The Sleepless City
A drifting sensation, as though I were bobbing on a boundless, empty sea.
What roused me from that feeling was a voice ringing through my ears.
"Hey, buddy, eyes open!!"
"Shouldn't somebody be waking the man up front?"
"What's got into him all of a sudden, eh? There — eyes open!"
"……?"
My vision began to brighten from a hazy blur. In place of still-imperfect sight, what struck me as strange instead was the rumble of the road surface, booming up through my backside.
Clatter, clatter!
The confusion hadn't cleared yet. I blinked, deliberately this time.
"Hss…."
Long bangs hung over my eyes. I moved to sweep them aside — and froze mid-motion.
Clank!
"??"
My wrists felt heavy. Wondering why, I lowered my gaze.
What the hell is this?!
Iron manacles clamped around both wrists — linked vertically by chains to my ankles as well, leaving me unable to stir so much as an inch from where I sat.
And the shackles weren't mine alone. Every one of the dozen-odd people riding in that wagon wore an identical set, dealt out with perfect fairness.
"Looks like you're finally back with us."
"Falling asleep in a spot like this — what a carefree friend you are."
They each grumbled off a single remark, and before long, lost interest in me entirely.
Faced with the situation now sprawled before my eyes, I couldn't help but be thrown.
Fuck — what the hell is going on?
I had clearly been sitting in front of a monitor. Exchanging question after question with GAIA about the Murim Thousand Character Classic, no less.
So why, out of nowhere, had I woken up atop a prisoner-transport wagon of all places?
But right then, something flashed through my mind.
[Inserting this system's administrator, 'Seo Mugeon,' into the scenario.]
[To derive a meaningful conclusion, the subject will now be forcibly injected into the designated world.]
GAIA going off the rails — the memory surfaced unbidden. If something was to blame, it was that.
First things first — get a read on the situation.
I set about sweeping my surroundings at once.
Ten men inside the wagon, nothing else. Ages all across the board, every one of them bound hand and foot, and not a trace of fight left in any of them.
Their clothing: coarse fabric, unevenly dyed. Not mass-produced goods.
What nagged at me most was the wagon itself.
A narrow viewing slit ran lengthwise along the top of the wall. Beyond tightly spaced iron bars, a thick transparent pane with a faint blue tint had been fitted over it.
Is that... a glass window?
It was finished so precisely it could have passed for something modern. I blinked at it.
Clatter, clatter! The road's vibration drummed up through the wheels, and the noise outside carried in clearly as well. And yet, for all that, one sound was missing—
No hoofbeats.
Still the wagon pressed on at a steady pace. This thing wasn't rolling on horse power. Something else was driving it.
Damn it... but I couldn't swear to it yet.
Assumption bred assumption, tails chasing tails. Just as the picture in my head was growing truly tangled—
Boom! Boom-boom! Boom!
Detonations went off loud enough to rattle my eardrums loose. I turned my head toward the scenery outside — and my jaw fell open.
"……!?"
Colossal fireworks were embroidering the jet-black night sky, tracing out the character for "joy" with ruler-straight precision.
Beneath them, wooden pavilions rose dizzy and high as skyscrapers, lined up without end.
"Whoa…."
But the most breathtaking thing of all was the light. A district crammed wall to wall with pleasure houses and inns — and above it, hanja signboards in every color of the rainbow blazing like neon, straight out of a 1980s Hong Kong night street.
A spectacle of pleasure so gaudy it could blind you. And even that wasn't the end of it.
Whirr!!
A flock of owls swept past our vehicle in formation. Look closer, though, and they were no living owls at all.
...Wood?
Wooden owls, the character for "flight" engraved in blue across both wings. With mail clutched in their talons, they threaded acrobatic loops between the pavilions.
"Move it! Move!!"
Whoosh!!
Someone blasted past at quite a clip. The culprit: a courier tearing along on a flat iron plate engraved with the character for "floating," weaving neatly around every obstacle in his path.
"Tsk tsk. Couriers have no damn manners, in any city you go to. None."
"And the Beggar Clan bums carrying on like that — hardly tomorrow's news, is it?"
The surrounding prisoners clucked their tongues. Rich, perhaps, from a cartload of men guilty of something or other.
Still, a scene that appeared moments later pulled every gaze to a single point.
FWOOSH!!
A roadside inn with its kitchen opened right onto the street. No firewood sat beneath the pot.
Instead, the cook gave his fingers a snap, the way one might turn a dial.
FWOOSH!!
A pillar of flame shot up alongside the character for "fire," and with practiced ease the man went on stir-frying his meat over the blaze.
"Ahh, now that gets the mouth watering."
"That inn's fire-seared flavor is out of this world. They've a branch in Hangzhou too, so I'd know."
"...That Kwak Sanggu. No mistaking a man of pleasure — the fellow knows his stuff cold."
Laughter rumbled through the wagon. The dish they were watching was one thing, but it was the name that middle-aged man had dropped that jolted my attention straight to him.
Kwak Sanggu?
A name I had most definitely heard before. And just as suspicion hardened into certainty—
HOOOONK—!!!
A whistle blast enormous enough to shred my eardrums. A vast shadow swept across the roof of our wagon.
"...Wow."
