1. If You're Going to Transmigrate Me, at Least Give Me Perks
How would it feel to open your eyes one day to a stranger's ceiling, waking up in a world completely unlike your own?
They say men never truly grow up, so it would be a lie to claim Sian wasn't the least bit thrilled.
But reality, as it turned out, was far colder than his imagination.
"Haaah."
Sian let out a long sigh. Thanks to his habit of squeezing novels into the margins of his commute to a job best described as a soul-crushing dead end, it didn't take him long to figure out that he'd landed himself in another world.
And so, brimming with ambition, he drafted a grand life plan for eating well and living well in his new home — only for a problem to crop up right from the very first step.
There's no bonus?
No infinite mana. No absurd, otherworldly talent.
He wasn't the reincarnation of some legendary hero, nor the heir to a noble bloodline. Nothing of the sort.
"Couldn't I at least have gotten one of those cheesy status windows people complain about being so cliché?"
This was a world with monsters, mana, and magic — and he'd been given absolutely none of it.
Of course, no amount of sighing or dramatic staring into the distance was going to conjure up a cheat power that didn't exist.
Which left Sian with no choice but to move on to Plan B.
If he had nothing, then clearly the answer was to latch onto the protagonists of this world, sink his straw in deep, and freeload his way to the high life!
And so he investigated, from every angle he could think of, which of the countless worlds he'd read about this one might be.
"No, seriously, this is going too far."
It wasn't any of them.
Even for a veteran bookworm who prided himself on having devoured a respectable mountain of novels, this place was a complete mystery.
In the end, he was doomed to live out his days in this fantasy world with no power and no talent whatsoever.
. . .
And just like that — who knows how much time slipped by in this other world whose name he never did learn?
The little boy who'd transmigrated with an age he could count on one hand had grown into a full-fledged adult.
And what was he doing with his life now, you ask?
"Hey, Sian! We're harvesting the wheat in three days. Think you can lend a hand?"
"Sure, why not."
"Thanks!"
He was living in a quiet, peaceful village in the middle of nowhere.
Sian hadn't started out in the countryside, though.
When he first stepped into the world, he'd chosen the life of an adventurer.
Well — half of that was a choice forced on me.
Like most orphanages, the one he'd grown up in was hardly flush with resources. Which meant that while, by modern standards, he was still years away from finishing growing,
"You're an adult now. Time to find your own path."
— he was shown the door all the same.
If I'd had even a single connection, I could've landed a job as a town guard or something.
Who was going to take in a boy with no family — one who was already a grown adult at that? With no money and no connections worth the name, the only path left open to him was the adventurer's guild.
Still, he tried to look on the bright side and soak up the fantasy of it all — a world where mana and magic truly existed.
My starting hand might be garbage, but…
Wasn't it possible he'd get lucky? That fate would reward him for transmigrating with some incredible opportunity down the line?
But no.
All I learned was that reality is a hell of a lot bleaker than the stories.
The adventurer's trade demanded, quite literally, that you stake your life on every job just to put food on the table.
Safe quests like herb gathering didn't come up every day, so even scraping together living expenses was a struggle.
Worse, there had been plenty of times when an acquaintance who'd been drinking and brawling alongside him just yesterday simply stopped showing up.
He'd grown so close to death that he worried he was going numb to it.
With talent, things might have been different — but it had been decisively established that he didn't have much of that either.
As these experiences piled up, Sian arrived at exactly one conclusion.
I need to get out of this business. Fast.
Romance and adventure be damned — he did not want to die.
For a man who'd lived as a humble small-timer even back on Earth, the single most important thing was his own life.
Which is why the thought that the adventurer gig was not a long-term career took root in his mind with great conviction.
Who knew those dead-end office years would pay off like this.
Being perpetually worn to the bone meant that working without rest had become second nature to him. While other adventurers took one request a day, he took two or three, hoarding coin with the greed of a misère.
People called him diligent and spoke well of him — but he had no desire to stay.
The plan: scrape together a minimum fund, then retire early.
Settle in some sleepy little village and pursue a peaceful life.
I was scouting places to live on the side while I worked…
And on a herb-gathering trip, he'd stumbled upon a spot that fit the bill perfectly.
According to the locals, not a single monster had appeared in this village for the past several decades.
A living monument to peace, essentially!
There was some rumor about it being where the Demon King first appeared ages ago, or whatever.
The fantasy-world equivalent of a schoolyard legend about how "this playground used to be a graveyard."
Anyway, that was how Sian came to settle down and ease into a leisurely rural existence.
No land of my own to farm, but eh.
It wasn't lavish, but between helping the neighbors with their fields and odd jobs, getting help in return, and putting his old adventurer skills to use with hunting and herb gathering, he was hardly destitute.
Beats having my life on the line every single day, that's for sure.
