WeTried Translations

Translator: ZEROSUGAR

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◈ The Royal Sentinel has a Strange Newspaper

Chapter 1

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The City Gates and the Newspaper

The busiest road in the kingdom was always the one leading to the capital's main gate. Travelers poured through without pause, and so many feet had worn down the stone path that the sunlight seemed to bake right into it, crusted there like scorched rice at the bottom of a pot.

"Reasonably busy today, I suppose."

In the shade, a low-ranking sentinel named Su-ho sat in a tolerably cool spot and read the newspaper, feeling quietly pleased with himself for having settled in this well after stumbling into another world entirely by accident.

Not exactly a prestigious lineage, but still a retainer family in service to a noble house. So what if he was the illegitimate son of a concubine? The fact that he hadn't been thrown out on the street was reason enough to toast the king's health.

Su-ho's family had served as sentinels for generations, going back further than anyone could remember.

It hadn't been easy to adjust at first. Setting aside the fact that learning aura techniques or magic was so far beyond his station it didn't even register as a dream, the medieval-style kingdom itself was the real problem. In some ways it was absurdly modern, and yet in most of the ways that actually mattered in day-to-day life, it was endlessly primitive.

The one hobby that connected his past life to his present one was subscribing to the newspaper, specifically the physical, printed kind. Back in his previous life, he'd been known as something of a newspaper fanatic, and it was worth noting that he meant the actual paper, not the news. Even in an era when video news and internet feeds had taken over everything, Su-ho had stubbornly gone around spreading the gospel of the print newspaper.

And in this kingdom, the print newspaper was still very much alive. "Newspaper" simply meant paper, ink, and all. Not the soulless noise churned out by AI, but real newspapers, written by real people.

Even if he had nine hundred and ninety-nine reasons to hate this world, those newspapers alone were enough to make him willing to live in it.

Look at this, he thought, the cheap paper they used to cut costs. The ink bleeding everywhere because the printing technology hadn't caught up yet.

It smells like people, he thought. Human. And look at this censored column, completely blacked out. That gap, that silence, that's the very soul of journalism right there.

‘Three typos today. Hmm. This reporter makes the exact same mistake every single time.’

He was absorbed in the morning edition with a level of focus and excitement that might have struck anyone watching as slightly unhinged, when it happened.

【Congratulations!】

【In commemoration of your 19th Year Survival Achievement,】

【from tomorrow morning onward, a newspaper will be delivered to you every day.】

A flyer.

A small, slightly garish slip of red and yellow paper had been tucked carefully into one of his newspapers.

"Hm?"

Su-ho was puzzled. He was the man who subscribed to all twelve morning and evening editions published in the capital, plus sixty-six monthly periodicals distributed from the outer regions, not to mention the quarterlies, pouring more than half of everything he earned as a sentinel into the habit. And yet.

"Was there a newspaper I didn't know about?"

He didn't recognize the one in front of him. He pushed the strange flyer aside and unfolded the unfamiliar paper with a tilt of his head.

【The Prophecy Gazette, Family Edition】

【Kingdom Calendar, Year 996, October 15th】

【Yesterday's Weather: Clear】

His head tilted a little further, showing off the flexibility of his neck joints. The 15th? That would be tomorrow. Today was October 14th.

Of all the typos to make, a wrong date was really something. Even for someone as obsessively well-read in newspapers as Su-ho, this was a rare and limited-edition mistake. It was a bit like showing up to a first date having forgotten to brush your teeth.

Then the headlines.

『Ursalite Value Plummets by 90%!』

『Mun Geum of the Capital's South Gate Sentinel Clan Falls into Waterway, Suicide Suspected!』[1]

Su-ho's mouth fell open.

‘Wait. Father did what? Suicide?’

Mun Geum was the name of the father who had given him the label of illegitimate son. There was no other Mun Geum among the sentinels stationed at the south gate, so there was no chance of confusion.

Su-ho scrambled to read the rest of the article.

「"The Greatest Treasure in Mining History" Becomes "The Worst Mistake Overnight?

The spirit stone newly excavated from Bear County, which had sent shockwaves through society under the name "Ursalite," has been found to contain a serious defect.

The discovery was verified by a certified stone-smith, which makes the possibility of a faulty analysis vanishingly low.

