I Became a Girl
Today, once again, I dragged my worn-out body through the front door of my home.
A studio apartment with nothing special in it—if anything, the empty spaces seemed to outnumber the filled ones. It was my new place, exactly one month old to me now. Since I'd thrown out everything from my old home, little remained, and the whole house felt dry and barren.
"Haa..."
I flung my exhausted body onto the bed.
Why is it so hard just to get through each day?
The loneliness won't go away.
The Awakener-Hopeful Community—better known as the Hunter Board—was a gathering place for people who spent their days posting, praying they'd awaken one day. And I was the one who'd staked out a fixed handle there, writing post after post every single day about how hard and how lonely everything was.
Most people ignored me, but every once in a while a comment like that would come in, and the brief exchange that followed was enough to leave me satisfied.
I know. I know perfectly well how twisted up I am these days.
A month ago, I sent off the last of my family. The damned Gates had torn us apart once already, and then even the final one left was taken—an illness we couldn't afford to cure.
No matter how much better the world got, ordinary people couldn't yet reach any of those benefits. Everything within reach cost money, and since we couldn't scrape together that kind of money, we chose instead to spend the time she had left being happy, and let that be our goodbye.
In this day and age, people like me were hardly a rarity.
People who'd lost their families to the Gates? Plenty. People who'd lost those families to sickness instead? Plenty. People unlucky enough to get hit with both? Not unheard of, either.
I was simply another one of them. Just another luckless bastard, that was all.
I cracked open a can of beer and idly watched the community scroll by. Idiots, weirdos, one guy beaming with pride over his new awakening, and a crowd of people envying him for it.
The beer, slowly going lukewarm, softened my body. I pulled the blanket I'd shoved into the corner of the bed—still carrying a faint smell that hadn't quite faded—into my arms.
Why did a person's life have to tangle itself up so cruelly?
When would this suffocating feeling ever go away?
I held the blanket close. Breathing in its faint scent, I fought down the hitching sobs. Mom...
I didn't say it aloud. And probably, from now on and forever, this house would stay as empty as it was tonight—because no matter how many things I filled it with, I doubted my loneliness would ever leave.
Tonight, too, the night went on slipping away.
The unusually long summer looked like it was finally coming to an end. Strange—the little breeze slipping in felt far too cold, so I pulled the blanket around myself.
My body was colder than it had any right to be. When I stretched an arm out to drag the blanket closer, it wobbled strangely, loose in a way it never had been before.
...Huh?
I reached, and my arm fell short of where I wanted it. I opened my eyes to find the blanket, and what I saw was wrong.
...Am I still dreaming?
A slender, pale arm. A body that looked like it would snap if I leaned on it the slightest bit.
Wondering if I was dreaming, I moved lightly—and found far too much about my body that didn't match memory. The hair I'd kept cropped short to save on barbershop bills brushed against the pillow, and the physique I'd maintained so carefully—because getting sick cost money—had lost all its firmness, gone soft to the touch.
Especially when I felt two small mounds rising gently from that slight frame.
I gave up pretending I could stand it, sat up, and bolted for the bathroom. My steps were a few beats slower than usual, but that hardly mattered right now.
And when I finally looked at the figure in the bathroom mirror—
there was a girl.
"...Hah?"
High. The sound coming out of my throat, unmistakably mine, was high.
I ran my fingers over my face while watching the mirror. It moved exactly as I moved, reflected faithfully. Finally, I gave my cheek a light tug.
Ugh..
Even twisted up in pain, the face was hopelessly adorable. That is—if you set aside the fact that it was mine.
I'd gone to sleep, woken up, and the world had made a girl of me. Why on earth...?
I blinked hard and swept my gaze around the room. And there it was—something that seemed to answer my unspoken what if.
A blue window was floating right beside me.
Name: ??? (formerly Lee Hoon)
Class:Covenant Executor
+ You may exercise covenants in accordance with the Pact. Contracted entities can be freely summoned and unsummoned at the user's will.
Rank:F (???)
Skills:From the Covenant (EX), Gloomy Charm (A), Restoration (B)
I glared in silence at the status window which, as if congratulating me on my awakening, had reduced my name to my old one. Word was that status windows were lifeless things, yet this one edged slowly sideways, as though it had been caught doing something wrong.
"...Ha."
There had been times I'd wanted to awaken. Times when, cursing the Gates that had stolen my family, I'd wanted to close one with my own hands. But awakening was supposed to be born of a user's powerful will and emotion combined—and if anyone witnessed this scene, I suspect even the person who said that would admit it was bullshit.
If Mother could have seen her son turned into this, what would she have thought? ...Honestly, she probably would have laughed. She used to say, every now and then, that she wished she'd had a daughter.
