WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
Chapter 2: Read a Book a Hundred Times and Its Meaning Reveals Itself (1)
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A person had died.
Just from being touched.
‘This is the Heaven-Killing Star...?’
An unreasonable power.
The cold reality of it flashed through him.
Then Yeon Sowol vomited.
It was not guilt, exactly. A primal revulsion had turned his stomach inside out.
“Huff. Huff.”
Even after retching for a long while, he struggled to settle his nausea and thought,
“...Do I really have to get used to this? Here?”
According to the common sense left behind in the ghosts’ memories, he did.
The world called Jianghu was a place where seeing corpses, becoming one, and making them was common enough.
It was the world Yeon Sowol would have to live in from now on.
“What the fuck.”
It was horrible.
Too horrible.
Yet the most horrible thing was that he still wanted to live.
He wanted to live a little longer. This time, without being screwed over for no reason. He wanted to be rewarded for his efforts and live a normal life, just once.
That made his chest feel tight.
“This is driving me crazy...”
Yeon Sowol looked down at his hand.
“Am I going to have to keep using this power...?”
Jianghu did not seem peaceful.
He might have to keep killing people. To survive. To keep from dying unfairly. He might have to kill people as easily as rag dolls.
‘Like before.’
Suppressing his nausea, Yeon Sowol looked around.
The skeletal old man.
The elderly monk with the broken neck.
Two corpses lay before him.
Without thinking, Yeon Sowol realized what he had to do.
“Fuck...”
The thought disgusted him, but he steadied himself.
“Huff. Still, I need to do what needs doing.”
He slowly approached the bodies and searched their robes.
“Urgh.”
A corpse before rigor mortis was surprisingly soft.
He dry-heaved several times, but stubbornly kept searching.
‘Do what needs doing. Do it. I need to survive, don’t I?’
He searched the old monk first.
There was nothing especially useful on him. Yeon Sowol only took spare clothes and shoes from the monk’s belongings, then changed into them. Modern clothes stood out too much.
Next, he searched the skeletal old man. The old man’s lower half was soaked with urine and feces, so he carefully avoided it.
There were considerable gains.
“...This is gold, and this is silver. And these are jewels?”
A pouch tied at the old man’s waist contained gold yuanbao, silver yuanbao, and fingernail-sized beads.
Yuanbao were one-nyang lumps of gold or silver, about the size of an ABC chocolate. Their bottoms were flat, while both ends rose around a dip in the middle, giving them a shape like a small boat that made them easy to stack.
Three gold yuanbao.
Seven silver yuanbao.
Three red beads.
Yeon Sowol recalled the knowledge in the ghosts’ remaining memories.
Even just the gold and silver were a fortune large enough for an ordinary farmer to live without working for years. He had no idea how much the gems were worth, but they looked expensive at a glance.
He detached the entire pouch and tucked it inside his waistband, where it could not be seen from outside.
Its heavy weight made him tense.
“It’s good to have money, but... I need to be careful.”
In a world like Jianghu, where public safety was poor, this wealth could invite trouble.
Swallowing hard, Yeon Sowol searched the skeletal old man more thoroughly.
He felt around the chest and found a small wooden box.
“This is...”
He remembered it.
‘At last. Shaolin’s Greater Rejuvenation Pill is in my hands.’
The skeletal old man had said that after stepping on the elderly monk’s neck and killing him.
“What is this supposed to be... Urgh!”
Flashes of memory pierced his mind.
Fragments left behind by the ghosts that had vanished within him.
「 It is a spiritual elixir. You must consume it while in perfect condition. 」
「 A supreme treasure. 」
「 If only I had a legendary spiritual elixir like the Greater Rejuvenation Pill... 」
「 Hand it over! 」
「 My martial arts are better. If only I had the internal energy. If only my internal energy could support me! 」
「 Aaaagh! 」
Within memories thick with noise, mad voices, greed, flashing blades, and screams passed by.
“Ugh.”
Yeon Sowol bit his lip against the nausea. He had already vomited enough and did not want to throw up again.
“Huff. So, to martial artists, this is an irreplaceable treasure. Something that can make you strong in an instant.”
Click.
He opened the wooden box.
Despite its grand reputation, it contained a perfectly ordinary round pill. If he had not known better, he might have mistaken it for an ordinary Uhwang Cheongsimhwan pill.
“...It seems it’s better to learn martial arts and prepare myself before eating it.”
Yeon Sowol looked up at the sky.
The sky he had fallen through was smoothly blue, as though it had never been torn apart.
“I can’t go home, can I...?”
The sky he had fallen from was impossibly high.
This was not simply medieval China. It was China in an entirely different world, where ghosts truly existed and martial arts, the ability to cultivate qi and surpass human limits, were real.
Fear suddenly took hold of him.
He felt like he was standing alone before a cliff in the sky.
Yeon Sowol shuddered.
He tightly gripped the Greater Rejuvenation Pill.
Forcing out the words, he made a vow to himself.
