The Extra Prince Sets Out To Conquer The World

  I can’t help but feel like I’m in a CGI-filled movie as the magical characters spin around me.

   The sight reminded me that I was once again in a novel.

   The magical characters danced around me, shrank in size, and then disappeared as they imprinted themselves onto my right arm.

As they vanished into thin air, the eponymous Ancestral Legacy fell to the ground, lifeless.

   “Hmm, is it done?”

   Despite the magic, I didn’t feel the slightest bit different.

   It’s strange, because the novel describes an unknown force and a momentary feeling of empowerment, but I don’t feel any of that.

   At one point, I picked up the book from the ground and checked it.

   “Did all the book’s contents go into my arm?”

   Every page of the book was a blank page with no content.

I picked it up, just in case, and noticed a small, unintelligible text under the sleeve that had slipped down.

   This, too, was not in the novel.

   “Is this an ancient language?”

   Prince Yuan recalled similar characters in his memory.

   It was probably from the eponymous era, but the original owner of the body hadn’t studied it, so he couldn’t read it.

   “Aish, there’s something ominous about this.”

Okay, first, let’s make sure that the Ancestral Legacy has changed my body properly.

   I picked up the clothespin and focused on it, as if I had just pricked my finger earlier.

   “Harden. Harden. Get hard….”

   I pricked my finger, muttering to myself to manifest the power, like the supporting character in the novel who gained this power.

   Pow!

   “Tsk-!”

   The clothespin punctured my finger as if it met no resistance.

   I panicked as a drop of blood formed on my fingertip so easily.

   “What, was that fancy effect a scam?!”

   Strange. Prince Yuan’s situation, Precia’s appearance, and the location of the secret mechanism in the royal library were all exactly as they were in the novel The Sage of the Winter Tree.

   So why not the Ancestral Legacy?

   No, the letters jumping out of the book and the right arm being infused with letters are just as described.

   So the question is….

   “No, no, no, it can’t be….”

   The problem is in the body of Prince Yuan, this body.

   “Well, it’s too early to tell.”

   First, I need to decipher the small characters on my wrist, which are different from those in the novel.

   Prince Yuan never learned the old script, but it’s the same language system, and the characters haven’t changed much.

It’s not a long sentence, so it shouldn’t be too hard to decipher if I go through the books in the library in reverse chronological order, from the Ancestral Period to the present day.

   At most, it would be like interpreting the Hunminjeongeum Haerye*.

    *Apparently, it’s like a mega dictionary/explanation for the original Korean script. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum_Haerye

   * * *

“The prince is much later than I thought.”

   Precia worried, twisting her fingers through her red hair, which was braided in a single braid.

At her words, Herion, Yuan’s manservant, smiled bitterly at the basket of sandwiches.

“I’m afraid so. At best, the lunch the chef brought all the way here will be cold.”

   It was both funny and sad to see the chef apologize for his rudeness as he brought the lunch, unaware that it was Yuan who had really slapped him on the head.

   Although the chef openly disrespected and belittled Yuan, he wasn’t really a member of the royal family.

He was just swept up in the overall atmosphere of the palace that disrespected Yuan and did the same thing others did.

   That was true of most of the people in the palace, except for a few people the Queen had planted.

   To belong to a palace that honored the First Prince, Yuan, was to be a pariah, and therefore politically uninformed.

So it was no wonder that the chef was apologetic when Yuan invited the court physician, who usually only examined royalty and nobles, to visit him.

   “Yes, but don’t you think the prince has been a little… strange since he woke up?”

Precia asked hesitantly, and Herion thought inwardly that he did, but his mouth said otherwise.

   “There is nothing strange about the prince.”

   Saying the opposite of what he meant was a habit he’d picked up over the years of working at the palace.

   In a palace where you could be whipped and hanged for any reason, even the simplest small conversation between servants was life-threatening.

You never knew where an ear might be listening, so anything that could be heard as gossip was an absolute taboo.

   But the young knight was too young to know the bitterness of the world to realize that.

   Precia threw up her hands in embarrassment at Herion’s insistence.

“Oh, no, it’s not that it’s weird, it’s just that he’s… how shall I say it… doing things he normally wouldn’t do.”

   He certainly was.

The man who hadn’t even touched a drink was reaching for one, and the man who couldn’t kill a bug was bashing the chef’s head in with all his might.

   “Change can happen suddenly. A person can become a different person at the slightest trigger, and at the prince’s age, that’s when the change is most noticeable.”

   “Is that so?”

   “And change isn’t always a bad thing.”

   Precia smiled and nodded at Herion’s words.

   “Well, that’s true, for sure, it was refreshing when the prince smacked that chef over the head!”

   At her exclamation, the old servant almost nodded for a moment, but with skillful deference, he simply smiled.

   “By the way, I hope we have time to prepare for the feast.”

   The two of them looked at the stairs Yuan had ascended and at the clock.

   * * *

I threw my hands on the floor among the piles of books, frustrated.

   Interpreting the characters on my wrist wasn’t too difficult, as some of the kings of old were in the business of compiling dictionaries.

But the interpretation was enough to frustrate me.

“Aah, this can’t be.”

   The three lines of text on my wrist read

   ‘Certification Passed’

   ‘Formula entry failed due to musculoskeletal incompatibility.

“Enforcing formula – 0.04 percent.

   This meant that it would take me an enormous amount of time to reach the same starting point as the supporting character who earned the Ancestral Legacy.

   The sentence didn’t change at all while I was interpreting it, so I figured the worst that could happen was that the percentages would simply fill in as time passed.

“Damn it! If this was going to happen, it would have been better to give it to Gilbert, the supporting character who was supposed to receive the legacy!”

   Gilbert is a supporting character who helps the main character, Jade, and becomes a faithful companion.

It was easy to make him an ally because I knew the situation he was in and how to solve it.

With his Ancestral Legacy, Gilbert would grow up to be a monster on par with Jade and Precia, which was much better than keeping it in a shitty body that couldn’t even use it right away.

   “No, don’t be discouraged. I still have two left.”

There’s no time for regrets. The time I’d spent deciphering the old inscriptions had been well spent.

   Now that I realized things weren’t going as planned, I had to be more prepared if I wanted to survive.