I Became a National Calamity

Ding!

"Sorry, my ass. If you were really sorry, you wouldn't send a copy-pasted text message."

I closed the messenger and logged onto the Hunter Gallery to post my sob story instead.

"Ugh."

What did I expect from these people?

Might as well check the trending posts of the day.

"Yeah, I should stop looking."

The gallery's in a mood today.

Why doesn't one of the mods ban that lovesick low-ranker bastard?

Then again, expecting sanity from Hunter Gallery users was never realistic.

People who come to this gallery are usually one of two things: the majority of unawakened who either curse their luck or pray for an awakening, or the handful of hunters who braved a lottery's worth of odds to head for the Tower and Gates, where death could come any day without warning.

And that made sense. Awakening is determined purely by chance. It's not something you can choose to want.

Of course, not all hunters are the same, either. A perpetual amateur and a pro hailed as the GOAT are entirely different species of human.

I was the amateur side, not the pro.

"Whew..."

I slid the eyepatch off my left eye.

They'd said treatment was impossible unless it was an A-Rank healer or better.

I raised my hand and flexed my fingers like I was complaining to the world.

Thread squirted out.

Pathetically unimpressive. This was my awakening. My ability.

I couldn't even crawl up walls, and dreaming of doing anything even remotely badass with threads was pure fantasy.

It was just ordinary, fragile thread. I couldn't even reliably gauge how much I ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠could produce—about a ball's worth at most.

Going by ability alone, C-Rank my ass—I was practically trash-tier.

It had offered essentially zero help in climbing all the way to C-Rank hunter.

The reason I'd made it this ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠far was probably my skill with ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠weapons, and how well I could imitate S-Rank hunters.

The god of hunters was a stingy bastard; you had to sacrifice a lot and grind desperately before he deigned to give you anything.

"Time to get some sleep."

If my routine fell apart, tomorrow would suffer for it.

It's always the small things that matter.

Just as I started undressing to move my body toward the bed in my studio apartment—

Weeeung! Weeeung!

My phone went berserk with an emergency disaster alert.

"Another gate accident?"

They wouldn't drag me in too just because of a labor shortage... right?

I casually glanced at the message.

"What is this?"

Paju. That's where my studio apartment is.

"Level 4... is it a plague?"

Come to think of it, that didn't quite add up. Plenty of mysterious contagious diseases had cropped up since the Towers appeared, but Korea had been doing fine lately.

If it was this sudden, had an S-Rank gate collapsed or something?

"Haa... and I was just about to sleep."

I turned the phone back on to check the news or the Hunter Gallery and see what was going on.

Crash.

Suddenly, the window a few meters away from me shattered.

It didn't break into pieces. Just a clean round hole, as if someone had punched through it with a tool.

Flap.

What flickered briefly into my vision was a white object, roughly the size of a baseball.

The sound of wingbeats told me it was some kind of insect-type monster.

"Oh no, damn it—my weapon!"

The white thing came flying at me before I could even react.

It vanished from my sight in an instant.

Drawn by inertia, I moved toward the weapon resting on its stand.

"Cough—ghk?!"

Before I'd even taken a full step, my breath cut off.

Somewhere in my throat, a foreign object was now wriggling.

And even that sensation changed almost immediately—like someone had stuffed a cotton ball soaked through with water down my windpipe.

"Ghhk... ghk..."

I couldn't even manage to feel cheated. The moment I thought I don't want to die, I was already dying.

Just before the suffocation took my consciousness—

A massive torrent of thread erupted from my mouth, enough to split my lips apart.

"Hahk! Ugh... blegh! Blegh!"

I was alive.

A slight headache, but nothing serious. The foreign thing that had squeezed my throat like it meant to kill me was gone.

My mouth wasn't spewing thread like a loom anymore, either. Where all that thread had gone was obvious.

"I coughed up all of this?"

My studio apartment was packed wall to wall with countless white threads. The furniture was buried in silk. There were even what looked like pillars of thread.

I turned around. There was a huge cocoon, split open as if something had just crawled out of it.

"Was that bug the cause?"

Weird, incomprehensible things did sometimes happen outside the Towers and Gates—but why me, of all people?

"Haa... I suppose just being alive counts as good fortune."

First things first—stay calm.

Nearly dying a few times on hunter duty had taught me one eternal truth.

"When the situation's bad, panicking never makes anything better."

I was shorter. Judging by how low my line of sight had dropped, maybe thirty centimeters or so.

My pride and joy—my workshop-tailored shirt and dress slacks, asset number one—were dragging on the floor, practically sliding right off me.

I needed to check myself over.

Even without pain, invisible wounds are the most dangerous. If I had any, I needed to wash them out.

I headed for the bathroom, yanked the door open quickly, and stood in front of the mirror.

Blink.

I wiped my right eye and looked again.

No mistaking it.

Antennae.

Fuzzy antennae sprouted from the head of a little girl with fluffy, snow-white hair.

And she looked incredibly adorable.

The image staring back at me was one of those precious, worldly-innocent little girls who make you want to ask if they've lost their mom the moment they fidget beside you.

The problem was that this little girl was me.

"Is this real life..."

It was not a dream. Those fluffy antennae drooping in shock like a puppy's ears were painfully, vividly real.

And it didn't end there.

From behind the eyepatch, I felt a sensation both familiar and foreign.

