3.
“Huh? What’s this?”
Inside the hospital room, which had fallen quiet again after I Runa left.
Lying alone on the bed with nothing to do, I was slowly looking around the room.
The door of the small bedside drawer was slightly open.
So I peered inside without thinking much of it, and saw a paper bag lying there.
It was fairly bulky. What could be inside?
Tilting my head, I took out the bag and checked its contents.
My belongings—my original clothes, wallet, phone, and the like—were all neatly inside.
It seemed the guild had taken care of them for me.
“…Wow, I didn’t think the difference would be this big.”
Apparently, even the clothes I’d been wearing hadn’t changed with me.
The clothes I pulled out of the bag felt bewilderingly large.
A breathable black T-shirt and wide-legged pants.
It wasn’t like I had anyone to meet outside anyway.
Since they were clothes I often wore, practically living as a one-outfit gentleman, I tried holding them up to myself.
And the words, “I really wore this?” slipped out on their own.
The moment I put on the T-shirt, one shoulder slid right off.
The pants, too, had so much extra room at the waist that there was no way I could wear them without a belt.
If I folded the hems a few times and tightened the belt all the way, I could probably wear them in a baggy sort of way.
But no matter how familiar the pants were, I didn’t feel like going that far just to wear them.
Looks like the first thing I’ll need to do after getting discharged is buy clothes.
A few tracksuits should… do, right. Yeah.
“Oh. Looks like someone charged it for me, too. What a relief.”
I neatly folded the clothes I could no longer wear back into the bag, then turned on the screen of the phone that had been placed inside with them.
Since it had been left alone for so long, I tapped the screen without much expectation, but unexpectedly, the battery was at 80%.
I’d been bored in this private room with no television. I was glad to have something to play with.
—Fingerprint does not match.
—Fingerprint does not match.
—Fingerprint does not match.
“Oh, right.”
Out of habit, I had placed my finger on it and tried to unlock it with fingerprint recognition.
Only to be reminded once again, by the authentication failure, that my body had changed.
…To think even my fingerprints had changed.
My skeleton had changed and my skin had changed, so it would have been stranger if my fingerprints had stayed the same.
In a world where everything from phone locks to resident registration cards used fingerprints for registration and verification,
the fact that the simplest and most certain proof that I was me had changed was a bigger problem than I’d imagined.
What if no one else had been at that scene besides me?
What if the power contained in the bead had activated much later?
In the worst case, I might have been unable to prove that I was me.
Thinking back on what I Runa had said, even if there was some way to prove it, the process would have become extremely troublesome.
“I need to re-register my fingerprints first. And get a new ID made too… Well, they said they’d help with that, at least.”
Seriously, trouble had sprung up from a place I never would have imagined.
I hoped nothing more troublesome than this would happen, but that was probably impossible.
Letting out a deep sigh, I drew my pattern instead of using my fingerprint and unlocked the phone.
[Camera]
Facing the familiar home screen, I muttered that I should hurry and register my fingerprints first.
But my fingers, in reality, headed toward the camera app, which I rarely ever opened.
…Because, well, I wanted to see what I looked like now that I’d become a woman.
The doctor had shown me briefly with a small mirror, but back then I was too out of it to take a proper look.
I had barely managed to confirm that my eyes, nose, and mouth were all in the right places.
I didn’t think I had looked that ugly. But what would the truth be?
Praying that I looked at least ordinary, I flipped the rear-facing camera around.
And my honest impression upon seeing my face reflected on the screen was—
“…Who are you?”
It was unexpected.
Most of the time, things that strayed from expectations weren’t considered good, but this time was different.
A 15.5 cm by 6.7 cm screen.
Inside it was an extremely pretty woman.
A head so small that her shoulders, narrower than when I had been a man, didn’t feel narrow at all.
Long, glossy brown hair and unusually distinct gray eyes.
There were no flashy colors, but even so, her features were clear enough to stand out anywhere.
“Why am I so pretty?”
My original face had been ordinary in every way.
Not outright ugly, but not handsome enough for a stranger to suddenly tell me so, either.
But now—if I asked ten people passing by on the street, wouldn’t eight of them react favorably?
It might have looked even more attractive to me because I used to be a man. But at the very least, it was definitely a beautiful face.
