The current time, according to the digital clock attached to the kitchen, was 11:12.
When I’d opened my eyes and caught a glimpse of it, it had been around ten.
Which meant an hour had already passed... An hour since I’d opened my eyes, spent sitting there blankly in this groaning, aching body.
Honestly, it was hard to believe.
It felt like ten hours had gone by. Whatever. I guess it was right.
When I couldn’t even tell whether my own body was reality or a dream, whether this was some delusion in my head or a mental illness, never mind the time, I might as well just believe it.
“Haa...”
In this house devoid of any signs of life, there wasn’t even the common full-length mirror.
Fortunately, when I looked around, there was a decent mirror attached to the inside of the wardrobe door. I could examine the body I’d newly come to depend on from head to toe.
Large eyes blinked.
It was a face with extremely delicate lines.
Slightly drooping eyes, big and pitch-black. The first thing that caught my attention was those large, pretty eyes.
Pupils so black there wasn’t even the slightest hint of brown or gray mixed in, as if they had no brightness at all.
And because the skin was unusually pale, the contrast between the two drew the eye even more.
Even when I tried to add something else, all I could say was that they were incredibly pretty eyes. A real beauty...
“Hahaha.”
I laughed on purpose because the situation was so absurd, and the beauty in the mirror laughed along with me.
It was damn awkward.
“...”
I turned my eyes back to the mirror.
Tall, with long, slender arms and legs. A beauty.
Not just a beauty, but beautiful enough to make you suspect she might be in entertainment. The kind of face you’d rarely see just walking down the street.
A white cotton T-shirt with long sleeves, black cotton pants, a plain outfit, but maybe because it emphasized the pale skin, it didn’t look tacky.
No. Her skin really was white. White enough that I wasn’t making a fuss over nothing.
At this point, rather than good skin, it almost looked sickly.
Thinking about the pills rolling around the room, maybe it really was a sign of illness... Ah, fuck.
I didn’t want to keep thinking along those lines.
I shook my head from side to side to shake off the ominous thoughts, and my skull rang, making my head throb.
Fuuuuck. I’m seriously going insane here...
Anyway, as I’ve emphasized several times, she was an incredible beauty. The whole “S-rank in the prefecture” or whatever level.
Thanks to the rounded, downturned corners of her eyes, even her expressionless face had a gentle look to it.
Because of those big, round eyes, even in her haggard state, she seemed to give off an intelligent air.
Even the expression where I forced up the corners of her mouth looked picturesque, and even the furrowed brow and twisted cheek somehow seemed atmospheric.
This was the kind of face that made life unfair.
That was right.
She was so beautiful it was hard to understand how she’d ended up attempting suicide with sleeping pills.
No. Since the person herself was already gone, maybe “attempt” wasn’t the right word.
Maybe the suicide had succeeded.
It wasn’t particularly comforting information.
Thanks to my miserable condition, the thoughts that had been endlessly leaking and spinning in place gradually began to settle.
I was still far from normal, but at the very least, I more or less accepted that this was the kind of abnormal phenomenon you’d only see in a web novel.
I had no choice but to accept it.
I still had no idea how I’d ended up entering that empty spot... but still, the situation I was immediately in was starting to come into view little by little.
Of course, it wasn’t as if I could accept it completely and cleanly.
Even now, a small suspicion remained that maybe I’d gone insane.
But let’s search my memory. My entire twenty-seven years of life.
I Jincheol. Twenty-seven years old. Male.
Residence: Incheon. Birthplace: also Incheon.
I wasn’t a complete native. I moved around a lot as a child because of my parents’ jobs.
Height: 178. No, actually 177.7 cm.
Not just simple personal details—I dug up more specific incidents too.
The location of the academy I attended from my third year of middle school to my second year of high school.
The alleyway to the XDonald’s I often went to after skipping night self-study.
The names of the friends I was close with. A few idiotic episodes.
How I got hooked on the shittiest dead game I’d ever had the most fun playing in my school days.
How I bombed the CSAT thanks to that and had to retake it.
How my best score ever popped out on the next CSAT, turning misfortune into fortune.
The acquaintances I knew from that shitty dead game. Even the avatar of the parry pervert I used to play with in the arena.
As I carefully went over memories from long ago, then recent events too, I became certain.
“I’m I Jincheol. I have to be.”
With memories this detailed and vivid, it didn’t seem like I was an ordinary delusional patient.
Thanks to that, I was able to force down my impatience.
No. Honestly, I didn’t manage to force it down much.
My teeth were still clacking together, and even standing still, my breathing was rough.
Still. If I couldn’t be calm, I should at least pretend to be calm.
In any case, there had been progress.
Because I could rule out hypotheses like, “Actually, I was a woman all along but developed a mental illness and thought I was a man,” or “One day, while living perfectly fine, I got kidnapped by a criminal organization and forced to undergo gender reassignment surgery.”
“Then. What. Is this really regression-possession-reincarnation?”
Honestly, I was still half in doubt.
No matter how much I usually enjoyed web novels, it wasn’t easy to suddenly experience something unscientific like possession and accept it.
But what could I do?
The balls that used to be attached were gone, and instead, two sizable lumps of fat were attached to my chest.
