Prologue
Prologue
I must have been unconscious for quite a long time.
When I opened my eyes, an unfamiliar ceiling stretched out before me.
It was an old wooden ceiling. Small holes dotted it here and there, as though something had been gnawing at it, and cobwebs crowded the corners.
A hospital... it didn't seem like one.
If I had really collapsed from a stroke, that was a gravely serious situation, and I would naturally have been taken by ambulance to a hospital capable of somehow treating that stroke.
And a hospital with that level of equipment would naturally be of some reasonable size, and a hospital of that size wouldn't be so poorly maintained.
No, more to the point, finding a wooden house like this in the middle of Seoul would have been even harder.
For a while I just blinked, then sat up.
Kee-ik. A sullen creaking sound came from the bed I'd been lying on.
My body felt light.
I mean... excessively light.
My cervical disc problems, which I'd gotten from looking down at a cheap monitor with a bluish screen that had no height adjustment, seemed to be gone. The chronic back pain from my hunched posture was gone too.
When I stretched both arms up over my head, my shoulders didn't feel stiff, and my vision was sharp even without glasses.
Yes... my body felt light. As if I were twenty-five years younger.
The trouble was, if I were twenty-five years younger, I'd be five years old.
My eye level was extremely low. My body was scrawny, and my arms and legs were far too short to belong to an adult.
My hair was long and flowing, reaching down to my hips. When I grabbed a lock and looked at it, it was a glossy black mane that seemed utterly out of place in this sort of setting.
The hand I saw was not the hand of a man just entering his thirties, slowly approaching being called middle-aged. It was a very small, delicate-looking, pale white hand.
"Ah, ah."
I tried making a sound for no real reason.
I was so young that I couldn't be quite certain whether it was a girl's voice or a boy's voice, but at least it wasn't a rough voice worn down by alcohol and cigarettes.
When I turned my head, I saw that children had gathered around my bed.
Their faces were smeared with dirt, and they were all scrawny, as if none of them had been eating properly. Dressed in large, worn-out shirts that almost looked like dresses, they were staring at me with their mouths hanging open.
"......"
"......"
For a while we just stared blankly at one another. Because none of us knew what to say.
"Who are you?"
Ultimately, the first to speak was the boy who seemed to be the leader, the tallest among the children surrounding me.
The language that came out of that kid's mouth seemed, from what I could tell, to be English.
Of course, it was a simple enough word for me to understand... but for some reason the feeling I got was different from when I normally heard English.
No, wait, was it even English?
I had a feeling it was slightly different from English.
"......"
Well, whether I had understood those words or not, the fact remained that I didn't have the slightest idea what I was supposed to say in response.
*
At first, I thought I had been transported to Industrial Revolution-era England.
You know those stories. The alternate history settings where someone suddenly collapses and wakes up to find they've possessed some person in some era. I wasn't the kind of full-blown history buff who really knew the facts inside and out, but I had occasionally read alternate history novels of that sort. Web novels were the best way to pass the time during my commute, after all.
I wasn't particularly picky about genre, and I browsed various sites. Whether it was a subscription model or pay-per-chapter, if the free episodes were interesting I'd just steadily follow along, so even though I couldn't claim to have solid historical knowledge, I had at least some sense for roughly guessing an era.
Judging by the people's clothing and the gloomy atmosphere of the back alley, this era was clearly the Victorian age, when Jack the Ripper stalked the backstreets!
... That idea was thoroughly shattered two days after I'd woken up in this world, when I saw an Aerial Battleship passing above the alley.
It was a battleship with a bizarre appearance, looking as though an ocean-going warship had been suspended upside down in midair.
Seeming to drive its propellers with a steam engine, the warship flew onward leaving a trail of black smoke, and it looked like an absurdly huge airship with the bridge and guns of an interwar battleship hung upside down from beneath it. It even had a wooden deck, so it genuinely felt as if I were looking down from above at a warship on the sea.
In reality, of course, the warship was the one looking down at us from above.
In the real world, such a thing would be impossible. No matter how large an airship filled with hydrogen or helium, it could never fly carrying a weight that heavy. Even if it could somehow get airborne, actually using those guns would be out of the question. The recoil from firing would throw its center of gravity off completely.
But that warship, together with the biplanes that flew beside as if to escort it, was sailing proudly across the sky in a formation—I wasn't sure whether to call it a flight or a fleet.
And once I'd seen that warship flying through the sky outside the window, I was able to understand exactly what kind of world I'd come to.
I hadn't entered one of the web novels I used to read. Then again, since I'd never even left a comment on one, there was no way I'd been dragged into one.
This world was the setting of a game, not a web novel.
A certain JRPG series I had played consistently over the last seven years.
A series of games, based on the motif of Britain's industrial revolution era with steampunk drizzled over it and flavored with a distinctive Japanese subculture sensibility, that commanded a fervent devotion among a certain segment of the otaku subculture.
It was unmistakably one of the titles in Millennium Company's Aetherna Chronicles series.
*
Millennium Company was a small-to-medium enterprise headquartered in Osaka, Japan. With around forty employees, the graphics and optimization, the areas requiring the most manpower in a game, suffered accordingly, so every time a new title came out, users would comment that it 'looked like a game from two generations ago.'