Even though it was only the image reflected in a phone camera, I didn’t get tired of looking at it no matter how long I stared.
I’d been thinking it would be a relief if I looked ordinary, but this was beyond relief—it was like winning first prize.
“There were still plenty of cafés and barbecue restaurants hiring, right?”
There were quite a few incidents where monsters that escaped from dungeons attacked shops on the streets.
Most shops had turned into takeout-only places, keeping only the people working in the kitchen.
But with looks like this, I felt confident that one of the few remaining barbecue restaurants or a large café would hire me as soon as I applied.
I didn’t have any special experience or qualifications, but with looks like this, they could be called a skill in themselves. Mm-hmm.
“Should I watch some streams and rest a bit now?”
For now, I decided to put off thinking about things that would only give me a headache and get some rest.
Maybe because so much had happened right after I woke up, I was a little mentally exhausted.
My biggest worry had been resolved, and I still had time left before I was discharged.
So I decided to take my time making plans for the future and, for the sake of rest—went to the internet streaming site I often watched.
“As expected, she did a singing stream. The VOD is……… closed….”
Time had continued to pass while I was asleep.
Which meant that, for as long as I had been asleep, the streams of the VTubers I liked had begun and ended.
Fortunately, most streams had VODs left behind, so I could rewatch them whenever I wanted.
But singing streams—or commemorative streams—were often blocked.
[This video cannot be replayed.]
Sob sob.
My eyes filled with tears. Tears blurred my vision.
VTubers who were really good at singing tended to leave their VODs open because the very sight of them singing served as promotion.
And for VTubers with many subscribers, the kind commonly called “big names,” even if they blocked their own VODs,
their troublemaker fans would save the entire stream and make clips, so it wasn’t hard to find videos with a little searching.
But for a VTuber who wasn’t very well-known and was embarrassed about her singing ability, once a singing stream passed, it was often over for good.
All those clumsy moments and embarrassed reactions belonged solely to the people who had been watching the stream at that time.
People like me, who couldn’t watch live, could only feel sad while reading community reactions like, “Today’s singing was so cute.”
“…She’s streaming right now.”
If there was one saving grace, it was that my oshi was broadcasting even at this very moment.
Putting my sadness behind me, I entered the stream.
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🟣 LIVE | Ayeon_AYEON
[🌙A quiet evening chat zzZ….]
🎮 Category: Just Chatting
👁🗨 59 viewers watching | 🕒 Stream time - 01:17
#Virtual #Radio #Drowsy #Chatting
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It wasn’t a room with many viewers. Unless there was special content or a collab, it usually stayed around sixty.
This time, too, there had been fifty-nine viewers, and when I entered, it became sixty.
【arigaddo donated 10,000 won!】
Since I hadn’t been able to watch her stream for a month, I donated ten thousand won as a casual greeting and check-in.
The regret I’d felt earlier about maybe cutting back a little on donations and so on had long since disappeared from my mind.
“Wow, Ari, it’s been so long! Thank you for the ten-thousand-won donation!”
I wasn’t exactly the top donor of this small room, but I had been donating for quite a long time, so she recognized my nickname and welcomed me.
Compared to many models coming out these days, it would be hard to call it high quality, but the head of the fairly cute avatar moved vigorously from side to side.
In the chat, a few of the diehard regulars who remembered my nickname also wrote messages saying they hadn’t seen me in a while.
Being acknowledged like this, even having my nickname called out for a relatively small amount of money like ten thousand won, was an atmosphere you could only feel in a small streamer’s room.
Of course, even if the viewer count wasn’t high, if she paid too much attention to one viewer, the others would get sulky, so the reaction didn’t last long.
But I hadn’t been watching this stream in hopes of some amazing reaction or excessive closeness in the first place, so it didn’t matter.
Maybe it was enough just to feel like I was part of the stream.
I lay on my stomach on the bed, pulled the blanket over myself, and began focusing on Ayeon as she chatted about small, everyday things.
A familiar time, a familiar action. Somehow, it felt like the messy mood I’d had all day was settling down.
My gender had changed, and even my fingerprints were different now. So many things had changed.
But inside a stream where my appearance had never been visible to begin with, I was still me.
And I liked that very much.