Chapter 1
Chapter 1
The fantasy world I knew was always on the brink of destruction.
Either the Demon King was about to burn the world,
or a mad emperor would dye the continent red with blood,
or a rift between dimensions would open, unleashing tentacled monsters.
And it was almost a rule that these disasters were miraculously stopped by an isekai hero who got hit by a truck, or by someone who was possessed.
But reality was different.
Even during the Cold War, when people were fiddling with nuclear buttons, the world didn’t end.
Even after two World Wars left Earth soaked in blood, humanity didn’t perish.
History was tougher than cockroaches,
and the world didn’t collapse as easily as stories made it seem.
So I believed, without much thought, that even if a fantasy world became real,
there was no way it would fall apart so easily.
Crash! Boom!
“Clear everything away!!”
But I was utterly wrong.
Even if the world didn’t collapse,
my world had completely fallen apart.
“Y-Your Highness! Please, restrain yourself! This attire was personally made by Her Majesty the Empress…!”
“I said shut up and clear it off in front of me immediately!!”
After dying in a meaningless traffic accident,
I woke up to find myself reincarnated as the crown prince of a fantasy world.
If anyone else heard that, they’d probably get stomachache from jealousy, thinking I’d hit the reincarnation jackpot.
From an ordinary modern man who just counted down the days to payday, I became a prince of an empire.
There’s no crazier rise in status than this.
But the problem was very simple.
This damn world had no smartphones.
From the moment I realized that, I was truly desperate.
The life of lying on a bed, endlessly scrolling shorts and stuffing dopamine into my brain, was gone.
No internet, no YouTube, no games, no late-night delivery notifications.
I’d heard rumors that the wizards of the Magic Tower were developing magical devices that could calculate for you.
Fine. Let’s call that the ancestor of computers.
But for it to evolve into a smartphone capable of running mobile games?
I’d be in the coffin long before that happened.
I wasn’t born noble—I felt like I’d been cruelly exiled from civilization.
And the lack of a smartphone wasn’t the only thing suffocating me.
The emperor eating first at meals?
Fine. That’s etiquette; I could understand that.
But lining up five silver forks just to cut a piece of meat, deciding the angle of each finger on each fork—wasn’t that crossing the line?
Clothing was no better.
Royal garments dripping with gold threads and jewels looked luxurious, but in reality, they were unbearably heavy torture devices.
Every day since falling into this world, I painfully realized how magnificent short-sleeve T-shirts and sweatpants had been in my previous life.
Unable to endure it any longer, I kicked over the high-end wooden table in front of me.
“Eek…!”
The servants cowering on the floor trembled as they scrambled to pick up the broken furniture and the thrown silk clothes.
Looking down at their terrified heads, I sighed deeply to myself.
‘Is there no psychiatrist around here? This needs urgent medication.’
In truth, it wasn’t just that I couldn’t adapt to the loss of civilization.
The real problem was that the body I had possessed was, from the start, far beyond the range of normal humans.
My name is Rouan Caesar.
Second prince of the vast Human Empire,
and a man notorious for his madness both inside and outside the palace.
The original Rouan had suffered a horrific assassination attempt as a child.
Rumors said it was orchestrated by the faction of the first prince who sought the throne, and a few minor accomplices had been executed.
But the powerful nobles hiding behind the plot were never caught.
Rouan had almost died from a deadly poison, vomiting blood, and only survived thanks to a sacred relic brought from the cathedral.
But the real problem came next.
He woke up on the brink of hell to realize that those who had brought him to that state were still at large.
Even the emperor and the first prince couldn’t handle it?
What would a child of about ten think in that reality?
He probably wanted to tear apart anyone who stood out.
Worse, the royal response was pathetic.
The emperor stayed silent, citing factional balance,
and the first prince didn’t abandon his subordinates.
The body, nearly dying from poison, was barely saved by divine blessing,
but the shattered mind was never restored.
Rage surged like seizures,
and pathological suspicion followed him with every breath, imagining assassins in every shadow.
Thus, second prince Rouan was thoroughly,
and perfectly, broken.
