The Great Wall
I spread my legs shoulder-width apart like a batter stepping up to the plate. Then I gripped the pot handle like a baseball bat.
“Hup!”
With all my strength, I swung a full-powered swing straight at the bastard’s face!
Whoosh—!
“Hiiiiik!!”
The terrifying sound of air being sliced made the kid spot the black pot bottom flying toward him. He instinctively shrieked and fell flat on his back.
See? You can see just fine when you want to.
“Alright, alright. The scam’s over. Why don’t you pack up and get lost while I’m still being nice? Or do you want to keep getting humiliated and have every last can you’ve collected shaken out of you? Huh?”
“W-why are you doing this…! Wait, huh?”
The kid who’d been raising his arms to defend himself suddenly locked eyes on my face and clothes. In that instant, his eyes started shaking like there was an earthquake inside them.
“Vita? You’re Vita, right?! Where the hell have you been hiding all this time—wait, more importantly, what the fuck is this crazy shit you’re pulling the second you show up?!”
“……Huh?”
God damn it. The original owner of this body had a wider network than I thought?
The commotion I’d caused drew in the beggar kids who’d been working the area. They stopped what they were doing and swarmed over.
In the blink of an eye, the circle of kids surrounding me started pouring out friendly greetings.
The warm, friendly beggar reunion atmosphere froze over in an instant, like someone had dumped ice water on it. Every pair of wide eyes snapped toward the black iron pot hanging from my shoulder.
“Vita. Why’d you do that?”
“Did something happen? Are you sick or something?”
Bewildered stares and worried questions poured in from every direction.
I fiddled with the pot handle slung over my shoulder and turned into a mute who’d swallowed a whole jar of honey.
Sigh… How the hell am I supposed to clean up this awkward, cringey mess?
I pressed a hand to my forehead and let out a long breath.
“So you’re saying… you mistook me for someone else and just randomly swung a pot at me?”
The boy called Shutein stood with his legs apart, looking utterly dumbfounded.
“Y-yeah! That’s what I’m saying! You had your eyes covered with bandages so I couldn’t see your face. You know how it is, right? Everyone’s accidentally smacked someone they thought was a friend from behind only to realize it was a total stranger and panicked. Right? So… Stain? Shutein? Anyway, I’m really sorry. Okay? Can you forgive me just this once?”
I awkwardly rolled my eyes and finally pulled out my ultimate last-resort technique to escape this nightmare situation.
The sturdy adult male ego buried deep inside me thrashed and screamed in utter humiliation, but there was no other way to fix the rapidly souring mood.
I slightly lowered my head and looked up at him with big, round eyes.
Inside, I was dry-heaving from disgust, but on the outside I sparkled my eyes like some pitiful, remorseful little thing.
The effect was incredible. At my upward glance, Shutein’s grimy cheeks flushed bright red like a tomato in seconds.
“H-hmm! W-well… if you say so, Vita, I’ll let it slide just this once. But next time, make sure you look properly before you swing!”
He cleared his throat awkwardly and whipped his gaze away. At least the biggest crisis was over.
“What? It ended that easily? Then Vita, where the hell have you been hiding and what have you been doing? You disappeared, so even I had to crawl out onto the streets and start begging!”
Huh? Wait a minute.
Listening to the kid’s complaints, it sounded like the original Vita had been a pretty important figure in this beggar den.
While I was just blinking, the girl next to him chimed in loudly.
“Yeah, yeah! The whole neighborhood went crazy while you were gone. A few days ago Prin’s big brother got caught stealing bread and they chopped his wrist clean off!”
“S-sorry! Guys, I suddenly feel sick! I’m heading back first!”
“H-hey? Vita, where are you going! We’re not done talking!”
I left the barrage of questions from the kids raining down behind me and bolted out of the alley as fast as I could.
Huff, huff.
Only after I got home, slammed the door shut, and caught my breath did I finally exhale roughly. Shit, I almost got completely exposed.
If they’d kept interrogating me, they would’ve figured out I wasn’t the real Vita and uncovered my fatal weaknesses.
And then the next day.
The awkwardness from yesterday and the embarrassment of running away had been cleanly reset after a good night’s sleep. When my stomach acid was already climbing up my esophagus, who had time to worry about shame or dignity?
With an utterly shameless face, I returned to the same market alley from yesterday for my “shift.”
I planted my butt in the prime corner spot I’d scouted the day before, pot placed neatly in front of me.
Alright. Time to start serious begging operations.
……But now that I was actually sitting here, what the hell was I supposed to do?
All I could manage was to huddle with my knees together, crouching and shooting the most pitiful, miserable gaze I could muster at passing pedestrians. That was the full extent of my sales technique.
