Surviving in a Frozen Dark Fantasy as a Genius Mage - Chapter 1

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Mordor

◈ Surviving the Frozen Dark Fantasy as a Genius Mage ◈

Chapter 1: Awakening

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[...And so the world froze, and its once-glorious civilization vanished without a trace. All that remained was the decline of those cowering beneath dying embers and the inevitable ruin drawing near.]

In a world where everything had frozen over, footprints marked the pure white snowfield.

A knight in a Great Helm, a rogue clutching a poison-smeared dagger, a Saintess carrying a mace, and others.

Their gazes, shining with courage, faith, and greed, were fixed on the massive tower, the only thing in that white world that had not lost its color.

[The seventy-ninth Expedition Party entered the Frozen Tower. To bring fire back to this world, or simply for a few pieces of gold.]

[May glory and God's blessing be upon their sacred journey.]

The white world vanished, replaced by thick darkness, dim torchlight, death, blood, and madness.

"Fuck, should I have saved my heals?"

[Coin Toss]

[Heads/Tails]

[Heads]

[Failure]

[The Reichmann Expedition Party was ultimately devoured by the Labyrinth's madness.]

I scratched my head as the screen went black.

The Frozen Labyrinth Tower.

Commonly called Dungeon of Death, this game was basically a roguelike. Every time you entered, the maps, monsters, and layout changed at random.

The monsters were nowhere close to cute, though.

Bloated corpses from the Black Sea, giant maggots, Face Mimics, human hydras. They were all pretty grotesque.

It was like Darkxst Dungeon, that dark fantasy game that used to be popular.

'And if a character dies once, you have to raise them all over again.'

The Expedition Parties that explored the dungeon had countless classes, including Northern Knights, Barbarian Warriors, Saintesses, Witches, Elven Archers, rogues, Alchemists, and Puppet Masters.

The difficulty was so brutal that levels and equipment were essential, and party composition mattered just as much. Each character's unique traits and dispositions also made a difference.

That alone would have made it an ordinary game, but Dungeon of Death had something unusual.

It was the Coin Toss and Memorize systems.

[Just as you were about to make camp, you felt an ominous presence.]

[You decided to toss a coin.]

[Success.]

[Your Expedition Party safely made it through the night.]

The coin was a gimmick you could use at major turning points or when a character found themself in danger.

As if a luck-based roguelike wasn't already enough, it added another random element. If the coin worked out, you could snatch victory from the jaws of death or stumble into good fortune.

If it failed, though, you suffered misfortune. Your camp might be attacked, or an enemy's devastating blow might land without resistance.

'Sometimes it's better not to toss it at all.'

'Not that you can always decide that yourself.'

That was the difference between veterans and amateurs.

Then there was Memorize.

Classes that wielded divine or magical power, such as Saintesses, Witches, and mages, could no longer use their spells once they had exhausted every spell they had memorized. They had to wait until the next day to memorize them again.

'You need fire spells in the Cursed Forest, where spore monsters appear. In the City of Doom, where fire-related monsters appear, ice- or water-type spells are a must.'

Memorizing the right magic for the right situation was a skill in itself. Since their uses were limited, spells possessed immense power and versatility.

That made mages the most important class in the game. Raise a mage well, and the game's insane difficulty dropped sharply.

No, really, all you had to do was raise the hell out of Fire Mages.

[The inhabitants of the cursed land worship fire. In this cold that freezes even the soul, only the remnants of the sun can hold it back.]

Since Fire Mages were treated like heroes, they received plenty of support not just in the Labyrinth, but outside the cities as well.

"Fire? Fuck that. Mages use Magic Missile."

At first, I had fun with Fire Mages too, but eventually I went another route. Once I became a veteran, the game got too easy.

"For something stitched together from stuff I've seen elsewhere, it's surprisingly polished."

For a while, I was so hooked on Dungeon of Death that I turned on my computer the moment I finished work.

"Ah, fuck!"

Then I got sucked into the game.

* * *

A gorgeous elf beauty and a dark elf girlfriend!

The praise and admiration of countless people!

I transmigrated into another world!

This was awesome!

I didn't have much attachment to life in the twenty-first century anyway. A country with a birth rate of 0.7 and a future headed for ruin. It was better than living as some 170-centimeter guy drowning in overtime every day.

'I'll use my knowledge as a veteran and live it up in this new world!'

...

That was what I thought.

It didn't take long to realize how wrong I had been.

"I'm fucked."

Whoooosh!

Snowflakes landed on my white hair.

Everywhere I looked was covered in white snow and mountains. Amid that overwhelming wilderness stood a shabby village, trembling as if it might collapse at any moment.

"Ian, what are you doing? Your hands aren't moving."

The beautiful elf I had wanted so badly spoke to me.

