The Reversed World
It felt like I was sinking into deep water. A fierce current tugged at me, tossing my body this way and that.
I couldn't open my eyes, but I thought I could see a light far in the distance — as bright as the sun filtering down through the surface when you look up from underwater.
The moment I strained with everything I had to force my eyes open, I felt the water I'd been sinking in surge upward, and all five senses came rushing back.
"Hah... hah..."
My body seemed to have taken whatever had just happened as a nightmare; my breathing was ragged. I exhaled hard, as if I could push the tightness out of my chest along with the air.
Once my breathing settled, I opened my eyes slowly. A dim ceiling stared back at me. A ceiling I had never seen before.
"Where am I...?"
I tried to piece it together through the haze, but I couldn't remember a thing.
Maybe it was just because I'd woken up. Holding on to the hope that it would come back if I gave it time, I sat up in bed.
I looked around from where I sat. Nothing about the place was familiar. It was a spacious loft, furnished with the bare minimum.
The gloom, it turned out, came from the curtains drawn across the tall loft windows.
Kidnapping?
The thought crossed my mind for a second. I shook my head. There was nothing to gain by kidnapping me.
I didn't like saying it out loud, but I was a guy with no will to live and no real job to speak of — a bum, basically. Better-looking than most, sure, and I'd bounced through enough odd jobs to pick up a wide, shallow spread of knowledge. That was the extent of it.
"And this place is way too nice for a kidnapping."
I hadn't looked closely, but it had to be an expensive studio. The walls and the stairs looked brand new — a recent build, a few years old at most. Even the bed I'd been lying on was plush and fine to the touch, the kind that came from a name brand or a serious amount of money.
First things first: I needed to figure out why I'd woken up in a place I didn't know. Where this was. What had happened.
A modern person can learn anything through a smartphone. There would be clues on there about whatever had gone down yesterday, too.
That was the plan, anyway, until I picked up the phone I'd found on the nightstand and realized the design was all wrong. The logo on the back was different as well.
"What the hell is this? Where'd the apple go? There's an orange on here."
Instead of the apple logo I'd seen every day of my life, there was a stylized cross-section of an orange. I had never seen a phone with a logo like that.
Maybe it was some no-name brand. I pressed the power button anyway.
"Fingerprint unlock? Will this even work?"
It was the kind that unlocked with a fingerprint, so I set my thumb on the sensor. A soft click, and the lock released.
It wasn't even my phone. Why would my fingerprint open it?
This keeps getting weirder.
If this were a kidnapping, would the kidnapper just leave a phone sitting right there? A phone locked to my fingerprint?
"No way."
But if it wasn't a kidnapping, then why was I here? I thought about it for a second and came up empty. Of course I did. I decided to start with the only lead I had and check the phone.
The wallpaper was a generic default image, nothing distinctive, and there were no extra apps installed — just the usual suite that comes on any new phone.
"The date's the same. As for the location..."
Seoul, thankfully — but not the neighborhood I'd been living in. This was one of those districts packed with studio apartments. I'd lived on the north side of the Han River. Now I was south of it.
Looked at that way, a kidnapping almost made sense again...
"Who the hell would even kidnap me?"
I scratched at my head, turning it over, and got nowhere. Then my fingers brushed the center of the back of my skull, and a strange flicker of recognition ran through me.
I traced the spot slowly. Yesterday came back.
"Ah—ah! Right. I got punched by a cat, and then I just..."
So I'd been moved here after that? If so, maybe it wasn't a kidnapping at all. Maybe someone had brought me in to take care of me. I couldn't jump to conclusions yet.
Honestly, I'd thought about calling the police. The signal was fine and the data was working. If I reported it, officers would be here in minutes, and I could go home.
But what if someone had helped me out of genuine kindness?
"Hah... maybe I should wait it out? They might come back."
I didn't know whose orange phone this was, but if it unlocked to my fingerprint, they'd probably left it here for me to use.
I checked the default contacts, the gallery, the browser. Nothing useful. It was as clean as a phone that had just been activated for the first time.
The only odd thing was the search engine that came up when I went online — one I'd never seen. Maybe it was something they used overseas.
I don't know everything. There's a lot more I don't know than I do.
I wasn't going to get anything else off the phone. I decided to head downstairs.
"Wha—?!"
The moment I got off the bed, something felt wrong. I staggered and sat right back down. Nothing hurt. It was more like walking itself didn't feel familiar.
No. It wasn't that walking felt unfamiliar...
It was as if this body wasn't mine. The sensation of my feet hitting the floor, the amount of effort it took to move, the height of my eyeline — and a dozen other things I couldn't put into words — all of it was off.
I told myself I just wasn't fully awake yet and stood up carefully.
"A pill bottle?"
Once I was off the bed, I spotted an empty bottle rolling on the floor.
There was no label, so I couldn't tell what it had held, but the smell inside confirmed it had been medicine.
Leaving it on the floor felt wrong, so I picked it up and took it with me.
"Nice place."
I followed the stairs down from the loft and came out into a wide open room.
Definitely a new build. The walls, the floors, the layout itself — none of it belonged to an old apartment.
