Prologue
The man died young. He opened his eyes in a place he did not know.
Someone was looking down at him. A god.
The god asked him a question.
"How do you want to be born, in the next life?"
...The next life?
Of course he had thought about it. Standing on the subway ride home from work. Coming back to an empty place and turning on the lights alone. Lying in bed in the last moment before sleep.
The sort of daydream anyone might have—he had chased those, too, without end.
The god held out a tablet and told him to go ahead, then, and draw up the plan for his next life.
The moment he turned the screen on, it filled edge to edge with entries packed as tight as a survey form.
"What is this?"
"Your fate in the next life. You decide that fate here and now. The world you'll be born into, the country, the race, the sex—everything."
"I decide my own fate? How is something like that even possible?"
"There's nothing I can't do. Whatever you're thinking right now, I could read it in a single glance. ...Not that I particularly enjoy looking inside human heads."
"Why not?"
"Because humans have a thing called unpredictability. Well. You've got plenty of time, so go on and start filling in the fields."
The man studied the screen slowly. Before he made a single choice, he read through a few precautions.
They were simple enough.
Every field is assigned both Fate Points and Penalty Points.
A participant's Fate Points are totaled from an evaluation of every life up to the last. Penalty Points begin at zero, but none may remain once every choice has been made.
A participant may purchase Fate Points. With each purchase, however, Penalty Points are levied at a fixed rate.
What decides the point value of each field is set by the social standards of the previous life.
An example. Being born in a wealthy country consumes more Fate Points than being born in a destitute one, and it accumulates more Penalty Points as well.
To spend Penalty Points, one must choose a clear disadvantage.
That was the end of the precautions. The man checked his Fate Points.
The first field was the world setting.
"Earth would be the familiar choice, wouldn't it..."
The moment he murmured it, Earth locked into the world field. And that was not the end.
Before long he understood just how far he could remake a world. He could shift the lay of the continents and adjust climate and weather, of course—but he could also bring new races into being, or change how far civilization had advanced, and rewrite history itself.
"Hahaha. Well? Feel a little like a god? Fate Points are limited, though. I'll be expecting wise choices."
He had vaguely assumed a single day would be enough to settle it all. Once he actually looked, it was nothing of the sort.
Every subject had its fields, and those fields opened into finer ones still. Faced with a dizzying number of entries, the man began to sink deeper and deeper in.
He portioned out his points with ruthless care, imagined, and imagined again. He agonized, over and over, about what kind of life he would live. And as he did, talking to himself came more and more naturally.
"Ahh.... I really don't want to do the military again..."
"A power on about this level ought to be all right, shouldn't it...?"
"Maybe I should give myself more chances to choose.... Hmm."
An untold stretch of time passed. The man was settling the final field: Fate. As he laid out the destinies and the incidents that would befall his newborn self and the people around him, he burned through every Penalty Point he had.
From the very beginning the god had watched him from the same place. The god already knew.
Whichever road they take, human beings are made to chase their greatest desire. The shape of it differs from person to person, but the man was no exception.
In the end he had gone and written a scenario in which he walked the road to his own ruin.
"So you weren't a normal human either. You've got quite a few Fate Points left. Sure you don't mind leaving them unspent?"
"It's all right."
"Fine. You'll be living a fairly harsh life, but hang in there. The you of the next life won't know any of this anyway."
The instant a new life begins, every memory up to that moment vanishes without a trace. Even the fact that his previous self met a god and designed his fate is forgotten.
"One thing, before you go."
"Yes? What is it?"
"Nothing important. Whatever fate comes looking for you, don't curse me."
With those words, the man's vision flooded white.
I was looking at a photograph.
It was a group picture taken just before middle-school graduation, so there were plenty of people in it, but my eyes went to only one of them.
Me, looking somehow ashamed. And a girl watching that look as if she found it funny.
Seeing it, a memory from when I was young rose up on its own.
Her name was Baek Jiyeon.
I, Hong Doyun, met her for the first time in middle school.
It's the same now, but even then Jiyeon had a brighter energy than anyone else in the class. Just having her nearby was enough to put strength in you....
In those years I was introverted, and I embarrassed easily.
I was reasonably tall for my age, and more than anything I heard people praise my looks every single day—but a personality like mine kept me from ever thinking of putting that face to use.
Back then there was a girl named Joo Chaerin who made it fairly obvious she liked me, and who went around keeping the other girls in check.
I didn't like Chaerin. The reason was simple. She was a classic delinquent, a punk, and she kept a lot of frightening friends around her.
Every break she drifted over near my desk and threw up an invisible barrier, all to keep me from getting close to the other girls.
And this when Joo Chaerin herself never managed to say a single thing to me.
There was someone, though, who stepped over that boundary as if it weren't there at all and struck up a conversation.
"Doyun, what's your number? Kkaetok is all any of us know."
That was Baek Jiyeon. She always came to me first and greeted me as if we were already close. She was the one who asked me to eat school lunch together, and the one who asked me to walk home together.
Before long, the time we spent side by side had grown on its own.
That day, too, Jiyeon and I sat on the swings at the playground and talked without end.