The villagers had been wary of him at first, but these days they smiled and greeted him first — a fresh pair of young hands was nothing for a village to complain about.
"So this is why old folks retire and move to the countryside."
Compared to modern life, drowned in a bottomless drip of dopamine, it could be tedious — but there was a different kind of fun to it. It would be a lie to say he didn't miss modern conveniences, but it wasn't as though he'd drop dead without them.
He was musing on exactly that as he walked home when —
"Waaah! It's the teacher!"
A horde of little kids came stampeding toward him.
"Hey there, rugrats."
In a medieval fantasy world with precious little to play with — and in a sleepy rural village at that — a former adventurer like Sian was, to the local children, nothing short of an object of pure admiration.
Between taking them along to the forest now and then to teach them about herbs and passing along tips from his adventuring days, he'd somehow found himself transformed into the kids' beloved "teacher."
For the parents, it was no bad arrangement either. He was keeping an eye on children too young to be put to work — safely, no less — while teaching them this and that besides.
"Teacher! Tell us an adventure story! An adventure story!"
"What happened after you met the dragon?"
"Look, like I said last time — that wasn't my adventure."
The kids loved tales of adventure.
Just, you know. Not his adventures.
The extent of my career is herb picking and hunting goblins. Weak ones.
If he stretched it, maybe the time he went out for herbs and got into an argument with a local alchemist over whose they were.
But crushing the kids' expectations felt cruel, so he retold the stories he'd absorbed back on Earth, lightly localized for local consumption.
He did make sure to say up front that these were fiction — the exploits of some adventurer he'd heard of — but a few of the children seemed convinced they were his personal experiences.
If they actually were, I wouldn't be living here.
He'd be off somewhere living large.
Some of them even ran to their parents repeating the stories, which meant he had to go around sheepishly denying it. They never listened no matter how many times he explained, so these days he'd more or less given up.
The villagers, for their part, knew perfectly well it was all make-believe.
"Teacher! How do you become an adventurer?"
"Ah, well, that…"
One of the girls listening to his stories thrust her hand in the air, eyes sparkling, and asked.
The unofficial ringleader of the village children — Elina.
She was the one who'd shown the most curiosity when he'd first arrived, the first to approach him and pepper him with questions.
Sian paused to think.
If he said, "Just head to the adventurer's guild and pay the registration fee," the kids would go home and throw tantrums about becoming adventurers themselves, and then a delegation of parents would come knocking to ask why he was filling their children's heads with nonsense.
He wanted no part of that headache.
Then…
As he wracked his brain for an answer, an idea surfaced.
"One hundred push-ups. One hundred sit-ups. One hundred squats. And a ten-kilometer run. Every single day."
He passed along the training regimen of a man who'd removed his limiter, lost his hair, and grown strong.
It's not like I'm telling them to fight monsters with their lives on the line, so nothing here can blow up in my face…
If anything, it would help them build stamina. Pure upside.
And later, once they'd gotten stronger, the parents would probably be delighted to put them to work in the fields.
Besides.
If any of them really did have talent, this regimen alone would lay a decent foundation for growth. By the time that mattered, they'd figure things out for themselves.
"Push-ups? Sit-ups?"
"What's a squat?"
"How far is ten kilometers?"
"I really have to explain from the ground up, huh."
The aspiring adventurers unleashed an avalanche of questions. Sian walked them through the proper form for each exercise and gave them a rough sense of the ten-kilometer distance.
"Ugh, I have to do this EVERY day?!"
"This is hard!"
"That's right. You thought becoming an adventurer was easy?"
It wasn't impossible for an ordinary human — but it was by no means easy either.
And so, from that day on, a few of the children began training, declaring they would become adventurers.
It didn't last, of course.
It's not like results show up overnight.
They did get a bit healthier, but these were growing kids who'd been healthy to begin with, so the change wasn't exactly visible.
Worse, since they weren't fighting monsters, there was no way for them to feel themselves getting stronger.
And bottom line — it was boring.
The hardest part, for children, was the patience it took to keep at something day after day. Few kids could stick with a task that brought no sense of growth and nothing but fatigue.
Just as Sian had predicted, within days nearly all of them gave up and went back to running around with their friends.
A few held out a little longer, but…
A week at most.
Right on schedule, after a week had passed, nearly every last one had quit — except for a single girl, who kept training.
The one who'd asked him the question. Elina.
Rain or snow, she never missed a day of training.
In the beginning she'd gasped and wheezed, looking half-dead from the effort — but before long, she seemed to handle it with ease.
One week. Two weeks. Three weeks. A month. A year.
Elina, who had trained without missing a single day, left the village one day without warning.
And word came back that she had become an S-Rank adventurer.
And then —
"Please take me on as your disciple!"
"…I'm sorry, what?"
From that point on, strange people began showing up at my door.