WeTried Translations

Translator: Joy

Editor & TLC: ZEROSUGAR

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Damned Transmigration ◈

Chapter 3: Yuri (2)

──────

The Black Snake Gang and the Oh Brothers’ gang fought, and they all died.

Yuri, the youngest at twenty, was lucky enough to survive that mess.

It was far too convenient a story for him to have survived without a single injury. Yuri clenched the cloth in his mouth and looked down at his body.

It seemed better to cut himself than stab himself.

“Ggh...”

Unlike the violence disguised as training, this was self-harm. He was cutting his own body.

He immediately understood why torture victims were made to bite down on something in movies and dramas.

* * *

Gordon from the general store.

He was one of the few good people in Yuri’s pitifully small circle.

Even if they were old, unsold goods gathering dust, Gordon regularly donated them to the Oldor Orphanage. Whenever business seemed to pick up, even a little, Gordon also sent a small donation.

Yuri had met Gordon several times while at the orphanage.

Even back then, Gordon had repeatedly nagged Yuri, who had always been a troublemaker.

Even after Yuri left the orphanage and started doing nasty things like pickpocketing in the back alleys, Gordon had nagged him, saying that if Yuri was going to live like that, Yuri might as well get a job at the general store.

When Yuri finally joined the Black Snake Gang and began living as part of the organization, Gordon could only sigh heavily.

Whenever Yuri, the youngest, came to collect protection money, Gordon never made things difficult by invoking their old relationship. Instead, Gordon would ask whether the gang was feeding Yuri properly and check in on him.

“Yuri...?”

Gordon had been sitting in the quiet, empty general store, yawning when Yuri staggered in covered in blood. Gordon shot to his feet.

“Yuri, Yuri?! You punk! What the hell happened?”

“Ah... Mister.”

Yuri called out to Gordon haltingly. Gordon hurried over, supporting Yuri while his face twisted.

“What is with all this blood...! Hey, don’t talk. Stay still.”

Yuri’s shirt, soaked through with blood from cuts all over his body, looked more like a rag than clothing. Gordon stripped off that rag and examined Yuri’s body.

“You...”

Old scars and burn marks. And now fresh wounds as well. Gordon’s lips trembled as he could not continue speaking.

“If Elena... saw you like this now... what would she think?”

Yuri’s cheek twitched at the name.

Elena. A childhood friend of the same age from the Oldor Orphanage.

But not all orphans were the same. Yuri had not seen Elena even once in ten years.

“What the hell happened? Where did you get these wounds?”

“The Black Snake Gang fell apart.”

He gave the answer he had prepared.

“The Oh Brothers. Those... sons of bitches stormed the office with their gang. And... and everyone died. The gang seniors, and those Oh Brothers bastards too.”

“Everyone? Everyone died? What do you mean?”

“I, I don’t know. I was hiding, and...”

He did not need to finish. Yuri stopped mid-sentence and bit his lip. Gordon stared at him blankly, then squeezed his eyes shut.

“That’s a relief.”

After a brief silence, Gordon let out a long sigh.

“It’s a relief that all those bastards died... and it’s a relief that you survived.”

Yuri could not help feeling conflicted at those words.

With Gordon’s help, Yuri arrived at his home, a shabby communal residence.

He climbed the creaking old stairs to Room 203. Yuri took a short, deep breath and unlocked the door.

Click.

“...”

Yuri’s home was about the same size as the studio apartment Lee Su-hyeok had lived in.

“Ha ha...”

He had known through Yuri’s memories, but he had not prepared himself enough.

“There’s really nothing.”

There was not even a bathroom or kitchen in the room. Yuri stood there blankly for a moment, then let out a hollow laugh.

‘My shoes...’

He paused just as he was about to take them off out of habit. Such habits were what got transmigrators killed. He was almost grateful that the floor was so filthy. It was definitely not somewhere he could step barefoot.

It was not that there was no bathroom at all, only that there was none in the room. He did not need one right away, but people never knew when nature would call. Yuri left the room again and limped down to the first floor to see it and steel himself.

“Ha...”

The shared bathroom on the first floor. Naturally, it had a pit toilet. That could not be helped. Next to it was a shared kitchen with a stove, and behind the building stood a well.

“Ha ha...”

So that meant he had to sleep on the second floor, piss and shit on the first floor, draw water from the well to wash himself, and light the stove to cook his meals.

Lee Su-hyeok had never gone camping. He would hold it in even when he needed to shit if there was no flush toilet, and he showered with hot water every day. The thought alone made his head spin.

He had never served in the military, but surely even the military was not this bad.

“Fuck.”

Yuri went back up to his room. That was all he had to use, so he would have to adapt somehow. Trying to think positively, he flopped onto the bed first.

