"That fucking hurt!"
The words came out as a hiss through my clenched teeth.
When I brought my fist closer to my face, I saw blood running from my knuckles. Red droplets trailed down the back of my hand, reached my wrist, and fell onto the sleeve of my pink pajamas.
"Great... Just fucking great."
I’d shattered the mirror in a moment of anger, but it hadn’t made me feel even slightly better.
If anything, seeing dozens of broken versions of myself in the cracked glass only made the rage inside me grow worse.
Right now, I wanted to tear the entire room apart.
I wanted to tip over the vanity, rip the decorations from the walls, throw the figures off the shelves, and hurl that rabbit with the pink bow out the window.
It felt as though smashing everything in sight might finally calm me down.
Because the joke fate had played on me wasn’t funny.
Back in my old life, I’d always been pointlessly prejudiced against feminine-looking men. If I was being completely honest, I was probably what most people would call homophobic. I never tried to understand them and stayed as far away as possible.
Now I was stuck in the body of a femboy.
And not just any femboy, but one feminine enough that anyone looking at him would swear he was a girl.
Fuck this shit.
I tried to take a deep breath, but the air filling my lungs did nothing to loosen the pressure in my chest. After one last glance at the shattered mirror, I turned on the faucet again.
The moment I put my hand beneath the cold water, my entire arm tensed.
"Fuck!"
The cuts hurt much more than I’d expected. I gritted my teeth as the water washed the blood from my fingers and carried it into the sink. Thin red trails snaked across the white ceramic before disappearing down the drain.
I opened and closed my fist several times.
At least I could still move my fingers. It didn’t look as though any shards of glass were stuck inside either. There weren’t any deep cuts, but the skin over my knuckles had split in several places.
I was about to turn off the faucet when I caught sight of my face in the cracked mirror again.
Blue eyes.
Wet blue hair.
Flushed cheeks.
And an annoyingly cute expression caught somewhere between fear and anger.
"Stop looking at me like that."
My reflection moved its lips at the exact same time as mine.
For a moment, I wanted to punch the mirror again.
The throbbing pain in my hand quickly reminded me what a stupid idea that would be.
Instead, I filled my hands with water and splashed it over my face again.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
I kept going, hoping the cold water would somehow snap me out of this. It didn’t. The chaos inside my head refused to settle, and my memories had become tangled with Noctis’s. Even trying to figure out which ones belonged to me was enough to make my stomach turn.
Eventually, I shut off the faucet.
When I left the bathroom, I made a point of not looking at the mirror behind me.
I needed something to wrap around my hand.
"Bandages... Where are the bandages?"
The answer surfaced inside my mind the moment I asked the question aloud.
There weren’t any.
This apartment didn’t even have a first-aid kit. Noctis had considered buying one a few months ago, then forgotten about it. The nearest pharmacy was two blocks away.
"Goddammit."
I returned to the bedroom and opened the wardrobe. I grabbed the first cotton garment I saw: a loose white top with some smiling blue creature printed across the front.
I didn’t care what it was. I grabbed the fabric with both hands and pulled.
Tearing it proved much harder than I’d expected with this body’s strength.
After struggling for a while, I finally managed to rip off a long strip of fabric. I wrapped it around my hand several times, then tightened the knot using my teeth.
It looked nothing like a proper bandage, but at least it stopped the blood from dripping onto my pajamas.
I sat on the edge of the bed, rested my elbows on my knees, and buried both hands in my hair. The wet strands tangled between my fingers.
"Think... Just think."
I closed my eyes and began sorting through the memories flooding my mind.
I really wished I hadn’t.
Every memory made my stomach turn a little more.
The cold stares of the Evernight family...
The humiliation Noctis endured for not possessing a Nexus...
His siblings embarrassing him during family gatherings...
The whispers behind his back at school, the laughter echoing through the hallways, and the disgusting jokes people made about his feminine appearance...
Photos taken without permission, images uploaded to fake accounts, and messages filled with harassment sent directly to his inbox...
People who acted sweet to his face, only to mock him the moment his back was turned...
And whenever he tried to tell his family what was happening, he always received the same answer.
If you carry the Evernight name, you shouldn’t be this weak.
As though the problem wasn’t the people tormenting him, but Noctis for not being strong enough to endure it.
The deeper I went into his memories, the tighter my throat became.
My discomfort with this body was one thing. What Noctis had endured was another.
Just because I hated being forced into his life didn’t mean I believed he had deserved any of it.
No one deserved that.
Even so, the rest of his memories only made my headache worse.
Noctis was a VTuber.
