“…A dream?”
It feels like I had an incredibly nostalgic dream. Though, in truth, it was something that happened only the day before yesterday…
I feel like there was something I was supposed to say at times like this…
“…”
Ah. Right, I remember.
“Fuck this dream.”
Yeah, that’s right. That was the rule.
***
My eyes opened on their own without any need for an alarm.
Because the throbbing headache pounding away like it was determined to catch and kill me was the alarm.
“Ugh…”
How nice would it have been if, after passing out in bed and waking up, I’d returned to my original body?
But I was still in that room. The deserted island in a modern city where I’d drifted ashore, so to speak.
Dreary interior. Spacious floor area. The bed was disgustingly soft, too. It seemed insanely expensive.
“Urgh…”
A groan slipped out of me on its own.
Even if I couldn’t wake up from this dream, if I at least hadn’t been swigging straight from the bottle, wouldn’t my condition, wrecked to hell from an overdose of sleeping pills, have recovered?
Pouring alcohol into a body that had attempted suicide with pills—who the hell would come up with such a stupid-ass idea…
I was that stupid-ass.
I’d done it thinking that, if I returned to my original body, whatever happened afterward wasn’t my problem.
Unfortunately, however, nothing happened, and I was still in an unfamiliar space and an unfamiliar body of unknown identity.
Then cleaning up the mess was now my job.
No, but seriously, fuck.
Isn’t this a bit too painful?
“Ah…”
And groaning in a woman’s voice in the middle of all this gave me an indescribable feeling.
Damn it. I should just keep my mouth shut.
When I opened my eyes, the light coming through the window was tinged red.
It looked like the sun was already setting.
Though I’m not sure if “already” is the right word.
In any case, it meant that time had been passing even while I was adding alcohol to the drugs and having some dogshit dream.
When I moved my body this way and that, my whole body felt stiff. It felt like every muscle in me was sore. In particular, I had a bad feeling that something was wrong from my lower back to my pelvis.
Even when I stayed still, it felt like my body was folding in on itself, and when I twisted around, it kept making cracking sounds.
My body felt like it wasn’t my body. (To be fair, it really wasn’t.)
Pushing my legs toward the floor, I practically threw myself out of bed.
I somehow managed to stand, but my head rang with every step I took.
Clenching my teeth, I walked to the window. The window of the studio had blinds installed, but sunset light was leaking through the gaps.
Now that I thought about it, it was strange that I hadn’t thought to check outside first when I knew nothing at all.
Or had I? I think the thought had occurred to me.
Maybe I’d just been too scared and was pretending not to know.
“Fuck.”
Even with my poor imagination, I could come up with dozens of ominous futures.
This could be a cyberpunk world in the 2060s, or outside this studio could be a zombie apocalypse.
Of course, those were absurd and pessimistic thoughts.
But what could be more absurd than possession or transmigration?
“Get it together… No, and this voice, seriously. Why the hell is it so damn pretty? I can’t focus.”
I forcibly pieced together my thoughts, which felt as if they’d been cut clean off.
If I started attaching pessimistic “what ifs” to everything, there would be no end.
For now, I felt like I needed to find out anything at all before I could sort out my dizzying thoughts.
The first thing I needed to check was the window right in front of me.
Steeling myself and raising the blinds, fortunately, I did not see anything like a post-apocalyptic or cyberpunk world.
It was an ordinary residential neighborhood, bathed entirely in orange light.
Ahead of me stood rows of buildings of similar height, their white-painted walls taking on an orange hue in the sunset.
Still, the familiar name X States greeted me warmly.
I breathed a sigh of relief. So this really is Korea.
It seemed this room was on a fairly high floor.
The people visible below looked small.
Not that it was up on the tenth floor or higher; probably around the seventh or eighth floor?
Looking closely at the tiny people, I saw a mother and daughter walking hand in hand. The little kid holding her mother’s hand was wearing a taekwondo uniform.
Good. This was pretty positive information. At the very least, I’d confirmed this wasn’t a zombie apocalypse.
Meaning I didn’t have to worry about starving to death trapped in this room, at least….
Even I don’t know what kind of stupid fuss I’m making.
“For now, that’s enough.”
The most important thing right now was understanding the situation.
It might be a slight exaggeration, but after that, I needed to secure a foundation for survival.
I mean the human survival basics: food, clothing, and shelter.
If this room was rented monthly, I might not even be able to pay next month’s rent and could get kicked out as soon as tomorrow.
To say that was too pessimistic—well, wasn’t this a woman who had committed suicide?
The hypothesis that there was even some money left in her bank account right now didn’t have much going for it.
