Let's Unite All Religions
Four years had passed since an unknown DNA epidemic swept across the globe.
At first, no one even knew what was causing it.
Perfectly healthy men would suddenly clutch their chests and collapse. In many cases, they were dead before they could even be carried to a hospital.
Age didn't matter. Neither did nationality. The healthy, the athletes, young children—no one was an exception.
As time passed, only one common thread emerged: the disease was fatally lethal to anyone with a male chromosome.
And now, four years later, fewer than ten percent of the world's men remained alive.
Naturally, the world changed.
Companies were run by women. Government offices too. The police, the hospitals—all women. Simply spotting a man on the street had become an uncommon sight.
It had become a world where it wasn't strange for people to turn and stare whenever a man walked past.
But that didn't mean every last man lived like a king, either. Reality was never that simple.
A man without money still had no money. A man without ability still had no ability.
And I was the textbook case.
Twenty-eight years old. Unemployed. Living alone in a small house my late parents had left me.
It wasn't that I had zero intention of getting a job, but I wasn't exactly tearing through job listings for my life either. Ever since the world took its strange turn, everything had started to feel like a chore.
I wanted to live enjoyably, make good money, and—with my competition so drastically thinned out—meet the countless women out there. But aside from the simple fact that I'd survived, I had nothing going for me.
My education was average. My looks were average. My height was average. I wasn't athletic, and I wasn't especially smart either.
If I had to scrape the barrel: ever since childhood, my friends had teased me about having an unusually large dick, and I was a decent talker. That was it. The whole list.
I was lying on the sofa, scrolling through my phone, when a story about some religious group popped up on the front page of the news.
The number of people turning to religion after the epidemic had exploded. So many had lost family members. So many had lost husbands. So many had lost sons. And some had survived for no reason at all.
People wanted something to lean on, each for their own reasons—a church, a cathedral, a temple, a shaman's shrine. Some dug deeper into the faith they'd always had; plenty of lifelong unbelievers suddenly found religion.
Religious organizations had grown more influential than ever before.
As I scrolled past the article, a thought struck me. But why on earth does everyone have to operate separately like that?
People believed in God differently, believed in Buddha differently. I knew the doctrines differed, the histories differed. I didn't know much about religion to begin with—I'd been raised without any faith at all.
But if you thought about it in the simplest possible terms, something felt off.
Churches tell you to live a good life. Temples tell you not to harm others. Cathedrals speak of love. No matter how much the methods varied, was there a single religion out there teaching people to become bad?
I sat up.
"Why can't they just merge into one?"
Even as I said it, I laughed. One unemployed guy uniting religions that had been split apart for thousands of years. Any sane person would call it lunacy.
But once the thought took root, it wouldn't leave my head.
The population had collapsed. Men had all but vanished. The world had already been flipped completely on its head once. Along with the thought of just how many women I might get to meet, another one followed: if the world could turn upside down once, why couldn't I flip the things we once took for granted?
I didn't start with anything grand like world religion. I wasn't the president, I wasn't a chaebol heir, I wasn't a celebrity.
I opened the map app on my phone and searched.
Church.
A few came up near my house. There was a tiny one, and a little farther off there was a big church in an impressive building. But knowing my luck, I figured I'd be turned away at the door of any place like that.
As I scrolled down, one church caught my eye—the smallest-looking of the bunch. Less than a ten-minute walk from my house, on the second floor of a commercial building. Even in the photos, the sign was small.
I counted the heads in a recent group photo posted online. Roughly fifteen people, including the pastor.
I stared at the photo for a moment.
"Perfect."
Pathetic, for the first opponent of a man planning to unify the world. But for me, it was just right. Better to try talking somewhere small than to go somewhere big and get brushed off.
I changed my clothes and headed out the door.
2.
The church was tiny. Second floor of an aging commercial building. When I climbed the stairs, a glass door came into view with the words Somang Church on it.
Opening the door, I saw a small chapel right away. Twenty-odd chairs, a small statue of Jesus at the front, a cross on the wall, and an old piano off to one side.
There were only three people inside. All of them women. One was mopping the floor, one was straightening the chairs, and a third—the one going through some papers up front—noticed me.
All three of them froze.
It was the same reaction everywhere I went these days, especially when a man appeared in a cramped space like this.
The woman with the papers approached first.
"First time here?"
"Yes."
"Are you here for the service?"
I hesitated for a beat. "No."
A puzzled look crossed her face.
Up close, she looked to be in her mid-forties. Her makeup was light, her clothes plain and ordinary.
"Then who are you here to see?"
"I'd like to meet the pastor."
"I'm the pastor."
I faltered for a second. It wasn't as though female pastors were rare these days, but I'd only glanced at the photos online and hadn't checked who the pastor actually was.
"Ah."
She smiled. "What brings you here, then?"
I looked around the chapel. It was small. Really small. A congregation of barely fifteen—exactly the starting point I'd been picturing. So I just came out and said it.
"I want to merge the religions into one."
The woman mopping the floor looked up. The one straightening the chairs turned to stare at me too. The pastor said nothing for several seconds.
"...Merge the religions?"
"Yes."
"In what sense do you mean that?"
"Just literally."
I pointed at an empty chair. "Would it be all right if I sat down for a moment and talked?"
The pastor studied me for a long while. It was the look of someone sizing up whether I was a lunatic. Fair enough—I'd have done the same. But in the end, she sat down in the chair across from me. I sat down too.
"I don't have a religion," I said.
"I see."
"I've never even properly read the Bible."