But that didn't mean I'd volunteered to be her daughter. Least of all like this.
"What kind of prank is this supposed to be?"
At my words, the status window fled from my field of vision as though bolting for its life. And here I'd been told it was a simple, emotionless pane of light. Right now it looked for all the world like something alive.
"Come here."
When I beckoned, the frightened window crept sheepishly back to me.
Off-the-scale abilities are worth only as much as their nature allows, but an awakening that came with both an A-rank and a B-rank skill was more than enough to call a jackpot.
Except for the part where I'd turned into a girl.
I flicked my fingers toward the status window to pull up my skills' details. It zipped close in an instant and displayed the information.
Surely, you must have been someone who was loved. If that were not so, the talent for covenant and summoning would never have manifested. This ability calls forth summons attuned to the user's wavelength, and with the summon's consent, a covenant may be forged. No mana is required to summon. All that is needed is earnest longing.
A slightly crooked way of speaking, a cold, clear-eyed view of the world—and yet people find charm in you regardless. Very easily, in fact! This ability, having bloomed, has granted your body an appearance people can't help but adore.
A talent for mending what is wounded. Extend a hand and offer your mana, and external injuries can be healed. The mana required shifts with the size and severity of the wound.
As "easily loved" went, these were undeniably fine abilities—but the words describing them were unsettlingly sharp. A crooked way of speaking, a cynical gaze. It felt like they were sniping at me specifically.
"Still, nobody said you had to make this my body."
The face of a young child who looked like she'd struggle to manage anything on her own. Somehow gloomy to look at, radiating an air of sorrow—a girl you felt you had no choice but to embrace, tears and all.
That was me.
"...So this is what my desperate longing was?"
I'd wanted to become a girl...? And not just any girl—a little, wispy thing like this?
I fought down the disgust welling up even toward myself. Instead, I snatched up my phone.
"The Hunter Board."
I tore through the search bar of the board where freshly awakened hunters gathered.
🔍 physical changes after awakening
🔍 strange cases after awakening
🔍 sex changed after awakening
However hard I searched, I couldn't find a single soul who'd been through anything like me. There was the case of Grandpa Park Chun-bok, eighty-eight years old, awakening and regaining the face of a late teenager—but not one case of anyone's sex changing.
Right. A brand-new form of awakening being discovered would be a tremendous blessing for the world.
...If it had happened to anyone but me, I could even have congratulated them.
Just then, my phone alarm went off in a frenzy.
- You have work. -
In all the shock of my changed body, it had slipped my mind entirely—I was an office worker. And I was supposed to walk into that office looking like this, wearing the clothes I used to wear? How exactly would the people at my company see me?
Oh my. This employee of ours... you've gotten awfully cute, haven't you?
I could practically hear the giggle of the office manager who lived for gossip in the break room. Absolutely, absolutely could not go in.
I pressed send, and before long the reply came back.
Reading my manager's reply, I opened the Hunter Board again. Driven by a desperate hope that somebody, somewhere, might actually be able to help, I wrote up a question post.
It's absolutely not about me, I'm just curious, okay?
When you awaken, you can suddenly use mana you couldn't even touch before, and there's that legendary case of Grandpa Park Chun-sik—the "88-Year-Old Pretty-Boy Drift" himself—so surely turning into a woman could happen too, right?
I'd been hoping, against hope, to turn up even one real case. These two just seemed convinced I was spouting nonsense.
"Right... 'So you went to bed and woke up as a little girl?' First thing they'd do is point me toward the psych ward."
I meekly turned my phone off.
First things first, then. I decided to start with what I could actually verify.
I thought back to that skill sitting in my skill window. An off-the-scale skill—every time one had ever surfaced in the world, it had turned out to be either earth-shattering or worthless garbage. Information about it rose in my mind, and along with it came a sense of how it was meant to be used.
So, of the two proofs of my awakening, the first—the status window—was already checked.
Now, to test the second, I stretched my hand into the empty air and spoke. I swallowed my embarrassment down hard.
"I call upon you."
Pure white light spilled out from my fingertips. A hexagram vast enough to fill every corner of my tiny room rose into being, and I held my reason together and let the skill carry my thoughts where it willed.
And where those thoughts came to rest was my family—who no longer existed.
"O companion who would lift this loneliness from me. I call my friend."
The skill demanded nothing from me but earnest longing. So I thought of who I'd been before the awakening—the me who found even this tiny room too big to bear, who craved the sound of another voice so badly he did nothing but dump melancholy posts on a message board. And that me was calling out for a new family to carry him out of his loneliness.
"So cross the wall of worlds, and come to me."
Chanting an incantation too mortifying for words, I spoke the activation phrase that would set the skill alight.
"…From the Covenant."