SLGAW 01

Chapter : 01

It was an ordinary morning, no different from any other.

A middle-aged couple was enjoying a brief moment of relaxation after breakfast, sipping warm milk.

“Ed is acting strange.”

To be precise, only one of them was truly relaxed.

William nodded as if this was nothing new.

“Ed has been strange since the day he was born. At this point, saying that is practically a morning greeting.”

“No, this time it’s really strange.”

That was a rather gloomy greeting for the morning.

Seeing the dark expression on his wife Greta’s face, William set down his glass of milk.

Their beloved son, Edward, had been unusual from the moment he was born.

He never cried, yet he was endlessly curious, always looking around at everything.

Once he learned how to move, he crawled all over the place. Yet despite that, he never broke anything.

There had even been a time when they caught him trying to tidy up a messy room with his tiny little hands. He had only been eight months old then.

“This child is strange.”

That was when it started.

From that point onward, William and Greta always described Ed as strange. Not in a bad way, but not in a way that was easy to feel comfortable about either.

He listened well, never caused trouble, was incredibly intelligent, and possessed a learning ability that put geniuses to shame.

More than anything else, he was suspiciously mature.

Could it be…

Did we somehow give birth to an extraordinary great man?

Heroes and great figures were always said to be different from birth, weren’t they?

For a couple who ran an ordinary candle workshop, the thought was both exciting and terrifying.

If he were merely clever, they could simply raise him well and hope he succeeded in life.

But Edward went far beyond merely clever.

“So what exactly is he doing that’s so strange?”

William asked after checking the position of the sun through the window.

He didn’t have much time before he had to head to the workshop, but he couldn’t simply ignore this either.

“He suddenly asked me to buy him paper and a pen. Then, after I finally got them for him, he locked himself in his room and won’t come out.”

Paper and a pen? Not leaving his room?

William immediately grasped the seriousness of the situation.

“It seems… Ed has figured it out. That we’re not wealthy enough to send him to school.”

“Exactly! He must want to study so badly that he’s trying to teach himself.”

The income from their candle workshop was just enough for the family to live comfortably and buy perhaps one book a month.

A higher educational institution like a school was completely beyond their reach.

“Even if he studies, it’s not like he can become a nobleman…” William sighed. “I don’t even know what to tell him.”

“It’s so heartbreaking. You know how smart our Ed is…”

“I know. I’ve asked around everywhere. But with our income, school is impossible. And even if he graduated, the best outcome would be a position at a merchant company or a low-ranking royal administrative post…”

“Sniff… our poor Ed…”

From early in the morning, tears began to flow across the couple’s dining table.

Neither of them could bring themselves to ask what their son was doing behind the firmly closed door.

They felt too guilty.

Being reincarnated into another world is much worse than people imagine.

As I moved my pen across the paper, that was the conclusion I came to.

Thinking about it, it was obvious.

Every convenience of modern civilization had vanished, and I’d been dropped into a world that was the unholy trinity of non-automation, poor hygiene, and lack of safety.

On top of that, this world’s class system was incredibly rigid. Unless a commoner earned military merit in war, becoming a noble was impossible.

Fortunately, the parents who gave birth to me were wonderful people, but…

I dipped my pen into the ink bottle.

At this rate, I would spend my second life as the son of an ordinary candle maker and eventually die from some accident, disease, or war.

After all, the medieval era was complete chaos. Nations fought neighboring nations, people fought monsters, and everyone fought plagues.

If only I were good with a sword…

Unfortunately, both in my previous life and my current one, I was unbelievably weak.

Far too weak to ever dream of becoming a knight.

I’d been given a new life in a new world, yet the only thing I could realistically become was a candle maker.

If it weren’t for that ability, I probably would have given up long ago and started doing push-ups to become the greatest candle maker in all of Lugbadin.

“Maybe I should check the next volume’s contents too…”

After placing the pen down, I closed my eyes.

Darkness filled my vision.

Then—

Fwoosh.

A brilliant white space unfolded before me, and a towering spire emerged.

A pure white tower so tall its peak was invisible.

Anyone seeing it would likely call it a magical tower straight out of a fantasy novel.

But it wasn’t.

It wasn’t filled with spellbooks or forbidden knowledge.

No.

If anything, it contained the most common knowledge imaginable.

I glanced at the sign in front of the building and stepped inside.

Library

That’s right.

This was a library.

A library containing the books of the world where I had once lived.

I first discovered it when I was around three years old.

In a dream.

My initial reaction had simply been:

“A weird dream…?”

At the time, I had been desperately worrying about how to survive in this medieval world, only for a library to suddenly appear in my dreams.

So I ignored it for a while.

I merely wandered around the building, muttering to myself.

“When am I going to wake up? Tomorrow I’ll probably just babble a bit and keep studying this world’s language…”

But the library appeared every night.

As though inviting me inside to read as much as I wanted.

Eventually, I started examining the books.

Most of the titles were familiar.

Classical masterpieces I’d known for years, relatively recent novels, plays…

Every book from the past and present was there.

Not new books.

All books.

Well, almost all books.

There were no technical manuals.

If there had been, my life would have become much easier.

