The Guest (1)
Not once in my life had I ever had a home.
I hadn't lived on the street, exactly. I had only just managed to escape that particular fate, and yet I had never once felt at ease beneath a roof.
From childhood all the way into adulthood, a house, for me, was a place you occupied only with the landlord's permission. Monthly rent or a lump-sum key-money lease, it made no difference. You could never stay for good. Sooner or later the price went up, or sooner or later they told you to get out.
By the time I came of age and moved out on my own, I had lost count of the relocations, and of the school transfers that came with them. Independence changed nothing. I spent years in the cheapest room I could find in a villa that had been shabby for a long time already.
Live like that for a lifetime, and a longing for a place of one's own starts to feel like the most natural thing in the world.
Anyway, I wanted a house that was mine. If it was mine, I wouldn't have cared if the commute was longer than the one I already had, or if the building was older and more rundown than where I was. I wanted somewhere I wouldn't have to worry about living expenses once the rent was gone, somewhere a paycheck arriving a little late wouldn't mean fearing eviction, somewhere I could return no matter what happened to me.
In the end, I never got it.
Maybe that was why I grew so fond of that particular kind of game. The ones that start you with nothing, send you out to gather resources, and let you spend what you've gathered on raising a house and planting fields. Even in a virtual world, making a home however small and stepping inside it gave me a strange sense of coziness, and it didn't matter whether the graphics were 3D or 2D. There was a satisfaction in watching a house that had begun as little more than a single room grow steadily wider, and then taller. In reality, after all, even a one-room flat of barely a hundred square feet had never been mine.
So it was only natural that I took an interest in that game.
"Huhwan Gangho?"
It wasn't what anyone would call famous. It was a game played only by the people who already played it, and the reason it had no name recognition at all was simple. Unlike the Chinese titles backed by massive capital, it was a free game still being steadily updated by a single Chinese developer who went by the handle Wang Yun. The graphics were a plain tile system, the sort you'd see in an old orthodox roguelike, but survival meant eating at set times, sleeping, and managing disease and injury. In truth, the original main attraction had been the martial arts rather than the survival.
True to a title that meant the Illusory Rivers and Lakes, the setting was not lifted straight out of reality. At its base it was the sort of world you'd find in a wuxia novel, with an alternate-history streak of technology rather advanced for anything medieval. It really had begun as a game of almost nothing but combat. Then, in the course of deepening the fighting and the status effects, all sorts of infections and toxins were added, and once the means to treat them went in as well, survival elements had apparently appeared before anyone quite noticed.
By the time I discovered it, the question of how long you could last after building a house of your own in the mountains or the wilds had already become the main content. As with any orthodox roguelike, starting blind and headfirst meant a wretched death before more than a few turns had passed, so I dug through the community boards for guides. The game was light enough to play in secret on my work computer, and for a long while I lived sunk in it.
At some point I became one of the people writing the guides, and I made a habit of entering the little contests the community mods hosted, the ones with modest prizes attached. The details changed from one event to the next, but the rules were usually much the same. Every element of character creation had to be randomized. The starting location had to be randomized too. With that character, you survived as long as you possibly could. You were not, however, allowed to relocate to a village or a city and live there, because once you started the story, survival itself became far too easy.
It was a game with a densely woven setting, something you could call a story, and character growth and loot that were genuinely fun. But if you were already one of the old salts, hadn't you enjoyed all of that long ago? The pleasure of those contests lay elsewhere: a variety-show scramble to survive, somehow, on a character thrown together at random. The prizes, in any case, never amounted to more than ice cream or a hamburger.
And that day had clearly been no different. My last memory was of working slowly through a contest whose prize was a premium convenience-store ice cream, alt-tabbing back and forth on the company computer, when—
"……Huh?"
Between one moment and the next, I was standing alone in a forest packed tight with trees.
Who was it that said it? Country people aren't diligent by nature. To live in the country, you simply have no choice but to be.
In a city, someone else maintains the place for you. Even if you never sweep a road yourself, someone keeps the trash from piling up, and when a public facility breaks, someone eventually comes to fix it. If the state built it, a civil servant looks after it. If a company built it, an employee does.
Housing is the same. City dwellers, especially someone like me who lived by paying rent, mostly end up in villas or apartments, and whether it's a villa or an apartment, the one responsible for upkeep is the building's owner. They take their taxes and their maintenance fees, so isn't it only right that the side doing the taking should also do the managing?
