Transmigration : ROOTS IN WAR, WINGS FROM THE FUTURE (Taekook)
Chapter 1: The Boy Who Woke in the Wrong Century
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Burning wood. Raw earth. The faint, acrid bite of something that was not
incense but tried to be.
Taehyung had died breathing recycled air filtered
through a hundred-story tower. This was nothing like that.
Rough wooden beams stretched above him, darkened by years of smoke.
A single oil lamp threw orange shadows across a clay wall where a faded
red blessing scroll hung crooked on a nail.
Somewhere outside, wind
pushed against thin window paper and made it groan.
He was alive — but not in the life he had left.
Kim Taehyung, third-generation cultivator, top disciple of the Void
Peak Sect, dead at twenty-six from a betrayal he never saw coming,
blinked at a ceiling that had no business existing in any century he
recognized.
He pressed both palms flat against a sleeping mat that
smelled of dried grass and felt every bruise the original owner
of this body had been carrying.
His fingers found something familiar near his sternum: warmth.
A pulse of spiritual energy no larger than a walnut, curled and
waiting.
His space — his personal dimensional storage, a relic
he had cultivated for eleven years — had followed him through
death and into this stranger's skin.
He almost laughed. Almost.
Because the memories were already flooding in: not his, but
theirs — the memories of the boy whose body he now wore.
Kim Taehyung. Seventeen. Omega. Youngest child of General Kim Namjoon,
the Iron Pillar of the Northern Front. Pampered enough to be reckless,
sheltered enough to be naive, and — the part that made the new Taehyung
press his lips together — stubborn enough to have dragged a stranger
to the altar and declared him a live-in son-in-law simply because
the man had a face worth looking at twice.
That stranger was asleep two feet away on a separate mat, one arm
folded over his eyes.
Jeon Jungkook. Eighteen. The abandoned son of a fallen merchant family.
A face of sculpted stone and ink-dark eyes, currently hidden under
a forearm. Broad shoulders. Callused hands. No home to return to.
No reason to have agreed except that refusing a general's child came
with its own dangers.
The new Taehyung stared at the ceiling and took stock of everything
at once: a country at war, a family about to lose everything, a village
he had never seen waiting to swallow them whole, and a husband who
was barely a husband at all.
Fine. Furthermore, he had rebuilt himself from nothing once before. He could do
it again — this time with better soil.
He was sitting up and pressing two fingers to his wrist to count
his own pulse when the door scraped open.
Kim Seokjin
Taehyung-ah — you're finally awake.
Kim Taehyung
Mother. How long was I asleep?
Kim Seokjin
Three days. You had a high fever.
Kim Taehyung
I'm sorry for worrying you.
Kim Seokjin
Sorry? My son never says sorry.
Kim Taehyung
I must have hit my head harder than I thought.
Kim Seokjin
… Are you truly well, child?
Kim Taehyung
Yes. Hungry, though. Is there any rice?
His mother — Kim Seokjin, forty, iron-backed and soft-eyed
at the same time — stared at him for a beat too long. Furthermore, she had the
look of a woman trying to decide whether to cry or to be suspicious.
She chose neither. She left to find the rice.
The moment the door closed Jungkook's forearm moved.
He had been awake the whole time.
Jeon Jungkook
You sound different.
Kim Taehyung
People change after a fever.
Jeon Jungkook
You called your mother 'Mother'.
Kim Taehyung
That is what she is.
Jeon Jungkook
You always called her 'the old woman.'
Kim Taehyung
I said I hit my head.
Jeon Jungkook
... What do you actually want from me?
Kim Taehyung
Right now? Nothing, rest.
Jungkook sat up fully. In the thin morning light he looked exactly
like the memories described: too handsome for a situation this bleak, expression guarded all the way down to the jaw.
He watched Taehyung the way a man watches a river that has just changed direction without explanation.
Taehyung met his gaze with calm he did not feel and decided that earning this person's trust would take time — and that time, for once, he was willing to spend.
Before either of them could speak again the outer gate opened with a bang that shook dust from the rafters. Heavy boots. The particular cadence of a man who was used to being obeyed. General Kim Namjoon filled the doorway the way mountains fill horizons: completely, and without apology.
He was fifty years old and built
like the war had personally decided to take on a human form. His uniform was still pressed, though it now bore no rank insignia — those had been stripped three weeks ago in a public ceremony that the memories described in enough detail to make Taehyung's chest tighten with borrowed grief.
He looked at his child on the sleeping mat and something moved behind his eyes that he would never allow onto his face.
Kim Namjoon (General)
You're sitting up. Good.
Kim Taehyung
Come in, please sit.
Kim Namjoon (General)
I don't sit while there is work.
Kim Taehyung
Then I will stand... What work?
Kim Namjoon (General)
We move to Ssangsong Village in four days.
Kim Taehyung
I know, I want to help plan it.
Kim Namjoon (General)
You will rest. You are still ill.
Kim Taehyung
Father — I am stronger than I look.
Kim Namjoon (General)
... Since when do you say that?
