Many people ask about the meaning of life. If someone ever asked that from Yoon Min Ji, she'd shrug and say, "Life is a piece of shit." Yeah. That would be her honest answer.
Right now, she was sleeping like a baby in her personal disaster zone, a one-room apartment that smelled like leftover soju and cheap ramen.
The floor was a battlefield of crushed beer cans, instant noodle cups stacked like modern art, biscuit wrappers tossed like fallen leaves, and empty soju bottles rolling around like they owned the place. Even she could barely find a place to put her foot down.
Buzz buzz.
Her phone vibrated somewhere near her pillow. She let out a half-snore and groaned, cracking open one eye. With a heavy yawn and hair all over her face, she lazily reached out and squinted at the screen.
Water bill. Current bill. Apartment rent. Notification after notification of unpaid bills lined her screen like a to-do list from hell.
"…Tch," she clicked her tongue and tossed the phone aside. "How did things even get this bad?"
Well, no one really knew.
She once stood on a shining podium, a gold medal glittering around her neck, a national Olympic champion in women's archery. People used to chant her name.
Now she was jobless, broke, and barely surviving in a crumbling apartment that smelled like convenience store leftovers.
She sighed again, longer this time, and turned her head toward the only clean thing on her wall, a giant poster. It was a digital drawing of a ridiculously handsome young man with sharp blue eyes hugging a girl with long pink hair, who had the same dreamy gaze. The lighting in the poster made them look like gods. They were smiling so warmly.
"How nice…" Min Ji murmured, staring at them. Her fingers twitched as if reaching out. "My life would've been better too… if someone like Lucien came into it. A rich, gentle, handsome man…"
Her voice cracked near the end. It didn't even sound like a joke anymore.
Lucien, of course, was the male lead of the web-novel Cold Duke's First Love. That story had basically become her emotional oxygen these days.
She opened the novel app on her phone with muscle memory. Before diving into the chapters, her eyes stayed glued to the cover, her dream man looking as perfect as ever in a tailored coat. He wasn't even real, but her heart still fluttered.
"Damn. Out of 8.2 billion people in the world, why do I only fall for ones who don't exist?" She hugged her pillow like it was a person. "Is this… normal? Aaaah, my Duke…"
She finally tapped the latest chapter, the final one.
"Why is it ending already?" she cried out, voice wobbling as she covered half her face with her blanket. But she still read it all in one go, tears stinging her eyes by the end.
'And then they lived happily ever after.'
A cliché, yes. A fantasy, sure. But Min Ji didn't hate it. In fact, it made her smile just a little.
"If only real life were that simple," she whispered.
She scrolled down and left a small comment:
'Wish I were a character in there.'
Then, with a deep breath, she kicked the blanket off and sat up.
"Okay! Time to get a fresh start." She stretched her arms toward the cracked ceiling, then her legs, hopping lightly off the bed.
Only to,
CRASH.
Her foot landed right on a beer can. She slipped with a cartoonish yelp and slammed face-first into the floor, limbs flailing like a fallen ragdoll.
A long pause.
She groaned from the floor, cheek mashed against cold tile. "…I don't think I'd die like this…"
A huge pain throbbed in her forehead.
She stared at a biscuit wrapper stuck to her face.
"…Can someone actually die this idiotically?"
But then her vision blacked out. Of course, since that was the case, she didn't see the glitch on her phone screen or her comment on it.
___________________________________
It was suffocating.
The first thing Min Ji felt was the tightness in her chest. She couldn't breathe. No, she wasn't breathing at all.
Water rushed into her nose and mouth when she tried to inhale. Her lungs screamed as her body panicked.
Am I… underwater?!
Her eyes flew open in a blur of panic, only for water to sting them instantly. Everything was blue and murky, bubbles dancing around her face. Her hands flailed, flapping like a startled duck as she kicked upward. Her fingers broke the surface first, then her head.
Splash!
She gasped for air, coughing violently as she dragged in breath after breath. One hand clutched at her throat. The other covered her mouth, trying to keep everything in. She bent forward, hacking up what felt like half the pond.
"Cough-cough! Haaah… dammit…"
A few more seconds, and she might've actually died. Drowned in a tiny decorative pond, barely deep enough to drown a toddler.
"What the heck…" she choked out between coughs.
She dragged herself to the stone edge of the pond, soaking wet from head to toe. Her gown clung to her skin, hair stuck to her cheeks like seaweed.
Her mind was spinning.
Didn't I… slip and fall in my apartment?
She rubbed her eyes with trembling fingers, trying to stop them from burning. They stung like crazy. When she blinked again, finally getting a clearer look,
She froze.
In front of her stood a massive, castle-like building that looked like it was straight out of some fantasy game. Its tall spires glistened under sunlight, and the entire outer wall looked like it was made of polished marble and gold.
Around her, lush gardens stretched in every direction, trees with golden leaves, white roses in perfect bloom, and butterflies fluttering lazily as if they belonged in a dream.
And she… was sitting in a shallow pond at the center of it all.
"...Is this heaven?" she mumbled, staring at the castle with wide, stunned eyes. "Did I… really die?"
Her hand lifted, and she slapped her own cheek, only to scream in pain.
"OW-ow, it hurts!" she cried out, recoiling. "Ah, damn!"
So it wasn't a dream. It really wasn't. She wasn't back in her beer-can-filled apartment. She wasn't on Earth.
Which meant… she actually died?
She blinked rapidly. Her gaze drifted upward again, toward the sky that seemed bluer than anything she remembered. Her eyes lit up, cautiously.
"Well… I didn't think I'd end up in heaven, but I'll take it," she muttered, wiping her dripping face. "Honestly, I thought I'd land straight in hell with how much soju I drank in my life…"
She looked around, dazed but starting to smile.
"Maybe the Grim Reaper messed up and dropped me into the wrong place?"
She shrugged, water dripping off her elbows. "…Well, who cares?"
"I do care, my lady! Oh my god!"
The sudden voice behind her almost sent Min Ji straight back into the pond.