TS
"Hey, Lee Kang-yeon!"
The morning after we'd come home from our trip to Japan — stumbling in at dawn — a young woman's voice I'd never heard before rang in my ears.
"This is not the time to be sleeping!"
I still hadn't opened my eyes, but by feel it was somewhere around ten in the morning. Late, sure, but not quite lunchtime yet.
Was there anyone who'd come looking for me at this hour? More than that — this was a room I'd only just moved into after discharge. None of my friends even knew the address yet. I'd told my parents I wouldn't be home until the small hours, so there was no reason for them to show up and drag me out of bed either.
"Ah, fuck."
Was that aimed at me?
I was still half-drowned in sleep, eyes shut, turning the thought over — when the mattress suddenly heaved like someone had climbed onto the bed. The next instant, a crushing pressure slammed down on my lower abdomen.
"Ghk—!"
"Open your eyes before I start pounding you."
"Hhk—!"
Alarm jolted me awake. I cracked my eyes open — and found a woman mounted on top of me.
A small frame. A face anyone would call cute. Long, reddish-tinted hair. And, filling most of my field of vision, a pair of enormous… those.
I did not know this person.
"……Who are you?"
"Dude. I actually got TS'd."
"Huh?"
"I fucking got TS'd for real!"
What the hell was she talking about?
None of the women I knew had a voice like that, or talked like that. If I had to pick someone similar, maybe the friend I was currently room-sharing with? But that guy, short as he was, was unmistakably a man.
"Oh, come on, quit playing dumb!"
She whined and rocked her body. Did she realize her ass was pressed against my lower stomach while she did that? And those massive things were bouncing right along with her.
"……."
No — wait. TS? The only person who'd say something like that was definitely that guy.
"Yoo Jae-min?"
"Who else lives in this house?!"
This person… was Yoo Jae-min?
Lee Kang-yeon.
Birthday: July 9th.
A solidly built man.
Not quite the top student in the country, but close enough — a student in the Subculture Artwork department at Hankuk University.
More precisely, a student currently on military leave.
One look at the major and you'd know: a severe-grade otaku.
Age twenty-two. Today's date being November 6th, he was scheduled to return as a sophomore come March.
The woman sitting on my stomach, ranting… woman?
Anyway. This one's name was Yoo Jae-min.
Twenty-two years old.
Birthday: November 18th.
Mathematics major at Hankuk University, also on military leave.
A high school classmate — same homeroom in sophomore year. Shortest kid in the class, which earned the nickname Jammin, as in "brat."
One of the few otakus in our year, so we'd gotten pretty close, as I recalled.
After graduation we never ran into each other again — until the military.
Around the time I was wrapping up private first class, the company personnel clerk was nearing discharge, and I — famously the Hankuk University guy — got forcibly slotted into the position. Yoo Jae-min, for his part, was a personnel admin at battalion HQ.
We crossed paths constantly handling company paperwork, so we naturally got close again. As discharge approached, he found a place and we decided to live together.
Apparently his uncle had come into the apartment by chance?
One of the uncle's employees had gotten stuck with a jeonse scam, and the uncle stepped in to take over the unit. The scammed employee was a veteran the company needed at a new factory, but without the deposit refunded he couldn't move near the site. What else was there to do? The place happened to be near the nephew's school, so the uncle paid out the deposit and bought it.
Even for family, free wasn't an option. The relative offered a three-room 2LDK for a deposit of eight million won and seven hundred thousand a month including maintenance — utilities separate. A steal of a price, but still steep for a broke college student, so he'd dragged me in — same school, same situation — to split it fifty-fifty.
Well. Three hundred fifty thousand each is cheap for Seoul.
About a month after discharge, once we'd settled into the place, we decided to take a trip to Japan before returning to school.
No particular reason.
We were both otakus, so the vague goal of "gotta hit Akihabara" had simply floated up.
We bought nothing but four-nights-five-days plane tickets and left. The whole trip was pure otaku tourism and food pilgrimage, nothing else.
By the afternoon of day three, after burning through most of the attractions and with our purpose starting to blur, Jammin spoke up.
"Hey. You read web novels, right?"
"Yeah."
"You read TS stuff?"
"……I don't go looking for it, but kinda?"
"Then wanna hit this place called the TS Shrine?"
"Are you insane? ……Let's go right now."
The place we ended up at was Yeohwa Shrine.
From what I looked up on the way, it wasn't actually a TS shrine. Among the related folklore there was a story about a fox turning into a woman… wait, that isn't TS at all. That's a furry shrine.
Anyway, at a shrine with basically nothing to see, this Jammin — having reached the absolute depths of otaku-hood — made a serious wish.
"Please make me the greatest TS beautiful girl in the country so I can coast through life on easy mode."
He even stuffed a thousand-yen bill into the offering box.
"Who the hell throws ten thousand won away at a place like this? And looking up the folklore, it isn't even a TS legend."
"Turning a guy into a girl has gotta be easier than turning a fox into a woman, right?"
"Okay, that… weirdly makes sense?"
"Dude. Fuck. What if I actually get TS'd?"
"Isn't the natural next step for a TS girl to start streaming? And you said you're Master tier in League. As a guy, whatever — but as a girl, that's a tier people actually want to watch, isn't it?"
We joked about it like that back then.
We didn't know yet.
That the wish ticket for the god living in that shrine might cost a thousand yen.
I close my eyes.
It still comes back crystal clear.
A full head shorter than me.
A fairly pretty-boy face.
Hair still short, not grown out yet after discharge.
The male Yoo Jae-min I remember.
I open my eyes.
