Waking Up in a New Skin
I let out a groan. Ow… my head…
It felt like someone had taken a sledgehammer and swung for a full home run right into my skull. The splitting headache yanked my consciousness back to the surface like a fish on a hook.
Before I could even open my eyes, the scorching heat of sunlight slammed into my face. Judging by the way it burned my skin, the sun was already high in the sky.
What the hell? Did I wake up earlier than usual…?
Wait. Sunlight? In my room?
I’m a hardcore hikikomori who lives with triple-layered blackout curtains drawn tight 365 days a year. Not a single ray of light is allowed to trespass. So where the hell was this light pouring in from?
I scrunched my face up tight and slowly cracked my eyes open.
The scene that greeted me wasn’t the familiar, cozy mess of my room. It was a completely unknown space I’d never seen before.
The sight was so vivid and so brutally miserable that my brain short-circuited. My mouth fell open like an idiot.
“Wh… what the…?”
Where the hell am I?
Huh? The voice that came out of my mouth sounded wrong.
“Ugh… uuu…”
The sound that slipped between my lips was thin and high-pitched, completely foreign. It had a scratchy quality like something was caught in my throat, but I didn’t have the luxury of worrying about my voice right now.
I forced strength into my trembling legs and tried to stand. But my joints felt like they’d lost their screws. My legs wobbled uncontrollably.
I barely managed to steady myself and looked around the room. The sight was pure horror.
A cramped space of maybe eighty square feet. When I looked up, old beams thick with sticky spiderwebs hung dangerously overhead, and the ceiling was so low it felt like it might cave in at any moment.
The roof was a pathetic mess of haphazardly woven straw and mud. The floor was nothing but bare dirt covered with a thin, stinking layer of straw. Not even a proper mat in sight.
What is this? Some kind of folk village experience center? Or did I get kidnapped and dumped in some isolated backwater?
I desperately needed information. My eyes locked onto the crude stove in the middle of the room—a sloppy pile of stones stacked together.
The ashes inside had gone stone cold and crumbled long ago. A single blackened, ancient iron pot sat abandoned on top. Inside the pot was some unidentifiable, rock-hard residue (probably barley porridge) left by whoever had eaten here last.
Then a chill crawled up the back of my neck. I slowly turned around.
“H-hiiiik!”
There, lying in the corner, was a corpse.
No—calling it a corpse was too generous. It was a perfect, bleached-white skeleton with not a scrap of flesh left on it.
Wh-wh-wh-wh-what the hell is that?!
Why? Why is there a skeleton lying in the corner of the room? Don’t tell me this is some kind of spoiler for my own ending—dying alone here and turning into bones just like that?!
I’d never imagined I’d come face-to-face with an actual dead body in my life. And this was a 100% real human skeleton, the kind you’d only see in an anatomy lab.
“Hic… hik!”
Hiccups burst out of me like I was having a seizure.
This had to be a dream. It had to be. I must have stayed up all night binge-reading web novels on my phone like always, then passed out in the luxurious embrace of that ridiculously expensive Super Giga Max MK8 gaming chair I’d splurged on recently.
Yeah, that’s why expensive chairs are dangerous. They’re too damn comfortable and send you straight into blockbuster-level nightmares. Waking up to find yourself rooming with a skeleton in some folk village set? That couldn’t possibly be real.
I let out a sigh of relief and rubbed my pounding chest.
Once I convinced myself it was a dream, the fear eased up a little. Maybe because my body felt sluggish, the distance to the skeleton seemed strangely far away, but I brushed it off. Dreams could mess with perspective, after all.
Still… why was this skeleton so huge?
It was way bigger than my own frame, and I’d always taken pride in being an average-height Korean man. This thing was practically giant-sized.
Why would a giant skeleton monster show up in my dream? None of this makes sense.
Maybe the clothes it was wearing would give me a clue about its identity. I narrowed my eyes and looked closer.
A tattered, dress-like rag with rough texture and countless repair marks.
Yeah. A dress. So this was the skeleton of a female giant.
The only other thing that stood out was the mess of jet-black hair scattered across the floor.
Hair doesn’t rot even after the body turns to bones, huh? Learned something new today. I nodded to myself, feeling oddly proud of acquiring such useless trivia.
But then I noticed something. The roots of the black hair had a different color.
Driven by irresistible curiosity, I reached out and picked up a handful.
The dry, coarse texture traveled up my fingertips with horrifying clarity. The roots were a faded golden blond.
So… two-tone dye job? No. Natural blonde, dyed black to disguise it.
“…Huh?”
Wait a second. Were dreams usually this detailed with touch sensation?
“H-hik!”
I freaked out and flung the hair away like it was on fire.
“W-w-w-wait… this… this isn’t a dream?!”
No way. If this wasn’t a dream, did that mean I’d been locked up in some museum storage room full of artifacts? My trembling gaze dropped to the hand that had just been holding the hair.
And I froze solid like a statue.
What I saw was a small, slender body wearing rags similar to the ones on the skeleton.
