The Story of My Life (1)

I suppose I should start by telling my own story.

It was one of those nights where I met up with friends for the first time in ages and we grabbed a few drinks. The mood started off great, but for some reason we ended up in a huge fight. Thanks to that, the whole drinking session went straight to hell. I felt so disappointed that the night I’d been looking forward to had ended so abruptly. Wanting to drink at least by myself, I bought some beer and decent snacks at the convenience store and headed home. That’s when a sudden wave of drowsiness hit me. In the end, I collapsed right there.

That’s the whole story of what happened to me in the past. Or, to be precise, what happened to me when I was still a man.

Anyone who likes to drink has probably experienced something like it at least once. It wasn’t like I caused any real trouble for others. Everyone’s had at least one fight with a friend ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠while drunk, right? It wasn’t anything special. Just a trivial little incident.

…At least, it wasn’t a sin bad enough to deserve being sent to hell.

The first thing I noticed there was the bone-chilling cold. It was so freezing I briefly wondered if it was winter. The cold stabbed at my skin like needles until I finally woke up. But instead of sweet rest, what greeted me when I opened my eyes was a white hell.

Even after opening my eyes, it was still freezing. So cold I thought I might actually freeze to death. Blizzards blew without pause, every single day of the year, swallowing the world like a greedy serpent. The landscape looked exactly like the end of an ice age had arrived.

At first I thought it was a dream. Unfortunately, what lay before my eyes was cold, brutal reality.

The Winter of the Apocalypse. A terrible curse where blizzards raged without a single day of rest. Even now, a hundred years later, that curse still tormented the empire. And of all places, the north suffered the worst.

The southern regions of the empire were somewhat manageable, but the north was buried in blizzards all year round. No living creature is born to face blizzards head-on. As a result, the north had completely lost its ability to sustain itself and was forced to rely on supplies like food and clothing painstakingly obtained from the south.

But even more than the reality of that white hell descending upon me, I was writhing in an emptiness I couldn’t even begin to imagine. At first I thought the piercing emptiness in my heart, sharp as a midwinter blade, was simply because of the cold that felt like it would snap my hands and feet right off. But I soon realized the true reason for that emptiness.

The absence I felt the moment I opened my eyes. I tried to turn my head away, to ignore it, but the sense of loss was impossible to deny. What I did next was closer to pure instinct.

Twenty-seven years may not seem long, but to me it had been an entire lifetime. My other half that had been with me every single day. With trembling hands, I reached down between my legs.

……It was gone. Really gone.

Only then did I fully understand how our family cat, Baya, must have felt. So that’s what it was like when your peanut disappeared. I’m truly sorry I couldn’t understand back then!

Well, there’s no point hiding it. The man I used to be had suddenly, overnight, become a woman. Not the selective transgender kind where the body is male but the mind thinks it’s female. Biologically, socially—everything—I was now a woman.

Yet I wasn’t even given time to soothe my heart, lost in emptiness and chaos. There was a reason people called it a white hell. Because they had come.

What would it feel like if a man-eating beast suddenly appeared right in front of you? And what if there was no tamer to control it, not even a cage to hold it back? You’d probably be so terrified you couldn’t even move.

But they were worse than that.

They had antlers like deer on their heads. Their faces resembled deer, but their mouths were torn wide from side to side, with sharp fangs glistening through dried blood. Most grotesque of all were their unnaturally long, dangling arms and legs, and the torso where ribs and internal organs were completely exposed. No matter how you looked at it, they couldn’t be classified as normal beasts.

Wendigos. Slaves of winter. Death that approaches with the cold. Monsters and predators that came with the Winter of the Apocalypse, creatures that devoured humans.

Obviously, if ordinary human strength could affect them, they wouldn’t be called monsters. Not only were human weapons useless against Wendigos—even the vaunted power of magic had no effect. In the end, people had no choice but to weep and offer up the corpses of family members who had already died from cold and starvation. At least then the living would be spared.

But even that wasn’t always enough. Sometimes the Wendigos grew capricious and dragged away living people instead. All that was left for humans to do was pray to the heavens.

If that had been the end of it—if that cruel truth was all there was—I might have simply accepted it with a sigh. Sure, it was disgusting to watch monsters act like they owned the place, but what power did I have to stop man-eating beasts? At least until the moment they began obsessively targeting me.

