I woke from sleep after tossing and turning at a chilly sensation.
A faint cold clung to my arms and legs. Maybe I should’ve slept with the window closed.
“Ugh.”
Opening my eyes because of the cold, I immediately shut them again.
Because just like the chill pasted to my thighs, a goddamn headache had pasted itself to my skull.
What the hell. Did I catch the flu in just one day?
Even squeezing my eyes shut didn’t make the headache go away. If anything, it only grew worse.
The throbbing pain gradually turned to a deep ache, and then sharpened as if someone were outright stabbing my head with an awl.
After writhing on the bed a few times, I was startled. The sensation against my back was strange.
It was too… comfortable.
I realized at once. This wasn’t the old mattress in my place—the piece of junk whose warped springs always found creative ways to torment my back.
“What the fuck?”
Sensing something was wrong, I forced myself upright and opened my eyes.
When I pried open my eyelids, stuck together as if glued shut, what I saw was not my room.
“What the fuck is this?”
Even my voice wasn’t mine.
***
It had been a day no different from any other.
Past midnight, in the early hours that had already become Saturday, I booted up that shitty dead game like always and ran arena matches. Even if I queued ranked, there was only one person with a matching MMR, so it was better to just make a private room from the start.
First, we lightly ran a first-to-ten. On one side of my dual monitors I had the shitty dead game up, and on the other, I browsed the forums. It was a daily routine I’d repeated as naturally as breathing for the past few years.
‘As expected of a shitty dead game, they’re all familiar faces—’
Of course they were. They were ghosts still haunting a dead game that hadn’t had a new title in eleven years.
I called the last round, got unfairly screwed, shouted that the next one was the real last, and then we kept trading wins back and forth until it became the real-real-real-real-real last, so by then it was already late, almost 2 a.m.
It was the weekend, and there was no one to nag me for sleeping in.
I threw my exhausted body onto the bed and sprawled out, but then sleep refused to come, so after tossing and turning for a while I picked up my phone again.
Maybe I’d just browse the web a little—only to end up reading web novels too, and it was past 3 a.m. by the time I finally managed to get some shut-eye. Was that where it all went wrong?
“Fuck.”
When I came to, I was floundering on the floor of a room I’d never seen before.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
My head hurt like the morning after I’d blacked out from drinking.
The lips that spat curses were parched, and my throat was choked up.
I felt like I was going to throw up.
The world spun round and round. No, just how many bottles did you drink, you crazy bastard Lee Jincheol—no sooner had I thought that than a sense of doubt rose up.
But it was immediately shoved to one corner of my head.
Because just as I’d felt something strange about the mattress, this place was not my studio apartment.
“…”
It was far too spacious to call a studio.
Squinting as I looked around, even at a rough glance it seemed over forty square meters.
It only looked cramped because of the bookcases, wardrobe, and other furnishings; in reality, it might be close to sixty. Maybe it was more like an officetel than a studio.
In any case, it was not my studio.
“Urgh…”
My head, which had been clinging to useless thoughts, declared a strike.
My skull was pounding with an intensity I had never experienced before, and my stomach kept churning along with it.
No. Even for a headache, this was inhumanly painful.
The throbbing in my head and the fucked-up state of my stomach were creating some kind of synergy, and I couldn’t get my bearings. I kept thinking I had to sort out my thoughts, had to sort them out, but I couldn’t calm down at all.
I was dizzy. Nauseated. And to top it off, my body was shivering too.
A man whining over a mere hangover—that would be one thing, but this nausea was absolutely not normal.
Did I drink by the crate? If not, there was no explaining this pain.
This was the worst hangover I’d ever experienced in my life.
This, this was absolutely no ordinary hangover. What the hell did I drink?
“…Huh?”
But there was a problem.
No matter how much I searched my head, I had no memory of drinking.
At first, since I couldn’t even imagine the circumstances of how I’d ended up here, I thought my memory must have blacked out. Maybe I’d slept on the street and caught a chill or something.
Some kind-hearted person must have picked me up before my mouth froze crooked and I died.
Everything fit perfectly; the more I thought about it, the more flawless the deduction seemed.
For a moment I accepted it, thinking so that was it—but, even if it was late, hadn’t I properly lain down in bed, browsed the web, and fallen asleep?
Even with my head completely fucked, I remembered that clearly.
What the fuck is this. I didn’t drink, did I?
To begin with, I didn’t even remember buying alcohol.
All I remembered was getting off work, taking the subway, and coming home.
Odinson was, fundamentally, a pretty difficult physical game. The more you played arena and raised your rank, the more it became difficult like a fighting game.
Reach battles, build battles, timing battles, hitbox calculations, poise reduction calculations… in any case, it wasn’t a game to play while drinking.
There were times when we’d set up an online drinking table, sure, but not yesterday.
Yesterday, the level of play had been pretty high, and the first-to-ten had been fierce in its own way.
From midway through, we started bringing out each other’s meme builds, like my secret Elven sword-spear build or the dagger-throwing giant build that the old man had been hiding away, so the atmosphere heated up quite a bit.
I also remembered the forum guys staying up late and commentating on it.
The more I thought, the more I was lost in a fog. When I concentrated harder to think harder, an even greater pain came back.
Goddamn it.
