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Over the Infinite – Prologue (2)

 

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Translator: mii

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「Speaking of which, why does Tsuna want to go to the Labyrinth City?」Yuki said, this time not the one from my memory.

He even sounded completely like a girl. Now that I think of it, it might be possible that he had been lying to me about his gender all along, so I should probably check if he had that ‘thing’ attached on him later on.

It shouldn’t be a big deal since both of us were men, but I became a little excited for some reason.

「For living.」

I said that on my own, but even I also thought that my answer was terribly realistic. But then, that’s just how it was in this world.

If there was a city where all of my wish would come true, just let me live a normal life. I would think about what to do next after achieving that.

My hometown in this world was a terribly impoverished village with no sufficient food available. It was to the extent where several people would die because of starvation every year.

I was born as the third son of a family which had the similar position like a village chief in such a village, but the third son of a farmer family had a very low status.

The eldest son was the successor of the family, and he would get the house and farm inheritance. The second son’s position was much weaker than the eldest son, but he could still live as a spare for the eldest son.

But the third son was the spare of the spare, so the amount of food that I received was scarce. I didn’t even have enough clothes. At that time, winter was basically a hell for me.

My parents used to say,『We can sell one of our children if we have daughters, yet why do we keep having sons?』 Well, I wanted them to apologize for not birthing me as the eldest son.

It was a cruel story, but all of that were the norms in that village. Girls were “donated” every year, so the number of girls was small. Rather, every family only had their eldest daughter staying in the village.

In most stories, the protagonist would start a romance with a cute girl in his hometown village before starting the full-scale main story, but I wouldn’t have any chance to get such event.

By the way, there were only a few young men too. Most of them were recruited to the war that happened when I was still very young, and even if they came back, they were “donated” as well.

Even with only a few young men, old men, and also a few children in the village, the village had reached the limit. No, it had exceeded the limit itself.

People sold their children that were saleable, the number of people was decreasing, and there was no enough food. It’s good that there were animals and plants in the mountain that we could eat, but the villagers fought to have them, and in the worst time, some villagers also planned to eat humans.

Our family seemed to have survived that because we were acting as the pseudo-village head. The villagers’ condition should be even more miserable.

Well, it didn’t mean that the situation was that terrible every year, but what’s important was that you now know that my life at that time was really hard. That was just a self-introduction.

It was even harder to live in this world when I had the memory of my great life in Japan, but I also got used to it and passed the day while trying to survive desperately every day.

In the middle of my bad luck, the eldest son decided to get married. They had a son six months after their marriage, meaning that his wife might have been pregnant even before their marriage. With that, he decided to discard the second son and the third son, who was me.

Both of us brothers were forced to live by our own, but even if we were driven out with only what we were wearing at that time, we succeed in working in the capital as servants until just a few days ago.

In fact, if the timing when we got kicked out was bad, we might even had failed to survive.

「That’s awful.」

「Well, that’s just how this world works. I’m sure that I would die in a heartbeat if I continued to keep my common sense as a Japanese person. …There’s no way my past self would imagine himself in a situation where I couldn’t even sell myself due to the fall in the price of the slave market.」

After we brothers went to the capital, we were planning to sell ourselves as slaves, thinking that we could at least eat by doing that. What we didn’t expect was how we couldn’t even do that.

It seemed like there was too many slaves in the capital, making the maintenance cost too heavy. Because of that, the applicants had to pay for the deposit so that they would get taken care as a proper slave.

Even the slave merchant who was called as the biggest merchant in the capital said that. No one was willing to accept us.

That’s why, we had no choice but to ask our distant relatives by using our ability which was known as ‘prostrating ourselves’, ended up working as the servants in a bar through our connections.

We believed that we at least wouldn’t have to worry about our food since we were working in the bar, but unfortunately, we were sentenced into a place that sold very cheap slum foods, and we could only get the amount of foods that was just barely enough for us to survive.

We didn’t get much salary, so I couldn’t buy any other foods. Still, I believed that it was still better than my condition in my hometown.

I would abandon everything here in an instant if I could scourge some leftovers in the back alleys of Tokyo. I could only think of the expired foods in the convenience store as a feast now. The country full of gluttony shone brightly in my memory.

「My life is a little better… no, maybe I can even call it pretty good. Even if I’m also the third son, my family is relatively wealthy, so I could eat proper food and didn’t get kicked out from the village.」

「Well, I can normally talk about my past troubles as well, but I’ve heard of some more awful stories after going to the capital.

Seriously, it’s really awful. It even made me, who have lived quite a hard life, feel sick and tumbled all over. It came to the level where Cliff-san, who is working as a slave merchant, came to my worst nightmares.」

「No, I don’t want to listen to that.」

Why? Cliff-san was amazing, okay? He broke his dignity as a human into pieces in the half of his life.

When I heard his story, I felt sorry for having pride in my misfortune. Just listening to him deconstructing his childhood was already making me puke.

Cliff-san most probably wouldn’t appear again in my future life, but his heroic sacrifice in half of his life would continue to etch in my heart.

「Well, basically I dream of making a fortune at one stroke and decide to become an adventurer in the Labyrinth City. That’s not really that strange, right? If I have a citizenship there, my movement will become restricted, but it’s not like it’s something that will trouble me that much.」

「It’s unusual, but not strange. If you become an adventurer in a random neighbourhood, you won’t be able to earn money at all, so there’s no chance to make a fortune.」

Yes, there were also adventurers that exist in those fantasy novels and games. They made use of their physical strength as their occupation in this world. I saw them a lot when I was still working at the bar, and I also heard stories about them.

Even if the occupation existed, all I heard about it was how it was an awful occupation. Becoming an adventurer was easy, but it wouldn’t make anyone had a decent life.

That’s why, I was even more courageous to gamble on my belief to the rumours of the Labyrinth City.

「The story I heard from the rumours about this Labyrinth City aren’t just about the chances, the money I can earn, and how good they say the prospect is. At that place―」

「”It stinks of Japanese people”, right?」

Yuki probably knew what I was meaning to say. He added on the last words of my line with a smirk.

Yes. The rumours about that place contained many keywords that only Japanese people could understand. It was as if the Labyrinth City itself was calling us.

And then, I couldn’t imagine that the originator of this rumours was the same transmigrators as us. that person should have those so-called protagonist cheat power.

Maybe they were the kind of guy that could make God kneel down on the ground with their cheat abilities. If that was really the case, I was very jealous now.

「Even if I won’t make a fortune in one stroke, but I’m wondering if I can at least live an ordinary life in that place. Perhaps, I might also find out the loopholes of the system in this world.」

The status that was useless even if one could see it, and the skill that wasn’t really learnable and rarely useful. But this world was surely a systematic world.

I might be able to find out a way to gain power through the loopholes in this system.

「Ahh, you’re thinking that far already? I guess my information collecting isn’t enough.」

…Oh?

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