A New Life
A profound stillness, almost unnaturally serene, and a languid haze wrapped itself around my entire body.
A penthouse suite on the top floor of a luxury hotel with glass walls on every side.
I was reclined against the headboard of a huge bed like some supreme power broker, while two actresses famed as the most beautiful women in the country knelt on either side of me.
Only the obscene, wet sounds of something being greedily sucked filled the silence, and at the foot of the bed, a neatly dressed female secretary in a semi-suit stood waiting with her eyes lowered, watching the scene before her.
Then, the one who broke that unbearable silence was me.
"I'm going to sleep, so you may as well head back."
"Yes, Chairman."
At my single sentence, the secretary bowed her head.
It wouldn’t have mattered much if she’d stayed, but it wasn’t as though I had some grand reason for telling her to leave.
It was just... a silent feeling that I might end up showing her something ugly.
"Wait until I contact you."
"Yes, I understand, Chairman."
With a click, the door shut, and once again the room held only the two women and me.
Whether it was accumulated fatigue or something else entirely, my eyelids felt heavy as lead.
I roughly seized the hair of the women whining between my legs, and naturally drifted into a deep sleep.
---
"Hajun, you need to get up. It's your first day at school today."
A soft voice tickled my ears.
Before I even opened my eyes, what reached my nose was not the familiar scent of my luxury hotel room, but something else entirely.
A plain, comforting detergent fragrance, the kind you’d smell in any ordinary home.
"Mmm... five more minutes..."
And the voice that came out of my mouth sounded horribly strange.
It wasn’t the voice I’d lived with all my life, deepened and dulled by years of hardship. This was clear and fresh, as if it had only just finished mutating.
The unfamiliar sound sent a bizarre chill through me, and my eyes snapped open at once.
"What in the world is going on!!"
"Honestly! It’s your first day at university today. Hurry up, wash your face, and get out here!"
Standing before me was a middle-aged woman I had never seen in my life.
But for a middle-aged woman, her skin was strangely smooth, and the shapely body outlined beneath her apron drew the eye in a way it shouldn’t have.
Hajun? First day? What was all this supposed to mean?
The name I remembered wasn’t Hajun.
Besides, there shouldn’t be a single human in this world rude enough to barge into my private space without permission like this...
"School? What school are you talking about?"
"Are you still half-asleep? Wash up and come out already. Breakfast is ready!"
The woman lightly flicked my forehead, then left the room.
I didn’t understand any of it, but for some reason, I felt as though I ought to obey.
I got up—my body strangely light—and headed for the bathroom. The moment I faced the mirror, I had to swallow a scream.
There was no face lined with age, no rough stubble from shaving, no weathered man staring back at me.
Instead, an unfamiliar young boy stood in the mirror.
My head spun so violently I felt like it might split open on the spot, but the woman’s impatient voice from outside pushed me to at least wash up quickly and step back out.
"My head feels like it’s going to crack..."
I splashed water on my face as best I could and left the bathroom.
On the living room table, a steaming breakfast had been laid out.
It was homely, ordinary fare, the kind of meal entirely unlike the food that used to be placed before me in my old life.
"Come on, eat up and get going, son."
"Ah, yes. Thank you, Mother."
"Pffft, what’s with the sudden 'Mother'? Hurry up and eat, my son~~"
The woman wiped her delicate hands on her apron and smiled brightly at me.
Son? My parents had already died long ago.
All I had left were cold memories of them hurling insults at me until their final moments, yet the woman before me was radiating an almost abnormal warmth.
And the generous curve of her hips, subtly revealed beside the apron, along with a chest larger than average, was enough to stir a man’s instincts.
This is an absurdly vivid dream.
Otherwise, there was no way a person could just become someone else like this.
So I decided to enjoy this strange, vivid dream for what it was.
An unfamiliar diversion, a rare comfort after so long spent carrying the weight of my office on my shoulders.
