Where Did My Money Go?
The name Galaxy — pro gamer Choi Eunha — was something I had built over four years.
From the moment I decided to go pro in my first year of high school, through a year as a trainee and three years after my debut, I stacked that name up piece by piece. I wanted to be like Lee Seonghyeok, Legend of League's pro and its GOAT: someone the whole world knew from the name alone. I wanted Korea, shrugged off in the FPS scene, to win an international championship outright and laugh in the faces of everyone who had dismissed us.
Well. I failed at both.
Six domestic titles in three years. Fourth, third, and a semifinal finish on the international stage. The best record in Asia, and still I couldn't be satisfied. At the same time, something in me broke. No matter what I did, I was never going to be them. I was never going to beat them.
I regretted every one of the four years I had spent as a pro.
The players on KZ had been good friends, good older brothers, good younger brothers. Teammates chasing the same dream, people I could set the hard days down in front of, teachers with plenty worth learning from one another. I didn't want to deny those four years with them. Even so, my four years were paved in regret.
If I had to force a comparison, imagine someone training for four years to fight a lion barehanded. Could a person actually beat a lion with nothing but their body? A few might. Most wouldn't. They would charge in bold and come apart, and then they would regret it — what did I do with those four years? That was me. Four years wasted on an impossible challenge.
And the reason the thought had come back now was that I figured it had something to do with the situation I was in.
At first I thought I had been sent back four years with my body changed into a girl's. The question of how going back in time was even possible got canceled out by the question of how a body could turn female in the first place. But the birth year on the ID was different. Before the change, my resident registration number had been 030812-3 — exactly four years off from the body I had now. Just in case, I checked the year as well. The date was a little off, but it was definitely 2023.
Maybe some complicated scientific factor I didn't understand was hidden under all of it. I had spent my schooling preparing to go pro, though, and I was too undereducated to even imagine a possibility like that. Maybe becoming my seventeen-year-old self was those four years I had regretted, handed back to me. I had no choice but to think of it that way. I couldn't come up with any other reason.
And the girl's body... if I treated that as the price, would that do?
I had gotten back the four years I thought I'd wasted. So what was I supposed to live on from here? The original plan had been to live quietly on my own, on the salary I had saved as a pro.
Wait. Hold on.
If those four years as a pro gamer were gone, where had the money I'd saved gone?
Ah.
"My three billion won..."
If anything was obvious, it was that I was never going to find that money. I had never earned it in the first place, so it couldn't exist. I just sat there, utterly blank.
"What am I supposed to live on now..."
Well, I was seventeen, with high school still ahead of me. There would be options. Study hard, get into a good university, and find a job. Trying a handful of different fields would be fine too. Seventeen was an age with infinite possibility — an age where, if you prepared hard enough starting now, you could become anything.
"Studying... ugh. Pass."
I had built a wall between myself and schoolwork, so I gave up on getting into college through grades or the entrance exam. Effort could probably get you anywhere, but studying and I just weren't built for the same road.
"...A pro athlete?"
In middle school I had started a few games for the basketball team. Back then the club mixed kids who played for fun with kids who had already chosen basketball as a career. High school was only the ones who had committed completely, and I had never particularly wanted to be a basketball player, so I quit. Being an athlete didn't sound bad — until I looked at the body I had now and dropped the idea.
I wasn't even going to clear 160 centimeters, and the only place with any softness was... that part on my chest. Everywhere else I was skin and bone. A pretty body, sure, but far too frail-looking for an athlete. I gave up on the spot. With looks and a figure like this, modeling might have been a decent direction, but that was a no from this side. Even if I had become a girl, striking poses like that was absolutely out of the question.
"Ah, seriously... what's even left?"
The world was supposedly full of jobs. Why was there nothing that fit me? I grumbled it inwardly. Of course, whether I had any right to think that after crossing studying off the list was its own question.
Then, right on cue, a decent job came to mind. Internet broadcasting. Streaming.
"I could just be a streamer, couldn't I?"
Back when I was pro, my team, KZ, assigned every player a personal streaming quota. They said talking to the fans mattered more than anything and made us do it almost by force. I had just chatted while I practiced, and from what I remembered, it hadn't been that bad. A few retired hyungs I knew were all streaming now, and the money didn't look terrible either.
Right. Streamer. That was it.
Once I had actually settled on a path, another problem remained. Streamers weren't all the same. Every broadcast had its own field. Some ran a radio-style show built on talking to people. Others played games across a bunch of genres. I looked around Korea's most famous broadcast platform, checking this corner and that, and decided what mine would be.
"A skill broadcast. Project A only!"
