How to Live as a Masterful Master's Student (2)

“Every professor in this world is a motherless bastard.”

At my regular bar, a place more familiar to me than the neighborhood market, I muttered as I knocked back some beer that tasted like sheep piss.

“No, fuck, you crazy bastard! This is a bar professors come to, too!”

At my heartfelt declaration, my fellow graduate researcher went pale and kicked me under the table.

“Aaaagh!! You bastard!! If you're a scholar too, use your words!!”

“Fuck that. You want me to get beheaded by professors for letting my fellow slave run his mouth?”

It hurt like hell, but that icy stare made my heart ache.

We'd spent three whole years working together and handling all the professors' shit, yet apparently I was still a slave in their eyes.

“That Viking-beating tomboy bastard… Even dead, you'd go to Valhalla instead of Magmel….”

“You really want to die?”

A sharp glare─.

My slave (graduate-student) colleague, who glared irritably at me while happily chugging watered-down Cass, was Dana, my friend with purple, curly hair that stuck out like dog fur.

Technically, that one was a woman, but after three years of slaving away in the same lab, gender became meaningless to a creature called a graduate student. She was just a fellow member of my species with breasts.

Maybe having an actual older sister would feel like this. She was exactly one year older than me, and I didn't see her as a woman, so it was probably roughly the same.

“No, fuck, listen. By the time someone is old enough to become a professor, they're probably pretty old, right? Then their parents would all be long dead, too, right? That's why they live however the hell they want, like they've maxed out their resistance to yo-mama jokes, I'm telling you!”

“I get how you feel, but if you keep running your mouth, I'm getting up.”

“Ah, please. Don't abandon this pitiful master's student who used to be a slave….”

“If you don't want to be abandoned, shut up.”

Dana sighed, shelled a pea-like bean, and flicked the kernel lightly against my forehead. The cheap bar snack bounced off my head and fell onto the table.

I shed tears of sorrow at the sight of the bean plunging toward the floor, just like my degree and career.

“Fuck…. I'm a master's student. I'm a master's student….”

“Get it right. You're a Master's Copper Badge holder.”

“You bitch….”

It had been a week since Professor Yerna, that rotten bitch, completely stole the culmination of my three years of effort.

The navy-haired elf bitch who'd flown off to a university in another country had copied my paper in her own handwriting and submitted it to academia under her own name before leaving.

And that bitch's paper—the one wearing my masterpiece's mask—had sent enormous shock waves through academia.

“Have you seen the paper Professor Gracier submitted this time?”

“Of course I have! I even stayed up all night turning my study upside down for the first time in ages. Good heavens, to think Elunic might not be derived from Runic! Isn't that a revolutionary idea and hypothesis?”

“Exactly! My heart was pounding, too, like it did when I listened to tales of ancient heroes as a child!”

“If this hypothesis is proven, won't this year's Heavenly Wing Badge be hers?”

“Of course! No one will be able to refute it!”

The Heavenly Wing Badge was basically this world's version of the Nobel Prize.

Since this was a different world where the cutting edge of information and communications technology consisted entirely of carrier pigeons and mounted messengers, it didn't have the same impact as a Nobel Prize, but there was no denying it was the greatest honor in archaeology.

“Fuck.”

The more I thought about it, the more unfair it felt. I was so fucking wronged that tears gushed from my eyes like liquid from a turtle egg with its top popped off.

The bitch who stole my paper had been nominated for the Nobel Prize with it? And the thesis I'd hastily cobbled together and submitted had made the examiners say, ‘Well, this is something.’

- The influence of her former advisor, Yerna Gracier, is strong, but it is sufficiently complete for a paper at the level of a college graduate.

- Focus on the quality of the paper rather than techniques for making the writing more elaborate.

- It merely repeats existing research and organization and lacks new creativity.

- For the reasons above, this scholar is hereby awarded the Master's Copper Badge.

- Cynthia Asherad, representative of the Degree Thesis System Directorate.

See that? Look at the way these fucking bastards talk.

What? Whose influence is strong? It looks similar because that elf bitch made the paper out of the materials left after stealing mine, you bastard!

Creativity, my ass. The paper you're all calling fucking amazing is my creativity, and you're accusing it of being derivative?

No wonder these kill-stealing tier whores were so good at pissing people off with a few lines of text.

They made me, Gang Buk-ho, a pure-blooded Korean from the nation of yo-mama jokes, foam at the mouth over a single sheet of A4 paper. Educated bastards really were something else.

