A Korea Where Women Serve in the Military?
Huh........
It took a while for my scattered wits to crawl back into place.
Sure, trading in an ordinary body for the frame of a pretty young nobleman was a win. But who the hell was I? And where was this?
First things first—find the wallet and check the ID.
Where had I left the thing? All I could remember was drinking with Deputy Manager Seonghyeon and Section Chief Dongcheol last night, then crawling home like a dog.
Fumble, fumble—
I searched the bed. Found it. Of course the wallet was just rolling around on the mattress. Right—I'd pulled out twenty thousand won that morning and tossed it onto the bed.
For the record, I was not some dementia patient who couldn't remember what happened that morning. Don't get the wrong idea. My head was just scrambled right now. Stop looking at me with those suspicious eyes. It's true.
I checked the ID.
Yu Sihyun.
Thankfully, the name was the same. The resident registration number and birthday matched too. So this pretty-boy brat was also twenty-six, same as me? Looking at him, though, you'd guess nineteen at most. Baby-faced as hell.
The last digit of the registration number started with a one, mercifully. So this wasn't some woman who'd transitioned. I'd briefly wondered, given how pretty he looked—like a beautiful girl. Relief washed over me. Well, with a dick hanging there this plainly, it was hard to argue otherwise.
While I was thinking about it, I gave it a squeeze. This bastard's cock was heavy—a real monster. The Creator really had poured every good thing into him. Lucky little shit.
Oh. That lucky little shit was me now.
An angelic pretty-boy face and a massive cock. A monster built to impregnate every woman on earth. With just one exception.
He was short.
Even my original self—an utterly average Korean guy—had been 176 centimeters. This pretty-boy young master didn't even look like he cleared 170. Still, with a face like this and a dick like that, bedding most women was more than doable.
The thought got me excited. Oh—and it got hard fast, too. Excellent functionality. Not a premature rabbit, I hoped? I'd only know once I stuck it in a pussy, so that would have to wait.
Hmm. The home address was the same as well. So the only thing that had changed was my body. My parents would still be themselves, then. Family first—I should call them. Hopefully nothing had happened to them.
I pressed my fingerprint to the phone. The lock screen opened without a hitch.
And then—fuck. What the hell was this.
385 missed calls. The KakaoTalk notification badge read 28,352.
Had the world gone insane? Had it actually gone insane?!
And it wouldn't stop—
Brrrng, brrrng~!
Fuck, even now.
Brrrrrng~!
The phone was shuddering like some fully automatic vibrator. I felt my mind about to leave the building again. No. Grab the reins. There was too much to do to let go now. Stay calm.
I switched the phone to silent and called Mom.
Riiing! Riiing!
"Oh, son!"
The voice was right—it was definitely my mom.
"Mom!"
"Oh, why'd you call? Calling because you were worried whether Mom and Dad were doing okay?"
Huh? What was that supposed to mean?
"Honestly. It's only been a few days apart and you're already calling. Mom's out walking the stone-wall path with Dad right now, so I'll call you back later."
"Mom, you're in Jeju with Dad? You didn't go hiking Mount Gwanak?"
"Sihyun, are you sure you're all right? You were the one who got free Jeju lodging vouchers and sent us on this trip. You said you were busy, but you've completely lost the plot. If nothing's wrong, hang up. I'll buy that mint chocolate you like on the way home. Click."
I sat there in shock.
Fuck. Even so—this was too much. Mom, to her own son. Mint chocolate?
Was she trying to poison me?
Apparently the body swap had come with a change in taste. Even so—a mint-chocolate fanatic? Ugh. _(´ཀ`」 ∠)_ Why would anyone pay money for toothpaste-flavored chocolate? Just who was this guy?
One thing was certain: he had some very peculiar tastes. Come to think of it, cigarettes had felt wrong and harsh in this body. So he didn't smoke either. The little shit looked like a party animal, but he was surprisingly clean-cut.
Anyway, I'd confirmed my parents were fine. Mom's voice had been a bit husky and rough, though. A proper chain-smoker's voice........
Wait. My mom didn't smoke. In this world, was she a chain smoker?
Ah, forget it. I was genuinely about to lose my mind~!
I was too scared to check the missed calls and KakaoTalk messages. Just the things that had already happened were enough to turn my stomach. My head throbbed. Pandora's box could wait until I'd steadied myself a little more.
I turned on the computer.
Click!
Opened Google.
Tap, tap, tap!
Connected to Naver. Time to read some news articles.
Nothing looked drastically different. The Republic of Korea was still the Republic of Korea. North Korea was still North Korea. Gangnam real estate was expensive. The stock market was in a downturn. Bitcoin was climbing?
And COVID?
Huh. Looks like this world never got the coronavirus. That was welcome news. Come to think of it, I'd walked around without a mask without even thinking about it. I'd missed this—this free world.
