My Life in Another World Sucks: Isekai Deconstruction, #1

By Alberto Catellani

My Life in Another World Sucks is an Isekai deconstruction. It takes what is perhaps one of the most popularized genres from the orient and goes away with the most common of its tropes; no LITRPG statistics, no Cheat Skills, no hidden Game Mechanics for the protagonist, whose name 'Hum', is on one hand the abbreviation of Human and on the other also one that changes throughout the story.

Hum remembers a past life in another, better world, but all he has on him are the clothes typical of the country he is in, and a back-breaking job in a clay mine. As a raiding party composed of both humans and beast folks raids the village and takes him as a slave, his main prerogative isn't to achieve the Harem of his dreams, or incredible cosmic powers.

It's to endure the hardships ahead of him, and find a place where he can truly belong.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alberto Catellani
• Release date: Jul 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393635765

Alberto Catellani

Alberto Catellani was born on the 9 of March from the country that brought forth the greatest of inventions: the Road. We are talking of Italy, and he was born on a dark and stormy night at 3 in the morning. From a bright and early age, he wanted to write and once he found his grandfather's old typing machine, write he did. What he wrote back then is best left forgotten to the annals of time. Still, he keeps writing on. Known on the Internet as Shadenight123, and outside of it as someone with fifteen years plus of experience as a Dungeon Master capable of actually finishing the campaigns he starts, he has enjoyed a Classical Schooling, moved on to the beer-filled lands of Germany, and is currently attempting a Master level degree with, hopefully, a Ph.D afterwards. And in the meantime, he keeps on writing. Writing brings happiness, to himself and to those who enjoy his books and that, more than anything, is what truly makes him willing to write more and more. If you work at something you enjoy doing, after all, it will be as if you haven't been working at all.

Book preview

Acknowledgments

To my mother, whose unflinching dedication to family made her my hero.

To my father, whose quick wits and no-nonsense attitude taught me most valuable lessons.

To my brother, whom I hope will be fine in the challenges yet to come.

To those who have read of me before, and are thus my veteran readers,

And to those who read me for the first time, whom I hope will come to enjoy what I write.

To those whose days I brighten, and whose nights I fill with pleasant dreams.

Cheesy as it may sound,

Your happiness is mine too.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Map Of Calemil - Year 811

Preface

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Epilogue

Map Of Calemil - Year 811

Preface

Some things are a midsummer’s dream; they come quickly, rise even faster, and then collapse at the end as you awaken wondering why the feverish nightmare is over so soon. This tale is a deconstruction of the Isekai genre. So, if you are looking for power levels, Game-like HUDS and things like that, I would recommend you look elsewhere.

This is a street-level story, as in, things are tough, life’s unfair, but you still strive and fight for an ending that’s a bit better than how you started off. Cause life is all about fighting; it’s also all about enduring incredible things in order to find meaning, and perhaps happiness, through it.

Also, it was quite fun to investigate how ancient battles were fought, and how hardcore the people of ancient times were. Though I cannot guarantee full historical accuracy -how do you deal with mages from a strategic point of view? - I still enjoyed watching and reading of many a great thing that might seem surprising to some. Like the incredible number of survivors from head wounds.

Our skulls are tough!

Just like the human spirit is indomitable, and hardened by circumstances, and will inevitably survive across what many would consider impossible.

Thus, this is a tale of endurance, of survival. It is not a tale of revolution, not yet at least, and it is not a tale of incredibly powerful foes being blasted with cheap, modern tactics that clearly everyone from the future would be able to apply to the past -this is sarcasm, by the way.

The few benefits are those born of an average to good education. Knowledge is power. The curiosity, the thirst for discovery, those can be the greatest weapons a human has in its arsenal.

With the preamble out of the way, I hope you’ll enjoy this short story just as much as I had in writing it, and then correcting it.

Alberto Catellani 

Prologue

Ihave no name, and I must scream.

I had a name, but now I do not.

I know what I had; and I know what I have lost. I know not where I am, but I know what this 'here' is.

But allow me to explain properly, for without doing so, we would be getting nowhere.

The nature of Isekai is a wet dream for the downtrodden, the dispossessed and the abused. It is a dream where they lose the shackles of society upon them and break free into a wonderful world where the rules don't apply or are different from them.

It is a world filled often with wonders, and magic, and things that make people gaze in awe as they apply all of their knowledge into fields they never truly bothered learning about, or they would not think it so easy to uplift whole societies without consequences.