At first I thought it was just bad luck. After all, they didn’t always settle for corpses—sometimes they attacked the living. I figured I had simply been unlucky enough to be one of their targets.

But the attacks started coming once a month, then gradually shortened to every two weeks, then every week. And they only ever attacked wherever I was. Anyone who wasn’t an idiot could see it wasn’t mere misfortune.

It was obvious. The Wendigos were after me.

Normally, even when Wendigos attacked living people, the shortest interval was two months. And people weren’t stupid enough to miss something so obvious.

“…….”

Before I knew it, people were calling me the witch who controlled the Wendigos.

There were Wendigos in front of me, and if I tried to go back, people with pitchforks were waiting. So what was I supposed to do?

“My heart is still that of a man.”

Between the worst option and the second-worst, I’d take the second-worst any day.

There’s an old joke that goes, “I’d rather die than go back to the military.” As a man who had served in the Republic of Korea’s army, I used to laugh and agree. But when it actually became my reality, it didn’t feel quite so funny.

And it wasn’t even a clean death—they were going to eat me alive. If those were the only two choices in front of me, most people would probably choose to reenlist. I did the same. At least I didn’t want to be chewed up like a living snack.

Fortunately, the army that fought against the mysterious monsters known as Wendigos was always short on manpower. It was like a starving hippo that would devour any usable resource it could find. Even if that resource happened to be a woman.

Thankfully, once I entered the fortress, the Wendigos stopped pursuing me. But if I ever stepped outside again, it was obvious they would torment me once more. The imperial army might be different from the Korean military, but an army was still an army. The moment I enlisted, I immediately wanted to be discharged.

Yet if I left the military now, I would become a Wendigo’s meal that very day. Or I’d be captured by the people with pitchforks and burned at the stake alive. I needed a way to kill the Wendigos. Or at the very least, a way to protect my own body.

With that resolve, I learned martial arts from the instructors assigned to the territory. And that was when I discovered a special power that no one could have predicted.

I possessed the ability to create flames.

“What do you mean? Explain yourself clearly, adjutant.”

The reason the Winter of the Apocalypse was so terrifying wasn’t simply because winter never ended. Of course, that alone was enough to call it apocalyptic for the people… but there was one fundamental reason no one could stop it.

It was a curse.

In any land afflicted by the curse of the Winter of the Apocalypse, no flame was permitted to exist. Even indoors, where blizzards could not reach, the only way to keep a lantern lit was to coat it with protective magic. Even then the fire flickered dangerously and required enormous resources and mana to maintain.

But my flames completely defied common sense. Without needing any protective spells, they burned hot indoors and burned even hotter outdoors. Now I understood why the Wendigos had been so obsessively targeting me.

In other words… I was their one and only hard counter.

“You bastards are as good as dead now.”

I have no intention of cursing the people who rejected me as traitors. In such a harsh environment, they had at least tried to help me at first. If I wanted to resolve the situation, I had to catch the real culprit. There was no point taking out my anger on innocent people.

“In the end, this is all your fault. So endure the pain you brought upon yourselves.”

I trained in the empire’s centuries-old imperial martial arts until I was practically vomiting, learning from veteran instructors with real combat experience. From a skilled mage, I learned how to handle the flames of the sun. Fortunately it wasn’t all that different from magic, so I mastered it without much difficulty.

And from that moment on, the counterattack began.

Wendigos were essentially immortal. Neither cold weapons nor magic worked on them. But once I stepped onto the battlefield, everything changed. My flames could pierce the Winter of the Apocalypse and kill Wendigos. Even steel refined with my flames gained the power to slay the undying monsters.

I seized that opportunity. My position within the empire grew enormously. And that meant the empire ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠would grant almost any request I made. That was my chance.

Why had I enlisted in the army in the first place? To survive those damned Wendigos. And for that goal, I spared no means or methods. If it could kill Wendigos, I took in criminals and traitors alike, every last one of them. Some people objected, but when I invoked the greater cause, they fell silent.

The Winter of the Apocalypse was a cursed calamity that had tormented the empire for over a hundred years. Now that a chance to uproot it had finally appeared, how could anyone let it slip away?

And so, a special unit was created solely for subjugating Wendigos. Soon after, the war for my survival began. People called that war the Winter War.

Ten years have passed since the war began. The Winter War has ended in the empire’s victory, and I have become the war hero who saved the empire.

And the very first words spoken by this hero were:

Any Korean man would understand exactly how I felt.