…Though recently, things had improved somewhat.
To be precise, ever since the “me” from the previous life—the foreign substance—had begun gradually taking control over this broken body.
I stood among the sharp shards of furniture I’d smashed with my bare hands, staring at my bleeding knuckles.
Ssshh...
The torn, gouged skin writhed like a worm, slowly reattaching itself and beginning to heal.
A disgustingly bizarre sight.
This was the only mercy the royal court had granted the abandoned second prince.
A miracle of the relic poured in to forcibly save a body poisoned nearly to death.
The body recovered almost invincibly.
But the wounded mind was still a stagnant, rotten pool.
I left the ceremonial garments sprawled on the floor like trash, storming out of the bedroom in a thin shirt.
If I stayed in that suffocating room, memories of Rouan, choking on poison and vomiting blood, rotting alone, would gnaw at my brain.
I needed something to purge this filthy, heavy feeling.
If only I had a smartphone in my hand, the solution would have been simple.
I could’ve lain in bed, scrolling shorts mindlessly or reading some spicy web novel, blasting pleasure into my brain.
But this was a medieval fantasy world, full of magic and swords.
In a place stripped of digital civilization, the most primal, intense pleasure a human could experience was a bloody fight.
“…I’ll challenge you to a sparring match.”
My voice cut low through the air of the training ground.
“Y-Your Highness…! But with that outfit…!”
“Doesn’t my order sound reasonable to you?”
The royal guard standing before me swallowed hard.
The opponent was a monstrous knight in flawless plate armor.
I, in contrast, wore nothing but a thin shirt, roughly holding two real swords in my hands.
It was clearly a suicide attempt.
In fantasy novels, dual-wielding swords looks cool.
But in actual swordsmanship, it’s basically declaring you’re abandoning defense.
So the knight probably saw only one thing:
A lunatic who would lose his head with a single misstep.
Yet my reason for doing this was simple.
Because they were the royal guard.
Human weapons of the empire, acknowledged by the emperor himself.
And the person who could inconvenience them the most? A member of the royal family.
The prince raises real swords first to challenge?
Winning would be awkward.
Hurting them would be awkward.
Being too gentle might offend the mad prince’s temper.
In short: the ultimate high-level court swordsmanship.
I looked at the tense knight and twisted my lips into a smirk.
‘Don’t chicken out. I’m still weak anyway.’
The original Rouan trusted no one.
He locked himself in a room, obsessively practicing swordsmanship only to slit the throats of those who tried to kill him.
Hence, his body had the etching of deadly sword skills.
But he never had the guts to aim them at actual people.
Now, though, it was different.
This body held the brazen boldness of a modern man paying rent.
‘Take every privilege I can and run.’
The palace was not a safe zone.
This body had nearly died from poison once.
So I had to use everything I could as a prince.
This was the beginning.
I stomped on the floor without hesitation.
Bang!
The sword tips tore the air with explosive metallic sounds.
Clang-!!
I never intended to go easy.
If the opponent went easy, it would have annoyed me even more.
I shook the left sword to distract and shoved the right one into the knight’s chest. Even knowing the shield would block, I pressed forward like a beast.
When facing an overwhelmingly strong opponent, momentum comes first.
Clang! Krash!
Steel met steel, sparks flying.
As expected, the royal guard was different.
The knight smoothly deflected the bizarre trajectory I forced with just a longsword.
My strength, speed, and balance were all repelled.
But that was fine.
If there’s no smartphone, no shorts, no games in this world,
the only stimulation left to drive me insane was this life-or-death dance.
The knight’s sword struck again.
Clang! Crack! Thunk!
Every block made my wrist bones scream.
My soles scraped, lungs burning with hot air.
Yet.
I loved it.
For the first time, the feeling of being alive hit my entire body.
The knight was still holding back.
Unable to kill the prince, yet careless enough that a real opening might appear—this middling state irritated me.
“Hit harder.”
“...Your Highness!”
“This is the prince’s order.”
The knight’s eyes changed the moment the words fell.
The royal guard, who had struggled before me, vanished.
