Paxiv's Lost Its Mind Too
"...What the hell?"
That was the thought running through my head as I stepped out of the convenience store.
Is that just what popular people are like?
She'd been a strange woman. Every time the conversation kept going, it felt like we were talking past each other — the wavelength just slightly off. Especially at the end, when she told me men needed to be careful walking around at night. What was that even supposed to mean? It wasn't like some guy in a red mask was prowling the neighborhood.
And then there was the way she'd stared right at me when I walked in, or that look in her eyes that felt downright lecherous when I was digging through my tracksuit pockets. She probably thought she was being sneaky about it, but I saw right through her. Honestly, she looked like there was something wrong with her.
Well... the world is full of all kinds of people.
It left a faintly uneasy taste in my mouth, but I decided to let it go. I'd already bought everything I needed. Two cans of beer, buttered squid jerky, and a bag of snacks. That would be more than enough to see me through the night.
"This should do it."
When you live alone, there are nights your own mind starts to eat you alive. With nobody around to talk to, the negative thoughts creep in and take hold, and the old mistakes — the failures you thought you'd buried — start replaying in your head on a loop. In my case, it usually hit after I finished work, or whenever the loneliness got its teeth in. Tonight had that feeling all over it.
That was what the booze was for. It fogged everything over until I couldn't tell my own thoughts from my own judgment. Just eating snacks and drinking was enough to kill the hours. A very dear friend, really, when it came to shutting the noise off.
Two cans won't quite cut it, though.
Ah, whatever. I'd drink sloppily and pass out. Or doodle some worthless sketches. Turning that over in my head, I trudged down the street. The night air was cool and pleasant, so I slowed my pace to enjoy it.
"Whoa..."
"Hey, look over there..."
Something was off.
As I walked, I kept feeling eyes on me. Sticky gazes, the kind that licked over your body. And every last one of them belonged to a woman. College girls heading home from drinks with their friends. Exhausted office workers dragging themselves back from a company dinner.
"......"
"Unnie, what are you looking at!"
Even a couple out for what looked like a night walk. Every person I passed on the street snuck a glance at me.
What... what the hell.
"Ah, well, heh. Sorry — my eyes just went there on their own..."
"Ugh, what do women even see in that. Guy looks like he'd sell his body for a living."
"Honey...! He can hear you!"
A couple walking by started talking shit about me behind my back. I was almost too stunned to be angry.
That motherfucker...
He'd do the same damn thing if he had the face for it. What, did he think I was staying a virgin at twenty-three because I didn't want to?
Hah. Let it go.
I came this close to losing it, but I held on with superhuman patience. I, Lee Se-won: resident outcast, certified loser, and a man who instinctively knew how to regulate his anger whenever two or more people were involved.
The staring didn't stop. Some of the women weren't even trying to hide it — they just looked, openly and without shame. Under ordinary circumstances, getting that kind of attention from women might have been secretly gratifying... but I had no idea why it was happening, so all I felt was a creeping dread. I zipped my tracksuit all the way up and hurried back to my apartment as fast as I could.
"...What the actual fuck?"
Today had been nothing but weird shit from start to finish. I stripped off the tracksuit and thought it over. It wasn't like every woman in the city had gone into heat at the same time... Thanks to all of that, I hadn't even gotten to enjoy the night air. I'd had to speed-walk the whole way home.
The moment I stepped inside, a comfortable warmth wrapped around me. It was a cramped three-hundred-square-foot apartment, and the loneliness did sneak up on me now and then — but it was a space where my mind, at least, could rest easy.
I cracked open a beer and planted myself in front of the computer. I couldn't exactly sit there drinking while I stared at a blank wall.
I never did upload that drawing earlier...
I needed to slap some finishing touches on it and submit it to a certain site that started with P. The site's name was Paxiv — the largest art community in the world, a place where anyone could freely upload their work the moment they signed up. The number of illustrations posted in a single day ran to twenty thousand. The daily user count was several times that, naturally.
You could upload anything, from the sunlit mainstream to the deepest underground, which meant that any artist worth the name usually had an account. I was one of those artists — and a reasonably well-known NSFW one, at that. The dark atmosphere unique to my style, the clean yet distinctive rendering, the solid fundamentals underneath it all. For those reasons, my work was fairly popular. Popular enough that I could scrape together the money for rent, anyway.