The uncleaned windowsill was piled high with dust, and the grimy window made the world beyond it look gray, as though dust had been brushed over everything.

This was not South Korea in 2023, where Lee Su-hyeok had lived. No, it was not even Earth. This was the Seronis Continent, named exactly like the game Seronis.

One thing at a time.

He tried to accept it.

He roughly understood his situation from the education he had received from Lorelia, a priestess of Order, before his transmigration.

This world was the original work behind the game Seronis. A different reality, not the game itself, where thirty years had passed since the game’s setting.

A world where transmigrators existed, players who had ranked first in the Hall of Fame before Lee Su-hyeok and had come here.

“Ugh...”

Yuri groaned, clutching his throbbing head. He had died and come back to life, then hurt his perfectly healthy body by cutting himself. Now he had so much to think about that his head was pounding too. It was enough to make him miserable.

‘I have to be careful around the people here, and careful around transmigrators too... What am I supposed to do from now on?’

How was he supposed to live in this world? It was not something to brag about, but Lee Su-hyeok had never been a particularly talented person. Lee Su-hyeok’s specialties were eating, sleeping, shitting, arguing online, and playing games. Yuri’s specialties were pickpocketing, stabbing people, and swearing.

If this world were truly the game and Yuri were the only transmigrator, he could at least have made use of his knowledge of the game he had worked so hard at... but this was a world thirty years later, and Yuri was not the only transmigrator.

The warning not to rely too much on game knowledge applied not only to people, but also to routes for obtaining items, skills, and the like that had existed in the game.

Thirty years had already passed since transmigrators began arriving. Being the first to put one’s name in the Hall of Fame was like robbing an empty house, but the hidden bosses had higher stats than the official final bosses to begin with.

If the people who transmigrated after beating such hidden bosses were here, they would naturally know all sorts of things about the game. Yuri did not know how many transmigrators had come over the past thirty years, but he had to assume that most of the hidden items and skills from the game had already been looted.

‘They must have come here too.’

Thinking about the transmigrators who had arrived before him reminded him of the few people he knew from the game community.

There had been a community brought together by the shared sense of kinship that came from enjoying the same shitty game.

Naturally, it was a foreign site, so Lee Su-hyeok had not bothered trying to write in English he barely knew. He simply used a translator to participate in the community.

Most of what people did in the community was talk about what a completely fucked-up garbage game Seronis was, or have idle conversations unrelated to it. But some people seriously dug into the game and posted their own know-how.

Of course, anyone who ranked first in the Hall of Fame even once vanished from both the community and the game. At the time, Lee Su-hyeok did not take it seriously.

They finally passed on!

The disappearance of the top rankers was even welcomed with that sort of attitude.

There were a few people among those who had passed on whom he remembered especially well. When people spent time in a community, they inevitably became more involved with those they clicked with.

Yuri, no, Lee Su-hyeok was the same.

Chuk-sin-doo.

Cat Panties.

FUCKINGSEXY.

USAUSAMI₍ᐢ.ˬ.ᐢ₎.

The four people he chatted with often.

He had no desire to meet them immediately, since he had no idea how they might have changed after transmigrating into this world. Still, even though they had only met through the community and used nothing but its chat room, he had grown attached to them.

‘Are they still alive?’

Of the five, including Lee Su-hyeok, Lee Su-hyeok had been the last to reach number one in the Hall of Fame.

He had no interest in languishing at a middling rank, so if the right opportunity did not come up, he repeatedly chose not to clear the game and deliberately died instead.

The other four people Lee Su-hyeok had interacted with were also freaks who had thrown away first-place records several times. None of them wanted to touch first place briefly. They all aimed to hold the position for a long time.

But in the end, they reached number one before Lee Su-hyeok and vanished. Lee Su-hyeok neither missed nor searched for those who had gone ahead of him.

Either they were confident enough to finally cement their names at number one after putting it off for so long... or they had become sick of the game itself, or gotten busy with real life.

He thought it would be ridiculous to cling to people he had never met in real life, saying he missed them. Anyone who finally reached the number one spot they had delayed should disappear on their own.

It was the job of those left behind to decide who would break that record.

If anyone still cared about their record being broken, they could simply reclaim first place themselves.

That was what he thought, but nobody ever returned.

Neither Cat Panties, nor Chuk-sin-doo, nor FUCKINGSEXY, nor USAUSAMI₍ᐢ.ˬ.ᐢ₎ came back and planted their name in the Hall of Fame again.

Well, they had finally passed on. Why would they pick up this shitty game again when they had nothing left to regret?

‘They could not come back because they had transmigrated.’

Who could have imagined the truth was something like this?

“If I’d known it would be like this, I would have gotten here sooner.”

No. If he had known it would be like this, he would never have played the game at all.

Yuri let out a deep sigh and sat up.

Footnotes:

Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried