Prologue: From Desk Slave to Doomed Warrior
A heart-wrenching pain, as if my heart were being crushed in a vise. That was the final memory of my forty-five years.
2025, South Korea. The life of Kang Cheol-min, department head at a small steel manufacturing firm, ended in pathetic obscurity. Schmoozing clients, squeezed between pressure from above and complaints from below, buried under mountains of unsigned documents on his desk. That day, too, he died with his face planted on the company monitor, without even properly seeing his family's faces. Cause of death: overwork. The kind of commonplace demise that might warrant a single line in the social section of the news—if that.
In his dying moments, what flashed through his mind wasn't regret for his family or sorrow over unfinished business.
Just an overwhelming exhaustion. A cowardly sense of relief that, finally, he could rest.
So he thought he'd sunk into eternal darkness.
"Ugh..."
As he lifted his heavy eyelids, the sight that greeted him wasn't the familiar fluorescent lights of his office. A yellowed thatch roof, crudely woven from straw. The musty smell of fermented soybean blocks and ancient dust stabbed into his nostrils, filling his lungs.
A hospital? Or had someone dumped his collapsed body in some rural nursing home?
He tried to sit up. Normally, he'd groan, "Aigoo, my back!" but something was off with his body's response.
It felt heavy. Like his whole body was wrapped in lead weights—or rather, as if his muscles themselves had been compressed into dense steel, giving an eerie sense of mass.
Yet his movement was explosive. He'd barely thought about it when his upper body sprang up like a coiled spring.
Crack. Creak.
The vertebrae in his spine clicked into place with a racket like shattering roof tiles.
"What... the hell?"
The voice that came from his mouth was utterly unfamiliar.
A raspy, deep bass. Like a beast growling in a cave. He hurriedly looked down at his hands.
Pot lids. There was no other way to describe them.
Enormous palms thick with calluses. Each knuckle as thick as an average man's wrist. Veins bulging over the backs of his hands writhed like living earthworms, pulsing with vitality. These weren't his hands. Not the slender, pale ones that had spent twenty years in an office job, merely twirling a ballpoint pen.
Reflexively, he touched his face. Rough stubble. A chiseled jawline. The skin felt tough and firm, like well-tanned leather sofa.
Still dazed, trying to make sense of it all, he heard footsteps outside the door.
"Deok-ryeong! You're awake!"
Deok-ryeong? Who the hell is that?
Scraaaape.
The rickety wooden door screeched open, and in strode a man with a topknot. Sharp, stern eyes and a white robe—he looked straight out of a historical drama. Seeing him, the man clicked his tongue.
"The sun's high in the midday sky, and you're still lazing about. As your brother, it's downright embarrassing. Did you come staggering home drunk again last night?"
Brother?
His head spun. It was as if someone had jammed a USB into his brain and started force-feeding him gigabytes of data. Alien memories crashed in like waves.
Jeolla Province, Damyang. Seokdu Village. His name was Kim Deok-ryeong. And the nagging bastard in front of him was his older brother, Kim Deok-hong.
"Ugh..."
He pressed his temples hard. Amid the flood of memory fragments, his identity crystallized.
Kim Deok-ryeong.
The ill-fated general who rose as a righteous army commander during the Imjin War, only to be framed for treason and die unjustly in prison. The name he'd read countless times in textbooks—no, in the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty, his favorite historical read.
"This is insane."
A sigh escaped him unbidden.
It wasn't a dream. This was all too vividly real: the prickly straw mat against his butt, the cold draft seeping through the door cracks, the spittle flying from the scholar's mouth as he ranted.
He, Kang Cheol-min at forty-five, had entered the body of Joseon-era Kim Deok-ryeong, carrying all his modern memories.
"Escaped the overtime grind just to land in hellish Joseon—and right on the eve of war, no less."