Chapter 0
Since I was little, my dream was to become a veterinarian.
Not the kind of veterinarian whose job is to shove a condom-covered arm into the pussy of a cow the size of a house or cut a calf's umbilical cord with butcher's shears, but the kind who treats dogs and cats at a neighborhood animal clinic.
By the time I was in high school, I'd already steeled myself to become a graduate student.
It would be fair to say that I'd accepted a future of being forced to work for passion instead of pay as a veterinary graduate student. In 2013, I was a nineteen-year-old high school punk ready to voluntarily enter the graduate school everyone else avoided and become a professor's slave and the lab's Dobby.
I got into a fairly decent university, completed about two years of classes, took a leave of absence, and even went off to the army.
My plan was to spend a few more years, graduate, and then embrace ‘Re: Graduate School Life: Starting My Master's and Doctoral Life’ with an attitude of accepting death.
“…What the hell?”
That is, until I got shitfaced while drinking on the day of my discharge and wound up in some other world.
***
My first day in another world.
Even when I came to in a broad meadow, I thought all of it was just a nightmare.
It was a disjointed dream, but I figured there was nothing strange about me having a dream like this now. I'd barely returned from the other world called the military, and it looked like I was about to be dragged into another other world called graduate school.
It wasn't until about half a day later, when night fell, that I truly began to grasp the problem.
My stomach kept growling, the weather was getting cold, and this horrible reality came crashing down on me without any sign that I was going to wake from the dream.
“Fuck. So it wasn't a dream or bullshit after all.”
After spending the night in the dark, I gave up denying reality.
From then on, it was a journey of wandering around the meadow. After several days of twists and turns, I barely managed to reach a city, and the real difficulty of my survival story in another world began there.
“Hmm. A traveler, huh? Very well. Present your identification.”
“…Identification?”
“Indeed. You would have received it if you had gone through the official entry procedures.”
There was no convenient system where I could just scribble down my name and breeze through.
When the guard demanded my identification, I immediately realized I was an illegal immigrant. It was only natural that I tried to flee before things got worse.
“Oh, I'm sorry! I forgot and left my ID at home! I'll come back another time!”
“Arrest him.”
“Yes, sir.”
“No, fuck—ow! Wait! Aaaagh!! Why are you hitting me?!!”
And it was only natural that I wound up thrown in jail in less than ten fucking minutes.
“The twenty-three defendants are hereby sentenced to three years of slavery for illegal immigration.”
Just days after my arrest, the white judge rounded up a bunch of grimy illegal entrants in the same situation as me and reduced us to slaves. Fuck, isn't this racial discrimination?
Thus, after having everything stripped from me, right down to my brand-new 98,000-won underwear, I was sent off to the slave market wearing nothing but a scrap of cloth.
“Mister merchant, I'm cold.”
“So am I.”
You bastard, don't sympathize with me—give me some clothes.
What a fucking bald-headed slave merchant bastard. At least I wasn't naked, meaning they had a bare minimum of human rights, but being left half-naked by the roadside was hardly a pleasant experience.
When a young noblewoman passing by even glanced at me and snickered, I suffered a suicidal impulse I hadn't even felt when my junior came out for guard duty carrying a cellphone.
That went on for nearly a month. The state-run slave market was held over the course of a month.
Though it took less than a week for me to fail to find an owner and be classified as dead stock.
“Hmm…. This isn't a particularly sturdy-looking slave.”
“Yes! But once you put him to work, he'll work as hard as an ox!”
“Like an ox? Hah, what's a man without a single callus on his hands going to do?”
I hadn't been out of the army long, but I'd been skinny by nature from birth. That was probably why I didn't look particularly useful as a slave by the standards of this other world.
As a result, I still hadn't found an owner even two days before the market ended.
Just as I was growing dizzy at the thought that I might be used as a mine slave or arrow fodder on a battlefield if things continued this way,
a group of scholars appeared at the shop where I was being held.
“We're looking for a slave to use as an errand boy. Got anyone suitable?”
She was a woman with a short navy-blue bob and ears as long as an elf's.
No, not “as long as an elf's”—she was simply an elf. That was when I first learned that this other world was a real, bona fide, fucking fantasy world.
The mixed-gender group of four, led by that elf woman, chatted at length with the slave merchant who came rushing over before finally walking to the cage I was locked in.
“Cheap. Two silver? He doesn't have some defect, does he?”
“Absolutely not! Even if he is built like that, he understands speech perfectly and doesn't have a single minor ailment!”
I wanted to ask what he meant by “built like that,” but I kept quiet. If I failed to find an owner this time too, my life might really be ruined.
“Hmm. If he understands speech, he should be able to handle simple errands. …What do you all think?”
“Being skinny means he'll eat less. It's not as if we're putting him to hard labor, so wouldn't he do?”
“I'm against it. He's far too skinny. He looks like he couldn't even carry luggage properly.”
“He's tall, so wouldn't he improve if we fed him well? They say the hunting peoples of the distant East have towering physiques.”
After whispering among themselves for quite a while, they bought me for the going price of two silver—roughly two million won by my reckoning, a bargain.
“I'm Yerna, an archaeologist. And you?”
“I'm Gang Bukho, from the New Continent.”
Apparently, the New Continent was a place crawling with people with yellow skin like me who had founded a country called ‘Kitai.’ As a result, I was naturally treated as an illegal immigrant from there.
“Hehe. Your name is ‘Gang Buko’? What a strange name.”
The elf Yerna burst into a delighted giggle when she heard my name.
More precisely, it was ‘Gang Bukho (姜北互)’, but my experience over the past month had taught me well enough that there was no point explaining it.
”You may call me whatever you like. It must be hard for you to pronounce, after all.“
“Really? Then I'll give you a new one. What does your name mean?”
