Prologue

“You cannot die.”

So they say raising a child is pointless.

The old sages were right. I take in the protagonist of a fantasy novel, raise a kid who was already a munchkin into an even more absurd munchkin, get sealed away for his sake, finally wake up after all that—only to hear the same damn thing again after twelve years.

Irkus Sagrina Robein, who had already been a devastatingly handsome seventeen-year-old, had ripened like a fine wine with age.

I looked anew at Irkus, who had grown perfectly well on his own while I had been sealed.

The disciple I’d last seen before he even turned twenty had shot up and was now on the verge of thirty. At times like this, the endlessness of my own years felt unbearably cruel.

Contrary to the contract we had made in the beginning, I found myself mesmerized by the beautiful violet eyes of this ungrateful brat who now had the gall to tell me he would not grant me death.

Whether it was because he carried the blood of a witch, or because he benefited from that protagonist beauty buff, something about him unsettled the heart without the use of even a single charm spell.

“You turn twenty-nine this year, while I am four hundred seventeen.”

“You’re going to start that damned age talk again, aren’t you.”

“Damned? Listen to this brat—he grows older and his mouth grows foul. Yes, damned age talk it is. At this point, I’m well past the age when death should be coming for me.”

At the word death, Irkus’s neat eyebrows twisted in a deeply pained expression.

When he was younger, that little frown had only seemed cute, but now that he had grown older, it carried an air of intimidation. Not that it meant much to me—he was still just a child in my eyes.

I casually reached out and rubbed my thumb over the furrow between Irkus’s brows. Why did he keep frowning, when human aging was so quick? Did he think being the protagonist would spare him from developing wrinkles forever?

“Keep the promise. We made a contract.”

“……”

“Your lack of response only confirms it—you’ve become Emperor, haven’t you? It suits you.”

My hand, which had been smoothing the crease between his brows, moved up to tousle his perfectly styled pale-gold hair.

Whether he lacked awareness that he was now Emperor of an entire empire, or whether the phrase “habits formed at three last until eighty” really was true, Irkus did not so much as resist my hand ruining his hair. Instead, he bowed his head slightly and received it quietly. Despite that obedient posture, the words he spoke were the same as always.

“Yuan, I’ll say it again… You cannot die.”

“You cannot break our contract.”

“And what makes you so certain?”

“Because I raised you, and taught you.”

From twelve to seventeen, Irkus had always looked at me with the same gaze.

Eyes that longed for affection, eyes shining with the childish hunger for recognition.

A child’s love or admiration is harmless. One can ignore it and move on. You just turn your head away, pretend not to see, and that is the end of it.

Fortunately, that was something I had grown very good at. When you’ve lived as long as I have, you grow accustomed to such things whether you want to or not.

But Irkus, now fully grown, still harboring the same feelings toward me—that was a serious problem. A long-held emotion he didn’t even try to hide was no good for either of us.

Between Irkus and me lies a span of centuries. I am immortal; he is mortal, and will one day age and die. Few endings are as tragic as a mortal falling in love with an immortal.

So my indifference was, in truth, for both our sakes. Irkus may resent me for now, but with time, he will come to understand my restraint.

“If only once…”

“No. Don’t continue.”

“I thought… at least once, you might respond to my love.”

“If you love me, then you must kill me.”

“……”

“That is the only answer I can give you.”

Four hundred seventeen years…
I have lived far too long.

Unless Irkus kills me, I will again wait through endless centuries for someone else who might.

Yet anything that appears in the future will undoubtedly offer lower odds of success than Irkus, the protagonist of this world.

At this point, I might as well be sealed away forever. If I cannot die, then better to never open my eyes again, so that everything may fade from memory.

As I withdrew the hand that had been stroking his hair, Irkus seized my wrist with enough force to keep me from pulling away.

He had not just grown in size—his hands were now more those of a swordsman than an emperor or mage. It seemed he had suffered a great deal while I had been helplessly sealed.

I took a step forward, letting him pull me without resistance.

A truly good teacher would look at those hands and clap the student on the back, telling him he had worked hard—but I was never good at such things.

I didn’t want to make Irkus sad, yet the thought that he truly might refuse to kill me made my heart beat uneasily. I feared that his finite, mortal life would make me want to live.

What should I do if I grow to want to live until this child dies?

If swept up in emotion, I choose to continue living just because he wishes it, I will lose yet another chance to die. The very idea of seeing through Irkus’s funeral while trapped alone in a body that neither ages nor dies was horrific enough even in imagination.

