What Kind of Life Have You Been Living?
After a one-sided thrashing that could generously be called a trade of blows—if you were feeling charitable—I stumbled out of the room looking like absolute wreckage. The living room hit me with the rich, earthy smell of doenjang stew and the mouthwatering scent of grilled mackerel.
The kitchen wasn't particularly large. Calling it a kitchen at all was generous; it was more of an alcove tacked onto the side of the living room.
The girl's mother—built like Alistar—scooped up a brutally generous helping of rice and set it down with a solid thunk at the edge of the table. That was clearly where the girl usually sat.
"Ugh, honestly."
Alistar set down the stew pot and let out a heavy sigh. Just looking at her daughter's face seemed to irritate her.
Young lady, just what kind of life have you been living?
Dinner started shortly after, but the atmosphere was so frigid I couldn't tell whether I was eating rice and mackerel or just chewing on her mother's silent judgment.
I decided to break the awkward silence myself.
"The doenjang stew is really delicious."
The formal politeness seemed to throw her. She paused mid-bite and lifted her head.
"…You need allowance money?"
No, for fuck's sake, I said it because it actually tastes good. Just how much of a disaster has this life been?!
"No. I mean it. It's genuinely delicious."
"Why the sudden formal speech? It's weird."
"Should I speak casually, then?"
"You looking to die?"
"No, ma'am."
I had no idea what she wanted from me.
I wanted to argue out of pure injustice, but as someone who knew nothing about this girl's relationship with her mother, all I could do was take every hit that came my way.
Her mother set down her spoon, her expression heavy—clearly she'd been holding this in for a long time.
"I know you don't want to hear this, but Mom has no choice. We need to talk."
"Ah—uh, um… Yes. Please go ahead."
I set down my spoon, wiped the corner of my mouth, and prepared to listen carefully.
That level of courtesy was so foreign to her that she eyed me up and down with open suspicion. Then she cleared her throat once and pressed on.
"I'm not asking you to become some great success. Just live like a decent human being. Look at kids your age. Not a single one of them sits at home drinking all day and wasting their life like you. Self-improvement. Effort. Get a job. Do something."
"……."
"I know you don't want to hear it, but…"
So, in short: this girl had graduated high school and been freeloading off her parents ever since. Judging by the circumstances, she'd failed her college entrance exams and promptly fallen into full dropout mode.
But come on—she's twenty-one. A little aimlessness is allowed. She'll get her act together eventually.
"Anta. Stop being so stubborn and just live like a person already. How long are you going to keep dreaming about being a baseball player?"
At those words, I had no choice but to ask again.
"What did you just say?"
"…What now."
"'Anta.' Were you… calling me just now?"
No.
No, that couldn't be right.
How could a person's name be—
"Did you eat something weird today? Pi Anta. You don't even know your own name?"
You've got to be kidding me.
How could a person's name be—
Pi. An. Ta!!
"I should've stopped your father the moment that Goraniz superfan decided to name you 'Pi Anta' so you'd become a baseball player."
So the name was her father's handiwork. Just how deep did a man's baseball obsession have to run to name his child—his daughter—"Hits Allowed"?
Please tell me someone named Pi Anta isn't a pitcher. That would cross a line. That's the same level of crime as naming a kid Yasuo because you want them to become a scientist.
Her mother finished eating first, stood up with her dishes, set them in the sink, and started filling it with water as she issued her orders.
"Just do the dishes. Mom's going out to get a perm."
"Ah… Yes. Leave it to me."
That dutiful reply made her mother glance over in surprise again. She'd clearly said it with zero expectations—more of a "let's grab a meal sometime" kind of throwaway.
But if I was going to rehabilitate the catastrophic image of Miss Pi Anta, I figured I needed to show at least a little diligence.
I still barely knew anything, and I had no idea when—or if—I'd ever return to being a man. But for as long as I was living this life, I might as well live it peacefully.
"Do it properly. Don't break any dishes."
I saw her off with her final warnings, then dove straight into the dishwashing.
