No Choice but to Go Live
I read it, and then I read it again — twenty-five pages, if you spread it across sheets of printer paper. And I managed to boil the whole thing down. A triumph of the human spirit, truly.
But not before I screamed.
"Y-you insane bastard of a god!"
Wait. Not a bastard. A bitch, was it? Either way, that wasn't what mattered right now.
Hard as it was to believe, everything that had happened to me was a god's meddling.
A deity with the grotesque name of Haruogaamurdiascagani had, so the account claimed, attained divine authority in some far-off dimension called Hemes. Earth was assigned as her first posting. After roughly a year of orientation under the senior gods, she was finally thrown into live combat, and she arrived in the Republic of Korea — selected as her very first jurisdiction — swollen with dreams of gathering heaps of believers and flexing the might of her church. What she tasted for the month after that, she said, was hell.
She trudged the streets preaching with everything she had, only to be treated like a lunatic. People picked fights in return — Do you believe in the Way? and Unbelief is hell! — and she even ran into con artists, criminals nursing ugly intentions, and people who tried to kidnap her. The grievances went on and on. Of those twenty-five pages, five were nothing but her pouring out the hardship and the sorrow of that time.
Deciding I didn't need to see another word of it, I shoved the relevant pages aside.
The heart of it is this.
Past that long, long journey, the core sat in the final three pages. She claimed that the moment she abandoned a month of offline effort and tried her luck online, she gained an army of thousands on day one.
Me? Why? How?
All I had done was rattle off, half as a joke, a handful of ideas for developing a concept stream. Who could have known that would seize the heart of a rookie goddess who had swallowed every hardship and humiliation imaginable for a month?
To cut to the chase, just as she had said at the tail end of yesterday's broadcast, the goddess had granted me the rank of Administrator.
The problem was that this Administrator could only be a woman.
Goddess Haruogaamurdiascagani styled herself the protector of unmarried, chaste women and the sovereign of every covenant spoken in the world. Ordinary believers could be anyone, but an office inside the church was open only to women.
You insane feminist goddess — where's the male quota? Why do only women get the high seats? Damn spinster deity!
Cursing all I liked changed nothing.
Down there felt empty. Every time I registered the fact, it was as if a great hole had been punched through my chest. An unbearable sense of loss.
I barely even got to use it out in the field.
The hollowness was enough to make me cry. Deciding something as important as sex on a whim, without so much as asking a doctor — she said she had used divine authority to rewrite the memories of everyone around me, so that I had been a woman from the start.
But would that actually fix anything?
I had lived my whole life as a man. The dissonance, the strangeness, was not merely physical. Mentally, too — and in countless other ways I couldn't even name — it was going to leave a mark.
If it hadn't been for what was on that very last page...
What let me keep hold of reason was one short sentence on the final page. Her power was spent for now, and what she could do was limited, but if the believers multiplied, she would be able to wield divine authority again.
And along with that, boasting that she had learned it from the senior gods, she presented me with a System that wasn't even funny. The design looked like one of those raising sims with dated graphics that had been everywhere in the early 2000s. There were missions, and clearing them earned points, and those points could grow abilities.
Abilities. My mind went straight to the flashy superpowers I had seen on TV and in movies, but those, apparently, violated the rules of the gods. So I asked whether I was at least allowed to tell other people about the gods, and about what had happened to me. She said that when she rewrote the memories around me, she had planted a lock in me as well. My unconscious would stop me from disclosing any concrete detail about the goddess to anyone.
"This is infuriating. Absolutely infuriating. All of this, over a scrap of text..."
The translucent chat window floating in the air was, so far as I could tell, a device only I could see. Every question that rose in my head was answered, without fail, by text appearing in that window. A Helper, it called itself, to help me adapt easily to the gifted System.
"Well, well."
"Bullshit — stop!"
I thrust a hand toward the chat window, palm open. Unable to parse the meme, the window blinked, registering puzzlement. I sighed and made it plain that Hamuni was absolutely not happening. Stream under a handle like that and the jokes would open on mockery and close on mockery. Hamuni sat one slippery syllable off halmeoni — grandma — and I was certain it wouldn't take a full day before people summoned everything from a plain old grandmother up through a great-grandmother and a great-great-grandmother.
"I'm not thrilled, but let's just drop the Mu and go with Hani. This one's a little off too, but..."
