The Child Maid of Chwiseondang
My very first day dropping into the Joseon Dynasty was an absolute circus.
“Singing the rat’s beak! Scorch the rat’s beak!”
Men dressed in the robes of palace eunuchs shouted at the top of their lungs, wildly waving blazing torches through the air. Little court maids, standing in a terrified row with wheat cakes plastered over their mouths, shrieked and convulsed as if about to pass out on the spot.
“Mind your wagging tongues in the royal palace!” one eunuch barked, thrusting a fiery torch right into a girl’s face. “Say one word out of turn, and we’ll scorch your snouts right off!”
In the thick of it all—amidst the deafening bellows of eunuchs, the shrill wails of young maids, and embers dancing like fireflies—I stood with a profoundly deadpan expression, taking in the spectacle.
What kind of trash dream is this?
My last clear memory was passing out cold at my desk while combing through the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty. Of all things to hallucinate, why on earth was I dreaming about becoming an indentured court maid? For a history graduate student slowly being crushed to death by her thesis, this felt uncharacteristically sadistic. Good grief, spare this poor grad student’s soul.
“Singing the rat’s beak!”
Jwiburigeullyeo—singing the rat’s beak. It was an initiation ritual designed to terrorize newly recruited child maids into absolute secrecy.
They call it disciplinary training, but in modern terms, it’s basically textbook child abuse.
To these little girls, it had to be a waking nightmare. But to my twenty-four-year-old modern self, it was nothing more than a bunch of grown men putting on an aggressively cringe-inducing performance. The only unsettling detail was how sharp my physical sensations were. The terror of the weeping girls was one thing, but the blast of heat cutting through the frigid winter air, the crisp snap of sparks, and the prickle of warmth against my cheeks were all far too vivid.
Just then, a voice broke through the commotion.
“Is this the child you spoke of?”
“Yes, Your Ladyship. It is she.”
At the sound of a woman’s refined tone, I tilted my head back. Luxurious silk robes swirled into view, and for a fleeting second, the breath caught in my throat. The woman was astonishingly gorgeous—the kind of jaw-dropping, breathtaking beauty I had never once encountered in my entire life.
Wait, why is this lady so ridiculously tall?
I blinked up at her face, which seemed perched miles above me.
“She is quite something,” the woman murmured, studying me with keen interest. “Even the ten-year-old maids are dissolving into floods of tears, yet this tiny thing stands there as calm as a stone. To think a young saenggaksi could possess such poise. You brought a fine one.”
Still watching me with amused curiosity, she reached down and gently peeled the wheat cake from my mouth. The brush of her fingertips against my lips felt impossibly real, sending a shiver down my spine.
“Little one, how old are you?”
“……”
Did she just call me ‘little one’?
As I hesitated in sheer bewilderment, the court lady standing beside her snapped sharply.
“Impudent girl! Her Ladyship has asked you a question. Answer her at once!”
Wait… did she just call her ‘Jaga’? That honorific belongs to a ‘Bin’—the highest possible rank among royal consorts!
Consort or not, why was I taking orders from an authoritarian stranger in my own dream? Yet years of conditioning under a tyrannical academic advisor worked faster than my pride, and an answer reflexively tumbled from my mouth.
“Twunty-four yeaw old…”
Hold on. What was that ridiculous toddler lisp?!
Panic flared behind my eyes, and my gaze darted down. Something was terribly wrong with this dream. Glancing at my clothes, I caught sight of jade-green sleeves finished with bright red cuffs—the unmistakable kkeutdong of a palace court maid.
These are court maid robes…
Worse, the hands poking out of those red-cuffed sleeves were tiny, pudgy, and practically shaped like baby fern fronds. It hit me like a splash of ice water: the women weren't unnaturally tall. I was trapped inside the body of a toddler.
“Twenty-four? Haha,” the consort laughed, a melodic, silver chime. “Being so very young, she must not know her numbers yet. She surely means four years old.”
“Indeed, Jaga,” the court lady chimed in smoothly. “Though she has only seen three winters, the new year approaches, so calling her four is fitting enough.”
Even as my mind spiraled into chaos, the consort and her attendant kept exchanging pleasantries. None of this felt like a dream. An eerie, creeping dread settled into my gut. This had to stop. I needed to pinch myself hard and snap out of this bizarre nightmare.
“Ouchie!”
“My goodness… Little one, whatever is the matter?”
The skin on the back of my hand burned so fiercely that tears instantly welled in my eyes. What was going on? This wasn't a dream. This was terrifyingly, undeniably real.
“I like this child,” the consort remarked, her gaze softening. “My heart has felt so empty of late; having a little one in my quarters should lift my spirits.”
“Undoubtedly so, Jaga. Though an orphan, she hails from a noble house, so she must already possess some natural sense of decorum.”
“An orphan? Oh dear. How pitiful.”
Setting aside whether I was an orphan in this impossible reality, having someone pitilessly announce it right in front of a kid’s face was downright savage.
“This is a fortunate turn for the child as well,” the woman continued. “The Crown Prince is certain to find her endearing.”
“Without a shadow of a doubt, Hui-bin-jaga.”
Hui-bin…?!
My entire body froze solid. Not the Hui-bin? Surely not the one I was thinking of?
No, no way. That's impossible.
I took a frantic breath, trying to talk myself down. There was no need to panic. First of all, this had to be a dream. It must be. And even if it weren’t, she wasn't the only royal consort to hold the title of ‘Hui-bin’ across five hundred years of Joseon history.
