Suspicion
Once the seed of suspicion toward Seon-a had taken root, my mind became a theater of relentless, terrifying fantasies.
Seon-a pinned beneath another woman, gasping in pleasure. Calling that woman's name over and over, their fingers laced together, those same lips that had kissed me now locked in a deep, hungry kiss with a stranger I had never met. The woman who had taken Seon-a's first time still wanting more of his body, still mounting him, still whispering love into his ear. And Seon-a, calling out that nameless woman's name as if he had no need of me at all, spending the night with her — the sheer bitterness of that imagined scene hollowed me out.
A grinding sound. The taste of blood filled my mouth.
I had been clenching my teeth without realizing it, chewing my own lip raw.
Back in elementary school, whenever Seon-a turned someone down by saying he already had someone he liked, I had watched it happen again and again, certain that person was me. The thought that he might now be holding some other woman in his heart filled my head with a crushing, airless agony.
Yurin tried to soothe herself, to burn the pain away with self-comfort.
The collection of dirty videos her cousin had given her ran to four terabytes — a little over a hundred and twenty clips, ranging from a few hundred megabytes of grainy footage to multi-gigabyte high-resolution files. But no matter which video she put on, Seon-a's face overlaid the male actor's. The man writhing underneath, moaning and crying out in pleasure, became Seon-a. Every time she watched, his image rose unbidden.
The last video she played showed a man pinned beneath a woman, moaning as he surrendered with the words, "It has to be this hole — nothing else!" — then carefully, hungrily licking the pussy he had just finished inside, as if it tasted divine.
Every video twisted something deep inside Yurin, feeding the anxiety and rage coiled in her gut. When that final clip ended, the fury boiled over and she drove her fist into the monitor. Even after the screen shattered, the speakers kept pouring out the wet, mingled moans of a man and a woman fucking. She kicked the tower, smashed it to pieces — and still the knot in her chest would not come loose.
The lie that she could comfort herself with masturbation no longer worked.
Only after all that pain had run its course did a single conviction settle into Yurin's heart: Seon-a had already been claimed by another woman.
Seon-a is mine. I will not give him to some other bitch.
They were only dirty videos, and yet every man in them became Seon-a. In Yurin's mind there was nothing left but the image of him gasping beneath a woman whose face and name she did not know, tangled with her own raw desire, her jealousy, her rage — a chaos of feeling too dense to untangle. The only way to resolve that hunger was exactly what her cousin had told her: to swallow Seon-a's body whole, to take him, to claim him as hers alone.
That damp, obsessive craving filled Yurin's chest to the brim.
In his previous life, Seon-a had never felt any particular aversion to sex or masturbation. But the self-pleasure he encountered in this life was something else entirely.
His cock was larger, for one thing — and even the lightest touch sent pleasure so intense he felt he might lose consciousness. The sensations, the responses, the sensitivity of this body's genitals were nothing like those of his former life. He finally understood why the men of this world had such low libidos, why they shied away from anything sexual.
A male body this sensitive made perfect sense of it.
Seon-a had tried masturbating. Most of the porn made for women zoomed in on the men in ways he found unappealing, though there were occasional clips aimed at male viewers, and some that featured only two women. The first time he stroked himself the way he had in his previous life, the pleasure hit several times harder. His body shuddered; he froze in place, trembling. At the time he told himself it was only because he had never done it before — that his body was simply unused to the sensation.
The truth was different.
He understood, with brutal clarity, why men in this world disliked sex and why women carried the greater share of desire. He kept stroking, chasing the peak — and when the climax finally crashed over him, his mind went white, then black.
He had passed out.
Most men in this world were finished after a single orgasm, and the sexual pleasure itself ran several times hotter than anything from his previous life — closer to the way women's pleasure had been described back then. If he ever had actual sex in this state, the dizzying intensity of it would drive him out of his mind. He had collected the occasional video to study this world's female tastes, assuming much of it was performance. Feeling it himself, he knew it was not acting. It was real.
Sex with a woman in this condition would knock him unconscious at best. At worst, he might experience the kind of "male corruption" that filled this world's adult media. The brief fantasy he'd entertained right after reincarnating — that he might bounce from woman to woman in a world where the genders were flipped — now struck him as nearly insane. No wonder men who got gang-raped in this world simply died.
Once he grasped all of that, the monster abductions that came through the Gates became even more terrifying.
If I get dragged off by monsters the way that glowing sphere wants, I'll die of sexual exhaustion for sure.
It was a hard-won realization, courtesy of post-nut clarity.
After blacking out from masturbation, he decided he needed to carefully manage the intensity of anything physical with Yurin. Suppress whatever sexual knowledge she might pick up. Push the day of actual sex as far into the future as possible. It was a choice he had to make for the sake of his own body.
