“Mmm……”
My head feels heavy enough to split open. When did I fall asleep?
I’m sure I was watching an internet stream yesterday….
A faint floral scent, one I felt like I’d smelled somewhere before, drifted through the room.
When I took a deep breath, the pleasant fragrance seemed to seep into my lungs.
‘Maybe I’ll sleep just a little longer…….’
Half-asleep and half-awake.
I gathered the blanket, which was originally meant to cover me, into one bundle and hugged it tightly to my chest.
I was intoxicated by the feeling that I wanted to become one with the blanket just like this.
The feel of the bed was strangely unfamiliar.
When I rubbed my cheek against the blanket, my skin reacted so sensitively I could feel each individual thread.
“Mmm……”
Beyond my hazy mind, it felt as though my voice had sounded an octave higher than usual, but now was not the time to be questioning such trivial things.
‘Feels nice….’
This overwhelming softness enveloping my whole body.
Just as I was about to sink deeply into the ecstasy of sleep,
what barely dragged me back to the surface of consciousness was the heavy pressure in my lower abdomen.
An utterly physiological and natural signal that always came after waking up.
“Bathroom……”
With my eyes half-closed, I staggered toward the bathroom.
As usual, with a familiar motion, I lifted the toilet seat and stood in front of it.
A routine I had not skipped a single day in over twenty years. This much was something I could do with my eyes closed.
Though my pants did feel a little loose today.
Still dazed, I slid my pants down and, in order to aim……
“……?”
Drip—
I didn’t hear the lively sound of water that should have fallen into the toilet bowl. Instead, sensation came rushing from an unexpected direction.
A hot, damp feeling running down the insides of my thighs.
The warm temperature tickled my skin and continued all the way to my ankles, snapping me wide awake.
“Ah…… aah……?”
It felt as though lightning had struck my spine, and my sleep vanished completely.
‘What. Is this.’
I looked down. A warm stream of water was helplessly flowing down my thin, far too thin thighs and onto the floor.
It was the moment when the natural common sense that formed the foundation of my life—urinating while standing—betrayed me.
My mind went blank.
I stared vacantly at the liquid spreading down my legs, over the tops of my feet, and across the cold bathroom tiles.
“………?”
I looked back and forth between the liquid pooled on the floor and my pajama pants, now soaked through.
That was when I realized something that should have been in my field of vision, something that had always existed there and proven my sex, was nowhere to be seen.
…It had vanished without a trace.
Only belatedly did I understand the situation.
“Wh-Wh-What?! What is this?!”
I felt a chirping sort of voice come out of my throat, but that wasn’t what mattered right now.
I hurriedly turned my head toward the mirror.
In the mirror I faced in an awkward, half-crouched posture stood a strange woman I had never seen once in my life.
Disheveled black hair falling to her shoulders.
A face that, rather than beautiful, would objectively make the word “cute” come out first.
Because she had just woken up, she looked a little messy, but even that seemed like an element that stimulated one’s protective instincts; her appearance was that destructive.
The large eyes in the mirror stared back at me.
Wondering if it was a dream, I pinched my cheek as hard as I could.
“Ow……”
It hurt. It hurt so much that tears sprang to my eyes.
I pressed my fingers together and rubbed them, then tugged at the corners of my eyes.
The woman in the mirror moved with not a single discrepancy from me and made the exact same expression.
I understood.
‘Aha. I’ve finally gone insane and started hallucinating.’
Something must have gone wrong with my head.
Surely my brain had rejected reality under the pressure of graduating college and having to live as a member of society.
Yes. That had to be it.
Otherwise, there was no way such an unrealistic situation would appear before my eyes in the mirror.
But it was strange. For a hallucination, it was far too vivid.
The pajamas I was wearing hung loosely, the shoulder seams drooping far down, and the pants were barely clinging to my hips.
My body had gotten smaller. No, it hadn’t gotten smaller—I had become a woman’s body.
First, I tried to grasp the situation, but there was something I had to do before that.
Biting my lip, I turned on the shower, crouched down, and sprayed water all over the floor.
The smell of urine filled the bathroom.
‘What am I doing right now….’
After cleaning up the bathroom, I threw off the wet pajamas and returned to my room.
* * *
After taking out and changing into another pair of pajamas, I tried to turn on the computer very calmly.
But my hands were shaking, so it took about three tries just to press the power button.
“Oof……”
When I settled my butt onto the chair, my feet didn’t reach the floor. My dangling toes came into view.
