Starting Over (1)
Dawn on a day of torrential rain.
A single photograph was all it took to make him move.
By the time he came to his senses, he had somehow escaped the city center.
Enveloped in pitch darkness, he couldn't see even an inch ahead.
He pressed down on the accelerator, leaving himself at the mercy of the screaming wipers and the headlights.
He had no choice but to head toward the place where his father and mother were buried.
If only it hadn't been for that photo, the sole beacon of his memories.
If only it hadn't been for the spade illuminated in the light.
If only it hadn't been a day like today.
Would the outcome have been different?
The blare of a horn echoing through the rain and blinding headlights suddenly engulfed him.
CRASH!
Oh my Lord, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil…
*Beeeeeeeep—*
It felt as if he were going deaf.
His body was so heavy he couldn't even lift a finger.
He focused all his strength just to open his eyes, but even that was denied to him.
How much time had passed?
Just as he was beginning to grow accustomed to the agonizingly awful noise, a familiar melody drifted in, pushing the ringing away.
Is this... Beethoven?
Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27-2, 'Moonlight'
He hadn't studied classical music deeply, but he certainly had an appreciation for it.
Besides, how many people in the world didn't know the Moonlight Sonata?
The first movement faded, and the second began to play.
As the mood grew more lighthearted, the sensations in his body gradually returned. Finally, when the third movement arrived, every cell in his body woke up as if swept by a raging storm.
At that exact moment, the memories of a young boy flooded his mind in a wild torrent.
They said human memory had its limits, but how far back did this go?
Whose sick joke was this, writing such an absurd, illogical story?
He had never seen this character in the novel, so he was definitely an extra. The bigger problem was that this extra was now him.
A gender-reversed world, of all things!
"What the f..."
He fell into utter chaos.
Even if rolling around on his floor enjoying that novel was a sin, this was going too far.
How could they treat a loyal reader who paid for every chapter without even mocking it like this?
Anger surged within him, making his head spin.
He barely managed to push himself up. The hands he looked down at were skeletal and pale.
Looking up further, his arms, legs, and torso were nothing but skin and bones—a literal skeleton.
"Did this crazy bastard do drugs?"
Ah.
Hello another me!
Welcome to my World!
It’s your turn now :)
"So this bastard is me? You've got to be kidding."
Under the illusion that something had just flashed before his eyes like in a web novel, he dragged his skeletal body out of bed.
He almost screamed, wondering if this damn room didn't even have a single mirror, before stumbling into the bathroom. There, he faced yet another wave of despair.
"Why are you testing me like this..."
He was a pale bag of bones. With bangs so long they completely covered his eyes—making him wonder if he could even see—and a body that gasped for breath after walking just a few steps, he was utterly hopeless.
Drug addiction? Malnutrition?
He barely managed to hold onto his fading consciousness amidst the jumbled, hazy memories.
What on earth was going on?
Surely, at the end...
The blinding headlights and the sudden impact...
It must have been a car accident.
It was clear that Edward Moon Livingstone—who until yesterday had held countless titles like the Emperor, the Pope, the Special One, and more—had gone to be with the Lord.
For some reason, the death of Ed, his original self, didn't even feel sad.
Was it because it had been such a terrible day, one where he had no choice but to rush out in a panic after seeing that photo filled with pure malice?
To him, who had been consumed by rage right up until he lost consciousness, this felt incredibly bizarre.
Even Frankenstein couldn't have stitched a brain together like this...
In a way, he felt a confusing sense of relief that it was a car accident rather than the suspicion that he might have been murdered.
Or maybe it was just a nasty nightmare.
He pinched his thigh. Unfortunately, it was undeniably reality.
A wave of nausea washed over him from the tangled mess of memories.
"I wonder if Christine is okay..."
A sudden rush of guilt, emptiness, and other emotions flooded him.
Trapped in a trash can of emotions, he shook his head violently.
His thoughts, hovering somewhere between reality and delusion, dragged him forcibly out of the abyss.