Yet instead of a bow or flowers, she held a plow and was tilling the soil with a filthy look on her face.

"Hey, what the fuck are you doing? If I get beaten because of you again, I swear I won't let it slide."

She was Elena, an orphan found near the village alongside me.

"Y-yeah."

I had become a young man named Ian and been dragged into the Frozen Labyrinth Tower, into Dungeon of Death.

But the idyllic otherworld life I had dreamed of never materialized.

For one thing, I had no status window or special privilege, even after being transmigrated. I should have been able to use my vast knowledge of the Labyrinth, but perhaps reality had different variables. There was no Labyrinth anywhere nearby.

In my previous life, I had been such a coward that I had never even killed a hamster myself. Around the village lay nothing but snow-covered ground and mountains that looked like Everest, and outside, it was cold enough to freeze to death within hours.

This world made an ordinary apocalypse look mild.

I was experiencing every fucked-up thing that could happen when a modern person got dropped into another world with no cheat powers.

'It snows twenty-four hours a day. The sky dumps garbage on us all day long.'

'Why did I have to play a game like this?'

'Give me a status window too, damn it!'

I scooped up fertilizer made from animal and human shit with my bare hands, carried it on my back, and hauled it around like a day laborer moving cement. The cold kept the smell from being too bad, but it still felt disgusting.

By then, I didn't even show it.

"Don't want to do it? Then get the fuck outside."

On my first day in this world, I had thrown up at the smell and stood around dazed, so the overseer beat the hell out of me.

'If Elena hadn't been there, I would've died that day.'

"Huff, huff."

A five-year-old. Someone a little older than that.

All around me, children who hadn't even reached adulthood were farming. In the twenty-first century, it would have been blatant child abuse, and someone would have reported it immediately. Here, it was normal.

"I'm seriously fucked."

For lunch, under Overseer Berry's supervision, we received one potato each.

"Eat up, you little shits."

Potatoes yesterday. Potatoes the day before that.

Here, we ate potatoes all 365 days of the year.

Only one lump a day, and not the fluffy, mild, delicious kind from Earth. Maybe because of the temperature, they were harder and tasted worse.

Even so, they were a feast too scarce for people here to eat whenever they wanted. Potatoes required little soil fertility, so Earth Mages had to put in less effort, and they grew relatively well even in the freezing cold.

Without potatoes, exactly ninety percent of this world's inhabitants would probably have died.

'Potatoes are great!'

"Ugh."

My whole body shivered. The skin on my hands peeled off and bled constantly from frostbite, but we sheltered beneath the roof from the snow and shoved potatoes into our mouths.

To survive.

Of course, living like this sometimes made reality hit me.

"Elena."

"What?"

I spoke to the elf beauty, who had stuffed her whole potato into her mouth and was even sucking her fingers like a slob.

"I want meat."

I was starving to death.

I wanted meat.

Spam. No, I would have settled for cheap pressed ham with six percent pork and the rest made of ground chicken.

There was meat in this world too.

But even when hunters occasionally brought back animals like roe deer or snow rabbits, it never reached orphans like us.

It belonged to the local big shots, like blacksmiths and village chiefs, as well as the privileged classes, such as Fire and Earth Mages. Fuck, now I understood why proletarian revolutions happened.

"Me too. I want grilled reindeer legs and whole roasted suckling pig so damn bad."

Elena smacked her lips as she spoke, her pure face completely at odds with her words. I stared at her with a deadpan expression.

"You're an elf."

"Elves can't eat meat? You goddamn fucking racist."

Watching that vulgar mouth on such a pretty face made everything I knew about elves feel wrong.

"No, I... sorry."

"Hmph. How uncultured."

Reality differed from the game, which revolved entirely around the Labyrinth, in many ways. I had to ask plenty of questions to learn the local knowledge, and Elena talked a lot.

That was how we became close.

Of course, Elena's knowledge as an orphan wasn't especially useful. Still, the broad outline lined up.

'About a hundred years ago, this world froze because of an unknown curse.'

'To solve it, people everywhere send explorers into the Labyrinth.'

Up to that point, it was the same as the game.

"Don't talk so much. It just makes you hungrier."

We weren't close to the other children. Everyone had to save even the energy it took to speak.

After working from early morning until sunset, we went home.

Ten orphan children slept crammed together in a tiny sixteen-square-meter house. It was a run-down chicken coop that made Kowloon Walled City look decent.

"Ugh."

We sat on the floor, where cold seeped up from below, laid down blankets, wrapped ourselves in layered linen bedding, and trembled as we shared each other's body heat. Then a Fire Mage would come and put an ember into the stove.

"Watch the fire carefully if you don't want to freeze to death."

But the warmth of the fire depended on the Fire Mage's skill, and since they had to take turns visiting other homes, sometimes the orphan settlement never got a turn.

Those were the most dangerous times.

