Chapter 1
Putting aside the shock of turning into a woman, I decide to get out of here first.
“Fuck… fuck…”
My original body is gone.
“Status Window!!”
I try calling up my Status Window in midair, but it remains unresponsive.
As expected, everything connected to my original body is gone too.
I have to start over from scratch.
‘It's all right… I can do this.’
I still can't forget the faces of those bastards who desecrated and dismembered even my corpse.
‘Before that, I need somewhere to live…’
I'll make a careful plan, then get my revenge. For now, that's my goal.
Just as I was burning with a fierce desire for revenge…
“Hey, you there! Who are you??”
“Huh?”
A middle-aged security guard in a fluorescent safety vest looks at me standing atop the pile of garbage, then his eyes go wide in surprise.
“Good grief, you startled me!”
“W-wait a moment…”
How am I supposed to explain this?
I feel as though my brain has stopped too. The security guard initially mistakes me for a ghost, but after realizing I'm human, his eyes begin rapidly sweeping up and down my body.
“Ooh…?”
“Er.....?”
.
.
.
“Aaaaaah!!!”
A half-beat later, the guard realizes that I'm a naked woman and bolts away with the flapping rustle of garbage bags.
“Miss!!! Where are you going?”
-THUD THUD THUD!
As I run at full speed, I feel my enormous tits swaying obscenely from side to side.
"Nngh…"
I clutch my breasts against the pain and keep running.
‘Why is my body… Damn it!!’
Fortunately, I spot a door nearby that looks like an entrance.
“Miss!!”
Leaving the desperately shouting guard behind me, I dash outside.
-SQUEAK… BANG!!
I wrench open the rusty green metal gate and slam it shut with a backward kick.
‘Wh-where am I…?’
When I raise my head, I see the ordinary, familiar buildings of a Korean city.
Low- and high-rise buildings are mixed together, and I can see familiar shops like restaurants, cafés, and convenience stores.
Right in front of me, a not particularly wide sidewalk and a two-lane road stretch out before my eyes.
It isn't a bustling district with many skyscrapers, but it is a downtown area crowded with cars and pedestrians.
And naturally,
Just as I see them, they see me too.
"Ah…?"
“Aaaaaaaaah!!!”
“W-what the hell? Why is there a crazy woman…?”
As nearby pedestrians begin screaming, more and more people's gazes turn toward me.
People walking along the sidewalk.
People drinking beverages inside cafés in the buildings.
People looking at their phones on buses.
Everyone focuses their attention on me.
“N-no…”
Some people are startled enough to call the police, while others pull out their phones to take pictures and videos.
“D-don't take pictures!! I'll report you all. S-stop!”
My face. My breasts. My crotch.
There are three places I need to cover, but I only have two hands.
In my panic, my hands flail back and forth, unable to decide where to go.
"I'm sorry! I absolutely didn't mean to look…! No, but it's impossible not to look…"
“I think she's crazy…”
“I've never seen a figure like that in real life…”
The frantic movement of my hands only exposes one important area after another, but I don't even have the presence of mind to care about that.
I desperately flee from the crowd into a nearby alley, but…
[Grandma's Pork Gukbap—70 Years of Tradition]
They say there is no paradise for those who flee.
Perhaps this alley's pork soup restaurant is famous, because dozens of people are lined up waiting, and my eyes meet theirs.
I learn later that it is right around lunchtime, the busiest time of day for foot traffic…
“Uh… uh?”
When my eyes meet those of so many people, everyone, myself included, grows wide-eyed with surprise.
“Wow...”
“Is this a MuTube hidden-camera prank? You know, to see people's reactions."
“Wow, fuck… she's gorgeous.”
"She's fucking huge..."
“Oh my… that figure…”
“Hey, hey, you'll get arrested if you keep that up.”
“Is she a crazy bitch? Oppa, don't just stare—call the police!”
‘Why are there so many people around here…’
The sound of cameras clicking can be heard frequently nearby.
It is practically a criminal act, of course, but perhaps they think it doesn't matter if they aren't caught—or perhaps they simply want pictures of my body even if they are caught. Either way, everyone keeps snapping away.
“D-don't look!!!”
I shout threateningly, but the clicking doesn't stop.
