Chapter 1: The Emperor's Son

“…My darling boy, your father is the Emperor of this country.”

The last words my mother left behind were short and to the point.

Anyone else might have whooped for joy at a life-changing truth like that and turned 3 backflips on the spot, but I had no room to care about any of it.

Emperor’s son or not, if my blood had been legitimate, I wouldn’t have spent my life crammed into this commoners’ district with only my mother for company.

The year was 1902, and I was 7 years old.

The Russian Empire, a living hell on earth for its common folk, was no country where a 7-year-old child could survive alone.

Maybe that was why.

-Whew, life’s officially ruined. But hey, don’t worry. A man’s gotta carve out his own path anyway. Just relax and take in my knowledge….

As if I’d been possessed by Satan himself, a strange voice suddenly started pouring into my head.

And not just a voice.

The life and knowledge of someone who was plainly not me came flooding in like a burst dam, and my head ached like it would split open.

I must have gone mad from the shock and terror of losing my beloved mother and being left alone in this world at 7 years old.

-No, no, you’re not crazy, okay? You’re me, and I’m you.

Mikhail Andreyevich Gorchakov of the Russian Empire, current age 7.

Lee Seong-jun of 21st-century South Korea, dead at 32.

The two personalities existed in one body without ever fully merging, but in the end, both of them were me.

As for how this absolute circus of a situation came to be…

-The plane I was on got blown out of the sky by a missile those Russian sons of bitches fired!

So he says.

I had no business knowing what a missile or a plane even was, yet strangely, my head understood it all as naturally as breathing.

If the memories of this Lee Seong-jun character yammering away in my head were real, his life had been quite the saga.

Born to an upper-class family in South Korea, he studied hard through elementary, middle, and high school and got into a prestigious university everyone recognized.

He then studied abroad in America, completed his MBA, and helped run his father’s business in Russia, walking a steady elite track.

Seong-jun was a born salesman, a genius who used his natural people skills and relentless effort to perfectly capture the needs of the notoriously demanding Russian upper class.

He spoke Russian like a native, of course, and knew Russian history inside and out.

The glory of Imperial Russia, the rise and collapse of the Soviet Union, how the ideology called communism took root in Russian soil and how it transformed, how the future Russian elite remembered that history and how they made use of it.

He chewed it all up, savored every bite, and internalized it completely.

-You think surviving a drinking session with Russians is just about holding your vodka? You gotta be able to recite a passage of Dostoevsky and drop a Stalin-era joke at exactly the right moment before they’ll say, “This bastard’s got some game.”

The 21st century is a terrifying age indeed.

But wait… Imperial Russia collapses?

Isn’t that saying our country is going to fall?

-And that’s not all. I read everything from Marx’s Das Kapital to Lenin’s theory of revolution in the original, and you have to be able to serve them up as bar-table chatter in front of Russian politicians.

Seong-jun hadn’t studied communism because he agreed with communist ideology.

-You gotta know commie ideology to sell things to rich ex-commies. It’s Business 101. The basics.

“They say if you get caught with that commie stuff these days, they drag you straight off to that scary place out east….”

Studying communist ideology as a merchant’s basic training. I was starting to feel genuine terror at the sales prowess of this country called South Korea.

Anyway, thanks to the knowledge and connections he’d built up that way, Seong-jun had become, by his early 30s, a man who carried the phone numbers of Russian business tycoons around in his pocket.

Of course, a life like that piles on the stress.

On his days off, he lost himself in something called alternate history web novels.

-Hey, you get the picture by now, right? Usually when you drop into the past like this, the standard play is to punch your way to the very top with modern knowledge.

Ignoring the noise rattling around my skull and judging him coldly, Seong-jun’s life had been one with success guaranteed.

Right up until the passenger jet he boarded for a business trip to Eastern Europe was shot down by a Russian missile.

-Do you have any idea how much money our company poured into wining and dining those people over the years, those bastards lower than dogs!

Honestly, at only 7 years old, the normal thing would be for me to have no idea what any of this nonsense meant.

But the picture painted itself so vividly, as if it were all my own affair. Didn’t that mean I’d gone well and truly insane?

In fact, perhaps because so much knowledge had poured into my head, everything I saw, heard, and felt was completely different from before.

It was as if my brain had suddenly aged several decades.

-No, no, I’m telling you, you’re really not crazy. Hah… this is so frustrating. Isn’t it the standard cliché that when you get possessed or reincarnated, the personalities just merge naturally? I can’t figure out why it turned out like this.

The fact that I was accepting words like possession and reincarnation without missing a beat was frightening in itself.

But whether I was mad or not, my immediate reality wasn’t going to change.

I had to hold my late mother’s funeral.

There was no way a 7-year-old could arrange a funeral alone, but thankfully, a parish priest my mother had known in life came by and took care of everything.

A coffin shabby beyond words, and a few sorry flowers.

The attendees were me, the priest, and two old women from the neighborhood. That was all.

So this was the end of the road for the woman who bore a child to the Emperor of the Russian Empire.

“Mikhail, there’s no need to worry.”

After the funeral, the priest knelt before me and gently lowered himself to meet my eyes.

“There is a man called Father Vasily who takes in children without parents and cares for them. If I speak with him, you…”

“It’s all right, Father.”

“…What?”

“Before Mother passed, she told me where to go. She said someone she knew there will take me in.”

Half lie, half truth.

But when a 7-year-old child stands there with tears welling in his eyes, clutching a letter holding his mother’s last words, most adults find themselves unable to press any further.

Priests were no exception.

