# Episode 1 — I Haven’t Even Managed to Retire, and I’m Already Scheduled for Execution
I thought I was dead, but my eyes opened.
I didn’t want to open them. Because I figured today would be another day of overtime anyway. It took two seconds for that thought to rise to the surface of my consciousness. Thirty-seven years of habit worked quickly.
‘Today’s probably overtime again.’
The moment I pushed my eyelids up—
I saw a ceiling.
It was strange. It wasn’t white plaster. Intricately carved gold-leaf patterns gleamed in the light. Morning sunlight slanted in and flowed along the edges of the gilding. The design was complicated.
‘……This isn’t the office.’
I tried to sit up. And something spilled over me. Onto my face.
It was silver. Hair, falling all the way to my waist. I tried to brush it aside with both hands, but there was too much of it to move all at once. If I swept it away with my right hand and tucked it behind my ear with my left, it flowed down in front again.
I looked at my hands.
They were long and slender. The joints were narrow. The nails at the tips were neatly trimmed short. The line running back from my knuckles to my wrist was thin. I turned my wrist. It was so narrow it looked like it would snap if grabbed. I wrapped my other hand around it. My thumb and middle finger touched.
‘These aren’t my hands.’
The moment I threw off the blanket and stood, my balance wavered. My center of gravity was different. A sensation of lightness above the waist and heaviness below it. The weight distribution was completely different from the body I’d used for thirty-seven years.
My feet were small. My ankles were thin. I exhaled. My ribcage was different. It felt like my breath moved higher up. A narrow, shallow breath.
I looked around the room. A gold-leaf ceiling. Purple curtains. Heavy furniture. There was a full-length mirror on one side of the room.
‘Let’s look in the mirror first.’
---
I walked over. My footsteps sounded different. With every step, the silver hair swayed behind my back. The sensation of the weight of hair shifting past my shoulders and over my back remained unfamiliar.
In front of the mirror, I stopped.
Silver hair flowed down to my waist. My eyes were red. A clear, deep red like rubies. The lines of my face were sharp. My cheekbones were coolly angular, and my lips were thin. My neck was long.
The front of my nightgown had fallen loosely open. My collarbones were exposed. Morning light pooled in the hollows inside them. The line beneath my collarbones continued down to the open front of the nightgown. I inhaled. The front of the nightgown pulled ever so slightly. Something beneath it changed. When I exhaled, it returned. On the inhale and the exhale, the same nightgown formed different shapes.
‘This is…… my body?’
I lowered my gaze. The nightgown continued past my waist and downward. The waistline was distinct. Even through the nightgown, I could read the curve descending toward the hips. Now I understood why this body’s center of gravity was lower.
Minjun stared into the mirror for a long time. Slowly, he pinched his cheek. It hurt. Once more. It hurt even more.
He touched the line of his neck with his hand. His skin was cold. When his fingertips brushed over his collarbone, his nerves transmitted the sensation with precise clarity. It was his own hand touching his own body, but it felt alien.
‘This is real.’
‘Did I die? From overwork?’
Last week too, he’d left work at two in the morning. The day before that, he’d pulled an all-nighter. His meals had been convenience store triangle kimbap.
‘But if you die, do you reincarnate into a body that looks like this?’
He looked closely at the face in the mirror. Even objectively, it was overwhelming. In thirty-seven years of life, he had never seen a face like this.
‘The benefits aren’t bad.’
---
He figured out the situation from an envelope on the desk.
“To Lady Isabel von Ester. Notice of New Term Attendance at the Royal Academy of Ester.”
That was this body’s name. He rummaged through the drawers and found a diary. It took thirty minutes. To summarize: noble young lady, infamous, confirmed villainess, execution ending reserved.
‘I haven’t even managed to retire, and I’m already scheduled for execution.’
When a maid came in and dressed him, it finally started to feel real.
It was a uniform. A white shirt, a dark navy jacket, and a skirt. When the maid fastened the shirt buttons, the sensation of the fabric brushing against his skin was different. The inside of the shirt touched his abdomen directly. The jacket lining wrapped around his arms.
The skirt was above the knees.
The moment he put it on, the sensation against the skin around his legs was different. It wasn’t the hem of trousers. A broad area of skin was directly exposed to the air. The skirt brushed the inside of his legs. When he walked, it swayed back and forth. When he stopped, it settled and touched his thighs. That texture kept making him conscious of his skin.
Once the jacket was on, the front of the uniform settled against his body. While the maid buttoned the jacket, the front pulled taut and loosened repeatedly. When he inhaled, he felt the front of the jacket draw tight ever so slightly. The way this body breathed was operating together with these clothes.
‘This is every day.’
