“Coward.”
Three seasons had turned since she’d fallen into this other world.
In terms of actual time, it had been roughly six months.
And at last, Sirin had properly pronounced the first word she’d intended to say.
Well, damn.
She felt less moved than she did baffled.
A memory surfaced—the source of this whole wretched situation.
This was unmistakably the game she’d purchased: ⟨Fall of the Empire: Chronicle⟩.
…Probably.
Fall of the Empire, or whatever the hell it was called.
She couldn’t remember the exact title.
Six months had passed since the brain damage.
Remembering the name of a game she’d never even played would’ve been nothing short of a miracle.
Thinking about it gave Sirin a headache all over again.
Am I a real person, or just a game character that somehow became self-aware?
With a man’s memories and a woman’s body—am I a man or a woman?
Was any of this even real to begin with?
There was actually a simple answer to Sirin’s confusion.
She was just insane.
A lunatic in a medieval fantasy land, dreaming one long, bizarre dream.
Like Zhuangzi’s mad butterfly.
“Drop it.”
Sirin had no interest in that confusion anymore.
She’d spent the past six months agonizing over it and had long since reached her conclusion.
There were more practical, tangible problems to solve.
The hollow sense of loss where something that should have been there simply wasn’t.
Second only to being unable to speak properly—or maybe even worse than that.
Sirin didn’t dwell on it.
All that mattered was that she was in a shit situation, and she had to get out of it.
Adapting well to any circumstance was one of Sirin’s few genuine virtues.
Her intelligence wasn’t low, but her knowledge was shallow, and her thinking tended to be short-range.
Sirin looked over the system window.
[ ! COWARD’S CORNER: THE SAFE HAVEN FOR SUPER COWARDS ! ]
A hollow laugh escaped her.
What a name.
It was like the system was mocking her.
Well, she was the one who’d picked Coward Mode, so she had no one to blame.
Coward Mode came loaded with all sorts of difficulty options befitting its illustrious title.
The biggest one, naturally, was this:
[ Auto HP Recovery active. HP cannot drop below 1. ]
Even if her HP hit 1, it wouldn’t go any lower.
No matter what happened, she couldn’t die.
What you might call an immortality mode.
[ ↑ Total EXP Gain 500% ↑ ]
And true to the Coward Mode spirit, the EXP multiplier was absurdly generous.
But the most eye-catching feature was something else entirely.
[ DLC – Using Martial Arts in Fantasy Land (Working Title) applied. ]
[ Attain and master martial arts through Mind Enlightenment and Body Enlightenment! ]
Sirin sighed.
She had absolutely no idea what she was supposed to do with that.
She didn’t know much about wuxia.
Her knowledge of martial arts amounted to a few glances at some wiki pages.
As far as she knew, martial arts were things you got by going to some grand clan like Huashan or Namgung and training under them, or by eating some kind of nutrient-dense magical carp.
Or by falling off a cliff.
From that angle, Sirin had already met at least one of the essential prerequisites for acquiring martial arts.
‘Well, I did fall off a cliff the moment I got here.’
The system’s explanation left something to be desired, but Sirin was in good spirits regardless.
Just being able to speak properly again was already giving her a profound sense of satisfaction.
And reclaiming her voice was a small but momentous first step toward achieving her goals.
Sirin’s ultimate objectives.
First: return to being a man.
Second: go home.
Over the past six months, she’d roughly mapped out what she’d do once she could speak again.
Strictly speaking, her plan had started as a form of self-delusion—a torture of hope designed to keep herself from going mad or despairing.
But not anymore.
It was now a genuinely achievable future.
This fantasy land was a world where magic, divine blessings, mysteries, and a thousand other things all coexisted.
If she could leverage those things…
‘There has to be a way to become a man again and get back home.’
Head to the heart of the Empire, where magic was said to be most advanced.
Or accomplish some great feat and earn a god’s blessing.
Or unravel some arcane mystery.
“…”
But there was something she had to do before any of that.
Sirin needed to repay the kindness of the old man from the Order of the Savior and the bakery woman.
She rose from the stream and washed herself.
It had been a long, long time.
Once the grime and soot were rinsed away, her true features emerged.
“…”
Sirin stared quietly at the face reflected in the water.
She wasn’t sure how to describe it.
Honestly, she wasn’t particularly interested.
