WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Dionysus

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◈ Cultivating Underground ◈

Chapter 1

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Yi Hyeon had rarely thought of himself as unhappy.

He had lived into his forties without any close relationships or dreams he wanted to pursue. That didn't mean he was dissatisfied with his life.

He had once worked at a mid-sized company, but the stress had driven him to quit. After that, he worked irregularly, earning little more than pocket money. He had some savings and hardly spent anything, so he managed to get by.

He almost never went outside. He lived in a world where he could buy groceries, order meals, and purchase anything he needed online.

Bringing in the packages left outside his front door was enough of an outing for one day.

That didn't mean he lived like a slob, with his room full of trash. He cleaned up right after eating and disposed of food waste regularly. He had never fallen behind on his taxes or bothered his neighbors by making noise late at night.

Yi Hyeon considered himself a very harmless person.

He didn't do the world much good, but he didn't do it any harm either.

He thought that was enough.

If there was one thing he kept up with, it was brushing his teeth. Cavities hurt too much, and going to the dentist was far too frightening.

On the other hand, he couldn't be bothered to get the free health checkups offered by the government. A checkup might reveal an illness, and if he found an illness, he would have to go to the hospital.

He didn't exercise either.

Watching streams, playing games, watching dramas, and reading novels were more than enough to make the days fly by.

It didn't take much to entertain Yi Hyeon.

If a new kind of instant noodles he'd bought tasted better than expected, a favorite YouTuber tried a different game, or a novel he was reading released a new chapter, that alone made it a fairly good day.

He could even find a little enjoyment in pouring water into a pot and watching the bubbles rise as it boiled.

That day was no different.

He opened the refrigerator, but there was nothing he particularly wanted to cook. In the end, he couldn't be bothered and took a packet of instant noodles from the cupboard.

While waiting for the water to boil, he sat on the edge of his bed and looked at his phone. A replay of the stream he'd fallen asleep watching the day before was playing.

It was a day just like any other.

So when his chest began to feel tight, he didn't think much of it at first.

Maybe it was indigestion. He wondered how he could have indigestion before he'd even eaten his noodles, but he stood up, thinking a little movement might help.

Before he had taken even two steps, the center of his chest clenched.

“Ugh...”

Yi Hyeon grabbed the table.

It felt as though someone had seized his heart in a fist and was twisting it. He couldn't draw a proper breath, and cold sweat broke out across his forehead and back.

By the time he realized something was wrong, his knees had already given way.

As he fell, his head struck the corner of the table hard. Yet he barely felt it. The pain spreading through his chest was far worse.

‘Could this be a heart attack?’

His phone was on the bed. It looked close enough to reach if he just stretched out his hand, but his body wouldn't obey him. He tried to move, even if he had to crawl across the floor, but he couldn't even move his fingertips properly.

The water was boiling on the induction cooktop.

Looking past a table leg toward where the pot would be, Yi Hyeon remembered that he hadn't put the noodles in yet.

‘It won't start a fire... will it?’

It was a useless thing to think about while dying.

But nothing else came to mind.

He didn't particularly regret not getting married, not making friends, or never going on a proper trip. Nor did he wish he'd worked harder at life. If he had, it would certainly have been more of a bother.

Still, he did feel a little cheated. If he'd known he was going to die so suddenly, he would have ordered something expensive to eat beforehand.

His vision gradually darkened.

* * *

When he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was a wooden ceiling.

The blackened planks were covered in old stains, and cobwebs hung between the rafters.

Yi Hyeon blinked and stared at the ceiling for a while.

This couldn't be a hospital. However old a rural hospital might be, surely it wouldn't let spiders build webs on the ceiling.

Did that mean he was alive?

He felt his chest, but it didn't hurt. He could breathe easily, and his body actually felt lighter than before.

Yi Hyeon carefully sat up.

The rough cloth covering him slid down. The first thing he noticed was his thin hands. His palms were callused, but these were nothing like the hands of his forty-something self.