"These primitive medieval assholes don't even understand insulation..."

"You're primitive too, so what are you talking about?"

"I'm different. I'm special."

"Bullshit."

Thirteen years old.

One year until adulthood.

Elena and I were the oldest in the orphan settlement.

"Yaaawn."

As the senior members of this chicken coop, the first things we did each morning were tend the fire and check whether anyone had died.

"Hey, Jimmy's dead."

"Fuck."

We hadn't been close, but Jimmy was still someone who had lived alongside us. As I clenched my teeth bitterly, Elena picked up Jimmy's body like a piece of luggage and snickered.

"Let's take the body over. Maybe the village chief will give us something to eat."

"You demon."

Was it because of her elf blood?

There was something seriously wrong with Elena's reaction.

Just being born in South Korea already meant you had luck that put you in the top five percent of humanity!

I regretted ever thinking, Screw this hellish Korea.

Yeah, this world was far worse than I could have imagined. A hell on earth where human lives were cheap, worth less than livestock.

"Yes, yes! Bring it here!"

The old man with the impressive goat beard was the village chief.

Even though an orphan was still a member of the village, he did not look particularly sad about the death.

Unless you were a noble, there were no burials. Under Winter's Curse, corpses could rise again as undead, and in this world, corpses were an important resource.

"Yes, yes, eat plenty, my Elizabeth."

Crunch, crunch.

Jimmy's body was fed to the pigs raised by the village chief.

They weren't monsters like the Flesh Pigs from the Labyrinth, but those greedy bastards ate human corpses damn well.

That was why the children feared pigs.

I hated them too. They reminded me of the monsters from the Labyrinth.

The worst part of this world was actually the latrine. You had to relieve yourself in a place where icy wind blew straight through, and sometimes it froze before you were done.

'If I stay here a few years, I'm going to get hemorrhoids.'

People had even frozen to death when a snowstorm suddenly started, unable to pull their pants back up.

And of course, we cleaned up those filthy bodies, then the village chief's pigs ate them.

"Elena."

"Yeah?"

I shuddered.

"This is a truly shitty world."

"You're only realizing that now?"

After we brought Jimmy's body over, the village chief gave us a piece of jerky because he was in a good mood. Elena chewed on it, then shoved the remaining half into my mouth.

"Gulp!"

It felt unsettling, but the salty taste and aroma of meat, something I hadn't tasted in so long, were incredible.

'Sorry, Jimmy.'

'I hope you have a better life next time.'

People really needed to eat carbohydrates and protein in balance.

'Forget conquering the Labyrinth, getting rich, and winning over beautiful women in this world.'

Chewing on the jerky, I made plans for the future.

'First, I have to survive.'

Clearing the Labyrinth was impossible for someone as weak as the rural teenager I was now. I had to build up my abilities and take care of myself first.

As I headed out for another day of sacred labor with that firm resolve, a group blocked our path.

"Hey, orphan brats."

The one sneering at us was Mauk, the village chief's third son. He held a bundle of goat-hide parchments tucked under his arm, as if he were imitating a Grimoire. Even in this situation, he was plump with fat, making it obvious how luxuriously he lived.

"Digging potatoes again today?"

"Looks like it."

"Work hard. We're going snow rabbit hunting now."

"Yeah, yeah, work hard. If you're lucky, maybe you'll become mages on the day of the ceremony. Hahahaha!"

"Those little shits without parents? Heh."

"They'll end up in an Expedition Party."

They laughed at us and walked past.

Decades of Korean online communities and every kind of parent insult imaginable had made me immune, but Elena, a pure elf, got angry.

"Fuck, should I just kill them?"

I stopped her.

"Don't. If orphans like us did that, we'd be in serious trouble."

"Hmph."

The day of the ceremony Mauk's group had mentioned was a chance to change the lives of orphans and villagers like us.

Mages were not created through education in this world.

You became one when chosen by a Grimoire.

In this frozen world of extreme cold, Fire Mages were the most precious of all.

Even someone who could make a tiny match-sized flame was treated as one of the village's most important people.

Earth Mages came next. They could make the land fertile and allow plants to grow even in this barren soil, making them nearly as valuable as Fire Mages.

If you proved your ability as a mage, you could even go to the Castle.

Awakenings sometimes happened at a later age, but that was rare. Most people's talent manifested when they became adults.

The village struggled to raise orphans despite its lack of resources because it hoped to produce mages.

'Awakening as a mage.'

That was exactly what I was aiming for.

I was no ordinary primitive resident of Medieval Land. I was a modern man blessed with the great knowledge, dignity, and culture of the twenty-first century.

If I wasn't special, who was?

* * *

At last, time passed. I turned fourteen, and my coming-of-age ceremony was held.

Fwoosh!

"O our King! Bless South Sunlight Village!"

