Is Masculinity the Price of Sight?
A long, sharp sizzle—the sound of moisture flashing off tofu the instant it met the hot oil. Pleasant to hear. Tok, tok, tok, tok... The ring of knife on cutting board, every time the two met. That was pleasant, too.
I had sharpened the blade only yesterday, so it was a small shame that the vegetables gave no crisp shk-shk-shk as they fell.
"Mmm. Smells good."
I minced the garlic, sliced the scallions thin, chopped the onion fine, and mixed a sauce to spoon over the pan-fried tofu. An ordinary scene of someone living alone getting a meal ready. The only difference was that I did every step of it with my eyes closed.
"Hi Ggoogle. Search Neotube for 'Arcadia Fall new character. Voice actor performance' and play it."
A moment later, a handful of sounds spilled from the phone. A soundtrack. The clash of a fight. And a voice—clean and beautiful, wound tight with power.
"You're going to explore that place? That's insane!"
Blue and gold, this one. Sweet, with a bitter finish. Dense in the grain—soft to the touch, and yet elastic... The voice actor I loved was perfect again. Breath. The amount of air. Resonance. The shape of mouth and tongue. Diction. The carrying of feeling. The texture of the voice. The reading of the character. The pace of the line. Breath sounds, the swell and the fade, the way a line was finished...
In every respect, it was rapture.
Voice actors really are a kind of magic. They breathe life into a character.
If I had a single regret, it was that I could never play that character myself. I had congenital total blindness—a blind man who, from the moment he was born, had never seen so much as a point of light.
"Food's ready."
Neuroplasticity, echolocation—the doctors liked to line up their difficult words. Put simply, I could grasp the lay of the ground and the objects around me from sound alone, not unlike a bat. Thanks to that, I lived by myself, and I could even cook my own meals. But I couldn't play games.
The way I enjoyed them was listening to story-summary videos on Neotube. Or, like now, putting on promotional videos and short anime clips and letting my imagination run. It ended there.
I want to play games the way everyone else does. I want to make friends, hang out, have a girlfriend.
There was far too much I couldn't do. There was far too much I wanted to do, as well. And of all of it, what I wanted most... was to let another person hear my voice.
"Ah— ahh— You're going to explore that place? That's insane!"
I copied the line I had just heard, word for word. Breath. Diction. The carrying of emotion. The texture of the voice. The pace of the line. Breath sounds. The ending. I even tried to push my own voice as close to that sound as it would go.
Still not a perfect match. A shame.
Know the trick, and a man can produce a woman's voice whenever he likes. I had been deeply spellbound by human voices since I was three, and for more than twenty years I had trained myself in the use of my vocal cords. A woman's voice was nothing.
But. A woman's voice, plus imitating a voice actor I loved, plus matching the performance itself—that was another dimension entirely. Catch it in passing and it sounded close. To my too-sensitive ears, it was always wanting.
"Guess I'll just eat..."
After the meal I blew through the dishes, the cleaning, and a bath. And then the routine I could never skip. Happy time.
Masturbation. Alongside the pleasure of hearing, of smell and of taste, it was one of the few enjoyments I had. Dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins, adrenaline—every hormone on the list shoved the stress aside at once.
"Nnh... haah! I-I'm sorryyyyy!"
I like this one. She actually sounds like she's enjoying it. None of that forced-moan feeling. She isn't really recording this while she gets herself off, is she?
Vision was the only problem. Sexually, I was fine. No... strictly speaking, I had problems enough in every other sense. At least there was nothing wrong with the function of things. These days there were platforms for adult ASMR and adult voice content, and I had gotten a great deal of use out of them. The visual stimulation I lacked, I filled in with imagination again this time.
Was it because, from childhood, imagining had been the only thing I could do? Or because I had recently awakened lucid dreaming, and an ability called synesthesia? When I concentrated to the extreme, the border between imagination and reality went hazy. Thanks to that, I found a clean, satisfying release seven times today as well. Four in a row just now. Three in a row this morning...
I'm going through tissues way too fast. Is everyone else like this?
A soft, drowsy languor. I couldn't be bothered with anything, but I made certain to clean up after myself before I lay down on the bed. Four or five hours like this, maybe? Listening to Neotube videos, or to VTuber streams, was the routine that closed out my day. A VTuber broadcasting quietly alone was nice. A stream where close VTuber friends laughed and chatted and messed around was nice, too. Music was good. Songs were good.