Next to those monsters overseas I came up short, but inside Korea there was almost no one I could honestly say was better than me. The ones who were had been on KZ, and they were pros to begin with. Nobody was going to compare a streamer like me with pros like them. The most popular game in the world, Project A, and the streamer who played it best in the country. There was no way that didn't work.
"The problem is whether I still have the skill..."
My last Project A match had been a few weeks ago — game five against Lord. I hadn't played a single round since. Whether this body, changed into a girl's, still remembered my hands: that was the question. If my skill was gone, I might have to give up on streaming altogether.
"Let's see... it's already installed?"
Streaming needed equipment. But the room I had now didn't even hold an ordinary computer. One MacBook on the desk was the whole of it. It wasn't a machine built for games, but it would do for a rough check of whether the hands were still there. I opened the Rioat client and typed in my ID and password.
"Huh?"
This should have been the right ID. I entered it again, password and all, and the same window sat in front of me.
"Ah."
Right. The ID I was typing belonged to Choi Eunha, male, born in '03. Now I was Choi Eunha, female, born in '07. Of course the account didn't exist. Awkward, I scratched at my cheek, made a new ID, and got into the game.
With the familiar music in my ears, I went straight into the practice range. It was a place to try different guns and agent skills — somewhere to loosen your hands lightly before a real game.
"Graphics all the way down... and change the sensitivity..."
I finished the settings so the MacBook would run as well as it could, and turned the range targets on.
Speed: Hard
Bot Armor: On
Unlimited Ammo: On
Project A had all kinds of drills in the range for warming up, and one of them was this shooting gallery, where you shot the targets as they came. Thirty bots appeared and vanished in a row. On Hard they disappeared so fast that if you didn't hit the head in one shot, you didn't get the kill. I pressed B and drew a pistol.
The Sheriff.
Eight hundred credits — the highest damage of any pistol in Project A, and the most expensive. Inside thirty meters, one headshot sent someone straight out. If your aim was good enough, you could even trade with the rifles. I hit the start button.
Beep. Bang! Beep. Bang!
The moment a bot appeared, I snapped the mouse to its head and fired with a left click. The spawn sound and the sound of them breaking came in a steady rhythm. Now and then I missed the head entirely — a shot through empty air, or one that caught the body. Then the range ended.
"Hm... twenty-five, maybe."
For a first try, and on a MacBook, twenty-five out of thirty wasn't bad. For a pro it was a pretty low score, but my hands hadn't actually fallen off. I could call that a relief. To be sure, I would need to fight a person instead of range AI — but I didn't want to play another game on this piece of junk.
I needed a computer. And of course I couldn't buy one with the money I had. What seventeen-year-old minor walked around with that kind of cash? Which meant, obviously, that getting a computer required an adult.
Right. My parents, for instance.
To anyone else that would sound like the easiest option there was. For me it was the hardest. Because my parents were incredibly strict.
My father was a man who had succeeded enormously in business. My mother had been a famous actress. My older brother had been drilled from a very young age to inherit Father's company, and I had lived my whole life being compared to him. When I first said I was going to be a pro gamer, my parents opposed it hard, and I walked out of the house. Looking back, it had been an incredibly childish thing to do. I wasn't even an adult yet. The coach caught me, sat me back down in front of my parents, and only after he talked them around did I get formal permission. After that, the coach tore into me for a long, long time.
Anyway, the father in my memory was a terrifyingly strict man. Someone with no gaps, picking at every bit of my conduct and pointing out what needed fixing. Being in the same room as him made it hard to breathe. That was my father.
Getting the computer I wanted out of a man like that was going to take preparation. First, he had to be in a good mood. Second, I had to lay out why I needed a computer, clean and organized. His mood was a variable I couldn't predict, but I had more or less built the reason. Honestly, a high schooler's room with no computer in it was a little much, wasn't it?
So I memorized the script I would deliver to Father and waited for evening.
I was still in my room, waiting only for him to arrive, when it got noisy outside. Seemed like Father was home.
"Eunha! The chairman's here. Come down and greet him!"
The housekeeper's voice from outside the door settled it.
"Yes!"
I ran through the script in my head one more time and walked out of the room. At the front door stood a middle-aged man exactly as I remembered him. My father. How was that the face of a man in his forties? But that wasn't what mattered now.
I approached him slowly, his expression cold and blank. All right. No gaps, and polite. I had already checked my hair and clothes in the mirror for this exact moment. The clothes were smoothed flat, no wrinkles, and I had combed my hair twice. The outside of me should be fine.
"Father, welcome home."
I finished a textbook ninety-degree bow and looked up at his face. Manners like this, and he would have to be satisfied... huh?
His face wasn't the flat, unreadable one I knew. It looked hurt, somehow. I was fairly sure I had never seen that expression on him before. He stumbled over his words in a way that wasn't like him at all.
"Huh?"
What? Why are you suddenly like this?