Death
“Today... I’m on a safe day...?”
A loud gurgle rolled out of his stomach and hauled his mind back up.
“...Ah.”
The belly-clock had gone off so noisily that he finally came to. He dragged his eyes off the novel and checked his wristwatch.
“What the hell did I even do for it to be almost eight already?”
He rolled the stiffness out of his body and got up. He hit like on the novel he’d just been reading and scrolled on down. It had been so long since he’d found a genuine masterpiece that the sentences still seemed to be drifting through his head one by one.
He opened the comments at once.
It really had been ages since a novel left him this satisfied, so praise that high was hardly wasted. He even wanted to grit his teeth and send the author a tip... but sadly, he didn’t have the money.
He rubbed his stomach, set the phone down, and a hollow feeling washed over him all at once.
“Ah... guess I’ve gotta go find something new again.”
Any web-novel junkie like me would understand: we have to know, at all times, that there’s something worth reading. Doubly so for someone like me, whose downstairs only answers to hypnosis-degradation smut.
Since high school I’d read nothing but hypnosis novels and hypnosis comics. I’d devoured every degradation story there was, enough that I could honestly call myself an expert. Games or novels, I could say without hesitation that nobody out there knew more about that lane than I did. Back in high school, when I was thrashing around in my own sex drive, I’d even decided I was going to become a hypnotist and tried it on a girl I was friends with. I turned into a loner after that, of course, but I didn’t regret it. At that level, I was proud to call myself the GOAT of the hypnosis-smut world.
I put up with the hunger, lay down, and chewed over the story I’d just read. Needing dirty thoughts before I could fall asleep was a habit that had set hard in me since I was little.
“Haa... if something like hypnosis actually existed... I know I’d be damn good at using it.”
The truth was, I’d fallen this deep into hypnosis degradation because I was an outrageous omnivore. I’d first stumbled onto porn back in second grade, and by middle school, when my sex drive was running wild, I’d taken my first step into erotic fiction. Novels had something more vivid in them than comics. I’d taken a bite of every genre there was, barring the niche stuff like BL and scat. There was a peculiar transgressive pleasure that came from relationships whose common sense had been rewritten, and the premise could hold all kinds of genres at once. You could stick any degradation you liked onto it and the plausibility never broke. Hypnosis degradation had been more than enough to set my boiling blood going back in high school...
Grrrrgle—
“Ah. Yeah, yeah, I hear you.”
I couldn’t ignore the belly-clock going off again, so I got up. It was a bit of a waste, but dinner tonight would be the one cup ramen I had left...
I rummaged around.
“...Huh?”
Nothing. It had definitely been there until yesterday. Thinking about it, I remembered eating the bowl noodles that morning. Son of a bitch. I opened the fridge. Dinner, for lack of anything better, would be an egg...
“...This is fucking sad.”
I’d been ready to whip up a quick scramble, and there weren’t even eggs. I picked up the phone I’d flipped facedown earlier and checked the account balance.
It was a pain, but there was no helping it. I’d have to go out and buy something. I grabbed the towel off the drying rack and ducked into the bathroom.
Five minutes later I was drying my hair with the dryer, standing in front of the old full-length mirror. My shabby self looked back at me. The dryer whined.
Name: Lee Dongwoo. Age: twenty-five. Height, about 173 centimeters—a little under average—and the face... in good conscience, I could not call it handsome. The part that mattered most on a man... this much was probably roughly average. I pulled my underwear up and went at my hair with a four-dollar flat iron and some hairspray.
“Living alone sucks at times like this...”
Being able to spend the whole day reading smut cover to cover was nice, sure, but the meals were definitely not the same quality as back at my parents’ house. Or were they? For a repeat examinee, cup ramen and an egg might already be a luxury.
I grabbed my wallet and headed straight out of the studio.
I shoved the villa’s front door open, and hard sunlight dropped onto my face. I threw both arms out like a statue and pulled in a deep breath. Maybe it was just my mood. The sky looked bluer and clearer today than usual.
“Feels like... something’s gonna happen today?”
I took the hit and went flying, and my head slammed into a utility pole.
The black SUV seemed to pause for a second, then picked up speed again and pulled away. A hit-and-run? Bloody phlegm crawled up my throat, and breathing like a normal person was already difficult.
“...Ghk.”
Fuck. I couldn’t die like this. If I died, I was taking that bastard with me—that hit-and-run son of a bitch.
I stretched an arm toward the nearest curb.
Damn it.
My arm came up a little short and never reached. I rolled my eyes in a hurry and looked around, but the quiet alley didn’t even show a sign of anyone walking this way. Alley or not, the sun was dead overhead. This was just the world telling me to die.