Even while Seon-a was doing dirty things with her in person, Yurin seemed to interpret his habit of getting rid of her dirty toys as jealousy — as if he resented the objects themselves. It was a little embarrassing, but better that she misunderstand it that way. Going all the way right now would be a disaster. Until he grew used to this hypersensitive body, it was far too early to let Yurin take him fully.
And yet, only a few days after their first deep kiss, Yurin started demanding sex.
Her requests escalated overnight — from knowing only how to kiss to suddenly wanting a whole range of things. From Seon-a's perspective, Yurin had been a child who knew nothing sexual beyond kissing. Something must have taught her more. About sex. About deep kissing. About the proper way bodies were supposed to join when a man and a woman came together. Things they would have done eventually anyway — but the suddenness of her demands put real pressure on him.
He managed to defuse the situation with deep kissing alone, but a Yurin with her fire lit would keep demanding sex. That much was certain.
In his previous life, no man had disliked sex. But the men of this world felt pleasure so overwhelming that even masturbation could shatter their minds. And if he had to absorb the lust of a woman who had been worked up for years by nothing but kissing — a woman whose baseline libido already rivaled that of a high-school boy from his old world?
He fully expected he might die of pleasure-shock mid-act. Or be wrecked by rough handling and finish himself off through sheer sexual excess. He had no masochistic streak. Facing pleasure he wasn't even sure he could survive required real resolve. He needed training — solo practice to desensitize himself — and mental preparation. Solo masturbation and sex shared between two people were entirely different things.
He couldn't accept Yurin's demands as things stood, so he tried to satisfy her with deep kissing alone. That was a grave mistake.
Yurin was more than he had imagined.
The day he finally learned how twisted her sexual desires had become, he would feel every calculation he had made up to that point turn to ash.
One day, the moment Yurin finished a long, wet, tongue-tangled kiss, something happened that was almost identical to what she had done in her room the first time they met. Her left hand locked around both of his wrists. Her right hand started pulling down his pants.
He shouted that they couldn't — loud, over and over — but Yurin's eyes had gone somewhere else. Heavy, excited breathing. Unfocused pupils. Rough hands yanking at his clothes. Secondary sexual characteristics, more than a decade of unintentional stimulation, the recent start of her own masturbation — reasons Seon-a couldn't fully know stacked on top of one another until something in her snapped.
But when Seon-a fixed her with a cold, steady stare and made his refusal unmistakably clear, Yurin had no choice but to back down. The thought that forcing him — something close to rape — would end their relationship for good must have cut through the haze. She stopped what she was doing and cooled her heat. Then she apologized, said her body was too worked up to control, and laid the responsibility for stoking her lust at Seon-a's feet.
Seon-a, for his part, remembered all the times he had touched his childhood friend's body, all the times he had let her touch his. Now that her desire was at its peak, it had simply exploded — and he concluded that a share of the blame was his.
So they reached an agreement. Sex would wait until university. And when Yurin's lust built up too high, he would relieve her with his hands from time to time.
Ending it in compromise was a relief, in a way. If they had gone all the way, he would have been pinned under her, thrashing helplessly, unable to control this hypersensitive body — the mere thought of how pathetic he would have looked made his face burn. He had to do something about this sensitivity before they ever went that far. Otherwise, there was no telling what he might endure.
He had hoped those sessions would help his body adjust. They were almost useless. The more he masturbated, the more sensitive he became. In a world where the genders were reversed, the experience of having had sex hundreds of times in a previous life was nearly worthless. If he tried to take Yurin's lust with his body as things stood, the odds of losing his mind were high.
Fear of how much he would feel sat side by side with a thread of anticipation. Yurin's looks were almost exactly his type, and he didn't think she would be truly brutal with him once they went all the way. Masturbation and sex were different, after all — maybe if he just held on as hard as he could, it would be manageable.
In the end, with no real solution in sight, he began to look away from what was coming, armoring himself in baseless confidence.
Time passed, and at last the day arrived that he had both longed for and dreaded: the entrance ceremony at Hanil University.
Studying was dull, thankless work. Most of his previous life's memories were gone, but doing it all over again brought fragments of recollection rising to the surface and made him reconsider how important education really was. Wanting to be a good son to the parents of this life only pushed him harder. He poured himself into his studies.
Universities often admitted students by rank. In a world where Gates opened and monsters poured through, which profession made the most money on average? Medicine, because people got hurt by monsters? Not really — Awakened with healing abilities had already encroached on most of what pre-med used to cover, so the department wasn't especially popular. Guild Management, supporting the administrative work between guilds, the military, the private sector, and the government? Ordinary companies already ran Gate-related investments and business divisions, so it wasn't that different from a standard business major.