Of course it was. I was an intellectual who had lived a perfectly respectable life back in South Korea (by which I mean I’d been a shut-in in my room).
There was zero chance I’d ever grabbed someone’s pant leg and whined for spare change in my entire life.
The only related experience I had was dodging people on the street asking if I knew the way. There was no way I could suddenly pull off an Oscar-worthy performance of opening strangers’ wallets on the sidewalk overnight.
The results were utterly devastating.
This industry was a far more brutal red ocean than my naïve thoughts had anticipated. Not a single angelic pedestrian offered precious coins or food to a passive rookie beggar who just sat there quietly broadcasting I’m hungry telepathy.
I just sat there blankly, receiving nothing but cold indifference and icy wind from people who breezed right past.
On the other hand, the bowl in front of Shutein—who was passionately acting blind across from me—and the one belonging to the tuberculosis kid who kept coughing up red phlegm occasionally received hard bread crusts tossed in by passersby who clicked their tongues in pity. Sometimes, if they were lucky, merchants would even throw them perfectly good, unbruised fresh fruit out of sympathy. Miracles like that happened more often than you’d think.
It was a complete defeat.
Armed with method acting that sacrificed their bodies, those beggars left the unskilled, zero-experience me completely isolated and ignored.
The sun set, and finally the long-awaited settlement time of the day arrived.
We moved to a deep, deserted part of an alley. Once we were alone, everyone started pulling out the day’s hard-earned harvest they’d hidden in their clothes.
Alright, let’s see what we’ve got.
The pathetic results rolling around at the bottom of my pot.
Three rock-hard bread crumbs. One slice of apple that someone had bitten into and discarded, now brown and starting to rot.
……That was it.
Ha, fuck.
I almost let a curse slip out between my lips.
I’d sat on the hard dirt ground from morning until sunset, enduring every kind of hardship, and this was all I had to show for it?
My knee cartilage ached, my back felt like it was about to snap, and instead of any physical reward I hadn’t even secured the minimum calories needed to survive. It was a total waste of effort.
In contrast, the other kids’ hauls were dazzling.
Shutein had a whole intact loaf of bread, seven crumbs, and even one large, glossy, perfectly good apple.
But the true winner was someone else.
The tuberculosis siblings. What they carefully laid out wasn’t leftover food waste.
It was one small, grimy piece of metal that looked like oxidized copper.
It was obviously a coin.
I’d only seen bartering all over the market and assumed this barbaric place had no currency system. To think even this primitive neighborhood had actual money in circulation.
“Hey, what’s that?”
Before I could even ask, Shutein—who had been gnawing on his apple—spoke up first, eyes sparkling.
“Huh? This? This is called a Ses! One of these is one Ses, like that! Right, big brother?”
“Yeah. The older kids said you can exchange these for real goods at the market.”
“Whoa, awesome! So how many loaves of bread can you buy with one coin?”
“Not sure? They said it could easily get you one or two.”
“That’s amazing!! So you don’t have to force yourself to eat old bread just because you’re scared it’ll go bad! You can just stash the coins away and when you’re hungry, go to the market and trade them for two fresh loaves!”
Well, would you look at that.
Uneducated slum kids instinctively understanding the greatest function of currency—store of value and ease of storage—and getting excited about it. What a heartwarming sight.
Having been utterly defeated in the competition, I could only watch bitterly while stuffing the three crumbs into my mouth.
On the third day since I started begging.
Staring at the pitiful handful of bread crumbs that still barely filled the bottom of my pot, I felt the bitter sting of my limits.
My begging skills had made zero progress for three straight days. No—let’s be honest. The real reason my skills weren’t improving wasn’t technique. It was the damn pride still lodged deep inside me.
Those desperate kids who had thrown everything into the gutter versus me, still drawing a line and hesitating.
Of course I was going to be weeded out.
In the end, I had to cleanly admit defeat. No matter how many days I rubbed my ass on the street like this, I’d never avoid starvation.
If begging didn’t work, I had to find a completely different method.
What should I do? Use magic to secretly rob only the bastards who wouldn’t notice? Or pick up scrap metal that could be sold for money?
Hugging the empty pot to my chest, I walked through the slum streets with a complicated mind, trying to sort out my thoughts.
How long had I been walking aimlessly?
When I finally lifted my head that had been hanging low, an overwhelming something that blackened the entire sky filled my vision.
“……What the hell is this insane wall?”
In front of me stood a structure so massive and majestic I had to crane my neck until it hurt just to look up.
This wasn’t some ordinary wall. It was a barrier. An insanely, stupidly enormous barrier.
It looked exactly like a wall built to stop bugs from crawling out.