Starting the Third Life Again 4
“Mind if I take my card?”
“Huh? Oh—sure.”
The reaction was exactly what I’d expected, and a small smile tugged at my lips.
“Thanks for your help.”
Even after I left the store, I could still feel the part-timer’s gaze boring into the back of my head. When I glanced over my shoulder, he was still staring; the moment our eyes met, he whipped his head away in a panic. Things finally seemed to be settling into something resembling normal.
On the walk home, I kept catching the eyes of people passing me on the sidewalk—and the drivers waiting at crosswalks. It felt almost like I’d become a celebrity. But the thrill only lasted a couple of times. Every glance that followed, every pair of eyes that slid openly over my chest and hips, snuffed out the rush and left something sour and unpleasant crawling up in its place.
I put the ring back on. The stares didn’t vanish.
The people I met after that walked past with the same blank indifference as anyone else, so I knew no new eyes were locking onto me. But the blatant stares from before I’d slipped the ring on were still there, still clinging.
I looked back. Far down the street, a middle-aged man had been trailing after me. He was the sort of face you’d see anywhere; the second our eyes met, he startled and jammed his phone against his ear. For a man with that paunch, the move was surprisingly quick—but the phone had been aimed straight at me a second earlier, so it wasn’t hard to guess what he’d really been doing.
Irritation edged past mere discomfort now.
I’d planned for this, but I hadn’t expected a leech to latch on quite so fast. I fixed him with a long, deliberate stare, meaning to send a message. He turned, still pretending to talk on the phone, and our eyes met again—then he bolted the other way, still faking the call.
He walked fast, but couldn’t quite let go; he glanced back toward me once more. When he saw I was still watching, he vanished down a side alley.
Ugh…
I scanned the street for any other gaze fixed on me. Nothing. The feeling was gone.
I thought I was beginning to understand the charm on the ring. While I wore it, people seemed to register me as ordinary—just another face in the crowd. Anyone who’d already been looking at me before I put it on, though, stayed outside the spell’s reach.
The man who’d run had clearly recognized me before the ring went on. Which left the question: if someone saw me while I was wearing it, did they still just see a normal person? The answer arrived in a way I never would have expected.
Still fuming, I was walking home when I stopped at a crosswalk. A dog out for its evening walk trotted over, sniffing at me. Its owner reeled in the leash and apologized—
and for a fraction of a second, while dipping their head, they hesitated. Their eyes moved on pure instinct.
No matter how you looked at it, they weren’t treating me like just another ordinary person.
Spending the whole day sorting and hauling trash taught me more about this body than I’d expected.
First: whether because of the Gamification trait or something else, I didn’t sweat a single drop while cleaning. I’d been moving nonstop, separating recyclables—anyone else would’ve been soaked—but not me. I touched my forehead. My underarms, which used to sweat at the slightest provocation. Nothing. Not even dampness. And when days passed without so much as a need to pee, much less anything else, I became certain it was the Gamification. That raised a new question about the meals I’d been eating on my old schedule out of habit.
As an experiment, I skipped a meal. I barely felt empty—just a mild snackish hollowness, nothing more. That feeling held for over a week.
Around the midpoint, I stopped drinking water too. No thirst. I watched myself through the water-inclusive fast for any change in appearance; none of the usual dizziness or weakness of fasting ever showed up.
The window where dehydration symptoms should have hit had already closed. Whether I could simply last longer, or go without food entirely, still needed watching—but either way, it wasn’t something that worked in my favor.
There was also the matter of this body’s place in the world. It was younger than I’d thought.
Middle school had been finished, but after her grandmother died she’d stopped going to class and been held back year after year. Naturally, some of the mail that arrived was from the school. And because the address was registered here, there was plenty of mail for her mother as well.
Recently an auction notice had come. When I checked the amount, the debt was larger than expected. Even after a forced sale, a house in Seoul should have left some surplus—but there were stacks of notices from other collection agencies. I opened them all, added up the figures on the demand letters, and the total sailed past two hundred million won.
At that level, there wouldn’t be any surplus. There wouldn’t even be enough to settle the claims. Auctions usually take about a year; in half a year, I’d be out on the street.