A fire burned in the village square. The two Fire Mages and one Earth Mage, the only ones in the village, wore robes as they hosted the ceremony.

There were never enough mages.

Memorize.

Didn't people here have a limited number of spells they could use each day?

Fire created by a spell lasted a long time, but flame passed on from that fire quickly weakened under the curse of cold.

The more mages a village had, the warmer and more prosperous it became.

That meant today was a chance for someone to change their fate. It was also a festival for the village.

"Good luck, you two!"

"Don't forget us if you make it big!"

With the orphan children cheering us on, Elena and I headed for the village square.

A great crowd had already gathered there to enjoy the festival.

The village chief opened the storehouse and even handed out what little alcohol and meat they had.

"Yee-haw!"

"Hahahahaha!"

To turn away from hunger, freezing weather, exhaustion, and fear, the villagers danced, shouted noisily, and painted their faces. The scene carried a sense of madness.

"I'll probably become an Earth Mage. Elves are close to the earth and plants, right?"

Elena chattered excitedly, her cheeks flushed.

Really?

An un-elflike elf, violent, absurdly strong, and afflicted with hand tremors becoming a mage?

"Mm, sure."

I didn't think it suited her at all.

'You're perfectly suited to be a northern barbarian, you bitch.'

"Why are my ears so itchy?"

"Come forward one at a time and place your hand on the Book of Guidance."

An old book that smelled of dust sat on the ceremonial altar.

It was an artifact known as the Book of Guidance. If someone possessed talent for magic, they could open it and walk the path of a mage. If not, the book would not budge no matter how hard they tried.

"Mauk! Come forward!"

At the Fire Mages' call, Mauk, the village chief's third son, headed for the altar with imposing confidence.

The village chief was a Fire Mage, and his eldest son was one as well. It was no exaggeration to say magic ran in his blood.

"..."

The village chief watched his child with a tense expression, then suddenly let out a sigh.

"Hoo."

Nngh!

No matter how hard Mauk tried to open the Grimoire, it did not move.

"That can't be!!!"

The Book of Guidance remained completely still.

He had not been chosen by magic.

"Why me!?"

He tried again and again, but the result was the same.

"Why me!?!"

Mauk huffed as if he meant to tear the book apart. Mais, the village chief's eldest son and the ceremony's host, shoved Mauk aside and told him to step down.

"Get down."

"...Khk."

"Idiot. Heh heh."

Elena laughed at Mauk.

I raised my middle finger and laughed at that pig too.

Served him right. He should have been kinder.

"Next, Elena!"

"If I make it big, I'll keep you around, Ian. You're handsome."

Elena patted my shoulder, then walked excitedly to the altar and placed her hand on the Book of Guidance.

The book did not open this time either.

"Fuck."

Elena returned to her place with a sigh.

She was so disappointed that her long ears, which had stood straight up even when an orphan friend died, drooped low.

After that, the orphans who had come of age and many other villagers waited for the Grimoire's guidance.

But the Grimoire cruelly gave them no answer.

Of course it didn't.

If Fire and Earth Mages were that common, this world would have been a better place to live.

Then...

"Next! Kerik, come forward!"

Fwoosh!

For the first time, the Grimoire opened.

It opened by itself as if it were alive, and flames rose from the geometric patterns that appeared within.

"..."

Kerik's eyes went unfocused, as though he were seeing something inside it.

"Ohhh!"

"Kerik has received the guidance of fire!"

He had been chosen.

Kerik was the son of a tenant farmer in the village. His father had died of illness, and his family's circumstances had steadily worsened.

Now, his life had changed.

"Kerik! Kerik!"

"Aaaaah!"

Amid the villagers' cheers, Kerik embraced the mother who had raised him through hardship and sobbed.

'He hit the jackpot.'

As I looked at him with envy, my head turned.

"Lastly... Ian!"

My name had finally been called.

"..."

I slowly walked toward the altar.

My heart felt ready to burst, and nervousness kept filling my mouth with saliva.

Fuck, shouldn't I get something for real now?

If I got thrown into a world like this, shouldn't I at least receive one special privilege?

Ignoring the cold sweat running across my palm, I placed my hand on the Grimoire.

Elena's long ears stood straight up, and she looked at me as if wondering whether it could be true.

Fwoooooosh!

Unlike when Kerik had received his guidance, the Grimoire on the ceremonial altar opened far more violently the moment I laid my hand on it. Its pages fluttered wildly.

At the same time, the geometric patterns engraved in the book flashed in several colors.

Blue, yellow, and purple.

Three colors in total.

"Oh...?!"

I smiled amid the gasps around me.

Hahahahaha!

Look at this, you primitive medieval bastards.

I really was chosen!

I was the protagonist!

I had talent for magic.

Crackle.

A metallic smell, as if something had sparked.