There were endlessly many things I didn’t know.
Whether this place was the same world I’d lived in.
Whether it was really 2025 right now, or the past, or the future.
Whether the body I left behind was okay.
Whether it was lying in a hospital as a vegetable.
Or maybe this woman had gone in there instead and was raising hell on that side in her own way.
If I started imagining things, there would be no end, and there was nothing I could find out.
Worrying any further seemed like a waste of time.
This woman had attempted suicide,
probably succeeded,
and I entered the empty spot.
I didn’t know the reason or the process. I couldn’t even imagine it. There was no way to know.
“...”
My head was still foggy. It was probably the effect of the drugs.
Damn it. Just talking about drugs gives me chills.
All that effort to organize my thoughts was wasted; my thoughts were spinning wildly again.
Let’s organize them again. No. Not the drugs. Let’s not think in that direction at all.
“Haha... ha... haa....”
If only a goddess had said, “Defeat the Demon King, brave hero,” at least I’d have some hope of going back. Goddess, my ass—I hadn’t even met a ghost.
I’d never written 5,700 characters like in the cliché, and I’d never inherited some suspicious keepsake from my grandfather, so why the hell...
└ Deungjjak: A next work? I bet both my balls that no such worldline exists lololololol
??????
No way.
[I bet both my balls lolol]
No way, seriously?
Just because I wrote one shitty comment like that?
I hurriedly felt between my legs.
I already knew, but what should have been there wasn’t.
Of course it wasn’t. Instead of the two that should have been hanging there, two new ones had appeared on my chest. Naturally there wouldn’t be any down below.
[I bet both my balls lolol]
It was ridiculous, but what naturally came to mind was the web novel I’d been reading before bed.
It felt like something had clicked into place. Was that shitty comment the cliché?
Now that I thought about it, it seemed sort of like the same context as the 5,700 characters, or maybe not...
Then what?
Was this really reincarnation into another world? Really regression-possession-reincarnation?
...Then maybe this too?
.
.
Nah. No way.
Still.
Yeah. Just in case.
.
.
“...Status window!!”
Naturally.
No, I was having the kind of day where even the word “naturally” made me hesitate, so I didn’t know if this was natural or not.
Probably naturally.
Nothing appeared.
“...”
I didn’t see any translucent hologram visible only to my eyes.
There was no status-window fairy or status-window AI either.
Just in case, I looked around.
Nothing had changed.
“....Pfft.”
Suddenly. A snort. I burst into laughter.
It was fucking embarrassing.
“...Hh... hahaha... Information window!!”
What a damn performance. What the hell was I doing right now?
No, seriously.
What in the ever-loving hell was this bullshit?
“Stat window!!”
Fuck, you’re making a person embarrassed here. I don’t care what kind of window it is, just show up first.
If someone is begging this desperately, shouldn’t at least something appear?
“Quest window!!”
Window... another window, what other windows were there?
I think I’ve said them all now.
What else was there... window... window... Right.
“Shit-window...!!!”
Maybe because I was worked up, I had the illusion that my face was burning.
No. It wasn’t an illusion. When I brought my hand to my cheek, it really was hot.
In truth, I was probably having chills because I was sick, but there was no way I had the mental room to think about that.
To begin with, the heat seemed to have climbed all the way to the top of my head, making it hard to think properly.
As a sudden wave of dizziness hit me, I staggered and flopped onto the bed.
Lying on the bed, I only turned my head slightly, and the liquor cabinet came into view.
And the SmiXnoff sitting on top of it too.
Haha. Easy to drink without pressure.
I forced my sagging body, which wanted to keep lying there, to sit up and grabbed the vodka.
Most of the bottles hadn’t even been opened, but the vodka already had been. Only about a third was left, so it caught my eye right away.
Well, vodka was a liquor that was easy to mix into cocktails. I used to mix it with juice often after getting home from work too.
But today, I didn’t have that luxury.
Clack. I opened the cap. Straight down the hatch.
Then another gulp.
I directly poured two swigs of forty-percent liquor into myself.
“Krrr...”
It was high-proof alcohol, but my body seemed to be used to it, so it didn’t feel that unpleasant.
Considering she’d even set up a separate liquor cabinet, I could roughly guess, but the original must have been quite the drinker too.
The moderately tingling sensation in my throat felt good.
Since I was at it, I gulped it down again.
Like an idiot, I drank straight from the bottle three times in a row. Truly without thinking.
If I poured real alcohol into the drugged-up skull of a suicide attempt victim who’d been suffering badly enough to mistake it for a hangover, I might be in far worse pain tomorrow? Who cared. I didn’t even think about dealing with the aftermath.
I drank one mouthful at a time, rolled saliva around to wash it down, then opened my mouth and breathed in.
The scent of alcohol mixed into my breath was sweet.
After being mentally pressured all day. After suffering humiliation and oppression, then drinking straight from the bottle.
Yeah. This was sex.
I started giggling without thinking, then realized it was the first time I’d properly laughed today, and my face crumpled.
—Gulp.
Because it pissed me off, I drank again. Then I lay down as if collapsing.
From that point on, I don’t remember much. As my head sank into sleep, one part of me thought it was a relief that I was falling asleep as if blacking out.