The countryside is different. Where few people live to begin with, it stands to reason that nothing gets properly maintained. A path no one walks is abandoned. Weeds grow far faster than you'd think, and a single month is enough for them to rise past your knees in a thicket you can hardly push through. Even a road that was well packed when it was first made will crack and crumble, little by little, under the endless cycle of rain and blazing sun. The paths around my own house were worse than most, because on an ordinary day I was nearly the only one who used them.
If I had been maintaining all of it for someone else's sake, I would of course have been sick to death of the work. But these were paths only I walked. I could tend to every bit of it diligently and still feel no great complaint. If anything, it made me proud.
Three years. Three years had passed since I came to this world and began to build a house. For those three years I worked hard. I raised a hut on land that belonged to no one, tilled the soil, set traps and hunted. I avoided the bandits who came running the moment they saw any sign of human habitation, and I hunted them in turn, thinning their numbers slowly. At first I had honestly wondered what this place even was, and whether a person could live here at all. But each time I tore the hut down and built it again, expanded the space, and made the inside cozy—each time I raised a palisade around it and worked a kitchen garden in the yard to grow something to eat—I came to feel that this was my home. Here, at least, there was no one to scold me for late rent, and no one dropping hints that it was about time I vacated a key-money room. A home I had made entirely with my own hands. How could I dislike looking after a place like that?
And so, what awaited me today at the spot I had come out to tend, same as ever, was a pit.
"Ugh."
The stench rising from the bottom of it made my nose wrinkle. The pit itself was not particularly deep. Every trap in the area was one I had made, and digging alone was exhausting, yes, but more than that it was unbearably dull. Instead I drove stakes into the pit as densely and solidly as I could, each one whittled as sharp as possible, and camouflaged the top with care. Anyone who came alone and fell in was finished. Even when they arrived in a group, they tended to turn back once the one in front dropped straight down. What mattered was not the depth of the trap itself, but making sure that anyone who fell died in a manner both certain and hideous, and digging it wide enough that a single leap could not carry you across.
In truth, digging it wide only meant so much. Ordinary people would fail to jump a pit of about three meters, but wasn't this the inside of a wuxia game? A martial artist with even a little training in the lightness arts could clear it easily. Even so, it handled "the one walking carelessly at the front" well enough. Step out without thinking and fall, and after that your eye sockets, your throat, and every manner of organ would be threaded on the stakes.
I had a fairly thick cloth wrapped around my face, and still the smell of a corpse not long dead came drifting up. It had not yet begun to rot in earnest, but the stink of a body is foul enough that you can't simply leave it. Fail to spread lime over it in good time, and the smell reaches all the way to the house. I scooped lime from the basket I had brought and dusted the corpse white. There was nothing on the body worth taking, so I decided to cover it as it was and leave it as a warning.
The next corpse was stuck in a tree along the path back up to the house.
"Ah……"
I sighed at the sight of a body with its chest run through by an enormous stake rigged like a swing. Of all places, up there? A corpse lodged in a tree made a fine warning, but its position was obviously a poor one for spreading lime. And unlike a pit trap, which required only digging and driving in stakes, a stake like this also had to be hung from the tree at just the right angle. I couldn't leave it as it was, though, so I scrambled up the nearby vines and dusted the lime on thoroughly. However else I felt, I hated the smell of rot seeping into the house.
A companion walking the same path must have seen the other one slam into a trap and decided that the answer was simply to take a running jump. I had, of course, prepared for people who tried to leap clean over. Still, dying to a trap this rudimentary suggested they were hardly worth calling a master. It was a mercy they hadn't touched the poison. The cleanup and the resetting were a nuisance in more ways than one.
"Hoo."
By the time I had spread lime over the corpse and reset the trap, the sun was high overhead. I had come out early in the morning to work, and it seemed lunchtime had already arrived. I took a fat packed rice ball from the pouch at my side and walked back toward the house, biting into it as I went.
"Hm~ hm-hm~ hmm-hmm-hmm~"
Along the way I hummed whatever tune happened to drift into my head. The rush of trees tossed by the wind, the chirping of birds, the rustle of insects—the forest never once stopped its chatter. Even so, the only human sound was still mine. I had no complaints about this life.
I still had no idea how I had ended up dropped into this world, or what wrong I had done the game's developer to be sent here. At least, in this world, I had been able to have a house of my own. At first I had wondered what I was even supposed to do. It was only because of all the knowledge I had picked up from the game that I had managed to survive like this. In that sense, I could only be grateful to Great Hero Wang Yun, the developer. Without the countless things I had learned while playing, I would have been dead before three days had passed in this world, let alone three years.