With that thought settled, I cleanly emptied the breakfast my mother had prepared for me.
"You didn’t forget anything, did you? You packed everything, right, son?"
"You needn’t worry. Everything has already been prepared."
"What’s gotten into you today? You’ve been like this since earlier. Has our boy finally grown up?"
As I stepped out the front door, I took in the sight of a neighborhood I didn’t recognize.
Name, age, school... and all my memories of reality were colliding inside my head.
I’d decided it was a dream, but the situation was so vivid that I couldn’t help wondering if it was memory loss instead, or if I had simply lost my mind.
Forcing myself to shake off the tangled thoughts, I headed for the university.
Even though I didn’t know the road, my feet moved there on their own.
"Good, I’m not late."
The lecture hall at the university was hard to find, but I made it in the end.
As I sat in a corner seat and tried to sort out the situation, some student with a barely grown-in head of hair came up and tapped my shoulder.
"Yo, Jo Hajun! I’ve been calling you and you didn’t even answer. What were you doing?"
"Hm? And who might you be?"
"What the hell, are you insane? You don’t even recognize your friend?"
He called himself my friend.
But in my mind, all I had was a white fog of confusion.
"Ah... sorry. Maybe I really do have amnesia or something. My head feels off."
"Quit spouting nonsense. You’re still going to the PC room after class, right?"
"No, I think I need some rest. My body isn’t feeling well."
"Why do you keep talking like an old man?"
An old man, huh. Did I really sound that aged?
Anyway, the PC room? Games? They were words that had never existed in my life.
After all, that chairman title hadn’t meant I was the head of some internet broadcast company; I’d been the chairman of a real corporation.
So naturally, I had no desire to do any of this, not even the slightest pull toward it.
After quietly spacing out through the lecture, I glanced at the clock and saw that it was already 2 p.m.
---
"Alright then, take care. See you tomorrow."
"Uh... yeah. See you tomorrow."
Before I knew it, I was in front of home.
I’d clearly meant to go straight back after class ended at two, but when I came to my senses, the sun had already gone down and night had swallowed everything in darkness.
It was a strange feeling, as though I hadn’t been myself for a while.
Looking back, the place where I’d said my last goodbye suggested that I’d been dragged off to a PC room with that so-called friend of mine.
But I had no memory of what I’d done there, or what game I’d supposedly played.
Hah... falling asleep inside a dream, too? Just how exhausted was I? If I sleep and wake up, everything should go back to normal.
I threw myself into bed as though fleeing.
Hoping that when I woke from this wretched dream, I would return to my original self, I shut my eyes.
And when I opened them again, morning sunlight was filtering in.
"Son, you’re up? Why did you sleep so long? It’s late, hurry and get to school."
Cold sweat breaking out, I looked around.
I thought I’d woken from the dream, but that woman—the one she called "Mother"—was still standing before me.
"What’s wrong with you? Pull yourself together!"
"Huh...? Oh, uh, yes?"
"You’re late. Hurry up, wash your face, and get to school."
I rubbed my eyes hard, thinking I must be seeing things, but the scene didn’t change.
My body moved again without my permission.
Was this sleep paralysis? Or a dream within a dream? I couldn’t make sense of what was happening.
But then it happened.
Something felt off, a faint wrongness brushing the back of my mind, and only then did I become certain.
Ah. This is definitely reality.
After getting up from bed and splashing my face with cold water, my skin still held the dampness, and I could feel the cold touch of the water in perfect detail.
If this were still a dream, or if it weren’t real, I shouldn’t have been able to feel even that.
As if that realization had become a signal flare, my focus slipped and warped as I looked at the woman before me and the living room around her.
Then I collapsed, and when I opened my eyes again, I was in an endless white space.
"Welcome."
An unknown entity appeared in midair.
It was a strange, shapeless figure, impossible to pin down as either male or female, young or old.
"Who are you? Where is this!?"