The human voice really is... a magnificent instrument.
And so, today as well, I fell asleep in the company of human voices.
A dream. A dream inside that dream. And, inside that, another dream. Like the movie Incepti-x, I had dreamed five layers deep. Today, greedily... I sank deeper still. Sixfold. Sevenfold...! Wanting to test the limit, I submerged myself without end.
Lucid dreaming... a dream you know you're having. It really is just like a dream.
A space where everything I had ever imagined was spread out like an amusement park. Here, even I could see color. I could see shapes, and I could draw. When I first had a lucid dream, none of that had been possible... Had I simply grown used to it, from dreaming so often? Or was it the synesthesia I had come into recently, the kind that put taste in sound, and texture, and color?
At any rate, unlike reality, everything was possible in a dream. I sang to my heart's content without a thought for the neighbors through the floor or the walls, and I tried my hand at instruments I could never have afforded. I did voice work with a script in front of me, and I enjoyed a broadcast where I watched the viewers' chat and talked with them... and I got up to plenty of lewd things with women.
The deeper I go into the unconscious, the more time I have to spend. Shaping imagination gets easier, too...
If someone told me I was addicted to dreams, I would have had no rebuttal. Perhaps I would stay buried in a pleasant dream like this and never wake again. I knew it was dangerous. I couldn't stop.
Reality was nothing but dark...
And so I gave myself further and further to dreams. Deeper. Sinking very, very deep. And today, at last, I arrived—a deep place, the outermost edge of the unconscious. I touched something I could not name.
There's something like a floor here?
I could feel something beyond the floor. I tried to go in, and it wouldn't budge an inch. ...Why? This was my dream. Nothing was impossible. Sheer stubbornness took hold of me, and I tried again and again. And at last, I got in...!
"...?"
...?
A place thick with greenery, where every kind of animal leapt and played. A paradise surging with life. There, beneath a single enormous tree rising straight into the air, some woman was looking at me.
"Who... are you?"
"That's my line. Who are you? A human who isn't even dead—how did you reach this place?"
What was she talking about? This was inside my dream. No—before that, what was wrong with this woman's voice? A mysterious voice, as if a hundred voices, men and women, old and young, had been fused into their most perfect blend.
"The inside of this place is not inside your dream."
"...?!"
She read my thoughts?
"But of couuurse. Reading them is nothing at all."
"I am Lilith. The primordial dream demon, born from the collective unconscious of humanity."
"Reading a thought or two hardly even counts as work."
Lilith? That Lilith, the one who shows up in every game there is? She certainly had a face that had smashed clean through the limit of what a human could possess...
"Hmmmm? How curious. What are you, really?"
"A living human, and yet that soul of yours is already no different from a dream demon's."
"Don't tell me one of your parents is a dream demon, like that fellow Merlin? Are you of our blood?"
"Pardon? What are you— Both of my parents are ordinary office workers."
"Wait. Hm? Mmmm... Aha. So that's how it was."
Lilith, who had nodded a few times, looked me over with those captivating eyes.
"You're a mutant. Gifted. Your potential as a succubus is extraordinary."
"...Pardon? Potential for what?"
"A succubus."
"I'm a man."
"I know."
She knows? For some reason, it felt as if a sting of music—dun... dun-dun-dun... dun...—were circling my ears like a hallucination.
"What an absurd aptitude."
"You're good at a woman's voice, aren't you? You can make a prettier voice than most women. I'm right, aren't I?"
"...!"
"Your face and your build ought to be thoroughly feminine, too."
"All of your masculinity is concentrated down below."
Lilith smiled with her eyes, the look heavy with meaning, and I glanced aside in embarrassment.
"Your lust goes without saying... and in a human body, you've already awakened lucid dreaming and shared dreaming?"
"I understand lucid dreaming, but shared dreaming?"
"Thaaat's right. Dream walking. You've been in and out of other people's dreams, haven't you? You have."
"Ah?!"
I had let it pass as nothing more than oh, someone else showed up in the dream. That had actually been me sharing a dream with another person?
"I have seen countless humans, and never a case like this. Truly... fascinating."
"Kwon Sehyun. I'll make you a formal offer."