A sick, unsteady ache started creeping through the back of my head. Goddamn it. The back of the head was exactly where I’d slammed dead-on into the pole... Before long, every bit of tension left my body the way it does right after a bath, and I went slack. At this rate I wouldn’t even get to say goodbye to Mom and Dad. As if my luck was going to be good today. My ass. Tears came.
“Ah...”
I held on for as long as holding on lasted, and then, all at once, everything in front of my eyes dyed black.
Yeah.
I’m fucked.
Mom, Dad, I’m sorry.
“...Mm.”
At some point I realized my body didn’t hurt at all, and that it moved the way I thought it should. I opened my eyes slowly.
“Where... is this?”
I braced a hand on my knee and rose, carefully, onto both feet. Where I’d been lying was hard-packed dirt, the stones neatly picked out of it. Every direction was full of thick white fog. I gave a little hop and looked around. The fog was so dense that even standing straight up, my toes only showed through it as a blur.
What the hell. The afterlife? But it was nothing like the underworld I’d pictured. How to put it—I’d been ready for something livelier... hotter, even.
“...Is anybody there? Anybody here?”
No answer came back. Had someone heard me and gotten wary because of the fog, or was there really no one at all? I dropped onto the hard dirt with a thump.
“...”
I dug through my pockets and pulled out my wallet. Thankfully, nothing was missing. The family photo tucked in it was still there too. Me as a little kid, smiling bright as anything, and my parents standing on either side. I wasn’t going to see them again, was I.
“Ha...”
It really had been a life stuffed with bitter regret. Not quite born with a dirt spoon in my mouth—more of a bronze-spoon household—and the days I’d lived had been ordinary enough... except my greed was filthy, and the things I’d ruined because of it weren’t just one or two. Especially those precious three years before the college entrance exam, which I’d thrown away on nothing because I’d gone around announcing I was going to be a hypnotist.
“The more I think about it, I’m a pathetic piece of shit. For real...”
I tried to cry. The tears wouldn’t come, so I rubbed my eyes with dirt-stained fingers and forced them out.
“If the hypnosis had just worked, my whole life would’ve turned around...”
The year after the exam had been nothing but drifting. It was only after that I’d gotten anything you could call a purpose. I’d enlisted determined to come out of the army an actual person, even tried for a logistics posting, and failed. Then I was discharged. But I did have something: money I’d scraped together with everything I had, starting from basic training, the military savings included. With that money I got a studio on the excuse of repeating the entrance exam and enjoyed a thoroughly degenerate life as an unemployed bum. Three months later was now.
Looking back, I really had lived like an idiot. If this was how it was going to go, I should’ve just bitten the bullet and gone to a top-shelf escort at least...!
All those days of comforting myself that the feel of my right hand and the real thing (?) couldn’t be that different. I’d lived twenty-two years of my life a virgin, steadily hypnotizing myself the whole time, and sure enough, now that I was actually dead, never having gotten my hands on a real woman’s body was the regret that stuck.
I’m sorry, Mother, Father... Please forgive me for running my mouth about this kind of thing even in the afterlife...
And so, right up to the moment I died, I had become a virgin who could look up at heaven without a shred of shame...
“...”
No.
No, that wasn’t it.
The more I thought about it, the more fucking unfair it was. Fuck that. Shit. You think I’m just going to die like this? Even if I had to meet the Jade Emperor himself, I was going to get an answer out of him about why he’d made my life this goddamn mess. In novels, if you mouth off like this, something always comes of it, doesn’t it?
I shot up off the ground. Footsteps carried me forward, and I started walking a road I couldn’t see. Not that calling it a road meant much. It was just flat ground going on forever.
How much time had passed?
“...Maybe I should’ve stayed back there.”
The fog was so thick I couldn’t tell whether I was going forward or walking off on a diagonal. Anxiety crept up, slow and crawling. Was this even right? Maybe I wasn’t supposed to go looking. Maybe if I’d just stayed put, something would’ve come and found me.
...!
That was when I saw a faint band of light beyond the fog. A glow stretching toward me, soft as a laser pointer. As if something had hold of me, I started toward the source. Once I had a direction, there was no reason to lose the way the way I had before.
“...?”
But I hadn’t gone far before I stopped dead. A question had occurred to me. The fog was so thick I couldn’t even see what was right in front of my face, so that light... how was I seeing it at all? Something felt wrong, so instead of staring at the radiant glow I turned my eyes to the surroundings.
“Well, there’s nothing else I can actually see besides that, but...”
Some kind of signpost, guiding me?
Then, past fog billowing up in thick rolls, a shape came into view—less present than the light, but definitely there. It was the form of a woman, lying on her side and beckoning.
“This is it.”
Afterlife or not, the side with a woman on it had to be the right one.