Ah, I Really Shouldn't Anymore
Working a convenience store part-time job, you end up meeting all kinds of people.
There are the customers who just grab a pack of cigarettes and leave, and the ones who walk out with both arms buried in merchandise. The polite little kids who greet you properly, the entitled middle-aged women who kick up a fuss, the old-timers who love to lecture. An endless stream of humanity flows in and out of a convenience store.
And after a full five years on the job, today the part-timer met an entirely new breed of human.
Is she a celebrity?
Ding-a-ling~ The door chimed open, and in walked a woman with hair blue as the sky itself, and eyes to match. With her exotic beauty she looked foreign at first glance, though there was something vaguely Eastern about her features too. How should he put it? Like someone had gathered the finest points of both and sculpted them into a single masterpiece?
You know that meme, the one where God pours the ingredients way too generously when crafting certain humans? Where one person gets the good looks, another the talent, another the personality? Most people get a reasonable, balanced blend — but this woman in front of him had clearly been made by a God who dumped the entire container of beauty into the mold.
That's how undeniably unreal her appearance was.
"I'd like to check out, please."
"Y-yes! Of course!"
The part-timer did his best not to let his eyes drift toward the chest rising above her black short-sleeved T-shirt. She had to be some celebrity or model. Staring could only invite trouble, and he wanted no part of that.
...Huh? Instant ramen, instant rice... kimchi?
Someone who looked like she belonged in a high-end restaurant eating premium steak was buying armfuls of junk food. And not just a single quick meal, either — a whole cartload of it.
Could she actually be into this stuff?
For the briefest moment, he felt an odd kinship with her, but then their eyes met once and he quickly looked away. No way, right? She was probably just trying it out as an experience, he figured. Someone who'd only ever eaten gourmet food, wanting to sample the food of ordinary folk. Or maybe her family or her agency was strict about dieting, and she'd come here to eat this stuff in secret. Her clothes were plain and ordinary, but she could've dressed down on purpose.
Either way, he was certain of one thing: the woman in front of him was absolutely not an ordinary person.
So absorbed was he in these thoughts that he'd been scanning barcodes for a while before his hand froze mid-motion. She had alcohol.
"Ah, could you show me some ID?"
"Sure."
The woman handed it over without a moment's hesitation. Lily... Elbrit. So she was a foreigner, as expected. With looks like that, it would've been stranger if she weren't. Born in 2002. Twenty-one years old. A bit young, that. Something about her had felt so mature that he'd guessed three or four years older, but looking at her now, twenty-one suited her face just fine. The photo was definitely her.
"...You can stop showing me now."
"Ah! Sorry!"
He'd been staring far too long. The part-timer hastily returned her ID, and she finished paying, turned, and started for the door. Damn it... I should've at least said something. How many more times in his life would he ever run into a woman like that?
He was tallying the register in his disappointment when he noticed her stop short at a shelf near the entrance, staring hard at something. ...That's the game top-up card rack. She plucked one of the cards from a game that had been riding a wave of popularity lately and hurried back over.
"This one!"
"Er — yes?!"
"What is this?"
The card she'd picked up: a 50,000-won top-up. Printed dead center on it were a devil and an angel.
"Mmm..."
I'd come back from the convenience store. Ramen was bubbling away in a pot on my tiny kitchen stove. Beside it, the rice warmer hummed a low woooong, and on the table beneath my raised monitor, convenience store kimchi already sat plated in a bowl. The bubbling broth and its smell stoked my ears and nose.
This. This is life.
This was what I'd really wanted to eat. The world I'd possessed into had almost nothing but bland fare — spicy food was practically nonexistent there. The ramen finished cooking, and I scooped the noodles into my bowl with tongs, arranging them just so. A final pour of broth, and it was perfect. Hehehe~ The laughter came all on its own. Honestly, I was happier now than the day I first succeeded at casting holy magic, back when all I ever ate was that greasy, insipid stuff.
"Done!"
Rice, ramen, and kimchi. All three pillars of Korean cuisine assembled on one table. At this point, wasn't it fair to call it a feast of delicacies? I cracked open a can of beer. With a satisfying psshh, the beer slid down my throat.
"Ahh... that's the stuff..."
There wasn't even decent booze in that world. Lukewarm, flavorless nonsense. That's exactly why I'd fought half to death trying to clear the main quest back then. A me spoiled by modern convenience like this could never survive in a backward medieval world. Ah — not that I mind things like not aging, or convenient magic, of course.
"Can't use magic right now, though... Now that I think about it, does that mean I'll start aging?"