I tore the eyepatch off and flung it away.

There was an eye.

"Funny, that's not what the doctor said."

Not that any doctor, however brilliant, would ever tell you, "Your eye will grow back, and you're going to become a white-haired bug girl."

The restored eye wasn't merely golden. The whites had turned jet black, radiating an unmistakably inhuman aura.

"Calm down. Stay calm..."

I was not calm in the slightest, but talking myself through it was the only option.

Had that bug given me some kind of disease?

I stripped off the sweat-drenched clothes and searched for wounds—there wasn't so much as a scratch.

No strange fuzz like the hair on my antennae, either. If anything, I was bare and smooth.

The only oddity was that my teeth had gone sharp as a shark's.

Embarrassing, mostly.

But if it wasn't a disease, then... no way.

"Status window."

Ding!

"Other than my name and Thread Spitting, not a single thing is the same."

No way in hell was I some level-1 scrub. And my class had absolutely, categorically never been anything like that.

Nue? You mean the silkworm? That bug that makes silk?

And what's with the queen business? Does this thing think we're in England?

Thread Spitting had survived, but the rest were skills I'd never heard of or seen in my life.

The status window cannot lie.

All I could guess was that a change this extreme had to be something close to a re-awakening.

But a re-awakening that changed your sex?

I pride myself on knowing the industry inside and out, and I'd never heard or seen anything like it.

"There was that legend about Hong Kong's Overlord turning from a grandmother into a little girl when she awakened, but..."

This wasn't something I could figure out on my own.

I turned on my phone to scrape together whatever information I could.

I dug through articles and academic papers, even asked an AI, and combed through everything. Not much of it was useful to me.

Clutching at straws, I searched again for cases of re-awakening combined with turning into a woman.

Amid a flood of TS web novels and comics—

Title: A Hunter Gallery Bastard Got TS'd and Re-Awakened!

There it is!

On the Hunter Gallery, no less.

"See? Even if everyone there acts like a lunatic, there's genuinely specialized knowledge in it if you dig around."

Riding a modest wave of pride, I clicked the post.

"AARGH! You Hunter Gallery bastards!!"

I'm the lunatic for pinning my hopes on an anonymous Hunter Gallery post. I'm the lunatic.

Grrrble.

"Ugh."

Was it because I'd screamed too loud? Or because of my newly transformed body?

Hunger started gnawing at me.

I brushed it off as ordinary hunger and kept searching.

GRROOWWLL!

"Damn it, I can't take this!"

This was beyond anything enduring could fix. What I'd dismissed as simple hunger was, at some point, now the sensation of my stomach sewing itself to my spine.

For a moment of complaint, this was abnormal.

"Hhk... food... I need to eat... now..."

I hadn't been able to hold it together since leaving the bathroom. Drool flooded my mouth enough that I nearly had to spit it out.

I'd clearly shrunk—had my metabolism gone shrew-mode or something?

They do say small animals have to eat constantly.

At worst, it felt like if I didn't eat something right now, I would starve to death.

Wiping my drool, I sprinted desperately for the fridge, naked and not caring one bit.

Ignoring the drool dribbling down my chin, I finally reached it.

BANG!

I wrenched the fridge door open.

Inside: frozen chicken breasts hoarded during a sale, meal-prep lunches that tasted like punishment, bottled water.

"Same menu as always, so why...?"

I'd always shoved these down as nutrition, not flavor—but the fridge contents no longer even registered as food, as if mocking the hunger from before.

Sniff sniff.

Suddenly, a delicious smell pulsed from somewhere other than the fridge.

It was uncannily like dark chocolate heavy on cacao, and fresh-baked cake.

My head dipped naturally toward the source of the scent.

"······Don't do this. Seriously."

The source was the phone I'd been holding this whole time.

Had the hunger literally driven me insane?

I hadn't even finished paying off the installments.

Just quietly eat the chicken breast like a good boy.

...No amount of self-hypnosis, however many times I repeated it, had any effect.

Like they say, humans are slaves to hormones—the urge to eat the phone coiled around my entire body.

My hands trembled violently, like an addict deep in withdrawal. Even when I set the phone down somewhere else, the aroma stabbed straight into my nose and brain.

And finally—

"Argh! I can't take it!"

I grabbed the phone.

Crunch!

Like a tiger that had starved for thirty days, I tore into the phone with my teeth. That wasn't enough, so I swallowed it whole.

"······Delicious."

It wasn't a hallucination or a delirium. The phone crunched apart effortlessly between my teeth. The shards inflicted no wound, no pain whatsoever in my mouth.

It even went down my throat smoothly enough that I didn't need water.

And it was genuinely delicious. Why?

The taste of a luxury cake decorated with premium dark chocolate. The aroma and the texture were exactly the same.

"This is an obscenely decadent flavor."

Whatever happens, happens.

"I'm thirty years old, turned into some moth girl, and eating a phone is the least of my problems."

It was useless now anyway. I wolfed down the remaining phones until my cheeks bulged like a squirrel's, cheeks comically stuffed to bursting.

I sucked on my fingers, mourning the last crumb.

Ding!

The status window.

"Did I win some beast approval raffle or something?"

I made the joke while reading the window's text—but the more I read, the less I could just brush past it.

"Hah..."

So this is what caused the emergency ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠disaster alert I was looking for, huh.