Standing so close that I could feel his breath, a sense of longing washed over me. When he was little, I could lift him easily into my arms. Now, all I could do was powerlessly look up at him.

“I’m sorry.”

“Yuan, please…”

“You know it too. I took you in so that I could one day die by your hand.”

I have lived far too long to endure this life alone anymore. Time has taken so much from me. Before what little remains is lost as well, fleeing into death is my only wish.

The Great Sage… simply wants to die.

The Great Sage Wants to Die — Chapter 1

The beginning of all this reaches back 398 years—back to before I fell into the world of the seventeen-volume fantasy epic The Book of Irkus; back when I was still a high-school senior in Korea.

I had never been interested in fantasy novels. They did not appear on the CSAT.

But as with most isekai stories, I ended up in this mess after flipping through a fantasy novel just once—on the night before the CSAT, no less. Had I obediently reviewed the Korean literature passages instead, such a tragedy would never have occurred.

Why should you never read a fantasy novel the night before the exam?

There are roughly three reasons.

1. Because if you read a fantasy novel the night before the CSAT, there is a high chance you will be hit by a truck and possessed.

2. Because most Korean seniors who die right before the exam become overpowered in another world.

3. Because even then, before becoming overpowered, they suffer through every possible hell.

Some classmate—whose face I can barely remember now—once joked:

“Dude, don’t read fantasy novels the night before the CSAT. You might get hit by a truck on the way to the test and end up possessed in the book.”

Looking back now, that bastard was a prophet. He should have become the Great Sage, not me.

Sunlight poured through the window whose curtains I’d been too lazy to draw. Dust motes glimmered gold, as if unaware of their own insignificance.

It had been a day just as bright when I found Irkus in the Southern Forest.

At the time, I’d crawled into bed determined to sleep for twenty years straight—but because I’d failed to apply proper preservation magic to the wooden bed, I woke up five years later, back aching terribly, because the bed had collapsed under the weight of years.

“Gilbert!”

Cursing atop the ruined bed, I shouted for Gilbert, the oak spirit I lived with. That was the start of my four-hundredth-birthday morning.

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“What a beast. He’ll wear out his CSAT prep book.”

“Are kids who get perfect scores on the September mock exam always like this?”

“Han Yuwan, seriously… don’t you dare read any fantasy novel the night before the CSAT. Guys like you are the type to get hit by a truck.”

“Is that a curse? Even if I get hit by a truck, it won’t make you first place.”

“You’re a study-obsessed lunatic…”

“Lunatics like me are the ones who uphold the future of Korea’s exam system.”

I am a prodigy. I say it with no shame at all, because it is true.

Out of conscience, I won’t say genius.

In a world overflowing with people who memorize everything after seeing it once, I still had to look at something at least three times. Among those who pulled all-nighters without batting an eye, I grew faint after just a day without sleep—so no, I can’t claim I had a natural gift for study.

In Korea’s academically brutal environment, my “moderately decent brain” was simply too low-spec.

There were plenty of people worse than me, but just as many were better. I could excel at school-level exams, but never quite dominate national mock tests.

Naturally gifted students, however, become complacent. They trust their innate memory and believe they will still place first even if they start studying later than everyone else. Though early preparation and pre-study are basics, they grow arrogant without them.

Unlike those geniuses, I was someone who became smart through hard work and learned vigilance. Sometimes, having average intelligence is an advantage.

Thanks to that, my name was always near the top in every school exam.

Does it matter if you aren’t born smart? You can overcome that with repetition and learned technique. Korean entrance exams aren’t philosophical—there is always a predetermined answer and method.

Even without understanding, if you memorize well, you win. The college entrance exam is the one field where a low-efficiency Tico can outrun a Benz.

Any fool who reads the CSAT prep book until the pages wear thin—so thoroughly that they can recall the fourth line of the English passage in section four—can score full marks. Drawing stripes on a pumpkin won’t make it a watermelon, but if you highlight a textbook enough, at least you can become a fluorescent green squash.

With time and determination, even the talentless can succeed. That is Korean entrance exams. It’s only those with weak will, distracted by every passing entertainment, who call the system luck-based.

My parents, my teachers, even the jealous classmates—they all assumed I’d score high and enter a top university. I was too relentless a student to fail.

I hadn’t even applied for early admissions anywhere except one top-tier university that I secretly hoped might “kidnap” me with an early offer. I was confident.

Then—unbelievably—I didn’t get to take the CSAT.

Korean is ambiguous. The “didn’t” here does not mean I failed the exam; it means I literally could not take it.

