Starting Over for the Third Time — 3
I stepped out of the bathroom and ran through everything I needed to do right away.
First, I had to clean the house while gathering as much information about her as I could. Even without any real constraints, I still needed to prepare for the unexpected. Memories glimpsed like scenes from a movie weren't enough to guard against disaster. In the end, I would have to dig through this landfill of a room and scrape together every scrap of information I could find.
And more than anything, I didn't seem flush enough to call a cleaning service.
I picked up the underwear I'd stripped off before going into the bathroom. Looking at the pubic hair scattered across it like the clippings from my haircut, I had no desire to put them back on. My body had changed enough that they were too small to take off comfortably, let alone wear.
I grabbed the baggy T-shirt that still more or less fit, shook free the hairs clinging to it, and pulled it on.
In the open bathroom mirror, my reflection showed the front of the shirt ballooning out like a curtain over my enormous chest. The faint outlines of my nipples showed through. The more I became aware of them, the more they seemed to stand out. Looking closer, the whole effect was strangely provocative.
Whether it was because I was wearing only a T-shirt, or because my race had become a succubus, I couldn't say—but something about it felt distinctly sexual. The shirt, hanging like a lifted curtain, casually exposed the place where underwear ought to have been.
I rummaged through the pile of clothes stacked in one corner of the room for something I could go out in and pulled out a pair of pants. They wouldn't go past mid-thigh. As a fallback, I tried on what looked like a sleep dress; with my height, the hem rode up above my knees. Still, I checked myself in the mirror, turning this way and that, and found no major problems. Layering the baggy T-shirt over it kept my nipples from showing.
This'll do.
Next I needed to find a card so I could buy trash bags. When I'd gone through her phone earlier, I'd seen that the account held less than a million won—not much, but something. And in the movie-like flashes of her life, I'd also seen a debit card. I searched the area around the bedding for anywhere a card might be, but found nothing.
What caught my eye instead was a mass of hair so tangled it looked like a discarded wig.
"What the hell is with all this hair…"
I suddenly remembered the snarled mess of hair that had been there when I first opened my eyes.
I pressed my left hand to the crown of my head, feeling for any tangles, but found nothing. I tapped and searched carefully; still nothing. When I swept a lock forward into my field of vision, all I saw was healthy, well-cared-for hair.
The thought settled in that every last hair on my body must have fallen out and grown back new. I brushed my eyebrows with my fingers—and tangled clumps that hadn't made it to the floor came away on my hand.
What I'd only guessed at was hardening into certainty. But then why hadn't the pubic hair and underarm hair grown back?
I ran a hand down my forearm, trying to feel any hair. There was nothing. Only the finest, almost invisible down showed if I looked closely—nothing prominent at all. The texture of my arm was similar to the skin where the pubic hair had been. If anything, it felt even softer.
I set aside the questions I had no answers for and shifted my gaze to the desk.
Among the general chaos, only the space where someone would sit had been swept clean—as if a hand had brushed everything aside, leaving the surrounding area even messier. What seized my attention, though, was the crust of dried blood, powdered and twisted on the desk, and the silver ring sitting at its center. That ring was the one from her memories.
The ring her grandmother had pressed into her hands just before she died.
Come to think of it, I'd been wearing the ring even when I woke up before the wish was granted. A memory of waking in the middle of the feverish illness flickered through my mind.
Like trying to reconstruct a blackout drunk, only scattered fragments came back—but I remembered falling hard when I got up. I remembered sweeping the things off the desk to clear a space.
I worked through those half-flight, half-falling memories, trying to drag them into focus, but nothing came clear.
I'm certain… she used a witch's spell.
I only had the memory of having been a witch. Nothing of the life connected to that. So I had no idea what the writing in blood meant, or what kind of magic was bound into this ring. All I could remember was that I had made it—and the image of myself beating my head in self-reproach, as if over a failure.
But there was a strange revulsion coming off the ring. A baseless aversion, like the feeling of a needle about to go into a vein for no reason at all.