She muttered to herself.
“I hate The Little Prince.”
The Little Prince had claimed that numbers couldn’t express what truly mattered—but Sirin disagreed.
Sometimes numbers were the most fitting expression of all.
Her appearance could be summed up simply in numerical terms.
Charisma: 180.
Meaning that out of a hundred people of the opposite sex, all hundred would find Sirin attractive.
And her 180 had overflowed past 100.
Even among the same sex, eighty out of a hundred would feel a physical pull toward her.
It couldn’t be helped.
Sirin was the type who put serious effort into character customization.
If she was going to make one, she might as well go all out—big chest, pretty face, the mysterious Eastern beauty concept.
It was the face she’d be staring at the most while playing, so naturally it had to look good.
On top of that, whether due to some system correction or otherwise, Sirin had no body odor whatsoever.
Even after rolling around in mud for months, she smelled like nothing but earth.
Of course, it wasn’t all upside.
The consequence of Charisma 180 had been an attempted assault, which was precisely why she’d been so desperate to patch herself into a different race.
Sirin dried herself off roughly, threw her rags back on, and headed toward the village.
She had no desire to cake herself in mud again.
But she also didn’t want more headaches from her looks.
So she let her long, tangled hair hang loose over her face and tore apart the bread sack Marta had given her, fashioning it into a makeshift mask.
‘That should do it.’
Her steps were lighter than they’d ever been.
Giddy with the freedom of being able to speak properly again, Sirin muttered to herself as she walked, not caring who heard.
“Bored, roses, up the nostril. Happiness is, a burning, spinning heel kick.”
A few villagers who passed by recoiled and scrambled out of her way.
She could almost hear them whispering—the crazy woman had finally started saying something other than profanity, and it was somehow even more unhinged.
In truth, Sirin was being quite careful about what she said.
Six months of using her scrambled language wiring had become something of a habit, and if she wasn’t cautious, she might slip up again.
‘I have to be careful.
I want to say “you son of a bitch” but I can’t have “thank you” come out instead.’
Picking her words with deliberate care, Sirin eventually began humming to herself as she entered the village.
She hadn’t realized how good it would feel to just say whatever came to mind.
Right now, she felt like she could laugh off even the taunting of those damn brats from earlier.
…And the moment that thought crossed her mind, one of those very brats popped out from around a corner and planted himself directly in her path.
The kid stared at her changed face and the clumsy mask for a moment, confused—then broke into his signature sneer.
“What, Mm-mm! You crawled out again? What’s with the—”
Sirin’s brow twitched.
This little shit.
He couldn’t even vary his insults, recycling the same pathetic line over and over—and he’d had the nerve to mock her with it for months.
Sirin briefly considered introducing this little punk to a civilized and varied program of physical destruction, but…she stopped herself.
Beating him up would be easy enough.
But she had a much better idea.
“Hey. Hans.”
Sirin called his name quietly, and the kid flinched, stumbling back a step.
“…Huh?”
Hans felt a chill crawl up his spine.
That crazy beggar woman was actually speaking real words.
And she knew his name.
In truth, Sirin knew not just Hans but a fair amount about the village in general.
It’s a well-known fact that beggars exist in a quantum state.
Sirin had been nowhere in the village, and yet everywhere at once.
It had been one of her many strategies for recovering her speech—she’d figured that listening to as many conversations as possible would help.
And it wasn’t just village gossip she’d picked up.
Sirin knew the names of the mercenary rabble causing trouble in the village, and even the petty detail that Heres—the worst of the lot—had struck Merye from Wilson’s household.
Sirin didn’t realize it, but she’d already been acting like someone straight out of a wuxia novel.
What she’d been doing was essentially the Beggars’ Sect’s foundational skill: eavesdropping from a state of quantum superposition.
Taking advantage of the kid’s hesitation, Sirin slowly, smoothly lowered the mask from her face.
With the grime and soot washed away, her true features peeked through the curtain of tangled hair.
It was only half a glimpse—but it was more than enough.
“Wh… wha… huh?”
Hans’s eyes went wide.
He swallowed a dry lump in his throat.
“Wha… whaaa…?”
It was unlike anything Hans had ever seen in his life.
It couldn’t be described with a simple word like “pretty.”
It was luminous, like moonlight through night fog—and somehow unreal.