I took a swallow of beer and loaded up Paxiv. The blue header bar filled the screen, along with the main page tiled with illustration after illustration.
And then the swearing came up all by itself.
"...The fuck?"
After Hitobi, now even Paxiv was drowning in men. Sexy male characters. Cute male characters. Delicate, fragile-looking male characters. And that was just what had climbed onto the popular rankings on the main page. I couldn't even begin to imagine what was waiting further down.
For a second, my mind went blank.
No... calm down. Maybe it's just this site.
I pulled myself together. Paxiv was a site that encompassed both the light and the dark, so art like that did occasionally crack the popular rankings. If something caught fire on Twitter or Instagram, or if the raw skill on display was just overwhelming, it would land on the front page. So that was the light side. I needed to go deeper into the dark.
I opened the settings and checked the filter. Sure enough, R-18 and R-18G weren't enabled. A small wave of relief. Right. Of course. There was no way Paxiv of all places would go insane.
I flipped R-18G on and clicked over to the latest illustrations tab.
And there, waiting for me, was nothing but despair.
"Oh, dear God..."
If the main page had been the mild version, this was extra hot. No — past extra hot. This had the destructive power of the Cthulhu mythos. Huge cocks this way, huge cocks that way... What kind of lunatic drew a shota with a Black guy's dick?
"Nyarlathotep... why have you inflicted this trial upon me."
Is this because I drew tentacle manga with your tentacles...? Come on, I can draw a little tentacle porn, can't I? Why is a cosmic entity being so petty about it.
Faced with a spectacle that made my mind go white, I had no choice but to get the hell off Paxiv. I needed to forget. I needed to wash my brain with alcohol. I slammed the rest of the beer in one shot, no hesitation.
"...Ahhh."
The carbonation scraped down my throat with a sharp prickle. Something about the cold settling in my stomach made my head feel a little clearer.
Why is even Paxiv like this?
At least now I could think somewhat rationally.
That site isn't an easy place to raid, though.
If it had been Hitobi getting hit, fine — I could understand that. They didn't take standalone illustrations, only comics, so the upload volume was relatively low. If somebody cracked open a carefully hoarded Pandora's box, flooding one or two pages was entirely doable.
But Paxiv? No. Like I said, twenty thousand images a day. That was not a space one person could raid no matter how hard they tried. Even if they managed it, the posts would flash up and vanish. The idea that you could scroll and scroll — I went through ten pages — and still see nothing but gay art was simply impossible.
Sensing that something was deeply wrong, I pulled up BC.
A place where every kind of gallery and every kind of freak gathered in one spot. If Paxiv had gone this far off the rails, the galleries were almost certainly a dumpster fire too. The fappers tended to congregate there as well. No — a pretty substantial percentage of the userbase were fappers. So I logged into BC with a certain amount of anticipation. I had never in my life been this eager to see a website in complete chaos.
...And yet the galleries were perfectly peaceful. Peaceful fappers, peacefully discussing fap material, peacefully conferring with their fellow fappers.
I want to look up at those contemptuous eyes while he grinds his dress shoes into me...
It looked exactly the same as always. The same old lunatics, hard at work spewing the same old garbage. If the subject under discussion hadn't been men, it really would have been a perfectly ordinary day on the site.
"...Huh."
I let out a hollow breath at the sheer absurdity of it. At this point, I had no choice but to start thinking it through again. This wasn't a raid. There was something I was missing. A sense of dissonance I hadn't pinned down.
Come to think of it... the whole day has been weird.
Fortunately, that dissonance wasn't hard to place. It had been advertising itself all day long. Even a quick trip to the convenience store had been enough to feel it.
The women were strange. No — not just the women. Everyone was strange, men and women alike. The men clung to women like desperate gays, and the women all had this faintly perverted air about them. As if something inside their heads had been swapped out.
So then what.
A single thought brushed through my mind, inevitable as gravity.
Did a gender reversal happen or something?
Even I knew that sounded like complete bullshit. I was just about to dismiss it as the dumbest thing I'd ever said to myself — right at the moment I was about to take it back —
"Urgh!"
Something came pouring into my head. A memory that was alien and yet somehow familiar. An experience built on an entirely different set of common sense, and yet one that connected to mine in places I couldn't quite name.
They were the memories of the Lee Se-won who had lived in this world.