Burial, Damn It: Day One of Isekai Transmigration
Burial, damn it.... Who'd have thought the cause of death on my first day of isekai transmigration would turn out to be asphyxiation from the smoke of the campfire I lit myself...!
I'd barely managed to manifest clean water and fire, yet the complete lack of ventilation forced me into an absurd blunder where I had to evacuate to the street like an idiot.
Squatting against someone else's wall and sniffling pathetically was quite the spectacle, even if I said so myself.
But what could I do about it!
It was a little—no, extremely pitiful to be driven out to the streets while my own house sat right there, but what of it? What did this matter, or that? None of it mattered!
Because as I rubbed my stinging eyes and sniffled outside, the sound of water finally boiling in the pot at last reached my ears through the crack in the door.
Bubble, bubble.
The savory aroma of carbohydrates as the scorched barley porridge residue gently melted into the hot water! Even after the stupid stunt of crying my eyes and nose raw, standing before this perfectly safe boiled water made all the suffering feel strangely glorified.
Well, until the firewood I'd crammed into that narrow brazier burned out completely and the smoke finally stopped, I couldn't step inside my own house even though it was right in front of me—an utterly ridiculous situation.
As time passed and the sun began to set, a wind that cut straight to the bone started blowing through the slum alleys.
Aaah, this weather that mercilessly stole the body heat from my malnourished, frail little frame was so hateful it drove me insane.
I shivered and huddled there pathetically for several hours.
Only after the thick smoke leaking through the open door had finally died down could I crawl into the house, now pitch-black with the sun fully set.
“Ugh, it’s c-cold…”
My teeth chattered from the drop in body temperature, and my whole body trembled violently. But the moment I closed the creaking door behind me, what wrapped around me was an unexpectedly cozy warmth.
The leftover heat from the brazier had been trapped inside the narrow, unventilated room, turning the house as toasty as if someone had cranked a boiler to full blast.
As the warmth melted my frozen body, I immediately fired up my positivity circuits again at full throttle.
That’s right. Let’s think positively. Extremely positively.
That chemical-warfare-level disaster earlier wasn’t my stupid mistake—it was a stroke of genius in sanitation.
Even in modern society, when you move into a new place, you set off bug bombs first, don’t you! That thick smoke had just now perfectly disinfected every rotten corner of this house.
There were bound to be all sorts of pests and flea eggs lurking under the floorboards or in the mud-wall cracks, but that gas-chamber assault had clearly wiped them all out in one go.
My meticulous and flawless self-quarantine operation!
Good. I’d shed some tears and snot, sure, but thanks to that, our house had become the most hygienic and pleasant clean zone in this entire barbaric neighborhood.
If that’s the case, today’s first activity was satisfactory—no, an overwhelming success!
The smell of smoke still lingered, but the warmth and comfort loosened the tension in my body, and an unbearable drowsiness came crashing down on me.
Haa, so much happened today….
But right before bed, I faced one massive problem. The only bed in this cramped mud hut.
Of course, calling it a bed was embarrassing. It was nothing more than a large rock someone had hauled in and roughly flattened on top—a stone slab, really.
Still, it was clearly the only VIP seat in the house, a hundred, a thousand times better than sleeping on the filthy dirt floor that radiated cold.
The problem was that Mr. Skeleton lay stretched out on that sole luxury bed in a very comfortable, relaxed, and perfectly proper posture.
No matter how you looked at it, even I couldn’t sleep side by side with a complete stranger’s bones.
No, think about it rationally!
I was the type who could watch horror movies or thrillers about killers with the lights off while happily munching popcorn, but lying right next to an actual human skull was an entirely different genre.
Let’s be brutally honest! Sleeping next to a corpse is terrifying! I don’t care if this is another world—I draw the line at haunted houses!
Hold on. What if, by some one-in-a-million chance, ghosts or spirits actually exist?
I’d already confirmed the existence of magic with my own two eyes. There was no guarantee that the souls of the dead or poltergeist phenomena didn’t exist too!
Besides, those dried-up bones looked so brittle they’d crumble with a single flick of a finger.
What if I tossed and turned in my sleep and accidentally snapped one of that venerable person’s skinny ribs?
That very night, a ghost might latch onto my back and spend the rest of my life moaning resentful curses in my ear.
Hmm. Then maybe I should just use my new power—my magic—to gently move that venerable person into a corner of the dirt floor?