Ed—whether he should call him his past life or another version of himself in a parallel world—accelerated his incomplete brain.
Groping through the memories that flashed by, he stared at the other him reflected in the mirror: Moon Saebyeok.
Hazel eyes, pale skin, and brown hair. This was not the appearance of a typical Korean.
"You didn't have a normal life either, did you? But still, this is too much!"
No matter how much he shouted at the silent persona sharing this single body, no answer came.
As the Moonlight Sonata continued to play in the background, he recalled Moon Saebyeok's memories.
Leaving the bathroom, he stopped the repeating music and stared blankly at the various pills scattered across the floor.
"..."
He offered a silent prayer for the boy who could never return.
May you no longer be in pain.
Rest in peace.
He wasn't sure if he should call this a stroke of luck.
This world, which was clearly the setting of a novel, wasn't much different from Ed's timeline.
Perhaps because his original memories had merged, he naturally turned on the computer and made a choice befitting a musician.
"Good old ViewTube is the best!"
But as he watched Queen's Wimbledon performance on ViewTube, he realized it was actually vastly different!
"Oh my..."
Goosebumps broke out all over his skin as he watched the insane performance of these alpha women.
He had watched this video over a thousand times. He remembered every single movement of the members, every breath they took, so how could this be...
The outfits and performance, which bordered on being rated R, would have gotten them arrested for public decency in his original world.
Moon Saebyeok's memories reared their head.
Apparently, this was common sense here. What a crazy world.
A young girl sitting on her mother's—not father's—shoulders, singing along to Bohemian Rhapsody!
Now that was a rare sight.
As if possessed, he played other videos following his usual routine, but the results were largely the same.
The gender-swapping of artists he had actually been close with was truly mind-blowing.
"That big man who was over 190 centimeters tall and weighed more than 130 kilograms... is now a big girl...?"
Her signature heavy rapping was still great, but... uh, this was kind of terrifying.
So!
The music was the same, the names were the same, but the voices and bodies were swapped?
Yet, strangely, it didn't sound off at all.
To his ears, having made a living off music, everything was absolutely perfect.
He would bet his own hand that no existing music technology could achieve such a flawless gender swap.
Was there a reason voice-activated locks existed?
Then what about the original female musicians?
They were exactly the same.
Did the author of this novel just hate men?
Was the world-building in the novel just that perfect, or did this world actually exist?
He couldn't grasp the logic behind who got gender-swapped and who stayed the same.
The more he learned, the dizzier he felt.
"Well, looking at my own state... *sigh*."
Should he look up a bit more?
Thinking of recent South Korea, world-famous groups came to mind.
BluePink and the Safety Fire Scouts.
He had collaborated with them, eaten meals with them, and... wait.
Anyway, BluePink was fine. Just up to that point!
"Fuck!"
"Isn't this just the Maid Boy Scouts?"
Seeing men wearing clothes covered in frills while doing bubbly dances made his stomach churn.
He'd rather they just transitioned like Queen!
How did those outfits and dances sync up so perfectly with the same music?
Even Satan would weep at this sight.
He didn't want to admit it, but it was definitely their music.
Feeling like his eyes were rotting, he turned off the monitor and chose survival.
"Hee-hee-hoo! Hee-hee-hoo!"
After a brief moment of satisfaction that he had learned this breathing technique, followed by resentment toward the fragile durability of his creaking body, he fell back into deep thought.
After a period of agony, he faced another dilemma.
There was one thing he hadn't dared to search for yet.
"Surely... no way... please... it can't be, right?"
The Emperor. The Pope.
Hall of Fame inductee.
Regular winner at the Grammys and the Brit Awards.
Holder of the record for the most weeks at number one on the Billboard charts.
Even to him, whose face flushed because listing these achievements felt like bragging, he was undeniably—
A legendary artist recognized by the era.
With trembling, clumsy fingers, he carefully typed in his nickname.
Search: Ed song
Pressing enter, he squeezed his eyes shut before slowly opening them to look at the ViewTube screen.
Huh...?