“…I see. But if things ever get hard, come to the church anytime.”

Only when the priest’s back receded into the distance, crossing himself as he went, did I finally let out a sigh.

If I went to the orphanage run by this Father Vasily, my life would end up no different from most of the lives rolling around this Russian Empire.

The original me, the Mikhail without Seong-jun’s memories, would have taken that hand without a second thought.

But I had something to do before any orphanage.

I went into my mother’s room, which would be emptied of everything in a few weeks.

Household goods that reeked of poverty.

A worn-out bed, a kettle that leaked, a few articles of clothing. That was what met the eye.

Nothing anywhere hinted that the owner of this room had once stood on the stage of the Mariinsky Theatre as a ballerina.

-The Mariinsky is the Imperial Ballet, isn’t it? A woman who danced there lived in a place like this?

I couldn’t understand it either.

My memories of my mother were hazy, but I clearly remembered the grace in her fingertips, the Tchaikovsky melodies she sometimes hummed, the warm moments when she sang me lullabies in French.

She had unmistakably been someone who breathed the air of high society.

Someone like that could have hidden away somewhere far better, even while concealing who she was.

-Didn’t you say her friend was Mathilde Kschessinska? The woman who was the Tsesarevich’s lover. With connections like that, she could have fled to another city and lived however she pleased.

“I don’t know. I don’t know why Mother lived here like this either.”

Maybe she had lived holding her breath, terrified of catching Father’s eye, until she was pushed all the way down to this place.

Or maybe she’d burned through the money of her youth so extravagantly that she couldn’t even afford to take me and leave.

Thinking about it would get me no answers, so I decided to focus on what mattered now.

In her last words, my mother had added that I should search under the bed.

I remembered a wooden box being in there, one she would sometimes take out and gaze into in the middle of the night.

Around last year, I’d tried to touch it out of curiosity, gotten a fierce scolding, and moped around for days.

But now I had her explicit permission, so this was absolutely not rifling through my mother’s belongings in secret.

I pushed the bed aside and looked underneath, and a single letter and a small brooch caught my eye.

The letter was written briefly in Russian.

The handwriting was immaculate and the ink expensive; anyone could see it fairly dripped with upper-class polish.

At the bottom was stamped something that looked like a monogram.

-Looks like the Emperor’s personal signature from his Tsesarevich days? Something this intricate would be impossible to forge.

The letter’s contents were shorter still.

[Get rid of the child. Use the enclosed to cover the cost. This fault is partly mine, so I shall not hold you responsible. Let us set everything right, as though it never happened.]

The brooch bore the double-headed eagle of the House of Romanov, exquisitely engraved.

An emotion like my insides being wrung out rose up from my gut.

Get rid of the child.

Make it all as though it never happened.

So this was the only message my father ever sent to my mother, and to me, not yet even born?

To a Russian Emperor, I suppose an illegitimate son is little more than an ornament.

-This must be a big shock for a kid your age, but honestly, this counts as remarkably kind. Other emperors aside, to our father, an illegitimate child would be an original sin, a denial of his very character. And…

“…I know. Maybe it’s because of you, but strangely enough, I feel like I can stay calm too. No time to wallow in sentiment, right?”

-No, that’s not it. I mean the letter. Take that to the palace and it’s physical proof you’re the Tsar’s illegitimate son. The brooch too. Bring them both together and it’s evidence no one can overturn.

He was right.

Ordinarily, evidence like this should have been burned long ago.

Walking around carrying proof of being an illegitimate child is the same as shopping for one’s own misfortune.

But this is exactly where Seong-jun’s knowledge produced an answer so creative it looped right around to dumbfounding.

-Like I said, where we need to go isn’t some orphanage. It’s the palace. Let’s go to the palace right now, show them the evidence, and quietly let it be known that you’re the Tsar’s illegitimate son.

Ah.

Young as I was, I understood perfectly.

So this deranged ghost wanted me to scamper up to my father the Emperor and stick my neck out, saying, here I am, the living symbol of the mistake you made, so feel free to kill me right here?

I distinctly remembered him saying, only moments ago, that my existence was an original sin, a denial of the man’s very character.

-Tsk, your average man in power might, sure, but your dad would never do that. I guarantee it, okay?

Not that a guarantee from a voice I couldn’t even tell was a hallucination or not carried a shred of credibility, mind you.

But even amid all this, memories rose naturally to mind, and I could recall my father’s name and deeds.

Our father’s name was Nicholas II.

Of the proud, great Russian Empire, the…

“…last Tsar?”

Ah, right. If these memories were real, this country would fall in a few decades.

-Yep. An idiot who ran his dynasty into the ground, indecisive as they come, but a grade-A pushover who’s kind to his family. Just ask him for enough money for us to stand on our own. Tell him we’ll go to America or wherever and live like we never existed.

Squeeze a generous pile of money out of our father, a man of disastrous ability but a decent enough heart, and bolt overseas.

…Fine. If I just let things drift along as they were, my life was a dead end anyway. There was nothing to lose in one little gamble.

I made up my mind to follow the plan of the loudmouth ringing around my skull, for now.

If it worked, it meant the knowledge floating around my head was real. If I got turned away, I’d simply be a poor child driven mad by the shock of losing his mother. Nothing more.

“But would a kid who looks like a beggar at first glance even get to see His Majesty just by going to the palace?”

-Obviously not. But you said your mom stood on the Mariinsky stage, right? Then there’s a way.

“Oh, right. That would work.”

And so the child equipped with a 21st-century personality and intellect trotted off to earn his ticket into the imperial palace.