Everyone knows that concrete exists, or that batteries are a thing. How many know the precise dosage of chemical compounds to make these products a reality? How many truly understand the amount of hardships that rocking the status quo has on entire groups?

Of course, the Isekai protagonist also has incredible skills that help him along the way. They are leaders, glorious hacks that get the very best in manners both of Waifu and Laifu, and everyone cherishes them and where they step gold springs out by the score, or they are born into success and privilege.

The average man, or woman, settled in the middle ages would die a rather gruesome death not two days later barring some rather extraordinary circumstances.

There just aren't those social safety nets meant to safeguard humanity's most precious thing: life.

Life has worth, of course, but it's relative to the people who care about you and the skills you bring to the table, there is no such thing as an organized police patrol, or judges actually willing to listen to your plea, or presumption of innocence until proven guilty.

Let us also not forget another of Isekai’s greatest failures, that of the wanking of the eras of the past; Samurais are honorable warriors, Empires are founded on the false line of Rome and all those nasty topics like slavery being bad, or the willful subjugation of someone's will to another are aptly forgotten.

Modern sensitivities fail to even as much as belong to the place, as they are swiftly pushed to the back of the young, fit, strong protagonist when the umpteenth bodacious beauty is added to the ever-increasing harem.

And while this goes on, the readers can engross themselves in thinking that in the protagonist's place they would do things a hell of a lot better, get it going on with everyone and just fantasize about a life that doesn't have them be enslaved in all but name to a grinding wheel known as society, work and the continuation of one's family line for some never-explained reason.

The only good thing of an Isekai might, indeed, be the actual acknowledgment that some kind of superior entity exists; for without such an entity such an impossible act -the transference into another world- just wouldn't be possible. But just because the entity is superior, it doesn't mean they are infallible, otherwise mistakes wouldn't happen.

We could argue that one mistake out of a trillion’s trillion trillion is insignificant, but it still does invalidate the concept of 'Omniscient' and 'Omni-powerful'.

It just takes a very long time to find out.

The premise, thus simply explained, does little to explain who I am, or why I want to go home.

I really, really want to go home to my computer, my hot water and everything nice in-between.

Instead I'm stuck being a villager.

And no, not even in the sense of being a farmer in some cheap countryside trying to eke by a living while staying in nature. I reckon that a combination of poaching and chickens would make for a far better diet, but I am a villager stuck in a village whose main production is clay mining.

There are fields, there are lush forests, and then there's the start of giant man-made mine that overshadows everything else around the place.

Now thankfully the requisites for the job of being a clay miner are surprisingly simple. You show up to the doorstep of a small village after having walked for half a day in the forest, with no clue on where you are, and no idea why you are wearing very itchy clothes. You cause a very brief sensation as the villagers take in your appearance, and then since you look just like ninety percent of them, they proceed to show you where the mine is, because that is clearly where you intended on going to begin with.

The mine overseer takes one good look at you, decides that if you’re not fit enough, you’ll become it soon, and then shoves into your hand the one tool you will come to consider as your most precious instrument of survival.

Pickaxe in hand, you will swing it all day. Then, you get one flask of water, soup for lunch and for dinner, and you get to sleep on some fresh hay in a small cramped room with forty other men. It's a good thing; there's no heating system, so ending up snuggled into a mass of smelly, sweaty humans is the only surefire way of surviving the nights.

Did I get special abilities? Did I acquire a cheat companion, or use my knowledge to make my life easier?

No to all the above answers.

There was no knowledge that could get me to make mining any easier. There was nothing but going beneath the earth, with a pickaxe on my shoulder, and then pick away at a corner of a tunnel and throw the clay into large, ungodly heavy mine carts.

The only positive thing were the canaries. They chirped prettily, and as their chirps filled the air, everything was fine.

Silence, on the other hand, was really bad.

If nothing had happened, I was half-certain I would have kept working in the mine until the next cargo delivery was planned, and then hitch a ride on it to get some work somewhere easier. Farming, for example, would have been harsh work, but not as harsh as mine-working. I'd have been fine even marrying some widow if such a thing was possible and work in her farm.

Or I might have tried getting a job in a local shop as a helper. My muscles were coming along nicely, and nothing made you lose weight as much as following the miners' diet and their harsh work schedule.

Still, something did happen.

And my life didn't become better. It became worse.