Dozens of meters overhead ran an elevated railway strung between gigantic stone pillars. A black steel train, dozens of cars long, spat sparks and streaked out of sight faster than an arrow.
"Incredible every time I see it — the express, the Thunderfire Line...!!"
"Luoyang to Chang'an in two hours. I don't care how many layers of hanja brushwork enchantments they've caked onto the thing — is that speed even sane?"
"They say one of the Hundred Greatest Masters under Heaven, at a full sprint, still couldn't outrun the Thunderfire Line. Hah."
With the prisoners' eyes stolen by the vanished train, a fierce conviction quietly took root inside me.
Sure of it now — this place.
A worldview unhinged from the very rails, nothing like the Central Plains of your ordinary martial-arts tale.
A world this absurd could only be one: the Murim Thousand Character Classic.
"Ha... ha…."
Even beholding it with both eyes, belief came hard. How was I supposed to readily accept that the world I'd only ever known through the panels of a comic was spread out before me right now?
Any sane person would have tipped straight into panic. So why was it, then—
Thump, thump, thump—
—that my heartbeat only quickened? Rather than the panic of facing an insane situation, it was exhilaration that kept swelling, bigger and bigger.
Every hardship life had ever put in front of me had, with a reasonable amount of effort, worked itself out one way or another.
The one and only wall I'd ever failed to climb — ironically enough — was this very work.
Thousands of "what if" scenarios, every last one a failure. The sole figure I'd managed to squeeze out in the end: a success rate of 3.1 percent.
To someone else's eyes, doubtless an all-but-zero number.
What mattered was that a possibility existed at all.
Out of the hundreds of millions living in the Central Plains, the "hidden genius languishing in obscurity" that GAIA had hand-picked and implanted — was the body I wore right now.
A body that surely carried a talent far beyond the ordinary. And if the one piloting it knew the original story better than anyone alive?
Plenty doable, I'd say.
A roadmap was sketching itself out in my head, neat and quick. The first order of business: bring out whatever power lay hidden in this body and break out of this wagon—
Zzzzziiing—!!
"What the— ugh...!!"
A vicious headache, as if my brain were being cleaved in two. And in the same instant, a notification window began to rise before my eyes.
[File restoration in progress: Synchronizing memories with the possessed body 'Jang Mancheol.']
"Ghh...!"
The host's memories began pouring into my skull.
His name was Jang Mancheol, twenty years old this year — an arithmetic genius who had taken gold at the Murim Alliance Arithmetic Competition at the age of fifteen.
Wielding that brilliant mind, he had even landed a post as a bottom-rung accountant for the Hwangbo Clan, one of the great sects.
But there was one fatal inferiority that had tormented Jang Mancheol without mercy—
—A blockhead without even a Stroke Right!
—All brains and no power to speak of!
Stroke Right. Simply put: the authority to write hanja.
The ability to summon a hanja character at your back and bring forth whatever that character describes.
Unfortunately, not just anyone could have it.
Across the whole of the Central Plains: three in ten. Only about three out of every ten people were born with a Stroke Right.
Elixirs that could grant it after the fact did exist — but their astronomical price put them effectively beyond reach.
The Stroke Right was treated as the mandatory ticket into the upper caste.
A society where, gift or no gift in any given field, without a Stroke Right you could all but forget about reaching its peak.
Worn down by a lifetime of being looked down on, Jang Mancheol one day went and did something insane.
Even if it takes filthy means — I will get my hands on a Stroke Right...!
Namely: skimming the operating budget of the Hwangbo Clan — the great sect he served as an accountant — and secretly buying an elixir with the take!
The result, of course, was a catastrophic failure. The elixir he'd purchased was a counterfeit.
The instant the Hwangbo Clan noticed the vanished fortune, the embezzler Jang Mancheol was hauled before the Murim Alliance's Hall of Punishment.
And the sentence he received was, of all things—
A d-death sentence...?
My stomach dropped through the floor. Any thrill had packed up and left long ago.
I had believed there'd be a reason. The vast Central Plains held a population in the hundreds of millions.
I had trusted without a flicker of doubt that oh-great-and-mighty GAIA must have had some enormous purpose in cramming me into this body of all bodies—
You fucking son of a bitch!!!!!!!!
The dumbass was me for believing. Dumbass, through and through.
Even as I spewed profanity, our vehicle slipped free of the glittering city center.
Clunk—!
"Wha—!?"
"Why's it speeding up all of a sudden?"
The wagon began accelerating hard — then plunged off toward a grim, near-lightless stretch of outskirts.
How much farther did we roll? We soon ground to a halt before a jet-black stone wall whose height defied gauging.
What it was: a detention camp built on a positively monumental scale.
Screeeech—
The gates opened, and what greeted us was a line of wardens wearing expressions like demons summoned from hell.
"What are you all waiting for — hop down, every one of you!!"
"Not moving fast enough, you bastards!!"
Souls half-fled from their bodies, the prisoners were dragged along by the wardens' rough grips.
And I was no exception.
"...Ah, fuck."
This was fucked. Genuinely, completely fucked.
Day one of possessing a character in the educational comic Murim Thousand Character Classic — and I had landed on the worst starting point imaginable.
As a death-row inmate whose neck could be lopped off at any moment.