9th Grade Civil Servant In Another World Chapter 127 - Johann (1)

The boy gazed out at the night sea.

The black waves that lapped against the bow swallowed up a body dressed in equally black clothing.

The body that had been sucked into the water swayed this way and that, gradually drifting farther from the ship.

“Haha, hahahaha!”

The boy’s refreshing laughter echoed between the waves.

Lying sprawled on the deck, he gazed up at the twinkling stars in the sky and laughed until his lungs might burst.

Feeling the fierce, refreshing wind, the stiff identification papers clutched tightly in his fist, and the texture of the shabby clothes he wore, he laughed like a madman.

***

He originally never smiled.

From a very young age, he had grown accustomed to being expressionless, to the point where adults found it strange.

“Come on, try smiling.”

A neighbor lady had once forcibly pulled at his cheeks.

“Such a pretty child, but he never smiles at all.”

Wondering if something might be wrong with him, listening to adults openly whispering about him, the boy would stand in front of a mirror practicing how to smile.

The result was always some kind of twisted, eerie sneer.

‘Idiots. What’s there to be so happy about?’

The boy couldn’t understand people who laughed often.

There was nothing to laugh about in this world.

That’s what he thought.

1870. The waves of republican revolution swept over Schufaben.

In the midst of terrible hell, the boy’s mother survived and barely managed to give birth. Then, a few years later, she died from a robber’s blade.

Would she have lived if she’d gotten to a hospital right away? Would it have been better than being left in an alley, screaming until all the blood drained from her body?

The boy felt neither sad nor empty. Back then, that was an ordinary death. Neither particularly unfortunate nor happy.

The boy’s father was cold and selfish, but his appearance alone was exceptionally striking, and he soon seduced a new woman.

His stepmother was a passionate person, unlike his father. She couldn’t be called a beauty even as flattery, but she was a lovely person with sparkling eyes.

Too good for a man like his father. And a fool who had been deceived by a man who was only flashy on the surface.

Despite being a rich man’s daughter, she was foolish enough to throw herself into revolution, swept up by absurd ideologies.

However, thanks to that stepmother’s naivety, the boy was able to leave the chaotic capital Lüdelheim and grow up in comfort in a quiet rural village.

Of course, he wasn’t happy.

The couple, opposite in both appearance and temperament, soon began to clash.

Fighting viciously in the elegant corridors became frequent.

His stepmother, embracing the boy with a face flushed red, would pour out curses, while his father would smile coldly and sneer.

The boy was more on his father’s side. His stepmother’s shouting hurt his ears too much.

‘I wish she’d just shut up.’

As the boy grew a little older, he would sneak out of the mansion every day to avoid his parents. The outside world wasn’t a happy place either, though.

The aftermath of revolution was severe.

As payment for killing nobles and landowners, the economy collapsed and paupers multiplied, while the incompetent revolutionary government offered only radical policies after sluggish debates, only fueling more chaos.

When the boy was about nine years old, an unprecedented famine swept through Schufaben.

The revolutionary government had forcibly introduced experimental new farming methods, ruining the harvest.

The villagers wiped out all the animals in the fields and ate every blade of grass they could find.

Still, many couldn’t endure the poverty and left the village. Among those who remained, deaths from starvation continued.

One morning, the villagers came flocking to the front of the mansion where the boy lived and shouted.

“Please save us!”

“Please, please give us bread!”

“Madam, the baby is starving!”

But the firmly closed gates of the mansion never opened.

By then, the boy’s stepmother had become hysterical, disillusioned with revolution, and his father was utterly indifferent to others’ suffering.

And the boy…

‘They’d be better off stealing than wasting time like that.’

He simply sat in a plush armchair reading a book.

However, when the people’s voices finally grew loud enough to shake the windows, he couldn’t bear it any longer and jumped to his feet.

He secretly gathered bread and fruit from the kitchen and quietly opened the back door.

“Give us food!”

“You swore revolution was good! Take responsibility!”