It wasn't that nothing was improving, but the pace was slow. In fact, if you looked at the graphics in games being made recently by other Japanese studios that had been around for a similar period, Millennium Company's graphical capability was objectively below average.
But that was talk for people who didn't play the games.
Fans of the series were simply grateful just to get a new game every year. The sales had never been spectacular, and as recently as five years ago, there hadn't even been a Korean-language release.
The series had a history of around twenty years. In the early days, the games came out on PC, but after suffering heavy damage from illegal copying, they moved to handheld consoles, then later returned to home consoles, and now they were coming out on PC again.
They steadily attracted new users by porting older titles to current-generation consoles or re-releasing them on PC, and although the technology was somewhat lacking, new users captivated by the unique atmosphere were continually joining the fanbase.
I'd been recruited by a friend about seven years ago and had been consistently buying and playing each new entry in the series ever since.
And, faithfully following the rule that those who start later fall in deeper, while my friend didn't buy the art books, I was already deeply into the game before I knew it—ordering art books directly from Japanese online shops, or playing the Japanese version before the Korean release came out and serializing a walkthrough on my blog.
The series spanned twenty years, but its internal settings were diverse. Games 1 through 5, 6 through 8, 9 through 13, and the games from 14 to the present all had completely distinct settings. It was easiest to think of the series as being periodically rebooted while keeping the basic system intact. Thanks to that, despite continuing for twenty whole years, it wasn't extremely hard to get into.
And whenever one setting came to an end, the emotion of following that grand finale in real time was immense.
That was probably why I had been able to get so absorbed in the game seven years ago.
"......"
Well, let's set that aside.
The problem was how someone like me, who wasn't even Japanese, had ended up dropped into the middle of a Japanese game.
Yes, while serializing the walkthrough on my blog, I'd occasionally criticized the scant cutscenes or the repetitive event scenes and dialogue. I'd once laughed at what I thought was a setting error, then later realized it had simply been foreshadowing and deleted the post. I'd also trolled internet forums, saying I disliked a particular character.
......
Hmm. No, well, I couldn't say there was nothing weighing on my conscience, but there was no way a game company in Japan was watching all of that. And the game wasn't even distributed directly; it sold through an importer.
......
Well, it was probably pointless thinking about it now anyway.
The most important question was: where in this world had I been reborn, and in what role? And why did it have to be as a girl, of a different gender at that?
Given the nature of this world, an orphanage couldn't be a very good place, but still, if I just wasn't in the same place as one of the original heroines, I might be able to get by without much incident. With luck, maybe I could even be adopted into a bourgeois household without children.
"Sylvia!"
Just as I was gazing up at the warship, by now nearly a dot in the sky, I heard an irritable voice.
A gaunt old woman was approaching me. She clutched a cane crudely whittled from a branch in one hand, and her back was bent, but the malice radiating from her face was so intense that she somehow came across as vigorous.
For reference, Sylvia was the name I'd acquired after coming to this world. My surname was Black.
I hadn't originally been a child in this orphanage, but two days ago I'd suddenly popped into existence, and when they checked, my name was supposedly written on the roster.
Watching the orphanage director grouse about where on earth I'd been hiding, I was practically dying to ask her whether she simply hadn't checked the roster properly, but I'd just seen a child get beaten with the cane in that old woman's hand, so I kept quiet.
If I still had the strength of a thirty-year-old adult, I could have tossed a crone like her aside, but for now I was only a five-year-old child.
"Yes."
I answered as meekly as possible and turned my body toward the old woman.
"A new child has arrived. You look after her."
Excuse me? Me?
I barely managed to swallow those words.
My personal preference, that I didn't much like children, wasn't worth considering here. I was a child myself, after all.
Normally, the leader of the orphanage, the boy who'd been here until yesterday, would have taken charge. But, wouldn't you know it, just the previous evening a benevolent-looking couple had adopted him.
"See? I'm not the same as beggars like you!"
He'd jeered at us on his way out, and I had ended up filling the vacancy he'd left.
"You're the oldest one here now. And since you went sneaking around inside this building on your own for so long without me knowing, you can manage to do something or other."
So that was the logic.
It looked like if I defied the old woman, who always reeked of alcohol, I'd be beaten right then and there, so I simply nodded obediently.
I followed the old woman downstairs to the ground-floor parlor, where, just like the other orphans living here, there was a child caked in grime.
But even in such a disheveled state, her pale skin and thick, deep blue hair reminiscent of the sea were unmistakably clear, and I knew at once who that child was.
"Starting today, I'm going to be living here. My name's Claire. Take care of me."
Or else I'll be beaten, was the implication.
It seemed as though those words were hidden behind the statement.
The girl, who'd been looking at me with something like a shy sidelong glance, smiled awkwardly when our eyes met.
... And the moment I saw her, my mind went blank.
Claire Fangriffon.
Her appearance, her name. It was all the same as the Claire Fangriffon in my head.
Of course, at the moment, she wouldn't yet have the surname Fangriffon.
... And, at the very least, she was a character I had absolutely never wanted to meet at an 'orphanage.'