"..."
I was done for. From here on I had no choice but to stream under the nickname Hani.
I had no idea how this idiot goddess had confused fan-club signups, follows, and subscriptions with religion, but that mess was mine now. I had to broadcast as a woman who had never been in my fate, and as if that weren't enough, I had to scrape together a huge audience on top of it.
"..."
Thinking about it only dragged sighs out of me, but if I wanted to go back to being a man, there was no other way. No — not only that. Since things had come to this, I would smash through every mission I could and aim for nothing less than turning my whole life around.
Past the middle of my twenties and charging into the late ones, everything I owned was a studio-apartment deposit of twenty million won, a little over seven million won in stocks, and three million won between a savings account and an installment plan. The more I thought about it, the angrier and more wronged I felt — but if I clenched my teeth and forced myself to look at it positively, couldn't this be another kind of chance?
"You shut up!"
No matter how hard I tried to stay positive, the Helper butting in from the side sent my temper spiking. This wasn't working. First things first — crack a can of beer and think it over.
"Uuugh..."
I was a zombie. No — I had become one. This damned body. Turn into a woman, and even my tolerance had shrunk to nothing. It had only been a can of beer and about half a bottle of soju, and the night had already cut to black.
"Wa... water."
I crawled to the fridge, hauled the door open, and chugged cold water. As the thirst eased, thoughts started shoving one another for the lead.
My money? Is the brokerage account the same? The company? Come to think of it, this was my last year of reserve-forces training.
"Are you insane? I— I never served? I never served!"
For a second, the actor Kim Yeong-in overlapped with me, howling flat on a bed. Damn it. Get a few drinks in you and the holy trinity with your friends is mandatory: army stories, soccer stories, and stories about playing soccer in the army. Now all that was left was soccer.
No — before that, what happened to my friends...
Good-natured, easygoing female-person friend, my ass.
Furious, I jabbed a stiff middle finger at the chat window. It didn't land a single hit. Realizing it was a waste of time, I asked the Helper about everything else I needed to know and stacked the answers up one by one.
"The first digit of the back half is a 2 now."
Starting with the number and the photo on my rewritten resident ID, I opened the closet and found — astonishingly — that the clothes and the underwear had all become women's. The men's toner and lotion, the same.
"Ghk! M-my collection!"
The grief of every piece I had carefully boxed and enshrined inside the shoe cabinet, all of it turned into heels and women's sneakers. I froze in the doorway and sobbed out loud.
"You bloodless, tearless scrap of text..."
Around the time the woman's voice — which had made me flinch at first — was starting to land a little more flatly, the Helper blared what it insisted was a fanfare and announced the first mission.
Let's reach ten fan-club members.
Reward: 10 Points
"T-ten fan-club members is e-easy. Piece of cake."
I didn't know why my voice was coming out so shaky. Broadcasting was something I had always watched and thought nothing of. The moment I pictured myself having to become a BJ, a streamer, a YouTuber, my head went dizzy.
"F-first I'll change the nickname..."
Come to think of it, I didn't love it, but there was a good chance someone was already using Hani. At that, the Helper announced that this was wringing out every last drop of remaining divine power — and the nickname I had been attached to all this time was changed to Hani.
If you had divine power left over, don't waste it on useless junk. Spend it on something that actually helps me.
Grumbling did nothing. The Helper didn't even care. If anything, the chat window flaring wildly on and off was clearly pressure to start the broadcast already.
"S-so I tweak the basic settings like this... hmm? What was I supposed to do after that?"
The situation was moving too fast for me to catch up, and before I knew it I was in the chair with every basic setting for a stream already configured. It was done. All that remained was the button that would take me live.
Am I really going to stream? Really? Me?
My trembling finger wandered through empty air. What was I supposed to say first? Was a plain greeting the safe route? All kinds of thoughts flickered past. I was nervous. It reminded me of the first morning I commuted in after landing the job, and beyond that, of finishing basic training and shipping out to my assigned unit.
Still, thank god there's no cam. With a face like this, hiding it is actually— ah!
I dropped my eyes from the monitor to the top of the desk. The camera wasn't the only thing missing.
"Uh, um, the thing is... hmm."
"The microphone... there isn't one?"
The silence from the chat window landed heavier than anything else.