Chapter 2
At first, I didn’t even realize that I had transmigrated into <The Lord of Heavenly Pillars>.
I’d been furious while reading it, but the truth was, it had already been several months since I’d read <The Lord of Heavenly Pillars>, and in the meantime, I’d devoured plenty of other novels.
Isn’t the golden rule of transmigration that you usually end up inside the novel you read most recently or your favorite novel?
So, when I opened my eyes in this world after being hit by a truck that suddenly came out of nowhere while I was crossing a crosswalk on my way home after finishing my part-time job, this was the very first thought that came to mind.
‘Is this a rofan?’
A reincarnation truck suddenly charging straight at me, a perfectly healthy body despite thinking I’d died, and an unfamiliar ceiling that wasn’t the ceiling of an ambulance or a hospital room.
No matter how you looked at it, wasn’t this the standard opening to a transmigration story?
Then the next scene was even more predictable. If I just lay there blankly on the bed, the door would suddenly burst open with a bang, followed by the appearance of a cheeky maid shouting, “My lady, what are you doing lying around instead of getting up already?!”
“Danna?”
…Nope.
“Danna, Danna?”
I reflexively turned my head to the side. Then I saw a woman with a slender, fair face.
“Oh my goodness, Danna!”
I was bewildered once again.
It wasn’t because the woman looked so graceful that she seemed like she could play a major supporting role in some historical drama, nor because an actress who looked like that was addressing me so familiarly, nor even because, after calling out to me, she suddenly started crying as though the world were coming to an end.
‘An East Asian?’
Black hair, black eyes, fair wheat-colored skin, delicate features, and clothing with an unmistakably East Asian style.
No matter how I looked at her, she wasn’t Western. She was East Asian.
An East Asian? Did people from East Asia even appear in romance fantasy?
“Ahhh, Heaven and Earth and all the gods, thank you, thank you! Danna, my child, you’ve woken up safe and sound; how fortunate is this… how….”
Even as I stood there utterly bewildered, the woman continued to shed tears. Then she suddenly grabbed my hand and began pouring out words that I couldn’t make heads or tails of.
“Danna, you don’t have to worry about your mother’s illness anymore. Don’t you understand that if something happened to you because of me, that would only make things harder for your mother? When I heard that our Danna had gotten into an accident in the mountains, I thought my heart was going to collapse…”
“Huh? An accident in the mountains? Who? Me? Who are you that you’re…”
“Huh?”
“What?”
A moment of silence followed.
“Ah…”
By the time I realized that something had gone wrong, it was already too late. The woman’s eyes went wide at my sudden words, and just as I, realizing my mistake, was about to come up with some sort of excuse…
“Ah?”
Suddenly, the sensations that had been distant began returning to me.
Pain suddenly poured through my body, making it difficult even to breathe. Heat rose all the way to the top of my head, and my entire body throbbed. As I staggered, the woman’s already-white face grew even paler.
Looking at the woman through my blurry vision as she cried out, “Danna, Danna!” I vaguely thought,
‘Ah, right. They said I got into an accident….’
That was my last thought before I passed out.
That became my first memory in this world.
***
When I came to again, I was lying alone on a bed.
As I lay there blankly staring at the ceiling, I remembered what had just happened.
An unexpected transmigration into another world, an East Asian appearing instead of a Westerner, a woman who had grabbed my hand and shed tears…
“Gasp!”
I hurriedly sat upright. But a moment later, dizziness swept over me, and I clutched my head while groaning.
Suddenly, I noticed that the hair caught in my hand was short.
Come to think of it, it wasn’t just my hair. The hands I could see before me, my feet, every part of my body was small. And now that I thought about it, my field of vision seemed strangely low too. Could it be…?
‘Did I transmigrate into a child?’
A sudden rejuvenation was certainly bewildering, but at least there was one thing to be thankful for: I was still female.
I ran my hands over my entire body and performed another thorough check. Only then was I finally able to face the next question I’d been putting off.
‘Then where the hell did I transmigrate into?’
Just as I was about to tear at my hair again…
“Child, are you all right?”
Suddenly, some people opened the door and came inside. I stared blankly toward the door.
I saw a short, stocky middle-aged man and a middle-aged woman with a warm, kindly appearance. Of the two, the middle-aged man naturally spoke to me.
