I've had my doubts before.
If life is simply about surviving, does it hold any meaning?
The ancients said that when a man dies, he leaves his name behind.
Do I have a name that will remain after I die?
I didn't want to just live like that and then die.
But that didn't mean I wanted to study.
You could say I couldn't do it, or that I didn't do it. Neither was wrong, and neither could serve as an excuse for the way I was living.
"Huu..."
How old am I this year? Twenty-four? Twenty-five? I can't even remember.
...I'm a writer.
Put nicely, an author. Put badly, a scribbler.
Put even worse, a pathetic loser.
...Actually, the last one isn't putting down an author, but putting down the person himself.. but it's all the same.
In the end, they're all words that point to me.
*Tak-*
I press F5 to refresh the page.
The rising view count.
...It went up by exactly 6. My favorites had actually dropped by 2, and recommendations and comments were still at 0.
The sensation of my heart being ripped apart makes me squeeze my eyes shut. If you're going to unfavorite it, then don't favorite it in the first place. If you favorited it, at least hit the recommend button, or leave an emoticon in the comments.
I paid attention to it since it was supposedly the final chapter. I tried to make sure those reading my work could feel something, at the very least.
Where did the 403 who bookmarked it go, and where did the 33 who set notifications go?
"Season 6 suicide in-gall!"
*BANG!!*
I smiled brightly and slammed my head against the wall. Naturally, my head hurt like hell.
This was already my sixth work, and my sixth completion. A whopping six series! An achievement that could earn you praise among authors.
"I really don't want to live..."
..That is, if you hide the results.
My first work, *I Became the Half-Lidded Con Artist of the Academy*, completed with 1,233 favorites and 160,000 total views.
For a first work, it was fairly decent—no, you could call it outstanding.
At least I thought so, and so I gained a little confidence in my writing.
My second work, *I Brought Internet Streaming to Another World*, ended with 332 favorites and 30,000 total views.
Serialized for a year and earned 100,000 won.
...
The third, fourth, and fifth. None surpassed 500 favorites. The views didn't even come close to 100,000; they barely scraped 50,000.
So many things happened during that time. I got triggered by a reader's critical comment and got into a flame war, got caught writing by my junior in the army and got tormented..
I went to promote on the novel reader gallery and there was a reader cursing my work, but since everything they said was fact, I couldn't say a word back.
So much shit happened.
..So what's the conclusion?
"Let's go, God of Thunder. Hide my form."
What else. Shit happens, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
I entered the novel reader gallery and wrote a post.
Since my account and IP were already exposed, I used the God of Thunder to bypass my IP, and I made a new burner account too.
The key here isn't promoting, but reviewing.
Reader galleries are prickly toward carefully written promo posts by authors, but tend to be generous toward honest reviews written by fellow readers, so if I approached them hiding that I was the author and pretending to be a reader, they would view my work favorably.
These days they say the reader gallery is nothing but a handful of people, but I didn't care. I was desperate for even that handful; handful or not, I wanted to gather them by any means.
I started writing in the first place because it was something even someone like me could do.
People must leave their names behind when they die, yet I felt I couldn't leave behind even the initials of my name, so I tried writing as a way to do something, anything.
But as I kept writing, I grew greedy. I didn't want to leave my name after death; I wanted to leave a work while alive. Not leave behind the existence that is me at the end of everything, but leave behind the work written by the existence that is me.
Even a maggot like me wanted to show that I could do it.
A single person's attention, however small—the attention to look at me, at my work—was so precious.
I.
[Anonymous: You fucking troll.. I can see the episode formatting...]
[Anonymous: Our readers are readers capable of episode writing, aren't they~?]
[Anonymous: Fucking loser in-gall hahaha]
[Anonymous: (Kugung—Mikukon)]
[Rommeng: Farewell]
Ah.
Fuck.
My vision went dark.
***
I turn on the shower and let the silently falling water hit my body. Normally it's such a pleasant shower, but now even the falling droplets feel painful.
I spent about three hours in the reader gallery. Posted an apology in the explanation tab, apologized one by one to readers who were cursing.. bypassed my IP again and defended myself with a new burner account..
Then I got caught again. No, strictly speaking I wasn't caught, but I went berserk and wrote 'Yeah, I'm the author,' while cursing them out.
Six works in total. While completing all of them, something like this had never happened. Something this pathetic was a first.
A suffocating sensation in my chest spreads throughout my body, making my fingertips tremble and my eyes shake.
Unlike usual when I would brightly crack suicide jokes, this time I truly felt like killing myself.
It's not completely over. I could change my pen name, or migrate to a different platform altogether.
But... I didn't want to think about it now. My head grew blank. The feeling of electromagnetic waves crackling before my eyes and ringing in my ears seized my senses, and amidst it I couldn't tell if tears or blood were flowing from my eyes.
*Sssshaaaa—*
Water kept flowing from the shower. It stung every time it touched my head. It hurt so damn much every time those droplets touched my head. I scratched my head.
Only then could I know. Could distinguish clearly. Only after seeing the fresh red blood on my hand did I realize.
What flowed from my eyes was blood. Earlier I couldn't endure the stress and slammed my head against the wall out of habit, but I guess the force was stronger than I thought.
Red blood dripped onto the floor. Thick blood mixed with the flowing water and diluted, and my emotions too became complexly mixed and diluted, finally resolving into emptiness.
All other emotions were devoured by emptiness. Since the only emotion that came at the end of death was emptiness, in the end what I felt was nothing but the emptiness of being left alone in this world.
It might be good news, in a way. If only the manner of my death became known, I would be remembered as a bizarre, grotesque human who involuntarily committed suicide due to stress after seeing readers' reactions.