The boy circled around the garden and approached the people who were shouting loudly.

“……”

He slipped into the midst of the people screaming their throats raw and held out a basket of food. For a moment, silence descended among the people who froze stupidly.

And suddenly, one man shoved the old man next to him and rushed at the boy.

“This is mine!”

The area in front of the mansion instantly turned into chaos.

“Waaaaah!”

“Get away!”

“You planning to hog it all yourself?!”

The boy was knocked backward and dropped the basket, and dozens of people swarmed over the dirt-covered bread and bruised fruit in a fierce struggle.

The boy watched carefully.

The adults’ bloodshot eyes and greedy expressions.

‘Rather than fighting and tearing each other apart for one measly rye loaf, they’d be less hungry just staying still.’

Just then, a piercing scream erupted right next to him.

“Aaaahhh!”

A man fighting over bread had stabbed his neighbor’s eye.

The man who had been looking at his bleeding neighbor picked up the bread that had fallen to the ground and quickly ran away.

“I see.”

The boy muttered.

So hungry, angry humans can do anything. They can commit such cruel and stupid acts without a second thought.

“Young master!”

The butler, who had belatedly grasped the situation, came out and cried in horror.

The butler lifted him up and ran to the mansion. Despite the rain of resentment from the people, he heartlessly locked the back door.

“You must never do such dangerous things again!”

The boy let the scolding from the pale-faced butler go in one ear and out the other.

The next day, and the day after that, he repeated secretly taking food and distributing it to people.

Eventually his father caught him and slapped his face, but he didn’t give in.

“We have to help them. Otherwise this mansion will be engulfed in flames—”

Looking at the boy speaking seriously, his father raised his hand once more.

Crack!

The sharp sound continued several times.

The famine ended.

However, the wounds that the famine had carved took a long time to heal. The village was divided, and the government’s approval ratings plummeted miserably.

Still, the revolutionary government held out fairly well. Until three years later, when the peerless genius knight Friedrich Kruger slit the president’s throat.

Kruger’s actions were unstoppable.

He completely reshuffled the power structure and encouraged people to indiscriminately kill the remaining nobles and landowners, as well as the village notables who had been putting on airs as revolutionaries.

“So that’s why we had to help them.”

The twelve-year-old boy muttered, looking up at the gallows in the town square.

His father and stepmother, who had been dragged to Ossel, were hanged the next day on the gallows with placards listing various crimes.

The mansion and all property were confiscated by the new government, and the servants fled.

Only the boy remained unharmed.

Because the villagers had at least left the boy alone. Just as he had predicted three years earlier.

The boy couldn’t go to an orphanage.

Probably either there was no room at the orphanage, or the responsible official had handled the work carelessly. It was a time when orphans like him were multiplying again, just like during the revolution.

Anyway, he had no desire to go. He knew well enough what kinds of things happened in such places.

So the boy was simply abandoned on the streets.

The villagers didn’t kill him, but they found him uncomfortable, so no one stepped forward to adopt him.

The boy settled in an abandoned ruin at the edge of the village.

A life of taking whatever work he could find for what little money he could get.

The boy’s position in the village had changed strangely. From a high-born son who was an object of jealousy and envy, to a lowly existence who reminded them of their guilt and the past they wanted to forget.

However, since the boy did any work assigned to him far too well… the villagers worked him mercilessly.

From pulling weeds in fields to tanning hides, cleaning chimneys, collecting waste, carrying building materials.

Any dirty, hard work.

They told themselves they were bestowing noble charity, but really they just treated him as cheap labor.

The boy didn’t laugh.

Watching the boy carry out his assigned tasks wordlessly with an expressionless face, the villagers whispered that he was somehow creepy. And they would either give him small change, or sometimes pick fights and give him nothing at all.

The boy’s only hobby was secretly climbing over the mansion’s wall to spend time in the garden.

In the mansion that had grown increasingly desolate since people left, only the garden trees remained green.