"Whaaat?! What are you even saying?! You're telling me to become a woman?"
"Not a human woman. A succubus."
"That's the same thing!"
"Settle that excitement and think it through. For you, this can only be a gain. It is absolutely not a bad offer."
Lilith set a hand on my shoulder and leaned that beautiful face in close. The line of her eyes curved, soft. Alluring, and... dangerous, that smile. So this was what it meant to be spellbound.
"If I offer a comparison you'll grasp easily, the you of this moment are running an ultra-high-spec game on a computer from ten years ago."
"The problem is that the game's requirements keep climbing."
"This game has no quit button. It will go on overloading the computer, stuttering and hitching... until the game blows, and the computer blows with it."
"You were born blind for the same reason. The specs of your soul and your flesh don't match."
"The vessel couldn't hold."
"That... can't be."
A story I could hardly believe. And yet why? I couldn't have pointed to a single piece of proof... but Lilith's words did not feel like a lie.
"End of the gloomy talk! From here on, shall we speak of the merits?"
"First: obtain a new body, and you gain sight. Perfectly sound sight."
"...!!"
"And as you can tell from looking at me—a succubus is, by nature, exceedingly beautiful, in voice and in form."
"We dream demons are wrought from the shapes humans imagine, and from the things humans desire."
"In your case... you will have the ideal form, and the ideal voice, that you yourself imagined."
An ideal voice. Sight! The gulp of a dry swallow was so loud I startled myself. I barely held back the urge to ask if it was real. Lilith let out a soft little laugh—and went on with words I couldn't sort into persuasion or temptation.
"You can do anything."
"Idol, model, VTuber, and the thing you love to death... a voice actor, too."
"I could be a voice actor..."
"Well? Want to try?"
"I— honestly, it is tempting! Even so, becoming a woman..."
"You've spent your whole life unable to do the things you want, haven't you? The chance has come."
"You don't have to hold back anymore."
A temptation that shivered through me. A temptation I had no way to refuse. Above all, if the computer example was true, then I had never had a choice to begin with. My heart had already tipped past ninety percent. But... a few things still caught.
"B-but if my sex changes, there's an identity problem. My resident ID! My legal identity on record, I mean."
"I'll take care of that."
"That's something you can just take care of, that easily?!"
"You only think so because you don't yet know what a dream demon is."
"Zeus, Odin, Ishtar, Osiris, Leviathan, the Azure Dragon, the nine-tailed fox... sometimes in the form of a demon, sometimes in the form of an angel."
"Appearing in the living world, clothed in the forms and the powers that humans imagine—that is what we dream demons are."
"Fabricating a single person's identity? It doesn't even qualify as an errand."
"......"
"You, too, will come to hold that kind of power."
"I don't care about power."
Sight! If only I could open my eyes.
I'd cut my dick off any day... cut it off... I can't!
Sight versus my dick.
How can a choice be this cruel?!
"Ahahahaha! Don't you worry."
"Even after you become a succubus, you'll still be able to use that proud thing of yours."
"Pardon? What do you..."
"I told you, didn't I? A dream demon can appear in many forms. Which is to say, you can transform as much as you please."
"What was it they called that...? Futanari?"
"You can keep a woman's body and wear only the male parts, or you can change back into your original form."
"Ah."
The weight fell off me all at once. Truthfully... I had been wondering what my parents would feel if I suddenly turned into a woman. If I could return to my original form, then that was a relief.
"Aside from that, the little problems—you'll be able to solve those yourself."
"That is what it means to become a dream demon. Anything becomes possible."
"Th-then... please take care of me!"
I bent at the waist, past ninety degrees. Lilith let out a laugh that could charm the sense right out of a person... and laid her hand upon my head. And then my consciousness cut out.
My eyes snapped open. And... I saw. The room I had only ever drawn inside my head, I saw with my own two eyes. The light and the colors I had wanted, my whole life, to see... I was seeing them.
"Ah. Aaaaah...!"
A clear high tone speared into my eardrums. A woman's voice. An incredibly beautiful one, at that. My heart pounded hard enough to burst. I shot up off the bed, ran for the bathroom, and faced the figure in the mirror.
"A... a woman. I really became a woman."
The ideal I had only ever drawn in imagination—pure and beautiful, and yet a figure brimming with sensual allure. I had become that woman.