Chapter 1
At last, this goddamn slave life ends today.
“This study shows that the entropy production rate in a nonequilibrium system depends nonmonotonically on the coupling strength, and has been published in Nature…”
I’m in the middle of my PhD defense.
In other words, today is the day I finally put my miserable grad school life behind me.
“Mr. Kim Muyeol, is there any research you’d like to pursue in the future?”
All that’s left is to answer my advisor’s final question, and then it’s basically over.
“I want to determine the nature of dark matter and dark energy through physics, and someday win the Nobel Prize in Physics.”
“Ha ha! A Nobel Prize already? You’ve got big dreams.”
“I don’t think there’s any point if you’re not aiming to be the best.”
“Good. I hope you’ll become the first Korean laureate and bring glory to Princeton.”
That’s right, Princeton.
This is Princeton University, one of the most prestigious universities in America.
It’s the very place where the Richard Feynman I admired earned his degree.
I can’t say how excited I was on the day I first set foot in America, thinking I’d get to study on the same campus where Einstein once strolled.
Completely unaware that this place was hell.
But today, even my advisor, the very incarnation of the devil, looked like an angel.
An angel? Have I gone mad?
That’s going too far, no matter how you look at it.
I must be seeing things.
Probably because I hadn’t slept in three days.
And yet, the faces of the five committee members shimmered strangely beneath the fluorescent lights.
Ping—.
What? I’m suddenly dizzy.
“What’s wrong, student Kim?”
It felt as if a very thin thread had snapped somewhere inside my head.
Beeeeeeep—
Along with the ringing in my ears, my vision spun around.
My professor’s mouth moved soundlessly, stretching out in slow motion before turning upside down.
‘What is this, a reversal of gravity?’
No, something so unscientific couldn’t happen.
I realized it in an instant.
My head was in free fall.
Could this be the overwork death I’d only ever heard about?
I know that.
But knowing didn’t mean I could stop it.
I’d finally had a chance to become one of the countless ‘Kim et al.’ papers.
Well, at least I’m not as common as ‘Zhang et al.,’ who seem to have written every paper in the world.
It’s unfair. So unfair.
It’s so incredibly unfair.
As my consciousness faded, someone shook me.
“Come on, Dr. Kim, my finest student! Wake up!”
My advisor, huh.
After making my life so miserable all this time…
He finally acknowledges me as a doctor at the very end.
It was awful meeting you. Let’s never meet again.
If I spot you at a conference, you’re a dead man.
And so my first life, that of Dr. Kim Muyeol (almost), came to an end.
Cause of death: sudden death from overwork.
I don’t particularly regret my life.
The papers I wrote will remain like a tiger’s hide, inspiring someone’s research and providing fertile ground for new discoveries.
Isaac Newton once said this, didn’t he?
‘If I have seen farther, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants.’
I’m those very ‘shoulders of giants,’ you see.
No, ‘giant’ is pushing it. I’m just a little taller than average.
Anyway, I lived hard enough to die for it, so I have no regrets.
‘…yeah, right.’
Even if I say that, it all feels so pointless.
I want to live. More than anything.
And I want to live a long, long time—until I’m so old I’m shitting on the walls.
I wanted to enjoy eternal life and study the truths of the universe.
And damn it, I’d never even been in a relationship.
###
“Oh, my, our So-ha. Who did she take after to be this pretty?”
So-ha? Who’s So-ha?
“Ho ho, she looks like a celestial maiden come down from heaven.”
And where am I, and who are you people?
The faces of the man and woman looking down at me were absurdly huge.
‘What is this? Giants? Attack on Titan?’
“Waaah! Waaah!”
I tried to ask, ‘Excuse me, but who are you?’ but, strangely, all that came out was crying.
‘I don’t know whose kid this is, but they sure cry loud.’
But something was strange.
It seemed like the sound was coming from my own mouth.
And with a brain that had shrunk to the size of a bean, I barely managed to figure out what was happening.
The baby who’d been crying so noisily all this time was me.
I had been reincarnated as someone’s child in some household.
I’d become the protagonist of one of those otherworld reincarnation stories I’d only ever heard about.
“Huaaahm, Mama!”
‘It’s wet. This feels awful.’
“She just said ‘Mama’!”
I endured the indignity of wearing a scratchy cloth diaper with no hope of anything resembling padding, and grew up healthy and strong.
As soon as I could walk and talk, I started gathering as much information as possible.
First of all, my name was
Ryu So-ha
.
I wasn’t poor, but I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth, either.
Fortunately, this place wasn’t Paradis Island.
The people here wore clothes you’d only see in historical dramas and lived among buildings in the style of ancient China.
At first, I thought I was in a remote village hidden deep in the mountains of China.
But it didn’t take long to prove that theory spectacularly wrong.
This wasn’t the pale blue dot I knew as Earth.
The way I proved that theory spectacularly wrong was simple.
The acceleration due to gravity was different.
How did I know that?
Obviously, I had no choice but to measure it myself.
The method: a simple pendulum experiment.
In physics, if the string is the same length, the pendulum’s speed depends on gravity.
