Waking Up as a Jobless Man
Episode 1. Waking Up as a Jobless Man
The living room of a vast, luxurious mansion.
I was sitting deep in the seat of the finest leather sofa in the center of the room, with two men in their forties seated on either side of me.
The three of us were in the middle of a confidential meeting.
Before getting into the details of the meeting, let me introduce the two men beside me.
The man sitting on my left was President Kim, the head of Next Planet, the largest dating app in the country.
The man on my right was President Lee, the head of Seed Entertainment, a major talent agency.
“Chairman, shall I send it through an overseas account under another name again?”
President Kim asked obsequiously.
I answered in a languid voice.
“Yes. Handle it the same way this time.”
As soon as I finished speaking, President Lee chimed in.
“Neither President Kim nor I would have ever dared to rise to our current positions without you, Chairman. We are always grateful.”
“I’m simply grateful that all of you trusted me and followed my lead.”
The two men sitting beside me gazed at me with unwavering, almost blind devotion, as though I were some kind of god.
Slurp. Lick. Slurp...
At that moment, an overtly lewd sound echoed through the living room as something beneath my legs was being eagerly attended to.
The three of us were impeccably dressed in suits from the waist up, but we were completely naked from the waist down.
Three famous actresses, each recognizable by name alone, were kneeling between our legs and eagerly attending to us.
The pleasure was certainly there, but for some reason, I felt unusually tired today.
I let out a short sigh and spoke.
“That’s enough. You can all head back.”
The actress who had been attending to me immediately pulled away and stood up at my words.
Still disheveled, she bowed deeply to me.
“I’ll be leaving now, Chairman. Your personal toy case is returning to her quarters.”
After she left the room, I waved my hand toward Presidents Kim and Lee.
“I’m feeling a little tired today, so I’m going to my room to rest. You two stay and enjoy yourselves before you leave.”
“Of course, Chairman. Get plenty of rest!”
“Sleep well, Chairman.”
Leaving their voices behind, I rubbed my stiff neck and headed toward my bedroom.
Something felt strangely off today.
My head had been dizzy for some time, and there was an unsettling chill in my chest.
I had a very bad feeling about it.
Click.
As I entered my bedroom, I found my wife, my “first bitch,” kneeling on the king-sized bed, waiting for me in nothing but revealing lingerie.
“Master, you finished your meeting early?”
“I’m not feeling well. I came in to rest by myself.”
“Oh my, you must have had such a hard day.”
As soon as I lay down on the bed, my wife naturally crawled toward me, intending to attend to me.
Normally, I would have accepted it while stroking her hair, but today I simply didn’t have the energy.
“I’m tired. Tonight, I just want to hold you and sleep. Come here.”
My words made my wife stare at me in surprise.
When I placed my arm beneath her head as a pillow, her eyes widened.
“M-Master... Is this my last day? This is the first time you’ve ever given me an arm pillow.”
I slowly stroked my anxious wife’s head and chuckled softly.
“You’re my wife. Have I really never even done something like this for you? ...From now on, try calling me ‘honey’ once in a while.”
At the word that came from my lips, my wife looked as though she had been given the entire world.
“H-Honey...”
“Yeah. If you feel like calling me that sometimes, go ahead. Maybe I’m getting old, but it sounds rather nice to hear.”
“Yes... Thank you. Truly...”
Feeling the warmth of my deeply moved wife in my arms, I slowly closed my eyes.
Amid the drowsiness washing over me, I never realized it.
That this would be the final moment of my life in this body.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Jin-geon! Wake up! How long are you planning to sleep?!”
My brows furrowed at the noisy voice.
Who the hell dared disturb my sleep?
Bang!
The door was suddenly thrown open, and someone roughly grabbed me by the ear.
“Ow! Ow! What the hell?!”
I shot awake from the pain.
And what entered my vision was not the ceiling of my luxurious mansion, but the wallpaper of an unfamiliar room.
And standing before me was a middle-aged woman I had never seen before, mercilessly pulling on my ear.
“Y-You! Who are you?!”
At my bewildered shout, the woman placed her hands on her hips, looking utterly incredulous.
“Me? Me?! Is that any way to talk to your aunt?”
“M-My... aunt?”
“Are you still half asleep? Hurry up and get out here! I made breakfast, so come out and eat!”
The woman angrily slammed the door shut and left.
I clutched my throbbing ear and looked around the unfamiliar room with a blank expression.
Jin-geon...? Aunt...?
I staggered to my feet and approached the full-length mirror standing in the corner of the room.
The moment I faced the mirror, I froze.
Staring back at me was the unfamiliar, youthful face of a young man.
I nearly screamed from shock, but I hurriedly covered my mouth and managed to hold it in.
What the hell is going on?
I wanted to calmly figure out what was happening, but the woman from earlier kept calling my name from outside, leaving me no choice but to open the door and go out.
The meal laid out on the dining table in the living room was worlds apart from the food I was accustomed to being served by hotel chefs.
It was nothing more than an extremely simple, ordinary home-cooked meal.
“Jin-geon, why are you just standing there? Come sit down.”
“Huh? Ah, yes. A-Aunt.”
“What’s wrong with you all of a sudden? Why are you stammering like that?”
I awkwardly sat down.
I stared curiously at the ordinary side dishes in front of me before, without even realizing it, opening my mouth wide and going, “Ah.”
“Why are you sitting there with your mouth open?”
