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Over the Infinite – Prologue (1)

 

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Translator: mii

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－１－

Basking in the morning sun that rose from the horizon of the wasteland, a carriage advanced, making a rattling sound.

This carriage originally wasn’t designed to take passengers on board, and it only had simple curtain installed on it. It was extremely bad news for my butt, which was in direct contact with the hard roof rack.

I wouldn’t complain since the coachman gave me a lift for free, but the damage to my butt was grave.

I had set myself on enduring it for the last three and a half days, yet I still couldn’t get used to this level of shaking no matter what.

From the gap between the curtains, I could make out an expanse of wasteland stretching as far as the eyes could see.

The land was very barren, to the point that I started to become uneasy, wondering whether there was really the so-called rumored city here.

The coachman, who was a lizardman, told me that most people wouldn’t approach this wasteland ever since a long time ago.

There was a city called as ‘Labyrinth City’.

That city was considered as a part of the kingdom, but they didn’t accept anyone who wanted to enter it, except if that person came from the capital. It was strange, considering how the city had contacts with foreign countries. Not to say, everyone had to follow the “emigration” procedures even if they came from the capital. This unique city held an autonomy, more than capable to support themselves.

Just like what the name suggested, there were dungeons in that city, filled with countless “adventurers” who were exploring the dungeons to feed themselves every day.

The existence of dungeon itself was actually not that special. Many other dungeons existed in this world, but Labyrinth City was the only city that utilized dungeon exploration as a legal occupation.

It might sound shaddy, almost like a fake rumour, and I certainly never heard of a job where someone only had to explore dungeons to earn money other than this so-called Labyrinth City. But then, I wouldn’t be sitting on this carriage right now without having a certain extent of conviction to those rumours.

Actually, only three people were riding this carriage which was making a round trip to the Labyrinth City. So if I was excluding the coachman, it was only me and one other person. There was also almost no baggage here, so the roof rack was close to empty.

The reason why I had to gamble on such a dream-like story was because the living condition in this world was really harsh. Even just making a living was very difficult. I had no choice but to cling on my hope to stay alive.

I didn’t wish to have a rich life like those royalties, or have a fame like those heroes.

I only wished to have an ordinary life, or at least retained my dignity as a human. That’s why I was heading to the Labyrinth City, holding on that ray of hope.

This might sound sudden, but I had the memories of my previous life.

It’s not like I believed in the circle of reincarnation. I wasn’t hit by the reincarnation truck like those transmigration web-novels, and no one summoned me to this world as well.

The possibility of me dying from God’s mistakes like those countless overflowing web-novel tropes still remained since I hadn’t confirmed the existence of God. …No, stop dreaming.

When I realized it, I was born to this world, which was different from the Earth I knew. …Rather, this world’s me remembered my previous life memories.

My last memory in my previous life should be how I spent my days normally. In the first place, I wasn’t even sure whether I had already died in my previous life.

With that, there was a possibility that I only had the memories. Meaning, the me from the other world was still living his ordinary life.

There were times when I imagined that I was currently trapped inside a game for some reason, but I was also sure that it was impossible.

It was a shame, but having memories from previous life in this world was not that rare.

Actually, you could still call it rare, but within thirty to fifty people, there was at least one person with such memories. The ratio was almost the same as if having one person with rare surname in a class.

When I first regained my memory, I felt as if I was a special existence, and my chest filled with hopes for the future. In the end, my rarity was only just that much.

Even so, the details and amount of the memories that those people regained would vary. Most of times, their past memories were practically vague, only the name and gender of their previous life remained as their “records”, and they could only remember the things they had strong impression to. For me who could vividly remember my past memories, I was considered as “somewhat more rare”.

In my previous life in Japan, there was something called as “web novel”, where people could read stories on the internet.

It had a system that allowed users to post the story they had written to have other users read it, and one of the genres that had been popular in the web novel posting sites was “Transmigration to Another World”.

As some kind of setting, the protagonist often transmigrated to another world from the modern Japan, perhaps to make the readers had empathy to those transmigration stories. Those protagonists situation was just like mine right now.

However, there were countless transmigrators (?) in this world, and the country where the transmigrators came from was not just Japan… No, it was not even limited to Earth.

In fact, when I tried to meet the people who had their previous life memory, there were far more people who came from a world other than Earth. Not to say, there were even multiple of those worlds.

Just like now, it seemed like the lizardman uncle who was the driver of this carriage I was currently riding used to be from a mysterious race called as Hayagriva in some other world. There were also some people in my hometown who called themselves as the nobles that ruled this world three hundred years ago.

I had met two people who used to live on Earth in my fifteen years of living in this world so far. One was a former Nepalese who was the bellboy in a royal inn, and the other one was a former Japanese, the young boy who was sitting across me right now.

『I think this is also the first time I meet someone who is a former Japanese.』

The appearance of the young boy who said so when we were introducing ourselves was far from a Japanese person. Rather, he had a face that you wouldn’t find on Earth.

He was short. His height was only around 150 centimeters or so, but well, I had to take his fourteen years old age into consideration, so he still could grow taller later on.

He had shiny, soft wavy white hair. It almost looked like elderly’s white hair, but he had fairy tale-like beauty that attracted attention even in this world with diverse hair colors.

His eyes were red. Of course it didn’t mean that he had congestion in his eyes. His pupils and irises were red. Combined with those white hair, he looked somewhat like a rabbit.

If he wanted to call himself as a woman, there was no sense of incongruity. Rather, it only felt even more weird to call him as a man, considering how his face structure made him could only be defined as a beauty. But I would definitely not call him as a pretty boy.

Since he didn’t have a speck of manliness, women who had preferences on masculine man wouldn’t consider him as their target, but he was definitely the shota boy who was popular within the elder sister circle. Even if he didn’t try hard, he could easily qualify as a trap[1. Man who crossdress as woman.].

It seemed like his name was “Yukito”. The person himself told me to call him “Yuki” when he introduced himself, so I complied with him.

His Japanese-like name might gave a sense of incongruity, but that was his name in this world.

Most people’s name were based on their name in their previous life. Even though it also applied for my name, a lot of people who I knew thought that this was a weird custom to do.

That’s why, the naming rules and customs for each country and region were very weak, and many people had very unrestricted names. There was not even a fragment of unity.

This tendency was mostly seen within those sub-racial groups who were using their own languages to converse in their daily lives.

One of the cause of this was the status.

Having a “status” might sound like something that only happen in a game, but only the priest in the church or those kind of facilities could tell us our status, which consisted of our name, gender, attribute value, skill, and more. By using a special tool, we could also see them as letters.

For the people who had their previous memories, it seemed like there were times when a newborn child might already have a name, so the parents often used that name as it was.

That’s why there was no similitude in the naming customs.

By the way, if their parents gave their child a different name from the one they already had, the child’s name in the status would change. There were many cases where the parents named their child with the previous name as their reference.

For example, Yuki’s original name was “Yuki”, but then his parents added the “-to” after his original name later on.

Yuki himself didn’t seem to like that name, and if I called him as “Yukito”, his mood would turn sour.

『Well, Yukito is a man’s name after all, right?』

No, that might be how his previous name was pronounced, and I wanted to say that he was a man in the first place, but it seemed like Yuki was a woman in his previous life.

Still, he had been living as a man for fourteen years, so he should’ve accepted his fate already, but the person himself didn’t seem to agree. How stubborn.

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