How to Live as a Masterful Master's Student (1)

“Nord. Nord. Wake up. It's already morning.”

Three years into my life as a slave in another world.

At last, about half a year after paying off all my debt and becoming a new man, I woke to the voice calling my name.

The sensation of a fountain pen with its cap on poking my cheek. The woman's voice ringing beside my ear was a familiar one.

‘Fuck. I'm screwed. That's my advisor's voice.’

I'd been caught sleeping my ass off in the lab, so I was about to get my ass kicked. Feeling my sleep vanish in an instant like a neighborhood dog kicked in the ass, I hurriedly got up.

“Gwaaah!! Professor Yerna!!”

“What's with the ‘gwaaah’? Anyone would think I was bullying you.”

The beautiful woman scolded me, sounding displeased. No matter how often I saw her, she didn't look several times older than me. Seriously, elves had age fraud as a passive racial skill.

“Ah, I'm sorry, Professor. I still have some slave-era habits.”

“You need to get a grip. You're a research student now, too.”

“Yes, I should.”

Senior research student in Carmine University's Department of Archaeology. That was my current title.

Isn't that fucking amazing? I, a mere slave bastard, had managed to get on a super-elite track in this highly illiterate other world, no less impressive than the one I'd have had on Earth.

“Ahem. Anyway, good morning. You got to work early.”

“Yeah. I have to prepare for my transfer, too.”

The navy-haired elf smiled back at me as I awkwardly greeted her.

Her robe, resembling a camisole with thick lining, plunged deeply at the chest. Her graceful figure, dressed in a long-skirted robe with a shoulder piece thrown over it, was downright violent to a brain that had just woken up.

This elf, whose looks were fucking incredible no matter how often I saw her, was Yerna Gracier, my former master and current advisor.

But that title of advisor wouldn't last much longer. Soon, I too would earn a proper degree—not as good as hers, perhaps, but a proper one all the same.

More importantly, she herself would be leaving the university soon. Her contract with Carmine University was ending.

“I still can't believe Professor Yerna is going to another university.”

“Neither can I. I've only spent fifteen years at Carmine University.”

Wow, fuck. As you'd expect of an elf, her units of time existed on a whole other dimension.

The three years I'd spent here had felt fucking long, but to her, even fifteen years seemed to have passed in a blink. They said elves lived far longer than humans, so by my standards it probably felt like she'd spent two or three years here.

“I hear your successor as advisor has already been chosen.”

“Yeah. They'd been looking since last year, and apparently found someone recently.”

“They hired someone capable enough to take over for you, Professor? That couldn't have been easy. I suppose our university's scouting ability is even better than I thought.”

“You. We're not going to see each other much longer, so why flatter me to my face?”

“I mean it.”

Though Yerna was a long-lived elf, her five-year contract wouldn't have been renewed three times if she hadn't produced results.

The university had allowed her to stay here for fifteen years because she was capable and kept delivering results.

Of course, what I'd just said had been half flattery, but nothing was easier than flattery based on facts.

The art of running my mouth and kissing my superior's ass was nothing to me after spending two years in the Korean military.

Even if we wouldn't be seeing each other anymore, Yerna was a famous figure in this field. I might need her help again someday, so tossing her a few flattering words was no trouble.

Even high-school punks know to offer their homeroom teacher a kind word when they're transferred. Would it be any use for a former slave at the ripe old age of twenty-five to be unable to butter up his advisor a little?

“So? Is this the paper you're submitting to academia this time?”

“Yes. It's a masterpiece I was able to create thanks to the knowledge I gained under you, Professor. You could practically call it your paper.”

What Yerna was pointing at was the paper I'd completed after pulling all-nighters for the past several days.

There was still a week left before the submission deadline, but in this field, even if your mouth were torn open, you couldn't call a mere week “plenty of time.”

If I missed this opportunity, I'd have to wait until next year for another one. That was why I'd had to rush to finish it, even while coughing up fucking blood from my nose.

“A masterpiece? That's some confidence.”

“I also have several certifications besides the paper. If things go well, I might even earn a doctorate right away.”

It had already been half a year since my liberation from slavery.

Thanks to my translation ability, I had also earned a pile of language certifications. And while helping Yerna over the past three years, I'd picked up enough knowledge to earn some archaeology-related certifications too.

But if that was all I had, my achievement amounted to little more than a middle-school graduate passing the equivalency exam and earning seven language certifications.