Mocking his fear that a female version of himself would be plastered all over the thumbnails, the screen was empty of him.
The related search terms that popped up were completely unrelated. They had nothing to do with him.
"Then let's try... Edward..."
Nothing...?
"The Emperor, the Pope..."
Only the holy female Pope of the current generation and MJ showed up.
A female MJ... now that was a bit much.
After watching the videos as if possessed, he pushed his skeletal body up and screamed.
"I don't exist?!"
Googol, ViewTube, StarGram, and so on.
No matter where he searched, he was nowhere to be found.
Edward Moon Livingstone was simply a musician who did not exist in this world.
He had become nothing more than a delusion locked inside Moon Saebyeok's head.
After trembling for a long time—so much so that anyone watching would have screamed at the sight of a lich on the verge of passing on—the corners of his mouth suddenly curled up in a chilling smile.
"Starting over from the beginning... not bad."
Half of his blood carried the spirit of a pioneer, which meant his excessive thirst for a challenge had always been a bit of a problem.
If Christine, who usually fussed over him like a mother hen, had seen him now, she would have locked him up immediately.
Steeling his resolve, he habitually picked up a notebook scattered near the desk and a pencil, a tool rarely used these days.
Without sensing any oddity, he opened the notebook to write in one swift, energetic stroke... but he couldn't.
It was because of the dense scribbles already filling the pages.
Moon Saebyeok's dreams, which would have seemed trivial to his past self, lay spread out before him.
Since his own childhood had been similar, he couldn't help but feel a deep sense of pity.
The pages were filled with the boy's lingering regrets.
Even the hesitation and embarrassment felt in the drawn musical notes were sorrowful.
He stared for a long time at the unfinished sheet music, pieces the boy had struggled to erase but ultimately couldn't bring himself to abandon.
The empty spaces left here and there in the scores were the footprints the kid had left behind.
"He had talent..."
It was then.
Faint noises drifted in from the distance.
He tried to focus a bit more.
The chattering laughter of children.
A somewhat irritated car horn.
The chime of an elevator.
Ed—no, Moon Saebyeok—shivered.
"You... lived in a world like this too?"
He could feel the pain of Moon Saebyeok, who had been thrown into a completely unorganized cacophony.
Probably, no one around him had understood. Perhaps they hadn't even bothered to try.
The life in his memories had been far from smooth, and there had been no adult to help his talent bloom.
It was a mirror image of Ed's own life.
The union of two people from vastly different social classes had ended in tragedy.
A Korean mother from a chaebol family. A British father from an ordinary household.
His mother had been too weak to survive on love alone, and his father had passed away early, leaving his young son behind.
In the end, Moon Saebyeok had been a clear obstacle and a burden to his mother's new beginning.
If she was going to abandon her child for a fresh start, she should have at least lived well, but his mother had died too.
As a half-Korean, half-white child, he was a stain on the Moon family, so there was no longer any safety net for him.
At the time, he was just an eighteen-year-old boy, an age where he still needed the care of an adult.
And this was the result.
Some might call his life a sad ending, but Ed had no intention of letting it remain one.
Why the boy had made music, what he had tried to convey through the passages that didn't make sense, which melodies were beautiful, and even the dissonances that an ordinary person would find hard to understand—none of it mattered anymore.
He hadn't even decided on a title for the song, but so what?
There were plenty of 'Untitled' masterpieces in the world's memory.
He looked out at the dawn settling over the city, fittingly matching his name, Saebyeok.
Edward and Saebyeok had met their ends, whether by choice or by fate, but music was immortal.
Even if this was a prank played by God, even if it was all just a dream, he refused to half-ass it.
Clenching his fists in a sudden surge of excitement, he stared out the window, only to freeze.
"...Let's put on some weight first. Moon Saebyeok! This isn't a human body. It's a skeleton."
Steeling his resolve, he got into a push-up position, took a deep breath, and lowered his arms—
"Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck—!"
A curse slipped out naturally at the reality of not being able to complete a single repetition.
He had a long way to go.