Return of the Apocalypse Knight

Chapter 17: The Mountain Village (1)

The year on the calendar was 203x.

“What happened,” I thought, “did I lose track of time in my previous life?”

The year on the calendar was pointing to the year after the last year I remembered.

It had been more than twenty years since I had been reborn, so had this village been destroyed decades ago?

However, there were no traces of it left in the houses, and the clothes worn by the undead villagers didn’t seem to be more than a year old.

So, after all, it hadn’t been more than two years since my previous life.

What the hell had happened?

No matter how much I thought about it, I couldn’t understand it.

Was time passing differently between the two dimensions?

Or had time in this world stopped in the meantime?

“Whatever the case, maybe we’ll see each other again.”

I wasn’t expecting anything, but now that it had happened, I had to find out.

I didn’t know if any of the people who were close to me in my previous life were still alive.

Zahina looked at me with a puzzled expression.

She couldn’t possibly understand what I was saying.

She looked at me puzzled and then pointed to the calendar.

“It’s too repetitive for letters, and if it were numbers, it would be……. It’s got a picture of a woman on it, but is it some kind of calendar?”

Surprisingly, she recognized the calendar.

“It doesn’t look like our calendar, but I guess it is.”

I don’t know the details because I’m just a simple knight with no education, but our world’s calendar was a circular calendar based on the constellations, thanks to the development of magic and witchcraft instead of science.

I wonder if that was the same in the country of the elves?

“We mark the days and seasons by the coming and going of the leaves on our mother tree. But we also mark the passage of days with numbers.”

It wasn’t the same.

She was a child of the divine tree and recognized the seasons by the appearance of the trees instead of a constellation.

“I think I know the rules, but I don’t think I’ll have time to study this, it’ll be faster to find someone alive.”

She was right and I didn’t need to do any research because I already knew.

After checking the calendar, which was frozen at September, I looked around.

There was nothing special about the open floor plan except for the hanging calendar.

Instead, there were many objects rolling around in the living room connected to the main hall.

A smashed and rolling TV, a quilt covered in congealed blood, scattered pills and an overturned phone.

I walked into the room and picked up the handset of an old landline phone.

Unfortunately, when I put it to my ear, I didn’t hear anything.

I flipped the light switch on the wall, but the lights didn’t come on, so the power must have gone out.

The landline phone should still have a signal when the power goes out.

When I saw that there was no signal at all, I realized that the entire area and the country had lost power.

With the power out, there was no point in checking the TV or anything else.

If there was a radio, I might be able to get some information.

Alas, there was no radio in sight.

Eventually, I picked up the note on the floor and left the room.

As I stepped out onto the floor, the pretty woman looked around and said to me,

“You seem to know your way around the weapons of this world, and now you seem to know how to use things you’ve never seen before.”

She must have seen me fiddling around in the room.

Well, my behavior must have been strange enough for her to think so.

To further lower her suspicions, I lied brazenly.

“I’ll try this and that just in case. If I knew something, there would have been some kind of reaction.”

Unlike the time I shot the gun, this time it was a viable excuse.

I was going to keep acting this way for the rest of my life, as hard as it would be to believe if it kept piling up.

It’s not me anyway, so what’s he going to do?

Anyway, what can she do?

With that, I brushed off Zahina’s question and continued to search the house.

I checked other rooms, climbed down from the floor and checked the kitchen off to one side.

The reason I kept searching was because there was still more to find.

After looking around the dusty kitchen, I opened the refrigerator inside.

“Yuck!”

I exclaimed in disgust and slammed the fridge door shut.

The inside of the fridge looked like hell and the smell was unbearable.

“Maybe I should check the other houses.”

With that thought, I looked around the kitchen again and found what I was looking for.

“Found it!”

The rice bin, still filled with rice, was lying on one side of the kitchen and a quick inspection revealed no rice bugs.

Furthermore, I found soy sauce, salt, and gochujang in the back of the kitchen.

Unfortunately, all the kimchi in the cabinet was rotten, but I was grateful to find rice.

I swept up the rice and various condiments into a space-expanding bag.

As I gathered up everything useful from the kitchen and headed back outside, Hoffman was coming out of the warehouse with a folding scythe.

When he saw me, he raised the scythe in his hand.

“Surprisingly, the farming tools in the warehouse are similar to ours. They’ve been well refined, and for a normal person who doesn’t use mana, they look much more usable.”

The scythe he was holding was an ordinary factory-made scythe with a bit of rust on it.

However, even such a scythe was much harder than the ordinary swords of our world.

Of course, it was nothing compared to a knight’s sword, forged to hold mana, but it was something Hoffman could live with.

After searching the first house, we left the village.

Hoffman wanted to check the other houses, but I shook my head.

