Chapter 31
A Night of Counting Stars (5)
“Shall we introduce ourselves one at a time? I’m Yevgeny. Yevgeny Novikov Karamzin. I’m Kim Eugene, currently occupying the body of a son of Duke Karamzin!”
Eugene spoke while writing his name in Korean on the whiteboard at the front of the clubroom.
Before him sat a terrified female student from the Department of Knighthood, an elf wearing a languid expression that made it impossible to tell what he was thinking, and the murderous Santa Claus of a big brother who still made Eugene’s knees weaken just by looking at him.
“The last novel I read was The Rogue Swordsmanship Genius of the Northern Duke’s House, and I’ve now enrolled in the Department of Theology to walk the path of a priest! Oh, I can also see a status window. Anyone else here have one?”
He raised his hand and tossed out the question in hopes of creating some easy common ground, but everyone merely glanced at one another.
No one?
Was having a status window actually extremely rare...?
Eugene lowered his hand awkwardly and continued.
“Um. Hmm...”
“The ending.”
“...Excuse me?”
“Explain the ending, setting, and story line of the novel you read.”
Eugene fell into thought for a moment.
Where was he supposed to begin?
A long-running web novel generally met one of three endings.
First, a normal conclusion.
Second, indefinite hiatus.
And finally, perpetual monetization.
The novel Eugene had read had been thoroughly transformed into the third category, down to its very marrow.
It had been an ultra-long serialization exceeding a thousand chapters.
The kind of novel that was perfect for emptying one’s mind during the commute, flowing smoothly without any frustrating bottlenecks while containing almost no actual substance.
“Anyone else have questions?”
In other words, it did not really have an ending.
The protagonist went to an academy, collected hidden pieces, began fighting an evil family of magicians, and then a world war suddenly erupted...
Every hundred chapters, the story prolonged its lifespan by repeating some variation of:
It turns out that the mastermind was actually—
Even the author probably could no longer imagine the novel ever ending.
“Hmm...”
“......”
Ivan listened to Eugene’s explanation and thought.
It was definitely a story he did not know, and a novel he had never read.
Ivan—or rather, Kim Sunwoo—had been truly serious about novels.
That meant he had possessed strict standards when choosing what to read.
He had also taken pride in refusing to read endlessly serialized, monetization-driven, no-romance novels with heavy boys’ love undertones that were gaudily promoted on the front page of the main web-fiction portal.
“Next.”
When Ivan turned his head, Oswald hesitantly rose from his seat.
“Oswald Eastbelpen. I am the second son of Viscount Eastbelpen. My father currently serves as a member of the Privy Council, and I am an elf from Calion, as you can see. My Korean name was Park Jaeyoung. The novel I was reading was... well... um.”
Oswald tightly shut his eyes and forced the words out.
“The Genius Mage Obsessed Over by the Villainess.”
“Ooh, romance!”
“Shut... Please be quiet.”
Oswald ground his teeth at Eugene’s interjection.
“I didn’t even read thirty chapters! The story wasn’t that good, and by that point all the emotional devastation had already ended. Afterward, it did nothing but force-feed readers contrived frustration!”
“Ooh, an expert.”
“Shu—! Be! Quiet!”
“How old are you? I was thirty-one in Korea, and I’ve been here for four years!”
“...I was twenty-seven in Korea, and I have also been here for four years.”
“Then you’re indisputably the younger one! Want to call me ‘big brother’ casually?”
“Hey, Ivan? I can’t work with this bastard.”
So this one knew neither the ending nor the broader contents of his novel.
Ivan nodded while ignoring the two men bickering beside him.
“Next.”
“Eek!”
Yuri, who had been shrinking into herself since earlier, struggled to rise from her seat.
“I’m Yuri... Frank. In Korea, I was Lee Yuri... and I worked as an illustrator.”
“Wow! A working adult!”
“Um, well... I was twenty-nine... and I’ve been here for four years... This body has no parents.”
“Whoa! Immune to orphan jokes...!”
“Is that bastard actually insane?”
Eugene’s excitement had soared now that transmigrators of a similar age were appearing one after another.
It seemed that the mere fact that more people could share information from home in this damned premodern otherworld was enough to delight him.
Yuri, on the other hand, remained hunched over.
“I-I didn’t mean that my parents in Korea were gone. I meant this body has no parents... I’m called Yuri Frank...”
“What was the original story?”
“Eek!”
Yuri flinched at Ivan’s question and averted her eyes.
Everyone focused on her mouth.
A brief silence followed.
“What is this, a riddle? I’ll guess! Let’s see. Academy story, regret-and-obsession story... Then this must be a gender-bender story! That seems like the natural progression! D-Did you used to be a man in Korea...?”
“No!”
“Or maybe it suddenly becomes a livestreaming story... Oh, it could unexpectedly be traditional fantasy...!”
“W-Well, you see...”
“Be quiet, Eugene. Miss Yuri Frank, allow me to cast a spell that will calm you.”
Oswald raised one hand with a warm smile.
He specialized in mind sorcery, the school of mental magic.
In other words, he could use supportive spells such as Bestow Courage and Guidance of Wisdom.
The moment mysterious purple mana began to ripple, Yuri shrieked and leaped backward as though having a seizure.
“H-Hypnosis! Noooo!”
“...What?!”
“W-What are you planning to do after casting that?! Y-You all know, don’t you? You’re all in on this! You pieces of trash!”