I would have studied like a madman and tried to recreate everything from electric light bulbs to airplanes.

But every book in the library was a story.

Masterpieces, cheap entertainment novels—it didn’t matter.

They were all stories.

Then, when I was four years old and suffering from severe homesickness, I finally began reading them.

Because I missed Earth too much.

I missed smartphones.

Videos.

Convenience stores.

During the day, I struggled desperately to adapt to medieval life.

At night, I read books in the dream library.

Strangely, time seemed to move slower there.

I could read three or four books every night.

The number of books I’d read gradually increased.

I became accustomed to the joy of reading.

And around the time my parents began worrying because they couldn’t afford to educate me—

I started writing books.

More accurately, I was rewriting and adapting them.

The reason was simple.

My parents had saved up and bought me a book, and the quality had been horrendous.

Some guy called the Knight King beat another kingdom.

Then beat some barbarians.

Then beat a dragon.

Basically, he beat everything that existed and eventually shouted,

“My legend shall live forever!”

before ascending into the heavens.

Or something like that.

In any case, after seeing the proud smiles on my parents’ faces when they gave me that book, I realized something.

The cultural level of this world was severely underdeveloped.

And while I didn’t possess the technology or genius required to revolutionize civilization—

I did possess stories powerful enough to revolutionize its culture and imagination.

I pulled a book from the library, reviewed its contents, returned to reality, and began writing.

Would it work?

Honestly, I had no idea.

Maybe yes.

Maybe no.

I didn’t know how interested people in this world were in reading.

But at the very least, it seemed like a more worthwhile challenge than becoming a candle maker.

And besides—

Even if it failed, it would be enough if my mother and father enjoyed reading it.

In the spring of my tenth year, while worrying about my future, I continued filling page after page with words.

“No competitive edge.”

Rudwin Valtheim, owner of Valtheim Publishing, sighed as he stared at the pile of manuscripts on his desk.

Lugbadin was one of the larger cities in the Kingdom of Aldbania, which meant manuscripts arrived constantly.

But they were all the same.

There was no need to read them.

“They’re probably all cheap romances. How much longer do we have to survive through volume sales and razor-thin margins?”

Rudwin’s concern never changed.

Book prices kept falling.

Traditionally, books were expensive.

Even now, with magical advances enabling mass printing, they remained expensive.

Printing itself cost money, and illustrations, binding, and decoration still required substantial manual labor.

Yet even these expensive books couldn’t defeat one thing:

The laws of the market.

What was the point of producing high-quality books when most books contained exactly the same stories?

At best, they were tales of heroic knights.

Or romances between knights and noble ladies.

Aside from magical texts and academic works, nearly every romance novel fell into one of those two categories.

Naturally, their prices continued to decline.

And Valtheim Publishing specialized in printing exactly those kinds of romance novels.

Faced with steadily decreasing sales, Rudwin once again found himself sorting through manuscripts while contemplating another price reduction.

“Isn’t there anything different? Anything that might actually sell?”

The editors working beside him cautiously selected several manuscripts.

“How about The Dragon-Slaying Tale of the Great Knight Kandeon?”

“How many dragons does he have to kill before the story ends? There are already about two hundred dragons rampaging through bookstore shelves. Reject it.”

“Then what about Lady Guinevere and Knight Russell’s Secret Moonlit Windmill?”

“Hmm… that one might sell. But we’ll need to change the title. Make it much more provocative.”

Books were experience goods.

And expensive ones at that.

Five silver coins was no small amount.

The title had to grab attention immediately.

Rudwin sorted through several more manuscripts before sighing again.

Works like these wouldn’t save them from operating at a loss this month either.

Especially since Aldbania was currently at war with its neighboring kingdom, Offenheim.

Cheap romance novels weren’t exactly in demand.

“Sir, these are today’s newly submitted manuscripts.”

An editor handed him another stack of papers.

Rudwin accepted them without enthusiasm.

What else could he do?

He simply had to keep searching until he found something new.

Something that would actually sell.

“Put all the manuscripts with similar titles together. I’ll review them later. Organize them by genre as well—hm?”

While casually sorting the manuscripts by title, something caught his attention.

One particular stack was unusually thick.

“What is this?”

It was far thicker than the others.

When Rudwin looked at the editor who had delivered it, the man immediately recognized the manuscript.

“Oh, that one. A messenger boy dropped it off this morning.”

“Really? Not by mail?”

“No. I figured it might have come from the child of a minor noble family in Lugbadin. The messenger handled it very carefully.”

“Hmm…”

That made sense.

There were more nobles who wrote novels as a hobby than most people realized.

Particularly emotional young boys and girls.

Would it be rude to call them one of the primary reasons knight literature and romance novels were in such poor condition?

It’s awfully thick for a hobby project…

Rudwin opened the envelope and pulled out the manuscript.

“Romance of the Three Kingdoms…”

“The Story of Three Kingdoms?”

The title was certainly unusual.

It sounded more like a historical text than a novel.

Had the author submitted it to the wrong publisher?

Rudwin began turning the pages one by one.

And when he finally closed the manuscript—

He discovered that he was sitting alone beneath the candlelight his employees had lit hours ago.

It was dawn.