"Doyun. You know what? Remember when I asked you for your number before? You're the only one."
"Huh...?"
"I never even asked the other kids for theirs. Honestly.... Do I really have to spell it out this far before you get it?"
She was the one who confessed first, too. That was how Jiyeon and I started dating.
Afterward Joo Chaerin needled me as if jealousy had gotten into her, but I decided not to care.
No matter how many of the little worker bees who followed her she brought along to threaten me, I wasn't scared. I had an older sister behind me who had come up through the taekwondo demonstration team.
And so my middle-school years wrapped up without much trouble.
Even after we moved on to high school, the thread between Jiyeon and me held.
We had been assigned to different schools, but there was still plenty of time to meet. I enjoyed every ordinary day I spent with her.
The problem, though, was me. I had aged a little past middle school, and still my body showed no growth worth mentioning.
While I stayed stuck in a middle-schooler's frame, Jiyeon grew past recognition and shot clean past my height.
From some point on, she took to wearing loose oversized T-shirts more and more often.
She said her chest had gotten bigger than she had expected. The stares made her uncomfortable, so she had no choice but to dress baggy.
When I drew into myself she comforted me, telling me there was no need to rush. Every time she held me it felt like being soothed by my mother, and my mood would lift.
For the record, this was how my high-school friends reacted.
"Hey, you little shit. You've got the face of a kept pretty boy among kept pretty boys, so what the hell is your height even a problem for?"
"First thing in the morning, for fuck's— Hong Doyun, just dress like a girl and be done with it!"
"Doyun in girls' clothes? Ooh...... Not bad, actually?"
"What do you mean, not bad! Quit teasing me!"
My friends weren't wrong. Being small in build, on its own, doesn't change much about getting through life.
"......"
Every day I stood in front of the mirror and checked my body. The frame I could accept. My cock, I could not.
It was so small I was ashamed to call it a dick. I had never measured.
I didn't have to. The knowledge had come on its own.
I had never grown the way other people did. Would I ever be able to satisfy Jiyeon? Would she be disappointed?
From some moment on, I worried more and more about a future that had not even arrived. Whenever I did, I threw myself harder into studying, and fortunately my grades, at least, stayed at the very top.
Jiyeon studied well enough not to fall behind me, so the two of us were able to aim for the same university.
That is as far as the memories of myself go. After I entered university, I buried every ugly feeling I had.
Studying with Jiyeon at the same school, in the same department, and going out together. I decided to focus on that alone.
......
"Hey, Hong Doyun!! Get your sister's panties out!"
"Goddamn it, seriously...... I'm sleeping, and here we go again..."
My sister, two years older—Hong Doha—went in to wash every morning and then hunted for a change of underwear. Every time, I dug a sports bra and panties out of her room and tossed them roughly in front of the bathroom.
"Doyun, you up? Want Mom to make you some coffee?"
Around the time I was rubbing the sleep from my eyes and heading back to bed, Mom, finished getting ready to go out, came out of the dressing room in a suit.
"Mom, no yoga today?"
"Why? You want to watch? Should Doyun do yoga with me?"
"No.... You do it every day, and you're not today, so I just asked."
"I've got a meeting early this morning. ...Doyun. Mom's heading out, so where's my kiss on the cheek?"
"I quit that ages ago! ...I'll do it, so just go."
"Hohoho, you're cute, so it's fine. Mom will be back!"
"Okay. Have a good day."
Once Mom had left the house, my sister came striding out of the bathroom with a towel hung around her neck.
I know caution isn't her strong suit, but I wished she would stop walking around stark naked in front of her little brother.
"Where's my underwear.... Hey! This isn't even a set!"
"Just wear it. You're going to work out anyway."
"That won't do. Oh, wait. Hey."
"What."
"How's my body? The lines are killer, right?"
Doha lifted both arms to show off the muscle. Her body, tempered by every kind of training, honestly had a beautiful line to the legs—beautiful enough to stare at in a daze.
If you thought about it, my sister carried a heavier masculinity than I did, and I was the man. Her hair was always a short bob that fell to the nape, and on top of that she tanned on a regular schedule.
"If you've got time for that, please just get out so I can sleep a little more."
"To think you don't know your own sister's charm. You've got a long way to go. Ahh, I miss the old Hong Doyun, I do. Those days were good..."
"You treated your little brother like a toy, and now you miss him...... I'm going to sleep."
Before I fell asleep again, I pictured the days when Father had still been here.
Life with him had become a memory from long ago. Even so, a few scenes remained as vivid as yesterday.
Father died when I was in the lower grades of elementary school. He isn't beside me, but I have always been grateful to him.
That our family can still live in comfort is thanks to Father.
I never learned exactly what work he did while he was alive, but somewhere along the way I grew a dream of becoming a capable person like him.
After stealing a little more sleep, I woke clear-headed and finished getting ready for school.
Right on time, there was a message from Jiyeon. She was already on campus, taking a selfie with the cherry-blossom path behind her.
She wore a smile as bright as the blossoms in full bloom.
I wanted to see her even a little sooner, so I scrambled through the last of getting ready and left the house.