“Fuck. This beer tastes fucking~ awful!”

Given how things had turned out, there was nothing strange about me passing out for two straight days from the shock, then skipping a meal and coming out for a drink the moment I woke up.

“Hehe. Life's shit. There's no point in being a good person.”

“…Hey, don't be so pessimistic. The average degree foreign scholars earn through a thesis is a Master's Copper Badge.”

“Are you going to keep saying shit that pisses me off?”

To be honest, I'd originally expected a Master's Silver Badge, too.

Some people might wonder why I was making such a fuss over what amounted to dropping from Silver to Bronze.

But as I said, the people of this other world were all tier whores.

Even among master's degrees, Copper and Silver were treated differently. What, you say there's only one rank between them? By that logic, college graduates and high-school graduates are only one diploma apart. A high-schooler barely reaching Diamond and a pro who made Challenger are only one rank apart, too.

Put simply, it took two years just to move from a Master's Copper Badge to a Master's Silver Badge.

Fuck, what kind of game takes two years to escape Bronze?

Honestly, even the master's degree itself had clearly been tossed at me with the attitude of, ‘I get it, so take this at least and shut up,’ after they saw my glorious list of certifications.

“Ha. Should I just go die?”

I poured the urine-colored beer, which looked like it had been brewed from malnourished millet, into my mouth while cursing the world.

I couldn't even tell anyone that my paper had been plagiarized.

Apparently, it had been fifty years since that Yerna bitch first made a name for herself in academia. Was I supposed to accuse a woman who had spent twice my entire life in archaeology of plagiarism? Me, a foreigner who had once been a slave and had neither a degree nor any achievements?

As if that paper were just any ordinary paper.

My paper was a once-in-a-generation fucking masterpiece that made even the most brilliant scholars twist their bodies and go, ‘Tee-yo-yong!’ It was the kind of masterpiece a twenty-something lab slave simply couldn't have written.

If I claimed such a paper as my own, academia would cast me out as some foreign bastard who didn't know his place and was making a scene.

As a result, the only person I could comfortably complain to about this shit was the purple, dog-fur-haired girl right in front of me.

“You just insulted my hair in your head, didn't you?”

“Caught me.”

Dana, who was painfully perceptive, clicked her tongue and propped her chin on her hand.

“See? Everyone with straight hair needs to die.”

“Oh, I agree. I'll shave my head, so just beat up one straight-haired elf for me.”

“Good grief. You're really in bad shape.”

Dana refilled my glass with beer as if she pitied me. It was only a refill of tasteless booze, but that was probably her way of showing consideration.

“Dana, you're a smart and decent person for a graduate student…!”

“Shut up before I smash this beer mug over your head. …Tsk. I'm paying tonight, so order some fried chicken or something.”

Her tone was gruff. But I was so grateful that she believed me that tears sprang to my eyes.

What if our positions had been reversed?

Suppose I'd earned my doctorate with this paper.

If Dana, who held a Master's Gold Badge, had told me, ‘Yerna stole the paper I was going to use to earn my doctorate!’ would I have believed her?

I probably wouldn't have believed her easily.

I would have just thought, What the hell is she suddenly babbling about?

Yerna's acting had been that good. Even I had never imagined that bitch would run off with my paper.

“Thanks for believing me. If it weren't for you, Dana, I probably would've hanged myself by now.”

“…I'm believing you because I'm afraid you might. Besides, it's true that you wouldn't throw away the paper you worked yourself to death on just to pick an unwinnable fight with Professor Yerna.”

“Sob, sob. I love you, Lady Dana.”

“Don't get cute, you bastard.”

Dana snickered and flicked a pea at me.

***

“So? What are you going to do from here on out?”

It was after we'd happily torn into a fried chicken that was only a notch above a chick and filled our stomachs. Dana tilted her glass and asked me.

“Even with a Master's Copper Badge, you can stay at the university. Well, if you don't have anything else to do, just stay in the archaeology department. You've come this far, so you should get your doctorate. It'd be a waste not to.”

“You bastard, talking like that, you've already become a professor.”

How could the world be so cruel? My slave colleague, who'd been demoted after having her paper stolen, was asking me, ‘How about staying a slave?’

Dana kept her mouth shut for a moment, then snickered.

“I can't be the only one suffering, can I? If you leave, your share of the work will fall on me, too.”

“They'll hire someone new when a person leaves.”

“Where are they going to find someone as capable as you?”

“Don't hold me back while pretending to compliment me.”

