Reincarnation
By the time he could properly make sense of the world around him—when his hearing and sight had developed enough to take things in—he began to recognize the familiar language in his parents' voices, the black hair and dark eyes, the everyday objects that felt like home.
The place he had been reborn into was not so different from the one he had left behind. He had been born again in the same country, Korea, and—mercifully—as a boy once more. That was about all he had managed to piece together by the time he was nine months old.
A person who was somewhat androgynous—more pretty than handsome, if one had to choose—approached him and spoke.
"Come on, my pretty Seon-a. Time for mama."
"Mama. Mama."
"Aww, look how cute our Seon-a is!"
His mother's name was Lee Min-a. His father's was Kim Hyeon-tae.
In his previous life, by the time he had grown old enough to understand such things, he had had no parents. The caregivers at the orphanage—adults who looked after him and the other children with something close to professional detachment—had been the closest thing he had to family. They were not bound by blood, and between the selfishness natural to young children and the fact that the staff rotated out every few months to a couple of years at most, forming any real attachment had been nearly impossible.
The one-sided, unconditional love a parent pours into a child was something he was experiencing for the first time. Even now, as he grew more used to it, his gratitude toward them only deepened. Feeling the warmth of a gentle hand stroking his hair, he drifted off to sleep in their arms, thinking how much he wanted to be good to these parents he had finally been given.
On weekdays, his mother prepared for work every morning without fail. His father cooked her breakfast and, when she left, carried Seon-a out to the front door to see her off.
Watching his mother go to work day after day, observing his father's distinctly feminine mannerisms, noticing that the anchors and reporters on the news were the opposite gender from what he remembered—something about it all felt off. This was a world in which the gender roles of men and women had been completely reversed. It did not take him long to realize that physical ability, sexual desire, and a host of other things had been flipped as well.
By the time he turned five, he understood that it was not only the social roles that had been inverted. Physical capability, values, patterns of behavior, libido—nearly everything stood in direct opposition to his previous life. Lingerie and cosmetics commercials featured delicate male models as the norm, and sexual crimes targeted men. It was a mad world.
When he started daycare at five, the boys his age played house while the girls tore around like little hellions, sword-fighting with sticks. It was dizzying.
And this world differed from his last in another, far more significant way: fifty years earlier, Gates had opened, and monsters from another realm had poured through them. At the same time, people began spontaneously Awakening—gaining powers of their own.
To close a Gate, one had to destroy the core inside it. But Gates obeyed a strange law that prevented external attacks from reaching their interiors, and within them, the ammunition and gunpowder used in firearms would spontaneously detonate. Cold weapons were the only option. Even so, no matter how well-armed a group of ordinary people might be, forcing their way into a Gate crawling with monsters and shattering its core was no simple task.
Then individuals began to appear who possessed strength, durability, and magical power far beyond the ordinary. They came to be called the Awakened. Among them, those suited for combat—who entered Gates to hunt monsters—were dubbed Hunters, and under that name the combat-capable Awakened formed the Hunter Association, a powerful organization that could negotiate with the government to protect their rights and define the scope of their work.
Outside the Gates, military forces took command, standing ready against monsters and emergencies. Inside, Hunters entered, destroyed the cores, and sealed the Gates shut. That became the standard model of operation.
In time, people discovered that the materials that formed naturally within Gates held enormous value—herbs that could heal a wound simply by being applied to it, new materials crafted from monster corpses, and more. Gates were literal treasure troves of resources. What had once been regarded as objects of unknown terror gradually came to be seen as little more than sources of profit: oil fields, gold mines, natural wealth waiting to be claimed.
But for him, the most shocking revelations concerned the monsters themselves. When they escaped a Gate, their first priority was to capture human males alive and carry them off. Research over the past fifty years had concluded that the monsters had invaded because of a specific kind of resource depletion. For all the strange riches that filled the Gates, the resource the monsters truly wanted was human.
Most monsters were either asexual or female in form. According to investigations, they took human men as a means of propagating their own species—using them as seed-spreaders, males of a race that could impregnate them even outside of heat. The idea was staggering.
Thinking back on the media of his previous life—alien species composed only of males, orcs, goblins—the method of seizing human women as broodmares was, in truth, inefficient. Taking a single male and using their own bodies as the vessels for reproduction was a far better exchange rate. For the victims, of course, it was a living hell.