"No need to be wary. This place is my domain—the boundary between the living world and the underworld, if you like. To get straight to the point, Kang Doyun, you are dead."
The entity announced the shocking truth with utter composure.
My real name was Kang Doyun. I was a 37-year-old man.
What mattered most, for the moment, was that this wasn’t a dream at all, but reality.
And... I had already died.
So had that man named Hajun.
---
My name was not Jo Hajun. It was Kang Doyun.
I had lived for thirty-seven years, but most of them were not what anyone would call a human life.
This, a fragment of my existence, was the memory of my final day.
"Chairman, let me brief you on today’s schedule."
"Forget it. Handle it as usual. You know my style."
"Yes, Chairman♥ Thank you so much!!♥"
Every morning, the secretary who stood in that penthouse suite and came to report my schedule was like an alarm clock announcing the start of the day.
Even if I had just woken up, it still wouldn’t truly be morning.
For me, morning meant the afternoon, long past lunchtime, and at my secretary’s words I would simply remain lying in bed.
And I, in turn, sat in the chair of a large conglomerate, OO Group.
Chairman in name, perhaps, but only in the sense that I occupied the seat.
I wasn’t especially capable, and the company had been built up by my father’s superior and brilliant mind.
One day both my parents passed away, and suddenly I was the one who had to inherit my father’s position, but I had neither much interest nor any real talent for it.
I was the only one left to stand in for my father.
After the shift in position, I remained what I had always been: a layabout who did nothing but use my wealth to indulge in whatever pleased me.
My secretary knew that as well, but the morning report was little more than ceremony.
Of course, even now, that life of idleness hadn’t changed. I still dumped the work on my secretary and devoted myself to pleasure.
"Won’t you come in beside me for a while?"
"I’m sorry. It is still business hours."
"Tch, no fun at all. Then let’s get going."
"Yes, Chairman. Understood."
Hearing my secretary’s cold response, I felt a pang of disappointment.
There was no helping it, so I got up and left the house at once. Today’s schedule was the same as always: savoring my pleasures in the penthouse suite on the top floor of a luxury hotel.
That very suite—the one where I’d spent my last moments.
"I’ll come to you later, so wait for me."
"Yes, I understand, Chairman."
But that promise would never be kept.
In the end, I had died.
I had only closed my eyes to rest my exhausted body, and in the act of falling asleep, I had met my end.
Of course, before I drifted off, I had felt something vaguely wrong.
An exhaustion so terrible it was abnormal, and a strangely deep haze that should never have been there... all of it had been foreshadowing my death.
But I hadn’t known, and in the end I had put the final ribbon on Kang Doyun’s life.
"But why am I in this kid Jo Hajun’s body?"
"Originally, Jo Hajun wasn’t fated to die, but someone on our side made a mistake and messed up the ledger. His body was perfectly fine, but his soul evaporated, if you want the short version."
At the word mistake, a laugh slipped out of me.
To think beings who handled life and death could make some low-level blunder like that, and then stick a man like me in as the replacement.
"I’ve been watching you for a while lately, and your life seemed pretty satisfying to me."
"Hm..."
My life, spent doing nothing but enjoying pleasure—he found that entertaining?
Still... for an existence confined to this place, observing human lives was probably its own form of amusement.
"What's already happened has already happened. As Jo Hajun, why not keep serving as my source of entertainment from here on out? In exchange, I’ll give the dead man a new life."
"...Puhaha, now that is a very good offer."
This nameless entity was surprisingly easy to talk to.
My life, which had pursued nothing but pleasure like some inhuman creature, was apparently the best entertainment this being had ever seen.
Then it was no loss for me.
If I could live a new life in the body of a young, handsome twenty-year-old, it would be a bargain in my favor.
"Good thinking. Jo Hajun’s memories will be synchronized to your brain like data. And I’ll throw in a little gift as well."
"A gift? What is it?"
"You’ll find out soon enough. It’ll come in very handy."
With those words, I collapsed into unconsciousness once more.
---