I wasn't obsessively clean by nature, but once I actually started cleaning, I was the type who did it well. I filled the dishes with water, pulled on rubber gloves, and finished the whole job in no time. That squeaky-clean sound of detergent-scrubbed dishes is a satisfaction no finished worker can put into words.
A perm would take two or three hours, roughly. In that time, I needed to clean the room and dig up more information on Miss Pi Anta.
Stepping back into the room after being in the living room made the sheer filth hit me with renewed force.
"Ugh, shit…"
It was a miracle bugs and mold hadn't taken over. Or maybe they already had? First things first—open the window and air the place out.
I gathered the piled-up beer cans and snack bags separately, prepped them for recycling as best I could, then wiped the dust off the table with wet wipes and scrubbed the floor. Only then did the place start to feel vaguely human.
"Whew…"
I washed my hands in the bathroom, came back in, and picked up the phone sitting on the nightstand beside the bed. Honestly, in the room's previous condition, my whole body had been crawling so badly I couldn't have brought myself to look anything up.
I unlocked it with face recognition, opened the internet, and searched for the first thing that came to mind.
Jeong Taesik
My name from when I'd been a man.
Back then, searching my name would pull up a massive header with my career stats trailing underneath—I'd been a slugger who terrorized the league, after all.
Now? Nothing came up.
Not on any search portal. Not on any baseball community. Not even on encyclopedia sites.
Does Jeong Taesik not exist in this world?
It wasn't just Jeong Taesik. Not a single baseball player I knew turned up by name.
Come to think of it, her mother had said something earlier.
—I should've stopped your father the moment that Goraniz superfan decided to name you "Pi Anta" so you'd become a baseball player.
That hadn't been a casual throwaway complaint.
Putting it together: this world had a baseball team called the Goraniz.
And just as anyone—man or woman—could become a doctor or a lawyer, the path to professional baseball was open to everyone. That was common sense here.
Similar to the world I knew… and yet completely different.
Which made me curious—how exactly could a woman play baseball? Was women's pro baseball more popular than the men's league, the way volleyball sometimes worked?
The answer was something I never saw coming.
Baseball of Legends?
BoL for short.
A baseball game.
A baseball game?
Professional baseball… run as a video game?!
"This isn't baseball!!"
I slammed my fist into the mattress with the pure rage of a washed-up traditionalist. The bed was decent quality—my fist bounced back with a springy ting.
Shit, that wasn't the point right now.
How do you replace a sport with a game?! This is insane!
In the middle of my fury, I suddenly remembered I was in a woman's body—and forced myself to shift perspectives.
What if baseball still only operated the old analog way? Then the current me would have zero path to becoming a baseball player.
A person who'd lived their entire life for baseball… unable to play baseball?
I'd be a deadbeat that very day. A human reject. A total waste of space.
Wasn't it better to have a way to keep playing baseball—even if the values of sport had shifted a little—than to become a complete freeloader?
The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. I accepted it.
Having discarded my obsolete old-generation thinking, I decided to research in detail how this "BoL" game actually worked as baseball.
Put on a Connector and launch the game!
…What the hell is that, you nerds.
Some kind of popular-kids' pastime?
I reined in my impulse to go full rage mode and calmly searched again.
A medium that connects your consciousness to a virtual reality game.
Just put it on like a pair of goggles — anyone can use it with ease.
Goggles?
Ah. Come to think of it.
My mind went to the one object in this room that hadn't been covered in dust.
Those goggles weren't scuba diving gear. They weren't a cosplay prop, either.
They were a gaming device.
I reached for them slowly. Up close, the front was a pair of goggles, but a heavy, complicated-looking black box was attached at the back of the head—probably handling the battery, VR rendering, all that.
On the right side of the goggles was a single button, clearly meant to be pressed. That was the on-and-off switch, apparently.
No other buttons anywhere.
Everything else must be handled inside the virtual reality game itself.
A virtual reality game.
What would baseball feel like inside a virtual world?
Heart pounding with a mix of nerves and excitement, I slid the black goggles over my eyes like a pair of glasses.
"Whoa…?!"
And an entirely new world unfolded before me.