There were plenty of other departments. But the one that made the real money was anything tied to Gate resources. Elixirs. Potions. Metals that weighed less than three kilograms, stopped bullets, and could still cover an entire body. The materials that came out of Gates carried technology far beyond anything humanity had imagined. Fifty years of regulations and restrictions had made specialized qualifications, techniques, and licenses mandatory to handle them — and the absolute peak of Gate resource studies was Hanil University.
Founded by Hanil Guild, the strongest guild in the country, the school supplied its students with Gate materials for practical training — pieces worth anywhere from a few million won to hundreds of billions. Teaching aids worth hundreds of billions. What other university on earth could match that?
Getting into Hanil University required not merely top-tier scores on the national exam, but the absolute highest ranks. And the Gate Resources Department was exceptional even among those.
There was another reason he had applied here.
"Seon-a. It's been a whole week."
And yet that golden-spoon childhood friend of his had strolled in on a donation admission track, boosted by the enormous admissions credit her mother Yura's hunter service had earned her. When a parent was a hunter — someone who closed Gates and worked for the nation — a special point system applied to university admissions, major corporate hiring, civil service exams, and more. It took substantial achievements to matter, of course. But for Executive Director Park Yura of the Hwaryong Guild, a founding elder who had been a hunter a full decade longer than Seon-a's own mother, it was hardly impossible.
He had deliberately applied to Hanil University, far from the region where he lived, hoping to put distance between himself and Yurin and start dorm life free of her. Somehow, Yurin had followed him to the same school.
Ever since that incident, the look on her face whenever she saw an opening — the look of someone ready to pin him down by force — had only grown more frightening. If they went all the way now, it would be a catastrophe. Even at this moment, Yurin's expression — sly and full of anticipation — was reflected in his eyes.
"It's only been a week. What's with the 'long time no see'?"
Was he running from reality? He let her words slide past and answered with practiced nonchalance.
"The day I've been waiting for is finally here. You're looking forward to it too, right?"
Yurin spoke as if the entrance ceremony itself were the thing she was excited about. Then she leaned in close, her face beside his, and said quietly:
"I mean the sex."
Her voice was tiny, but hearing it sent a rush of confusion and unwanted anticipation through him that turned his face scarlet. The greedy look on his childhood friend's face as she licked her lips made it perfectly clear what she wanted to do to him. Something almost sadistic lived in that expression.
His face burned red in an instant.
"I'll see you a little after the ceremony."
Shame and fear settled into his chest. The urge to run right then and there climbed all the way to the top of his skull.
Hanil University — a prestigious name. At its entrance ceremonies, tradition held that the top incoming student would speak on behalf of the new class, addressing the faculty and upperclassmen with their hopes and first impressions.
On the day of the ceremony, Yurin stared fixedly as the top student's name was announced.
It was Seon-a — the friend she knew best, and her lover.
Yurin had studied with him every exam season. She had known since they were children how good he was at schoolwork. Whenever her boyfriend showed himself at his best, pride swelled in her chest until she wanted to show him off to the world.
"That concludes my remarks. We ask that you guide us well as we begin."
The moment the top student's speech ended — before the ceremony itself was even over — Seon-a slipped out under the pretense of using the bathroom and fled. He had already texted a few of his new classmates; he could head to the dorms once the ceremony finished. Clutching his chaotic thoughts, he ran for the main gate — and there, at the entrance he had seen so many times, stood the very person he had been praying not to run into. The reason he was running in the first place stood clear before his eyes.
Yurin had already been waiting at the main gate. The moment she spotted Seon-a, she started toward him.
How did she even know to wait at the front gate?
Yurin had watched Seon-a come down from the stage after the top student's speech and suddenly try to slip out through a back door, and something felt wrong. He looked like a person watching for someone's eyes, trying to escape. Applying to Hanil University — so far from where he had always lived, and without telling her — had been strange enough. The way he had suddenly become so skilled at kissing was strange too. All of it was suspicious.
She could feel another woman's shadow on him.
Promising sex once they entered university was not the kind of thing that came easily from a man's mouth. Sex could be dismissed as a crude mingling of bodies, but for Yurin it was a long-awaited promise with the person she loved. Thinking back on what Seon-a had said then — even if he were seeing someone else, he was not the type to lie about having sex with her. He had always liked dirty things, after all. He might hide things that involved her, but he did not lie.
Yurin waited for him at the rear gate with her heart full of anticipation. She finally had the chance to hold Seon-a accountable for years of setting her body on fire — and the thought of asking his body directly whether another woman was involved made the wetness between her legs grow thicker by the second.
And if there was another woman — she would wreck that lying slut's body until he understood exactly who he belonged to.