WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Satori
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Healers Are Not Tools ◈
Chapter 1: You All Know This Story, Right? You're Lying, Aren't You?
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Thirty minutes.
That was how long it took me to accept that I'd become a woman after waking up in a studio apartment I'd never seen in my life.
No matter how much my head throbbed, the bra and panties hanging on the drying rack made it clear this wasn't my room.
“Where am I? Whose place is this... huh?”
And when I blurted out those startled words, the unfamiliar woman's voice told me something was wrong.
Every hair on my body stood on end. I rushed through the bathroom's wide-open door, and once I saw my reflection, denying that I'd become a woman would've been stupid.
The bathroom was spotless, without a trace of mold.
Apart from the unfamiliar things women used, neatly arranged on the shelf, it was just a bathroom.
“...”
The face in the mirror was unbelievably flawless and pretty.
Pretty enough that, as I stared in a daze, I could almost consider the twenty-odd years I'd lived as a man nothing more than a free trial.
“My hair... What's wrong with it? Is this supposed to be a dye job?”
But my appearance was strange enough to make me talk to myself.
My hair was so white it almost seemed to sparkle. I checked the roots, wondering if it had been dyed, but they were white too.
Even my eyes were red.
When I lowered the hand touching my face, I found a chest that felt a little too heavy.
Of course, I wasn't wearing a bra. And once my hand went lower, there was no reason left to doubt that I was a woman.
... Fine, I accepted that I'd become a woman. But who was I?
Fortunately, I could use the smartphone in the pocket of my pajama pants.
[Delivery Folk]
[Hanseong Delivery]
[Korea Post]
[Lost of Fantasy]
I calmly opened the chat app and checked the contacts, but these were the only conversations I found.
This unidentified woman with the pretty face wasn't even in a single group chat.
Right. Who even used this chat app these days?
With that in mind, I searched through the phone for Insta or some other social media app, but found nothing.
... Wait, there were women who didn't use Insta? I'd hoped she at least used Tweeter as a last resort, but not even that?
[Jeong Hana]
Fortunately, a little more digging through the chat app told me her name right away.
“Jeong Hana... Jeong Hana...”
After muttering it for a while, I sank onto the toilet and clutched my head with both hands.
“I'm... not crazy. I finished my military service just fine, I don't remember getting hit by a truck yesterday, I've never left a bad review or seen a suspicious comment on a forum...”
Thirty minutes.
That was how long it took me to accept that my twenty-something years of life had been a free trial.
* * *
“So, basically, I've become a woman with no friends and no parents...”
Back on the bed, I dug a little further through the chats and text messages and figured out what sort of person “Jeong Hana” had been.
First of all, she was an orphan.
A quick search told me that the 4.2 million won left in her bank account was money she'd received when she left the orphanage.
I also found a polite text exchange with someone she'd addressed as “Sister,” so there was no mistaking it.
And that was it.
“... Whew.”
Guri, Gyeonggi Province.
A studio apartment tucked away in a corner of this small city near Seoul.
The rent was 250,000 won a month because the landlady had taken pity on her.
She hadn't gone to college because she wasn't interested in studying. Apart from that, she'd worked a few short-term part-time jobs.
That was the whole life of twenty-one-year-old Jeong Hana. I didn't even need to scroll far through her bank transactions to take it all in.
“This is just cruel... If I was going to turn into a woman, shouldn't I at least have become some rich family's daughter, or my favorite VTuber, or a noble lady in a romance fantasy?”
I'd become a woman with a fairly large chest and a nice figure.
And that was the only upside to this absolutely legendary life I'd landed in. Was this really okay?
In the end, the journey of self-discovery I'd started on the bed was over in no time.
There just wasn't much to Jeong Hana's life.
* * *
《◆Lost of Fantasy》
[A new RPG where you can meet all kinds of people is coming!]
[Finally launching today at 13:00!]
[※ This message is sent only to users who preregistered.]
The chat notification arrived around the time I received my food delivery, which the completely empty fridge had left me no choice but to order. It was both welcome and ridiculous.
“Lost of Fantasy.”
It was a game I knew so well it almost made me sick. But in Jeong Hana's world, it seemed to be a “new release.”
Why had she preregistered for it, though?
Maybe I shouldn't say this, but MMORPGs weren't exactly the sort of games women found appealing...
“What the heck? These are some good specs...”
And it wasn't just the computer's specs. The games installed on it were a selection good enough to prove she knew her stuff.
There was Legend of League, which practically everyone had played, along with Battle Royale, Escape from Paradise, and Darkwatch 2. Apparently, she wasn't picky about genres, since she even had anime-nerd games like Red Archive installed.
It seemed this Jeong Hana wasn't just some ordinary woman. She'd been pretty interested in games...
Even Lost of Fantasy was already installed, with an icon that looked much like the one I remembered.