A cause for celebration. I achieved my dream. The dream of leaving my name behind after death.
Even if the method was pathetic, and I couldn't leave behind a work, everyone would be able to remember me. After all, it's a story and death that won't be easily forgotten.
...
Was I truly unable to leave behind a work?
The rougher my breathing grew, the more the cold air woke my mind. A paradox arose where my consciousness faded yet my thoughts churned just fine.
And in that paradox, the thought I had, the last thought of my life, was 'I want to leave behind a work.'
Not a name, but a work.
Not the person that is me, but the world of my own creation made by the person that is me.
I didn't want to be remembered as me, but as my work.
Even if what I wrote was merely kindling for momentary amusement, after writing for several years, I had developed something like pride as an author.
I wanted to leave behind a work that everyone remembered, everyone loved, everyone smiled at.
It didn't have to be everyone.
If someone remembered it, someone loved it, someone smiled at it, that was enough.
I wanted to leave behind a work that received passionate love.
It was an impossible dream. A dream unreachable to me who faced the end. The existence that is me, the me who was already dying—a vain light I could not reach.
An intense yearning, wanted yet unobtainable.
"...Huh..?"
...It was. Definitely.
I clench and unclench my hand, feeling the vivid sensation at my fingertips.
I take stock of the sensations of breathing through my nose, thinking with my brain, hearing with my ears, speaking with my mouth.
They were all fine. Unlike me who had been dying just moments ago, unlike just now when my senses had been fading one by one, every sense was functioning properly.
...No, that's not right. Beyond malfunctioning, there was a function that had disappeared.
*Teup-*
I touch my groin, the space between my legs, with my hand. What should have been there did not exist. I couldn't grasp any bulge; there wasn't even a stick, let alone balls.
What existed there was not male but female. Nothing but a single slit clamped shut as if embarrassed.
Let's assess the situation.
I, who had died in the bathroom while washing up, suddenly opened my eyes in the chair in my room. Yet the symbol of masculinity that should have been attached was gone, and instead a female symbol existed.
No breasts. Well, maybe a little. Either way it probably doesn't make much difference. This or that, it seemed about the same.
My field of vision was a bit.. no, a lot lower. To check my appearance, I tried to get down from the chair to look in the mirror, but my feet didn't reach the floor, of course, and after grunting my way down and looking around, my vision felt bizarrely different.
I'm anxious. Beyond anxious, I'm scared. At this already confirmed change, a Novelpia cliché comes to mind—the platform where I serialized my novels.
I head to the bathroom. The place where I died. The place where, just moments ago, blood and water had thoroughly mixed.
I see the mirror.
And I see a beautiful woman.
I can't see her body. Only her face. Nevertheless, I could be certain that this was a woman.
Her fair, white skin was vastly different from my darkly tanned skin. Looking at that cute, squishy mochi-like face so unlike my hideous one made me feel disgust.
Her delicate, finely sculpted features brought to mind idols I'd only seen on TV. Her assertive, beautiful eyes doubled the charm of her face, and the mysterious black pupils that sucked in one's gaze were the only part of my body that hadn't changed.
Yes, except for the pupils—except for those common, all-too-common black pupils—I had become an entirely different person.
...Correction. Just now, the eyes that had been black turned blue, changing into something different from what I had before. With white skin, white hair, and even blue eyes, she looked nothing short of a foreigner.
Though from the start, I had wondered if this face even looked Korean.
".... Ah, aah."
I had hoped against hope, but as expected. The voice too belonged to a completely different being from the old me. A high-pitched, nightingale-like, forced baby voice—similar to the VTubers that sometimes pop up in my YouTube recommendations.
Is this.. me?
No.
This isn't me. To begin with, just moments ago I had been dying.. no, I died. I definitely died. But...
...
I return to my room. I step into my room with its all-too-familiar layout, where even the cup ramen trash strewn about was the same.
I open my wallet. My resident registration number was the same. Except that the first digit of the back number was 4 instead of 3, it was identical.
And my name hadn't changed either.
[Ha Seoyun]
My unmistakable name. My name that had lived with me through years—whether 24 or 25 I couldn't tell, but certainly not short years.
This body was definitely me.
It wasn't me, yet it was me.
...Even as I say it myself, I don't know what this means. No, I know, but I don't want to know.
I didn't want to accept that this was me. My head ached wondering what had happened to the owner of this body, and if she had died because of me.
What... what should I do from now on?
【What do you mean what should you do! You must live well!】
...Perhaps my mental state was more broken than I thought. Hearing something like an auditory hallucination that I had never heard no matter how hard things got—maybe not thinking about the current situation was the right answer.
【This is no mere hallucination! But that is a good thought! Yes! Don't think about complicated things and just try to live well!】
...
I habitually move to slam my head against the wall, then hesitate. I had died doing that, so I was reluctant to do it again.
【To think you would try to harm yourself! Even if you did not go through with it, that won't do! This body is also my body, so handle it with care!】
And that reluctance vanished immediately. I boldly slammed my head against the wall, blinking my eyes and focusing on the silence that rang out.
...Did it disappear?
【I say, I am not something like a hallucination!! Ah, no!! Do not hit it!! Do not hit your head!! It hurts!! It hurts, I say!!!】
Fuck.
What the hell is this.
I died, yet I didn't die, and had become a woman.
Confused because this body is me yet doesn't feel like me, I hear an auditory hallucination in my head.
...
Ah, I see.
So I died and went to hell. I've read novels like this. Died and became a woman to become a sex slave in hell for eternity..
【What in the world have you been reading?!! No, to begin with, I..!! I am not something like a hallucination, I tell you!!! How many times must I say it?!!!】
...
For now.. so...
...
I think I need to calm down for a moment.
Yeah...