It's baked into my species, so surely I won't. I do accept that someday I have to die — I just don't want to live for thousands of years like a celestial. Pwook. Brooding for no reason put a damper on things, so I set the beer down and ate my ramen instead. Slurp. Spicy noodles and hot broth sliding down — my whole insides felt at peace.
"Eh. What does any of that matter? What matters is that I made it back."
The past is the past. All I had to do now was enjoy the present. It wasn't as if I was ever going back there again.
"...Mmm."
Click. Clack-clack. I plopped a spoon in my mouth to gnaw on, booted up the computer, and started hammering at the keys. First time touching a keyboard in thirty years, but my body apparently remembered — typing didn't feel awkward at all. Sitting on top of the keyboard was a small top-up card I'd tossed there carelessly: a little plastic card on which a devil and an angel glared at each other in eternal opposition. Across its face ran the blue figures 50000.
Then I found the search results. No — "found" is putting it politely. They were practically lunging at my screen the instant I hit enter, desperate to be seen. The game. A virtual reality game, to be exact — Devil of Angel. You can see it from a mile off, can't you?
"Not going."
I shut off the screen. Do I look insane? Go back to that place again? Sure, it was a different game from the one whose ad I'd clicked at the very start. Different name, played on a computer instead of in VR, and the story looked different from what I'd skimmed. But I could feel it instinctively, as a Heaven-Scented Human: that game and the world I'd possessed into were deeply connected.
Which is exactly why I shouldn't go. What if I possessed into something all over again?
"By the way... where did my body even go?"
The man I used to be had vanished without a trace, and only Lily Elbrit, the little Saintess of the Small Village, now filled this room with her warmth. So had my original body simply disappeared? Or had Lily's soul, displaced from the body she once owned, taken over my old one? And if not that, was Lily's soul still lingering somewhere inside of me?
"...Too much thinking."
Back in the day, I'd have sharpened my thoughts in a heartbeat — survival demanded it. But having returned to modern life, my brain refused to turn over. Maybe it was just the alcohol.
"Heheh."
I was happy. I couldn't say why, exactly, but I was. Was it joy at coming back? Or just the taste of good food and booze after so long? Hard to say.
At some point the bottom of the ramen bowl had run dry, clattering hollow. Feeling a little lighter, I tossed the bowl in the sink, dumped the trash into the blue garbage bag I'd bought earlier that day, and flopped onto the bed. Heaven-Scented Humans stay impeccably clean, even after a day or two without a wash.
"Ah... no. I really shouldn't."
And I went to the bathroom.
Every morning when I woke, the village chief would come out to greet me right in front of my house. He said it was only proper — I was a Saintess under the protection of the celestials, after all. I found it rather burdensome and asked him to stop, but after about five years, I'd gotten used to it. Then, after another five years, when I announced I would be leaving the village, you wouldn't believe how he carried on. The chief, the villagers — and not my real parents, granted, but Lily's parents all the same. Everyone was reduced to tears.
But my mind was never changed.
Beep-beep-! Beep-beep-!
"......"
Beep-beep-! Beep-beep-! Beep-beep-!!
"Shut up already..."
My skull was ringing. Seven measly cans, and it felt like my head was going to split open. Back when I was a Heaven-Scented Human, I could drink any amount of anything without so much as swaying...
"Uuugh... I'm gonna die..."
With trembling fingers — pale, flawless fingers, annoyingly enough — I groped along the bed's shelf toward the alarm clock, which was still blaring its self-righteous little heart out. I casually cast Strike and smashed it. Or, well, tried to smash it.
"Huh. It won't break..."
Aside from its button being shoved deep into the casing, the alarm was perfectly intact. It was official: magic here had no real effect whatsoever. The modern conveniences I'd longed for so desperately were already mine to enjoy — but every convenience magic had once provided was gone. The one I missed most, of course, was Clean. That wonderfully handy spell erased not just surface grime but every bit of bodily waste and stray illness from the inside out. Thanks to it, I hadn't been sick a single time in nearly thirty years, barring attacks from enemies. Now, if I got sick, I'd actually have to go to a hospital.
Brushing a hand through my bed-mussed hair, I pushed myself up from the mattress. Sunlight streamed through the window and caught me full in the face. Squinting against it, I dragged myself upright, gave the pot a halfhearted rinse, filled it with bottled water, and pulled a ramen packet from the cupboard, tearing it open.
Hair of the dog. I'd had a feeling this would happen, so I'd grabbed some bean sprouts at the mart — I'd just toss a handful in and call it a meal. With a base like this underneath it, surely I'd be right as rain in no time.