Starting the Third Life Over — 1
As always, the memories of a new life came flooding in.
I watched that long existence piece by piece, like a drama in installments. And when I finished that short film of a life and opened my eyes, it was not a hospital's white ceiling that greeted me. The dimly lit room was damp and reeked of mildew.
Habit, already nested in the body, sent my hand groping across the pillow for a pair of glasses.
I put on the thick, almost magnifying lenses and surveyed the room.
Beyond the tiny half-basement window, the wallpaper bore water stains; black mold bloomed in every corner. From the tower of trash rose the smell of dried delivery food and ramen packages long past their expiration dates—and, circling those desiccated leftovers like scavengers, a cloud of gnats.
"Haa..."
A life that started with a sigh.
I had expected as much from the memories I had skimmed, but reality still outstripped my worst predictions by a comfortable margin.
The stick-thin hands and forearms were even more skeletal than they had been in those memories; the body was so wasted that the ribs stood out, and the breasts were less than a handful. Hair tangled into a wild bird's nest seemed to announce my future all by itself.
Still, there were mercies. It was the modern era, and it was South Korea. Compared with most other countries, Korea was relatively safe for a woman—and my experience from previous lives would still apply.
All things considered, I had come out ahead.
I checked the bedside and found a phone. The date was roughly two months past the last one I remembered.
The gap was small enough that I would not need to relearn the outside world. That, too, was a relief. Time, then, to face reality.
I threw back the blanket—black grit cascading from its folds—and examined the body from head to toe. The witch's memories were still intact, which meant the wish had not taken effect yet. No matter how thoroughly I combed those memories, though, I could not guess what this body had wished for.
Ordinarily, watching someone's circumstances and history gave me at least a rough idea. With this one, I could not even form a hypothesis.
Does it even matter...?
I had never expected much anyway. If anything, keeping the witch's memories would be more useful than whatever wish arrived—so I decided not to dwell on it.
I sat up and sorted through the clutter on the floor, hunting for any further clues about this body. Then I tore through everything on the phone, matching fragments of information as carefully as I could.
I knew the broad outline of her life, but not the fine details; I had to dig harder. Recent call logs, the contact list, the photo album, browser history—everything she might have used. By the time I finished, the sunlight that had been leaking through the window was gone, and a feverish ache had settled into my bones.
The wish came later than usual. Normally it arrived not long after waking, accompanied by a bout of body aches. This time it took more than six hours by any rough estimate.
It was the wish she had wanted—and yet I could not shake the bittersweet feeling that remembering the witch's life would have been far more useful.
Grimacing, I pulled the grit-shedding blanket back over myself and set the glasses on the pillow.
When a wish took hold and the fever hit, it never lasted more than a week at the outside. This one stretched on and on. Whether it had simply tangled with a real illness, I could not say—but I retained a hazy memory of wandering the room in a fog, as if I had not slept for days.
Then, one morning, I opened my eyes feeling as if I had slept deeply and well.
Even after sitting up, I only blinked, savoring the aftertaste of real rest. That was when I noticed something wrong.
The ceiling, which should have looked as if I were peering through fogged glass, was razor-sharp. The thick, almost magnifying glasses had always left every object blurred—yet everything was vivid.
I felt around my eyes. No glasses. So this had to be the wish.
Better eyesight, of all things.
A laugh escaped me at how trivial the wish turned out to be, and I pushed myself upright. With that motion came a sudden sense of open airways—and then something enormous filled my vision.
...
Breasts so vast that even both hands could barely contain one side of them stopped every thought dead. Pure instinct set one hand on each, kneading. The soft, sticky-rice-cake give of them, felt even through the T-shirt, was pure happiness.
Where once I could have clawed and still found nothing to hold, flesh now spilled between my fingers.
My hands themselves had changed, I realized. In place of those emaciated sticks were long, delicate fingers so free of calluses they hardly seemed mine. From the wrists down the forearms, the limbs were slender and flawlessly smooth—almost painfully beautiful.
I hiked up the oversized T-shirt I had been wearing like a dress, and breasts the size of an infant's head came into view. They were large enough to steal every scrap of downward sight.