Was this that responsibility without pleasure or whatever?
After forcibly shaking off those useless thoughts, I naturally arrived at the question of how I had ended up here.
Where the hell was this place? And more importantly, how had I gotten here?
Was it a dream?
No way.
While dreaming, you can’t think properly in the first place, and if it isn’t a dream, you can tell from your senses.
Then had I gone insane?
Maybe because my mind was so worn down, that hypothesis sounded fairly convincing. It was a little sad that I couldn’t immediately deny it.
Judging from the fact that I had no memory, if I hadn’t gotten dead drunk, then what, had I been hit in the back of the head with a bat and kidnapped?
Was that why my head hurt like this?
But why would anyone kidnap a low-ranking civil servant whose greatest life achievement was 12,000 hours of playtime in a shitty dead game? What the hell would they use me for?
No. Who knows.
It might be a revenge crime by that potbellied old man whose back I stabbed countless times yesterday.
But I’d gotten front-grabbed no less often and had holes punched in my stomach, so it was self-defense.
I deliberately kept the nonsensical thoughts going and forced a silly grin, but even a small, hollow laugh shook my skull and made my head throb.
“Ahh… fuuuck…”
Spitting curses, I covered my forehead with a hand that felt like it might split apart, then goosebumps rose all over my body.
I had noticed several things, but first of all, my glasses were gone.
And yet the view before my wide-open eyes was clean and clear.
Come to think of it, second was that the voice that had spat those curses sounded unfamiliar.
Come to think of it, third was why the hell my hair was so long and in the way.
As if fleeing from that thought, I turned my gaze and swept it across the room.
It had everything it needed, but it lacked the feel of someone living in it.
The interior was plain, with only exactly what should be there. The only thing you could call unusual was the shelf lined with liquor bottles.
Aside from that, the desk and dining table were neatly cleared.
It was markedly different from my room, where the beer glass I’d used yesterday, cola cans, and bottle caps rolled around on the desk.
There wasn’t even any dust on the monitor or bookshelves.
Clearly, it had been cleaned just recently. Seeing the pack of wet wipes sitting on the desk, I was probably right.
And beside that pack of wet wipes—the pack with useless words like Clean Promise and Baby Skin written on it, looking thin as if a bunch had been pulled out in the middle of a thorough cleaning—I saw a white bottle.
“…”
The remaining space beside the pen holder was all being used to shelve books.
Come to think of it, there really were a lot of books.
As someone who liked books quite a bit myself, I tried building some inner sense of kinship with the owner of the room… but when it became too hard to ignore any longer and I forced my gaze back—
I saw the white bottle again.
“My God…”
The white plastic bottle reminded me of a pharmacy at a glance.
It was different from health supplements like multivitamins, wrapped in fruit pictures or flashy packaging. This was real pharmacy medicine, with only the necessary information written stiffly on it.
Probably the kind of medicine you couldn’t buy without a prescription.
“What the hell… seriously, what the fuck…”
Along with what was probably my umpteenth curse since entering this room, I read the words “insomnia medication.”
For some reason, the sound of it sent a chill down my spine.
A very. Very unpleasant thought came to mind.
And below that, I also saw countless blue pills scattered not only across the desk but even on the floor. There were letters written on their surfaces, some alphabetic marks whose meaning I didn’t know.
Letters that felt like an ordinary person would be better off never knowing for their entire life.
“What is this…”
Cold reasoning requires something to work with. With this little context, there was no deduction to be made.
My confused brain quickly called GG.
I don’t know.
Please save me.
Please stop.
I’m scared.
At this rate, everyone’s going to die.
“…And what are you?”
Of course, there was no answer.
For some reason, I felt wronged, and curses surged up inside me.
“Who the hell are you, you bitch…”
I didn’t normally have such a foul mouth.
But honestly, my head hurt way too much.
No. Putting everything else aside—
“Where did my voice go…”
This was the thing I absolutely couldn’t understand.
What reached my ears was a woman’s voice so damn pretty that even the filthiest curses sounded pretty.
Where had my own voice, wrecked by booze and cigarettes, gone?
“This. Fucking.”
When I dropped my head with a curse, I saw locks of hair falling on both sides.
It wasn’t that long. About to my forearm, roughly?
Pitch-black hair with such fine texture that I understood what it meant to say something was black as ebony.
It only swayed lightly below my shoulders, but the sensation of long hair that I was experiencing for the first time in my life was already unfamiliar enough.
For a head already overdosed on unfamiliarity, it was hard to accept.
When I lowered my head, there was yet another first-time experience.
Breasts.
Yes, breasts.
Just lowering my head was enough for the round swell of breasts to block the floor from view.
Even though I was wearing a boxy top, the outline alone made it clear there was quite a lot there.
Far more intuitively than the long hair, it was evidence reminding me that I was trapped in an unfamiliar body.
Without thinking, without even realizing it, my hand went to them.
When I placed my palm there, naturally, once again, I felt an awkward sensation I had never felt before in my life.
It was the first time for the touching side to encounter this size, but the side being touched—was hard to put into words.
The elasticity and softness against my pressing palm were surprising, but the sensation of my chest being compressed was chillingly unfamiliar.
—Squeeze, squeeze.
My breasts pulled, so it hurt a little.