If that mother of hers had at least been free of debt, I could have built a foundation here slowly. As things stood, there was no hope of that.
Like always, I sat at the trash drop-off point and combined half-filled bags. I’d bought the 100-liter ones thinking, Easy—I can handle that. But I wasn’t a man anymore. And this woman’s strength was so pitiful that a full 100-liter bag was too heavy to lift. Factor in the stairs and the walk to the disposal area, and half-full was the limit.
“What a life…”
Nearly a month of clearing trash, and it still went slowly. Ordering necessities online kept generating new waste; anything I couldn’t get delivered meant leaving the house to shop, which slowed things further. Still, constant work had turned a place that could honestly have been called a dump into something livable.
I wanted to tear down every scrap of mold-blackened wallpaper and replace the stained flooring, but I had no money—and once the house sold at auction, I’d have to leave anyway. Better to spend only on essentials and the things I truly needed.
I hunted for the cheapest usable options within a tight budget, but the body change made everything cost more than expected.
Pants had to be bought for the hips and then altered. Bras meant foreign brands or custom orders, which weren’t cheap. If I’d had time I could have ordered overseas, but I couldn’t keep going out with nothing but adhesive bandages stuck on forever. I needed at least one proper set.
I’d thought I was buying only the necessities. The account was already scraped bare.
When the wish first came true, I’d planned to finish cleaning and walk straight into a job. Then the unexpectedly young age caught me by the ankle, and an even lower level of education locked the chain. The only work realistically open was part-time, and I needed money now, so it had to be somewhere that paid at least weekly. Which meant that even after the cleaning was done, my days collapsed into lying on the bedding and staring at my phone.
Whoever’s Wi-Fi it was, the signal was strong right where the bedding sat—as if that spot were some kind of lucky geomantic node.
“Hello? I’m calling about the job posting.”
Every call, the same parroted line.
If they invited me to an interview, they’d act ready to put me to work on the spot—until they heard my age, and then their faces went awkward. To save the transit fare, I started stating my age first whenever they asked me to come in.
It took several days of searching farther and farther from home before that message finally arrived.
Sitting on the moving bus, I toyed with the silver ring on the ring finger of my left hand.
Even when people registered me normally, if they felt I was out of their league they usually just marveled and whispered behind my back. Once in a rare while, though, someone asked for my number. After a stretch of awkward excuses, I’d started simply acting like I had a boyfriend. So I’d put the ring on my left ring finger, where it could pass for a couple’s band.
I finally felt like I might actually get to work—and then the worry crept in that they’d tell me to take the ring off. A hotel buffet job made that more than possible, and I had no interest in drawing stares and creating a headache for myself.
I got off the bus and went to the place the text had named. Other part-timers were already waiting; someone who looked like the supervisor was there checking names.
I was absurdly nervous, as if this were my first interview ever.
When I stepped closer, the supervisor faced me—and I heard him swallow hard.
“Um… is there anything wrong? Anything I can help with?”
I turned the words over carefully and still couldn’t make sense of them. The kids around us looked like college students here for short-term work, and this man checking the list in front of them was clearly management.
“I’m here for the buffet job. Is this the right place?”
“If it’s the part-time buffet work, yes. And your name is…?”
“Kim H—… no. Lee Yeeun.”
The supervisor scanned the list and confirmed the name was there.
“Could you sign here for me?”
He held out the clipboard with the roster and a ballpoint pen. I signed the column and handed it back.
“Once everyone else is here, I’ll explain everything at once.”
A few more people filtered in. He ran through the rough work hours, break times, and the usual cautions, then told us to change into the shirts and vests in the locker room and gather again.
I fell in behind the other part-timers like I’d done this a hundred times and changed into the clothes provided.
I took what looked like the largest shirt and pulled the black vest over it. In the mirror, I pinned my hair up and secured it under a hairnet.
I checked myself over for anything off, then finished. The body felt good under my hands, but clothes like these made the front float out; the silhouette didn’t sit right. It looked a little bulky—but with a face like this to carry it, it wasn’t bad.