Stronger gravity means faster; weaker gravity means slower.
The period is proportional to the length and inversely proportional to gravity.
Even a watermelon knows that.
So, if I knew the pendulum’s period, I could work backward to calculate the acceleration due to gravity.
I cut a silk thread to the length of a handspan, tied a heavy jade pendant to the end, and made a simple pendulum.
Since I didn’t have a ruler, I measured its length with my handspan.
Since I didn’t have a stopwatch, I pretended to sit on my father’s lap and act cute, then gripped his wrist tightly to measure his pulse.
Using the average adult male heart rate of 70 beats per minute as a metronome, I approximated the pendulum’s period.
The result was shocking.
Plugging the numbers into the formula gave me an approximate gravitational acceleration of a whopping 13 m/s².
Even allowing for error, that was about 1.3 times Earth’s gravity.
‘It wasn’t because I was a frail little girl that learning to walk was so hard.’
I made my equipment more precise and measured it again.
Just in case, I measured it again, this time involving everyone in the household, from family members to servants.
Unfortunately, the results still fell within the margin of error.
You’re asking if my method of measurement could have been wrong?
But I didn’t want to think that.
If so, the fundamental premise itself would be different.
Because that would mean Newton’s laws of motion themselves were wrong.
In other words, this world wouldn’t be the world I knew.
After conducting that makeshift experiment, I fell ill and lay in bed groaning for a week, unable to swallow a bite of food.
Even the precious white rice and meat side dishes wouldn’t go down.
“Status window… Is there no status window?!”
Reincarnating me without a status window is an obvious violation of the rules!
Still, I quickly pulled myself together.
‘Give up hope of getting back to Earth. I’ll adapt to life here.’
Besides, it wouldn’t be right to show my new parents, who had given birth to this body, nothing but a gloomy daughter.
“Mother, Father! Your daughter is feeling better now.”
“Did you just call me Father? So-ha!”
“You called me Mother! My darling girl, come here.”
Once I accepted my situation, a new possibility opened up.
“That’s it, math! I still have math!”
The language of physics is mathematics.
Even if the physical constants were different, mathematical axioms wouldn’t change anywhere.
It felt as if I still had at least one connection to my original world.
So, both to study and to preserve the memories of my past life, I began writing my own books.
『Set Theory — Author: Ryu So-ha』
『Introduction to Linear Algebra』
『Euclidean Geometry』
This uncivilized world obviously doesn’t have the highbrow system of knowledge known as academic papers, but…
At the very least, formally announcing these facts would cause a huge stir in the world.
Maybe I’d even be summoned to the court of this country, called Zheng, and given a position.
‘No. Let’s not do that.’
History shows that things rarely end well for those who are too far ahead of their time.
At worst, I might be branded a ‘witch’ and executed, like in medieval Europe.
No need to stick my neck out.
It’s best not to do anything that might invite trouble.
So I quietly and steadily built up a library of my own.
‘Am I a guy—or a girl, I guess?’
I felt like the librarian of Alexandria, guarding dangerous knowledge that might one day transform the world.
Maybe that was why.
Whenever I looked at the books that felt like my children, I couldn’t help smiling.
“Heh heh. I have become the guardian of the world’s knowledge! Ha ha ha!”
“Oh my, I think our So-ha has hit puberty.”
“Mom! S-since when have you been there?!”
“Since you started laughing weirdly?”
“I’ve told you so many times to knock!”
“All right, my girl. I’ll knock next time. Knock, knock!”
The English word I’d blurted out without thinking became a catchphrase in our family.
One leisurely day, as I was tidying my room, a dust-covered notebook fell to the floor.
The cover was scrawled with crooked handwriting.
“This is… 『An Introduction to Physics』?”
The book was full of blank pages, and I hesitated even to write a single line.
Maybe, as a physics student, I simply couldn’t bring myself to accept that the entire system of physics had been disproven.
A strange thought suddenly occurred to me.
Could Isaac Newton have been an apostle reincarnated from another world? Someone sent to spread physics throughout uncivilized Europe.
The father of physics.
An apostle of knowledge, sent to open up an uncivilized world.
‘That’s totally me! Eeeeek!’
“Eureka!”
“So-ha, you’re bouncing around like a boy again. What’s ‘Eureka’ supposed to mean?”
I dashed over and threw my arms around Mom.
Now that I was a woman, I found myself talking more naturally.
Was this the ‘small talk’ my female friends had always wanted?
“Mother! I’ve found my dream!”
“Oh my, my beautiful daughter, the prettiest girl in the world. What’s this dream you’re making such a fuss about?”
“I’m going to become a physicist!”
“What is physics?”
“The word mul (物) means ‘things,’ and ri (理) means ‘principles.’ It’s the study of the principles that govern how all things move. I want to explore the truths and laws of the universe.”
Mom’s expression stiffened strangely.
“So, So-ha, you want to… cultivate the Dao?”
“What’s the Dao?”
“Immortal cultivation…”
Mom stroked my head with a worried look on her face.
“But to cultivate immortality, you have to be born with a spiritual root…”
“The Dao? Immortal cultivation? And what’s a spiritual root?”
