I pick up a water bottle, dew having formed inside from rolling around on the floor, and open the lid.
I briefly wonder if it's okay to drink the water inside this bottle, which could have been rolling around since who knows when, but since I won't die whether it's spoiled or not, I lightly send the water down my throat.
After a sip, then another, the bottle was empty before I knew it, yet my throat was still burning like a parched desert.
【So!! In other words, I am you!! And you are me!!】
"...Even if you say that, your explanation is complete dogshit. Get your thoughts together and speak properly."
【Urk... Wh-What do you want me to do!! I am not good with words!!】
"You said you were a king. But you can't speak well? How did you rule a nation?"
【Th-That...! Lord Hairou...】
"And who is that?"
And it was only natural. Who in the world could be perfectly sane while conversing with their alter ego? Rather, I thought myself mentally quite resilient for at least keeping my throat hydrated.
The voice echoing inside my head... calling herself 'Hareuse von Ereuhaim,' seemed to have been the king of a nation. From what I heard, she was the king of a powerful nation possessing multiple Swordmasters, and those settings were strikingly similar to the tropes of a run-of-the-mill fantasy novel.
In fact, it was only natural. This was my mental illness, and since my mental illness ultimately stemmed from me, it was only expected that those settings were things I already knew. Humans are beings that find it difficult to fill in what they have not experienced; therefore, it was undoubtedly filled with 'me.'
【So even if they are not settings!! I!! This King ruled a nation!!】
"For now, could you stick to either 'I' or 'this King'? My head, which already hurts, is starting to hurt even more."
【No..! That.. seems difficult.. Lord Hairou said it would be better to use 'I'...】
"I'm asking who the hell this Lord Hairou is. Every time you speak, you trot him out as a shield. Is he just a shield, or more like a scapegoat?"
【N-No!!! Lord Hairou is.. truly precious.. he who protects.. me...】
"Sounds like a shield to me."
【He is noooot!!!】
I gave half-hearted replies to the voice ringing in my head and started searching on my computer. The search keywords were 'mental illness, multiple personality, DID'—an investigation of this thing inside my head.
At the same time, the additional keywords were 'gender change, feeling like my gender has changed, gender transition hallucination.'
Come to think of it, I may have judged too hastily. Because the site where I serialized my novels was Novelpix, the fact that my appearance had changed immediately led me to assume this was TS, but realistically, such a thing could not exist.
Suddenly becoming a woman, or snatching the body of 'me' from another world—those things could not exist. So too with the crazy bitch inside my head who thinks she's a king; the probability that everything was a mental illness was high.
The ocean of information called the internet is vast, and the hidden information within it is prime stuff. Occasionally, one encounters false information filled with malicious intent, like shitposts encountered while gallery-browsing, but it is no big problem. These days, the times have advanced, and fact-checking is easy.
I stamp my feet impatiently and scroll down the mouse wheel. It might be the wrong expression to say I'm stamping my feet since they don't touch the floor, but that wasn't important. The more I scrolled down, the more I bent my waist, inevitably drawn closer to the screen as if being sucked in.
"Nothing."
Even with AI's help, despite searching for information for about 40 minutes now, there was no mental illness identical to my current symptoms.
There were similar ones, but none could be considered identical to me, and a mental illness where one suddenly feels as if they have turned into a soft, squishy beautiful young girl could not be found even in fragments, save for Novelpix novels.
The closest thing was delusional disorder, but that was ultimately caused by 'strong belief and conviction.' For what I was experiencing to be delusional disorder, I would have had to consider myself a beautiful young girl.
...Of course, I was a beautiful young girl right now, but never in my life had I thought of myself as one, nor had I ever even wanted to become one.
Rather, if anything, I felt aversion. I knew this kind of statement didn't suit someone who serialized on Novelpix, but I was what they call a TS-hating young man.
Even when reading works for reference and input for my novels, I had never read the TS genre, and naturally, what I wrote was a pure, completely TS-free stream, not containing even 1% of it.
Therefore, this was not delusional disorder.
【Well, did I not say I am real!!】
"..."
Then, if asked whether it was Dissociative Identity Disorder, commonly called 'multiple personalities,' that was not it either. The core of DID was memory gaps, ego separation, and identity switching.