***
With an enormous number of reports coming in, the police arrive quickly and catch me near the alley within five minutes.
I'm dragged away just like that and questioned by a middle-aged police officer while wrapped in a large blanket.
Fortunately, they don't handcuff me or treat me like a serious criminal, but being arrested for public indecency… This is deeply humiliating.
“……”
“Sigh… What's your name?”
The police officer looks at me as though I'm some kind of oddity.
‘Oh heavens…’
No, should I be praying to a constellation now?
Come to think of it, my connections with all the constellations who had contracts with my original body have been severed too.
To think that I, once the world's number one, would become a woman and be questioned naked at a police station… I can't help but sigh.
-BANG!
“Miss, do you think this is a joke?”
“Ah, you startled me!”
The police officer looks irritated, perhaps stressed by the countless calls he has received, and slams his hand down on the desk in anger.
‘What am I supposed to do…’
I had only just possessed this body. There's no way I could know its name.
But if I gave my old name, I was already a dead person, an entirely different man from who I was now. They would definitely treat me as even crazier.
Besides, I had to get revenge on those bastards. If I said that I had returned without any power, wouldn't those traitors secretly kidnap me and torture me?
‘And I'd be lucky if it were just torture. With this body…’
The thought of the kinds of torture I could suffer as a woman sends a chill over my body.
There is only one way to explain myself here.
“I-I don't remember…”
I act as pitifully as possible, pretending that some unknown evil organization attacked me and erased my memories. I answer in a pitiful voice.
An inexplicable, burning humiliation coils around my body, but I have to endure it. This body has returned to the level of an ordinary woman, so there will be plenty of things I'll have to put up with from now on. Surely I can endure just this one thing?
‘That's right. For the greater good…!’
However,
“Good grief, I've seen all kinds of crazy lunatics, but you take the cake…”
"Huh...?"
The veteran police officer, who has subdued countless drunkards and lunatics, sees straight through my pitiful act despite the humiliation I endured—and curses me even more.
“No, I really don't remember.”
“Miss, do you know where you are?”
The police officer lowers his voice, leans his sparsely bearded face toward me, and glares sharply.
“At a police station..?"
“Then what's the name of this country?”
“Korea… right?”
“You remember that just fine. And you speak Korean perfectly well. So what the hell did you forget!!!!”
-BANG BANG BANG!!
The police officer now kicks his chair back, stands up, points at me, and shouts.
“Do you think I've only seen people like you once or twice? Huh!!! You think being pretty is all it takes? Anyone can see you got shit-faced and slept somewhere weird. Or maybe you were high.”
“N-no, I wasn't!!”
“Tell me the truth, now!!!”
‘Why isn't this working? In novels, saying you lost your memory always worked…’
It's unfair. But could I really reveal my true name?
And if a woman was pretty, wasn't the other person supposed to fall in love at first sight and let everything slide?
For the record, I only learned what my face looked like after walking around naked and seeing my reflection in a glass door.
It might be a little narcissistic, but I think I'm practically national-treasure material at this level. Apparently, that doesn't work at all on a veteran police officer.
“Sheesh, enough already. You picked the wrong person to mess with. These days, fingerprints and facial recognition can tell us who anyone is! You really think the police are a joke?”
-BANG!
The police officer slams the desk loudly and leaves.
'Oh no....'
As I sit there stunned, I hear whispers from beside me.
“Tsk, tsk… What could such a pretty young lady have done in broad daylight?”
“Who knows? She wandered around downtown completely naked~”
“Does she wear her brain as decoration?”
“Hahaha! Now that's a proper crazy bitch…”
“That's what I'm saying. The world's really gone to hell~”
"I'm not a crazy bitch!"
‘Fuck…’
The old drunkards who were dragged in after drinking during the day and causing a disturbance nearby treat me like a crazy bitch.
‘Sigh, how did this happen…? Why did I end up in a body like this?’
About five minutes later.
“Ahem… Why is this happening?”
The test results.
No match. Not even a similar person. She isn't dead or listed as missing, either.
They also tested me for alcohol and drugs, but naturally, both results were normal.
In other words, I was either a foreigner who had entered the country illegally or someone who had never even had a birth registered.
“What the hell…?”
‘Exactly… what the hell? Is this body's owner not Korean?’