So the basics were the same as the world that had existed up through yesterday. Only the details had shifted, little by little.
Three hypotheses were possible.
One: I was still stuck in some ridiculous dream.
Two: I'd drunk myself to death last night, crossed the River Styx, and this was the afterlife.
Three: this was a parallel world in the same dimension.
If it was a dream, I should wake up already! —No. Scratch that. With this smooth face and this monster cock, I should fuck every sexy woman in sight first. It was a dream, so ethics and all that didn't matter, right? Just go for it.
I pinched my thigh hard again.
Ah, you son of a bitch! That hurt like hell. Not a dream, then. Fine—let's officially rule out the dream theory. I was done with this insane self-harm.
So had I died and crossed the River Styx? I didn't even want to imagine it. A flower of a young man at twenty-six, drinking at a convenience store with a bunch of middle-aged guys, then taking a plunge into the Han River? Depressing as fuck. Delete.
Riiip~!
That left one hypothesis.
A parallel world in the same dimension. I'd seen plenty of those back when male-oriented novels were booming on Novelpia.
What should I check first? Ah, right. Worlds this insane always had one of those. Come on, let's try it.
"S-Status Window!"
Even saying it alone made my face burn. I wasn't some middle-school-syndrome kid. Still, one more try.
"Status Window!"
As expected, nothing. Even I could tell I'd lost it. Status Window, my ass. A twenty-six-year-old sitting at home alone yelling "Status Window!" like an idiot. Never again.
All right. So this was a parallel dimension of the same world, but there was no status window. I went back to digging through news articles. I needed to get a handle on this world fast. Survival depended on it.
And then—
Holy shit?
Whoa! Solo Leveling Season 2 was being serialized. No matter how urgent things were, I couldn't pass this up! As if possessed, I started reading Solo Leveling Season 2.
The basic premise of Season 2 was a little different. The original protagonist, Sung Jinwoon, had become Sung Jina—name and gender both swapped. Sung Jina was a 178-centimeter hunter radiating pure charisma. Even with the gender flip, class was eternal. Damn, the writing was insane. Sung Jina was so cool. Holy shit. For real!
By the time I came to my senses, a full hour had vanished.
Fuck. The plan had been: research this world online! But of course it had drifted with the stream of consciousness. Now I was deep in webtoons and web novels.
Whoa! Tomb Queen! Whoa! Martial God of Mount Hua! Whoa! The Ranker Who Lives Three Times!
I handed my brain over to the stream of consciousness and kept reading webtoons. Before I knew it, the day was growing dark. Parallel-world webtoons from another dimension were still ridiculously fun.
But one thing was unmistakably different from the world I'd lived in.
Most of the webtoon protagonists were women. Tall women with killer figures, at that. By contrast, the men were short and cute. Men were the ones being protected by the women. The male characters were prickly and arrogant—and yet the female characters still bootlicked them like crazy. No—dick-licked them.
One guy was dating three women at the same time. The women all knew he was seeing the other two. And they still fought tooth and nail to claim him. Woman One was a chaebol heiress. Woman Two was a genius doctor. Woman Three was a nationwide idol. And the guy? A nobody employee at a mid-sized company. Well—he had one thing. A kind heart?
Even for a webtoon, wasn't this going way too far?
The funny part? This completely absurd webtoon was ranked number one on Naver's Wednesday lineup.
Whoa. What the actual hell?
Did this parallel world not have a Ministry of Gender Equality and Family? If it did, there was no way a webtoon like this would be allowed on Naver.
I searched the internet. And there I found the reason this entire gender reversal had begun.
In this world, feminism had peaked in 1980. In the world I'd come from, the MeToo movement hadn't started until around 2010. Here, a MeToo boom had hit in 1980. Successful men were dragged off to police stations. Fired. Driven to suicide. Buried by society.
And still feminism wouldn't stop. "Korean male vermin" lost every foothold they had. By the 1990s, National Assembly members, legal professionals, doctors, entrepreneurs—women held them all. Naturally, a preference for daughters became the norm. The birth rate was already falling, and boys simply weren't being born. Korea became a female-majority society.
In 2000, the male-to-female ratio was 1:2. For every one boy born, two girls arrived. But the imbalance only grew worse. Now the ratio stood at 1:10. For every one boy born, ten girls arrived. Korea was suffering an extreme drought of men.
The duty of national defense had naturally passed to women. At first, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family had fiercely opposed it. How could women go to the military?! That was absurd! They already bore the sacred duty of childbirth—and now they were supposed to shoulder national defense too?!
But North Korea kept probing the weakened Ministry of National Defense. At this rate, the Republic of Korea itself would collapse. Even the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family had no choice but to raise the white flag.
The first female conscripts served six months. Then a year. And now, every woman served two full years of mandatory military duty. Two years of hellish military grind before you got discharged.