Her expression grew stranger still. "And yet you want to unite all religions?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
I thought about it for a moment, then answered. "They all tell you to become a good person, don't they?"
The pastor looked at me in silence.
"The methods differ. What they believe in differs. But in the end, isn't it all about not doing bad things, helping others, living like a decent human being?"
"It's not that simple a problem."
"I know."
"The doctrines differ, the concepts of God differ, and there are plenty of parts that simply can't coexist."
"I know that too."
"So then what?"
I smiled. "That's why I'm going to meet them all myself, one by one."
Only then did the pastor let out a disbelieving little laugh. "Meet whom?"
"The churches, to start."
I glanced around the room. "This is number one."
In the quiet chapel, I heard someone stifle a laugh. I paid it no mind.
"You have about fifteen people here, right?"
The pastor's eyes widened slightly. "How did you know that?"
"I counted the photo."
This time the woman arranging the chairs laughed too. The pastor touched her own mouth, then said, "You're quite an unusual person."
"I hear that a lot."
Actually, I'd never heard it before in my life.
The pastor studied me for a long moment, then asked, "What's your name?"
"Kang Hyunwoo. I'm twenty-eight."
"What do you do for a living?"
"I'm unemployed."
The pastor's face froze. Somewhere behind her, a laugh finally burst out. I laughed too, embarrassed.
"Look, I know, okay? It's weird when an unemployed guy shows up out of nowhere saying he's going to unite every religion in South Korea."
"The whole country?"
"That's the goal, for now."
"For now?"
"If it works, we go bigger."
The pastor pressed a hand to her forehead. "I honestly don't know where to even begin with you."
I nodded. "Which is why you should teach me."
Her hand dropped. "Teach you what?"
"What a church even is. Start there."
This time, nobody laughed. I meant it.
"Because I don't know anything."
The chapel went quiet. The pastor stared at me for a long, long time. Then, very slowly, she opened her mouth.
"Then come back this Sunday."
"For the service?"
"Yes."
"And after that?"
"We'll think about that when it comes."
I stood up. "Understood."
As I headed for the door, her voice followed me. "Hyunwoo-ssi."
I turned around. The pastor asked, "Do you really intend to unite every religion?"
I answered without much thought. "Yes."
"Why does it have to be you?"
I didn't have an answer to that one either. It wasn't like I had money. I had no power. I had no religious knowledge.
And yet, strangely—I wanted to try. So I said,
"Doesn't seem like anyone else is going to do it."
I pushed the door open and stepped outside. And on the walk home, a thought came to me.
"It'd be to my advantage to win over at least one person on my side before Sunday's service..."
3.
I waited a good long while near the entrance of the building where the church was, hoping one of the other two women from earlier would come out.
How long did I wait? Around four in the afternoon, the woman who'd been arranging the chairs finally emerged.
Heading home, I take it?
".........?"
When I spoke up, she turned to look at me with wide, startled eyes.
"I'm Kang Hyunwoo—I was talking with the pastor earlier."
"Ah, yes..."
"What's your name?"
"I'm... Ma Hyunju..."
She looked to be in her early thirties, with a gentle, demure face and an air of shyness about her.
"It's not every day a man comes along these days. Would you like to come over to my place for a cup of coffee?"
"Coffee...?"
"Yes! It's really close from here!"
Shy as she was, Ma Hyunju nodded sooner than I expected, and before long she was at my place.
"How long have you been attending the church?" She was sitting at the table while I made coffee in the living room, and I started asking the things I was curious about.
"About three years..."
Though she seemed awkward about it, she answered my questions kindly, and for roughly half an hour our conversation drifted from one topic to the next.
"Actually, I'm planning to unite the religions."
"You really meant what you said earlier?"
"Of course! Every great thing starts small, you know. There's even a saying—humble beginnings, glorious endings."
"Wow... that's really admirable of you."
Maybe it was my confident, burning eyes and voice, but she stared at me with an air of wonder, as if amazed.
"And I'm going to become a god. The world's already been turned upside down—where is it written that things have to go back to the old definition of normal? If I champion happiness and good, and stand against evil, don't you think I could move people's hearts?"
"A god..."
Ma Hyunju was listening to every word with rapt attention.
"And for that to happen, I want Somang Church—the one I visited earlier—to be my starting point."
"Our church... as that starting point..."
She echoed my words back, sinking deeper and deeper under their spell.
"Hyunju-ssi, will you be my first partner? The first partner of a man who will one day become a god."
"How... would that work...?"
"What other way is there? We just lean on each other, help each other, and make each other happy."
"Ah... I've never been in a situation like this before..."
"Don't overthink it! There are hardly any men left in this world—let's just be partners!"
Carried by the momentum, I urged her on, and before long Ma Hyunju nodded, her face flushed with embarrassment.
Then I drew close to where she sat in her chair.
"First of all, to celebrate becoming partners—let's build a little bond, shall we?"
As I closed in, setting the mood, Ma Hyunju made no move to refuse—she just watched me with an embarrassed look on her face.
And I leaned in gently and pressed my lips to hers in a kiss.
I felt her flinch, but she didn't pull away.
Slowly, I cupped the back of her head with my right hand, and as her head tilted and I eased my face to the other side, I slipped my tongue deep between the lips I'd been sucking, from her top lip to her bottom one.
The inside of Ma Hyunju's mouth was wonderfully warm.
And it was slick.
Almost instantly, a thought surged up in my head: I want to put my dick in that warm, slick little mouth.
