The Return, and a Prank
Five years ago, Han Seyul went to another world.
And became a woman.
He had wandered that world in the form of a frail, beautiful girl with long, flowing silver hair.
It had all started with something utterly trivial. One day, a message arrived on his phone under a bizarre title. On closer inspection, its full contents read:
And Seyul pressed "Yes."
He hadn't believed it for a second—he'd assumed it was a prank. The price of that casual tap was dire: the next thing he knew, he was standing in another world, in a woman's body.
The one saving grace was that the new body's abilities were extraordinary. To all appearances he looked like a fragile young girl, but this body had never been human to begin with.
Melusine.
A dragon race bearing that name—a breed of dragon, and peculiarly, a subspecies made up of women and women alone. He had become a woman because his species itself had changed into that of a Melusine.
The body possessed physical abilities far beyond any human's. It did not age, and it was free of every manner of bodily function. Gifted with talent for both the martial arts and magic, it could master the two alike.
A body blessed with powers like these. Perhaps because it started out with such overwhelming specs, Seyul only grew stronger as time went on. It wasn't that he never faced mighty enemies—but he somehow overcame every last one of them and kept on living.
And then, at some point, he realized he could hardly find a worthy opponent in the other world anymore. Without ever noticing the moment it happened, he had become the strongest being in that world.
Using that overwhelming power, he searched for a way home—and after countless twists and turns, he finally found it and returned.
The hometown he came back to after five years had changed a great deal. His family had changed with the passing years as well, and it showed—clearly they had been through hell searching for him after he vanished. He shared a tearful reunion with them all.
He was home. He had seen his family again. He'd assumed all that remained was to live out a happy life with the power he'd built in the other world—
"I want to go back to the other world."
Now that he was actually here, he missed it.
"I regret everything."
Seyul lamented, staring up at the ceiling. "Every single thing I did over there. I ran wild trusting nothing but the cheat ability I'd been handed, and then I came home without cleaning up a single one of my messes—just turned my back on it all. If I could go to that world one more time, I'd never do it that way again."
So flowed Seyul's endless litany of woe. He had been like this ever since his return—never stepping outside, cooped up at home, doing nothing but feeling sorry for himself.
"There you go again, oppa?"
It was Han Semi—Seyul's little sister, who had shot up in the five years he was gone—who called him out in a voice thick with irritation. She looked at her brother, moping away like this, with a faintly exasperated gaze.
Going by appearances alone, no one could have guessed which of them was older. Compared to Semi—a beauty with a brown bob and a mature, voluptuous figure—Seyul was her exact opposite. Becoming a woman had made his looks strikingly young: long silver hair, skin white as snow, a petite frame with a slight figure that could pass for a middle schooler's. Unlike his sister's bold, self-assured presence, he was beautiful in a way that somehow looked sorrowful and fleeting.
"Oh, come on! You finally make it back home, and now you're saying you want to leave again? What the hell is that?!"
Semi snapped at her brother. Five years ago, he had disappeared—and returned as a woman. When she asked where on earth he'd been, the answer was that he'd been off killing people in some place called "another world." It had taken her forever to wrap her head around that, and now he wanted to go back? The absurdity of it made her feel like she was losing her mind.
"Why do you even want to go back to a place like that?"
"This world is inconvenient in a lot of ways."
Modern South Korea was simply not built for someone like the current Seyul. His eye-catching looks drew stares everywhere he went, and the world was hardly suited to unleashing his power—if even a tenth of his abilities showed, all hell would break loose. It felt like living his whole life on tenterhooks, forever conscious of other people's eyes.
"I can't even remember the last time I got to use my power freely. If anyone caught me at it, that'd be a problem. In the other world, I could go about my business just fine even as a different species. Earth really is inconvenient."
"Still, there's no way it's as bad as the other world."
Semi shot back, incredulous. And she had a point—by any common-sense measure, no matter how inconvenient the modern world was, it couldn't hold a candle to the other world. Its civilization lagged behind modern Earth's, and its ethics, its everything, fell short.
And yet.
"Maybe that's exactly why I want to go back even more."
Seyul's eyes turned distant and desolate as the past played through his mind. Aside from the initial shock of his sex changing, the beginning had actually been fun. The new body was beautiful, and talented in field after field—wherever he went, there was nothing to be ashamed of.
