Chapter 2
The imbalance between men and women.
At first, it might not sound like anything particularly serious.
If you called it a disaster, some people might be even more inclined to cock their heads in confusion.
It wasn't as if a virus had spread, the food supply had been cut off, or a weather disaster had struck and swallowed an entire city.
It was merely a matter of one sex being slightly less numerous than the other.
Anyone who didn't know better could have simply brushed it off that way.
Until they learned what lay beneath it.
“It is said that the global collapse of the gender ratio began in earnest after the emergence of the dungeons.”
It was social studies class in elementary school.
The teacher displayed a world map on the blackboard and pointed out the regions shaded red, one by one.
Dungeon emergence sites.
Monster invasion zones.
Areas where the initial defensive lines had collapsed.
And beneath them came the statistics.
Male survival rates plummeting.
Male birth rates declining.
Male Awakened death rates skyrocketing.
The imbalance in the population eligible for marriage worsening.
When I was young, I didn't really understand what any of it meant.
I simply thought the numbers were strange.
One man for every hundred women.
It was a ratio that made no sense by any ordinary standard.
But the people of this world accepted those numbers as common sense.
Every year, the news announced policies for preserving the male population, while textbooks treated the Male Protection Act like a required subject.
Schools even assigned separate safety education for men.
At first, I thought it was funny.
Men were precious?
Men had to be protected because they were men?
To me, someone who remembered the South Korea of my previous life, the very idea sounded like some twisted joke.
But as I advanced through the grades, I came to understand.
The gender imbalance wasn't merely a matter of “having trouble dating.”
The explosive increase in the number of people unable to find a partner meant, in other words, that the population capable of forming families was shrinking.
It meant that the birth rate crawled along the floor even when propped up by government policy, and that the institution of marriage was turning into a marketplace.
Who could you marry?
Who could have children?
Who was qualified to be assigned a man's genes?
Those questions were placed not on the table of individual emotions, but on the state's administrative agenda.
Viruses kill people.
Food shortages starve cities.
Weather disasters sweep away the land.
But a “collapse of the gender ratio” changes the very shape of society.
It turns love into a system, marriage into a ration, and the human body into a state resource.
And in that world, being born a man meant this.
It meant being protected simply for breathing, while also meaning you had to obtain permission even for the way you breathed.
I learned that fact again and again as I went through elementary, middle, and high school.
From textbooks.
From the news.
From the looks people gave me.
And from the countless rules that followed me because of my body.
A male-to-female ratio of 1:100.
That number was not simply a statistic.
If the Black Death of the Middle Ages swept away the population, the collapse of the gender ratio in this world twisted human relationships and social institutions out of shape entirely.
And in such a world, a man's life was far more fucked-up than I had imagined.
“What? You're saying I can't advance because I don't have enough credits?”
For a moment, I wondered if I'd heard correctly.
“Professor. This isn't some American university. Where does a rule like that even exist?”
“Jihu. Well, you see⋯.”
The advisor sitting across from me adjusted his glasses and avoided my gaze.
Korea's top medical school.
It had existed under the same name in the same place in my previous life, with only the male-to-female ratio being different this time.
I had enrolled there for the second time.
That didn't mean I had attended casually.
“I know my own grades. My GPA is 4.42.”
“That is true⋯.”
“I got a perfect score in anatomy lab, and I ranked near the top in both physiology and pathology. You even said yourself that the paper I submitted separately this time was impressive for something written by a first-year student.”
“That is true as well, but⋯.”
“Then how can you say I don't have enough credits?”
My advisor couldn't answer.
I knew from that one expression alone.
This wasn't about my grades.
“It isn't because of my grades, is it?”
“⋯⋯.”
“Then what is it?”
The professor cleared his throat as though swallowing a sigh.
“Jihu. A university isn't a place that runs on grades alone. Medical school is even more demanding. We have to consider the curriculum, the practical training environment, patient safety, student protection⋯ a number of things.”
“⋯Ha.”
The statement left me speechless.
Student protection.
It sounded very convincing.
But in this world, the word “protection” attached to men usually carried a similar meaning.
Don't move without permission.
Don't go anywhere dangerous.
Don't stray from the place society has assigned you.
In the end, they all meant the same thing.
“Are you saying I'm the danger, or that the patients are?”
“You have to consider it both ways.”
My advisor finally spoke in a low voice, as if he had given up.
“As you know, male medical professionals are almost unheard of. Clinical doctors who come into direct contact with patients are even rarer. It isn't as if there haven't been a few attempts in the past, but⋯ most of them didn't end well.”
“For example?”
“In the United States, there was an incident where a patient who came into the emergency room complaining of chest pain tried to lock a male resident in an examination room. In Germany, a patient who wasn't fully awake after anesthesia once lunged at a male surgeon in charge, and the entire operating room had to be shut down⋯.”
His voice grew quieter and quieter.