To explain: I was hit by a dozing truck driver on the morning of the CSAT and died.

My parents certainly had not raised me like a precious treasure so I could die this pathetically in a car accident.

After twelve years of school and on the way to the one-day exam that would measure all those years—I died. If life were a product, this would be grounds for an instant refund.

If I had known I’d die like that, I wouldn’t have spent my days stabbing my thighs with a pen to stay awake and memorize. I would’ve gone to PC cafés when invited, skipped class once or twice, lived a little.

But no one knows what lies ahead. If we can’t even predict whether a CSAT will be easy or brutal, how can we know our own future?

My only rebellion had been casually flipping through a fantasy novel the night before the CSAT—one that had been sitting on our bookshelf. Damn it… I shouldn’t have. Even now, in hindsight, it was one of the biggest mistakes of my life.

That classmate even warned me. But at nineteen, I committed the classic mistake: doing exactly what someone told me not to do. The rebellious frog instinct strikes again.

But humans are creatures who—when told not to imagine a pink elephant—immediately imagine a very detailed pink elephant. There was no avoiding it.

It wasn’t even an e-book, but an old-fashioned printed fantasy novel titled The Book of Irkus.
The cover had a giant Gothic font, painfully outdated; the prose read like a CSAT non-fiction passage; the entire atmosphere reeked of something my father’s generation would have devoured.

The story was roughly this:
The protagonist, Irkus Sagrina Robein—good grief, what a long name.

Anyway, Irkus was the third prince of the Robein Empire and a descendant of a witch. Despite all the court politics and assassination attempts, he ultimately survived because of his lineage and protagonist status. Fantasy world or Korean society—having good bloodline is half the battle.

In typical old-fashioned fantasy fashion, Irkus suffered every hardship known to man in volume one.

But being a witch’s descendant, he was born with immeasurable mana—an inherent munchkin. Not a “growth type,” just a “broken from the start” character, like a new game unit the developers refuse to nerf, probably because they like him too much.

The phrase “his mana could not be measured” told me everything. As someone who mastered non-fiction passages, I knew exactly where this was going. He would succeed—whether as mage, magic swordsman, or whatever.

But at only twelve years old at the start of volume one, he was tormented by the crown prince—Radanta Something Something Robein—god, why are their names so long? Anyway, tortured and stripped of everything, he eventually fled into the Southern Forest, crawling with nasty wood spirits.

Right.

You could see the whole outline from volume one.

The protagonist would utterly crush that crown prince and become Emperor. Irkus-whatever-robein would become Emperor after grueling struggles, gain friends, maybe build a harem.

Given the description—golden hair, purple eyes, stunning beauty—even as a twelve-year-old, it was obvious he’d grow into a terrifyingly handsome man. If the protagonist is both strong and gorgeous, well—of course he’ll gather a harem. A seventeen-volume series needs romance to be profitable.

Aside from the overly serious prose, humorless pacing, and the fact that the author needlessly dragged out a story that could’ve ended in two volumes—there was nothing special about it. A typical mass-produced fantasy novel.

I closed the book after volume one—not because the CSAT was the next day, but because the rest was too predictable.

How dull… frivolous… The English word drifted through my mind as I fell asleep memorizing vocabulary. Half the story had already evaporated.

As I said, I’m a prodigy, not a genius. My brain capacity is painfully limited.

When I woke up, the only thing I remembered was that Irkus’s name was ridiculously long, as was Radanta’s. Every detail had been pushed aside by math formulas more important for the exam.

And yet the end of my CSAT day was this:
Wearing the neatly ironed uniform my mother prepared, walking toward the test site—and being hit by a drowsy truck driver at a green light.

Even I must admit—what a waste of a life. Someone like me should have shaped Korea’s future. I was perfectly suited to thrive in our corrupt rote-learning system. S University? Y University? K University? Practically guaranteed.

But apparently the universe agreed that my life shouldn’t end so meaninglessly. For I opened my eyes in the world of The Book of Irkus.

What the… Where was the mandatory one-on-one meeting with the Creator before transmigration?

Thinking about it now makes me furious. I had planned to grab that god by the collar and throw a fit—“I could’ve gotten into S University, you bastard!”

If I had known my future, I would’ve spent the entire night reading that seventeen-volume fantasy novel instead of memorizing English vocabulary.

Excuse me… If you’re going to turn a high schooler into an isekai protagonist, at least give some warning so I can prepare mentally. Dropping me in without foreshadowing or signs—this wouldn’t even make it into a CSAT literature passage.