“Then... I’ll become a martial artist.”
They also seemed to be called people of Jianghu. People with strength beyond human limits, who could live with relative freedom even in this dangerous world.
In other words, people who could live here without getting screwed over for no reason.
‘It won’t be easy.’
Yeon Sowol was already nineteen years old.
Even elite athletes on Earth started in elementary or middle school. Martial arts, which dealt with mysterious powers, would be no less demanding.
‘Maybe it’s like a senior in high school suddenly deciding he’s going to become a soccer player...’
Still, as though it were fate, the Greater Rejuvenation Pill had fallen into his hands. A legendary spiritual elixir said to transform one’s constitution and make one stronger at once if consumed after learning martial arts.
‘And I have the Heaven-Killing Star’s power, too.’
It had instantly killed the old man, who had been monstrously strong.
Of course, its limits were obvious.
He had to make contact to kill someone. People died when they made serious contact with a blade anyway. Considering that, perhaps it was not such an extraordinary ability in this world of martial arts.
But.
‘If this power and martial arts were combined...’
Maybe he could live with his shoulders back even in Jianghu, where martial strength was everything.
‘Think of it as martial arts instead of the college entrance exam...’
That thought gave him a little confidence. Studying and working hard to become something had always been Yeon Sowol’s specialty.
“Yeah. Let’s do that.”
Having decided on the course of his new life, Yeon Sowol hesitated.
Was that really it?
Would he never be able to return to Earth?
All kinds of thoughts grabbed at his ankles.
Still.
In this unfamiliar world.
A world where no one could help him.
He could not afford to waste time.
Even if it was unfair. Even if he wanted to cry. Even if he was angry. He had to move forward.
He had to prepare himself.
‘It’ll be harder than the college entrance exam. I should save even the energy I’d waste bawling.’
When studying, he had to be ruthless.
Survival probably would not be any different.
Yeon Sowol forced himself to move.
He bit his lip once, then looked up at the sky.
Pressing both hands to his forehead, he mimicked a bow.
“Stay healthy...”
It seemed he would never see his family again.
Mom. Dad. Please stay well. I’ll find a way to survive here too.
It felt as though he could hear his mother’s voice again.
- Sowol only needs to stay healthy.
“...I’ll make sure I live well.”
Not yet a full nineteen.
And the second act of his life had begun so suddenly.
Tears nearly welled up, but he did not cry. He turned around instead.
After climbing a little farther up the mountain, his view opened wide.
A small city, nestled among rolling hills, spread out before him.
It was Shinheung County, a mountain town in Guangdong Province, at the southern edge of the Central Plains.
* * *
Crossing mountains was not easy with a high school senior’s pathetic stamina.
By the time he finally made it down, his clothes were covered in dirt.
‘I made it!’
Perhaps because he had suffered so much to get there, some of Yeon Sowol’s tension eased as he passed through Shinheung County’s gate.
The unfamiliar scenery caught his eye.
Walls built from stone and brick. Tiled roofs with broad eaves stretching overhead. Cows and horses passing through the streets.
The noisy sounds of the marketplace.
‘It feels like a wuxia game. Or like I’m traveling somewhere.’
It felt like a new beginning.
A little strength returned to him.
‘Yeah. If I work hard here too, I can probably make a decent life for myself.’
People lived the same way everywhere.
Why would a wuxia world be different?
If he lived sensibly and worked hard, he should be able to live respectably without major trouble.
Yeon Sowol renewed his resolve.
That was before bad breath wafted over from a passerby beside him.
“Ugh!”
The stench was so foul that something had to be rotting in their stomach or throat.
It felt like being punched in the face. Yeon Sowol came to his senses and blinked as he examined Shinheung County’s streets again.
“...”
The first thing he saw was a Beijing bikini.
Middle-aged men with bellies as round as mountains had rolled up and tied their inelastic clothes somehow, openly displaying their grotesque stomachs.
“...”
Then he turned his head and made eye contact with a woman relieving herself in an alley.
“...”
When he looked away again, he saw people shouting as they haggled with street merchants, nearly coming to blows.
Their shrill, ear-piercing voices were full of tones that rose two octaves.
His gaze swept back with a frown and landed on a filthy streak of body grime running across a street stall’s display.
Thud!
Someone walking past slammed hard into Yeon Sowol’s shoulder.
“Ah!”
It was almost a punch, not a bump. Startled, he turned around to find one of the men showing off his belly glaring at him.
“What are you looking at? Standing stupidly in the road. Hork, ptoo.”
Yeon Sowol quickly averted his gaze as the man spat thick phlegm and glared at him.
You did not pick fights with crazy people.
But his hands trembled.
‘This is insane...’
It was a reality that an ordinary person with twenty-first-century common sense could not possibly handle.
‘Wait.’
Then Yeon Sowol realized a terrible truth.
‘This is a wuxia world...?’
Which meant.
In other words.
This was a parallel world of ancient China.
Ah.
Yeon Sowol hated the world.
Footnotes:
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