Went on Hiatus and Got Transmigrated (1)
“No, seriously—what the hell is going on here?”
There was no one else in the room, but the reality staring me in the face was so absurd that the words simply tumbled out on their own. The situation was clearly that incomprehensible. Even Schrödinger's cat, whether alive or dead, would have nodded solemnly and given three rounds of applause.
Yes. Let's start with the obvious: I got transmigrated.
Because if it wasn't that, it would have to be death and reincarnation—and honestly, waking up inside a novel felt slightly more plausible than having died in my sleep.
No, wait. Reality has no business existing inside nonsense like transmigration or reincarnation in the first place.
I looked around.
Unlike my own room, the place had an old-world, antique elegance to it. The bed was covered in what anyone could tell was expensive fabric, and even the ornaments and wallpaper were a far cry from a modern studio apartment. Hell, even the full-length mirror was draped in ornate decoration.
And so I rose from the bed and approached the mirror. Call it a what-if—a real, desperate what-if. It wasn't impossible that one of my few friends had pulled some kind of elaborate prank on me.
I looked into the mirror, and I marveled at the striking face framed by silver-platinum hair—a disguise so flawless that no costume could ever achieve it.
And then, inevitably, I fell into despair.
“No, no… This doesn't make any sense. Why the hell are you of all people here…?”
Because the reflection staring back at me was Niger Caritas—the final boss of How to Survive the Academy, the web novel I'd written. A serial killer.
********
Here's how it all happened.
My name is Kim Dohyun, an ordinary web novel writer on hiatus. Though I suppose you could question whether "ordinary" is a title a hiatus-bound writer deserves in the first place.
And honestly, it wasn't even fair. I hadn't stopped serializing because I wanted to. It was just that, at some point, the stream of imagination that had always flowed so effortlessly while I wrote simply snapped—cut clean off.
Truly, I couldn't tell you why. From that moment on, the story of my own novel simply refused to surface in my mind, no matter how hard I tried.
Anyway, I went on hiatus, and I should have quietly swallowed the nasty comments as the price of that sin.
Every word of it was true—I was a cripple of a writer on hiatus, and I had killed Elia there. So who knows why I got so angry. But reading that comment and then, of all things, replying to it—kindly, no less—that was my mistake.
Well… yeah. I suppose if you're going to curse out a malicious commenter, you should at least be prepared to get transmigrated for it. Should have been prepared… anyway.
“Ah, my life. Seriously… what am I supposed to do about this…?”
Let me state for the record that as someone who checked the mirror for damages and then immediately ran to leap out the window, I was most definitely not dreaming. I'd jumped from the second floor and nearly died of the pain, for real.
So let's think this through.
The character I'd transmigrated into was Niger Caritas—professor of Sacred Arts at the Academy and a priest of the Elohim Order, according to the setting. A priest who was supposed to be holier than anyone… except the problem was that behind closed doors, he went around cracking people's skulls open with a mace as a serial killer.
First, I hadn't possessed a random extra, a member of the protagonist's party, or even a supporting character. I'd landed on the final boss. That was, definitively, a good thing. It meant that at the very least, nobody out there could beat me to death. Which, conversely, was also a bad thing—it meant I'd likely get dragged into every villain and every incident this world had to offer.
And for what it was worth, not being a student at the Academy was a pretty big plus too. Remembering all the notes I'd written about students being ground to paste under endless assignments and exams at that prestigious academy, I had to count myself lucky.
On top of that, being a priest actually pleased me quite a bit. Priests were elite personnel, welcomed wherever they went. The weight of being a healer-buffer combo was on a completely different tier from a front-line meat shield or some disposable mage cannon fodder.
Ah, and if anyone's wondering—wait, isn't it hard for a priest to protect his own body?—I'd kindly ask you to remember that Niger Caritas is a serial killer who goes around cracking skulls with a mace. I may not be one, but this body is a Combat Priest.
Though… granted, a modern college student like me couldn't exactly go around bashing in people's heads with a mace.
Once I'd organized my thoughts like that, I was finally able to let out a sigh of relief.
No matter how I looked at it, waking up in a murderer's body didn't seem like such a bad situation.
If anything, you could argue it was a good one.