It was impressive, sure, but my résumé elicited a long “hmm” if I wanted to enter academia in earnest. I was planning to go into archaeology, not linguistics.

In this world, degrees were awarded not by universities but by the overarching academic body for each field.

Researchers who built up a record of achievement earned degrees as doctors in their field, not doctors of a university. In that sense, I still hadn't officially been awarded a degree by the archaeological community.

‘For now, I'm still just a grad student.’

You could tell from the fact that I was a research “student,” not a researcher.

No, fuck it—put more bluntly, I didn't even have a college diploma, so I wasn't merely less than a grad student; I was worse than an intern at a small or midsize company. I could practically see grad students on that faraway Earth getting worked up and yelling, “You think we're a fucking joke?!”

Three years of career experience accumulated as a slave? None of that counted.

‘What professor would put a slave's name on his paper?’

Professors were the kind of creatures who made a show of adding the graduate students they worked to death every day to their papers.

Free translation slave Nord wouldn't be included as a first author or coauthor, let alone in ‘everyone else who helped me write this paper.’

But there was exactly one way for me to earn a doctorate right away.

“It's the thesis that will determine my standing in academia, so I can't write it carelessly.”

The thesis-based degree system.

This was, in a way, a sort of rural special-admissions program, but it was a method available only to foreigners like me.

At Carmine University, foreigners could undergo degree review based solely on certifications and papers. You could think of it as a system giving foreigners a chance to have their degrees recognized in this cultural sphere.

If you compared it to university admissions, it was like a special-admissions route using a foreign-language essay instead of regular or early admission.

Or you could call it an unconventional method, like a transfer exam.

If I proved sufficient ability here, I could earn anything from a bachelor's degree at minimum to a doctorate at maximum. Almost no one had ever earned a doctorate in one shot, but I might be able to do it.

Because I had a shitload of language certifications, and the paper I was preparing was shaping up to be fucking amazing.

“Hmm~ Even without any completed formal education on record, Nord should be able to earn about a master's degree based on his certifications alone.”

Yerna acknowledged that, knowing my qualifications.

My publicly known qualifications at Carmine University were the ability to speak seven languages and an advanced archaeology certification.

Most of my certifications were thanks to my translation ability, but they still weren't an ordinary research student's qualifications.

In particular, two of my language certifications were in Runic and Elunic, languages that even wizards and archaeologists claimed they could spend their entire lives studying and still not master. They were fields substantial enough to have their own specialized departments.

To outsiders, I probably looked like a genius who had achieved results comparable to professors who had studied for decades, despite being only twenty-five.

In reality, the university's prevailing opinion was that I was probably some bookish nerd who knew nothing about the world, got baited by a broker, entered illegally, and ended up a slave.

“But wouldn't a doctorate be a little difficult?”

“Well, yes, it would. Honestly, I'm not even aiming for a doctorate. I'd be satisfied with just a master's silver badge.”

A master's silver badge was a sort of tier.

It was as if the ghost of some gamer who'd died while grinding ranked games had possessed this other world; everyone here fucking loved sorting people into tiers.

As if scholars weren't bad enough for attaching ranks to degrees, even the common adventurers went around making a goddamn fuss about bronze, silver, gold, mithril, and adamantium.

If I taught these people online gaming, they'd spend a week after every patch chattering about how the tiers for each class had changed. And in the end, they'd probably make damage charts among themselves and painstakingly classify everything from Tier 1 to Tier 10.

This state of affairs extended to professors' seniority bullshit and seniority pride.

Slaves went without saying, but even I, now a research student, was forbidden to dare interrupt ordinary professors while they engaged in high-formality discussions.

It was the same even when the subject was something trivial like “Isn't lunch bad today?” Fuck, I didn't understand why they got angry when they were the ones who'd asked me a question and I asked if I could leave.

The academic hazing practiced by people who'd done a bit of studying didn't end there.

For example, even if these bastards had a typo in their paper, I wasn't allowed to point it out. Their fucking moronic logic was: How dare some bastard without even a doctorate find fault with a professor's paper?

So what did I do? I had to quietly correct the typo without saying a word to the professor.

‘Fuck, but this primitive-ass other world doesn't have Word or Hancom.’

Papers here were all just scraps of paper written in ink.

There was no making a backup like a computer file, deleting just the typo, typing a few keystrokes, and calling it done.

If there was a typo on one page of a paper, I had to copy the entire page and then correct only the part with the typo.