“Well, you see…”
“What?!”
My world crumbled once again as Mom explained it all that day.
And I finally realized why I’d been reincarnated into this world.
Apparently, there were people here called cultivators, in a truly unscientific world where they could fly through the sky and shoot palm blasts.
And at higher cultivation realms, they could even enjoy eternal life…
My mother would never lie to me, so the information was reliable.
Then why hadn’t anyone told me from the start that this wonderful leveling system existed?!
At the end of my life, I’d made a wish.
I wanted to enjoy eternal life and study the truths of the universe.
It was obvious that God had granted my final wish and tossed me into this world.
I was supposed to cultivate the Dao, advance through the realms, attain eternal life, and uncover the truths of the universe.
And in theory, that was perfectly possible.
Why? Because Earth has something called the ‘infinite monkey theorem.’
It’s a thought experiment: given infinite time and a typewriter, a monkey will eventually produce one of Shakespeare’s plays.
In other words, it was no different from saying that even a foolish monkey like me could complete the unified field theory that had been Einstein’s dream, given infinite time!
I could explore the truths of the universe forever?
That… was the best thing ever!
Still, there was one thing I regretted a little.
If God were omnipotent, wouldn’t it have been better to give Kim Muyeol, the Princeton PhD, the power of eternal life?
‘No. Don’t regret it. I can’t get trapped in the past.’
Regret is an anchor dropped in the past.
A ship clinging to its anchor can never sail out to sea.
Those who try to change the past lose the future.
Only those who accept the past can gain tomorrow.
I should do what I can now.
What I needed to awaken to the Dao was…
“Mother! How do I learn about immortal cultivation? If you don’t know, please find me a teacher right away!”
“So-ha, the world of immortal cultivation isn’t the romantic place you imagine. It’s cruel, with blood flying and bones breaking.”
Mother firmly shook her head.
“You were born with a beauty that could topple kingdoms, so your best option is to marry into a good family and live an ordinary, happy life. I hear some very important guests are coming from far away to see you at your birthday banquet tomorrow.”
Mom meant that the world of immortal cultivation was cruel, so I should just marry into a good family instead.
A groom? Not a chance.
My body may have become a woman, but my mind was still very much a man’s.
I had absolutely no intention of becoming someone’s demure wife.
I resolved to find a cultivator somehow and use my scientific knowledge to embark on the path of immortal cultivation.
In any case, to learn about cultivation, I first had to find a cultivator.
“But it’s not like an immortal’s just going to poof into existence…”
Maybe I could meet one if I threw an axe into the lake?
The whole, ‘Is this your golden axe?’ thing.
That day, I secretly threw an axe into the lake without telling Dad.
Even after waiting half a shichen, nothing happened.
The sun rose the next day, and I had nothing to show for it.
Today was my fourteenth birthday as Ryu So-ha, and it had been a full fourteen years since I came to this world from Earth.
A great feast was being held in the village, with men flocking from every direction like clouds just to admire my beauty.
‘Life as a beauty is exhausting. My face is going to wear out from all this staring.’
I was sitting like a doll, smiling endlessly, when it happened.
The sky split open.
That wasn’t a figure of speech. The clouds literally parted.
Speak of the devil.
A cultivator had arrived.
Everyone prostrated themselves before the man who introduced himself as a Qi Refining cultivator.
Arrogantly, he grabbed my chin roughly and inspected me from side to side as if appraising an object.
“Hmm, your beauty lives up to the rumors. Good.”
I was furious that no one, not even my parents, could stop him from treating me this way.
‘I have to endure it.’
“I’ll take the Ryu family’s daughter as my cauldron.”
At those words, my parents and all the village elders burst into tears.
The men who admired me drew their swords.
I racked my brain to figure out why.
Here, ‘the Ryu family’s daughter’ meant me.
And ‘take’ obviously meant he was going to take me away.
The problem was probably the word ‘cauldron.’
‘Furnace’ meant a furnace, and ‘ding’ meant a tripod.
Taken literally, it just meant a furnace and a tripod…
I still had no idea what it actually meant.
What on earth was a ‘cauldron’ that made everyone react like this?
A little later, a warrior explained what it meant, and I was left in utter shock.
That bastard was going to brainwash me and steal my yin energy.
And that wasn’t all.
After enslaving me and taking something called my innate essence, he’d discard my useless husk.
In simple terms, he was taking me as a disposable human battery.
‘What does this bastard think human life is?’
“What? You want me to be a slave…? And a sex toy, too?! Fuck that.”
“So-ha! Please watch your language and bow your head, So-ha!”
Despite my parents’ tearful pleas, I sprang to my feet.
Then I stared straight into the arrogant cultivator’s eyes as he looked down at me like a bug, bared my teeth, and snarled.
“Hey.”
“Y-you…?”
“Yeah. So what if you’re an immortal? You cultivate the Dao—are you the Matrix or something? You use people as batteries? Aren’t you just a crazy bastard?”
I’d already died once, anyway.
‘He calls himself an immortal? What a joke.’
I didn’t care who he was.
I wouldn’t become a slave.
I’ve had more than enough of that, you know?.