Instead of showing his real face on camera, he used a cheerful, blue-haired female avatar. He didn’t even need a voice changer. Most of his viewers genuinely believed he was a girl.
And Noctis rarely bothered to correct them.
As if that weren’t enough, he also did cosplay.
Mostly of female characters.
The costumes weren’t revealing. He didn’t take pictures that showed off his body, focusing more on copying the characters’ appearances and poses. The only good thing was that he never posted those photos anywhere.
That information didn’t make me feel any better.
If anything, another stab of pain shot through my head.
"Why?"
I grabbed my head with both hands.
"Why would a guy willingly do all of this?"
Noctis’s memories answered before I could.
Because when he hid behind the avatar, no one looked at him as the Nexusless heir of the Evernight family.
No one saw him as a defective child.
People came to his streams, laughed at his jokes, supported him while he played games, and promised they would return the next day.
For the first time in his life, people seemed happy that he existed.
Those streams gave him a few hours when he could become someone else instead of hating his own face.
They were the rare moments when people watched him because they liked what he did, not because they wanted to mock him.
I let myself fall backward onto the bed.
"That doesn’t make any of this less weird."
I stared blankly at the ceiling.
Where exactly was I?
Had I fallen into the world of a game?
Or had I ended up inside some novel?
I’d barely watched any anime in my old life, and I’d never been interested in RPGs. However, I had a few friends who were obsessed with that kind of stuff. Every time we met, they would ramble about reincarnation stories, systems, hidden classes, and overpowered abilities.
As far as I remembered, the protagonist in those stories usually woke up inside a game they’d played or a novel they’d read.
But the name Noctis Evernight meant nothing to me.
I’d never heard of powers called Nexus either.
That meant I probably hadn’t fallen into any fictional world I knew.
Still, I had woken up in someone else’s body.
I was in another world.
Which meant...
If I had actually been reincarnated, wasn’t I supposed to receive some kind of advantage like the characters in those stories?
A system.
A unique power.
Maybe an ability capable of fixing everything.
I sat upright again and stared into the empty space in the middle of the room.
"System?"
Nothing happened.
"Status screen?"
Still nothing.
"Stats? Menu? Inventory?"
Silence.
I was beginning to feel like an idiot.
Gritting my teeth, I tried to make my voice sound as threatening as possible.
"Oiii! Get your ass out here, you son of a bitch!"
Thanks to the soft, high-pitched voice coming out of my mouth, I sounded less like a threat and more like a pissed-off anime character.
A moment of silence passed.
Then a bluish light flickered in front of my eyes.
"Huh?"
The light expanded and transformed into a translucent window.
[Welcome, Chosen One.]
[Identity: Noctis Evernight]
[Status: Nexusless]
[Strength: 10 | Stamina: 10 | Agility: 10]
[Crit Rate: 10 | Crit DMG: 10]
I blinked several times.
The text didn’t disappear.
I reached out and tried to touch the window, but my fingers passed straight through it. The panel had no physical surface. It seemed to be projected directly into my field of vision.
Just as I was trying to accept that this was an actual system, the window extended downward.
[Active Quests]
[1. Control Your Anger]
[Objective: Do not break anything for the next 24 hours.]
[Description: This quest has been issued in consideration of the Chosen One’s current anger level and is intended to prevent him from making choices he may later regret. Good luck.]
[Reward: 2 Eclipsie Points]
[Failure Penalty: Severe headache for 48 hours.]
My eyebrow twitched.
"Are you fucking with me?"
The System didn’t answer.
Instead, a second quest appeared.
[2. First Stream]
[Objective: Reach 100 concurrent viewers during a livestream.]
[Reward: 3 Eclipsie Points]
[Time Remaining: 23:47:11]
[Failure Penalty: Large Breasts.]
[23:47:10]
[23:47:09]
I read the text once.
Then I read it again.
Especially the final line.
I wanted to believe I was seeing things.
But no.
It really did say large breasts.
It didn’t take me long to lose my shit.
"What kind of fucking penalty is that?!"
I shot to my feet and kicked the nightstand beside the bed with all my strength.
The nightstand barely moved.
I, on the other hand, immediately started hopping around on one foot in agony.
"Fuck! Fuck, fuck!"
My toes throbbed, while the corner of the nightstand didn’t have so much as a scratch.
New text appeared in front of me.
[You attempted to damage an object.]
[Recommendation: Apologize to the nightstand.]
"Go fuck yourself."
Clutching my foot, I collapsed onto the bed. After waiting several seconds for the pain to fade, I looked at the quest window again.