And if the handwriting didn't suit the professor's tastes after I corrected it? I'd be summoned in the middle of the night while sleeping like a baby and get my ass chewed out.

Fortunately, Yerna didn't have that kind of sadistic hobby. If I'd spent three years like that under the other professors, I'd have stabbed those bastards in the gut long ago and been hanged for it.

Anyway, I'd gone off on a tangent. But these hardcore gamers obsessed with seniority flexing and status differences weren't about to hand me a high-level degree easily.

‘Even on Earth, transfers were usually more demanding than regular admissions.’

This thesis-degree system was, of course, much more difficult than earning an ordinary degree.

The examiners reading my paper would probably be as strict as a battalion commander who'd been dumped by his girlfriend two days earlier judging a military-discipline competition. Even if I submitted a Nobel Prize–level paper, they'd find something to nitpick 100 percent of the time.

So I wasn't expecting much either, and planned to submit it satisfied with earning only a master's silver badge.

“May I read it?”

“Yes, of course. Shall I make you a cup of tea?”

“Oh, would you? Thank you.”

Look at that. She actually thanked me.

What superior thanks a subordinate for making coffee? I couldn't count how many times I'd thought how lucky I was that Yerna had bought me. This woman really was my goddess.

I went to make tea, happy as could be.

But why did even this somehow feel like slave mentality?

“Hmm? Was this an archaeology paper?”

“Huh? Oh, yes.”

Had I not mentioned what the paper was about? Fuck, if I said I'd simply forgotten to tell her here, it would look like my score was about to get docked.

Dune 3000%, full power! Hold on, my brain!

“You were busy preparing for your transfer, Professor, and I didn't want to add to your workload for no reason. I could manage well enough on my own.”

“Heehee. Is that so?”

Luckily, a fairly convincing excuse came to me.

Fortunately, Yerna didn't seem upset. My improvisation had been a huge success.

“Since you never asked me anything, I figured you were going to submit a paper on linguistics. That field is one where I'd have to learn from you instead.”

“Hehe. Working under you made me more interested in archaeology, too. Runic and Elunic are… kind of difficult, though.”

At first, I'd considered earning my degree in that field too.

Runic and its variant, Elunic, were languages closely related to magic. Magical grad student Nord. Now that's fucking cool!

But if I had to put it simply, Runic and Elunic were like programming languages.

In other words, I was a computer illiterate who couldn't even turn on a computer but knew how to code. If I wanted to make a living as a Runic or Elunic scholar, I'd have to learn a lot, starting with magic itself. It would cost a lot of money, too.

‘I'm not going to settle down here for the rest of my life.’

I had to establish a base of operations and someday find a way back home, so I didn't want to waste time on something pointless.

Fortunately, there were plenty of ruins and dungeons in this world, so archaeology, which studied the past, had a strong position.

Other-world archaeology was a field with bright prospects. If I put my three years of experience as a grad-school slave to use, I could establish myself quickly.

“Somehow, today ended up being the first time I've shown it to you. I had the framework all laid out more than a month ago.”

I made two cups of tea and went over to Yerna. When I got there, she was silently reading my paper.

“So, what do you think? My paper?”

“Uh, y-yes?”

Yerna, who had been staring at the pages as if her eyes might fall out, belatedly looked up at my question.

“Oh, yes. Right. It seems fine. You worked hard on it, didn't you?”

“It's the paper that will determine my degree.”

It was basically this world's version of a placement test, so I couldn't just scribble something sloppy and call it done.

I had to start at Platinum from the moment the game began, just like fucking Faker, if I wanted to become a great elite who made a name for himself at a young age.

There was nothing wrong with gaining something through hard work. I just wanted to avoid the absurdity of failing to achieve results despite having the ability.

“…Yes. It's a good paper, just as I expected.”

Yerna stared at my paper for quite a while longer before setting it down.

“So, if you're okay with it, Nord, would you like me to help edit it?”

“Huh? Really?”

It was an offer I'd never dared hope for. I could have my paper corrected by someone whose years of professorial experience exceeded my entire life?

That was supposedly what an advisor did, but perhaps because my slave mentality had been ingrained in me, it was something I hadn't even dreamed of.

“Of course. You put my name on a paper this good as the first author, so I can't very well not lift a finger, can I?”

No, fuck, what graduate student doesn't put their advisor's name on their paper?