Even ordinary sex with human women in this world could push men to the brink of death from exhaustion, given how much greater female stamina and desire were here. If dozens of monsters gang-raped a man, the odds of him dying or going mad were overwhelming. He would have to do everything in his power to make sure that never happened to him.
Today, as on so many other days, he stood before the mirror, still not quite used to the face looking back at him. A pretty child with Hyeon-tae's features and his mother's slightly sharp eyes stared out from the glass. He was still young, not yet through his second growth spurt, and when he pressed close to his father's face it felt as though he had inherited every scrap of the man's genes—his reflection and his father's almost interchangeable.
The front door opened. Footsteps and a familiar presence entered the house.
"Mommy's home, my pretty Seon-a!"
"Welcome home, Mom."
The moment his mother came through the door, Seon-a let go of his father and ran to the entryway, throwing himself into her arms. She scooped him up and kissed his face.
"That tickles, Mom."
Lee Min-a was twenty-seven, a short-haired woman who looked a touch cold because of those sharp eyes, and who stood nearly a hundred and eighty centimeters tall. She was a B-Rank Hunter, a seven-year veteran of a major guild. The reason their family could live in a safe zone at all was thanks to the support of the large guild she belonged to.
And the reason a soul who had lived nearly thirty years in a previous life still clung and acted like a child had nothing to do with calculation. It was pure and genuine. Having known a parent's love for the first time, he found himself craving family affection more than ever. The hollow that no girlfriend had ever been able to fill was being mended by the love he received from his parents. People said a child raised without a mother was prone to affection starvation—he had had neither parent, and he had always hungered for other people's attention. The reason he had two-timed his girlfriend and started seeing Mina, too, had almost certainly been that same deficiency.
A bitter little smile, far too old for a child's face, touched his lips.
His father's voice drifted in from the living room.
"Seon-a, are you just going to abandon Daddy the second Mommy walks in?"
He had been holding onto Hyeon-tae, only to drop him the instant his mother arrived, and now his father was speaking in a faintly sulky tone.
"Then I'll hug Daddy again."
Even with the roles of men and women reversed, some things, it seemed, never changed. He hoped this happiness would last forever.
Lee Min-a was a veteran Hunter of Hwaryong, one of the ten largest guilds in Korea, and a candidate for executive rank. Reaching B-Rank at twenty-seven put her in the top five percent of all Hunters—an elite. The guild master and the senior members had taken note of her trajectory and recommended her as an executive candidate, intending to elevate her within a few years. Given how likely a young B-Rank like Min-a was to reach A-Rank, she stood a real chance of rising not merely to junior executive but all the way into the upper ranks of leadership.
Park Yura sat on a sofa, smoking a cigarette, turning over Min-a's bare-bones profile in her mind, and spoke to herself.
"If Min-a puts in three more years, she should be ready for a guild executive post."
An A-Rank Hunter and one of Hwaryong's founding elders, Park Yura had been among the first to mark Min-a as someone worth watching. She held the position of Executive Director—the very top of the factional line Min-a had been drawn into—and made a point of crossing paths with her often enough to signal to rival factions that Min-a was one of hers. She was also the one who had pushed Min-a from provisional team leader to full team leader.
In truth, a guild was not so different from an ordinary company. Office politics existed. So did the unspoken factional wars people called "lines." People got demoted and reassigned to the provinces. In her youth, Yura had believed that building the tower was all that mattered. Age had taught her that keeping it from collapsing was just as important. She knew that the more people she had at her side, the more solid her standing within the guild became, and so she had worked actively to pull talented members into her own faction.
"I should have dinner with Min-a's family one of these days. She mentioned a five-year-old son, didn't she? I could bring my daughter along—let the kids get to know each other."
Park Yura had a five-year-old daughter the same age as Min-a's son. She herself was thirty-seven. That she had become one of the key figures who built Hwaryong into a major guild as an original member was no accident. She had poured her youth into what had once been a startup guild, married late as a result, and—hardened by habits formed young—become a workaholic who was rarely home. Her relationship with her husband and daughter was a little strained because of it.
The thought of spending a weekend with her family while also taking care of necessary business put her in a good mood. Her family found her hard to understand, but Yura herself never quite realized what it meant to them that she treated the precious time she was supposed to spend with them as merely an extension of her work.