For all that modern space, the furniture was ordinary and sparse. A sofa and a table in the center of the room. A big TV and a stand across from them. That was it.
First things first — I need to do something about this dark room.
I went to the window and tried to pull the curtains aside. They didn't budge. The loft windows were high enough already, and I had no idea how anyone had even hung curtains up there.
I tried a few more times. Nothing. I gave up and flipped on the lights.
"Now it actually looks like someone lives here."
I smiled, satisfied with the brightness, and looked the room over again.
"A laptop? The owner's?"
On the table in front of the sofa sat a laptop and a leather-bound notebook.
I didn't feel right touching a laptop that wasn't mine, so I checked the notebook instead. I didn't even have to open it — it was already lying there, spread open.
Not that that made peeking any more justifiable...
I was desperate for information. I talked myself into it and started reading.
"Hmm..."
The notebook was a diary. And the contents were staggering. The owner, it seemed, had taken their own life last night — or in the early hours of this morning.
The entry for yesterday was filled with writing about ending it all, despairing of life.
"Then this is... sleeping pills?"
The empty bottle I'd picked up off the loft floor and set on the table. If I had to guess, that was the prescribed sleeping medication mentioned in the diary.
Which raised another question.
"So where did the person who took these go?"
Given where I'd found the bottle, they'd taken the pills near the bed. That made the person who swallowed them the likely owner of this place — but would they really have gone outside to die?
And there was nothing in the diary about me. I had definitely collapsed yesterday, but there wasn't a single line about bringing home someone they'd found passed out in the street. If anything, the entries read like someone who had been holed up in this apartment for a long time.
"What the hell is going on here?"
Yesterday's entry wasn't enough. I was going to have to read more.
If this person had truly tried to end their life with an overdose of sleeping pills, then this was a matter of someone's life. Even just looking for clues, reading it was the right call.
The diary was about as thick as a planner, and a little under half of it had been used. At a skim, I could finish it in about fifteen minutes.
Page by page, from the beginning. The further I read, the harder it became to keep my hands from shaking.
That's impossible. How could something like that even happen?
I asked myself that and tried to deny it, but the thinner the remaining pages got, the more that denial lost its force.
What should have taken fifteen minutes took me thirty. I finally finished and closed the diary.
"Hoo..."
I let out a long breath, then slowly stood up from the sofa. The only door on the first floor led to the bathroom.
I opened it, stepped inside, checked the mirror — and sighed all over again.
"Wait, so...? You're telling me the one who tried to die on sleeping pills... was me?"
The me in the mirror had hair long enough to cover his eyes and irises of green. His skin was pale, and a lot of the muscle was gone. Most decisive of all: he was shorter.
This was nothing like the face I knew — hair that only just covered the brows, dark eyes, skin tanned healthy from years of odd jobs, a body built up over a long time, and a height that had once pushed six feet.
I refused to believe a change like this was possible in a single day. Even if I stretched every other explanation as far as it would go, height was impossible.
Judging by the height of the mirror and the size of the body I was looking down at, I was somewhere around five-six, maybe five-seven.
How did I not notice this?
When I first got out of bed, I'd wondered about the height of my eyeline. I'd ignored it.
No — I'd tried to ignore it. I'd known, really. I'd known that I was different.
"He's actually pretty cute..."
The diary had been full of despair over his looks. The long hair he'd grown because of it. The pale skin from never leaving the house. The green eyes, mentioned over and over.
He wasn't ugly enough to despair over. If anything, it was a rare kind of cute. The problem was that it was me.
"Hah... what am I supposed to do now?"
I didn't know how, but I had ended up inside this man's body. And this man was probably me — from another world.
There were plenty of differences, but the face itself was similar. If you took the me from my original world and simply made him smaller, this is what you'd get.
"A parallel world... or something like that?"
That was as far as I could take it. I didn't know why I'd come here, why I'd ended up in this body, or how any of this worked.
"For now, I should look for more information."
That this world was similar and yet different — that much the diary had made very clear. The reason this world's me had tried to die had come up, off and on, for months.
I just couldn't bring myself to believe it.
"Scared because women come on too strong? Is that even possible?"
I had felt women come on to me before. Plenty of times.
But to be afraid of it — and more than that, to claim that every woman outside would look at you with eyes glazed over by lust? Was I supposed to believe that?
That kind of look was something you caught now and then walking through club streets, or past the bars in a nightlife district late at night.
Was he taking something besides sleeping pills?
Maybe he'd been suffering from paranoid delusions. Holding on to that slim possibility, I sat on the sofa and opened the laptop.
At the same time I turned on the TV and found a news channel. As luck would have it, they were just starting a new story.
"What?"
Had I heard that right? Was what was written in the diary actually true? Not a paranoid delusion, but a fact serious enough to be treated as a social crisis?
I rushed to open a browser and search for news articles. I'd never seen the search engine before, but it worked the same way.
"S-seven times? And what the hell is a Hunter?"
I wasn't the one who'd gone crazy. I almost wished I had. This place was far more different from my world than I had imagined.
Women with sky-high libidos. A male-to-female ratio pushed to the extreme.
In other words, what people commonly called a Reversed World.