A Prayer That Reaches Anywhere
I knelt with my hands pressed neatly together. Or rather, I wasn’t exactly kneeling—I was sprawled face-down. To be completely honest, I was completely passed out, drooling all over the floor in utter exhaustion.
“……Haa.”
I must have gotten too excited by a sensation I’d never felt before. The moment energy started boiling up inside me, I’d unleashed it without restraint, and now here I was, panting like a dog. I’d thought I could handle one or two skills just fine, but I’d clearly underestimated the penalty attached to my trait.
I barely managed to lift my head and look at the message floating in front of me.
Distance: 11,423 km / Target Level: 1
The Awakened’s mana consumption will be 11.4 times the base requirement.
‘11,423 kilometers… where the hell is that?’
America? Africa? Portugal? My pathetic knowledge couldn’t even begin to guess. I’d only prayed while thinking of someone who desperately needed help, yet it seemed our benevolent god had matched me with someone on the exact opposite side of the planet. No wonder the mana cost had spiked and overloaded my body.
This tutorial was way too Spartan right from the start. The perception range was ridiculously wide!
I grumbled to myself, twitching from the crushing fatigue.
“……Ugh, I can’t even move.”
My fingers wouldn’t so much as twitch, so I gave up on standing. Well, if I died like this, at least I’d have died helping someone. Wouldn’t that count as a good death? I was entertaining that ridiculous thought while trying to catch my breath when—
—Thud!
Something landed on the back of my head.
‘……What the?’
W-was it a bug? That thing? The memory of a giant hornet invading my house a few days ago flashed through my mind. The terror from that day was carved into my bones, so I fought through the exhaustion and frantically patted the back of my head.
Fortunately, what had landed on me wasn’t a bug.
“?”
It was a heavy red coin, surprisingly weighty for its size. When I looked up, a new message window introduced it as a chip.
You have exerted a minor influence on society and gained 17 EXP.
You have received 1 Skill Point.
You have received 1 Chip.
Skill Points were probably used to strengthen skills… but what were Chips again? My memory was hazy, so I opened the Record and searched for information on them.
Oh, right. It was coming back to me. Chips were a universal currency you could earn from dungeons, the system, leveling up, and so on. I’d heard that one chip could generally be exchanged for about a hundred dollars’ worth of goods.
So I’d just earned a hundred dollars with one short prayer?
‘That’s… insanely good.’
The reality of having awakened finally hit me. The exhaustion that had been weighing down my body seemed to melt away. I couldn’t help but grin in a rather unpleasant way as I pushed myself up.
“……Heh, hehehe.”
‘I had to do it.’ Han Saje—male—deceased.
Click. Han Saje—female—has entered the chat.
It wasn’t like I’d done a good deed expecting money, but now that I actually had something in my hand, I couldn’t stop smiling. I stared at the chip and grinned like an idiot for a long time.
‘What should I use this on? Actually, how do I even use it? Should I search that too?’
Just as I was trying to wring some ideas out of my underpowered brain, a familiar alarm blared from the phone I’d left on the bedside table.
—Good morning! Good morning!
“……Ah.”
My mind snapped back to reality. Unfortunately, today was Friday, and my circumstances were far from comfortable. In short, I had to head to my part-time job at the neighborhood convenience store in a few hours. That was the only thing keeping a twenty-one-year-old high-school-grad studying for civil service exams fed.
“What am I supposed to do about clothes?”
I looked down at my loose-fitting outfit and frowned. There was no way a guy living alone would have women’s clothes. Well, it was possible, but I certainly didn’t have that kind of refined, eccentric hobby. Even if I ordered something online right now, it would take a whole day to arrive. What was I supposed to do?
Maybe I should just call in sick? Come to think of it, with all this chaos going on, showing up for work like nothing happened would be ridiculous. My condition was terrible after overusing mana, too. Asking the manager for the day off seemed like the smart choice. I was just about to look up her contact info when—
‘—Wait, did my phone always look like this?’
I tilted my head as I fiddled with the device. The model itself was the same. But the case, the wallpaper—everything was subtly different. To be precise, everything had become cuter and more delicate.
‘What the…’
When I opened the gallery, it was even worse. There were photos I had never saved mixed in. And right at the very bottom of the scroll was a picture of my mother standing beside a cute girl, both of them smiling at a high school graduation ceremony.
It was me. Right now.
Only then did I look around my room and feel a massive sense of dissonance.
