Chapter 1: A New Life, A New Face—And No Money

The sensation of waking up is generally different every day, but that wasn’t the case for me.

It’s not like I possess incredible health and wake up refreshed every morning—quite the opposite, actually.

You don’t even need to look for vampires from novels; there are creatures in the world that wake up at dawn and sleep during the day.

Specifically, most internet streamers, their die-hard fans… or people in related industries like me.

A video editor.

‘Ugh…’

I set a four-and-a-half-hour alarm, programmed to repeat every 30 minutes, then went to bed.

Then, I woke up when I could finally hear the alarm.

The result of my own “Ha Eunsol Sleep Method” is random.

It mostly doesn’t produce good results.

Today’s outcome was, unsurprisingly, very bad.

Maybe it’s because I heard so much abuse yesterday, or because I was contemplating exposing my slimy employer’s verbal abuse that I recorded late into the night.

‘…Let’s wash up.’

The roughly healthy Ha Eunsol Sleep Method continues with a morning routine.

Turning on the computer, checking for important contacts or issues, and then shoving myself into the bathroom.

“Eek!!!”

That routine shattered when I took a few steps from the bed with my eyes half-closed.

I moved according to habit, but a sharp pain shot through my foot as I reached forward to walk.

The powerful sensation of kicking the leg of the desk enveloped me, and I let out a clear high-pitched scream before freezing.

‘Eek…?’

A chilling sense of foreignness washed over my entire body, so intense that I couldn’t even register the pain for a moment.

South Korea provides excellent education and a great environment for growth even to children abandoned by their parents, from a global perspective.

Even if I haven’t lived a life closely associated with studying, I still have the titles and general plots of famous novels in my head.

Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis.

I’ve heard of it.

The story of a man who turns into a cockroach overnight and goes through hardships, showing various meanings.

People lose many things when they leave a familiar place and become someone unfamiliar.

In my case, the first thing I lost was my composure.

Even a small studio apartment has a mirror in the bathroom.

A woman’s face was reflected on the slightly cloudy surface of the mirror.

A woman with a bewildered expression.

‘What the….’

I had changed overnight.

I don’t remember my entire life, but in all the memories in my head, I didn’t look like this.

Metamorphosis.

At least I wasn’t a cockroach.

I looked like a woman who could be found in a heavily edited photo; it’s hard to compare me to a bug.

Simply put, I was very pretty.

Or maybe more on the cute side.

‘…Am I crazy?’

I was momentarily captivated, but that’s not the point.

My appearance has changed.

As soon as I realized that fact, I slowly turned around and went back out of the bathroom.

I looked around the room, which felt familiar in space but the furniture arrangement was completely unfamiliar, and sat in front of the computer that looked like it hadn’t been used in years.

Even before the monitor turned on, my reflection on the black screen was the same as what I had seen in the mirror a moment ago.

Through years of living in the online world, my Google-fu was quite fast.

The programs on the computer and the domains of the websites were all the same as in the world from my memories.

Ten minutes of browsing the internet.

The information I gathered during that time was as follows.

It’s not certain, but it’s the past world I lived in.

Probably around when I first left the orphanage, so about five years ago.

From that point, I started searching the room.

I didn’t remember at all how I had kept the room five years ago, but I could roughly find things to get information from.

A check card and ID on the desk.

My name was written on them.

Only one digit of the resident registration number was different.

A photo taken with everyone at the orphanage before I left.

Everything in the photo was the same as my memories, except for one person.

Me.

A video editor for an internet streamer’s YouTube channel.

It wasn’t an unfamiliar occupation for someone used to subculture.

There was a story I had seen once, something similar to what was happening to me.

Parallel world.

‘This is, what…….’

What does this all mean?

I muttered a curse as I sat in front of the monitor, but then I shut my mouth because a strange voice came out.

I spent the first day huddled under the blanket on the bed.

This is too weird.

If there’s someone who knows exactly what to do when something like this happens, that person is probably mentally ill.

Thinking that I might return to normal if I went back to sleep was the best I could do.

However, when I naturally fell asleep and opened my eyes again, I was still in that room from yesterday.

Why, and how, did this happen?

I spent a week as a stay-at-home philosopher, contemplating this question.

That means I was under the blanket without going outside.

I did manage to maintain a basic standard of living.

I’ve changed about 180 degrees.

Changing my way of life to match that was really difficult.

Because there was nothing I could understand.

Fortunately, the difficulties of living as a different gender were mostly concentrated in life outside the house.

I was able to endure the adaptation process to living as a different gender with the help of the internet.

The first insurmountable problem I reached was on what I called the eighth day of starting my parallel world life.

It was the wall of reality that ordinary stay-at-home philosophers commonly reach.

I had no money.

It was the same concern I had in my memory from five years ago.

It was a freaking parallel world.

‘…Haa.’

I had to do something right away to avoid being kicked out of this studio apartment.

And I had finished organizing my thoughts on what had happened to me.

‘…I don’t know. I don’t know.’

There’s no way to know.

At least the protagonists in novels or cartoons go through this kind of thing by talking or doing something.

Even if they gloss over the process without any backstory, they at least get hit by a dump truck.

The only thing I could remember that was even slightly related was a story I told when I had an online drinking session with friends who also worked as editors.

We once had a debate.

The topic of the drinking session was whether you would switch your employer to your favorite streamer.

When I received that question, I said this.

“Of course, I’d switch.

If I could turn back time, I’d work with someone else from the start!

As a founding contributor…. I chose the wrong country at the beginning.”

Could this kind of lament really be the cause of this phenomenon happening to me?

That’s something I can’t know.

Probably forever.

In any case, I had to live.

That was the only answer I could find in the mystery.

I don’t know why I came to live this life, but I had to be alive to do something.

Whether it’s for my current survival, or for the sake of the real me who might return someday.

Let’s put aside the fear of the unknown and first solve the fears that exist in reality.

‘First, I have to make money.’

I wasn’t stranded on a desert island.

I returned to five years ago, but I’m standing inside my studio apartment.

The first thing you need to survive in modern society isn’t a campfire, but money.

To live, I had to make money, and to do that, I had to work.

‘A part-time job… would be tough.’

However, there aren’t many jobs you can do right away without a base.

Especially if it’s a job you can do from home.

It was still too difficult to go outside.

I couldn’t do my main job of video editing.

I needed at least the minimum equipment specs to do it properly, and with no portfolio or experience, I couldn’t find a job in that field at this time.

I should go in this direction after laying the foundation, but it’s impossible right now.

A counselor helping the unemployed would give me a scornful look if they heard my conditions.

No experience and working from home.

The only solution I could find among jobs that satisfied these conditions was one.

It was also a path I had found in my past memories.

I decided to commit a petty crime, a solution that remained in my memory.

Wouldn’t even God consider this to be for survival?

‘I don’t remember well since it’s been five years… was it this?’

I went to a surrogate driving site and applied to be a driver with the contact information listed.

A world that was surprisingly identical to my memories.

If I think about it conveniently, it’s just the past from five years ago where everything is the same except for me.

At this point, the best game in the world was a low-spec game that ran well even on the old computer that the previous tenant had left behind.