I've Become Hachiko
“Ah… ah… Test, one, two…”
Every time I opened my mouth in front of the mirror, a clear, beautiful young woman’s voice rang in my ears. Lowering my pitch did nothing.
The sound that left my throat remained pure, as if a professional voice actress had recorded it.
“No. Why won’t this go down?”
I cleared my throat a few times. Nothing changed. If anything, the slender voice only spread more clearly through the tiny studio apartment.
With trembling hands I cupped my cheeks. The skin under my palms was unnervingly smooth.
My fingers and wrists were far thinner than before, and the slightest turn of my head sent silver hair cascading over my shoulders and back. On my right foot, one of the red socks that had appeared last night hung half-off my ankle.
This isn’t a dream.
The sock was still there. The ghost story had been real, and this body was real too.
The oversized boxy T-shirt kept sliding down one shoulder. The shorts would fall straight to the floor if I didn’t cinch the drawstring tight.
I took a single step and my body swayed sideways. Even my center of gravity was different.
My limbs felt light, yet the familiar distances and stride no longer matched. The more I tried to move the way I always had, the more my body lagged half a beat behind.
“This can’t be… Is this actually real?”
In the full-length mirror beside the shoe rack stood a slender adult woman roughly 155 cm tall. Long silver hair falling to her waist.
Pale skin. Red eyes wide with panic.
She was identical—not similar, identical—to the cheap V-Tuber avatar “Hachiko” I had bought for thirty thousand won on a freelance site. From the angle of the outer corners of her eyes to the way her bangs parted, even the shape of her lips, she matched the on-screen model perfectly.
“It was a thirty-thousand-won job…”
Of all the things in my life, the cheapest outsourced result had become my body. I didn’t even know whether to laugh or cry.
Staggering, I returned to the desk and rummaged through my wallet. When I held my resident registration card up beside the face in the mirror, reality grew even crueler.
The ID photo showed a blank-faced twenty-seven-year-old non-awakened freeloader named Han Dohyun. Short black hair.
Tired, drooping eyes. A face that hadn’t been properly taken care of for days.
There was not a single resemblance to the silver-haired, red-eyed woman in the mirror now.
“How am I supposed to go anywhere and claim I’m Han Dohyun with this?”
The bank, the hospital, the community center—everything was a problem. Even if the landlord showed up, I couldn’t open the door.
With an ID and a face that didn’t match at all, there was no normal way to explain myself. Until last night, the biggest problem in the world had been the three-hundred-fifty-thousand-won rent.
Now even leaving the apartment to pay it had become impossible. Not only had the ghost story I invented become reality and knocked on my door—I had become the very avatar I used on stream.
Why? For what possible reason?
The more I thought, the more my head turned to chaos.
Bzzzt.
The smartphone I’d tossed on the desk vibrated. The screen was flooded with breaking-news alerts.
I pulled my hand free from the sleeve that had swallowed it and picked up the phone. The main page of every internet news site was already plastered with a single incident.
My breath caught. I tapped the first article and a CCTV clip began to play.
On the grainy black-and-white screen stood the exact figure I had seen through the video phone last night. Black clothes trailing to the floor.
A face with every feature erased. Wet hair seeping through the crack of the door.
The black woman in the footage lifted her head toward the camera. I nearly dropped the phone on pure reflex.
“It’s real…”
An anchor’s urgent voice spilled from the speaker.
“At 2:44 this morning, identical Supernatural Disaster phenomena were reported across major cities including Seoul. Multiple missing-person reports have been filed in connection with an unidentified entity that knocks three times on front doors and then asks a question…”
It was an official broadcast. Not some community hoax, not a hallucination born of terror.
The baseless theory I had spun for thirty-seven viewers had manifested as a nationwide catastrophe. I opened the TubeLive app and searched for “Black Woman.”
The video list scrolled endlessly.
“What the hell is all this…”
Sometime during the night someone had recorded my stream and uploaded it. Short clips and short-form edits had ridden the internet communities and every video platform.
Videos containing the lines and safety rules I had invented were already racking up millions of views and dominating the real-time trending charts. The comment sections refreshed like mad.
The moment I saw the last comment, strength drained from my hands. Identity confirmation.
IP tracking. A visit to my studio apartment.
In my head the worst-case scenario finished itself in an instant. Police, the NIS, or the Hunter Association would smash the door in.
I would be arrested as a terrorist who had known about the Supernatural Disaster in advance and broadcast it. My inexplicable physical change would be discovered and I would be hauled off to a research lab.
“No… no…”
My breathing turned ragged. Was all of this because of me?
Last night I had just spouted whatever came to mind for a few bucks. Yet someone who hadn’t heard those words had vanished, and someone else had survived thanks to the safety rule I threw out.
My words were no longer disposable internet-stream nonsense. They were words that could kill or save people.
The moment I accepted that fact, my stomach turned over.
With shaking hands I logged into the TubeLive Studio admin page. The original VOD of last night’s live stream was still sitting there.
[Delete Video]
My finger hovered over the button. If I erased this, at least one piece of evidence that I had created the disaster would disappear.
No—I hadn’t known anything. I had just done an ordinary ghost-story stream.
Without the video, no one could prove I had done it on purpose.
Yeah. Delete it.
This is to stop the phenomenon. If more people watch the video and panic, the situation could get worse.
I’m not destroying evidence just to save myself. That was how I convinced myself as I pressed delete.
Video has been deleted.
I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping the crushing guilt in my chest would vanish with it.
Immediately I went into channel settings and changed the visibility.
Channel has been set to private.
The Hachiko channel vanished from the screen. Only then did I let out a breath.
“Is it over?”
But the search results still showed countless mirrored videos.
I had only deleted the original.
Short-form clips, edited versions, and re-uploads had already spread beyond any hope of control. And there was no proof that the Black Woman in reality had disappeared just because the video was gone.
On the live news feed still playing on my phone, a new bulletin continued.
“Even after daybreak, phenomena believed to be the Black Woman continue to be sighted in underground walkways where sunlight never reaches and in dark apartment corridors. Citizens are advised not to enter dark places alone…”
I stared blankly at the screen. Even after deleting the original, the phenomenon had not stopped.
What had already happened could not be made to un-happen.
“What… what have I done…”
I crawled into the corner of the bed and curled into a ball. Silver hair spilled over my shoulders and knees.
Should I go live again? If I explained that everything had been made up, would it stop?
But the moment I called it a lie, what if the safety rules vanished too? People who had survived thanks to the red socks could be put in danger again.
If I did nothing, even more people might disappear.
There was no answer.
Whatever choice I made, I would have to take responsibility.
That was when it happened.
BEEEEP!
BEEEEP!
BEEEEP!
The emergency disaster alert tore through the narrow studio. The sharp sound from the speaker bounced off the walls and ceiling, multiplying itself.
I hunched my shoulders and stared at the phone on the bed. A red alert screen flashed.
My heart hammered in the same rhythm as the alarm. Clutching the loose fabric of my clothes, I picked up the phone.
[Ministry of the Interior and Safety]
Urgent national safety guidelines regarding the nationwide Supernatural Disaster “Black Woman” that occurred this morning.
If someone knocks on your front door, under no circumstances answer or open it.
If a standoff occurs, put on red socks turned inside out. Survival effect has been verified.
Avoid entering dark places.
Source: HACHIKO channel tip video
The moment I read the final line, my breath stopped. The baseless safety rule I had improvised on the spot just to scrape together three hundred fifty thousand won in rent…
…had become an official emergency disaster text from the government of the Republic of Korea, filling every citizen’s phone screen.