I almost ignored the message.
It came in the middle of nothing—no conversation, no notification chain, just a vibration against my palm while I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling, half-asleep and half-awake in that numb space where thoughts drift without direction. The profile picture was blank. The username was a string of characters that didn't look human. I should've deleted it.
Instead, I opened it.
*If you could go to any novel or manhwa world, which one would you choose?*
I let out a quiet breath through my nose. A prank, probably. Or one of those automated bait messages. Still, something about the timing felt deliberate, like it had waited for me to be exactly this bored, exactly this unguarded.
I typed back without thinking too hard.
*Lookism.*
Three dots appeared instantly.
*Traits? You may choose freely. Strength, talent, growth, luck, influence, existence.*
That made me pause.
I sat up, back pressing against the headboard, phone suddenly warm in my hand. My thumb hovered over the keyboard. If this was a joke, it was oddly specific. If it wasn't… well, that was stupid to consider.
I thought about Lookism. About ceilings. About how every strong character still felt bound by something—society, talent, fate, narrative. I didn't want to replace Daniel. I didn't want to be a crew head or a king.
I wanted to stand outside the scale.
*Max everything,* I typed slowly.
*No upper limits.*
*I don't want to be the protagonist.*
*I want to be something the world has to account for.*
The typing indicator didn't appear this time.
The screen froze.
For a second, I thought my phone had crashed. Then it vibrated once, sharply, like a pulse.
*Confirmed.*
*Transmigration will begin.*
My heart skipped. I opened my mouth to laugh, to call myself an idiot for getting caught up in it—
And the world folded inward.
There was no pain. No screaming. Just a sensation like gravity suddenly deciding it didn't know what direction it belonged to anymore. My body felt compressed, stripped of context, memories peeling away and being rewritten faster than I could process.
I tried to breathe.
I couldn't tell if I succeeded.
When sensation returned, the first thing I noticed was weight.
Not physical heaviness, but density—like every cell in my body had been packed tighter than before. My feet were planted firmly on wet ground, rain tapping steadily against my skin. The smell of asphalt and iron hung thick in the air.
I was standing.
Not waking up. Not reborn.
Standing, as if I had always been here.
My hands were clenched at my sides. When I looked down, they were larger than mine had been before, scarred, veins visible beneath skin that felt… real in a way my old body never had. Blood dripped from my knuckles, warm despite the rain.
I didn't panic.
Shock came first. Then silence.
Information settled into place gently, like dust after a collapse. This body had history. Years of it. I wasn't a student. I wasn't young. I wasn't new.
I had arrived in Lookism long before the story ever began.
Power stirred the moment I acknowledged it. Not explosively—there was no surge, no adrenaline spike—but with quiet certainty, like flexing a muscle that had never once failed me. The ground beneath my feet creaked faintly, responding more than it should have.
Ten.
The number didn't come from comparison. It came from absence. There was no sense of "stronger than." There was only completeness, a feeling that whatever force governed limits had simply… stepped aside.
That understanding scared me more than excitement ever could.
The first fight happened days later. Or maybe weeks. Time blurred in that early period, not because it moved fast, but because nothing challenged me enough to anchor memory. Men came looking. Strong men. Ones who had already carved names into the streets. They felt me the way animals sense pressure changes before a storm.
Gapryong Kim stood across from me in an empty lot, rain pooling around his shoes, eyes sharp and alive. He didn't ask who I was. He didn't posture. He just smiled faintly, like he'd found proof of something he'd suspected all along.
We exchanged blows.
Not many.
When it ended, he was on one knee, breathing hard, looking up at me not with resentment, but clarity. "So this is the ceiling," he said quietly.
I told him no.
That was the floor.
Others followed. Shingen, whose blade never fully left its sheath once he understood the distance. Charles Choi, watching from afar, already thinking about how to build a future where someone like me couldn't accidentally erase it. Gun, raw and violent back then, learned restraint the hard way. Goo laughed through pain and decided early that some things were better admired than challenged.
I didn't walk that path alone.
There were a few—very few—who didn't try to test themselves against me. People who understood that strength wasn't the only axis that mattered. An older man who ran information routes and never lied to me once. A woman who handled logistics for fighters and treated my presence like bad weather: dangerous, but manageable if respected. A quiet doctor who patched up bodies without asking questions and told me, once, that even monsters needed somewhere to bleed.
They became allies without oaths.
They stayed alive because of it.
Years passed. Generations shifted. I watched kings rise and fall. Watched power get reorganized, inherited, diluted. Eventually, I stepped back. Not because I was defeated. Because the world had begun to warp around my presence in subtle ways—fights ending too early, men hesitating before committing, history bending away from conflict instead of through it.
That wasn't growth.
So I disappeared.
Not sealed. Not erased.
Just absent.
By the time I re-entered the picture, the air felt thinner.
I lived quietly. Took on a name that didn't carry weight. Built a small life that wouldn't attract attention. That was when my sister entered the story—not by blood of this world, but by fate's stubborn insistence on familiarity.
She came home one afternoon talking about school, about classmates, about a boy who'd changed overnight.
"Daniel Park," she said, eyes bright. "He's weird, but… kind."
I felt something settle in my chest then. Not dread. Not anticipation.
Recognition.
The story had finally caught up.
From that point on, I stayed at the edge. Watching. Listening. Letting the second generation struggle honestly. My power remained buried, deep enough that even Gun only felt unease instead of certainty when he passed me on the street. Goo joked about it, then avoided my territory. James Lee noticed and chose absence. Charles Choi adjusted plans he'd never admit were reactions.
They didn't fear me because of what I did.
They feared me because of what I hadn't needed to do yet.
And as my sister walked deeper into a narrative that was never meant to include someone like me, I understood something with quiet clarity:
This world had rules.
They just hadn't figured out yet that I was one of them.
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