“Then, Jaga, taking that as your permission, I shall escort the child to your quarters at once.”
“Very well. It will chase away some of the loneliness in Chwiseondang.”
The moment that name left her lips, my filter shattered completely.
“Whuh?! Chwi-thun-dang?!”
I shrieked before I could stop myself. Chwiseondang?! Did she say Chwiseondang?! I was a child maid of Chwiseondang?!
Chwiseondang was the residence of undeniably the most notorious woman in all of Korean history: Royal Noble Consort Hui of the Indong Jang clan. Jang Hui-bin.
Which meant the breathtaking woman standing before me was…
She’s really Jang Hui-bin?!
The legendary femme fatale whose fiery romance with King Sukjong tore the political landscape apart; the poster child of vicious inner palace warfare; the undisputed supreme villainess of the Joseon Dynasty. But my sheer terror wasn't born from meeting a historical celebrity. Anyone with a passing interest in history knew exactly how her story ended: Jang Hui-bin was sentenced to death by forced poison for casting curses on Queen Inhyeon.
Whether she drank the poison bowl or was hanged was a matter of academic dispute, but that didn't matter right now. If I had truly become an aegi-nain serving in Chwiseondang…
The court maids of Chwiseondang… almost all of them were rounded up and executed after Jang Hui-bin died!
“Haaah…”
I let out a soul-crushing sigh that could have caved in the earth, staring blankly up at the wooden ceiling rafters that looked like they belonged in a historical folk village. Here I was, deep inside Changgyeonggung Palace, lying on the floor of a court maids' quarters attached to Chwiseondang.
Whenever I lifted my head, I saw antique wooden chests straight out of a period drama resting in a scorching, wood-fired ondol room. Feeling like my back was about to roast off the floorboards, I pushed myself upright, only for my eyes to land on a lone brass chamber pot sitting squarely in the corner. An artifact one would normally only encounter behind glass in a museum or an antique shop was now my daily toilet. That chamber pot served as a painfully blunt reminder of my grim new reality.
I really transmigrated.
Usually, when people in novels woke up in another world, the standard starter pack included cheat abilities, a cheat system, or at least a silver-spoon noble pedigree. None of that applied to me. To summarize the sheer absurdity of my predicament:
1. I was a graduate student majoring in Joseon history. In short, I had transmigrated directly into my own field of research.
2. I hadn't possessed royalty, high nobility, or a magical genius, but a bottom-rung, indentured court maid. And not even a full maid—a pint-sized, helpless toddler of an aegi-nain!
3. I appeared to be a penniless orphan. Which meant there was no brooding, secretly overpowered mastermind father to tame, nor any influential hidden relatives waiting to bail me out.
…And the real disaster is so much worse than any of that.
Frankly, the personal background of a powerless toddler maid wasn't worth a copper coin. The real problem was the ticking time bomb strapped to my chest, counting down every single second toward the slaughter of Chwiseondang’s maids.
Jang Hui-bin was executed in the twenty-seventh year of Sukjong’s reign. But what year is it right now?!
I desperately needed to know how much time I had left before the executioner came knocking.
Just then, the sliding door rattled open.
“Hwang Bong-bong! Are you feeling any better now?”
“Yeth, Hang-ah-nim.”
Whether from the sheer psychological trauma of transmigrating or physical exhaustion, I had been bedridden with a raging fever for days. In that time, I had managed to gather exactly one piece of information about the child whose body I occupied: her name was Hwang Bong-bong.
At this point, I couldn't help but question humanity.
What kind of name is Hwang Bong-bong? What on earth were her parents thinking when they named her?!
Regardless, the court maid bustling into the room was named Seol-hyang. She was a fully fledged nain who shared this room with me—essentially my direct senior and guardian. Fortunately, Seol-hyang was remarkably sweet and had nursed me with genuine tenderness while I was sick.
“Hurry up and get dressed, Bong-bong! Today is Ipchun, the Beginning of Spring. It’s the day we paste up the chuncheopja couplets on the pillars. We can’t have our youngest slacking off, can we?”
If today was Ipchun, that meant it was the twelfth lunar month, right on the threshold of the Lunar New Year. It was a minor scrap of information, but my ears perked up instantly. As I struggled into my tiny clothes with chubby, uncooperative limbs, an idea sparked.
“Yeth… But, Hang-ah-nim?”
“Hm? What is it?”
“How old ith the Crown Prince?”
“His Highness’s age? Why on earth do you need to know that?”
“Juth curious.”
Seol-hyang didn't press further and answered easily.
“His Highness is twelve years old. Once the New Year passes, he will be thirteen.”
“He’th twelve right now?”
“Yes. But Bong-bong, why that look on your face? Are you feeling sick again?”
Seol-hyang’s worried voice faded into the background as the gears in my historian brain spun frantically.
Jang Hui-bin was executed by poison in the ninth month of King Sukjong’s twenty-seventh year. At that time, the Crown Prince was fourteen.
The Crown Prince, Yi Yun—Jang Hui-bin’s flesh and blood, Sukjong’s eldest son, and the future King Gyeongjong—was currently twelve years old. And today was Ipchun in the twelfth lunar month.
Which means right now is the twelfth month of Sukjong’s twenty-fifth year.
That meant…
One year and nine months…!
That was the exact amount of time left before the blade fell on Hwang Bong-bong, child court maid of Chwiseondang.