Episode 2: Tutorial (2)
"Whoa. What is all this?"
The moment I stepped into the Shop, my eyes went round. The spread of goods, and the abilities attached to them, blew straight past anything I had imagined.
"There's furniture, there's food... Don't tell me. Skills? These are the skills I'm thinking of, right?!"
Curiosity caught fire over the kind of skills I had only ever seen in games. With a gleam in my eyes like a kid set loose in a toy store, I worked the Shop's category filter until nothing remained on the screen but Skills.
"Gah! An SSS-grade skill costs 99,999,999,999 Points?! How is that even possible!"
I had been dragging the Shop window along, skimming skill after skill, and when that SSS-grade entry finally showed itself at the bottom, the price dropped my jaw.
"...When am I supposed to scrape together 9,999,999,999 Points? I've barely got 1,000. I'd rather buy something else and be done with it."
I scrolled back to the top, cleared the Skills category, and returned to the first screen.
"So what do I buy with this voucher?"
Back on the opening screen, I stared at the free purchase voucher in my possession, turned the question over, and started sweeping the Shop window again.
"Yeah. If I'm buying anything, it starts with these two!"
I wanted a choice I would not regret, so I went through the Shop's endless catalog one item at a time, slow and careful. Then two products caught my eye and would not let go.
From the names alone, both of them dug hard into my urge to buy.
"With just these two skills, I wouldn't have to feel outclassed anywhere—looks and a body both—and women would line up after me. Hehehehe..."
But wait. With what I've got right now, I can only buy one.
I had been grinning in that murky way, already living the happy days in my head, when the one enormous problem came back to me.
"Then I have to pick whichever side pays me the most."
For the sake of the future, I wrung a brain I had barely used in twenty years for every scrap of profit it could still produce, and I thought as hard as I could.
Bewitching Looks (A+) alone would make it easy to win women over... but I want washboard abs, too. Honestly, I'm not even that ugly, am I...?
Little by little, my heart tipped toward buying Marvelous Body (A+).
Right. There are lower-grade appearance skills anyway, so I'll save up Points and buy Bewitching Looks (A+) later. A man puts his body first!
Nodding to myself in pure satisfaction, a little drunk on my own judgment, I purchased Marvelous Body (A+).
You have purchased the skill: Marvelous Body (A+).
Body reconstruction will now begin.
"Ghk—?!"
The message that I had acquired the skill rose in front of me, and for a second I smiled. Then, riding in with the notice that my body was being reconstructed, a pain I could not name slammed through me.
Crack. Crrrrack.
"Gyaaaaaah!!"
Agony turned my vision inside out. Every joint in my body felt as if it were splintering apart, and at a pain worse than anything I had ever known, the scream finally tore loose.
If I black out like this, I really might die!
Some instinct understood that fainting would be the end. I bit down on my tongue and clung to my mind through the pain, and then a strange sensation began to spread—the feeling of my body starting to change.
It was a bizarre sense of having become someone entirely unlike the man I had been. Broken bone knit back together at a furious speed, and every ruined cell began to rebuild itself.
Body reconstruction is 78% complete.
Body reconstruction is 85% complete.
Body reconstruction is 98% complete.
"Nngh—!"
I forced myself to ignore the cold sweat pouring off me like rain. When my focus finally crawled back and I checked the message window, I could see there was almost nothing left.
The user has acquired the skill: Marvelous Body.
During reconstruction through Marvelous Body, appearance rose from Passably Decent Ordinary Looks (C+) to Pretty Decent Looks (B).
◈ Body proportions are adjusted to near perfection, and every form of recovery tied to the body rises sharply.
◈ You gain the talent to rapidly acquire any technique or ability related to the body.
◈ Waste no longer accumulates in the body, raising resistance to disease so that illness does not take hold easily.
The moment the completion message surfaced, the extreme pain that had been devouring my whole body vanished without a trace, as if it had only been an illusion.
Thud.
"...Hah... hah."
With the pain gone, I collapsed onto the floor just like that, dragging in breath after breath.
"...Pfft—ha! Fuck, I really thought I was gonna die!"