Looking around the room, he spotted a cracked water bowl. He staggered over to it and looked down at the face reflected in the water.

An unfamiliar young man stared back at him.

He had tanned skin, tangled long hair, and cheeks slightly hollow from hunger. He looked twenty at most. His face was ordinary, neither particularly handsome nor ugly.

When Yi Hyeon opened his mouth, the young man in the water did the same.

“Ah...?”

Yi Hyeon crouched in front of the bowl and sat in a daze for a while. Everything he felt was far too clear for him to deny reality.

Pinching his cheek hurt, and warm sunlight came through an opening too small to call a window.

He went back and lay down again.

He hoped that if he slept a little longer, he might wake up in his original world.

But when hunger became too much to bear and he opened his eyes again, the wooden ceiling and cobwebs were still there.

Almost no memories remained in this body.

There was only a faint sense of having been hungry. He had no idea who his parents were, where he had lived, or why he was lying in this old thatched house.

Some time later, an elderly person came to check on the house and found Yi Hyeon awake. They introduced themselves as the village chief.

According to the chief, Yi Hyeon had been found collapsed on a mountain path a few days earlier. A villager gathering medicinal herbs had discovered him, and the chief had laid him down in this empty house.

“It looks like you hurt your head badly. You can't remember anything but your name?”

The chief looked worried. Yi Hyeon thought for a moment, then nodded.

“That's right. I don't remember anything.”

This was Baengmok Village, a small settlement in the western part of the Daeyeon Kingdom.

Only the chief's house and the homes of a few fairly well-off families had tiled roofs. Most villagers lived in houses built with mud walls and thatch. People went out to the fields at sunrise and returned home at sunset.

At first, Yi Hyeon thought he had landed in a world resembling some period in Chinese history.

He could speak the local language naturally, which he figured was probably because he'd possessed this body.

He needed to find work to survive here.

He ruled out farming first. Farming required a great deal of cooperation with the villagers, from maintaining irrigation channels together to sharing seeds.

He didn't want to trade either. That would mean talking to customers.

Hunting was out of the question. He didn't know how to shoot a bow properly, and the mere thought of encountering a wild animal frightened him.

In the end, he chose to become a woodcutter.

He went into the mountains, cut down suitable trees, made them into firewood, and sold only as much as he needed to in the village. His body was young and strong, and his palms were already callused as though he had wielded an ax before. At first, his whole body ached, but he grew fairly used to the work over time.

With the village chief's permission, Yi Hyeon repaired a small abandoned hut at the foot of the mountain.

There, he began living alone again.

Compared with his previous life, everything was inconvenient. There was no electricity, running water, or gas, and food spoiled quickly.

To save firewood, whenever he lit a fire, he had to use its heat both to cook rice and to boil water. In summer, insects swarmed everywhere. In winter, he was cold no matter how many blankets he piled over himself.

The hardest thing to bear was the lack of internet.

For the first few months, Yi Hyeon suffered from terrible boredom. There was nothing to do after sunset, and oil and candles were too expensive to keep a light burning all night.

Only then did he realize how much he had enjoyed in his past life.

Eventually, Yi Hyeon began pulling stories from his memory and rewriting them in his head.

Paper was too expensive for him to actually write anything down. Instead, he reconstructed the novels and game stories he remembered from his past life. He changed endings he hadn't liked, made characters from different works meet, and sometimes turned a favorite villain into the protagonist.

When he had time to spare, he carved wooden figures. He made knights in armor, demon kings with horns, and robots whose exact appearance he couldn't remember.

He wasn't going to show them to anyone, so it didn't matter if they were ugly.

And so Yi Hyeon lived in Baengmok Village.

It was less comfortable than his past life, but once he grew used to it, it wasn't unbearable.

Yi Hyeon was accustomed to finding small pleasures wherever he was. Sitting under the eaves on a rainy day and listening to the rain wasn't bad. On days when the wild mountain greens in his soup tasted better than expected, that alone put him in a good mood.

He intended to live an ordinary life here, grow old, and die.