Pale, delicate hands like those of a child who had never seen sunlight. Glossy black hair flowing down narrow shoulders.
Praying with everything I had that this was just a nightmare, I pinched my cheek as hard as I could and twisted.
“Ow! That hurts…!”
The stinging pain that brought tears to my eyes made it brutally clear this was fucking reality.
“What the hell is this!!!!”
I’d woken up as some nameless little girl.
Cause unknown. Reason unknown.
Next to me was my cozy new roommate—a skeleton—and there wasn’t a scrap of food in sight. Was this some kind of hellish wilderness survival documentary where I got dropped in buck-naked from the start? Was I seriously, completely screwed?
O-okay, deep breaths. Get a grip on my mentality.
Right. First, figure out where the hell I am. Please, god, let this still be Earth. Let it be some movie set built in the middle of nowhere. I prayed with all my heart.
But judging by the rags I was wearing, I was clearly a native of this shithole house. In that case, was the skull over there supposed to be this kid’s mother?
…No. Jumping to conclusions is dangerous.
I remembered the horrifying scene I’d glimpsed through the cracked door earlier. Every single person walking by had black hair. Jet-black hair seemed to be the default setting around here—it was everywhere.
And the people wandering outside looked just as ragged as I did. Absolute beggars. The surrounding buildings were all the same dirt hovels. This was a slum, plain and simple.
Hundreds—no, thousands—of web novels I’d devoured flashed through my mind.
Possession? Reincarnation? That was the question. But I don’t remember getting hit by a truck!
Where did the original owner of this body go? Did my real body have a heart attack while sitting in that chair?
As questions piled up on top of each other, I looked around the stinking, filthy, unsanitary room again and felt my vision go dark.
Ah, so this is how my dream of owning a house comes true. The future looked so bleak I felt like crying.
But no matter how much I tried to deny reality, this wasn’t the Earth I knew. Because I’d seen it clearly through that door crack earlier.
That’s right. Magic. It was definitely magic.
I’d watched some insane musclehead casually carrying a boulder the size of a dump truck—something no normal human could possibly lift. And blue, shimmering aura had been blazing all over his body!
The moment I saw that, every bit of common sense inside me shattered. Even a hardcore gym rat who could bench 500… no, 1000 pounds couldn’t pull that off. That wasn’t something you could explain without superpowers or magic.
Of course, it might not be magic. Maybe everyone in this neighborhood just had Captain America-level base strength.
But I really, really hoped it was magic.
If I’d been dropped into this kind of bullshit fantasy world, wasn’t it only fair that a modern person should at least be able to shoot fireballs from their fingertips? That was the romance of it, right? Probably… because that might raise my chances of surviving in this brutal neighborhood in this tiny kid’s body from zero to at least a booger’s worth.
There had to be a good reason I’d been possessed by this unfamiliar body.
No. There had to be.
I’d been stripped of delivery apps and flushing toilets and thrown into this primitive world. At the very least, if I shouted “Status Window!” into the air, an S-rank cheat ability should pop out to make it worth it.
Something like a grand mission to defeat the Demon King and save the world. That kind of thing.
Gurgle—
Right then, a pathetic sound echoed from my small, pathetic stomach.
Ah, I’m screwed.
There didn’t seem to be a single thing in this house that a rat would bother eating, and now hunger decided to hit at exactly this moment.
Of course, there was that rock-hard mystery barley porridge in the iron pot on the stove earlier. The kind that would make even a passing beggar go “Ah… maybe not.”
But the second I put that in my mouth, I was pretty sure the last shred of dignity left in me as a 21st-century intellectual would snap like a dry twig. I’d rather starve than lick that crap.
Okay. First, I’d go outside and find some normal food that a person could actually eat.
And once I filled my stomach a little, I should probably give my skeleton roommate a proper burial in a sunny spot.
No matter how strong my mentality was, I had zero interest in the eccentric hobby of living with a corpse. Plus, the deep Confucian values and modern ethics inside me were screaming at me that a body should at least be buried in the ground!
I forced my feet into the old, thin leather shoes lying in the corner—presumably belonging to the skeleton.
They were adult women’s shoes on a small child’s feet, so they might as well have been flippers. I’d have no choice but to shuffle along like a penguin, dragging them across the floor.
I’d have no choice but to shuffle along like a penguin, dragging them across the floor.
“Huu…”
I stood in front of the creaking old wooden door.
Peeking outside through the crack earlier to test the waters was one thing. Actually stepping out of this safe zone with my own two feet was something else entirely.
Most of all, I had no idea if this world was safe enough for a tiny girl like me to wander around alone. For all I knew, the second I stepped out I’d get robbed by some thug from this rough neighborhood or eaten by a monster.
But I couldn’t just sit here and wait for a starvation ending either.
“I have to do this… I can do this. Don’t chicken out…”
I muttered to myself, trying to calm my trembling heart.
Because if I stayed locked up in this room, I’d end up as nothing but bones too.