But I had no intention of playing it.
Absolutely not, thank you.
Unless the day came when I couldn't pay my rent, I had no intention of touching that game again~
Go out of my way to play the game that had swallowed ten whole years of my life, now that I'd become a woman?
I wasn't that stupid.
Anyway, I couldn't just eat fried chicken without watching something, so I opened YouTube.
[Finally, the official release!! Which class should we choose in LoF?]
[Destined to top the PC café charts! What kind of game is Lost of Fantasy?!]
[A former pro gamer's recommendation! You have to play a rogue!]
[So what kind of game IS Lost of Fantasy?]
[Master the beta! | Just follow along! Raise your combat power fast!]
Apparently, Jeong Hana really had been a genuine gamer girl.
No matter how far I scrolled, YouTube kept recommending an endless stream of these videos.
Wait, was Lost of Fantasy popular here?
Why did these have a million views each?
[A game unlike anything before it? Lost of Fantasy review!]
[It is SERIOUSLY FREAKING HARD! Introducing Lost of Fantasy's endgame content!]
And what was all this fuss about?
It wasn't some game unlike anything anyone had ever seen.
The year I'd checked on the smartphone wasn't much different from what I remembered.
If I'd gone back ten or twenty years, I would've jumped up screaming and immediately started looking up how to buy Bitcoin.
Hell, even ten years back, how many stocks could I name off the top of my head...?
Anyway, curious about what nonsense they were spouting, I clicked a video with over two million views.
“Hello! Great to see you. It's Rice! Today, I'm going to introduce a game called Lost of Fantasy...”
Rice was a pro gamer who'd won a Legend of League championship.
From that, it seemed like Jeong Hana's world and mine weren't all that different...
But was LoF really big enough for a former pro gamer to make a whole introduction video about it?
Maybe overseas, but in South Korea? It wasn't that big a deal, was it?
I wasn't about to deny that it was a legend among legends in MMORPG history, but...
“Lost of Fantasy is an RPG developed by Frost.”
Nothing very different there...
“I've played plenty of RPGs myself. You've all played games like Dungeon and Warrior, Thor, famous for its Execution Sword, and Mushroom Story, right?”
Every one of them was a nostalgic classic that was still popular.
Honestly, I doubted there was anyone in South Korea who claimed to know RPGs and hadn't played at least one of those three.
“Ah, but... Lost of Fantasy is completely different from the games I just mentioned! Seriously, completely different. Frost invited me to their headquarters, where I got to play for about twenty hours...”
Sure, someone who loved LoF might go that far...!
But I wasn't so sure that line would go down well in our country these days.
I'd played it for over ten years myself, but I couldn't praise it that much in public.
“Lost of Fantasy... You've played open-world games, right, everyone? Just like those games, this has a map where players can go anywhere they want. There's also the fun of finding dungeons and going inside. And the classes are incredibly detailed and well designed.”
- Wow lol, open world
- Is this for real???
- Wait, an online RPG can be open world?
- Aw yeah lol, god-tier game
Was this for real? Was a former pro gamer allowed to hype it up this much?
And what was wrong with the chat? What was this?
“And the endgame content! If you like RPGs, we can't leave out the endgame, right? This game doesn't just have dungeons. There's this really fun thing called a ‘raid group’... Wow, going in with several parties and fighting a huge monster was seriously amazing.”
- What's a raid group?
- Several parties go in together?
- Whoaaaaaa
- Wait, how do you get the loot, then?
- Does it use MMR matchmaking?
... Huh?
“Right, that wraps up the introduction! And I'm not just any former pro gamer, am I? As a pro among pros with two championships under my belt, I'll recommend which classes you should pick.”
- What should a jungler play, then?
- Are there any OP classes?
- Aw yeah lol, gotta play whatever class the ex-pro picks
What were they all talking about? The pro gamer, the viewers, everyone?
... They didn't know what raids were?
Why?
Sure, Lost of Fantasy had come out twenty years ago, but it wasn't as if MMORPGs hadn't existed both before and after it.
Even if Lost of Fantasy was only launching today in Jeong Hana's world...
Sure, it was so famous and popular that it did feel a bit like the genre's flagship game, but...
“Wait. Don't tell me...”
On a hunch, I searched for terms like “raid games” and “instanced dungeon.”
The results made me let out a hollow laugh.
“... Is this even possible?”
Jeong Hana's world had Legend of League.
It had Escape from Paradise.
Battle Royale.
Dungeon and Warrior, too...
There were countless games, but...
“Raid games didn't exist...?”
The tank-DPS-healer trinity and raids.
Apparently, those concepts were only just starting to bloom at this very moment.
“In that case, it'd be worth playing again, wouldn't it?”
After all, nobody knew better than I did what happened in Lost of Fantasy or what the right answers were.
If I didn't have to go through all that misery, it was definitely a game worth playing.
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