Before long, lying on the soft weeds under the tree shade and gazing at the sky became the boy’s way of resting.

It was quite far from the ruin he used as shelter, but he visited that place faithfully every day.

***

“Who are you? Why are you in our house?”

A swelteringly hot summer when he was fourteen.

The boy was napping under the beech tree in the garden as usual, avoiding the sunlight.

When he opened his eyes at a voice that sounded a little childish, as if puberty hadn’t yet arrived, a boy who appeared to be his age was looking down at him.

Suddenly, he remembered rumors that had been spreading around the village the past few days.

‘They said an elderly couple bought it. For a mansion this size, it sold pretty late.’

People had been glancing at the boy and talking about how it was probably because of the ominous incidents that had occurred. The boy had pretended not to hear and worked silently.

‘So today was moving day.’

The boy seemed to be the late child of the couple.

“This used to be our house.”

The boy said, sitting up.

“Really? I didn’t know! I moved to this village today. I was watching the cart loaded with luggage come up from the bottom of the hill, but it was so slow that I wanted to see the house first, so I ran ahead. Did you really live here? You can tell me what kind of house it is! Show me around. Oh, I’m Johann Werner, what’s your name?”

Johann’s face shone as he chattered excitedly by himself, then smiled brightly and extended his hand, his spotless blond hair gleaming.

The boy clasped his hand.

***

Johann Werner was the most foolish human among all the humans the boy had ever seen.

You could tell just from how he got along better with the boy than with friends he’d made at school.

Probably because, unlike other children, the boy neither envied Johann nor fawned over him.

From the day they first met, after the boy had told him various things about the mansion, Johann treated him like they were soulmates.

He would always come running to the boy’s workplace as soon as school ended.

“Hurry up and play with me!”

“I told you I can’t go until work is finished.”

It was a conversation that repeated every time.

At first, Johann had tried clumsily to help with the boy’s work, but after realizing he was only getting in the way, he would wait at a distance.

When he smiled and stared intently like that, the adults couldn’t treat the boy as roughly as before.

And when the boy finished his work, Johann would happily read books together, or go catch crayfish in the stream, or engage in other such trivial games.

Sometimes they would join other children who were reluctant to include them.

“Let’s go play soccer today! Finn is waiting too.”

“Finn? You mean Finn Schäfer? He’ll hate me.”

“No, Finn is a good kid. He’s probably just awkward because it’s still new.”

Looking at Johann’s naivety in defending even someone who was obviously a nasty little rat, the boy just let himself be dragged along.

Why did he do everything that fool wanted?

Because it was clearly beneficial to the boy too.

It was a day when rain was falling steadily.

On days like this, work usually didn’t come easily, but some lady who didn’t want to leave the house had sent him on an errand for groceries.

The boy was running with a coat pulled over him, unable to hold an umbrella because of the paper bag stuffed full in his arms, when he slipped on standing water and fell spectacularly.

Along with a throbbing pain as if his ribs had shifted, he nearly drowned with his face buried in a puddle.

“Damn!”

Even the usually taciturn boy had to curse when he became covered in mud and unable to move.

He was just twisting his posture this way and that to keep water from touching his face, only exhaling, when he heard something like footsteps from far away.

The footsteps grew faster and faster, soon turning into running sounds that approached.

“What are you doing! Are you okay?!”

Johann, who had thrown aside his umbrella and come running after seeing his miserable state, helped him up.

“Ugh…!”

A pained groan flowed from the boy’s mouth. It hurt enough to suspect that a broken bone might be piercing his organs.

“J-just hang on a little!”

They walked with difficulty to find a doctor.

The rural village had only one hospital, and the doctor’s diagnosis was indeed broken ribs. The boy was forced to be hospitalized.

“Poor thing.”

“Me?”

Johann nodded at the boy’s question from his hospital bed.

“You’re pitiful. Your parents passed away, and you’re living such a hard life. Just come live with us at our house. Can’t you?”

To Johann’s innocent question, the boy gave no answer at all.