WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS x FLAME COMICS

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint ◈

Chapter 631: Episode 15: A Kingless World (4)

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Simply put, the Beggar's Sect was a faction made up of beggars.

In most martial arts novels, it was considered the group with the best intelligence network, but I had no way of knowing how it was described in TWSA.

So, all the way to Seoul Station, I repeatedly turned the TWSA skill off and on.

[The Exclusive Skill Three Ways to Survive the Apocalypse has been deactivated.]

[The Exclusive Skill Three Ways to Survive the Apocalypse has been activated.]

You never know. Maybe if I kept doing this, the skill would react at least once.

How many times had I repeated the same thing?

[The Exclusive Skill Three Ways to Survive the Apocalypse is annoyed.]

At last, the skill reacted.

It was a strange reaction, but still.

「...The early Beggar's Sect was one of the powerful factions among the Nine Sects and One Gang, but its influence greatly declined after it was swept into the Scenario territory of the Star Stream...」

Content from TWSA related to the Beggar's Sect even began to flow out.

It sounded annoyed, but at least it was telling me something.

「The rising masters who learned the key principles of martial arts accurately and quickly through the Star Stream's system soon took control of the Martial World. The Beggar's Sect fell behind in the competition and was naturally pushed aside by the later waves of the Yangtze.」

Hmm, I already knew that part.

The story continued.

「Originally one of the Nine Sects and One Gang that ruled the <First Martial World>, the Beggar's Sect eventually had to move its base to the <Second Martial World>, then once again to the <Third Martial World>. A few secret stories remain about this matter.」

Was it like moving from a spacious apartment to a smaller one?

I kept reading.

「When they moved to the <Second Martial World>, the Beggar's Sect's Dragon-Head Ark Master and the Four Beggars, its elders, gathered the beggars and vowed to carve the true spirit of the Central Plains into their new home. Had a 'little master' not appeared before the signboard that day, and had the Beggar's Sect's Third-Knot Beggar, who was serving as gatekeeper, not repeatedly made rude remarks about the master's height, their faction-founding ceremony would have ended safely.」

A little master?

「That day, every disciple of the Beggar's Sect had their bellies opened up by Paradoxical White Purity Kyrios Lordgrime. The surviving Dragon-Head Ark Master and the Four Beggars clutched their spilling belly skin and fled in haste to the <Third Martial World>.」

...

Wow.

「Afterward, the Dragon-Head Ark Master and the Four Beggars led their ruined faction and settled in the <Third Martial World> once more. Having even lost the principles of an orthodox faction from the shock Kyrios had inflicted on them, they decided that since they were ruined anyway, they would become an unorthodox faction and seek a new beginning. Unfortunately, if the Sky-Splitting Sword Saint who appeared in the <Third Martial World> had not begun the Evil-Exterminating Sword Journey, they might have become a reasonably decent unorthodox faction.」

...

At this point, I felt the Beggar's Sect was a rather pitiful faction.

To sum it up, Kyrios had crushed them in the <Second Martial World>, while the Sky-Splitting Sword Saint had crushed them in the <Third Martial World>...

There was no record of what happened to the Beggar's Sect after that.

I turned the skill off and on again, searching for additional records.

Then...

「Kim Namwoon pressed him for more, and Yu Junghyeok answered as though annoyed. "If you want to know more, find out for yourself, you bastard."」

A completely unrelated sentence popped up.

Why was it suddenly doing this?

Was it broken?

Perhaps my expression looked strange, because Huiwon asked with concern.

"What's wrong?"

"It's nothing."

Maybe the Beggar's Sect in the Martial World was connected to the Beggar's Sect here.

Given the structure of the Scenario, it was almost impossible for real martial artists to be here, but if their descendants or related Constellations existed...

I glanced over the soldiers following us and the children on their backs.

The one I paid special attention to was the freckled boy called Wonsik.

The others were one thing, but why was Wonsik so terrified when his father was the Beggar's Sect's Ark Master?

"Seoul Station is in sight."

Well, I'd find out soon enough.

* * *

Go Jangwon sat on the landing of Seoul Station's stairs.

Looking at the beggars lined up before him, Jangwon wondered how he had ended up like this.

Twenty-three years old.

Liked reading martial arts webtoons.

Had a girl he secretly liked.

Just a few weeks ago, those sentences had described him.

He was an ordinary university student who had taken a leave of absence before enlisting, agonizing over whether to confess to a classmate he had secretly liked for three years.

"Oh, I like webtoons too. What do you read?"

"I prefer web novels to webtoons."

"Web novels?"

"Do you know Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint?"

That was how he came to read that novel.

"Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint?"

"It's a novel I've been reading lately. I've read it eight times."

"I like novels too."

It was a novel he read just to have one more conversation with the girl he liked.

A week before enlisting, he binge-read Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint from chapter one to chapter 551. The next day, imagining that he would confess to the girl using a line from the novel, he went to sleep with his heart racing.

He had even chosen the line.

"Yeongin. We can date. You know that, right?"

When he opened his eyes again, he found himself already enlisted in the military.

"Aaargh!"

Screams rang out everywhere, along with the roars of monsters.

Jangwon cried, trembled, barely recalled what was in the novel, and survived through sheer luck.

"Dad! Where are you going? Dad!"

