Incidents have a way of striking without warning.
My parents suddenly dying of cancer, the fire that spread from the house next door and burned everything in mine, including my keepsakes, and the important project at work I ruined because of it—all of it had happened far too suddenly.
What was happening now was the same. The moment I woke up, I tried to turn on my computer, only to find that the latest model I’d bought less than six months ago was nowhere to be seen. The sleek black tower was gone, and in its place stood a bulky-looking old white one. The same went for the monitor, mouse, and keyboard—everything that fell under the broad category of “computer parts.”
But there was something more important than the fact that I had lost, overnight, the prized possession I had bought after paying off all the damages from that fire and the compensation for the ruined project.
“…Don’t tell me I’ve been kidnapped?”
The desk was white, the wallpaper was white, and the clothes hanging on the rack were all white. The books on the shelf had been plastered over with white covers, and most of the writing utensils on the desk were white as well.
Considering that people usually used black pens, anyone who saw me in this room might mistake it for a psychiatric ward. Compared to my stylish room, there was an absurd amount of “something” missing here.
Though, if I’d been suddenly locked up in a hospital ward, they wouldn’t let me use a computer, outdated or not, so that probably wasn’t it.
Kidnappers wouldn’t normally leave me somewhere with a computer either, but it might be the kind that required a password at startup, so for now, it was probably better to assume this was a kidnapping.
And if the kidnapper had some kind of mental illness and had papered the whole room in white, then the eerie overabundance of white made sense too.
I couldn’t just keep lying there and looking around the room, so I pushed off the thin cloth blanket and sat up.
Maybe I’d been drugged, because my head throbbed. I wasn’t wearing anything like handcuffs, but the weakness in my arms and legs was enough to make sure I couldn’t resist the kidnapper even without them.
If the door was locked, I might have to make some kind of escape-room attempt, so I tried opening it first. With a single creeeak, a hallway came into view, along with a staircase leading downward.
Was this the second floor? After checking carefully and confirming that there was no staircase going up anywhere, I very cautiously closed the door again.
If the kidnapper found out I was awake, there was no telling what might happen, so it was better to be careful.
That said, there was a black spherical CCTV camera installed on the hallway ceiling, with a red dot lit to indicate it was powered on. If someone had been watching the feed the whole time, then the kidnapper would have seen me step out and go back in. But that couldn’t be helped.
It wasn’t as if I could avoid checking whether I could get into the hallway or not.
Of course, since I might have been caught on CCTV anyway, it might be a good idea to use the opportunity and check whether I could get out through the front door, but…
‘It wouldn’t be that sloppy.’
If I could just walk out the front door, then I wasn’t being confined. It would simply mean someone had brought me here.
Judging by the sound of car exhaust coming from beyond the curtained window, this wasn’t some remote countryside location.
If I got out of here and immediately reported it to the police, I’d be able to return home, and the owner of this house would end up in prison for kidnapping me.
—I did not move while trusting in such hopeful assumptions.
That was experience I’d gained after [that day]. Even after hearing there had been a traffic accident, I hadn’t believed my parents were dead, only for the notice of death to arrive. And when the fire next door took everything from me, I had thought I could simply start over with the compensation money, only for someone who had seemed perfectly fine until then to be declared mentally and physically incapacitated. I had already gone through things like that.
Maybe because I’d thought of my painful past for the first time in a while, the headache I’d already had now felt much worse.
At a loss as to what I should do, I sat on the bed like it was a chair, and then I noticed things I hadn’t seen earlier.
The clothes rack, entirely covered in white. Other people probably wouldn’t have found anything particularly strange about the clothes hanging there, but I, whose powers of observation were far superior to others’, could see it. The sleeves of the white blouse were unusual.
They weren’t unusual because they’d been cut into some bizarre shape or anything. It was just that the shape was one a man would find strange, and it instantly made me realize what gender the owner of this room was. And why I had been kidnapped here.
Damn my popularity. It just never cools down.
I let out a weak, hollow laugh.
Because I had realized the cause of this entire comedy.
Ah, had I bewitched someone again?
Me, Choe Isu.
Age thirty-two.
A man who had been single since birth, but only because women couldn’t overcome my handsome looks and confess to me, preventing me from dating. In reality, a sinful man who had made many women fall in love.