Before boarding the carriage, he looked in the mirror once more. He was wearing the uniform. The jacket tapered to fit his waist. The waistline was clear. Beneath the jacket, the skirt continued. After wearing nothing but trousers for thirty-seven years, Minjun had now learned over three days what it felt like to wear a skirt. The air touched between his legs.
The Isabel in the mirror looked as though none of that bothered her at all.
‘I still don’t know how to make that expression.’
The uniform collar wrapped around his neck. Silver hair spilled down over it. The maid arranged his hair, and he felt the entire weight of it shift all at once at the back of his neck.
‘I think this requires more adjusting to than twelve years of overtime.’
---
The carriage swayed.
Outside the window, trees flashed by quickly. Even inside the carriage, the hem of the skirt bothered him. When he sat, the skirt rode up and his thighs touched the seat directly. It was a sensation that wouldn’t have existed if he’d been wearing trousers. Every time the carriage rocked, the area of contact changed. The friction between the inside of his thighs and the seat shifted little by little with the movement. He felt it with every sway.
Two maids sat across from him with their heads bowed. No one spoke.
The academy looked enormous even from a distance. Several stone buildings were connected together, and sky-blue flags fluttered in the wind.
When he stepped down from the carriage, gazes poured over him. The path opened on its own.
‘Looks like Isabel was a scary character.’
---
Walking down the corridor, he stopped.
It was the moment he had just turned a corner.
He saw blond hair.
Golden hair cut in a bob swayed slightly above narrow shoulders. Beneath it, clear green eyes were looking up at him. Her eyes were large. They were a warm color, but right now they were frozen wide open.
Above the uniform collar, the line of her slim neck was visible. Her shoulders were narrow. They had lifted a little, as if she were holding her breath. The front of her uniform jacket remained taut in response to that tension. As though her chest had tightened from holding her breath, the shape of the jacket’s front showed, exactly, the state of her halted breathing. She held a crystal orb in both hands, her fingers slender and her wrists small.
Minjun thought reflexively.
‘She’s cute.’
And 0.3 seconds later, he thought.
‘……Ah, wait.’
‘I’m a woman. Right now.’
‘No, my body is female, but inside I’m a thirty-seven-year-old man. Then is this reaction normal or abnormal?’
‘A male brain in a female body. This case was never covered in HR training.’
Conclusion: judgment deferred.
Isabel’s memories flashed by. In this corridor, he was supposed to do something to this girl. Ignore her, shove her, humiliate her.
‘Hey, I can’t do that.’
He had spent twelve years living as the one on the receiving end. Why would he do that to someone else?
He said nothing. He simply passed by her.
The moment he brushed past the girl’s shoulder—
At this distance, Chloe’s uniform was visible. The line of her neck above the collar. The line from her shoulder into her jacket. The front of the jacket held taut with tension. It meant she was holding her breath. Out of fear. That fear was contained in the shape of the front of her jacket. And her skirt. Above the knees. The line continuing beneath it. Slender. Light from the window had settled over it.
Minjun saw all of it.
‘A male brain in a female body. This is judgment deferred. Completely deferred.’
A faint scent passed from the blonde. It wasn’t sweet, but clean. It was only an instant, yet it clung to the tip of his nose. And he sensed her body heat. Though they hadn’t touched. Heat transmitted through the air at close range. This body perceived it through the skin. That warmth had stopped just before it touched Isabel’s cool skin. This side’s skin was cool and the air on that side was warm, so the difference in temperature drew a line through the air between them.
He said only one sentence.
“Don’t block the way.”
His voice was cold. Even without meaning it to be. Isabel’s voice was like that by nature.
He felt silence fall behind him.
‘Compared to twelve years of overtime, this is nothing.’
---
Behind him, Chloe Armand did not move.
She stood there blankly, her eyes following the retreating back of silver hair.
It felt as though the air where Isabel had passed was still warm. It probably wasn’t. It was only a feeling. And yet Chloe’s left shoulder still remembered that warmth.
Breath returned inside her uniform jacket. When she inhaled, the front pulled taut. That sensation overlapped with the moment Isabel had passed her earlier. The body heat she had felt from the distance at which Isabel’s shoulder had gone by. The cool, faint scent that had clung to her nose for a fleeting instant, then vanished. The moment those red eyes had looked at her from below upward, something in the upper part of her chest had responded—Chloe recognized it, even as she tried not to.
Without realizing it, Chloe curled her toes. Her fingertips gripped her own sleeve.
Isabel von Ester—
Had not tormented her today.
‘……Why?’
Before long, her brow drew together slightly. Strength entered the hand holding the crystal orb. Chloe did not know.
That more than “why she hadn’t done it,” the far more frightening question was “for what reason she would refrain from doing it from now on.”