“I was just about to go call the physician, but you regained consciousness so quickly. That’s a relief. Do you know how shocked I was when Mrs. Sa came running over crying? She kept saying all sorts of strange things about how you’d suddenly lost your memory.”
“Huh?”
“Then you collapsed, and it was quite troublesome. I had Mrs. Sa lie down in the master bedroom for now, but I don’t know if she’ll be all right. Maybe I should go call the physician even now…”
“Mrs. Sa?”
I asked in confusion. Was he talking about the woman who had been clutching me and crying as though the world were ending? What had that woman said again…?
“You don’t have to worry about your mother’s illness anymore… if something happened to you because of your mother, that would be even more…”
Mother, mom?
Just as I had a feeling that I’d made another verbal slip-up, the two people who had been staring at me in surprise asked incredulously,
“Y-you don’t know? Really?”
Only then was I forced to tell the two of them about my situation.
Of course, when I say I told them, I couldn’t exactly say, ‘The truth is, I just transmigrated here and don’t know anything,’ so I ended up making something up about having lost all my memories.
Even that was apparently enough of a shock, because the middle-aged man’s and woman’s faces went pale. The middle-aged man let out a hollow laugh as though he couldn’t believe it, then spoke.
“Not only that, but you don’t even remember who you are? Hah, unbelievable. How could something like this happen…”
The middle-aged man and woman looked at each other, unsure what to do. Then they left me behind, went over to a corner, put their foreheads together, and began earnestly discussing something.
After quite some time, they finished their discussion, approached me, and began speaking.
“Then I suppose we’ll have no choice but to tell you everything from the beginning. First, I’m Pyo Il-ung, and this here is my wife, Sim Ok-hyang. We’re your neighbors; we live right next door to you. Ah, and first of all, as for your name…”
So, putting together what the middle-aged man, Uncle Pyo, told me, this was the situation.
My name was Seo Dan.
I was the sole breadwinner of the household, a young head of family living in Boluo County, Huizhou, Guangdong Province, while taking care of my sick widowed mother.
‘Huh? A young head of household?’
I was surprised at this part.
I was definitely possessed by a girl. No matter how carefully I checked, there was nothing between my legs that suggested otherwise. But as I continued listening to the Pyo couple, I began to understand.
Seo Dan lived alone with her mother in Boluo County. With no father and no relatives around, how could a young girl possibly support the household by herself? Not only living expenses, but consistently procuring medicine for her mother must have been difficult.
In the end, Seo Dan disguised herself as a boy and went from place to place doing odd jobs. And in the middle of that, an incident occurred.
“Those bastards! How dare they pin the blame on you when you did nothing wrong?”
Seo Dan had been falsely accused and kicked out.
Apparently, she’d been caught stealing the shopkeeper’s wife’s jewelry while working at the store and was thrown out because of it, but whenever Uncle Pyo explained this incident, he would fly into a rage, insisting that it was ‘complete nonsense.’
I listened to the story as though it were someone else’s problem and secretly thought to myself,
‘Well, you never know. Maybe she really did get caught stealing…….’
Of course, I couldn’t know the truth. The real Seo Dan wasn’t here anymore.
Anyway, having suddenly lost her job, Seo Dan must have been at a loss. Even if she somehow managed to figure out her living expenses, how was she supposed to get the money for her mother’s medicine?
In the end, it seemed Seo Dan had gone into the mountains to gather medicinal herbs that could be used as ingredients for medicine, since she was in urgent need of them. But because she hadn’t returned even late into the night, her mother, who had been waiting for her daughter, eventually asked the Pyo couple for help, and the three of them went out to search for her.
And that was how things had ended up in the current situation.
My vision went dark.
‘Is this for real?’
If I ever transmigrated, I thought I’d become a princess, royal princess, duke’s daughter, villainess, saintess, and so on, and use my knowledge from the book to run wild as a transmigrator.
Who would’ve thought I’d become Poor Young Breadwinner Girl #1?
And on top of that, I had to take responsibility for a sick family member too…
As I tore at my hair, Uncle Pyo, who was sitting beside me, clicked his tongue softly.
“If only I’d gotten the news to you a little sooner, you wouldn’t have gone up into the mountains. It’s a shame it turned out this way.”
“News?”
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