In my past life, I was a Japanese office worker, living in the middle of nowhere. I passed away at the ripe old age of twenty-nine.
After I graduated from a national university not too far away from home, my parents had pulled some strings with their connections to help me land a job at a local bank.
Honestly, I’d had it pretty good. My job hadn’t asked me to put in all that much overtime. As long as I’d hit my quotas and built some interpersonal connections of my own, I’d gotten along just fine. That basic Monday-through-Friday job meant I’d had two days off to myself every week, giving me plenty of time to explore my hobbies: chilling out on the internet and playing video games. You know, the easy bachelor life.
I mean, that was the boonies for you.
For a homebody like me, there really hadn’t been much fun stuff to do nearby. Even if I’d wanted to get married, there hadn’t been many women my age in the area. I had convinced my family that it didn’t matter much if I, their third son, got married or not. In my opinion, that’d been for the best—I’d ended up in an early grave, after all.
I’d been hit by a truck—a heroic sacrifice I’d made to save a valued client’s granddaughter. Good going, me! Although I had wanted to enjoy my life a bit longer, society appreciated that I saved a little girl’s life a lot more.
And so, before I’d realized what’d happened, I had been reborn into another world.
Boy, this light novel-esque world was cool as hell! I couldn’t believe that getting reincarnated somewhere else was actually a real thing. In the webnovels I had been really into in my past life, protagonists usually started out strong as babies, even before they hit one year old. They only kept getting stronger too. A number of these characters were born to noble or royal families. Sometimes, they’d end up being called heroes of legend!
But, well, it turned out that those cookie-cutter destinies in teenage fantasy tales didn’t actually exist.
I had been reborn to an ordinary, penniless farmer family. Emphasis on the penniless part. Living high in the wilderness of a craggy, mountainous region, I lived a quiet, unassuming life tilling tiny fields and keeping goats.
As far as hacks from being reincarnated went, I guess I had a little agricultural know-how from back when I’d helped my folks out in my past life...? There really wasn’t much arable land on these mountains to work with, but thanks to the knowledge and skills I possessed as the former son of a farming family (which, honestly, were probably anachronistic), I managed to keep us from starving to death.
That was just how bad my new birth family had it.
By the way, common education doesn’t even exist here. School? Never met her. Not even a glimpse of a schoolhouse could be found this deep in the mountains.
I had been more or less ready to die illiterate, but when I went to the “city” (aka the village at the base of the mountains) for the first time in my seventeen years here, my destiny was flipped on its head.
I caught sight of a sign hanging on a storefront’s door and figured I wouldn’t be able to read it. But as I stared at it, somehow, I found that the words weren’t as foreign as I thought. The writing was in a script near and dear to my heart: Japanese.
All aflutter, I asked a passerby what the name of the village was. Then, I asked for the name of the mountain range I lived in, and the name of the very country we were in. That was when I finally came to a stark realization.
The god of teenage fantasies wasn’t dead after all.
The world that had taken me in for a second chance at life was exactly like the MMORPG I’d played in my past life. If you’re not familiar, “MMORPG” is short for “massively multiplayer online role-playing game,” which is a game that tons of gamers (or just players) can play at the same time over the internet.
Among the many MMOs out there, the one I had played was called Golden Dawn Online. It was a fairly orthodox sword-and-magic RPG set in a medieval European fantasy world. I was one of the leading players in Golden Dawn, on the forefront of the latest cutting-edge content...in my dreams, at least.
Honestly, I had just played a mid-tier craftsman job with the ability to gather raw materials and craft a lot of small-scale items. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but gathering materials had been my bread and butter, and the depth of my knowledge regarding the map’s geography and all its gathering points bordered on the obscene.
I had even made an S-ranked item on my own! I just hadn’t been able to make SS- or SSS-ranked items because I was in a lower job tier! (Well, it wasn’t impossible for somebody to at least try or anything, but I would’ve had to be willing to risk blowing up my materials and making garbage instead...)
Anyway, after having that epiphany and filling my heart with hype, I got absolutely obsessed with crafting. I mean, once I tried it out, I became able to use basically all the same skills as my character in the game.
My dream had become a reality. I couldn’t squander this opportunity!
Thus began my days of running up and down and all around the Gaelius Mountains (where I’d been born and raised), collecting raw materials to craft things. The tiny, remote village I called my hometown was nestled in a valley amid the rocky peaks, and a bit deeper into the mountains, I built a man’s dream of dreams: a secret base to call my own.
Heh heh! Crafting’s awesome! It’s the best! Even if I couldn’t make much use of anything I could make. The restoratives, popularly called “potions,” aside, nothing I could make was practical enough for simple farmers. Bartering was the main form of trade out here, and I couldn’t even offer my crafts to others in these backwoods. As a result, I kept as many of the things I made as I possibly could, and as I continued to craft, I felt a sense of fulfillment from completing whole collections of items. Awesome.
And now, fast-forwarding to the present day... I was now twenty-five years old. Ever since the moment I had realized at seventeen that I’d reincarnated into a world very closely resembling a game I’d played before, I’d seen a lot of things come and go.
My fiancée, a friend I’d known practically since we’d been in the cradle, had ended our engagement. I had also laid my grandparents to their final resting places. They had taken care of me in lieu of my parents, who had passed away young. I had also crafted every single thing imaginable with the materials that could be found in the area.
My grandparents had been the only blood relatives I had left, and after standing vigil at their bedsides until they had finally departed this life, I no longer had anything binding me to these lands.
I was an orphan in my bloodline, leaving me as its only bearer.
Seeing as there was nothing left for me here, I figured I might as well leave home and spend the rest of my days gallivanting around the world of Golden Dawn. Since I lived in the sticks, I was painfully ignorant of this world and how it worked, but I was sure I’d figure it out. I still had my knowledge of the game in my pocket, after all.
Even if, for example, I were subjected to the fantasy genre’s trademark (Source? Me.) plot twist—getting duped into a human trafficking operation and being sold off as a slave—I had the power to escape at my fingertips. While I admit I wasn’t anywhere near as proficient in combat these days as the SSS-tier endgame players had been, I was still fighting fit and skilled enough to win my own tussles. Or, at least, B-tier ones.
Oh, right. Before they passed away, my grandparents had mentioned that people who reincarnated into this world while retaining memories of their past life—people like myself—were known as transmigrators. Though transmigrators were few in number, the phenomenon itself was not entirely unheard of.
I thought it might be nice to find other transmigrators and shoot the breeze with them. We could talk about our memories of our past lives.
I wonder if everyone was sent to this world by way of a truck? If so, that would be kind of heartbreaking...
I sold the goats.
My secret base was probably safe and sound. I mean, I had built it deep in the mountains in a terribly remote place, and I had zero regrets about that. Who needs convenience when you can have an impractical dream instead?
Deciding to abandon my ramshackle house to the whims of nature, I harvested my field’s meager crops for the last time. Maybe I’ll give them to the acquaintances who’ve helped me out.
I gathered an assortment of things I figured I might need for a long journey and placed them, along with what little else I owned, into the interdimensional storage that’d been granted to me by “Pocket Dimension,” a hack I had obtained upon being reincarnated.
Slinging the harvested vegetables over my back, I put the house I was born and raised in behind me.
My house was perched higher on the mountainside than even the nearest settlement, which was nestled in a valley between the peaks. Descending the mountain involved following a precipitous path. While hiking down didn’t present much of a problem, going back up was... Well, that didn’t matter, really. I wasn’t planning on returning.
And so, I arrived in the village at the foot of the mountain, where I just so happened to learn that we were embroiled in a war.