‘Hold on…’
It was definitely the studio I’d been living in. But the layout was slightly off. The interior was a little different, and so were the objects. It was as if this room had belonged to Han Saje the girl from the very beginning.
For example, the toothbrush in the bathroom was pink instead of mint. The curtains and wallpaper had brighter, cheerier designs. And when I opened the closet, it was packed with women’s clothes I had never bought in my life.
‘Then does that mean…?’
A terrible premonition struck me. I hurriedly dug out my wallet and checked my ID card. Shockingly, the first digit after the birth year in my resident registration number had changed from 3 to 4. Even the ID photo proudly displayed on the side showed a girl’s face.
I stood there speechless for a long time in front of that bizarre, surreal sight before finally forming a single hypothesis.
‘It’s not just me that changed—the whole world changed?’
The male Han Saje no longer existed in this world?
*
And that was the morning it happened.
To cut to the chase, my hypothesis was correct.
“Oh, Saje. I saw your text. Why are you so late today?”
“……I’m sorry. I wasn’t feeling well this morning.”
“Really? It’s nothing serious, is it? You look pretty pale.”
“I-I’m fine now……”
The manager didn’t seem the least bit surprised to see me as a woman. She called me Saje just like always and treated me with the same casual familiarity she’d always shown her part-timer. There was only one tiny difference.
“Don’t push yourself. If it gets too hard, tell me right away.”
“……Huh?”
“What? You said you were sick, didn’t you?”
She seemed a little kinder than usual. Of course, the woman in her late thirties who managed the store had never been a bad person. She was just the straightforward, no-nonsense type—late means late, mistake means mistake. But today her tone was strangely gentle. Normally she would have said something like “You should have told me sooner,” but now I could feel something close to genuine concern.
Or maybe I was just being overly sensitive.
‘I am ridiculously tired right now……’
After listening to me complain about feeling anemic, the manager stretched with a groan and said,
“Then I’ll head out first. Take care.”
“Ah, yes. Have a good day!”
Once I was alone, I immediately slipped into the storage room. Between the ramen boxes and packs of bottled water, a hanger with the staff uniform hung on one wall. I was about to grab a vest like usual when I paused.
A worn full-length mirror attached to the side of the hanger had caught my eye.
‘……She really is cute.’
In the mirror stood a rather convincingly dressed girl. A white dress shirt under a beige sweater. Below that, a navy skirt fell neatly to just above her knees. For something I’d randomly pulled from the closet, the combination wasn’t half bad.
No, it was more than that. It was downright adorable. But I didn’t feel any joy.
Because I still couldn’t accept that the girl in the mirror was me.
It felt more like I was looking at a game character. A meticulously customized beautiful-girl avatar. Or a 5-star limited character from a gacha game. That was the exact distance I felt.
So I let out a short sigh.
“……Huu.”
I had awakened. I’d gained an incredible ability. I’d even earned a hundred-dollar chip with a single prayer. These were all things I should be happy about. In fact, just a little while ago I had been grinning like a creep.
But standing in front of the mirror brought all the tasks I now faced rushing into my mind one after another.
Was I really going to have to live like this from now on? How long would I keep working part-time? Should I at least register as a Hunter first?
“……This is giving me a headache.”
The future felt far more uncertain than I’d expected. My life had changed too much to simply cover it with the single word “awakened.” If the world now remembered me as Han Saje the girl, then the male Han Saje truly no longer existed in this world.
The moment I fully realized that, my chest felt tight.
My mother’s words suddenly came to mind.
‘What should I do now, Mom?’
She had definitely told me while she was alive: Don’t turn your back on people in need.
But right now, wasn’t the person who needed help the most obviously me?
Feeling lost, I muttered under my breath.
“God, please let me live a decent life.”
It was closer to a complaint than a prayer. Just a childish whine because I had nowhere else to direct it. But apparently someone had been listening.
Word of Encouragement - Lv. 1
The target’s willpower and determination are boosted for 24 hours.
“Huh?”
I stared blankly at the message in front of me.
‘……It works on myself too?’
A Prayer That Reaches Anywhere—did that mean it could reach me as well? Or maybe it could even reach a god somewhere out there? The absurdity of it all made me burst into a helpless laugh. And thanks to that laugh, the heavy weight on my heart felt a little lighter.
Only then did I slip on the uniform vest and mutter to myself.
Yeah. Let’s just get through today. The same way I’ve lived until now.