Otherworld Reincarnation Perk (2)
Thanks to that ridiculously overpowered ambidexterity, I'd shredded through the entire reflection essay at nearly twice the usual speed, and I carried my gratitude to its logical conclusion by giving Lee Ye-eun a piggyback ride all the way home.
Ye-eun's mother had apparently been getting worried with the kids staying out so late, but when I showed up carrying her daughter on my back, she just gave us a soft smile and didn't ask a single question about what we'd been through.
For the record, the teacher who'd assigned the essay had already clocked out for the day, so instead of handing it in personally, I slipped it into the desk drawer in the staff office where I was told to leave it. And naturally, my gym uniform—the one the teacher had confiscated as evidence—was not returned to me. Since explaining the whole situation would have been impossible, I just told my mother it seemed to have gotten lost somewhere.
But there was something far more important than these little loose ends. The moment my mother set dinner on the table, I offered the usual meal greeting and picked up my chopsticks with my right hand.
I'd never once used my right hand for chopsticks, even though the original Kim Yi-seon was pretty decent at it—but sure enough, after a brief moment of clumsiness and awkwardness, the motion smoothed itself out almost immediately. As if I'd been doing it for twenty years. By the end, I even ran a test picking up individual grains of rice, and I could manage it one grain at a time without any trouble.
Seeing is believing, they say, and once I saw it with my own eyes, I got so worked up that the instant I finished eating, I grabbed whatever ball I could find and bolted outside to the playground in front of the apartment. Not a proper soccer ball—just a bouncy rubber ball meant for dodgeball—but who cares.
Because I'd spent this life obsessed with baseball, my soccer was shaky at best, but I started tapping the ball along, dribbling it in a loop around the edges of the playground. First, naturally, with my dominant left foot. Never having actually been taught the game, I was terrible at it—though I wasn't exactly hopeless; I could manage a light jog while dribbling, if not much faster.
Next, I switched to my right foot. At first it wasn't just awkward—I couldn't control the power at all, booting the ball way into the distance or poking it so close my feet tangled up in it, which meant I couldn't build any speed. But as I kept dribbling at a walking pace, a familiar feeling crept back into my muscles before I even noticed it arriving.
By the end, I could dribble comfortably at a gentle run. And after that came alternating feet on the move—two-footed dribbling. Being able to touch the ball with each stride made everything so much smoother, and eventually I was dribbling at nearly a full sprint.
Even more electrified now, I came back inside and ran more tests.
I used a toy air gun stashed in a corner of the house, alternating left and right hands; I drew pictures with both; I dug out some scrap cloth and tried sewing with each hand in turn; and I hopped around on one foot, swapping legs to compare. Every single test: flawless. Finally, to confirm the last crucial element, I told my mother that my eyes felt a little strange and asked if we could visit an eye doctor.
She was so startled she suggested skipping school the next day and going straight in, but I talked her down, and we compromised on a trip to a major university hospital.
"Honestly, in all my years practicing medicine, I've never seen a case like this..."
The doctor spoke with a troubled air, and hearing it, my mother tensed up and squeezed my hand tight.
"Doctor, is something wrong with my son? Is there a serious problem with his health?"
"No, ma'am. This is my first time seeing a case like this, so I can't say for certain, but as far as I can tell, there's nothing wrong with him physically."
"I'm sorry—what exactly is that supposed to mean?"
"Well, ma'am... are you familiar with the term dominant eye?"
"Dominant eye?"
The doctor swiveled his chair around, retrieved an anatomical head model, and continued the explanation, pointing at it piece by piece.
"Just like your hands, your eyes have one that dominates and one that lags behind. That's what we call the dominant eye. So when people try to look at something off to the side—the direction opposite their dominant eye—they tend to feel discomfort in their vision."
Then, having demonstrated by whisking his hand back and forth beside the model's face, the doctor pointed at me.
"Once a dominant eye is established, it never changes. Yi-seon told me his eyes felt off somehow, so I assumed there'd be some anomaly—but the basic exams came back completely clean. It was only after running a broader battery of tests, including the dominant eye assessment, that I finally figured out what was going on."
With that, he showed us my test results.
"And that's what makes this case so remarkable. Yi-seon's baseline dominant eye is his left. That in itself is nothing unusual—your dominant eye tends to align with your dominant hand, though not always. No anomalies there. The problem—or rather, the peculiarity—is that when the viewing angle shifts to the right side, his dominant eye suddenly switches over to the right."
"I see... so is that a problem or not?"
