Otherworld Reincarnation Perk
With the "Build a Healthy Kim Yi-seon" plan now in full swing, I'd been operating under a meticulous strategy ever since my daycare days. But there was one blind spot I couldn't ignore.
"Status window! Stats! Inventory! Character screen! Shop! Gacha! Draw! Broadcast window!"
Kim Yi-seon's injuries could well have been caused by poor management. If that were the case, then managing everything properly really might let me enjoy a long, injury-free career.
But what if the problem was Kim Yi-seon's body itself — what if he was simply born to get hurt, management or no management?
"Quest window! Mission screen! System! Affection meter! Faction screen! Scenario!"
The author never actually denied that his rival was a glass cannon, after all. I racked my brain over how to solve this problem, until I finally reached the conclusion that there was only one answer: reincarnation perks.
"Skill window! World map! Item check! Uh... what else was there again."
That said, that bastard Yasin seems to have a shaky grasp of the genre. Normally, when you get transmigrated into another world, the standard pattern is to receive one absolutely overpowered perk. Was I seriously getting nothing at all?
"Hey, Kim Yi-seon. What are you doing over there? What weird thing are you up to this time?"
"Go away. I'm pondering the most important part of my life plan."
"A life plan? You? Quit talking nonsense and come on. My mom says we're eating out with your family tonight."
"What's the menu?"
"Grilled eel. Seriously, why are you so picky about food? I keep telling you, if you're a picky eater you won't grow tall."
"It's not pickiness, it's diet management. Believe me, I'd love to eat everything too."
The girl stared at me like I was hopeless, let out one long sigh, and waved me along. Eel, though — I could never say no to eel. Trailing my feet behind me, I followed Lee Ye-eun home.
—
The girl who'd just been nagging my ear off was named Lee Ye-eun. We weren't anything special — her mom and my mom were friends, and we lived in the same apartment complex. That was it, nothing more.
But as you might guess from her unusual reddish-brown hair, she was also a character from the original story.
Among my critiques of The Weakest High School Ace had been the point that, for a sports series, the story only ever showed game highlights and results — there was zero depiction of training or preparation.
Readers cursed that the kids' daily lives and romance lines swallowed the whole narrative.
Of course, as the supreme manga connoisseur that I am, I knew this was pure nitpicking. That's just what high school baseball manga are. Training gets brushed past in a panel or two, and new techniques are mastered within a chapter of their introduction — isn't that the standard formula of the baseball manga?
Who wants to watch every grueling step of the training montage? If anything, that stuff is just boring page-filler.
Anyway, Lee Ye-eun was the character at the very center of that nitpicking controversy. She wasn't even part of the main couple, but when her subplot romance appeared, people lost their minds.
Her romance target was, naturally, Kim Yi-seon. In the manga, the two of them attended the same schools from kindergarten straight through high school, just like this.
Perhaps wanting a strong contrast with the protagonist, the author had made the protagonist's baseball club manager a childhood friend of the gentle, devoted-wife archetype, while giving the rival team at Donghyun High a manager who was likewise his childhood friend and in love with Kim Yi-seon — but flipped into Lee Ye-eun, the extroverted, in-crowd gyaru type.
She shows up early in the manga as a character who lightly looks down on the protagonist and his crew, and later on her love story becomes one of the major arcs of the final act.
Half the people raging about a subplot couple "padding out the chapter count" clashed with the other half going, "Ye-eun's pretty though, just NTR her and make her the heroine," and public opinion turned into an absolute warzone.
"Hey. Do you like me or something?"
"What the hell are you saying? Ugh, you spilled something here. Wipe it up instead of just staring at it. Seriously, there's no dummy like you."
So I did find myself wondering the same thing I had back in the original — isn't this girl supposed to be into me? But maybe because my insides were different from the original Kim Yi-seon's,
it wasn't romantic pining at all. To anyone watching, she just seemed like a big-sister type fussing over a hopeless klutz.
Shoveling oily grilled eel into my mouth, I secretly leaned over and spoke to Lee Ye-eun's little brother.
"Hey, why is your noona so extra ferocious today? Something happen?"
"No idea. She wasn't like this at home. Seems like she gets worse whenever she sees you, hyung. Shouldn't you be the one figuring out why?"
"Fair point..."
Granted, she was never exactly a docile beast even on a normal day, but lately she'd been as vicious as a starving predator right before winter hibernation. Had someone trespassed on her territory or something?
Even now I dodged the blazing glare she was burning into me, and continued a deeply scholarly debate on the cause with Ha-yul (age 6. Special note: listed on the same family registry as Lee Ye-eun). I genuinely couldn't think of a single reason.
—
Even after starting elementary school, I kept up my non-negotiable routine of yoga, running, and bodyweight training, and had flopped down at home to rest when my mother glanced over at me and asked a question.
"Sweetie? Didn't you have PE at school today? There's no gym uniform in your bag."
Oh. The gym uniform.
Did I grab it after changing back? I remembered changing, but whether I'd packed it afterward was...
"Did you maybe lose it?"
"No. I must've left it at school. I'll go get it right now."
"Alright, but you'd better be home before dinner, understood?"
After the incident where I lost my indoor shoes last week, or threw away my entire backpack the week before, saying "I lost it again" stung my conscience just a little.
