Rental Boyfriend
Kim Hyunsoo woke in his one-room apartment, the sunlight pouring in so brightly it stung his eyes. The room had no curtains, so by mid-morning the whole place lit up as if someone had flipped on every light inside it. There was nothing he could do about it. He was a lower-class citizen without much money — a day-to-day existence, like a mayfly living off whatever it earned that morning.
"Ugh..."
Feeling his throat burn, Hyunsoo dragged himself out of bed. After draining a glass of water, he checked the fridge and found it empty. He could have sworn he'd stocked it yesterday, but as if such a thing had never happened, there wasn't a single item inside.
He was hungry. Hyunsoo headed to the convenience store to buy something to eat, but something felt off. Getting asked for his number by the store clerk was old news — but even though he'd gone out in nothing more than a short-sleeved shirt and shorts, he could feel the gazes of the women around him burning hot against his skin. In his old world, didn't men wear t-shirts and shorts whenever they ran anywhere close by? This was hardly the kind of outfit that should have drawn that kind of heat from women.
And then came the endless wave of women hitting on him... Back in his original world, he had never once been approached in his life, but the moment he arrived in this one, he'd lost count of how many times it had happened. Only then did Hyunsoo finally realize something was wrong with this world. In any ordinary world, women would never be throwing themselves at him like this. He was, if nothing else, reasonably perceptive.
So he dug around on the internet and pieced together a rough picture: a world where gates existed and monsters spilled out of them; a world of magic-wielders and church orders channeling divine power; and above all, a world where men were far, far fewer in number than women.
He spent an entire day gathering this and that piece of information, but in the end, nothing really changed.
The name Kim Hyunsoo hadn't vanished. He was still a high school senior who'd dropped out — not even a graduate. He was nineteen. He had no money. His bank account was bone-dry. He was in no position to worry about anything except next month's rent. And his phone, naturally, held not a single saved contact — because Hyunsoo was an orphan with no relatives whatsoever. He hadn't exactly lived a normal school life either, considering he'd dropped out before graduation.
Of course, that wasn't to say Hyunsoo had been a bully or had lived badly. Quite the opposite. Existing as if he were there and yet not there — that had been his entire school experience. His homeroom teacher would sometimes forget he was even in her class. That's how little presence he had.
What is this?
He hadn't been hit by a car or died and crossed over — he'd simply fallen asleep in one world and woken up in another. Hyunsoo couldn't help but be flustered. To cross into a different world without a single warning sign like this... And yet there was no denying it really was another world. Otherwise the women's reactions at that convenience store could never have been so favorable. And the information on the internet certainly wasn't fabricated.
His looks were admittedly above average, but not to the degree that he'd been showered with attention by women back in his old world.
"Status window!"
Just like in the novels he'd read, he tried shouting the words out loud, but no strange hologram appeared. Hyunsoo let out a sigh of disappointment. His dreams of coasting through life on free stats had just hit a dead end. In novels, whenever someone got dumped into a bizarre world like this, they'd at least get a status window, wouldn't they? That was the only way a person could make a living without trouble. For a humble plebeian like Hyunsoo, the power of a status window was his only hope of survival.
"Huh..."
But realizing reality didn't change a thing. Hyunsoo lay sprawled on his filthy mattress, thinking. Come to think of it, it had been an incredibly long time since he'd washed the bed cover. There wasn't much he could do about it, though — he didn't own a washing machine. He did his laundry at the coin laundromat down the street. There was no space in the room for a machine, and he certainly had no money to buy an expensive one. That was why a mountain of worn clothes stood piled in the corner of the room; he let them accumulate for weeks at a time before hauling them all off to wash.
"So... what do I do now?"
There was nothing to do. Even back in his original world he'd been a day laborer, and coming to this world changed nothing about that. A guy who couldn't study and wasn't particularly bright had exactly one option: manual labor.
Having concluded that a full day of research had changed nothing, Hyunsoo woke at dawn the very next morning and headed to the labor office near his home. A guy with no connections and no credentials had nothing available but grunt work. Next month's rent had to be dealt with first. No matter how precious men were in this world, no woman was going to pay his rent for him.
A man living hand to mouth like Hyunsoo couldn't possibly have any savings. There was, of course, the security deposit still sitting at his place, but if he kept eating into that, he might find himself thrown out onto the street. The apartment was his last line of defense — the final refuge he had left in the world.
"Well, I'll be... What brings a young man to a place like this?"
But Hyunsoo had forgotten that this world was different. The manager of the labor office wasn't a wrinkled old man like back home — she was a woman. And glancing around the office, he saw nothing but elderly women. It dawned on him that the eyes fixed on him were anything but ordinary.
In real-world terms, it was as if a girl fresh out of high school had walked into a labor staffed exclusively by fifty-something men. Thankfully, public safety wasn't as bad as in some developing country, so nothing untoward was going to happen — but the looks directed at Hyunsoo were far from kind. Still, he did his best to ignore those gazes and asked the manager, "I'm looking for work. Anything available?"
"There's work if a man's willing to do it."
Hyunsoo was assigned as a flagger and thrown onto a construction site. But within a single day, he abandoned any thought of making manual labor a daily grind. It wasn't that the work was hard — flagging was hardly backbreaking. All you did was hold a baton and wave it around all day; it was about as easy as construction work got. And the pay was generous. But there was one thing that outweighed all of it.
"My, such a diligent young man. What brings you here of all places?"
"Here, have some of this."
"You remind me of my son back home..."
"So what are you getting up to after work tonight?"
Far too many older women kept showering him with favors while looking him over. But every one of those well-wishers was fifty or older. They weren't beauties, either — these middle-aged women were ogling him with lecherous eyes while piling on the kindness. It made his skin crawl. And beneath all that goodwill, he could sense something hidden — an unspoken expectation of some kind of repayment.
Hyunsoo quit after one day. He simply couldn't stand the way those middle-aged women looked at him. Their eyes were like those of predators sizing up prey. And whether he was working or not, they spent the entire day chattering at him. In that moment, he understood exactly why young women quit construction work so quickly. The sexual harassment was relentless.
And it wasn't even harassment from pretty women. If beauties had been the ones doing it, he could have laughed it off — but when old women with permed hair were saying those things, there was no putting up with it. In his heart of hearts, he wanted to throw a punch straight into their faces.
After that, he searched the internet for jobs men could do, and found that his options were few and far between.
At only nineteen, he couldn't even land a proper full-time job. And the places where men who weren't Hunters could get hired were vanishingly rare.
He had no idea how other men managed to get by, but for him, manual labor was the only path. If he'd known this was coming, he should have graduated high school properly. Then he could have done decently in his studies and maybe latched onto a pretty woman and lived off her instead.
His youth — a nineteen-year-old high school dropout — kept tripping him up at every turn. Do I really have to resort to underground work? he wondered. If manual labor was out, there was truly nothing left. He even considered applying at a logistics warehouse.
It was right then that his eye caught a flyer advertising a high-paying part-time job. It was a leaflet promoting a line of work that only men could do. The duties were spelled out in detail.
Being a boyfriend for women?
The flyer described spending the day as a woman's boyfriend and going on a date with her. From where Hyunsoo stood, the terms weren't bad at all. Wasn't this basically the same thing as the rental girlfriend services from his old world, just flipped?
And so, as if under some spell, he dialed the phone number printed on the flyer. The conditions were far better than construction work, and the money was significantly higher.
They said it was easy, simple work — so what reason did he have not to do it?
Compared to hauling rebar all day, going on dates with young women sounded infinitely easier — and a lot more fun, too.