In the worst case, she might have squandered all her assets—and perhaps even gone into debt—before ending up committing suicide.
It was an extreme thought, but for someone with a face like this to have been driven to suicide, an extreme situation seemed more natural.
Then I might end up being saddled with all of that… Once I go outside, there could be mountains of private loan debt piled up, interest alone could be several million won a month, and debt collectors might be lying in wait for me in back alleys.
…Hadn’t it been less than five minutes since I told myself not to think negatively?
“Fuck…”
What good was trying not to think pessimistically?
The situation I was in was already pessimistic and extreme.
Fine. What I’d just imagined was going too far, no matter what.
Putting income or savings aside, being chased by creditors sounded like something that would only come up in some trashy melodrama.
With my dizzy head in some semblance of order, I blinked eyes that wouldn’t quite focus.
Even just to confirm that things really were okay, I needed information right now.
I forced my gaze away and looked around the room.
As I said before, it was a large and desolate room. A wardrobe, a liquor cabinet, a bookshelf, a desk, and a bed. That was all there was in this spacious room.
The arrangement was messy, making it look cramped, but even taking that into account, it was so large that it still looked spacious.
Looking around the large room again, the thing that stood out the most was the desk. More precisely, the object on top of it.
Naturally, the sleeping pills rolling around on the desk seized my attention the most, but there was something more important than that.
A monitor. More precisely, a desktop computer including it.
“…!!”
That’s right.
The internet.
Now that I thought about it, searching once would be far more effective than wasting time worrying alone like this a hundred times over.
It was baffling that I’d only just thought of it.
At the very least, it would be much better than clutching my whining head.
I immediately crouched down and examined the tower under the desk. Then I poked here and there, looking for the power button.
…I couldn’t find it.
After wrestling with it for a while and pressing this and that, the lights suddenly came on.
The moment I pressed something, it beeped, and lights of all colors lit up. The thing attached like decorative lighting was actually the power switch.
The sound of the cooler spinning was loud, too; at a glance, it was clearly a gaming computer.
The monitor was the same, but the tower also looked like money had been spent on it. The owner of this body might have been a gamer girl.
Lots of books in the house, seems to like mystery novels, and even a gamer girl.
My internal sense of affinity is rising. It kind of feels like a parallel theory.
I’d probably find that out soon enough if I dug through the computer. In modern society, a personal PC was a collection of personal information, a hotbed of private life.
The first things that came to mind were social media or messenger apps. At the very least, it would be nice if I could check her email.
If I could increase even a little bit of concrete information, I held onto the hope that I might be able to sort out this endlessly confusing current situation.
“You son of a bitch.”
That hope didn’t mean shit.
…But thinking about it, it was only natural.
On the contrary, I should probably question why I hadn’t thought of this either.
If a personal computer was a hotbed of personal information,
there was no way it wouldn’t have a password.
And from the standpoint of an uninvited guest, there was no way to figure out the eight-digit password the owner must have naturally entered every day.
“…”
My body froze in front of the password input window, and after fumbling blankly for several dozen seconds, I only came back to my senses when the monitor went dark in sleep mode.
My fragile sunfish-like mentality screamed, and out of a desperate need to do something, my hands moved first.
First, I tried entering the latter half of the password I often used.
Naturally, it wasn’t right.
Just in case, I’d wondered if this body was Lee Jincheol from a parallel world and used the same password, but maybe that was too naive an idea.
“…”
I calmed my trembling heart and took a breath.
It was a day where I did a lot of deep breathing. Maybe the most I’d ever done in my life.
Next, 11111111, 12345678, 00000000.
As I pressed the keyboard fluidly, the mechanical keyboard made a pleasant tak-tak-tak sound.
My heart, however, felt like it was burning up.
The results weren’t very pleasant either. They were all rejected as incorrect passwords.
Just in case, clockwise, 14789632. In reverse, 12369874. Rejected again.
My long, slender fingers moved as if gliding, coming up with several numbers that seemed easy to enter.
The movement looked stylish, like I was playing a keyboard. The more I looked, the prettier these hands were.
As expected, the result was not pretty. They were all wrong, and nothing changed.
No, maybe I had to take back the part about nothing changing.
Because after more than five wrong attempts, an input lock for 60 seconds appeared.
You could say it had done nothing useful, and had only backfired.
Still, perhaps in exchange for the penalty, the desktop gave me a password hint.
My face lit up at the unexpected stroke of luck, but the moment I actually saw the hint, it clouded over again.
“…?”
[hint : .]
It was “.”
A single period.
Thinking I might have seen it wrong, I looked this way and that, but
all that had come up as a so-called hint was a single dot.