But as time went on, life in the other world grew harder. The stronger he became, the more people appeared who wanted to put that strength to use. Swept up in one scheme after another, he ended up doing things against his own will. Under the noble banner of "justice," he did things that should never have been done. Looking back now, it was nothing but regret. If he ever got the chance, he wanted to live in a way that never repeated any of it. Maybe the reason he longed to go back so badly was precisely because he wanted to make amends for those mistakes.
"So you're saying that because you miss it, you'd leave me behind too and just go?"
"..."
"You said you don't even know how to get back in the first place, remember?"
"True. That's right."
"But hey—couldn't you call virtual reality a kind of other world too?"
"Huh?"
Seyul, who had been answering his sister in gloomy tones, tilted his head at the remark that had come completely out of nowhere.
"Oppa, you've heard of VR games, right?"
"That thing that came out while I was gone?"
What had changed while Seyul was gone wasn't just his family. The world itself had been transformed, and one of those changes was virtual reality games—products of technology that had leapt forward in his absence.
"Instead of going to a real other world, you could get pretty much the same experience by playing a game."
"Really?!"
"Yeah. It's fake, sure, but the game renders a world completely different from ours."
Virtual reality, yes—but a realized world all the same. An other world he could slip in and out of safely, any time he liked. To Seyul, mired as he was in his depression, those two facts came as an enormous temptation.
"Then... should I get one?"
Realistically, wanting to return to the other world didn't mean he could. If that was the case, then satisfying the longing through a game was the better option. When he asked, almost shyly, Semi let out a breath of relief.
"Well, thank god a game's enough for you. I'm the one who brought it up, so I'll buy it. So—what kind of game do you want?"
"Anything's fine. If it's got fighting, I'm happy."
To Seyul, one fantasy world was as good as another; the other world he'd actually lived in hadn't been anything special either. So without giving it a second thought, he told her any game would do and left the whole decision to his sister.
"Oppa, your package came today."
A few days later, the VR game console Semi had ordered online arrived. The moment it did, she tore open the box and started pushing buttons and fiddling with settings right in front of Seyul.
"What do you want your nickname to be?"
"Just my name."
"Got it. Hmm... ooh, setting it up like this is gonna be fun."
"What are you doing?"
"Just setting up all sorts of convenience options for you before you start."
Semi answered with a smirk. She claimed it was all for her brother's sake, but for some reason, her smile looked distinctly ominous.
Living under the same roof as me and still whining about wanting to go back every single day. Time somebody taught you a lesson.
Hiding that scheming heart behind a bright smile, Semi handed over the game device. Seyul felt a strange premonition about her—but this was his little sister. Surely she wouldn't do anything bad. He accepted the device without a shred of suspicion.
"So I just put this on my head?"
"Yep. Here, like this."
Semi even fitted it onto her brother's head with her own hands. And the moment she did, an entirely different world unfolded before Seyul's eyes.
It's unbelievably realistic.
Astonished, Seyul examined his own body. Where in any of this was the "virtual" part? His body moved without a hint of awkwardness; his senses felt vivid and real.
"Huh?"
But as he marveled, he quickly noticed something off. His body was fine—his clothes, however, were another matter entirely. Draped over his frail frame was a set of threadbare rags, and to top it off, iron shackles and chains bound both his wrists and ankles. The outfit of a criminal, or—
"A slave?"
Like a slave, of all things.
Seyul had no way of knowing that his sister had played several pranks on the settings before handing the game over. The first was setting the difficulty to Extremely Hard—on which a player's starting point was the dead center of enemy territory, and their status was set not to ordinary citizen but to plain, ordinary slave. That was why he'd spawned straight into a slave's rags.
That was prank number one. Prank number two was—
Seyul's gameplay had been set to broadcast automatically through the streaming feature. Viewers, intrigued by the fresh newbie suddenly appearing in a long-dead game, trickled in one by one.
But the final prank had caused a problem on the viewers' end, too: Semi had blocked Seyul from seeing the chat, so that he wouldn't catch on to her mischief halfway through. And so Seyul was abruptly transformed into a slave girl who couldn't hear a word his audience said, while the viewers were left with no choice but to watch his every move in one-sided silence. Thus began a gloriously chaotic broadcast—one that drove both sides out of their minds.