Nothing but breasts. Nothing else in the world.
I pinned the hem of the shirt under my chin and worked both hands over them.
God, that feels good.
The yielding softness and the solid weight of them soothed something deep in my chest.
While I kneaded, my gaze drifted past them to my thighs. Full, sturdy thighs tapering into slender calves, then to the ankles and toes. Not a single detail out of place. The long clean lines of the legs and the almost painted perfection of the feet moved exactly as I willed them.
I was still riding that warm satisfaction when something on the floor caught my eye.
A pair of membrane-stretched wings, as tall as a person.
The pleasant mood turned to ice. My hands froze on my chest.
The way they lay made it obvious they should be attached to me—yet my mind refused the fact. I traced the bat-like bone structure anyway, and felt them join my body just above the hips. The other side was the same. A matched pair.
I reached behind myself, searching the pelvic area for any seam or joint. There was none.
They were simply part of me.
Neither in my previous lives nor in this woman's own memories had I ever encountered a person like this. I was still turning over the idea of surgical removal when my hands, still exploring my back, found something else. I followed the length of it down from the base of the spine and discovered a tail ending in a spade-shaped tip.
A single word rose in my mind.
Succubus...
Wings sprouting from the hips and a spade-tipped tail left little room for any other conclusion.
I stood and looked myself over.
Trash caught on the wings fluttered free; I barely registered it.
I pulled the boxy T-shirt off. As it cleared my head, an unfamiliar sensation registered along my scalp. My fingers found horns rising from either side of my skull and curving toward the crown—and ears drawn long and pointed as if someone had stretched them.
I felt over my face and torso for anything else that did not belong. The change in figure had also left my underwear strangling me, so I stripped that off as well. Fine curly threads showered out of the fabric.
Pubic hair, stuck to the cloth. A few stray hairs would have been normal; this many were not. When I reached down to touch myself, there was almost nothing left. More precisely, whatever hairs had been clinging to the skin simply fell away at the lightest contact, until my fingers met only bare flesh.
Nothing but soft, smooth skin.
...
I had assumed the T-shirt had simply picked up dirt from the filthy room—but this was something else. On a hunch I checked under my arms; every hair there came away the same way, leaving only the tender texture of a baby's skin.
I lifted one arm and looked. Exactly as my fingers had reported: a completely hairless, pristine underarm. The situation below would almost certainly match.
I ran a hand along the folds of my crotch and still felt no hair. When I bent to look, gravity dragged my breasts down into my line of sight and blocked the view. I straightened, sat back in a chair with my hips rolled forward, and confirmed it—nothing. In its place, something else marked my lower abdomen.
Only by pinning my breasts out of the way could I see it clearly.
A heart at the center, with stems branching to either side. And it looked unmistakably lewd.
"..."
No matter how charitably I tried to read it, it was a womb tattoo—a mark of the vulva and uterus.
Horns. Ears. Tattoo. Wings. Tail.
Even if I wanted to deny it, the evidence had grown straight out of my body.
The tattoo could be hidden under clothes. The rest could not. Cosplay might fool people once or twice; living like this for the rest of my life was another matter entirely. I would sooner bite my tongue and go looking for the next life.
How bleak...
From what I had felt under my hands, a face and figure like these could have made for an easy life. The problem was that I also possessed things no human should—and that turned the body's value into that of a zoo monkey.
I sat down hard on the floor and used the phone to scroll through news clips and any footage crowded with people. Everything matched what I remembered. This was the same modern society as my previous life, and everyone else was ordinary—no wings, no tails, no horns.
I flipped the camera to selfie mode and checked my face. The phone screen showed the horns standing proud and the elongated ears just as clearly. Even the faint hope that only I could see them was crushed.
How am I supposed to... live like this?
The woman on the screen was so beautiful it hardly seemed possible she could exist. An impossible blend of purity and allure shifted with every expression, and my mood swung with her. I moved the face in the glass through expression after expression.
The screen went dark.
"Haa..."
The black display still faintly reflected her face—and beside her head, something else was visible.