A Compromise of Sorts
"—Alright, that's it for today's class. I hope you'll all go home and review the material I said was important. And... Lee Se-won?"
"...Yes?"
"I hope I'll be seeing more of you from now on."
"Haha... Yes."
The moment the professor finished, I headed for the door. I had never walked faster in my life. I wanted to get back to my nest as soon as humanly possible. The whispering had died down around the middle of class, thankfully, but by then my mental stamina had already been wrung completely dry.
I stepped out of the building and let out a long breath.
Hah... that was rough.
Sitting in that classroom had been so uncomfortable I could barely remember a word the professor had said. Something about how microeconomics applied to actual society, I think... To me it might as well have been Martian.
The one silver lining was how many women were in the room. The economics department's usual seven-to-three gender split had been flipped clean over, so the ratio now ran seven women to every three men. That was good news. Their heads might have been reversed, but the packaging was still a bunch of pretty girls, and I got to sit through a lecture surrounded by them. An economics lecture, but still.
...Okay, now I'm pissed just thinking about it.
Why the hell had this Lee Se-won bastard picked economics? There were departments that actually lined up with what he did — visual design, for one — so why economics, of all things? I couldn't make sense of it. Had his admission scores just not cleared the cutoff?
The question flickered through my mind, and then I let it go. Whatever.
"Yeah... not like I can do anything about it."
We were already halfway through the first semester of sophomore year. Transferring was off the table. Complaining wouldn't change a thing. What was I supposed to do? Show up and keep going, that was what.
I was the kind of person who knew how to accept the things he couldn't change and adapt around them.
The other mercy was that I'd only had the one class today. It had been a three-hour block, sure, but it was over now, and I could take my time getting home.
Sleep first.
Yesterday's unfinished rest was catching up with me in a heavy wave. I needed to lie down and recharge before I did anything else.
I trudged to the subway. Twenty minutes on the train and I was home. I walked in and dropped straight onto the mattress, and the second the tension left my body, a warm heaviness flooded in behind it. My eyes slipped shut without a fight.
I was out.
I opened my eyes. My hand found my phone before I was even fully awake. I thumbed the power button and checked the time.
Four thirty-five in the afternoon. Too early to call it a night, too late to commit to flipping my sleep schedule entirely. I'd gotten about four hours, so I wasn't even properly tired.
A hollow little laugh slipped out of me.
"Heh."
Great. Another day off to a flying start of completely wrecking my circadian rhythm. Odds were excellent I'd be passing out at six in the morning again, and that snowball would roll straight into tomorrow and wreck that day too.
I didn't let it show. I was not the kind of guy who folded over something like this. I'd spent whole months flipping my sleep schedule several times over. Tomorrow's exhaustion could go sit with tomorrow-me.
What, future-me was going to be tired?
Yeah, and? Present-me feels fucking fantastic.
I entertained that useless thought as I sat up. Right on cue, my stomach let out a long, pointed growl — the dinner bell in my gut, requesting a deposit. I rummaged through the apartment to see if anything edible was hiding in there.
One pack of instant noodles, one can of beer, some leftover buttered squid...
No rice. Barely any side dishes. In other words, there was nothing to eat. Which, thinking about it, tracked — I was a guy living alone. Housekeeping was a problem for somebody else, and that somebody else did not exist. Of course the kitchen was empty.
Now what...
I didn't want ramen, and I also didn't want to go grocery shopping and actually cook. So I folded, the way I always folded, and decided to order delivery. The apps were good enough these days that anything you tapped through showed up fast. No reason to drag myself outside.
Yeah. I'm craving Chinese.
When you think delivery, the first thing that comes to mind is jjajangmyeon. I decided it had been too long. I picked a restaurant more or less at random and ordered a large black bean noodles and an order of fried dumplings. Add the delivery fee and it blew past ten thousand won without even trying. Even in a gender-reversed world, apparently, the cost of living was still out to get you.
I ordered it anyway. I was hungry.
The delivery was fast.
"Delivery for— wait, huh?"
"Thanks."
I raked a hand through my hair, grabbed the bag, and shut the door. I caught the female courier looking startled for a second, and I let it go. I'd be pretty startled too if I knocked on a door and a woman in her underwear answered. In a gender-reversed world, this kind of thing was just a minor incident.
The Chinese food was more important.
I peeled the plastic off and took a bite. The well-browned onions and the black bean paste fried in oil came together in a perfect sweet-and-salty harmony, and the savory depth of the pork wrapped around all of it and left a long, satisfying finish on my tongue. Throw in a hefty fried dumpling on the side, and I was pretty sure I'd found heaven.
The bowls emptied at an impressive speed. The fuller they got, the fuller I got. Chinese delivery had, once again, been the correct decision.
"Nngh. That was good."
