May 15, 1143. Overcast.
It had been three months since I transmigrated into this world. The Church had finished testing me, and I had taken care of everything I came to Trier to do. At last, I had a chance to sit down and write my first diary entry.
If I didn't find somewhere to speak my mind soon, I was genuinely afraid I would start treating all those jumbled memories in my head-the twenty-first century, high-speed trains, planes, the internet-as one long dream, and think of Suhit City in Intis, here in the Fifth Epoch, as my happy hometown.
When I saw Roselle secretly hiding his diary earlier, I had scoffed to myself, What self-respecting person keeps a diary?
I never expected those words to come back and slap me in the face so soon...
Still, at least nobody could read this. I was writing in Chinese, a language only I understood. If someone really could make sense of it, that would be wonderful.
Because it would prove I wasn't alone.
That's right. I wasn't actually from this world. I was a transmigrator from twenty-first-century Earth.
Unfortunately, as far as I knew, there were no signs that could prove other transmigrators existed. Culture and technology in all the major countries were developing at a perfectly ordinary, sluggish pace, roughly at the level I associated with the period after the Renaissance but before the Industrial Revolution. Crude, primitive guns and cannons already existed here, seafarers were trying to discover archipelagos and new continents, and bankers' bills sometimes carried more weight than nobles' written orders... Of course, the countries were completely different from the ones I knew, and their beliefs came in all sorts of strange varieties.
The one thing I was grateful for was that everyone in this other world still had two hands, two feet, and two eyes, without any strange extra parts. The same went for the body I now inhabited.
That had let me adapt quickly after transmigrating, without giving too much away.
But... of course, there had to be a "but" at a time like this.
Although transmigration had given me a new body, turning me from a frail young person worn down by late nights at work into a young, healthy, energetic "otherworlder," the problem was that this world, just like Earth, had both men and women. And unfortunately, I had become the latter...
I still remembered the name I had used all my life, the half-asleep face in the mirror when I washed up every day, my mom and dad, my idiot friends, my colleagues who deserved a good punch, and the goofballs in my online chat groups. I remembered everything about Earth, but I always felt as though I had lost something forever...
Fortunately, becoming a woman wasn't entirely bad news. At least Roselle had voluntarily given me a larger share of the profits when we worked together, though I kept feeling that it was because of my gender and my looks... Speaking of which, he wasn't interested in me, was he? I needed to give him a stern warning, just in case he really started treating me as someone to pursue. That would be horrifying!
Back to the point.
I had indeed met quite a few people since transmigrating. There were new friends, like Henriette, who seemed to know everything but liked speaking in riddles; Miss Viève, who came from a common family yet seemed more elegant than any noble; and Mr. Morvan Durand, a lawyer who was more like a history teacher. They had all helped me a great deal. There were also people the original owner of this body had known for a long time, but all I had left of them were a few hazy fragments of memory: that older female cousin I only exchanged letters with, Roselle and his friends whom I mentioned earlier, and my father-he truly loved me, loved the original "me."
Even so, I still felt empty inside. That loneliness... how could I put it? It was as though all the merriment belonged to them, while I was merely a spectator.
That loneliness had nothing to do with my status, nor was it because I had a bad personality. It certainly wasn't because I looked down on anyone or felt inferior to them. It was the distress of a modern person transported into ancient times, lost and with nobody to confide in.
I was writing this diary because I was afraid that, as time passed, I would gradually forget all this, forget who I used to be, and blend completely into their world. In the long run, that might be a good thing, but I still couldn't accept it.
My mom and dad, and my old friends, surely were still waiting for me to return. As long as I could find a way to transmigrate back, there would still be time. There had to be.
...But how could it be that easy? This world didn't even have decent technology. It was nothing like the Earth I knew. To find a way back, I first needed money, status, and connections. That was far too difficult for a declining family. Even though I had saved up a little money and attracted the Royal Family's attention, the truly great nobles probably saw it as nothing more than children playing around.
Come to think of it, before transmigrating, I had read plenty of webnovels about this sort of thing. Every protagonist seemed to have cheats: either they knew everything under the sun, with heads full of advanced physics and chemistry, or they were surrounded by overlooked geniuses who only needed a little guidance to produce technological breakthroughs, lead the times, marry a beautiful, wealthy woman, and reach the pinnacle of life.
But only after transmigrating myself did I discover that reality was far crueler than fiction.
Several thousand years had passed between the myths in the Church's scriptures and the events recorded in history books, yet this world was hardly any different from medieval Earth. People still used pit latrines and dumped wastewater straight into the streets, letting it flow into the river before drawing drinking water from that same river... Fortunately, they boiled their water-at least my family did. Apparently, the Church required it. Frequent bathing was another improvement over the Middle Ages... But with technology at this level, computers and the internet probably wouldn't appear even by the time I died of old age, let alone research into quantum mechanics, space exploration, or an understanding of how "transmigration" worked.
And although I knew steam engines needed boiling water, I had only a vague idea of how that became mechanical power. I knew sailing ships would eventually be replaced by ironclads, but I didn't understand a thing about their actual design principles... The people in the Church of the Artisan might understand as soon as they heard the idea, but I worshiped the Eternal Blazing Sun and had no common ground with them. If I rashly approached Miss Viève and asked her to introduce me to the Archbishop of Trier so I could invent things, I might be arrested as a heretic, dragged into the Inquisition, and slow-roasted into a well-done human.
Oh, right. Much like the webnovels described, this world had conservative churches and enthusiastic burning stakes. The difference was that supernatural powers really existed here!
Since science couldn't explain how I had transmigrated here, perhaps mysticism could point me toward a way home?
Luckily, I had encountered that power early on and become one of the Beyonders, people who drank potions and gained supernatural abilities. Although the process had been somewhat convoluted and the justification a little flimsy, it was still a good start.
As for "getting to know" Roselle again afterward, founding a newspaper with him, earning my first pot of gold, having the honor of an audience with the king, and even taking advantage of this trip to the capital, Trier, to join that exclusive gathering organized by Mr. Fool-all of it was probably a chain reaction set off by that incident.
And it all began on that day three months ago. That night, I died...