I had no idea how I’d ended up in this fucked-up situation, but not a single part of it looked promising.
I had no Nexus, my family hated me, I was stranded in a world I knew nothing about, and I was trapped in someone else’s body.
My only advantage was a system that threatened me.
"What the hell is this failure penalty supposed to mean?"
My gaze drifted toward that line again.
[Failure Penalty: Large Breasts.]
"My appearance is already fucked enough. Now I’m going to grow tits too?"
I covered my face with both hands.
"Fuck..."
I slowly exhaled.
At least it wasn’t a worse penalty.
At least...
"It doesn’t say anything about hurting my dick."
As I tried to reassure myself, my mind suddenly became stuck on that word.
My dick.
I went completely still and slowly swallowed.
It existed in Noctis’s memories.
I knew this body was male.
But nothing I’d seen since waking up made any sense. Trusting those memories alone suddenly seemed like a terrible idea.
I lowered my gaze.
"I need to check."
I looked toward the bedroom door.
Even though I knew no one else was home, I listened carefully one more time. Then I hooked two fingers under the waistband of my pajama pants and peeked inside.
After several seconds of silence, my shoulders finally relaxed.
"Oh, thank God."
It was still there.
At least for now.
I raised my head and looked at the blue window still floating before me.
"Oiii, you damn thing. Can you talk, or do you only show me stats and quests?"
A new line appeared.
[Yes. I am here to answer the Chosen One’s questions.]
"Chosen One, my ass... You put me in a femboy’s body and then call me that."
[Correction: Your current body was not created by the System.]
"I don’t care about technicalities."
[Furthermore-]
"Yeah, whatever. Disappear."
The window vanished instantly.
The room looked ordinary again.
Well, except for the shattered mirror, the bloodstained pajama sleeve, the kicked nightstand, and the pieces of torn fabric scattered across the bed.
I got up and returned to the wardrobe.
I needed to go outside.
If I didn’t get some fresh air, I was genuinely going to lose my mind. I also needed proper bandages and disinfectant for my hand. My headache still hadn’t gone away either, so I would need painkillers.
And I was hungry.
Somehow, my stomach had managed to remind me of its existence through all the disasters I’d experienced this morning.
I started digging through the wardrobe.
"Something normal... Please let there be something normal."
The first thing I pulled out was a frilly white-and-blue dress.
I threw it aside.
Next came a wizard costume with a short cape.
I tossed that one away too.
Then I found a rabbit-eared hoodie, striped socks that reached the knees, a shirt with an enormous bow, and a red uniform belonging to some character I didn’t recognize.
"Why is half of this wardrobe filled with costumes?"
The memories answered.
Because there hadn’t been enough room for all the costumes in the other half.
My eye twitched.
I continued throwing clothes onto the bed while cursing under my breath. At one point, a hard accessory fell onto the floor. I had to stare at it for several seconds to make sure it hadn’t broken.
I had no intention of failing the headache quest within the first few minutes.
Finally, I spotted a piece of folded black fabric at the bottom of the wardrobe.
I pulled it out.
It was a plain black tracksuit.
No stars, no ribbons, and no pictures of cute animals.
"Thank fucking God."
I was so happy that my eyes almost watered.
Never in my life had I imagined I would be this relieved to see an ordinary tracksuit.
I quickly stripped off the pink pajamas and put on the black tracksuit. The top was slightly oversized, but that only made it better. It concealed the slender shape of my body.
My hair was still wet and kept falling around my face.
After wondering what to do with it for several seconds, I grabbed a black hair tie from the nightstand and tied my hair back into a messy ponytail.
I refused to look in the mirror.
Finding the phone, wallet, and keys wasn’t difficult. Thanks to Noctis’s memories, I already knew which items belonged to him. The wallet contained an ID card, several bank cards, and some cash.
I decided not to look at the ID.
I’d already experienced more shocks today than I could handle.
After searching through the shoe rack for a while, I found a pair of white sneakers.
"Good. At least this freak owned a few normal things."
I straightened up and stopped in front of the door.
The plan was simple.
First, I would go to the pharmacy and buy something to properly clean and wrap my hand, along with some medicine for my headache. After that, I would find something to eat.
I could think about the livestream quest later.
One hundred viewers.
Normally, that didn’t sound impossible. Noctis’s channel had far more followers than that.
But stepping in front of hundreds of people and acting like a cheerful anime girl when I hadn’t even been in this body for an hour...
The breast penalty suddenly felt much more real.
I let out a long sigh.
Reaching for the door handle, I muttered,
"For now, I just need some air."
I opened the door, took a deep breath, and left the apartment.