“There have also been cases of stalking, illegal filming, unwanted physical contact, threats made by using refusal of treatment as leverage, and attempts to lure them out of protected areas⋯ I could go on forever.”
“So?”
I nearly laughed because the whole thing was so absurd.
“Are you saying I shouldn't become a doctor because things like that happened?”
“It's not that you shouldn't⋯.”
“Then what is stopping me from advancing to my second year?”
I had no intention of living like I had in my previous life.
The hell of a severe trauma center was enough for one lifetime.
So this time, I planned to live intelligently and go into either plastic surgery or dermatology.
A path to money, a life of my own, and nights spent sleeping like a human being.
My own paradise.
But that path had been blocked before I could even advance to my second year.
“Did the government send an official notice?”
My advisor's hand stopped.
That was all the answer I needed.
“It's the National Reproductive Resources Management Agency, isn't it?”
“Th-that⋯⋯.”
“I knew it.”
In the end, the laughter I had been holding back escaped.
The National Reproductive Resources Management Agency.
The Reproductive Resources Agency for short.
In this world where the gender ratio had been obliterated, it was the government agency responsible for managing men's health, reproductive cells, and genetic information.
Its official name sounded perfectly respectable.
Protection of men's rights, preservation of humanity, management of reproductive resources, securing future generations, and so on.
It had every pleasant-sounding phrase imaginable attached to it.
But in the end, it did one thing.
It collected, stored, and distributed the reproductive cells of adult men.
To put it more bluntly, it collected sperm.
“Professor. You're telling me to go to the Reproductive Resources Agency, aren't you?”
“⋯Do you really have to take it so negatively? It is a perfectly legitimate government agency, and one of the safest career paths available to men.”
“You mean the place where I go once a week, jerk off, and get to spend the rest of my life doing nothing?”
The professor fell silent.
It wasn't as if I knew nothing about it, either.
I had received counseling from the Reproductive Resources Agency when I was in high school.
At first, I was honestly tempted.
To someone who had died of overwork after living as a doctor in his previous life, the promise of lifetime financial support, housing, and medical benefits in exchange for visiting an institution once a week sounded pretty sweet.
But when I looked into it more closely, things were different.
Once a week during the first year.
If your health indicators remained stable, the frequency increased starting in the second year.
The agency gave programs names like hormone regulation, restorative IVs, prostate stimulation assistance, and sexual-response induction devices.
On the surface, it was men's health management.
In reality, it was an auxiliary system designed to harvest more sperm, for longer.
If you didn't know medicine, it might have looked like welfare.
But I did.
It wasn't a system for protecting the body. It was a system that managed it just enough to keep it from breaking down while extracting as much as possible.
And once you reached a certain age and, after they had finally squeezed everything out of you, you developed sexual dysfunction?
They converted you into an honorary donor and awarded you a lifetime pension.
But in reality, it was closer to storing a used-up component instead of throwing it away.
“I have no intention of going there.”
“Jihu. Wasn't the easy life what you wanted?”
“It was.”
“Then you don't have to become a doctor. You're a man. You can live a perfectly good life without entering a dangerous hospital environment.”
“The comfortable life I want doesn't have a eunuch ending.”
I wanted to live comfortably.
That part was true.
I had no intention of grinding my own life away to keep someone else's alive like I had in my previous life.
But if that comfort meant entrusting my body to a government agency, being harvested a set number of times, and ending up as a retired resource with a pension once my functions declined, then it was a different story.
Because that wasn't what I wanted.
I wanted to get married, too.
I wanted to have children, too.
I wanted to have, at least once in this life, the ordinary family I hadn't even dared dream of in my previous one!
One daughter and one son.
Was it really too much to dream of that much?
“Then is the university's decision final?”
“For now⋯ yes.”
“What about the claim that I don't have enough credits?”
“That will be recorded as the official reason.”
“What if I file an appeal?”
“It is procedurally possible, but it will be difficult to change the outcome. The decision comes with a recommendation from a higher agency.”
A recommendation from a higher agency.
What a convenient phrase.
It blurred who was responsible while making the penalties for refusing perfectly clear.
I remained silent for a while.
That was when it happened.
A familiar window appeared at the edge of my vision.
[The awakening conditions for the unique profession ‘Hunter Specialist Surgeon’ have been met.]
[Would you like to change professions?]
[YES / NO]
“⋯⋯.”
It was that thing again.
It had started after I entered medical school.
More precisely, that damn status window had begun appearing whenever it got the chance, ever since I grasped anatomical structures far faster than everyone else during my first anatomy lab.
Hunter Specialist Surgeon.
The name alone was exhausting.
I was already sick to death of severe trauma centers. How much worse would it be to become a doctor specializing in hunters who had lost limbs in dungeons?
After dying of overwork in my previous life, was I now supposed to become a doctor dedicated to victims of monsters in this one?
“Haa⋯.”
Seriously.
I had the feeling this life was going completely off the rails, too.