“Ha, I’ve g-gone completely insane….”
I busily moved across the keyboard and typed whatever came to mind into the search bar.
Tap, tatap, tatap—
The feeling of typing on the keyboard with my smaller fingertips was unfamiliar.
Because I kept pressing the key next to the one I wanted, I ended up hitting backspace more often than anything else.
[mental illness feeling like a woman],
[woke up and became a woman],
[acute sex change],
[what to do when you’re a man but became a woman]
Tens of thousands of search results poured out, but the results were miserable.
Anime, web novels, delusional posts from otaku communities.
There was not a single realistic solution or piece of medical information.
To be honest, I hadn’t expected there to be medical information about something like this, but it was still a little disappointing to actually get no results at all.
‘Well, of course.’
Biting at my lip, I posed a question to a high-performance AI that had recently become popular.
[Question: I woke up and became a woman. What should I do?]
A moment later, the answer that appeared on the screen was almost sarcastic.
[Wow! You must be really surprised. It must feel like you’ve become the protagonist of a novel or movie. In a situation like that, why don’t you take a deep breath first and enjoy the person you see in the mirror? If you’d like to role-play, I can continue helping you!]
Even the AI was treating my words as the delusion of a crazy bastard or some elaborate role-play.
“Aaagh! Shut up, seriously……”
The voice coming out of my mouth still felt awkward.
The tone that flowed smoothly from my throat without anything catching sounded not bad at all.
No, it was my ideal voice.
A voice that sounded as though it had never inhaled a single speck of fine dust.
I’d only ever heard this kind of voice flowing through earphones with the volume turned up.
“Uuugh….”
A sense of helplessness strong enough to make me want to smash the monitor washed over me.
With these small fists, better suited to a “bonk” sound effect than a “bang,” it would probably be meaningless.
Even while thinking that, I slammed my hand down on the desk.
‘Bonk.’
The sound rang out exactly as expected—and I hugged my knees on the chair.
My hand throbbed.
The air slipping through the stretched-out collar of my loose pajamas felt especially cold.
And the air that entered through the empty space made it feel as though it was brushing over my entire body, sending a shiver down my spine.
When I unconsciously brought my legs together, the sensation of my knees touching each other was unfamiliar.
Soft.
“……Hoo.”
I caught my breath for a moment and forced myself to regain my composure.
Fine, let’s admit it. This isn’t a hallucination, and it isn’t a dream.
The soaked pajama pants proved that.
* * *
I continued doing my own research on the computer.
Every source was completely unreliable, but I had to cling to even things like this.
Various forms of media, delusions, web novels….
According to my research, these insane situations usually seemed to fall into several patterns.
First, world alteration. A case where everyone in the world remembers me as having been a woman from the start. A state where everything from my social records to the perceptions of those around me has been perfectly remodeled.
Second, possession. Reincarnation. A case where I possess someone else’s body, or reincarnate into another world.
Third, mutation. A case where only the body changes while the surrounding circumstances remain the same.
Possession and reincarnation were out. The situation already didn’t meet the conditions.
This was my familiar studio apartment no matter how you looked at it, the clothes hanging in the wardrobe were all men’s clothes I had worn, and the room was still scattered with the things I used.
The only thing that had changed was my body. No matter where I looked, it was identical to yesterday’s room.
Then could there still be a possibility of world alteration?
If so, there was only one thing to check.
With trembling hands, I frantically rummaged over the desk.
‘Where’s my wallet. Wallet. Wallet…!’
My resident registration card.
If the world had been altered and I had changed into a different person,
then surely my resident registration card would have changed too.
‘Found it…!’
I opened the black leather wallet.
And from within it, with trembling fingers, I pulled out my resident registration card.
I squeezed my eyes shut. For the first time, I, who did not believe in God, prayed to God.
‘Please…. Please….’
And when I opened my eyes, what I saw was—
[Resident Registration Card]
Name: Baek Eunhae
011111-3xxxxxx
Date of Birth: November 11, 2001
“Huh……?”
A stupid sound popped out of my mouth before I could stop it.
The thin, wheezing breaths and voice leaking out in my panic were, contrary to my feelings, horrifically cute.
My heart pounded.
The name was the same. The birthday was the same.
The first digit of the latter half of my resident registration number was 3.
The truth that the small card in my hand told me was far too cruel,
and I had ended up understanding that fact.
Everything went dark before my eyes.