“My surname means strength, and my given name roughly means north.”
My given name, Bukho (北互), means getting along with the north.
Yes, that north. The communist dictatorship ruled by the morbidly obese missile pig who applauds while looking down.
My paternal grandfather had been separated from his family by the division of North and South, so my parents apparently gave me that name hoping reunification would come by my generation. I never liked it much, so I only told her it meant north.
“I see. Since you'll only be using it while you're a slave anyway, there's no need for a surname… All right.”
The navy-haired elf smiled sweetly as she put a collar around my neck.
“From now on, your name is ‘Nord.’”
That was the beginning of my three years of slavery.
***
I had been sold as a chore slave at rock-bottom price, but fortunately, the period I spent wearing myself out doing manual labor was not long.
There was a reason for that. Just as protagonists in other-world stories are usually given some kind of language-translation ability, I too had been able to understand the language of this world from the beginning.
This automatic translation ability was a ridiculously fucking overpowered OP skill.
Even in this other world where God had created humanity, unifying all languages had been impossible. Here, too, every country and race used a different language, and that state of affairs became an enormous opportunity for a slave like me.
How many kinds of languages were there even on Earth? The language barrier in this other world was fucking sky-high too.
But the Papago translator in my head could smash through that language barrier ridiculously easily, like kids smashing a sandcastle in a playground.
“I'd be an idiot if I let this awesome ability go to waste.”
I immediately demonstrated my ability to the people around me. Once the professors at Carmine University learned that I was a fucking capable polyglot who spoke seven languages, they promoted me to an office-work slave.
“This guy's good at his job.”
“Hehe. Thank you very much.”
“Good heavens. You translated a twenty-page Romanian history book in full in one week? Say, wouldn't you like to be our department's slave for life?”
“Why are you cursing me for working hard?”
It didn't take long to prove my usefulness. Thanks to that, the errand boy Yerna and her group had originally been looking for was assigned to another slave they bought six months later.
And that's where the fucking trouble began.
“Are you the archaeology department's slave? Good, you came. Here's part of an edition. Translate it into Britannian and put it on my desk by next week.”
“Yes!”
“I've heard the rumors. They say you're quite capable. But I don't believe anything I haven't seen with my own eyes. Fully translate the edition I'm submitting to the academy this time, along with the thirty-page map associated with it, and bring it to me by the end of this month.”
“Huh? Yes.”
“Hey, you. This is my paper. Go to the library, attach ten supporting documents and ten reference books that fit it, and proofread the spelling, too.”
“…Yes.”
“You there. Put my elephant in the refrigerator for me.”
“Yes?”
“Ah, I misspoke. Park my elephant, then sort and label the ingredients and specimens I brought with it and store them in the restaurant refrigerator and my laboratory freezer, respectively. By lunchtime today.”
“…Yes.”
“What are you waiting for? Get moving.”
“…………Yes.”
What's the use of being fucking competent when I'm a slave?
Slave! Competence! Free!
Hit with a triple debuff, I became Free Translation Machine No. 1, like the coffee machine at the entrance of a Korean barbecue joint that everyone gets to use at least once. This Oriental does it for free!
“Fuck, I'm a grad student.”
It pissed me off, but that was reality.
Somehow, I'd become the lab slave of translation-obsessed, motherfucking professors.
And my outstanding translation ability, rivaling that of current professors, along with the broad title of “university-affiliated slave,” turned me into a translation slave passed around among a dozen or so professors.
“Wow, what the fuck kind of country is this?”
I had come out about my ability to make things easier, only to end up with more work than during my chore-slave days.
Back then, I only had to move things around, clean, and occasionally run errands; the rest of my time was free!!
“When I get back to Earth, I'm dropping out of university, working part-time at a convenience store, and then dying. If I ever go to graduate school again, I'm not human.”
It was a full three years, with all the joking aside, every bit as fucking brutal as military service. I had been an artilleryman, yet it was bad enough to make me regret cursing the administrative soldiers for having it easy.
Still, enduring all that fucking bullshit—and all those ridiculous side rolls and somersault kicks—had been worth it.
When my three years of service ended and I was freed, I was granted the right to remain in this country because the professors gave me a researcher position.
“Have you decided what you'll do once you gain free-citizen status? Finding a job has been difficult lately, and getting residency isn't easy either.”
Why did it remind me of our company first sergeant asking whether I wanted to sign on as a short-term sergeant because I was good at my job?
I still vividly remember Yerna recommending that I obtain researcher status.
Looking back now, it was the same sort of kindness professors use to bait graduate students into pursuing master's and doctoral programs.
“Even if it won't go on your résumé, you've spent three years here. Wouldn't it be a waste to throw all of that away? We'll pay you, too, so why not work hard for a few years, get your qualifications, and even become a professor?”
“Uh… What if I don't?”
“Then you'll have to return home. I can at least give you enough for the fare.”
Fare, my ass. Do you have a dimensional warp ship at your house, Professor?
It was obvious that even if I were kicked out of here, I wouldn't be able to return to my homeland, South Korea.
So, reluctantly, I decided to put down roots at the university.
It wasn't a decision that would cost me much. Either way, I'd need a certain amount of power and money to investigate and prepare various things to get home.
It was better than starting from scratch.
So I decided to obtain a suitable degree and position at this internationally renowned institution, Carmine University.
“I'll do it. I'll become a research student.”
“Really? Good thinking!”
Even as I watched Yerna smile like she'd just landed a sucker, I didn't particularly regret it.
After all, I'd gained plenty of know-how and material for papers over the previous three years. I figured it wouldn't take all that long to achieve suitable results.
─But fuck.
Looking back now, it was the dumbest decision of my entire life.