Every container hit empty, and I let out a light belch. Sleep, eat, burp. I looked like an animal. I was fine with that. People needed to switch off sometimes and just exist. That was how you stored up enough of yourself to survive the next thing that came for you.
"......"
And now it was time to face that next thing.
I picked up my phone and looked at the notification sitting at the top of the screen. The cold little text the bank had sent me when I paid for the jjajangmyeon. I opened it the way you open a door you know a punch is waiting behind.
A hundred and sixteen thousand, one hundred won. That vicious little number reached into my chest and gouged.
All I'd done was order one bowl of noodles, and my balance had already taken the hit. It was disproportionately sad. I wasn't even sure I could survive the rest of the month on this.
"Money... I need to make money."
The situation was pretty bad. At this rate, twenty orders of jjajangmyeon would wipe the account clean. Twenty bowls. That was twenty meals. There was no world in which that lasted.
The question was how to actually make money... though I did have a lead. I opened Paxiv on my phone. Luckily, this Lee Se-won had at least made an account. Nothing had ever been posted to it, but the guy had been an artist, so of course he'd signed up out of obligation. Which meant I got to skip the annoying registration process.
I'd already uploaded a piece to that account. The thing I'd spent a solid twelve hours pouring myself into yesterday. A nude woman, pink nipples as the finishing flourish — the kind of piece that, in my original world, would have been buried in comments like dayummm and sensei this is so fucking hot pant pant.
In this world, though...
The comment section was a disaster. I'd slapped tags on the piece like wallpaper, so every gooner on the site had found their way over to review my work, and every last one of them said the same thing: I'd aimed in the wrong direction. My vision started to swim.
"No! That's not true!!"
I wasn't the one who was wrong!! The world was wrong! I was the only sane person here and the rest of them were insane!!!
But minority opinions had a way of getting ignored. My shouting never reached anyone. It just died in the room. Another outburst and I'd officially be the crazy guy, so I had no choice but to swallow it.
"Hah... haah..."
I let out a breath and forced myself to look at the situation coldly.
Of course. Gender-reversed world. There was no demand for drawings of women.
...Okay. There was some demand. A minority's worth.
Paxiv had men and women mixed together, obviously, but the user base was always going to skew female. The site sat connected to the underground, so the hornier gender naturally ended up running the community — and in this place, the hornier gender was women. The comment section turning into a dumpster fire was, in hindsight, completely inevitable.
Women jerking off to porn... the mental image was a little hot, not that it helped me right now.
I sat there and turned it over.
...What if I just went after the guys?
Draw what I actually wanted to draw, and take tips from the minority — meaning male readers. That was a strategy, if you squinted.
"...No."
I shook my head. The money on that side would be worse, obviously. It wasn't that I was writing off what male readers could spend. When they found an artist they liked, they tipped big. But they still couldn't beat raw numbers.
If men were twenty percent of this site, women were eighty. Going after the eighty was always going to print more money. I was broke right now. Targeting female readers was the correct answer.
But then... then that meant...
"...I have to draw men?"
Pumped muscle pecs. Hung shota. Sex scenes framed around the guy. With a story, even...?
"No... I can't, fuck..."
The room tilted. I couldn't do that. I didn't care how deep capitalism had its hooks in me — I could not do that!!
Reality, unfortunately, disagreed. My hundred-and-sixteen-thousand-won bank balance was very patiently explaining that I needed to start drawing gay porn.
I had to draw it. That was how I was going to eat.
And just like that, my principles started to wobble. Be a hungry Socrates, or a well-fed pig... a truly vicious binary. I could have cried.
I thought, and then I thought some more. It felt like hours.
"Hah... alright."
One conclusion, reached by leaping from leap to leap until I landed on a compromise I could almost live with.
A bit of a stretch, maybe. Fine.
I needed to make money. Drawing nothing but male erotica, though, was too much to ask. So I would cut it all off.
The arms. The legs.
Instead of an intact male nude, I would draw a male nude with the limbs removed.
Fortunately, I had a much stronger stomach for gore than I did for male porn. No — when it came to gore, I was confident I could draw the hell out of it.
That was enough.
If you can't have the best option, you take the second-best. If you can't even have the second-best, you take the lesser evil. And then the lesser evil becomes the best option you've got.
Starting today, I was a gore erotica artist. The reigning king of deviant desire, specializing in the hard stuff.
That was the conclusion I had reached. My hidden piece.
Okay.
I felt like I'd grown as a person. Or like something inside me had finally broken.
Nickname first, then.
The name on this Paxiv account wasn't the one I'd used in my original world. This world's Lee Se-won had gone by something else. And when you were about to do something big, the first button always mattered. The name had to change.
I opened settings and hit Edit Profile. I deleted the old nickname without hesitating and typed in a new one. The name I'd always used.
Hala.
And just like that, I had a name.