“I can no longer follow the course of this conversation. Ivan, what should we do?”
Ivan considered the matter briefly.
She hesitated to reveal the original story and appeared suspiciously terrified even by his perfectly ordinary appearance.
She reacted the same way to Eugene, an ordinarily handsome young nobleman, and Oswald, who always wore a gentle smile and had a naturally kind appearance.
“I-I was dragged here... while working on an illustration! The o-original work was a h-humili... humili...”
“Aha! I know the answer! A sexual-humiliation story!”
“Aaaaaah!”
Yuri covered her face and collapsed to the floor.
I want to go home. I hate everyone. I’m scared...
She had never once dreamed of attending an academy containing a blond delinquent, a narrow-eyed hypnotist, and a suspiciously powerful gardener.
While Yuri sniffled, Ivan suddenly muttered:
“All of you have been here for four years.”
“Ah, as for this big brother here, he has been here for an astonishing thirty years.”
“How old is he this year...?”
“His body is thirty-four!”
“Oh... I see.”
Oswald looked at Ivan’s beard and sighed sorrowfully.
How difficult must his life have been...?
Oswald nodded to himself, deciding that even if Ivan occasionally behaved like a madman, he ought to be understanding.
“Come to think of it, all of us fell into this world at roughly the same time! What happened four years ago, I wonder? Hmm...”
“The Demon King died.”
Ivan studied them with a grave expression.
“The Hero killed the Demon King four years ago. And both of them were transmigrators.”
“Uh...”
“This world does not possess a single ‘story.’”
Because this was reality.
Ivan barely managed to accept that statement before continuing.
“But individuals do possess their own ‘stories.’ Each person has one, just like the original works all of you read before coming here. Maximilien, who likely crossed over after reading a traditional Hero story, became the ‘Hero.’ The Demon King was probably the same.”
“Then...”
“The Rogue Swordsmanship Genius of the Northern Duke’s House.”
Ivan gestured toward Eugene, then moved his finger toward Oswald.
“The Genius Mage Obsessed Over by the Villainess.”
“Haah...”
Oswald shook his head with a displeased expression.
“...And an unidentified sexual-humiliation story.”
“Huuuaaah...!”
Yuri began to cry while sniffling.
“All of you began your stories in circumstances similar to your original works. The delinquent son of a ducal family, a magician loved unrequitedly by a noble young lady, and an unidentified sexual-humiliation story...”
“P-Please stop emphasizing that...!”
“Right. But the stories that follow are different.”
Ivan’s gaze deepened.
“A woman who knew the previous generation of transmigrators once told me something.”
Live your story and bring your story to an end. Neither fate nor the world decides what sort of conclusion it reaches. That is something you must decide.
Every individual story has its own ending, and the direction leading toward that ending is not necessarily dictated by predestined fate.
“There is no fate. Whether on Earth or here, life is not trapped inside a story running along predetermined rails.”
Do not wait for fate to end your story. My disciple, turn the pages of your book with your own hands. All the way to the end.
Remembering Enrique’s words, Ivan nodded.
“After spending thirty years in this world, meeting the Hero’s party, and now meeting all of you, I developed a hypothesis.”
Ivan walked toward the whiteboard.
“Fate does not determine a person’s future. However, I believe that fate may interfere with a person’s past—with the ‘beginning’ of their story.”
Suppose the world had desired a Demon King and a Hero, and had therefore transmigrated them into the roles of Demon King and Hero.
And now there were three other transmigrators who had appeared immediately after the Demon King’s death.
Each had transmigrated through an entirely different story, yet astonishingly, each had begun from a “starting point” resembling the original work.
And every one of them had gathered here at Saint Yansk University.
Was it an incredible coincidence?
No.
This was some form of “design.”
It had to be.
In other words, a tendency might exist within the kind of story the world desired.
What they could infer at this point was—
“It is an academy story.”
“Just as I thought! Amazing!”
“And we possess an ability that allows us to track the ‘recognized’ narrative flow in real time.”
Ivan gestured toward Eugene.
“That fellow possesses a ‘status window.’ It presents the direction of the story in the form of quests. The quests dynamically change to reflect the current situation.”
“Oh...”
“Then from this point onward, we will...”
Ivan began writing large letters across the whiteboard.
[What story all of us are needed for.]
[What ending all of us will ultimately reach.]
[What we must do in this world.]
“We will unite to determine these things. We will identify each of our stories, analyze the flow of the world, and move forward toward our respective ‘endings.’”
“Ooooooh...!”
As Eugene exclaimed in admiration, Oswald raised his hand.
“Wait a moment.”
“We still have not heard what Ivan’s story was.”
“Oh, right! I don’t know either. What was your story, Big Brother?”
“I do not know.”
“......”
“Huh?”
Ivan looked solemnly over all of them and spoke calmly.
“I left malicious comments on more than thirty works so that I could transmigrate.”
“Oh... Wow.”
“That is... unfortunate.”
A madman.
In the minds of all three, three thick red underlines were drawn beneath Ivan’s name.
That night, every one of them stood atop the highest spire at Saint Yansk University, looking up at the sky.
“Then the Korean Patriotic Corps is setting out!”
“I told you, it’s the Returnees’ Party.”
“I wish we simply wouldn’t give it a name.”
Privately, Ivan had already settled on the name Volunteer Club.