Kim Taehyung
Since now. Sit down. Please.
The general did not sit. But he did stop moving, which was the closest thing to compliance a man like Kim Namjoon offered.
Taehyung pressed on before he could lose the moment.
He reached up and unfolded the map that had been tucked against the wall — the original Taehyung would not have touched it, would not have known what to look for — and smoothed it across the mat with hands that remembered, muscle-deep, how to read terrain.
Ssangsong Village. Fifty-three households. Mountain to the northeast, a creek to the west that flooded in summer, farmland that had been
under-yielding for six straight seasons according to the county records he had absorbed from his predecessor's patchy memory. The war front was forty li away. Far enough to breathe. Close enough to matter.
He had twelve years of agricultural knowledge from a future where crop science had advanced far beyond anything this world had ever imagined.
He had a dimensional space full of tools, seeds, and texts he had collected throughout his cultivation years — an encyclopedia of practical knowledge, an old herbalist's ledger he had won in a sect competition, and enough high-yield grain seeds to transform a barren field into something that could actually feed people.
What he did not have was time to explain any of that.
So he pointed to the creek and said something his father would not expect at all.
Kim Taehyung
This creek — it floods every summer, yes?
Kim Namjoon (General)
The villages lose crops to it yearly.
Kim Taehyung
We can fix that before the rainy season.
Kim Namjoon (General)
Furthermore, we are not engineers. We are displaced.
Kim Taehyung
Father, displaced people still need to eat.
Jeon Jungkook
He has a point, General.
Kim Namjoon (General)
You stay out of family matters.
Jeon Jungkook
I am family. Technically.
Kim Taehyung
Father — let me try. Just this one thing.
Kim Namjoon (General)
... You are different since the fever.
Kim Taehyung
I grew up a little. Is that allowed?
Kim Namjoon looked at his child for a long moment. Looked at the map. Looked at the finger tracing a drainage channel that did not yet exist but that — and this unsettled him more than he would say — was drawn with the certainty of someone who had seen it work.
He left without answering.
Which, Taehyung had already learned from the memories, meant yes.
Jungkook was quiet until the boots faded down the lane. Then he crossed the room, crouched beside the mat, and looked at the map with eyes that were sharper than his face suggested he was paying attention.
Jeon Jungkook
You've never read a terrain map before.
He said. It was not quite a question.
Taehyung rolled the map back up and met those dark eyes without flinching.
Kim Taehyung
Things change, "he said". Get some sleep, Jungkook-ah. We leave in four days, and I am going to need someone who can carry things.
He turned over and closed his eyes.
Behind him, after a pause, he heard Jungkook exhale through his nose — not quite a laugh, but the nearest thing to one he had probably allowed himself in a long time.
It was a start. And in the small, warm pocket of space that hummed quietly against his sternum, ten thousand possibilities waited for the right moment to grow.
Chapter 2: The Road to Ssangsong
The Kim family left before sunrise.
There was no ceremony in it. General Kim Namjoon — former general, now simply a man with four dependents and two oxcarts — stood at the gate of the house he had built with twenty years of salary and said nothing for a long time. Lady Kim Seokjin stood beside him, one hand wrapped in both of his, not speaking either.
Taehyung watched them from behind and filed the image away.
He had packed the night before — not much in the way of the original family's belongings, but tucked against his ribs, invisible and weightless, his dimensional space held more than either cart combined.
Seeds from three climate zones.
A bronze hand-drill. Dried herbs that this world had no name for. His old sect's encyclopedia, condensed into a palm-sized jade slip he had slipped into a cloth pouch that now looked like an ordinary medicine sachet.
The road out of the city was a lesson he hadn't asked for.
War does not look like battle. It looks like people walking the wrong direction on a road meant for merchants, carrying what they couldn't bury. It looks like children quiet in ways children should not be quiet.
Jungkook walked beside the second cart. He had said nothing since morning. But twice, without comment, he had stepped off the road to help a woman whose wheel had sunk in mud, and once to give his water skin to an old man sitting on a milestone with nowhere obvious to go.
Taehyung noticed all three times.
Kim Seokjin
Taehyung-ah, ride the cart. Don't strain yourself.
Kim Taehyung
I'm fine walking, Eomma. Truly.
Kim Seokjin
You were bedridden three days ago.
Kim Taehyung
And now I am walking. Progress.
Kim Namjoon (General)
Let him walk, Seokjin. He looks steady.
Kim Seokjin
You both have the same stubborn face.
Kim Taehyung
Is that an insult or a compliment?
Kim Seokjin
Ask me when we reach the village.
The road narrowed past the third li marker. Fields on both sides sat empty — not fallow, but abandoned mid-season, the soil cracked and whatever had been planted left to rot.
Taehyung crouched at the roadside and pressed two fingers into the earth. Dry three knuckles deep. Iron-deficient. Workable, though. Definitely workable.
He stood to find Jungkook watching him.
Jeon Jungkook
What were you doing just now?
Kim Taehyung
Reading the soil. It's not ruined.