He abandoned the boy calling him Dad.

He did feel guilty, but it was unfair from his perspective.

He had suddenly woken up as a man in his late fifties, with a child to raise.

"Die!"

Enemies targeting him were everywhere, and monsters kept appearing.

It was already hard enough to look after himself.

The one fortunate thing was that he knew the contents of this novel.

To survive somehow, Jangwon recited the passages he knew.

The people nearby began following him, and the connections of the body he possessed proved useful.

Thanks to that, he became a military commander with a soul that had never served in the military.

"I need to meet Kim Dokja."

From the moment he realized he had possessed a character in a novel, that had been Jangwon's only goal.

He had to meet the protagonist of this story.

Only then could he escape this story.

Only then could he return to reality.

That was why Jangwon spread word everywhere that he knew the future.

He calculated that Dokja would certainly come looking for him.

"You know the future?"

But others found him before Dokja did.

A group calling themselves the Beggar's Sect.

Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint wasn't even a martial arts novel, so what was this Beggar's Sect supposed to be? By the time he came to his senses, the elite soldiers following him had been beaten to death in an instant by the Beggar's Sect's masters.

That was when he first learned that a staff could be such a terrifying weapon.

A beggar holding a Dog-Beating Staff smeared with human blood and flesh placed a hand on Jangwon's shoulder and declared Jangwon's new affiliation.

"From now on, you are the Beggar's Sect's strategist."

That was exactly where 『Omniscient Go Jangwon's Viewpoint』 had reached.

"S-So the soldiers took Wonsik away. The sniper was taken out as well. They're heading this way now."

The beggar prostrating before him spoke while trembling.

Watching that sight, Jangwon felt like he had become the cliché villain of a cliché story.

Villains like this always had their heads cut off by Dokja or Junghyeok in Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint.

Still, there was nothing else he could do right now.

If he plotted something foolish, the Beggar's Sect's Ark Master might cut off his head before he even got to meet Dokja.

"Wonsik? You mean the Ark Master's son?"

"Y-Yes!"

"That damned brat."

Jangwon remembered the freckled child who never listened.

Come to think of it, he had a son too. Not a real son, of course, but the son of the person he had possessed, Master Sergeant Jeong Munho.

"What happened to him?"

Guilt came over him belatedly as he thought of the boy who had clung to him in tears.

He shouldn't have turned away from that boy then.

That was when the beggars near the entrance of Seoul Station began shouting.

"They're here!"

He could roughly guess who had come.

They were probably Sergeant Kim and the remaining soldiers who had once served under him.

They must have kidnapped the Ark Master's son in a fit of anger, and they had likely come to apologize.

Before long, soldiers with familiar faces appeared.

"Master Sergeant Jeong!"

"Sergeant Kim."

So it was these fellows.

Jangwon... no, Jeong Munho put on the solemn expression of Master Sergeant Jeong and spoke.

"It's been a while."

"Are you all right? We heard you were captured by the Beggar's Sect..."

"I'm fine. More importantly, do you have the Ark Master's son?"

"What? Y-Yes."

"Then return him quickly and surrender."

"What?"

"The Ark Master is terrifying when he's angry. You saw it too, didn't you? They're masters who fly through the sky and beat people like dogs. They aren't opponents we can handle."

Sergeant Kim stared at Munho and stammered.

"D-Don't tell me you joined the Beggar's Sect?"

Munho nodded heavily.

"That's right. You should join us before it's too late as well. I've already personally prepared a place for you."

"How could you? Even so..."

"Shouldn't people survive first? The President and Prime Minister are both dead already. Don't burn yourself up over meaningless patriotism. Come here with me, and let's plan for the future."

"Why has the way you speak changed too?!"

"The way I speak..."

He was about to tell him, "You'd talk like this too if martial artists tortured you for three days and four nights, you bastard," when someone stepped forward past Sergeant Kim.

It was a striking woman with long hair and a long saber at her waist.

The moment he wondered what was going on, a deep pain throbbed in one side of his chest.

He knew that woman. More precisely, it wasn't him but this body that knew her.

"Dad. What are you doing there?"

Looking closer, the boy who had called him Dad before was on the woman's back.

His stomach churned, and his head spun.

What was he supposed to say?

Was he the Reader Go Jangwon, or the character Jeong Munho?

Why did they call him Dad, and why did he have to feel guilty?

"What's going on there?"

A group of beggars emerged from inside Seoul Station.

Munho recognized the beggar at their front and shot to his feet.

He couldn't let them meet Sergeant Kim's group here.

"Huiwon-ssi, wait a moment."

That was when a man stepped forward.

A man in a white coat with an oddly smiling face.

The moment Munho saw his eyes, he remembered Yeongin, the girl he secretly liked. He remembered the novel she liked, then the figure drawn on that novel's cover.

"Hello. You're Huiwon-ssi's father, right?"

His voice, his manner of speaking, even that crooked smile.

He looked exactly as Munho had imagined him.

Munho listened to the man with his mouth hanging open.

"If the Beggar's Sect's Ark Master is inside, could you pass along a message?"

There was no doubt.

"Tell him a Disciple of the White Purity Sect has come."

Kim Dokja, whom he had waited for, had finally come to the Beggar's Sect.

Footnotes:

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