So this body might be a killer, but I wasn't. A perfectly ordinary human being who'd lived in modern society was hardly going to start smashing skulls out of nowhere. I had no particular ambitions either, no burning desire to achieve anything. Just a glance around this room told me I could live a perfectly comfortable life right here.
Which meant all my agonizing so far had been pointless, hadn't it? Besides, if the final boss were a nice guy, wouldn't that break the world or something?
“Wait. So I just get to live however I want, then?”
That was the conclusion I reached.
Ahh… yes. A perfect ending in which everyone, without exception, lives happily ever after.
Ta-da.
And it took almost no time at all for that happy fantasy to come crashing down.
Simply put, it had been nothing more than a daydream—a dream lasting all of one afternoon.
Exhibit A: the mace in my hand. Exhibit B: the blood spattered everywhere around me. Exhibit C: the corpse that had already been beaten into paste. I really didn't need anything more.
It was a dark night, and a thick smell of blood filled the alley. A corpse, crushed well past the point of recognition, decorated the ground. And the scraps of flesh wedged between the mace's spikes whispered to me: care to guess who the killer is?
These people, already reduced to lumps of meat, hadn't even managed a single scream—and I was the only one standing here.
There was no way I couldn't know who did it.
The mace is in my hand with flesh stuck to it. There's a corpse under my foot. How exactly am I supposed to not know? I beat them into paste exactly the way I wrote it in my own novel, and I'm supposed to not know?
Yes. As I remembered it, Niger had definitely been committing murder even before the main storyline began. When night fell, he'd take to the streets, slip into some deserted alley, and helpfully bash in the skulls of a few select human beings.
Granted, his major crime scenes were the Academy and the various locations the story's episodes took him to—but he'd definitely killed people in places with nothing to do with the plot too. A serial killer doesn't exactly discriminate by venue.
And right now, the Academy hadn't even opened for the semester yet—it was still break. So it was, indeed, the perfect season for Niger to kill. A part of me wanted to ask how "the perfect season for murder" could possibly be a valid phrase in any language, but there it was.
But here's the thing.
The absurdity of it all was beyond measure—I was the one who'd transmigrated, so why in the world did the body go out and commit murder while I slept? I possessed this body, didn't I? And if I possessed it, then logically the killer's personality should have vanished. Isn't that just common sense?
We came to a happy agreement, didn't we? I distinctly remember agreeing that I'd live virtuously and coast through life on easy mode. And when I was thinking so hard about it all by myself earlier, nothing objected—so wasn't that tacit consent?
My brain churned furiously on that thread of thought. No—it had to churn furiously.
Keeping my thoughts running this calmly was, in truth, an avoidance response to a reality I didn't want to face, because the alternative was bringing up everything I'd eaten for dinner right then and there.
Yes, exactly—just the thought of how queasy I felt right now, like this—
Ah.
“Ugh… huurregh….”
The moment the thought of throwing up crossed my mind, I promptly emptied my stomach. Modern sensibilities really weren't built for a murder scene, apparently.
I'm a soft modern human who'd develop trauma just from seeing an intact corpse—what was I supposed to do with bodies missing their entire skulls?
And honestly, to tell the truth, the scene that greeted me the second I opened my eyes had made my hands shoot out and my whole body shake with tears—I only lasted as long as I did because I forced myself to organize my thoughts first.
The vomit I'd brought up spread in a thick layer over the corpse, and at that grotesque, repulsive tableau, I squeezed my eyes shut all over again.
Staring straight at a scene like this with both eyes wide open was beyond me—I was still just a washed-up writer on hiatus who hadn't even fully grasped his own reality yet.
So I closed my eyes and tried my hardest to think about anything else.
I did eventually arrive at the deranged conclusion that a corpse covered in vomit was maybe, maybe, preferable to one drenched in blood—but then the thick, coppery stench of blood mixed with the reek of my own bile, and that thought died right there.
“Hrrk—ulp—huueegh….”
It was too revolting to bear, so I had to empty my stomach yet again. There was no room left for thinking when everything I had was already splattered across the floor.
And so I spent a long, long while in that cycle—emptying my stomach, recoiling in disgust at the sight before me, and emptying my stomach all over again.
My life. Seriously….