Strange things happen in life.
Like dying on your first day as a newly appointed teacher, hit by a car — and then, the moment after you die, opening your eyes to find yourself inside the world of that youth school romance manhwa you’d read just to learn a little something about your students.
For starters, the school name Seowol and the distinctly designed uniforms made it immediately recognizable. Sky-blue checkered neckties paired with colorful, vibrant outfits — uniforms that carried an artistic sensibility you’d only ever see in a manhwa.
Well, of course. I was literally reading it until yesterday.
The problem was that out of 150 chapters total, he’d only read up to chapter 35. After that, he’d skimmed through sleepily, skipping around and barely reading — mostly just looking at the art. Thinking to himself what a talented illustrator the artist was.
If I’d known it would come to this, I would have stayed up all night to read all 150 chapters.
Who could have known. That he’d die like that, that day.
In any case, the name of the body he now inhabited was Shin Cha-heun.
Once he’d settled into this body, memories began to flow in. Who he was, where he’d been, what he’d done… that sort of thing. They didn’t all pour in at once — it was more like scattered memories slowly surfacing one by one.
…We have the same name. Minus the last name.
The body’s original owner, ‘Shin’ Cha-heun, was a third-year high school student who appeared to have transferred into this manhwa’s school today, on the first day of the new semester.
But more pressing than any of that was the memory that vaguely surfaced regarding something called ‘traits.’
This body looks male on the outside, but… it’s similar to a female internally. So… what, I’m a male who has female reproductive functions and also emits pheromones?
Even after retrieving the memory, he couldn’t make sense of it — he sat there like a broken robot for a good while, and only after going back over it roughly fifteen times was he finally able to understand.
So — it seemed that the gender one was born with, previously divided simply into male and female, was more like a cosmetic setting. A separate gender, determined by internal organs and pheromones, was designated as either Alpha or Omega. Beta, it seemed, was the equivalent of the ordinary male and female from his original world.
Hmm. …So if I think about it simply, I’ve become a woman? Just with a male cosmetic setting. And there’s something called pheromones — like a perfume that attracts men?
After much deliberation, Cha-heun came to accept the conclusion.
Yep. Starting today, I’m gay in this world.
Beta women, Omega women, welcome.
And here — a male-type Omega whose only unshakeable confidence lies in his appearance.
That’s that.
Since it wasn’t his body to begin with, he probably shouldn’t be thinking about romance at all — but for now, it seemed wisest to lean into being a man who, externally, prefers a different gender than himself, while internally sharing the same gender.
Cha-heun organized his thoughts up to that point, checked the date and time on his phone, and got ready for school.
Today was Shin Cha-heun’s first day as a transfer student. Possession or not, the important thing was that this body was a student, which meant going to school.
…Oh, what am I going to do.
This was beyond awkward. The memories surfacing on their own was fine enough — but what followed was content he couldn’t afford to ignore.
…So, Shin Cha-heun was born male, but I should think of him as someone without the organs capable of pregnancy.
He’d already packed his bag and was standing in front of the bedroom door when the returning memories threw him into confusion all over again. He stood there mulling it over for a moment, then shook his head.
No, wait — his trait was Beta from the start. Not just the cosmetic setting — his gender is male, too.
As a Beta, he should have been identical to the males of the original world — but the problem was that, having been born between an Alpha and an Omega, a pheromone-secreting gland had formed inside his body. And not the kind an Alpha would produce, but the kind belonging to an Omega.
So to Alphas or Omegas who could perceive traits, he registered as an Omega — but if you judged strictly by physical condition alone, he was technically a Beta male.
…Ah. So he’s a Beta, but a half-baked one.
Somewhere in Cha-heun’s inherited memories, a voice — belonging to someone who might have been family or an acquaintance — seemed to call him a half-baked Beta bastard. Probably Cha-heun’s older brother, most likely.
…You really had it rough, didn’t you. And still a minor, at that.
Since Shin Cha-heun hadn’t appeared in any of the chapters he’d read, he was probably somewhere around Extra #40 in the manhwa. But in this life, this person would undoubtedly be the main character — so Cha-heun found himself with a goal.
First, let’s try calling Shin Cha-heun back here. Should I buy a book on summoning rituals or something?
Maybe it was because he’d spotted a book with the word “summoning” on the spine while packing Shin Cha-heun’s things earlier — whatever the reason, he was having that ridiculous thought as he stepped fully out the door.
Thud —
“Ah, fuck!”
“…….”
He’d been so lost in thought while walking that he’d walked straight into someone. The other person spat out a string of crude expletives and then fixed Cha-heun with a menacing glare.
“What the hell, you dumb Beta bastard — did your eyesight get cut in half too?”
Startled by the raw, unfiltered profanity, he stared blankly ahead — and there stood a slick-looking young man dressed in casual clothes. Handsome in a sharp, slightly rough-around-the-edges way. …He got a strange sense of déjà vu — this was probably Cha-heun’s older brother.
“Hey. I told you to keep your eyes down when you walk.”
…What exactly did he want? Eyes down, or eyes open?
…This guy is insane. Completely insane….
Cha-heun gave him one sideways glance, muttered a quick apology, and decided to head straight to school. The golden rule: never engage with a madman.
More importantly — this house is ridiculously grand.
Taking in his surroundings, he could see exactly what people meant when they described a wealthy family’s home. Cha-heun’s room was on the first floor, but the center of the house had a separate staircase leading up to the second floor, and even the first floor itself was so spaciously sectioned off that it felt enormous.
“Shin Cha-heun.”