I crossed my arms and began pondering with a grave expression.
But wait. If I moved the corpse with magic, who exactly would be the one who touched the skeleton?
Since my hands hadn’t made physical contact, maybe the curse or bad karma wouldn’t transfer to me?
The theory that a ghost wouldn’t realize it was my doing if I used supernatural power for indirect contact.
……No, before all that, there was one fatal problem.
Just to shove that single skeleton onto the floor, I’d have to endure that hellish pain again with a completely clear mind?
No matter how tempting the stone bed was, sacrificing my eyeballs just to stretch my legs and sleep comfortably was, upon any reflection, a terrible loss.
Wouldn’t freezing on the floor and waking up with lockjaw be better than having my eyeballs explode?
Haa…. What the hell should I do?
Sleeping on the bare floor meant I’d probably freeze to death. Sleeping on the stone bed with the skeleton meant fearing its curse. Using magic meant my eyes probably wouldn’t survive.
Ah, forget it!
After a long, agonizing internal debate, the conclusion was simple. Ghosts be damned—I was exhausted enough to die, and I couldn’t possibly curl up on that freezing floor.
I’m sorry, but please sleep on the floor tonight. I’ll dig you a proper grave and lay you to rest in the morning….
I squeezed my eyes shut, carefully (yet very quickly) pushed the skinny skull, and rolled—no, lowered—it onto the cold dirt floor.
Then I claimed the empty spot and immediately lay down on the stone.
I’d expected to feel the characteristic cold, hard texture of the rock, but no. The fatigue from everything I’d gone through that day crushed every sensation.
The moment my head touched the floor, I slipped into deep sleep as if I’d fainted.
And the next morning.
When I snapped my eyes open, I had to scream from the horrific full-body stiffness that felt like it might snap me in half.
“Aigoo, my whole body aches…!”
It felt like every vertebra and joint had been hammered all night long.
Haa… I missed mattresses, fluffy pillows, and soft blankets so badly it hurt…!
The one silver lining was that there had been no ghostly curses, sleep paralysis, or nightmares like I’d feared.
I’d worried my dreams would be haunted after tossing someone else’s bones onto the floor, but I simply closed my eyes and opened them to find the morning sun high in the sky. They must have been surprisingly merciful.
I cracked my stiff neck with a loud pop and hauled myself up.
Well, a refreshing morning had arrived. Shall I head out energetically to steal someone else’s belongings again today?
…Wait. Wasn’t I adapting to thievery a little too naturally on the second day of isekai life?
Of course, as a decent citizen of South Korea, I knew deep in my bones just how immoral and trashy it was to lay hands on another person’s property.
…I really do!
But what choice did I have? I couldn’t clutch this meager conscience and starve to death with elegant dignity.
Even if the father of morality himself showed up, if he fell into this gutter he’d steal the first bread crumb he could shove into his mouth.
Yes, only until I found a legitimate job where I could work fairly and earn my keep.
Until then, this was just unavoidable borrowing for the sake of survival.
Above all, making thievery a daily routine in this barbaric neighborhood was a life-or-death gamble for me as well.
If I got caught by bad luck, I wouldn’t be writing a statement at the police station—I’d have my hands chopped off by the market vendors’ knives right then and there.
Precisely because the risk was so horrifically high, I needed to find an alternative means of livelihood to replace this as soon as possible.
And… I should find a proper place to bury these bones, too.
I stared down at the skeleton lying alone in the corner of the room.
Honestly, with my own troubles already piled sky-high, I had no obligation to deal with someone else’s corpse. But that skeleton might very well be the biological mother of the young girl whose body I’d possessed.
It wasn’t as if I’d wanted to steal this small frame, but from the position of freely borrowing another person’s body without even paying rent, leaving the original owner’s family member to roll around on the floor wasn’t something a decent human being could do.
Minimum courtesy.
That was the last duty I could offer to the original owner.
And so I ended up wasting the entire day.
I wandered the slums from morning till night, searching for a spot where the soil was soft enough to dig with bare hands yet remote and secluded enough that others wouldn’t casually disturb it.
Though it was nothing more than a shallow, unsightly hole, I carefully laid the skeleton inside and firmly packed the dirt over it.
With this, I had at least fulfilled the minimum of human decency. The uneasy weight on my heart had been lifted, so now it was time to go find some food.