Suddenly having blank spots in memory, saying someone else did things I didn't do, and slowly realizing it—that was DID. Not even knowing you have another personality until then—that was DID.
But from the very beginning, some crazy bitch declaring herself a king had approached me to talk. It wasn't that we naturally started conversing during treatment; she just started talking to me first.
【I tire, I am tired.. How much longer must I insist before you heed my words?】
"Would you believe it if you were me? A self-proclaimed king suddenly appeared in my head, spewing bullshit about being another me?"
【Well, even if it is not bullshit but real!!】
Conversation simply could not proceed. No, in this case, it was more appropriate to say neither of us had any intention of carrying on a conversation.
In my case, I didn't want to believe this situation was reality, and as for her... what was her name again?
【Hareuse von Ereuhaim! It is not even a long name, so memorize it!】
Right, Hareuse von Ereuhaim... Not long, my ass, it's ridiculously long. I'll just call you Hareuse for short. Anyway, Hareuse seemed to know something but couldn't explain it properly, and I wanted to deny this reality; from the start, we were parallel lines that could never meet.
Perhaps this was a dream born of utter exhaustion. I had finally reached the ending, yet I couldn't even handle a single afterword properly and had failed, leaving me in agony and exhausted.
So if I slept and woke up, something might be different.
If I woke up and the situation hadn't changed, it would surely be due to slight vertigo. If not vertigo, perhaps I was intoxicated by a dream, hazy and dazed; and if not that... then perhaps this itself was a dream.
There were still overflowing possibilities for escape. Until I eliminated all of them, I absolutely did not want to acknowledge this situation.
The very idea that something which could only happen inside a novel was appearing in reality was absurd; therefore, I...
....
Novel.
Novel?
At that single word, my head tingles and a brief pain flares. A bizarre sensation, as if my brain is being stimulated, as if something is wriggling about inside it.
Novel. Why does that single word hurt my head so? It was what I had been writing since my third year of high school, and even if it never bore fruit, it was what I had continued writing all this time. Why, then, does that single word cause me such pain?
【It has begun. Yes.. this would be easier. Go on, see it for yourself!】
I can tell.
I came to know.
Even though I didn't want to know, it wriggled its way into my head, as if it were a ritual that had to be fulfilled. It squeezed through my mind, rummaged through my memories, and forcibly stuffed new memories between the rifled ones.
In the garden I had cultivated, my own garden, a single tree I never planted proudly took root.
Yet I could not reject it. What took root was, rather, the final plant of this garden that I had been unable to find until now. It was the final plant that would complete this garden.
Whirrr—
The life of a person—of Ha Seoyun, not me—plays out like a panorama.
Her father was a nameless white man.
She was bullied at school.
She fell in love with a story made of printed words. When she saw the end of that story, she gained courage.
Her courage made her resist those who tormented her, and her courage changed her school life.
She reached hell. There was no hope. She could not escape. The tightening, guiltless pleasure grew ever more vicious. There was no longer any way to improve.
There was no money. Her mother ran away. Her older sister had been attending university but took a leave of absence and increased her part-time jobs to feed and support her younger sister.
She fell into self-loathing. She hated herself for being a burden to everyone, and being hated and bullied by everyone, she began to hate even herself.
She plunged once more into the story she so loved. She dissected every single letter, savored them, and read the author's intentions that the author never intended.
And she met a cruel fate. My stomach churns. The author who wrote the words she loved so much was one of the main instigators of her bullying.
It was a truth she had learned by chance while being bullied, and loving the words excreted by the being she hated most was a humiliation harder to bear than anything else.
And so she became a hikikomori shut-in who couldn't even shed the label of being a mere high school graduate. She distanced herself from the world and stepped into a new world called the internet.
She hated writing. She loathed it. But even so, she loved writing. She read his writing. Again and again, over and over.
While retching up disgust and hatred, her eyes could not tear themselves away from the combination of printed letters she so loved. It was her first love, and her indelible love.
Because that affection was one that could not disappear no matter how twisted it became, she placed her hands on the keyboard.
She.
I.
Must write.
Inspiration arises. Unlike the cookie-cutter mass-produced ideas I had constantly thought up, this was different. Similar, yet the deep essence contained within was different. Had I ever conceived such inspiration in my life?