He was briefly dazzled by all of it when a voice called his name. He turned around to find a middle-aged man in a suit standing near the front door — the kind of man who must have been very popular in his youth. He was watching Cha-heun.
“…A— Father….”
The man stood well over 180 centimeters, with a solid, lean build and nothing wasted about him — he radiated an unmistakably intellectual air. His pitch-black eyes studied Shin Cha-heun carefully.
“How are you feeling.”
…How are you feeling?
Was this his version of a good morning…?
“I’m… fine.”
“Good. Come on down. I’ll drive you to school.”
It felt like too much for a first meeting, and he’d almost naturally declined — but if Shin Cha-heun had been getting rides up until now, refusing would look stranger. So Cha-heun answered without protest and followed the man.
Ah, but it’s a little disorienting — my real name is also Cha-heun.
It wasn’t a common name to begin with, and having two of them was, well — disorienting, to say the least.
…Right, I’ll just add the last name and call him Shin Cha-heun going forward. Shin Cha-heun, that works. Shin Cha-heun.
What exactly was he doing, talking to himself like that.
Maybe it was just because the class he’d been about to take on as a teacher happened to be high schoolers. He couldn’t help feeling a little something, whether he liked it or not.
For now, this was Day 1 of Operation: Return Shin Cha-heun’s Soul — and Cha-heun intended to give school life his best effort until the day Shin Cha-heun came back.
Not knowing yet that this was the beginning of hell.
That plan to make the most of school life hit a snag right from the start. It became abundantly clear that in this world, a dominant Omega was essentially the equivalent of a female idol.
Combing through the memories, it seemed that Shin Cha-heun was a Beta — yet of all things, what his pheromone-secreting gland produced happened to be the pheromone of a dominant Omega. Even back in middle school, there were scattered memories of receiving unsettlingly aggressive flirting because of it.
Of all things, why does Shin Cha-heun’s pheromone have to be dominant.
From what he could gather, this pheromone system also worked on a spectrum — the closer to dominant, the more alluring it was to the opposite sex. His rough instinct told him it worked something like looks: just as being more attractive tends to make you more popular, pheromones probably functioned along similar lines.
Transferred, was it? It’s only been ten days since the semester started.
…And yet.
The number of times I’ve been flirted with by guys is a grand total of five.
Up until he actually arrived at high school, nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Sure, it stung a little to be here as a student instead of a teacher — but the classmates seemed decent enough, and he’d thought adjusting to school wouldn’t be that hard. Then the Alphas started showing interest, and everything unraveled.
Getting confessed to every other day was already a problem — but on top of that, the Beta students, apparently uncomfortable around those Alphas, had begun avoiding Cha-heun now that he was drawing them in.
…This is maddening.
And the bigger issue was that Cha-heun simply wasn’t attracted to men. The only ones capable of detecting pheromones were Alphas — and Alphas, regardless of which of the two genders they presented as, apparently all had external male genitalia.
In other words, whether they look male or female on the outside, they’re all men with that attached.
Bluntly put, from Cha-heun’s perspective, even a female-presenting Alpha was just a man wearing a female cosmetic setting.
There was a reason he’d felt an instinctive, full-body revulsion — actual goosebumps — when a pretty-looking girl asked if he’d consider going out with her. Not that he had any intention of dating a minor in the first place, but one thing was certain: his skin had literally crawled.
Whatever the case, Cha-heun had begun adjusting to this world without much incident. Except for being treated like a ghost within the household.
Though, to be fair, treating me like a ghost made sense.
He’d remembered it later — originally, Cha-heun had been living with his biological mother, and after she passed away, Shin Cha-heun had followed his father, a man named Shin Chae-il, to this place, and had been living here for quite some time now. But for some reason a year ago, he’d dropped out of school, and was only now returning.
His father, Shin Chae-il, had at least shown some concern — but even that felt uncomfortable.
After all, this man had an existing family. He was ultimately the one responsible for cheating and fathering Shin Cha-heun.
…Either way, in that house, I’m not just the cold rice — I’m literally a pebble they trip over. That explains why that sharp-looking guy hates me.
Shin Cha-heun really was a kid with a lot of baggage.
Well, regardless — in truth, his original body was either dead or in a coma, one of the two. He’d even tried to find a way out somehow, to return this body to Shin Cha-heun and get himself out.
Even if Cha-heun himself had died, this body wasn’t his — it had to be returned to its rightful owner.
I need to meet the kid first… but where on earth did he go.
That was why he’d even gone and bought a book on summoning rituals at night to try calling him back — fat lot of good it did. He wanted to sue every single person who’d written those books for fraud.
Poor Shin Cha-heun’s 100,000 won. I’m sorry — I’ll pay you back if I ever can.
…That was practically blood money for a student. He felt genuinely terrible.
But more than that, the real problem began when the sub-male lead of this world appeared. On Day 33 of being in this world, Cha-heun encountered an obstacle he hadn’t anticipated.
“Ah! Please, why are you doing this.”
“Hyung, go out with me, okay? I’ll treat you so well.”
Cha-heun was desperately, desperately trying to push off a large young man who had latched onto him. Every Alpha up until now had backed off the moment he said no — but this one was on a completely different level of persistence.
This was Baek Yu-gyeong — Sub Male Lead #1 of this high school romance world. For the record, it was pretty clear he didn’t exactly play a favorable role. He’d only read up to chapter 35, but Baek Yu-gyeong had been the one who bullied a friend and ended up on bad terms with the female lead because of it — and from what he could tell, things between him and the female lead would only get more hostile from there.