"I apologize that I can only offer speculation, since I have no precedent to draw on—but as I said, I don't believe it will cause any significant issues. The trouble is, this case has never been reported in the medical literature, so frankly, I'm at a bit of a loss myself."
Still, he cautioned that there could be problems we couldn't detect yet, and recommended additional testing, including a brain scan. At the same time, he offered to waive the cost of all further exams if we allowed him to write a paper based on my case—so at least I wouldn't have to feel guilty about the medical bills. Small mercies.
Truthfully, everything I'd heard at the hospital today was more or less what I'd expected. Between a few private experiments and the sensations I'd been picking up, I already had a good hunch about what ability I'd been given.
This life's me—Kim Yi-seon—is left-handed, left-footed, and left-eye dominant. But the manga gallery lurker I was in my past life was right-handed, right-footed, and right-eye dominant.
Think about it: how far does the memory you carry into reincarnation actually go? Is it only knowledge in the form of text and video? Or are the sensations you felt, the physical stimuli you experienced—aren't those memories too?
Even right now, I can remember the taste of food I ate in my past life. That's a memory of sensation, isn't it? And if sensation counts as memory, then naturally, so does the memory of how a body moved. In other words, by reincarnating, I'd gained the ability to summon up the motor memory of my past life's right hand onto a body that was natively built for the left.
Ambidextrous people and two-footed athletes certainly exist. But for all of them, it's ultimately a matter of one body with a dominant side that happens to be unusually good with the other. My case is entirely different. I'm using this life's left hand alongside my past life's right hand—which is to say, in the truest sense of the word, both are my dominant hand.
And on top of that, my dominant eye—something no force of human will can change—had switched over to the right, just like in my past life, by whatever mechanism this works. I had literally become the only person on Earth who could function at full capacity as a perfectly symmetrical human being.
Now THAT is a reincarnation perk that stirs a man's soul. We've all dreamed of having two good hands since we were kids.
Look at the weapons wielded by the coolest heroes. Twin swords, twin pistols—whatever it is, they're always toting a weapon in each hand, aren't they? Or what about those broken-cheat characters who fluidly switch stances left and right while unleashing relentless combos? Who hasn't felt their heart race watching that?
I don't know if it was Yasin's intention or pure accident, but for an author who can't plot his way out of a paper bag, he certainly knows how to pull at the heartstrings. Doesn't this reincarnation perk just drip with style?
The moment I got home from the hospital, I skipped my workout for the day and went straight to find Lee Ye-eun, to offer my gratitude for leading me to discover this godlike trait—and, of course, to show off.
"So? I get that you can use both hands now. But what are you actually gonna do with it?"
Faced with this earth-shattering power, Ye-eun just stared at me with a blank expression, clearly not understanding a thing. Figured. Was it really that hard for a girl to grasp the romance of manhood?
"You wouldn't get it, Lee Ye-eun, but if both your hands are skilled, you can wield twin swords."
"Swinging swords at what, exactly?"
"And you can dual-wield pistols too."
"You can't shoot guns in this country, dummy."
"I can write with my left hand while browsing the internet with my right hand on the mouse."
"Wow. Incredibly niche."
Ye-eun had initially pondered, since I kept saying it was amazing, whether this might actually be some incredible power—but now her gaze had settled into the exact look she gave me on any ordinary day. This is genuinely amazing, though...
"That's because you're a girl. Any guy who heard about this would lose his mind."
"Yeah, yeah, got it. Now go home. Your mom's probably looking for you."
"I'm telling you, this is a seriously insane ability. I can dribble with both feet and everything?"
Ye-eun turned me around by the shoulders and sent me off with the look one gives a slightly dim child. Well, I'd delivered my thanks, so my work here was done.
I'm sure you've all figured it out by now, but the single most broken part of this perk was the one thing I hadn't told her.
If I can dribble with both feet, then there's no reason I can't throw a ball with both arms, right?
Right. If my arm and shoulder got wrecked from overuse, why not just split the workload across two arms? My torso and legs take the same beating no matter which hand throws, and the parts that break down aren't my hips or my hamstrings—it's the shoulder and the elbow.
Two-handed pitchers are rare, but examples aren't nonexistent. Granted, the research is thin, so nobody really knows how much strain their unusual career places on the body.
But I've already got "glass body" written into my fate—am I seriously going to sit here and hide my trump card? If the universe hands you a cheat code, you use it.
Wondering how I could put this ridiculous perk to the best possible use, I sat down and began revising my plans for the future.