The Reversal of a Reincarnated Life
I had been reborn.
And into a martial arts world, no less.
I couldn’t remember why.
What mattered was that my memories of Earth were still vivid.
So this is my reincarnation perk.
Armed with the memories of the wuxia novels I had read on Earth and the knowledge of a modern man, I would write a grand epic that would shake the world.
…
That was what I had thought.
Thirty years had passed since then.
“Hoo.”
Deep in the mountains, I let out a long breath as I went through a series of calisthenics beneath the moonlight.
Once I was drenched in sweat, my mind felt much lighter.
“As expected, exercise is the best cure for a wandering mind.”
I had dreamed big, but my life had gone to hell.
The martial world was a place where bloodline and background ruled everything.
If you weren’t the illegitimate son of a prestigious clan, the heir of a ruined house, or at the very least a servant in some enormous sect, you barely had a chance at anything at all.
Born as nothing more than the son of an ordinary woodcutter, I hadn’t even been handed a rotten rope to climb with.
More than thirty years of living had been enough to carve that painful truth into every inch of my body.
I shook my head to drive away the thoughts that kept creeping back.
“The next movement is….”
Recalling the incantation I had read in the book, I slowly moved my body again.
Wolhameiingyeong.
A book spread out over a rock, with an absurdly grand name.
I was the author of that book.
More accurately, it had been written by me as a child.
Not that I had some out-of-body recollection of it; my childhood memories were hazy at best.
It had already been more than ten years since then.
No matter how passionately I had written it, I had lived through far more since, so there was nothing I could do about forgetting.
Back then, I had stood at the center of a tremendous current.
Modern knowledge, the superiority of being ahead of everyone else.
The exhilaration of believing I was special.
The desire to show off, the vanity of possessing knowledge no one else knew.
And, of course, the perfect age for it.
Everything led me toward one inevitable result.
A storm called middle-school syndrome.
Fortunately, I vented all that monstrous desire through writing.
And I had the perfect excuse of “studying writing” to go with it.
My parents, who couldn’t read, had been full of high hopes when a common-born child like me started reading and writing.
Thinking about it now, it had been a monstrous act of filial impiety.
“At least it’s a relief I got out of there quickly.”
Another long sigh slipped out of me.
The day I happened to witness a petty martial artist in the marketplace draw his blade during an argument and a neighboring merchant collapse helplessly to the ground.
That was the day I finally woke up from my dream.
I had no choice but to accept that the protagonist’s place had never been mine to begin with.
But I couldn’t bring myself to keep working as a woodcutter, either.
The only skill I had to my name was the silver tongue inherited from my past life, so I had no choice but to become a storyteller.
I spent my days wandering from village to village, barely managing to keep food in my mouth, until even my parents passed away.
It wasn’t that they had been caught up in some incident.
They simply lived out their allotted years and returned to nature.
That was how short a person’s lifespan was in this era.
In the end, after I’d wrapped everything up, the only thing left in my hands was one of the many products of my delusions, which I had asked my mother to dispose of when I left home.
Even if they had gone that way, the guilt of failing to fulfill my duty as a son crushed me all the same.
Burdened by that unbearable emptiness, I cast away all lingering attachment and chose the road into the mountains.
A year had passed since I headed for the mountains with nothing but the single book my mother had left behind.
I lived only because I couldn’t die.
With time, my emotions grew dull.
In that peaceful but viciously boring daily life, I absentmindedly opened the dust-covered book.
Inside, under a grandiose title that didn’t suit it at all, were explanations of various calisthenic movements.
To soothe the boredom of living alone,
I began to imitate the book’s movements with a light heart.
And that was how, for the first time, I gained the one and only pleasure of my mountain life.
Today marked exactly two years since then.
“If you keep at anything long enough, it becomes exercise.”
I finished the last movement, let out a snort, and murmured to myself.
When I inhaled, the cold predawn air sank deep into my lungs.
This is cultivation, isn’t it? What else would cultivation be?
After wiping away my sweat, I went back inside the hut and collapsed onto my bedding.
They said a healthy body housed a healthy mind.
Nothing had changed in reality, but my heart was at peace.
Today, and probably tomorrow too.
Grateful for another tranquil day like this, I fell asleep.
**
I woke to the sound of birds chirping.
For some reason, my body felt heavy.
No, not heavy—just… laborious.
“Mm….”
As usual, I let out a groan in the grip of morning sleep, then jerked awake all at once.
“What’s with my voice….”
A woman’s voice.
One I hadn’t heard in years of living alone in the mountains.
It was even more enchanting than the clear, melodious voices I had heard in pleasure houses I’d visited once upon a time.
Full of questions, I moved a hand toward my throat without meaning to.
It’s smooth.
A graceful neck with no protruding Adam’s apple.
And the skin—soft beneath my fingertips.
There was none of the roughness of a mountain life that had left me unshaven and weathered.
I slowly extended my arm and looked at it.
So soft.
The scars and calluses I had built up over three years in the mountains had vanished without a trace.
No—more than that.
These weren’t even my hands.
White, tiny, delicate fingers.
Hands I had never seen before were moving exactly as I willed them to.
What is this?
Still hazy from sleep, I couldn’t feel any sense of reality.
Was I dreaming?
My heartbeat began to quicken little by little.
With trembling hands, I carefully groped down my body.
Overall, the sensation was soft and supple.
I moved my hands again.
I felt around my chest, but there was nothing unusual.
Maybe there was a slight swell, but that had always been there.
Reassured, I lowered my hand further.
Nothing.
“Kyah!”
When my hand found my groin and I was so shocked that I let out a girl-like scream.
The sound echoed through the mountains.
I could hear wild animals scattering, but that didn’t matter.
Unable to believe it, I checked between my thighs once more.
Still, there was nothing.
What should have been there.
Was gone.
This is impossible.
Calm down.
This had to be a dream.
I needed to wake from this horrifying dream as fast as possible.
The last thing I saw was my own head smashing into the floor.
Then my vision went dark.