That would be even crazier than a rookie director deleting all the sponsors' names from a movie's credits and displaying only his own.

“I'd be grateful. If I've put your name on it, submitting a low-quality paper would reflect poorly on you too.”

“No. You really did a good job. A well-studied kid really is different.”

Yerna smiled brightly and rose from her seat.

“Then I'll grab a few reference books from my study.”

“Ah, let me help.”

“It's fine. They aren't very heavy. I'll be back soon, so wait here.”

And so we spent our time proofreading and revising the nearly completed paper.

We added source material to reinforce the arguments that were already in place. Yerna even asked another graduate student who came in to work to pack up her belongings for her, just so she could help revise my paper.

But after spending hours doing this shit with paper and pen in a world without even a typewriter, I quickly grew sleepy.

“……Snnnnrk. Zzzzzzz….”

Before I knew it, half my soul had escaped, and I was drooling while sitting upright. Dobby is free now. I'm off to dreamland.

“Hehe. Sleepy?”

“…Ahem, I'm fine. Sorry for falling asleep.”

“No, you can close your eyes for a little while. Come to think of it, I woke you up and made you work. No wonder you're sleepy.”

Yerna said that and stood up. She returned from the kitchen at the back of the lab carrying two teacups.

I wondered what she'd brought in a world without even caffeinated tea, but the teacups held warm milk.

“Drink this, at least, and get some rest. There are still several days before you have to submit it, anyway. When you're tired, you make more typos, which only creates more work.”

“I suppose you're right.”

She was right. Even one typo meant the entire page had to be redone. When my brain wasn't working properly, it was faster to sleep and do it after waking up.

“All right. I'll take a quick nap and get back up.”

“You can sleep as deeply as you like.”

With Yerna smiling brightly at me, I drank the warm milk. As it went down my throat, my body slowly relaxed.

I must really have been tired. I hadn't even drunk half of it, but my eyelids were already drooping like a pair of balls in summer.

“Wow. This stuff works really… fast…….”

After I set down the teacup, my consciousness quickly sank into sleep.

Through my closing eyes, I caught a glimpse of Yerna wearing a smile that was somehow different from usual.

***

I woke to the sound of birds chirping like fucking mad.

“Tweet tweet! (Sex!)”

“Tweet tweet! (Sex!)”

This fucking goddamn translation ability.

I still hadn't gotten used to those flying sex parrots making a racket every morning. There was no need for it to translate animal speech too.

“Good morning, you fucking lab.”

I got up from the sofa and stretched.

Judging by the sun already high in the sky outside the window, good morning had probably long since passed, but since I'd just woken up, it was morning now.

Besides, how long had it been since I'd slept this soundly? Even after being freed from slavery, I'd been tormented by certifications and my thesis, sleeping and waking like someone flipping off a computer's power strip.

“You're up?”

“Yeah. Slept fucking great.”

I returned the greeting to my nearby lab slave… no, fellow research student, and got to my feet.

But Yerna, who had been beside me until I fell asleep, was nowhere to be seen. Rubbing my eyes, I asked my slave buddy.

“Hey, where'd the professor go?”

“What are you talking about? She left for her new post this morning.”

“What? Without even saying goodbye to me?”

I was surprised, and secretly hurt too. Even so, we'd spent three years eating from the same pot (not a typo), and she'd just left without saying goodbye to me!

“Huh? Professor said she'd said goodbye to you last night.”

“…What did you say?”

Fuck?

It was the instant I heard my fellow research student's answer. An indescribable foreboding climbed up my back without warning.

This was it.

That feeling you get when you oversleep on a day you have to go to work.

That uniquely fucked feeling where the sunlight shining through the window and the chirping birds give you the instinctive realization, ‘I'm screwed,’ and the sensation shoots through your body.

I looked at the table. The neatly tidied table had not a speck of dust or a single sheet of paper on it.

─Cold sweat broke out down my back.

“…M-my paper. Fuck, where's my paper?”

“Why are you suddenly asking about a paper? Are you still half asleep?”

Ignoring my frowning colleague, I searched around. There was no paper on my desk, nor in its drawers.

“Hey! What are you doing?!”

Ignoring their shrill protests, I rummaged through the drawer Yerna had used.

My paper was nowhere to be seen there either.

My paper was nowhere to be found in this lab─not anywhere.

“…Wha?”

I realized it with a clear head, not a trace of sleepiness remaining.

Yerna had run off with my paper.