* * *

One spring day, Yi Hyeon was tying firewood into bundles.

Suddenly, the village dogs began barking like mad. Soon afterward, he heard people shouting. All the villagers were rushing out of their houses and looking up at the sky.

Yi Hyeon looked up without thinking.

A ship was flying toward them, cutting through the clouds.

A blue cloud pattern decorated the wooden ship's white sails.

When the ship stopped above the village, people in long robes came gliding down through the air. Beneath their feet floated swords, leaves, and objects shaped like round disks.

“They're the immortal masters from the Cheongun Sect!”

At someone's cry, the villagers all dropped flat on the ground.

Yi Hyeon took his cue from them and bowed as well.

That day, the visitors, who said they were from the Cheongun Sect, tested the village children for spiritual roots.

One by one, the children placed their hands on a transparent orb. For most, nothing changed, but beneath a few children's hands, red or blue light appeared.

They said that children with spiritual roots could enter a sect of immortals and cultivate the Dao.

The parents hoped their children would be chosen, yet when their children actually boarded the ship, they wept.

Watching the scene, Yi Hyeon finally realized what kind of world he had landed in.

‘So this was a xianxia world.’

His heart didn't race with excitement. Instead, he broke into a cold sweat.

Yi Hyeon had read quite a few xianxia novels in his past life. The details varied from one story to another, but they had one thing in common.

Most of those worlds were terribly dangerous.

A novel's protagonist would overcome countless crises and rise to become the strongest, but Yi Hyeon wasn't optimistic enough to think he was the protagonist.

The chief suggested that he get tested too.

“Who knows? You might have spiritual roots yourself.”

“It's already been several years since I came to this village. Aren't the immortal masters looking for young children?”

“That's true. I suppose it might be too late for you to join.”

Entering a sect meant cultivating. It also meant competing, and he might be forced to enter secret realms or go on missions. For Yi Hyeon, who wanted a quiet life, that future held no appeal at all.

* * *

After the Cheongun Sect's ship left, Yi Hyeon went back to living as he always had.

The years passed without any notable incidents.

In spring, mist gathered over the mountain. In summer, the stream in the valley swelled. In autumn, the leaves turned red, and in winter, snow piled softly on the hut's roof.

Before he knew it, the boys who had run around the village with runny noses were getting married. Wrinkles appeared on the faces of the young men who had been his age.

The villagers sometimes joked about how little Yi Hyeon's face changed. Each time, he dismissed it, thinking this body must simply look young for its age.

Yi Hyeon didn't pay much attention to his appearance.

He had no mirror and little reason to study his face closely. When his hair grew long, he cut it without much care or tied it back. When he grew a beard, he shaved it off with a sharpened knife.

He realized something was strange one day, twenty years after he had come to Baengmok Village.

Yi Hyeon had gone down to the village to sell firewood when he encountered an unfamiliar man standing outside the chief's house.

The man stopped when he saw Yi Hyeon's face. After a moment, he approached with a look of surprise.

“Are you Mr. Yi Hyeon, by any chance?”

Yi Hyeon didn't recognize him.

His face seemed familiar, but Yi Hyeon couldn't remember where he had seen it. When he hesitated to answer, the man pointed at his own chest.

“It's me, Jang Sam. When I was little, I used to follow you around and get wooden figurines from you...”

Only then did Yi Hyeon remember.

He was the little boy who had followed him along the mountain path, sniffling as he went. After Yi Hyeon carved him a wooden bird, the boy had come by every day, pestering him to make something new.

“So it's you, Jang Sam. You've grown so much I didn't recognize you.”

As Yi Hyeon spoke with a smile, the pleased look vanished from Jang Sam's face. Jang Sam stared at him.

Only then did Yi Hyeon get a bad feeling.

“What's wrong?”

“Mr. Yi, you...”

Jang Sam lowered his voice.

“You look exactly the same as when I was little.”

Footnotes:

Xianxia is a Chinese fantasy genre in which cultivators seek supernatural power and immortality.

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