"Hmm."
Far off, my house came into view. Up on a hill that rose a little above its surroundings stood my own fortress, ringed with a tall, sturdy palisade. A pleasant, comfortable house of my own, where I could live at my ease, growing this and that and doing a bit of fishing, with nothing in particular to disturb me aside from the very occasional guest—
"……Oh."
But the feet that had been carrying me there came to a dead stop. Someone was standing in front of the only gate.
Half a head shorter than me. My own height was nothing remarkable beside the men who regularly blundered into the traps, or beside the guests who visited now and then. Well, I was a woman. The last character I had been playing had been set as female. I hadn't chosen that on purpose. Female characters carried a fair penalty in survival play, and the result was simply that I had followed the community contest rule requiring everything to be random. Out here, deep among fold upon fold of mountains, women were almost nowhere to be found among those who fell into the traps or among the guests, so an exact comparison was impossible. Even set beside the women I had seen from time to time, though, I could tell my height was nothing special. Half a head shorter than that, and the build looked downright childlike.
Black hair fell long to the waist, gradually reddening toward the tips, an unusual color. Hair and clothing were both black, which made the porcelain-white skin seem especially pale. Whether she had heard my presence drawing near, or sensed that I had approached and then stopped at a distance, the guest turned slowly around.
Looking again, I saw a sword in its scabbard held in one hand. The scabbard, plastered messily with talismans, was slung carelessly over her shoulder, and the posture had a somewhat slouchy air to it. A girl's face. A few years younger than me—than this body, anyway—still young enough to be called a girl, and by the look of her, not yet married even by this world's standards. The pupils at the center of her black eyes were red.
But this was the world inside a wuxia game. However young the outside looked, there was no telling the real age. Above all, she was a guest. She had ignored every polite notice of refusal I had posted, time and again, starting long before the house, and she had come on without triggering a single trap, following the one winding path to my door, a path you could not find at a glance no matter how you looked. Or else she had disregarded all of it, never once setting a foot on the ground, and passed without a sound between the countless traps hidden among the trees. Either way, she was without doubt a master I could not afford to ignore.
The girl's eyes went to my hand. The rice ball, still half uneaten, was there. Slowly, I refolded the large lotus leaf it had been wrapped in, neat as I could, and tucked it into my pocket. Then I brought my hands together in front of me and spoke with all due courtesy.
"This girl is Wang Soyun, the one who tends this manor. Might I ask who you are, honored guest, and what business brings you to visit?"
Wang Soyun was just an alias I had made up, more or less. To be precise, I hadn't really had anything like a name in this world anyway, so you could just as well call it my real one.
The girl who heard my greeting sank briefly into thought, then hik—lifted one corner of her mouth and smiled, crooked.
Smiling?
Of course she could smile. If she smiled, what exactly was I supposed to do about it? I was the sort who went out carrying every self-defense tool I owned, but I did not imagine that gave me the advantage against a truly capable master. None of the guests who had found their way here so far had tried to harm me. Whether that was because they were wary of me, or because they simply didn't find me worth the effort of harming, I couldn't say.
The girl moved. I flinched. I had a grip on the bamboo tube inside my sleeve, ready to throw it if she rushed me, but fortunately that was not what the movement meant. She set the sword she had been casually shouldering down on the ground with a soft thud, then moved slowly, pressed her fist respectfully to her palm in a martial salute, and spoke.
"This girl is called Jin. I am traveling the martial world, gathering experience. I heard the mountains in these parts were worth seeing, and I came in, only to lose my way for quite some time before I discovered this manor. If it would not be an imposition, might I have a mouthful of water?"
A lie. Someone who had reached this spot without a scratch had no reason to get lost in this forest. But if it was a lie, what of it?
I looked at the sword lying on the ground. Ominous at a glance. Among the weapons brought by guests who had visited my house, it looked like the second most dangerous thing after a strike-fire gun. If that was a sword with something inscribed upon it, then this was a person who could carry around a thing that unhinged and still behave as if nothing were wrong.
"Yes. The manor is hardly wealthy, but it can manage a cup of tea for an honored guest. Please."
Saying so, I walked slowly and slipped past in front of the girl.
A bright little smile. Meeting my eyes, the girl turned that smile on me.
"……"
Pretending I had not seen it, I lowered my gaze a little and opened the gate of the manor.