Some experts say: "Accounting for the mana-leakage defect, the new spirit stone from Bear County is no better than an ordinary run-of-the-mill stone." The frenzy is over.」

「Mun Geum's body has yet to be recovered, and the case remains shrouded in mystery.」

There were other minor articles in the paper, but none of them reached Su-ho's eyes.

He sat in a daze, vaguely wondering who had gone to all this trouble to stage such an elaborate prank, when a single thought cut through the fog.

‘If Ursalite collapses, it won't just be Father. Our whole family invested in it.’

And Su-ho was a member of that family.

The illegitimate label had made him an outcast in many ways, but the fact that he was still here working the gate proved that he wasn't free from decisions made at the family level.

Which meant…

‘I put in everything I had, too.’

Thud.

The newspaper slipped from his hands and fell.

Su-ho always followed procedure to the letter in his work as a sentinel. That wasn't a quirk of his personality, it was simply how sentinels operated.

So he moved directly into verification mode.

"Hey. Little sis."

"Oh, for, don't call me little sis. I'm the legitimate one, remember?"

"Do the words in this newspaper look normal to you?"

"What? Can't you see the line of carriages all the way back there? I'm already drowning in work and you come up to me with, what even is."

His younger half-sister, who unlike him carried legitimate blood, glanced at the paper with an irritated eye.

What Su-ho held out was, of course, the Prophecy Gazette dated for tomorrow.

"Even has an article about fashion trends for next season. Huh, how unlike you. You walk around looking like a stray dog every day. Have you finally decided to look like a proper person?"

"Fashion? You're reading it as a fashion article?"

Su-ho double-checked several more times.

It must be noted that a fair amount of time was lost trying to explain that newspaper collecting was already a refined cultural pursuit, a hobby permitted only to civilized people.

"It really is! And by the way, I only read the Cornerstone Newspaper, so don't bother showing me that kind of garbage."

In the end, his sister ran out of patience entirely.

"If you have that much free time, why don't you go search those carriages over there? That is, if you'd like to avoid working overtime tonight!"

"Call me oppa, politely, and I'll do it."

"Are you out of your mind?! You lunatic, get lost!"

He got lost.

Searching cargo carriages was the most tedious job on the roster and everyone avoided it, but this time Su-ho had another reason for wanting to be out there.

As he worked through dozens of carriages, he quietly showed the Prophecy Gazette to each of the drivers.

The drivers looked at him like he was strange for asking, but they had long since grown used to the eccentricities of capital sentinels and answered quickly enough.

And every single answer was the same.

So it really is true.

They're all reading it as a fashion article from today's morning edition of the Round Letter Daily. Every single one of them.

It was baffling beyond words.

And that wasn't even all. While searching the cargo carriages, he overheard some unsettling rumors floating through the crowd.

"You know, over by the capital, near the Everbloom Marquis’s territory, there was apparently some kind of explosion. Made quite a mess of the road over there."

"An explosion? Another stunt by those rebel rats?"

"No, no. Apparently one of the cargo carriages just went off on its own. Supposedly it was one of the carriages coming up from Bear County."

Su-ho went quiet.

Working as a sentinel meant you heard every rumor under the sun. If newspapers were the medium that carried news in the abstract form of printed words, the capital's main gate was the physical crossroads where traveling merchants and drivers carried news from every corner of the land on their backs.

It was part of why Su-ho was surprisingly content with his job. The gate and the newspaper both touched something deep in him, and he couldn't quite explain it any other way. Something like the art of waiting, the instinct of a spider that sits perfectly still and lets the information come rolling in on its own.

If those were carriages from Bear County, he thought, could they have been carrying Ursalite?

On any other day he would have let it go as idle gossip. But right now it stuck in the back of his throat like a fish bone that wouldn't go down no matter how many times he swallowed.

What is going on? Some kind of illusion magic?

He knew his place well enough.

But there's no reason anyone would go to this much trouble just to fool someone like me.

Even if he assumed all of this was some elaborate illusion spell, it was a theory far too bewildering for a low-ranking sentinel to make sense of. Put another way, there was absolutely no reason anyone would go to all this effort just to prank a nobody like him.

More than anything else, though.

During his break, Su-ho pulled out the flyer again and unfolded it.