The village had a clay mine; we were clay miners.

In the words of an overused meme, it was obvious that some neighboring place would come and speak, in ancient words spoken since the beginning of time two truly historically unchanging words.

Gib clay.

The answer from the village was, of course, a resounding no.

Raiding parties never accepted 'No' as an answer, though.

Chapter One

Unsavory types do not give forewarning when they decide to attack. They do, however, make their intentions known on the off chance that they might get the clay without having to start a fight. And normally, the village would be smart enough to hand over the clay.

Nobody wants a fight; nobody wants to get killed. The moment the request for clay was made, the clay miners that lived there, had someone sweet to them and were planning on starting a family decided to go talk with the village elder concerning what to do next.

Those who were there just because they had been looking for work, had no strings or attachments or just valued their lives more simply packed their meager belongings and trudged off on the main road. I would have followed them, but I didn’t have enough to tide me over, and there was no telling whether the bandits were patrolling the paths or not.

Some decided to work just one extra day for some extra spare change, since there wouldn’t be much of an increase in salary over something as trifling as a bandit raid. Further was no fun or simple coin change. You needed ludicrous amounts of copper coins to get a single gold one; it wasn't an easy one to one hundred conversion. The location of the coin's mint, the purity of the alloy, and the coin you wanted to change it with as well as where you were played a hefty part in it.

There was a money changer at the mine after all, since apparently you could get a kind of fake-gold variant called 'Electrum' which was worth more in certain places or good old silver, though that was mostly if you were willing to work for two weeks in a row and eat only onions and hard bread; in the range of the hundreds of copper coins, it was normally exchanged only at the end of the week and only if requested.

The fact that Electrum or Silver were interchangeable and depended on the weight of the copper coins had some people try to game the system by dirtying the coins, but those got washed a bit before being weighted, and it was just a waste of time in general.

Some even insisted on getting a specific mint of coins from the money changer, who did everything in his power to convince you that indeed, the village of X appreciated certain coins more than Y, and that Z truly loved Electrum rather than Silver.

It was a matter of coin circulation, and there was no unified currency system.

Well, barring the fact that you could buy barrels of copper and silver coins with gold, I didn't really care that much about working an extra day when my life was at risk.

They wanted the clay, and we slept near it; best thing to do was hightail it out of there as fast as possible.

The village folks would discuss it between themselves, plan some kind of shitty defense, and probably get beaten black and blue with blunt clubs or whatnot.

Then we go back in a couple of days and nothing's changed, was the end of the experienced miner's explanation on why it was just for the best if we headed off into the wilderness and survived on berries, water from a river and what little game we could get.

Strings to catch hares, dig small pits with wooden sticks sharpened with rocks, all of that kind of 'this is surviving' knowledge, and then agreeing to share the loot at night in a meeting spot.

There we were, a small group of five people who didn't want to leave fully but also didn't want to be a part of the defenses. The best of both worlds in a certain sense, since it meant that after the broken bones, they might even pay us more to do the same amount of work.

Hum, the experienced miner's name was Nik. Simple, quick, and probably nobody had thought about that for longer than five minutes. My name was, aptly, 'Hum'. It wasn't really mine, since I couldn’t remember what name I had held before appearing, lost and puzzled, in the nearby forest, but I would hum often, and that was enough for them to give me a nickname which would pretty much become my official name.

It wasn’t uncommon for children not to be named, or to name themselves when they got old enough to speak. You couldn’t guarantee a child would survive the harsh winters, and if they died it was better not to have grown attached.

Camaraderie between men working together was obvious; when people get shit thrown on by someone else, they tend to band together. I had been new to the job, but I hadn't had complains. I also knew the unspoken rules of men-bonding, and thus I had settled in ready to jeer and belittle the newest arrival when they had punctually arrived.

It had worked like a charm. There had been no everlasting bonds of friendship, and since there was no way to avoid sharing the workspace, I had eventually gotten along with pretty much everyone else. 

Yeah? I replied.

We stick together, Nik said. His dark eyes were clear in purpose, and his body used to the mines. His breathing was a bit short sometimes; he made it up by being unstoppable when he started going at it and you didn't want one of his punches crashing against your face. He was big, mean, and had no qualms putting you back in your place.

Got it, I answered.

Few words, brisk movements verging on the rude, and we were both off. I'd shake the undergrowth, get the hares running in one direction and Nik would jump on them from his hiding spot, or