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Dawn Traveller - Chapter 03 - Two Beginnings
'Ugh… it’s so suffocating…'
Yeon Woo had been feeling a heavy weight pressing down on him. He couldn't open his eyes or move his body.
‘Where am I? I thought I was sleeping…’
He knew that there were people that had insomnia and couldn’t sleep. ‘It's probably because I started learning the times tables. Well, it is a pretty hard subject for a six year old.’
Yeon Woo had tried to fall asleep with comfortable thoughts of him playing family with Jin So Ra.
Having a good sleep would lead to a good day tomorrow.
Just because he was a kid didn’t mean that he had no worries, and running around with friends his age meant that he was physically and mentally healthy.
‘Children are so noisy. I can’t even understand what they’re saying when they’re all in a group.’
He tried sleeping, but the weight continued to press on. It felt like a force was grabbing him, like he was being dragged somewhere.
It felt too real to say that it was just a dream.
Yeon Woo felt like he was in grave danger.
This wasn’t normal… Even though there was no such thing as ‘normal’ with him.
'Have I been kidnapped? Mum please save me… I won't eat chocolate for a week! Please!'
Ignoring his desperate thoughts, his legs slipped into something.
‘It’s cold…’
Immediately he felt the cold course through his legs.
‘This feels too real to be just a dream…’
And suddenly, someone grabbed his legs and pulled them outwards. He slipped out from the suffocating but comfortable place.
He had felt this feeling before.
Yeon Woo, for some reason, knew it.
'Have I been… born… again?'
Amazingly, he remembered, very clearly, being born into the world.
His first steps into the world were filled with fear and uneasiness.
Filled with an unknown sorrow, he instinctively searched for his mother. Naturally...
Everything was the same as the time he was first born.
‘Why me? I’m not some product at a shopping mall… It's not as if I can be exchanged or taken back or something.’
Yeon Woo didn’t know what was going on, but he tried to act as carefully as possible. He tried to act as normal babies do and opened his mouth to let out a loud cry.
‘Wah… waaaah...’
Swoosh!
‘What is this? This doesn’t feel right...’
It was difficult, trying to move that heavy head of his, but he could see something flying towards him.
‘What is that? It’s coming closer… it kind of looks like its rotating.’
And soon after he realized what it was.
A polished, sharpened axe!
“AHHHHH!”
Instead of a loud baby’s cry, he let out an honest scream.
Clash!
The axe was blocked by another blade and spun off in another direction.
“What?”
The place where Yeon Woo was born the second time was an underground space.
The space around him was filled with fiery torches and a group of five people were fighting weird green monsters.
Crossbows fired bolts, and strange creatures were running around shooting fire balls and jets of water what could penetrate slates of metal.
The group of people were protecting the woman who had just given birth from the green monsters.
They were talking to one another but it was in a language that Yeon Woo could not understand. He couldn’t understand everything, but he got the general gist of the conversation through the emotions in their thoughts.
Why did he have to be born now?
'This isn’t my fault. You were the one that suggested we go exploring here. There’s a time and place for everything. If she had said that she might have the baby soon, we might not have come here.'
'We can talk once all these monsters are dead.'
Korean children learn about their parents fighting at a young age!
‘I know I’m weird, but who dreams in 3D with sound effects?’
Yeon Woo moved his heavy head and looked around at the people around him.
The man had an armour of leather and metal, and wore a quiver on his back. His clothes were a mixture of hunter and lawyer outfits.
The middle-aged man wearing robes was waving his hands around in strange motions, making magical spells to shoot at the monsters.
There was a woman with beautiful, chocolate coloured skin and a Dark Elf that summoned spirits. A dwarf with a short beard was violently swinging an axe around.
Including the woman who just gave birth to him, there were five of them.
‘Pretty.’
Yeon Woo smiled brightly every time the spirits went past him.
The water spirits were revealing young women. Every time they busily ran around, their cool moisture touched his face.
They washed clean Yeon Woo’s dirt filled face.
“Gooaaaaeeet!”
The much-damaged monsters fought for a while but retreated after letting out anguished cries.
'They're fleeing... This fight looks like an awesome scene from a movie...'
At that moment, the woman who gave birth to him said something incomprehensible and started to breastfeed him.
“Ooh!”
His mother’s milk flowed into his mouth.
Not strawberry, chocolate or banana milk, the feeling of his mother’s milk!
“It’s delicious. This really isn’t a dream then?!”
*
The team of explorers had defeated the monsters.
Occasionally the dwarf would stop them to disarm the traps that blocked their path.
It was like he did this many times before; his hands worked surely and with familiarity.
‘Lets hurry.’
‘Isn’t it better for us to just go back, since the baby has been born and all?’
‘We risked all this danger to get here. Would our efforts be wasted if we just go back? We won’t know who else will have explored this place when we come back.’
‘I’m okay.’
‘Let's all be strong. We’re almost there.’
Yeon Woo could not understand the conversations between them yet.
Sleep started to roll in after his stomach was full.
‘I shouldn’t sleep. This is really dangerous. As they say, ‘you must keep your head even when you are bitten and dragged away by a tiger’. But I guess I can’t do anything anyways, even if I stay awake…’
He fought against sleep and kept watching their adventures.
Yeon Woo was on the Dark Elf Grona’s back.
The human warrior Rendal and the priestess Riley were married.
The Magician Herse liked to mutter to himself, and the dwarf drank beer after every battle.
Yeon Woo tried continuously to learn about the situation he was in.
‘The baby isn’t sleeping.’
‘It’s hard to put him in a deep sleep in a place like this. Even if Grona tries to move carefully, he will wake up when there’s a battle.’
‘It’s a relief that he doesn’t cry. We don’t have to worry about him alerting the monsters.’
‘By the way, is the ‘thing’ near us?’
‘I think we’re almost there, according to the map.’
‘Let’s finish this quickly and go back.’
Whenever Riley, the woman who gave birth to him, prayed, light appeared around them. During the battle, if she prayed, the light sometimes healed their party or scared off the monsters.
‘This is more effective than the hospital!’
Yeon Woo found this all fascinating, but what caught his attention most was the magic and the spirits.
‘I get a weird feeling every time they use that. I think it has something to do with some unknown force around me.’
So he savoured the feeling of the magic that the magician and the spirits gave him while he was carried onto the Dark Elf’s back.
Getting milk from his mother Riley whenever his stomach emptied, he explored the dungeon with them.
They were at least two times faster than normal people and yet quieter.
‘What could they possibly be?’
It was a question that Yeon Woo kept constantly in his mind.
They were people who bravely entered a dungeon full of monsters… They definitely weren’t normal people.
After a long time of hard work, they arrived at their destination.
There was a crown with big gems embedded into it and lots of armour was on display, and in another room, there was a fair amount of gold coins, precious gems and magical items.
‘We’re finally here.’
‘So this was the once-great Duke Loedran’s dungeon.’
‘Lets just hurry up and take everything.’
‘We wouldn’t have to worry about money for a while if we took everything here.’
The handsome lawyer, the magician, the dwarf who worked with traps, the Dark Elf who shot arrows at a great distance to kill monsters, and his mother, the priestess!
They opened their backpacks and shoved every treasure into them.
Yeon Woo finally realized who these strange people were.
‘Ah… They were tomb raiders!’
-
Translated by Hannah Kim
Proofread by Janowicz
This chapter was released on Sunday the 30th of October, 2016.
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