The skin visible through the tangled strands of hair was strangely pale and smooth, and her eyes were sharp yet deep.
His mind went into a jumble.
An intense sense of wrongness that made him forget to breathe, and from that wrongness, an inexplicable pull.
His heart pounded strangely, and his face began to flush for no reason he could name.
“What?”
Sirin asked, and smiled.
The kind of smile that would make a hundred men—including the gay ones—clutch their chests.
“N-no… I mean, uh…”
“Not going to say ‘mm-mm’?”
“Wh, wh… n-no, that’s not—!”
The kid was completely at a loss.
Understandably so.
Sirin’s Charisma was 180.
To put it a little dramatically—if she’d been born in Troy, she might have been Helen; born in the Shang dynasty, Daji.
In other words, with just a little cosmetic effort, she had the face to bring down a kingdom.
On top of that, there was no body odor whatsoever, thanks to whatever system correction was at work.
Sirin narrowed her eyes and spoke.
“That thing in your hand. That’s a rock, isn’t it? Did you pick it up to throw at me?”
“N-no, I mean, uh, that’s—!”
“Why aren’t you throwing it? If you’re going to throw it, throw it.”
Hans felt something strange.
A voice that was teasing and yet somehow soft.
With the sudden sensation that he’d committed some terrible offense, Hans found himself, without quite knowing why, dropping the rock and bowing his head.
“S-sorry…!”
Sirin snickered and pulled the mask back up.
She was about to head back to Peter’s place—but this damn brat was shuffling along behind her, hesitating.
Watching him, Sirin hatched a plan on the spot.
Right.
After everything this little pest had put her through, she couldn’t just leave without making him pay for it.
Sirin had no patience for kids who thought being young meant no consequences.
No matter how young you were, you had to pay for what you’d done.
Especially when no one had made you do it.
‘Repay kindness twice over, and grudges… let’s say twenty times over.’
Sirin didn’t know it herself, but she was a remarkably wuxia-compatible person.
Her vicious temperament bore more than a passing resemblance to the poisoned heart of the Tang Clan.
Sirin glanced around as if checking her surroundings, then walked over to Hans and crouched down in front of him.
Even through the mask, her beauty was palpable at this distance.
Sirin leveled her gaze with his and dropped her voice to a low, silky register.
Hans felt like he might stop breathing.
“What? Do you want to see me take the mask off?”
Those words were like a spell that paralyzed what remained of Hans’s rational mind.
He did want to see.
He wanted to know what was behind that mask, whether what he’d glimpsed was real.
Face burning red, Hans nodded as if in a trance.
Sirin smiled with her eyes in a way that said she was pleased.
That smile made Hans’s heart drop all over again.
Sirin glanced behind Hans—though Hans had no idea why.
She narrowed her eyes further and whispered.
“Then… could you say I’m pretty, just once? If you do, I’ll think about it.”
Sirin’s voice was sweet, but there was something about it—like the hiss of a snake—that sent a shiver down the spine.
“…S-si…”
Face blazing red, Hans repeated her words back to her.
For a kid like Hans, Sirin’s provocative eye-smile and honeyed voice were practically a hypnosis app.
Some corner of the boy’s brain was telling him something was off, but every nerve in Hans’s body was focused entirely on what lay behind that mask.
“…S-sis… you’re, you’re p…”
“Hmm? I can’t hear you. I don’t know what you’re saying.”
Sirin tilted her head and asked again.
That gesture made Hans even more desperate.
Just a little more, just a little louder, and she’d show him.
“S-sis… you’re pretty…”
“Aw, that’s not going to cut it. It doesn’t sound like you mean it. If you really want to see, say it louder. Loud enough for me to hear.”
Sirin pressed him with a tone that was faintly wheedling but unmistakably firm.
The anticipation that she might take the mask off, and the anxiety that if he hesitated any longer he’d lose his chance—Hans squeezed his eyes shut and shouted, almost like a battle cry.
“S-sis, you’re pretty! You’re really pretty!”
Sirin nodded with an air of satisfaction.
Hans caught his breath, eyes full of eager expectation as he looked up at her.
She’d take the mask off now, surely.
Instead of removing the mask, Sirin pointed behind him with one finger.
“…Huh?”
It was time for this little delinquent to pay for his crimes.