“You’re supposed to feed me, aren’t you?”
A moment of silence followed.
For some reason, the woman suddenly became furious. Without saying a word, she smacked me squarely on the forehead with the spoon in her hand.
“Ow! Why did you hit me?!”
“What? Feed you? Are you a child? You’re a grown man, so why are you asking someone to feed you?!”
“But my women always fed me...”
“This brat has been sitting in his room watching harem anime all day, and now he’s finally gone crazy and can’t even tell reality from fantasy!”
The woman raised her spoon again, and fearing another blow, I hurriedly clasped my hands together and begged for forgiveness.
In the end, I had no choice but to obediently pick up my spoon and finish every bit of the meal she had prepared.
“Jin-geon, I’m going over to Ji-young’s place next door to have some coffee.”
“Yes. Have a nice time, Aunt.”
“Don’t spend all day cooped up in your room watching anime! You’re an adult now, so shouldn’t you at least start looking for a part-time job?”
“Yes, please go ahead.”
“Listen to that attitude. Do you want another smack before you learn some manners?”
“I said, have a safe trip...”
Bang.
As soon as I heard the front door close behind her, I returned to my room and collapsed onto the bed.
“Ugh...!”
My head felt as though it were about to split apart.
It wasn't the spot where she had hit me with the spoon.
Unfamiliar memories were becoming tangled with my original memories, violently tearing through my mind.
At this rate, I really felt like I was going to lose my mind.
I have to sort this out using my ability.
However, I had no idea whether my ability would still work in this pathetic body.
I hurriedly pulled an old smartphone from my pocket, opened the voice recorder, and began recording my own voice.
Then, with trembling hands, I pressed the playback button.
“You will become drowsy the moment you hear this voice.”
My ability was none other than hypnosis.
Of course, it wasn't omnipotent.
If a target had a strong sense of suspicion or powerful resistance, the hypnosis would be broken.
But in return, it possessed the absolute power to make a subject accept suggestions as reality itself.
By taking the time to gradually reinforce a suggestion, I could eventually manipulate almost any human being however I pleased.
Because I had absolute faith in my own hypnosis, I could even push myself into a deep hypnotic state using nothing but a recording of my own voice.
“You will escape the extreme headache caused by the collision of two sets of memories.”
“Your memories from the past and these unfamiliar memories from the present are all completely yours.”
“Your brain will rapidly and perfectly synchronize the two sets of memories without causing you any further pain.”
“Now, when I count to three, you will have completely organized who you were and who you are now.”
“One.”
“Two.”
“Three.”
Flash.
My eyes opened.
The excruciating headache that had been pressing down on my skull as though it might split my head apart had vanished as if it had never existed.
The two lives that had been scattered like fragments and violently colliding had finally been pieced together into one clear picture.
My ability is still intact. Perfect.
The process was complete.
The name of this pathetic body was Moon Jin-geon.
He was currently twenty years old.
He had lost his parents in an accident when he was five.
After finding me alone in a corner of the funeral home, crying miserably, the woman from earlier had taken me in and raised me ever since.
Her name was Lee Ah-young.
She was thirty-five years old and worked as a novelist.
She had originally managed to land a respectable job despite the difficulties, but out of a sense of responsibility for raising her infant nephew herself, she quit not long after joining the company.
After that, she raised me properly, never letting me want for anything, using my parents' life insurance payout along with the money she earned by writing day and night.
Blood ties... What do they even mean?
She sacrificed her entire youth for a nephew who was only fifteen years younger than her?
She was completely different from the bitches in my previous life who had blindly obeyed my every command for the sake of my pleasure and profit.
This was another form of blind devotion that was utterly incomprehensible to me.
Why had I ended up inside this young man's body?
No matter how much I thought about it, there was no way I could find an answer right now.
I tapped the screen of the smartphone in my hand and opened the internet search bar.
I searched for my original name and the name of my company one after another.
The first results that appeared were breaking-news articles.
[Breaking News] Seed Entertainment's President Lee and Next Planet's President Kim: “May the Chairman We Respected All Our Lives Rest in Peace...”
According to the articles, the media had been thoroughly prevented from reporting any specific details regarding the cause or circumstances of my death.
All they reported was that I had died suddenly, and that the two remaining presidents and my wife were serving as chief mourners at a massive, solemn funeral being held privately.
Seeing photographs of the two presidents wiping away their tears and my wife dressed in mourning clothes left me with a strange feeling.
My original body really did die.
I remembered my wife's face from last night, when she had been overjoyed at receiving an arm pillow from me for the first time.
I felt strangely sorry for leaving her behind like that without saying goodbye properly.
I was also slightly concerned about whether Presidents Kim and Lee would be able to handle my absence.
But what was done was done.
Well, they'll figure something out and keep living somehow. The living have to keep living, after all.
There was no need to remain trapped in a past that had already ended with my death.
I closed the article and turned off the smartphone screen.
My eyes fell on the twenty-year-old body reflected in the mirror, brimming with vitality.
Well, now that things have turned out this way...
A quiet chuckle escaped my lips.
As long as I still had this ability, I could always use suitable bitches to gather my fortune again.
In my previous life, I had discovered this ability far too late, and I had always regretted the decline of my physical vigor.
But this young body was overflowing with energy I could barely contain.
More than the power I had lost,
the vigorous stamina and vitality of this twenty-year-old body were far more valuable weapons to me now.