If it's not in my bag, it's in the classroom. School stays open until late in the evening anyway, so a quick trip should be doable.
And so, dragging my exhausted body all the way back to school, I heard sniffles and hiccupping sobs near my classroom door.
"Hey. What are you doing here?"
"None of your business, dummy."
There sat Lee Ye-eun at her desk, tears streaming down her face. She was bawling at nearly full-wail volume, and yet she was clamping her mouth shut, clearly trying not to make a sound. Was it pitiful? Or just hardcore?
I ignored the hand gestures she was frantically making to hide something, and picked a single sheet off the pile of crumpled paper on her desk.
'I will not use violence against my friends.' 'I will resolve problems properly, according to the rules.' 'I will speak with kind and courteous words.'... Isn't this what they call punishment lines?
"Hey, Lee Ye-eun. Who did you hit?"
I mean, sure, her personality ran a little hot, but she wasn't the type to just go around punching people... whoa, she suddenly burst into loud wailing? Hey, you were holding it together just fine a second ago, why are you crying now?
"Hey hey! Don't cry! Why, who was it? Who set you off, Lee Ye-eun?"
"Hic, sob...! You — you absolute moron! Seriously, it's because of — sniff! hnngh...!"
"Okay, okay, I'm sorry. My bad, so let's take a breather, alright? Hmm?"
"Genuine moron... I swear, you..."
Once I got her tears to stop, coaxing and soothing her through her reluctance to explain, I pieced together the fragments she let slip. Here's how the whole incident went down.
There was a girl — Miss A — whom Lee Ye-eun had never gotten along with. Something about Miss A seemed off today, so Ye-eun cornered her and it turned out the girl had stolen my gym uniform.
Miss A had a completely different build from me, and a different gender besides, so what she planned to do with my gym uniform, I couldn't begin to guess.
But whatever the reason, seeing it made Ye-eun's blood boil, she unleashed both verbal abuse and violence on Miss A, got caught by a teacher doing rounds after school, and walked away with a mountain of reflection essays.
Yeah, this one was definitely my fault. No wonder she lost it when I asked who she punched. With my conscience pricking at me, I took a peek at the stack of essays piled beside her.
There was enough paper stacked up to actually measure its height. It was a volume that made you wonder exactly what kind of human being assigned it. No matter how badly a kid misbehaved, this amount was excessive.
Left with no choice, I dragged a chair over to Lee Ye-eun's desk, sat down across from her, and quietly picked up a pen.
"...Get lost. I'll handle it myself."
"Yeah, yeah, sure you will."
Some scrap of pride or embarrassment must have survived, because she insisted on doing it herself. I brushed her off lightly and kept writing the lines.
Wow, the line spacing on this is insanely tight too. Isn't this like 9-point font in Word? The teacher who assigned this isn't disciplining kids — I'm starting to suspect they're just a sadist who likes watching students suffer.
As I grappled with the tiny squares, writing one cramped character at a time, the fatigue piled up in my fingers fast. I'd worked out today and put in some grip training, and the lettering was tiny enough that barely a few pages in, I couldn't write any more.
But I'd just put on a tough front in front of Lee Ye-eun, so quitting after a couple of pages whining about my hand hurting felt pathetic. I gritted my teeth and pushed on, but before long it wasn't just pain anymore — my hand had started visibly trembling.
The sun was already sinking low outside, and at this pace there was no way I'd make it home before dinner at this rate, just like Mom said.
My hand was completely spent and my handwriting had devolved into chicken scratch, so on a whim, I decided to try writing with my other hand — the right one — and switched the pen over.
They say lefties commonly use their right hand too, but nobody at our house had ever tried to correct my left-handedness, and these days there are plenty of products made for lefties — so I was pretty sure I'd never really used my right hand before.
And so I focused and wrote with that unfamiliar hand. Naturally, since it was a completely untrained hand, my handwriting was barely legible, and I just couldn't seem to get the hang of—
"Huh?"
Why... is this actually working? After only a few crooked characters at the start, my handwriting steadily straightened out, and within less than a single page it had reached a level barely distinguishable from my left hand.
It felt awkward at first, but it was as if some familiar sensation was waking back up, and I adapted almost instantly.
Made me wonder if this was possible too, so I pulled out another pen. Holding one pen in each hand, I wrote the same passage with both at once — concentrating was a bit difficult, but near-identical handwriting flowed across the paper in twin columns.
"Hey, Lee Ye-eun."
"...What."
"I'm giving you one get-out-of-jail-free card. As long as it's not a crime, I'll forgive you anything. Forever."
"What kind of nonsense is this now?"
As I vibrated with the joy of new discovery, Lee Ye-eun gave me a look that said she thought I'd finally lost it. Ahh... she doesn't get it, does she?
"Watch this, okay? Ambidextrous writing!"
By now I'd grown used to it enough that both hands moved at practically the same speed as writing with one, churning out reflection essays in tandem. Lee Ye-eun blinked at me several times, then heaved one long, deep sigh.
"What is so damn cute about this idiot that I..."
No, seriously, how can you not see how amazing this is? Ordinary people, honestly...
Because this — this was my Otherworld Reincarnation Perk. Not quite a status window, but an absolutely busted ability all the same.