“Our purpose is to survive until the gates reopen, so we need to get out of the demon’s territory as quickly as possible.”

If I hadn’t known what lay to the south, I would have done as Hoffman said and moved cautiously, but knowing what lay to the south, I had no reason to stay in this village.

I could get the rice I needed right now.

Besides, the thought that my acquaintances might still be alive made my heart race.

At my word as leader, our party descended out of the village to a small stream.

The sun was overhead and hanging in the middle of the sky. It was time for lunch.

I halted the group in front of the stream.

“Since we’ve been walking and fighting, let’s eat lunch here.”

Normally, I would have skipped lunch, but after all the moving and fighting, we deserved a break and a bite to eat.

The rest of the party felt the same way and stopped obediently.

But it wasn’t just because I was hungry that I stopped them.

‘I want to eat rice!’

I thought of the rice in my bag and couldn’t hold on any longer.

“I’ll cook this meal,” I said, “because when I was searching the house earlier, I found a grain similar to what we used to eat back home.”

I hadn’t eaten rice in years and I was confident I could eat it all, even if it was full of rice bugs.

I gave the two of them a quick once-over, then pulled the rice and cooking utensils out of my space-expansion bag and started cooking.

I took out the firewood, lit it, and put the rice cooker I brought from home on top of it.

I also took out water, poured it into the pot, and washed the rice in the stream before serving it.

“I haven’t been on the continent long, but this is a grain I haven’t seen before.”

Zahina muttered as she watched me cook the rice.

Hoffman looked at the rice in the water curiously.

“I haven’t seen it either, but it’s a big continent, and from what I hear, the diet is quite different in the south, so there may be grains I’ve never seen before.”

He glanced at the folding scythe propped up in the tree nest alongside his knife.

“Grains are similar to those on the continent. This scythe and this place seem to have a surprising amount of similarities to our world.”

My words were a lie, but Hoffman wasn’t wrong.

The technology is different, the vegetation is different, but when you think about it, our world and this world are so similar, even though it’s a different world, a different star.

There was no air and water, no plants, animals, or demons, but there were so many similarities.

The most similar thing was humans.

Sure, humans on this world had no mana, but other than that, they weren’t much different from humans on the continent.

I could attest to that, having lived in both worlds.

The only difference was the elf that sat in front of me, watching the rice cooker.

‘I’m lucky to be alive.’

In any case, the rice, which I hadn’t eaten in over 20 years, was delicious.

What’s more, we were eating the garbage soup with the rice that was flavored with seasonings and salt from the abandoned house.

“Oh my God…….This tastes like this. What kind of drugs did you put in the soup?”

“It’s a little salty, but it tastes really good to me.”

Thankfully, unlike the unfamiliar rice, the soup was a huge hit with the two party members.

“I put spices in it because I had some, and the spices from this world work well.”

It was a dangerous thing to eat unfamiliar food, but neither the elf nor Hoffman was surprised by the mention of otherworldly spices.

After all, after years of fighting the Demon King, we’d grown accustomed to any kind of food.

It was no different for the elves, whose land had been poisoned by the demons.

Basically, the place where we fought the demons was full of death energy.

The food there was bound to be tainted with death energy, so it was natural that it could not be covered.

The food there was bound to be tainted with death energy, so it was no wonder they couldn’t cover it up.

After all that hell, and all that mana, only I or Hoffman had a high tolerance for bad food.

Besides, the elves were known for their immunity to sickness.

So while we all finished eating and rested for a while, I pulled out the note from the house we’d searched.

The note was bloodstained and partially obscured by time.

As you will see when you come here, your mother and I can no longer wait for you.

I would not have let you come if you had called, but I am afraid you might have an accident on the way.

But you two are my children, and I know you will be safe.

We were very happy to have you two, send you to college, send you to the army, and marry you.

And…….>

I could no longer read the middle, where she might have written about those happy times, and could only make out the bottom sentence, which was hastily scrawled.

And I, for one, will soon follow in her footsteps.

Until then, of course, the walls and gates that keep the dead villagers out will have to hold.

Either way, I don’t think I’ll ever see you in this world again, my son.

My son, Jae-min.

I know this is the first time I’ve said it, but your mother and I love you and will always be proud of you.

Give my regards to your children and grandchildren.

March 14, 20xx.

The note I picked up was a letter, or suicide note, from the grandfather who had died in the house to his children.

His love for his children was palpable.

Moreover, the old man seems to have retained his wit until the end.

It was something that touched my heart…….

I remembered the date of the letter and tossed the note into the fire.

The letter was full of family affection, but the war had been too long to be moved by a letter like this.

I brought it back only to confirm the date of the village’s disappearance.

After the break, we packed our bags again and continued down the mountain path.

After a while, we came across a paved road filled with abandoned cars.