“Ah, caught me. Look how perceptive this bastard is.”

“Yeah~ There are plenty of people who can do it even without me~ The lab won't collapse~.”

“Yeah~ The lab will collapse if you leave~ Don't go~.”

We snickered at each other and clinked our glasses.

“Ah, so what are you really going to do?”

“Dunno.”

“If you're staying here, at least help with my paper. I've racked up enough results by now, so I'm thinking of going for a doctorate, too. I'll put your name on the paper. Sounds good, right?”

“Big sis is practically dripping with regret already.”

It was my first time having a woman come on to me so directly.

It ought to have been exciting, but after spending three years going through hell together, I saw her as a comrade-in-arms rather than a woman, which was a strange thing.

That wasn't to say Dana was ugly.

But fuck, we'd spent five days straight sitting at desks staring at nothing but letters or being chased by monsters in ruins while screaming Kiyoyot! There was no way we could develop a sex drive in the middle of that.

The three basic human urges were ranked sleep > food > sex. Even if you were dying from exhaustion, if your dick still responded, you really needed to go to the hospital. Your brain was being controlled by your dick!!

“Actually, I've already decided on my career.”

I set down my glass and told her the plan I'd had from the beginning.

“I'm going to become an adventurer. I'm heading to Sargadis, in the west.”

“…What?! An adventurer?!”

Dana looked as shocked as a student teacher hearing that one of the boys at the high school where she was training planned to attend Ewha Womans University.

“Are you out of your mind?! Why do you suddenly want to become an adventurer?!”

I understood why she was so dumbfounded.

In this world, archaeology occupied roughly the same position as aerospace engineering on Earth. It was a promising, practical field, and it was easy to make a living from it.

That was because this world's history said that the great ancient civilizations had declined due to war or disaster.

Like in an old online game, objects bearing names along the lines of Primitive Ancient in this world were actually more technologically advanced than modern ones. Fuck, this wasn't Diablo.

“Hey, calm down and think about it again! Say you do become an adventurer. Do you think you'll find some artifact in a ruin and rise to the top as an adventurer or something?!”

“No, not really….”

Anyway, there was a gap between the ruined ‘Ancient Civilizations’ and the modern era that was almost impossible to comprehend. The ‘artifacts’ Dana was talking about were one example.

That gap was so vast that, to exaggerate a little, even if a time machine were developed five hundred years from now and we went back into the past, a ship could still be shot down by a chipped-stone spear thrown by some ooga-booga primitive.

Anyone perceptive enough probably already understood why archaeology was so respected in this world.

Archaeology was the industry that deciphered the languages of ancient civilizations, uncovered their history, and recovered things called artifacts and OOPArts.

In other words, this world's archaeology was a kind of space industry. It was especially similar in that the technology and military strength of nations could be enhanced through the byproducts of research.

The state actually kept a close eye on it and sometimes funded research.

But a friend capable of rivaling current professors in that industry had suddenly announced that she was quitting her job and going out to the sticks to start a business. If I didn't try to stop her, I wouldn't be much of a friend.

“Working directly in the field is faster when it comes to producing results. If you just apply, academia will even issue you a field-archaeologist certification.”

“No, even so….”

A field archaeologist was, in other words, an archaeologist who ‘did the work with their body.’

Generally, professional archaeologists were divided into three types.

State-contracted researchers who usually conducted their own research but were dispatched when the government discovered a ruin.

Independent researchers who hired people to explore ruins or remote areas and then studied the results those people brought back.

And field explorers who personally explored ruins while smashing monster skulls like fucking macho maniacs.

Having been steeped in machismo in this other world, my goal for the future was to become a field-exploration-track archaeologist, or simply a ‘field archaeologist.’

“That's a different path. Those people are adventurers first and earn archaeology degrees afterward, whereas you're obviously a scholar at heart! No matter how badly you botched your degree, why would you suddenly….”

Dana stopped speaking and suddenly looked shocked, as if she had realized something.

“No, wait. You didn't submit your thesis this year without spending another year preparing because you wanted to become an adventurer, did you?!”

“Yep.”

“…Wow. I knew you were crazy, but I didn't realize you were this crazy.”

Dana collapsed into her seat as if her soul had left her body.

That's right. I hadn't thrown away my thesis because my mental state had fallen apart.

I'd simply gotten my degree out of the way with a college-graduate-level paper so I could become a fully certified archaeologist as soon as possible.

I'd stayed at this university from the beginning so I could become a fucking incredible intellectual adventurer!