Purging the Orphanage Director (1)
Lying about blood being red the same for everyone is just that—a lie.
Some people were born with blue blood, and that hadn’t changed even in the modern age we lived in now.
Especially in the job market.
In this world of blatant lineage discrimination, the most valuable blood of all belonged to the blind.
The blood of chairmen, CEOs, prosecutors, and chief judges. The sons, daughters, grandsons, and granddaughters of countless powerful men and women.
While everyone else bled themselves dry for entrance exams, clawed at the ground to build their credentials, and ruined their bodies through unpaid internships, they went abroad under the guise of “studying overseas,” drank at clubs in America, threw parties at home, and contributed to the domestic economy of the land of plenty before coming back to take the positions already waiting for them.
And once again, I was one of the job seekers who had lost in an interview blinded by blind blood—a person who had inherited the cheapest blood of all.
In other words, an orphan.
“…Life.”
I had no shame before heaven or earth, and yet the repeated failures were driving me mad.
I was a model student—good, obedient, and diligent.
And yet the reality waiting for me after a clean four-year university graduation was nothing but failure upon failure.
If employment was the starting line for entering society, then I was already hardening in place, never even granted the chance to stand on that line.
If this had really been because I simply lacked talent, then maybe I could have given up on the world of office jobs altogether.
But when I unlocked the cheap secondhand smartphone I’d bought and looked at the screen—
Job Gallery
Title: I work at ○○ Trading Company
Body: Every one of the new hires this time is total nepotism. The guy assigned to HR said the CEO was his uncle.
ㅇㅇ: lol, that’s just how trash companies are
Wouldn’t ○○ Trading Company count as a decent small-to-mid-size firm?
All companies in Hell Joseon are trash companies, idiot
That was all it ever was in the places I’d applied.
At one company, the CEO’s son had to get in. At another, the executive director’s niece. Somewhere else, the chairman’s children each needed one grandson apiece placed neatly into the company.
Every time they took one of the limited seats, someone else had to be pushed out.
Again and again.
That someone was me.
All because of blood.
Because of those people who got in on the strength of blood alone.
My chest felt tight.
Lately it had been happening on and off, but today it was especially frequent.
“…Fuck.”
I forced the word out, but cursing with an oath that didn’t suit my mouth only made me feel worse.
Why did people like that even bother to get jobs in the first place?
If you were the grandson of a conglomerate chairman, the only son of a family that owned a building in Gangnam, or the child of a rock-solid small-business owner—if you were born into a line of people who could never spend all the money they made even if they did nothing but lounge around for the rest of their lives—then couldn’t you just keep lounging around and stop being a nuisance?
“…Haa.”
I was tired. Tired of drowning in self-loathing. Tired of even looking at the Han River.
My chest throbbed again, and I rubbed it with my hand.
I should just go find some part-time work unloading cargo.
The convenience store where I’d been working had closed, and this month’s rent was in danger.
Even if you were born with a silver spoon, you could still live with your parents; an orphan didn’t even have that.
It didn’t matter whether you’d been injured, robbed, or were dealing with some unavoidable circumstance.
If you couldn’t pay rent, you were out.
I’d actually been forced out of a rented room once before when I broke my leg, and had to live in a jjimjilbang.
Even self-pity was a luxury with a limited supply, and for an orphan whose only option for survival was labor, there was no room for it.
“If I’d been born with a better bloodline—”
—wouldn’t that have been nice.
Then my chest throbbed again.
“Ghk…!?”
This was completely different from the vague discomfort I’d felt until now.
The pressure and pain clamped down on my chest like a vise and spread from there into my left arm.
“Ah—gh…!”
My strength drained away. As I watched my body collapse downward, I thought back to the conversation I’d had with the doctor yesterday.
—It looks like you may have had a congenital heart condition, but have you never had a medical checkup before? Hm? You’re saying this is your first time ever visiting a hospital?
No way.
Was I dying?
—Well, even so… Ah, right, you said you don’t have a guardian. Hmm… It seems like a hereditary issue. Please go to a big hospital as soon as you can. This could become serious.
Even my death was because of my bloodline, and not my fault?
“Fucking… hell…”
Pain swallowed me whole.
My consciousness sank into darkness.
In that endlessly spread blackness, I heard a whisper.
[Your bloodline, is it.]
The owner of that voice lifted my very soul into her hands and held me within her.
[I’ll grant you half of what you wish for.]
Then she carried me to an entirely different world.
[Go on and live with the best and the worst bloodline at the same time. At the end of that journey, will there be light—or darkness?]
And then darkness again. Pain again. But this time, it was a different kind of pain.
“Aaaagh!! A-ah, aaagh!!!”
“Push! Harder! Harder, damn it—! The mother’s done for!”
“Then save the baby, at least!! Get me the scissors!!”
The darkness cleared, and then there was red.
A beautiful woman drenched in blood looked into my eyes, crying as she smiled.
“Ah… ou… l… our… baby…”
With awe.
“Ellie, ah…”
And then the light in the eyes of the woman who had given birth to me vanished.
My second birth remained as trauma.
Fifteen years later.
In an orphanage of the Empire, I fully recovered the memories of my past life and, after serious consideration, said:
“I’m screwed.”
No matter how I looked at it, I couldn’t think of anything more fitting. It was accurate, and it even had a little wordplay in it.
So my bloodline is—
My father was the Emperor.
My mother was a prostitute he’d spent one night with.
I didn’t know whether it had truly been just one night or whether she’d been a regular, but either way, their identities were clear enough.
It really was the best bloodline and the worst bloodline all at once.