Perhaps the reason I had been kidnapped into this room was because of the sin of being too indifferent toward the women who loved me…
That was how I thought of the person who had locked me up here.
That was how I wanted to think of them.
‘Surely it isn’t a gay guy… right…?’
After all, the subtle change in my voice, the feeling that I’d gotten shorter when I stood up, and the fact that my hands seemed strangely pale and my fingers thinner couldn’t possibly be because I’d been made to take female hormone medication.
I knew that taking hormone medication for just a day or two wouldn’t affect someone enough to make them shorter, but if I hadn’t been unconscious for just “a day or two,” then who knew? Maybe my skeleton had shrunk as a side effect of taking far too much hormone medication.
To lay out my honest feelings, homosexuality was not a sin. In fact, I didn’t particularly dislike homosexual people. It was just that I didn’t want to do it myself, and dragging me all the way here and injecting me with hormones for the sake of homosexuality was definitely a crime.
In that sense, it was honestly a relief that there was no mirror in this room.
No matter how handsome I had been, I’d still had a fairly masculine appearance. If I had been twisted into something grotesque under the influence of female hormones, I might have screamed, Kyaaaaaaah! in a way that didn’t suit my gender at all. The window was a cloudy gray too, so it wasn’t reflecting my body.
Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep~.
While I was thinking it was a relief I hadn’t seen my altered body, I heard the sound of a door lock being released—perhaps the kidnapper had seen on CCTV that I’d stepped into the hallway and gone back in.
It was loud enough to reach my ears even through the closed door on the second floor. The person presumed to be the kidnapper who had brought me here did not come straight up to the second floor.
I had my ear pressed to the door, and I didn’t hear anyone stepping on the stairs. Instead, a few minutes later, a savory and fragrant smell wafted in strongly enough to reach me even through the closed door.
“…Come to think of it, I am hungry.”
I had no idea how long I’d been starving. Did the kidnapper know that and was now cowardly cooking?
But I couldn’t exactly refuse to go down. What were the odds that the moment I opened the hallway door with the CCTV, the kidnapper just happened to come in and start cooking? If I dared to estimate, zero percent.
They probably seemed certain I was awake, so if I didn’t go down like this, they might make the perfectly reasonable assumption that I was trying to escape and lock me up even more securely.
It seemed better to go down and ask what they had kidnapped me for while I was at it. …Definitely not because I was hungry.
Convincing myself of that, I opened the door I’d had my ear pressed to until a moment ago, and the fragrant smell of meat stabbed into my nose.
No matter how smart this body was, as long as I was human, there was no way I could know exactly what that smell was with the door closed.
If it smelled this delicious, then choosing to go down had been a very wise decision. Once I’d fully descended the stairs, I went straight to what I assumed was the kitchen, the source of the smell, and there I found a feast laid out.
Pass.
Another pass.
Meat, as they say, is supreme. There were countless side dishes spread across the table until it looked ready to buckle—salad to eat with the meat, yellow croaker that could even serve as a substitute for meat, fresh-looking seasoned bean sprouts, and more—but the meat was clearly the master of this table.
As the saying goes, even Geumgangsan should be seen after eating, so eating took priority over checking the kidnapper’s face or figuring out their intentions.
If they had intended to make me eat something strange, they would already have done so, so I picked up the chopsticks and put the meat into my mouth first.
It melted softly away—meat that felt like eating a snowflake. Among all the meats I knew, none tasted like this.
Was it because the cooking method was special? Or had they used some kind of special meat? The desire to ask tickled my throat, but the kidnapper’s voice came out before mine could.
“It seems you like it?”
A kind woman’s voice. The hypothesis that the kidnapper was a gay man who had abducted me was scrapped, but the hypothesis that this woman was a lesbian who had kidnapped me and injected me with female hormones still remained.
Was it because I now knew the other party was a woman? Even with my weakened body, I felt confident that if she tried anything strange, I could at least ram into her once. I raised my head, and then I discarded every hypothesis I had made.
[Yoo Inna]
[Ability: Influence]
[Role: Sub-Heroine.]
—Because the thought suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t been kidnapped, but had gone insane and been transported here.