She had wanted to write. I do not know the contents of that writing. It was merely an impulse to write without even a proper outline from the start.
【Do you understand? This is..】
"Shut up."
However, such thoughts of hers—no, her life, unable to escape her fractured mind and the being she loathed, longing for love in the writings of that loathed being—made an outline unnecessary.
This itself was a story. A proper 'work' with high completeness, one that I had never written before, needing only a little polish.
Did you ask if I understood?
I understood.
Not that I understood it perfectly yet, but why I had entered her body, and why Hareuse—who looked nothing like me—called herself me; the jumbled, chaotic puzzle had begun to take shape, to take the form of a picture.
But that wasn't important.
Right now, that kind of shit wasn't important.
I kicked away the puzzle taking shape in my head. I had no time to care about such things.
Between the brilliantly scattering puzzle pieces, the inspiration I had captured shone. Brightly, more brightly than ever before.
I seize it and write with it as my ink.
I write words, I write a work.
I strike the keyboard, containing the life I just witnessed, what I experienced, the original owner of this body, every story I experienced, that emotion, that single person.
How should I depict this? This might feel more natural here, but for immersion, a slight awkwardness might be acceptable as a dramatic device.
Vitality surges. Energy courses through my previously slumped body, and the corners of my mouth rise at the letters multiplying one by one before my eyes.
".... Ha, hahaha..."
When I came to my senses, I had already written five pieces of roughly 5,000 characters each.
Yet it was not enough. Those were merely stories of her childhood, and at most, they contained nothing more than a nameless white father abandoning her and fleeing, and her mother beginning to sell her body.
The beginning of a tragic narrative. Her story could still grow even more unfortunate, and the end of that misfortune existed here, brazenly, before my eyes.
Until it became me. Until this story became me, I did not want to stop.
And yet my body—this pathetically weak body—was trembling merely because I had written five chapters. My fingertips were going numb, and my bones ached.
My back, which had been bent low, and my neck, which had been thrust forward, had stiffened painfully, and for some reason tears were streaming from my eyes.
...It did not take long for me to understand why I was crying. At the deep nausea rising from within, my mind thought.
I had watched her memories and lived her life. Before I was the man Ha Seoyun, I had also, unmistakably, been the woman Ha Seoyun. Both were me, and because of that, her memories, her emotions, the very being that was her, had become mixed into me.
I could not upload this story. I must not upload it. For Ha Seoyun’s sake, and for my own, it was a story that must not be uploaded.
This was my story. My weakness, the shame I did not want to reveal, the horrific story I did not want anyone else to discover.
And I had wrapped such a story in words as if it were nothing, calling it a work, and had tried to upload it to a public web novel site called NovelFix.
This—this could not be done. Selling my misfortune was nothing but pornography. It was more shameful than selling my body. It was the path to becoming a bitch no different from my mother, no different from some whore selling her body.
But I—my hands were already moving.
I created a NovelFix account that had not existed in this world, and clicked “Register Work.”
I wrote down the title, and filled in the tags.
“Because Even If Life Falls Apart, You Still Have to Live”
In the end, my story—a piece of writing that contained me—was uploaded to NovelFix.
I.
What had I done?
I had to delete it. I had to delete it even now. It was a story I absolutely, absolutely did not want anyone to see. I had to delete it. I had to erase it.
And yet.
Why couldn’t I delete it?
What—what was it that I wanted?
Ha Seoyun.
I am Ha Seoyun.
And I—Ha Seoyun—was... a writer.
A horrifying existence who wanted to leave behind works more than her own name; who, when death came for her, wished more powerfully than anything to write a story that would be loved. Who wanted to be loved even if it meant selling my shame.
I am. Ha Seoyun.
I wanted to become a writer, but this was not what I wanted.
I was.
A piece-of-trash bitch no different from a prostitute, no different from some whore selling her body.
You disgusting bastard. You did it. You went and did it. That isn’t your story. It isn’t your writing, either. That’s....
【Come to your senses. Breathe, and blink.】
I breathe.
I blink.
【Calm yourself, and rest for a while. You may sleep for a bit, or, hmm... yes, simply sleeping would be best.】
Dragging my trembling body along, I approach the bed.
And I.
...fell asleep like that.