Onion and Clarion

Haru Tajima was playing a mobile game when he suddenly found himself somewhere that definitely wasn't Japan. Two moons hang in the sky, swords and magic are real, and a bizarre dolphin-like guide named Curio appears before him behaving suspiciously like a video-game tutorial character. Haru quickly reaches the obvious conclusion: he's been transported into some kind of game-like fantasy world. And as a modern Japanese man armed with twenty-first-century knowledge, surely this is where he introduces revolutionary inventions, transforms civilization and becomes rich beyond his wildest dreams. Unfortunately, somebody already beat him to it. The country Haru finds himself in was once ruled by another Hero, and that Hero already exploited knowledge from another world to modernize the nation. Its people are well fed and cleanly dressed, its economy is prosperous, and its cities contain technology and infrastructure far beyond what Haru expected from a supposedly medieval fantasy society. His half-remembered modern trivia isn't revolutionary here. Nobody particularly needs another isekai protagonist teaching them basic technology, and Haru soon discovers that simply being Japanese doesn't make him special enough to earn a comfortable living. So he turns to a different kind of modern knowledge. “I have a very special opportunity I'd like to share with you. Nothing suspicious, of course. Back home, we called it a pyramid scheme...” If Haru can't become an otherworldly savior through science, he'll claw his way up through business, manipulation, scams and whatever other dubious schemes keep him alive. This is the story of a man initially despised as a con artist who will one day become infamous as the “Soap King,” and of his rise through an otherworld whose history may be considerably stranger than the fantasy game it initially resembles.