【Congratulations!】

【In commemoration of your 19th Year Survival Achievement,】

【from tomorrow morning onward, a newspaper will be delivered to you every day.】

Nineteen years of survival.

That phrase kept nagging at him.

‘I have been in this world for nineteen years, that much is true. But…’

This is something nobody knows except my mother.

Back then, his mother, who had come from humble origins, had exhausted every scheme she could think of to get him entered into the sentinel family's lineage. It had more or less worked. The family's treatment of him was never kind, but his name had been entered into the family registry all the same.

However, due to certain complications that had arisen during the whole process of getting him registered, everyone around him now believed he was twenty-two, three years older than he actually was.

‘Mother passed away, so now I'm the only one who knows.’

And yet this flyer knew he was nineteen.

As a small aside, the younger sister he had just tried to bully into calling him oppa was twenty years old, which meant she was objectively a year older than him. Su-ho was a committed ethical subjectivist.

Cut ties, he thought.

Something in that subjective ethics of his was sending out a warning signal.

I'd love to get the rest of the family to sell their shares too, but, no, that's not going to happen.

Su-ho's standing in the family was the very last seat at the very last table. Going up to them and saying, "the newspaper says Father is going to try to end his life tomorrow, and the Ursalite is about to become a very unlucky rock," was not an argument he had any confidence in making.

What could he do? Those who were meant to live would live.

The moment he clocked out, he quietly sold off his Ursalite shares. Even selling in a rush, buyers were falling over each other to get them, and he walked away with double what he had originally put in.

He had just doubled his entire net worth, and yet Su-ho felt nothing but dread.

The current market sentiment had people predicting the Ursalite would triple from here. It had been climbing so sharply that each day set a new record.

The next morning, on his way into work, he climbed down the rope ladder from his tiny room wedged like a snail shell into a makeshift building pressed up against the outer city wall, and found a crowd already buzzing at that early hour.

His father's face was among them.

"Hyung-nim! What do we do, hyung-nim! The ancestral rites are coming up soon!"

His father said nothing.

"Please, say something! We invested on your word, hyung-nim!"

His relatives were shouting, but his father didn't react at all. He just stared up at the gate with the hollow, empty look of someone who had left their soul somewhere else.

Normally he would have started the morning with some spear practice, but today he went straight to collect the newspapers first.

Beside the guardpost, the delivery boy had already come and gone before anyone else was awake, leaving the stacks piled up there. For some reason Su-ho's heart was pounding as he reached out and grabbed the top paper at random.

His fingertips were trembling.

【Ursalite Value Crashes! Investors Plunged into Despair!】

【The spirit stone newly excavated from Bear County, which had sent shockwaves through society under the name "Ursalite," has been found to contain a serious defect.】

This paper too. And that one. The Cornerstone Newspaper. The Round Letter Daily.

Every single publication was loudly crying out about the Ursalite collapse.

There were more typos than usual across all of them, and the section layouts were sloppier than he had ever seen. Evidence that the editorial teams had not had time to carefully review anything before rushing the breaking news to print.

‘Oh…’

Su-ho's head swam.

In a single night. He had almost lost everything he owned in a single night.

Boom, boom, his heart hit his ribs like a battering ram being swung against a castle wall. The impact was too much. The newspapers slipped from both his hands.

Among the scattered, disheveled papers on the ground, he caught a glimpse of a familiar red and yellow flyer, the same one from the day before.

【Congratulations!】

【You have used the Prophecy Gazette for the first time.】

Su-ho, as if in a trance, pushed through the other papers and pulled out the one that had the flyer attached to it.

【You have been awarded 10 Subscription Points.】

【As part of the new subscriber welcome service, the Advertisements Column has been unlocked for free.】

【Subscription Points can be used to access various services provided by this publication.】

【Current Subscription Points: 10】

Points? What, no, that wasn't the important part right now.

He set the flyer aside and read the newspaper attached to it.

And there it was.

【The Prophecy Gazette, Family Edition】

【Kingdom Calendar, Year 996, October 16th】

【Yesterday's Weather: Clear, then Rain】

There it was again, that strange newspaper from yesterday.

Not today's paper, but tomorrow's.

[1] Mun Geum, 문금 (門金), Su-ho’s father’s name, literally means guarded treasure because of the hanja attached, but the more common and typical interpretation of the word is 문금 (門禁) or curfew / lockdown.

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