A bastard child of the Emperor.
What fate awaited people like that in my old world?
Correct answer: a clean severing at the neck!
Whether they rose in rebellion themselves, were framed for treason, or were simply misunderstood, or even cut down preemptively just in case—more often than not, their ending was either a beheading or a neat little stab to the heart.
In that sense, it was probably better to be stuffed away here in this orphanage… or I would have liked to say that, but—
“E-Ellie.”
The stammering Hans whispered to me.
“If we don’t finish c-clea-cleaning soon, we won’t g-get dinner t-tonight either.”
The orphanage—what my old world would have called a childcare center—was my second life.
One problem: calling this place by the same name as the child-rearing institutions of twenty-first-century South Korea would have been a grotesque insult to the latter.
Take Hans, for instance, standing right in front of me.
He was skin and bones, and one side of his head was always caked with blood and pus from a skin disease.
It was a condition that could be cured completely with a single doctor’s visit.
It didn’t even cost much. Two loaves of bread.
But because the orphanage director thought that money was too precious to spend, Hans had lived with that disease for as long as I could remember.
The treatment of the other children wasn’t much better.
Rooms like chicken coops. Clothes torn to shreds and patched over again and again. For meals, they served a tiny piece of trash-grade bread and thin vegetable soup, and every so often, milk that was just on the verge of spoiling appeared as a special treat.
This wasn’t a childcare facility. It was a child abuse facility.
The problem was that if you tried to leave without permission, your life was in danger.
The place I’d been reborn into wasn’t a modern society where social welfare existed, nor even a modern era where the idea of social welfare was just beginning to emerge.
The Middle Ages.
Only, very unlike the medieval world of my old life. In some respects, it was even better than my old world’s Middle Ages—or even better than the modern age.
And the reason was—
“Ellie! Hans!”
A girl almost as filthy as the rest of us and clearly undernourished came running over. Her name was Mary.
“The director says we all have to wash, so hurry up and go! Girls to the west wing bathhouse, boys to the kitchen!”
I’d just finished my own assigned job of cleaning the stairs.
“Yeah, I’m coming.”
The voice slipping between my lips was soft and delicate.
My raised hand, though roughened by hard labor, was still white and slender, with fingertips as graceful as a lady’s.
“T-Then I’m g-going first.”
Hans left, and the girl and I headed for the west wing together.
As I’d just muttered to myself, the reason was that in the process of reincarnation, my manhood had been cut off.
More precisely, I had been manhood-cut off.
My new name was Ellie.
Officially, I had no family name, though my proper surname was probably going to be very, very long.
I was fifteen now, a little on the short side at 155 centimeters, but my body had recently started maturing more quickly in certain places, and though I’d hardly ever seen myself in a mirror, I was probably quite pretty.
A girl.
That was my new body.
“I hope we can get a good look at the one who’s coming today.”
Really?
“Who did you say was coming today?”
As we headed toward the west wing, I asked, and Mary startled before answering.
“Huh? You didn’t hear?”
“Isn’t it some merchant who donated a lot last time?”
Of course, donating to this orphanage was no different from donating directly to the director’s pocket, but most donors either didn’t know that or didn’t seem to care even if they did.
“Nope! Today it’s a real big shot!”
“What kind of person?”
“That would be, none other than—”
Mary’s perpetually troubled eyes suddenly sparkled bright.
“Ellie!”
A roar like a bear’s shook the air. A fat one, too—fat from rampaging through the forest, gobbling everything in sight.
“Eep…!”
Mary trembled.
The sound of heavy footsteps—bang, bang—shook the old wooden floor, and a middle-aged woman, broad both vertically and horizontally, appeared before us.
Doloria Umper.
The director of this orphanage and its tyrant.
I opened my mouth.
“Did you need me?”
Doloria raised her eyes.
“I told you to keep your eyes open!”
A hand the size of a pot lid rose.
Whoosh.
The sound of air being split.
But the palm stopped just short of my cheek.
“...No, even if you’re an ordinary-looking little bitch like you, we need to put your face on display today.”
Instead, her fingers reached for the shoulder hidden beneath my clothes.
Her rough nails dug into the soft flesh of my upper arm.
They pinched.
She kept pinching until her nails ground against my skin.
“...”
When I endured it without screaming, Doloria twisted her lips.
“I’m really curious, Ellie. How long do you think you can keep this up?”
She pulled away with a sneer, my blood smeared on her fingertips.
“Go wash yourself.”
After Doloria stalked off, Mary asked me,
“A-Are you okay…?”
“Mary.”
Breath.
“Who’s coming today?”
Mary blinked.
“A mage.”
“For real?”
“Of course! They said it was a super famous mage family that had been granted nobility ages and ages ago!”
The biggest difference between my old world and this one.
Magic.
In this world, where magic was superior even to technology, a mage was a lord and a noble. The way warriors mounted on horseback and wielding lances had been in my old world.
“Oh?”
I smiled.
“Perfect.”
I didn’t care who it was, as long as they were a real mage.
It didn’t matter whether they were a ducal house descended from the Emperor’s own teacher, a baronial family that had built a fortress in the borderlands and carved out power for itself, or even just some independent mage with none of that status at all.
The one and only reason I was still trapped in this orphanage was that I had never once seen proper magic up close.
“We can go hunting bears today.”
“B-Bears?”
“Yep. That kind too.”
I lifted my hair in one hand.
After confirming that it was still neatly black, I smiled at my frightened friend.
“A bear that gobbles up children and gets fat as a pig. A really awful bear.”