Had she used magic on a family heirloom just to make sure I would wear it no matter what? And before that—had I even seen, in her memories, that this was her grandmother's keepsake?
If she'd forced herself to make it even through that feverish agony, it must have been an important spell. But the memory of her clutching her head and pounding it in despair, and this odd resistance rising in me now, made me hesitate.
Then it hit me. From the status window I'd seen in the mirror, I remembered a skill called Observe.
It was supposed to call up information about a target. Maybe I could get some kind of hint. I turned toward the ring, held the skill in my mind, and willed the information to appear.
Nothing showed.
"Observe!"
Still nothing.
The way I had with the Disguise skill, I closed my eyes and steadied myself. I focused on the skill and thought about wanting to see the information. Nothing changed. On a hunch I took the ring into the bathroom and tried the same thing, but the mirror showed nothing either. The game-like status window still floated beside my head—and from the ring, not a scrap of data.
Strange.
I dropped it and picked it up the way you'd loot a dropped item, tried using it that way—still no response. Then it occurred to me: if there was a skill called Subspace, maybe things only showed their information once they were inside an inventory.
"…Fuck. So how do I even do that?"
A sigh escaped on its own. I thought of the Subspace skill and set things on the floor, tossed them into the air—nothing.
"Subspace!!"
Repeating it did nothing. Shouting it into empty air changed nothing. Trying in front of the mirror, closing my eyes and wishing myself into the subspace—none of it made a difference.
"Aaaagh!!! This is so fucking annoying!!"
I put the ring on.
If none of this had existed from the start, maybe I wouldn't have cared. But given the unique trait I'd seen—Gamification—I was certain Subspace was an inventory. And item information would only show once something was inside it, at which point I'd use Observe. The problem was, I had no idea how to use it.
I'd only wanted to learn a little about the magic on the ring, and the process of trying had left me furious instead.
That unique trait, Gamification. If I really was operating inside a "game" framework, skills ought to be an incredibly convenient system. But knowing how convenient they should be, without knowing how to use them, was like a feast I could only look at.
At this point, the only option was to put the damn thing on and find out for myself.
I dug through the piles of trash I'd swept onto the floor, searching for a card, then went over the desk again corner by corner. In a desk drawer, I finally found the card and the house keys.
Stepping outside felt strangely unreal.
Only a few days ago, I'd been commuting to work. I never imagined I'd be walking through Seoul as a woman. Even less that I'd be doing it without a scrap of underwear. My nerves were a mess, but I pushed the feeling down and headed for the main road.
The neighborhood she'd been living in was on the shabbier side, but this was still Seoul—after a short walk I hit a wide street, and a convenience store came into view.
I'd expected people to stare the way they would if a celebrity had appeared on the sidewalk. Against every expectation, I felt no eyes on me at all.
Was this not the world I knew? The doubt crossed my mind, but no—that wasn't it. The people I passed were ordinary enough, and the clerk at the register was absorbed in their phone, completely indifferent.
Was someone like me common, then? That wasn't it either. By the standards of my previous life, everyone walking by was ordinary. The drinks in the cooler matched what I remembered; even the soju bottles had the same celebrity models. So it wasn't that the standards of beauty had changed.
Everything was normal. Only I seemed to have become strange.
As I turned that over, my eyes fell on the ring.
Is it because of this?
I took the ring off and set a can of coffee on the counter.
"Trash bags, please."
The clerk rang me up in a purely mechanical way and set the coffee down in front of her. Then, without thinking, he knelt to get the municipal trash bags ready.
"What size do you need?"
I ran a quick inventory of the garbage waiting at home. I'd have to hit a big supermarket anyway for flat recycling bags and cleaning supplies, and trash bag prices didn't really change at the larger stores.
"Twenty of the hundred-liter bags. And ten of the three-liter food-waste bags."
The clerk stacked the bags and punched them into the POS. I watched him carefully and, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, slid the card into the reader.
Around the time the prompt came up, I felt his eyes drop to my chest. The moment I noticed, his gaze jumped to my face—and his eyes went wide.
"…"
He said nothing. He simply stared at my face, as if frozen.