Jeon Jungkook
You can read soil now too?
Kim Taehyung
You'd be surprised what can I do.
Jeon Jungkook
I'm already surprised. Daily.
Kim Taehyung
Good. Keep been surprised. It's useful.
Jeon Jungkook
You're strange, you know that.
Kim Taehyung
Strange people grow things. Strange people change things.
Jeon Jungkook
Is that from some book?
Kim Taehyung
Sort of. One only I've read.
They camped that night by a dry creek bed, a fire built low against wind, Seokjin heating the last of the grain porridge over it with the focused calm of a man who refused to let exhaustion show.
Namjoon sat apart, back straight even here, eyes on the dark tree line as if old habits died harder than titles.
Taehyung sat close to the fire and opened the cloth pouch around his neck just enough to feel the warmth of his space hum back at him like a second pulse.
Forty-eight hours to Ssangsong, he calculated. Enough time to plan the first three things he needed to do when they arrived. He closed his eyes and let the list build.
By the time the fire burned low, he had seventeen items. He fell asleep on item eighteen, which had something to do with proper crop rotation and the specific angle of morning light at mountain foothills.
Jungkook put a second blanket over him without waking him.
Chapter 3: A Village on Its Knees
Ssangsong Village was smaller than the memories promised and more broken than any map could show.
Fifty-three households — the county record's number — but half the roofs were patched with reeds instead of tile, and two structures at the village edge were simply skeletons, burned out and left.
The well in the center square had a crack running its full width. Children in doorways stared with the particular stillness of people who had learned that strangers most often brought bad news.
Taehyung walked through the main lane with his hands loose at his sides and cataloged everything.
Severe malnutrition in at least a third of the children. The kind of gray around the skin that meant protein deficiency, not just hunger. No livestock visible except two goats.
The field to the east had been plowed but not seeded — someone had tried and run out of either seeds or hope.
An old man came out of the largest building to meet them.
Village head, seventy years old, back bent from decades of bowing to people who deserved it less than he did. He had a sharp face and eyes that still added things up quickly.
Elder choi (village head)
General Kim. We were told you were coming.
Kim Namjoon (General)
Former general. I hold no title now.
Elder choi (village head)
A man's spine is his title, sir.
Kim Namjoon (General)
Thank you, Elder. We'll not be a burden.
Elder choi (village head)
We have little, but we share what we have.
Kim Seokjin
You are very kind. Where may we stay?
Elder choi (village head)
There's a house at the north edge. Empty now.
Kim Taehyung
Elder, how long has that east field sat unplanted?
Elder choi (village head)
Two seasons. We ran out of seed grain last winter.
Kim Taehyung
What about the creek flooding in summer?
Elder choi (village head)
Lost crops three years running to that water."
Kim Taehyung
I would like to fix that, if you'll let me.
Elder choi (village head)
You're what — seventeen? Fix a creek?
Kim Taehyung
I don't need to fix the creek. Just redirect it.
Elder choi (village head)
Come, let me show you to your house first.
The house was structurally sound, which was more than Taehyung had hoped for. Two main rooms, a small kitchen, a courtyard the size of four sleeping mats with a persimmon tree that had somehow survived everything.
Seokjin walked through it with the careful expression of a person deciding whether to grieve what they had lost or be grateful for what remained. He chose grateful. Taehyung watched him choose it, deliberately, in real time, and something in his chest that had been tight since he woke up in this world loosened just a fraction.
Later that evening a small girl appeared at the courtyard gate — could not have been more than eight — holding a bowl of something thin and pale.
Behind her, half-hidden by the gate post, a boy around fifteen with quick bright eyes and a small frame, watching them with unashamed curiosity.
Park Jimin. The name surfaced from the original Taehyung's scattered memories — the village elder's grandson, known for getting into trouble and talking too much. The girl set the bowl down at the gate and ran. Jimin stayed.
Park Jimin
That soup is from my grandmother. It's thin, sorry.
Kim Taehyung
It's warm. That's not a small thing.
Park Jimin
Are you really the general's son?
Kim Taehyung
I am. Kim Taehyung. And you're Jimin.
Park Jimin
How do you know my name already?
Kim Taehyung
I made it my business to know. Come in.
Park Jimin
Into your house? Just like that?
Kim Taehyung
I have questions about this village. You seem like someone who knows answers.
Park Jimin
I know everything about this village. Everything.
Kim Taehyung
Good. Then we'll talk every morning. Starting tomorrow.
Jungkook, from the doorway, watched the exchange with the particular look he was developing — part wariness, part reluctant fascination — and said nothing.
That night, while the others slept, Taehyung sat in the courtyard under the persimmon tree and reached into his space with practiced ease.
His hand emerged holding a cloth packet of high-yield winter wheat seeds, a smaller packet of red bean, and a folded sheet from his encyclopedic tome — the page on companion planting.
He spread the page across his knee, read it in the moonlight with the calm of someone re-reading something beloved, and began to draw a simple field grid in the dirt with a stick.
The village did not know it yet.
But the season had just changed.
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