Concept Collapse (4)
In the neighborhood where Yuhan lived, a surprising number of people knew his face.
He kept a fairly regular routine, and he went out walking or running often enough that a handsome man who kept showing himself in a gloomy neighborhood lodged easily in the residents' memories. Even so, not many people could bring themselves to look that fierce face full-on, so most of them only knew him in the vaguest terms.
Among them, the person who remembered Yuhan's face best was… Yeeun, the convenience store part-timer.
She was currently staring at the man planted in front of the liquor aisle.
Slightly bloodshot eyes. Hair in disarray. Dark circles sunk deep beneath them. People in that condition were usually written off as shut-ins rotting in a corner, and they rarely heard anything kind said about them—but as the saying went, looks were everything. On him, those details only sharpened a kind of decadent beauty.
When he finally moved after lingering so long in the liquor section, Yeeun dropped her gaze. Even as he came closer, her eyes, once lowered, could not find their way back up.
Yeeun regretted it.
I never should have jumped the gun and confessed like that.
On the day Yuhan had first come here, she had overreacted to a simple kindness and even asked for his number. Now, every time he walked into the store, she wanted to die.
Yeeun thought,
If I'd known I'd be seeing him this often, I should have taken it slow.
Taking it slow wouldn't have drawn any affection out of that blonde, tanned man anyway—but that was what she told herself.
And then there was the man who hadn't slept a wink the night before.
The sight of him walking weakly down the street with dead eyes was enough to stir the lust of every woman he passed. He himself, however, was thinking nothing at all. To put it more precisely: he was incapable of thinking anything at all.
Since arriving in this world, he had not masturbated even once. He had gritted his way through a few videos and adult comics on porn sites, swallowing his disgust, but the content had been nothing he could possibly accept. The videos hadn't lasted a full minute; the comics hadn't lasted five panels. A computer's records, though, did not care about duration. They simply, mechanically, logged every visit.
Yuhan came home and pulled eight bottles of soju from a black plastic bag.
He had always been too cheap to bother with alcohol, but today he simply could not hold out. He could not endure this sober. From morning on, he started chugging straight from the bottle.
Looks that put actual celebrities to shame. A webcam whose quality did absolutely nothing to show those looks off. And yet the looks forced their way through anyway.
Ten in the morning. Seong Yuhan's… no, Geum Taeyang's… no. My stream came on.
No. I turned it on.
Yeah. I can feel it now. I'm a little drunk.
I usually figure you shouldn't do anything while you're drunk… but I couldn't stop myself. If I'd been about to make a rational, reasonable decision, would I have started drinking in the first place?
This goddamn body.
Was it even possible to still be fine after three bottles? Only after I pushed past four did I start getting even a little buzzed. Honestly, I'd bought the absurd amount of eight bottles of soju planning to drink for days with my mental state in pieces… but for this physique, that seemed to be about the right amount for a single sitting.
Wasn't soju the drink you picked because you could get drunk cheap? The fact that this body charged extra just to get a buzz going was deeply unfair. The drinking capacity I'd built up doing hard labor was now completely useless. Whoever I drank with, they'd go down first anyway, so knowing my own limit wasn't going to do me any good.
Four green bottles standing in a row on the desk caught the camera. Three more on the other side. One in my hand. A full-blown drinking banquet was underway.
They were having the time of their lives. Having a blast all by themselves.
What I'd wanted was a Geum Taeyang character with reverse charm. Watching the chat explode every time I fell apart, it seemed I had charm of some kind… The problem was the twist. I had never asked for a twist like this. The gap was way too big.
"Huuuuh…"
They were typing up a storm. I didn't care.
I cracked the cap on the fourth bottle in my hand. They'd been going on about how this was my first drink, and now they were turning me into a streamer who faked everything. Surely they wouldn't treat the bottle I'd just opened as fake too. If they did… those would be people who wouldn't believe me no matter what I did.
I put the bottle to my mouth and chugged.
My Adam's apple worked without pause, as if I were drinking water, and the camera sent every motion out to the stream.
One shot. Not a glass—the whole bottle.
Question marks were flooding the chat like mad.
I cracked a new bottle and worked the mouse. What I clicked was a community post I'd seen in the small hours.
It was so unfair.
It was so bitterly unjust.
I'd been on forced nofap for weeks now. Who could have known that a few seconds of looking would leave a full record behind?
This world was a polygamous society in which a man taking multiple wives was permitted. It wasn't an everyday case, but polygamy carried out with the wives' consent didn't draw strange looks. Of course, once you hit around three wives you'd still get treated as a weird guy.
Anyway. I'd been handed this incredible opportunity, so of course I'd wanted to build a harem. I'd never dated anyone, so I had zero skills to speak of, but still!
And I prided myself on being a pretty sharp reader of people. I prided myself on being the kind of person suited to romance.
So what was this?
The women nearby?
Sehee was still a minor. Six years younger, even. She was fond of me, sure, but being fond of someone wasn't the same as liking them. In a grade of three hundred, half of them boys, there was no way a guy like me would catch her eye. And now I'd become Geum Taeyang on top of it. Of course, Sehee had been an impressive girl even as a child, and there had been a time I'd looked up to her… but she still wasn't someone I had any right to want. She was too good for me.
Ari?
There was nothing more fun than hanging out with Ari. Our personalities clicked too well, and she was also the first friend I'd made since the lower grades of elementary school. I couldn't claim I had no ulterior motives at all. I did try to treat her as a friend, but anyone would start catching feelings for a beauty on Ari's level who also got along with them that well.
Still… Ari had a boyfriend.
This insane body of mine drooled with filthy desire every time I pictured Ari as a couple… but I still had reason left. I was not the kind of person who let himself be ruled by his body. I was far too normal to pull a genuine NTR like the Geum Taeyang in the comics.
Well. If I just kept being friends with Ari, I'd get used to it. The ulterior motives and all the rest of it would fade.
I've gone on too long. What I wanted to say was…
That it was pathetic I'd come all the way to a gender-reversed world and failed to make even a single girlfriend, never mind a harem.
Hah. In gender-reversal web novels the plot moved along in no time. Why was it like this for me?
I sat there a long while with the bottle in my hand, not moving, and the question-mark bombardment started up in chat again. In that bitter mood, I brought the bottle to my mouth.
Another chug from the bottle. Another one-shot.
No matter how furiously they typed, I didn't answer. They'd been the ones to start mocking me, hadn't they?
That made six.
I was definitely drunk now. Not enough for a blackout, but still. This body really was too superior. It could have been a little less superior. It was superior in all the useless places. Getting drunk shouldn't have been this hard.
Worrying about it now was already too late.
The last bottle, one-shot as well. After seven, it was starting to feel a little rough.
It had been an impulsive stream to begin with. I considered just killing it then and there… but that would have felt like running away because I couldn't handle the alcohol.
I spent a long time silently browsing the posts about me on the community, and after some time had passed, I ended the stream.
As more time went by, the buzz climbed higher. Still not more than I could handle—actually a pretty pleasant level. I'd stayed up all night drowning in self-loathing, and with the alcohol in me, sleep came on fast and heavy.
Brushing my teeth could wait until evening. I lay down on the bed just like that.
Without checking the flood of Kkatalk notifications on my phone.
Yeah. That evening.
Sehee, who let herself in with the passcode I'd given her… chewed me out until I was a wreck.