I had secretly hoped this would be my chance to find out who the owner of this body was and where she lived, but that opportunity was gone.
I tilt my head in confusion just as the police officer does.
“Can you speak English?”
At that moment, the police officer suddenly asks me a question in English.
“Um, uh… yes. A liddle.”
I try to answer as calmly as possible, but…
“What? So she is Korean after all?”
The police officer tilts his head, muttering, “I knew it, I knew it.”
‘No…’
He figures out that I'm a native Korean from my English pronunciation. It's embarrassing, but I have to give him credit.
“You don't remember your home address either?”
The police officer's tone has become a little kinder now.
“No… I don't remember anything about my past.”
'I do remember, I just can't say....'
“You don't even know your own name…?”
“Nooo…”
The police officer seems quite flustered, as though this is the first time he's encountered a case like this.
“Sigh… Is there even a manual for this…?”
He spends some time rummaging through things on the computer, then repeatedly makes phone calls to various places.
‘Maybe he's not as bad a person as I thought.’
I was a little intimidated at first because I couldn't fight in this frail woman's body, but once he realized that I truly had amnesia and was unidentified, he became quite kind.
About thirty minutes later.
“Ahem, I really thought you were a strange person earlier. I apologize. I only found this out myself, but apparently, although it's very rare, some people really do develop amnesia like this. I thought it was the kind of thing that only happened in dramas… I apologize once again."
“No, it's all right.”
He bows deeply and hands me several sheets of paper.
“For now, in case you have a family looking for you, I've uploaded your photo to the missing-person database. On these forms, just choose the name you'll use from now on, read through the various benefits, and sign here.”
“Uh… just like that?”
"Normally, you'd have to visit the courts, administrative offices, and hospitals in that order, but apparently, in the case of a woman presumed to be the victim of a serious sex crime, those procedures can be postponed. A woman who will help arrange temporary housing for you will be here shortly."
"Oh…."
Ah, this damn country.
No, now that I'm a woman too, is it actually a good country?
Anyway, a young woman had been wandering the city naked after losing her memory, so the government was providing some kind of assistance. I don't know whether they had the authority to do this, but I was getting free housing, and I was being given a free pass on the bothersome examinations for now.
"Of course, you'll also need to write an incident report, so I'd appreciate it if you could describe where your memories began to return."
I roughly write that I woke up in a garbage lot and describe everything I remember, even though I'm embarrassed by the memory of wandering around naked. They would probably assume, with a high degree of certainty, that I was a kidnapped woman. As for the investigation, the police could handle that themselves.
And the important thing was.
‘A name.’
People usually receive their names from their parents.
My name in my previous life was Lee Do-hyeon.
I was an only child, so I had no younger or older sisters, but my mother had once chosen a name for a daughter in case she ever had one.
‘Lee Do-hee.’
Do, 桃, meaning peach; Hee, 熙, meaning radiance.
The meaning of the name had probably just been made up by combining the characters however she liked, but what mattered was that, as a member of my family, I was carrying on my own will—Lee Do-hyeon's will.
And peaches happened to go perfectly with this pink hair too, so it was just right.
'I will punish the traitors and see the end of the Tower.'
With looks and a figure like this, I could make a living without any trouble by filming internet broadcasts or vlog lookbooks and spouting nonsense. But I don't want to do that.
‘Phew…’
I have a mountain of things to do.
***
A little later, the auntie(?) who was supposed to show me where I would be staying appears at the police station.
'What? They said an auntie....?'
"Oh my~ Hello~"
I don't know where to look; even without bending forward, an abundance of flesh remains clearly visible above her clothes, and my gaze keeps wavering.
"Ah... hello."
She has a kind-looking face, but an aggressively voluptuous body.
'How is she an auntie?'
She might not be as young as a woman in her twenties, but she is completely different from the 'auntie' I had imagined.
When I slightly raise my head, I see her waving at me with a pleased smile.
"Ho ho ho.... We have such a cute young lady this time~"
Her gentle, languid voice lingers in my ears.
“You're Do-hee, right? Shall we go together?"
"Ah... yes, I'll go."
I had been staring blankly without realizing it, so I answer a beat late.
I shake my head vigorously to clear away my distracting thoughts, then follow her out.