In his place stood a real weapon, seasoned by countless deaths in actual combat.
Boom-!!
The next strike was a whole different dimension from before.
A fraction of a second late, and my wrist would have been severed.
I twisted my waist unnaturally to barely deflect the blade.
My spine shivered.
And yet, it thrilled me.
‘Yes. This is it.’
I gritted my teeth and swung again.
Clearing a path with the left sword, targeting vital points with the right.
The knight stood unmoved, like a massive fortress.
With each exchange, I realized something clearly.
I wasn’t strong.
I was just a modern man swinging swords like crazy to survive, slightly better than minions.
Before a true top-tier world-class fighter, I was still a baby.
But knowing that made my heart beat faster.
It meant there were still many stairs to climb.
Swish-!
The knight’s sword struck from bottom to top.
The block immediately exposed a perfect trajectory targeting my neck.
Honest, with no place to dodge—a deathly exchange.
I barely deflected it with crossed swords, but my balance collapsed under the recoil.
It was over.
Just as my brain screamed warnings, my body reacted first.
Instinct honed from tens of thousands of swings in my room.
I twisted almost sliding along the floor, explosively thrusting my sword tip upward.
Krrash-!!
A deafening noise echoed across the training ground.
The knight’s eyes widened for the first time.
My sword tip had pierced the center guard thought impenetrable.
Of course, the armor blocked it.
In a real fight, I would have been obliterated by the next counter.
Still, the symbolic meaning was enormous.
The empire’s top-class knight had been caught off guard by a mad prince hiding in his room.
I laughed.
“Now, this is fun.”
After that, it turned into a literal mud fight.
My palms were skinned, shoulders slightly cut, blood spraying.
But my body didn’t obey normal rules.
Torn wounds writhed and healed, flowing blood stopped, flesh rebuilt.
Unless limbs were severed, I could fight continuously.
A truly vicious passive ability.
Finally, the knight stepped back, lowering his sword.
I also lost strength and dropped my swords.
The training ground fell silent.
And then.
“Extraordinary, Your Highness!”
“Truly a sharp sword!”
“This will serve as a precious lesson for the entire order!”
The knights bowed in unison.
Too much.
I wiped sweat and looked down at their heads with disbelief.
The mad prince who had flailed with a sword until yesterday had completed the sparring without killing anyone.
For the knights, that alone must have felt like a miracle.
Even a mad dog praised for wagging its tail without biting.
I approached my sparring partner and casually said,
“A fine sword. Well done.”
The knight’s face turned pale, then flushed with joy.
“Y-Your mercy is boundless, Your Highness!”
‘How badly must I have acted like a dog before?’
I shrugged off their excessive praise and walked through the corridor, feeling a strange sense of discomfort.
I was happy.
Somewhat embarrassed.
And scared.
These weren’t purely my feelings.
Residual emotions from the broken Rouan reacted awkwardly, not from fear, but from receiving praise.
To spar with someone without killing them,
to meet others’ eyes without murderous intent—
That warmth was something the original Rouan had never known.
I stopped in the middle of the corridor.
‘Wait, if the original Rouan is comforted by just this…’
I reconstructed the information in my mind.
Childhood assassination attempt.
Deep wounds.
Pathological suspicion.
Rage and madness.
A noble bloodline easily swayed by others.
It all felt too familiar.
Not the whole fantasy genre, but a specific one.
Female-oriented romance fantasy.
‘I thought it was just a fantasy world. Political assassination attempts were extreme, though. In the real world, no noble would survive such schemes.’
A wounded, broken yet beautiful and dangerous royal man.
Obsessed with the heroine, saved by love.
‘Was the chaos of the father and elder brother remaining silent because it’s a messy romance fantasy?’
If there were already a villainess, saintly figure, or pink-haired person nearby, I’d have recognized it as romance fantasy immediately.
But around me, there were only sword-wielding knights trembling, trembling servants, and scheming royals.
‘If this really is a romance fantasy, then Rouan is…’
[Main obsessive male lead]
The problem?
I still had no idea who the heroine was.