A head and a half shorter than me, at least.
The cutest face of any girl I've ever seen.
Lush hair cascading all the way to her waist.
And the absolute showstopper: two round, bare-skinned watermelons that looked bigger than her face.
On top of that, she was wearing nothing but a thin T-shirt, so her soft-looking thighs weren't even properly covered.
This was the Yoo Jae-min standing in front of me right now.
"……Is this real? The beautiful girl in front of me is that pervert bastard Yoo Jae-min?"
"What. Why. What about it."
"Hey, that's my line."
Every kind of thought flooded my head.
Starting with this has to be a hidden-camera prank, all the way to men and women aren't supposed to share a roof — is it really okay for me to keep living alone under the same ceiling as her?
Out of the swirl of confusion, one sentence tumbled out first.
"So. What exactly did you want to say when you woke me up."
"I bought an onahole in Japan and I haven't even gotten to use it yet — what the hell do I do?"
"You are a complete fucking lunatic!"
"Dude, that thing cost five thousand yen!"
I already knew this guy was crazy, but was he actually insane?
"I checked my ID and it says woman, I looked in the closet and all the clothes are women's — so why the fuck is the stuff I bought in Japan still the same?! It should've swapped into a dildo!"
"Is that what matters right now?! The part you just said like it was nothing is way more important!"
If the ID said woman and the closet was full of women's clothes, that meant this person had always been a woman… right?
"Jammin. Your ID says you're a woman?"
"Huh? Yeah. Wanna see?"
Jae-min scampered off, then came right back from her room with a wallet.
"Look."
Yoo Jae-min.
Birthday November 18th, same as I knew.
The first digit of the back half of the resident registration number: even.
Meaning: female.
This ID was real. It wasn't just the body that had become a woman's — the person called Yoo Jae-min had become a woman completely?
"Does this make any sense? The past got rewritten?"
"Uh…… maybe?"
"Then why do I still remember?"
"Because we made the wish together at that shrine?"
Jae-min tilted her head for a second, then grabbed her phone.
"Hold on a sec."
"……."
I snuck a glance at her screen. She was calling her mother.
"Oh, my daughter. Mom's a little busy right now — if it's not urgent, can we talk later? Bye~."
Click.
"What the fuck."
My daughter?
"She called you daughter, right?"
"Why the hell am I a daughter?!"
"Because you're a girl. So yeah — daughter."
"……."
But if she'd always been a girl, how were we sharing a room in the first place……?
We'd reunited in the military, after all.
"If her entire identity flipped to female, what happened to the military service? School?"
"Good question. Hang on, let me check."
Jae-min worked her phone again and opened the university app.
She poked around for a bit, apparently pulling up academic records — then her expression changed.
"Fuck."
"What, is there a problem? What happened?"
I peered over at the screen.
Late April was around midterms — the classic route of bombing the exams and bailing.
Did this… did this make any sense?
So the military service had been erased, and instead she'd been attending school the whole time — and this was the result?
"Is this for real? No — semesters one and two, those are the ones you actually attended. That god at Yeohwa Shrine or whatever, trying to make the settings line up, completely fucked you ov—"
"Stop."
"……Huh?"
I'd gotten so heated looking at the grades that the words just poured out. Jae-min grabbed my arm.
"I was always on academic probation."
"What?"
"Originally it was semesters one and two that were the probation ones. School sucked so I half-assed it."
"You crazy bastard…… three probations and you're expelled, right?"
"I didn't hit three."
"How were you even planning to come back, then……"
"I was ready to be a fifth-year and retake the freshman lectures from scratch."
"You absolute lunatic……"
Brrring-brrring.
My phone rang.
A quick glance — the caller was my mom.
I looked at Jae-min. She nodded and stood up.
"I'm gonna go check if anything else changed around the house."
"Yeah."
I watched her back as she left the room, then picked up the call.
"Son, you up?"
"Yeah, just now."
"Trip go okay?"
"Yeah."
"And Jae-min? Did you take good care of her?"
"Yeah…… wait, what?"
"You did take good care of her, right? Even if she didn't get sick, she's your wife — you're the one who has to look after her. Don't make my daughter-in-law suffer too much, okay?"
"……What?"
Wife? Daughter-in-law? What the hell was——
"While you were in the army and Jae-min was going to college alone, she had a hard time adjusting, I heard. So when you go back, you take good care of her. The College of Natural Sciences and the College of Arts are right next to each other, aren't they — you said so yourself. Once you're back, eat lunch together, keep an eye on how she's doing. Got it?"
"Uh, y-yeah……"
"Still half-asleep, huh. Alright, get some rest, and eat a nice lunch."
"Yeah……"
"Okay, hanging up~."
The call ended.
What was this. What was happening.
Just how much of the world had rewritten itself over one person — Jammin — becoming a girl.
I got up immediately and walked out to the living room.
"Hey, Jammin."
"What."
Jae-min looked up from rummaging through the kitchen sink cabinets.
"We're going to the community center."
"Why all of a sudden?"
"I just heard something massive."
"What."
"We need to check the family register. Don't you want to know how this whole situation is actually working?"
"If we're just checking, we can do it online."
"Ah. Right."
My brain clearly wasn't firing on all cylinders either.
I pulled up the family register on my phone right then and there.
And I came face to face with a situation that was shocking — and, given everything so far, exactly what the circumstances had been pointing toward.
Subject: Lee Kang-yeon
Spouse: Yoo Jae-min
"Subject, Lee Kang-yeon……"
"What is it."
"……Spouse, Yoo Jae-min."
"What? Fuck?"