, and that wall simply shattered.
Yes. I had just unlocked the dual GOAT achievement of bringing both fire and flood control to Jemili Village in one stroke.
“Hahahaha!! Young master!!!”
And no one celebrated the achievement louder than the village headman of Jemili.
“I knew it was Your Lordship!! I’d heard of your brilliance since you were small, but this…!!”
He had young children of his own. In a few years they would have been the ones risking the road for water; I had erased that nightmare overnight. Loyalty doubled on the spot. Beaming so hard his face might split, the headman seized my hands.
“Ah—if you haven’t eaten yet, won’t you join us for a meal?”
“A meal?”
“Yes. When you visited last time I was never able to offer proper hospitality as headman. It still bothers me.”
A meal, was it?
I glanced sideways. Max gave a small nod.
Well, even modern politicians start their vote-hunting by touring traditional markets and filming themselves slurping gukbap…
“All right. Why not?”
Time to inspect a medieval northern breakfast table.
Fuck. I should have refused.
My head still hadn’t finished processing what I was looking at.
What exactly had I expected?
“It’s nothing fancy, but please eat your fill!”
Welcomed by the headman and his entire family, I sat down to dinner—and my jaw dropped at the spread. The headman, mistaking the expression for pure emotion, heaped a mountain of food onto my plate with a hearty “Go on, dig in!” Behind me Max murmured,
“My lord… the headman has gone to quite some expense.”
…This?
Arranged on a wooden tray were the following:
Rye bread, herb-mixed greens, a fruit pie, nuts, smoked herring, a catch-all stew, and roast pork.
Memories from the original body finally surfaced and labeled each item. A little late, but better than nothing. I put a bite in my mouth—
…Wow.
That single mouthful taught me just how cosmically lucky I had been to be born in the twenty-first century.
How do these people live on this?
First, the rye bread that served as their staple. Calling it bread was an insult to the word. Texture and flavor were the least of its crimes; it simply wasn’t bread. It reminded me of the rock-hard biscuit I’d eaten in the carriage on the way to Asbil Village. Swing this thing hard enough and you could crack a skull. Only after soaking it in the stew did it become even marginally edible.
The greens were nothing like a modern dressed salad. Raw, unharmonized bitterness punched the back of my tongue. The fruit pie couldn’t decide whether it was sweet or savory. The nuts, which at least provided calories in this cold, had never been selectively bred for taste and therefore had none. The smoked herring was insanely salty. The stew needed no further comment. And the roast pork—
“This… this roast pork. Don’t tell me…”
“Ohoho! I knew it!! I tried to hide it, but of course Your Lordship noticed!”
You made zero effort to hide it, old man.
“You bought spices?”
I asked while the aggressive seasoning coated my tongue and made my mouth feel thick. The headman had clearly been waiting for the question.
“Truth is, this entire meal was paid for by the whole village, coin by coin. You gave humble folk like us warm floors to sleep on. You taught us to dig wells so our children no longer die on the road. And above all, you shielded us from the underhanded tricks of those southern merchant guilds. All of it is thanks to Your Lordship.”
Therefore—
“The villagers pooled every scrap they had and bought the spices. We heard that the great lords of the Empire eat like this, and we wanted, just once, to offer Your Lordship the same.”
…Ah.
In that moment the childish sulk I had been nursing felt suddenly shameful.
Even the roast pork was no everyday food for people in their position. It was a once-a-year luxury at best.
They keep the livestock indoors not only so the animals don’t freeze, but so no one can steal them either, don’t they?
And still they had freely set the best of it before me. That was how sincerely they valued what I had done. I had joked about unlocking the platinum dual achievement of fire and flood control; they truly, genuinely held me dear.
This table was the northerners’ heart made edible.
The instant I understood that, I knew exactly what I had to do next.
The table. I have to overhaul the entire dining table.
Because even with all the goodwill in the world, I still could not bring myself to swallow another bite of this.