I barely got my body moving, took one swallow of water from the fridge, and only then did it feel as if I could breathe again.
"What kind of insane System is this! If it was going to hurt that much, it ought to warn a person first, shouldn't it?!"
Once I had recovered enough to think, fury climbed at how close I had come to dying, and I hurled curses at the System.
If I could have had my way, I would have fired a 5,800-character complaint at some customer center. A lunatic System like this was never going to have a function for that.
Ding!
Curse or don't, it made no difference. A chime sounded, and a new message window appeared.
You have taken one step further as a writer. It is now time to present the script you have written to the world.
Submit your script to a contest.
※ Additional rewards will be granted if you advance to the final round.
🎁 Reward:Low-Grade Random Box ×1
🎁 Bonus Reward:??????
"Come on. You nearly kill a guy, and then you hand him a quest..."
The window floating in front of me was absurd, and yet I understood it a little. From the very beginning it had been a System with the strange name Entertainment Success Story. It had not built all this just to torment me. True to that name, its purpose was obviously to push me into the entertainment industry, so a quest like this was not strange at all.
"Urp! What is that smell?!"
I closed the window and started for the desk, meaning to get a script ready for the contest—and only then realized a vicious stench was rolling off my own body. Worse, the clothes I had on were smeared all over with something black and sticky.
"Is this the waste...?"
Touching the black, sticky liquid on the fabric, I knew by instinct that it was waste expelled from my own body.
"Ugh. This feels foul. I need to wash, fast."
I wiped the mess off my fingers onto my clothes, threw a window open to air the room, and went straight into the bathroom off the living room to strip. The waste-stained clothes hit the floor. I turned the shower to warm water and stepped under it.
"...Ah. That's taking some of the fatigue off."
Warm streams wrapped my whole body, and it felt as if the day's exhaustion were rinsing away together with the waste on my skin.
"Oh?! What the—now that I look, my body's changed like crazy!"
Washing my loosened body with a little more care, I could tell just how different it had become. The skin was clean. The lines of muscle stood out sharp. And above all else...
"Holy shit!"
My cock hung heavy.
If I had walked into a public bath, every stare in the place would have locked onto it without fail. Honestly, even looking at it as another man, it was impressive enough to pull a gasp out of me. It was that far above the rest.
"The part of the reconstruction that benefited most was my dick... which only makes it better!"
Satisfied with the body I had been rebuilt into, I scrubbed with care until the waste had rinsed from every corner of me.
"...Whew. Now I feel like I can actually live."
Finished with the shower, I sealed the stained clothes in a bag and threw them out, then pulled a T-shirt and pants from the closet and put them on.
"All right. Time to look for somewhere to send the script."
Changed into clothes that felt clean and airy against my skin, I sat at the desk in a good mood and dug through contest sites one after another.
For the first submission, send Part One only.
Submission window closes today.
While I was searching contest sites on the laptop, a promotional poster caught my eye—the submission period ran out today, and it carried that line about sending only Part One to start.
This contest, meant to foster rookie writers, was judged on the script alone, and established writers could not enter. The rules even included a clause demanding a penalty fee if an established writer was caught participating.
If you advance to the final round, additional scripts may be requested.
"Take the top prize and my life flips overnight? And the script I wrote happens to be exactly one part..."
Looking more closely at the guidelines, the top prize was fifty million won, plus a confirmed slot on JTBS. For a drama writer, it was no different from hitting the lottery. Of course, the competition would be every bit as fierce.
"But my gut's telling me to submit it here... Whatever. I'll send it once. If it doesn't work, I can just enter it somewhere else."
After fretting it over, I followed my instinct, finished the file for the JTBS contest, and typed the email address in one piece at a time.
"What do I use for a pen name?"
Once every required form was filled in, the last blank stared back at me—the author's pen name—and when it came to it, I had no idea what to write.
"Ah, what a pain. I'll just slap something together that sounds like my name."
I turned it over for a long while, then got sick of thinking and simply wrote down a plain pen name: drop the surname Lee, and reverse the syllables of Jeongwoo.
Ding!
The moment I submitted the script and the synopsis to the contest, that now-familiar chime reached my ear.