Chapter 1: The Porcelain Martyr in Silver Reflection
Enri's past was not merely a memory; it was a chronic pain seeping into his very bones. In that first life, he had been a business student—a path forced upon him by his father, a man with heavy fists and the perpetual stench of cheap liquor. His father believed that dry numbers and graphs would forge a man out of his "too soft" son. Enri still remembered how his fingers trembled when handing over his academic reports, and how his stomach turned to ice at the sound of a key turning in the front door lock. Every evening at home was a lottery: either he would be ignored entirely, or he would become a punching bag for a man who blamed his son for his wife's death.
His appearance had always been his curse. Features too delicate, skin hauntingly pale, and bright blue eyes that seemed like an anomaly in his world. At school, they called him the "porcelain doll," and that doll was the perfect target. By thirty, Enri had mastered the art of invisibility. He dyed his hair a muddy chestnut and slouched, hoping the world would forget he existed. But the world never forgot. Harassment from teachers, oily hints from colleagues at work—his beauty was like an open wound that constantly attracted flies. Death in an accident under the blinding glare of truck headlights was not a tragedy for him, but a quiet sigh of relief.
Awakening felt like emerging from a prolonged anesthesia. Enri opened his eyes in a room flooded with soft morning light. The first thing he did was grab the smartphone lying nearby. The fingerprint sensor worked instantly.
"The writing... it's the same," he whispered, scrolling through the news feed.
He spent hours studying information about this new world. "Alphas," "Omegas," "Betas"—a world divided into castes by scents and instincts. He read dry Wikipedia articles: Alphas were leaders, Omegas were a rare treasure, and Betas were the workforce. When he found his ID and saw the letter "B" (Beta) in the secondary gender column, he nearly wept. Being a Beta meant being ordinary. It was his chance at a life without predators.
But when Enri approached the mirror, his heart skipped a beat. On the wall hung a photo of this body taken ten days ago: an ordinary boy with chestnut hair. But the reflection... it had changed. It was as if the soul's transmigration itself had reshaped the flesh. Now, a youth with hair the color of arctic silver looked back at him. It wasn't the dull gray of the elderly; it was a living, vibrant metallic shimmer.
Enri ran a hand through his hair. It felt like pure silk. His skin had become as translucent as elite porcelain, through which thin blue veins were visible at his wrists. He had become a hundred times more beautiful than he had ever been. But this beauty terrified him. In his past life, he had been beaten for less.
"Why again?.." he exhaled, touching his face.
He tried to dye his hair back, buying dye from a shop around the corner. But as soon as the formula touched his skin, his head burned with hellish fire. He barely managed to wash off the chemicals, staring at the horrific red welts on his forehead. His skin was too sensitive. It rejected any attempt to become "ordinary."
He barely slept that first night. He lay in bed, listening to the sounds of a foreign city outside the window. Two sets of memories crowded his mind. He remembered studying marketing and logistics in his past life, but that knowledge now seemed like dust. In contrast, the knowledge of this body—medicine, anatomy, Latin—stood before his eyes in clear diagrams. He knew how to stop a bleed, how to make an incision, how the human heart functioned.
"This is my only weapon now," he decided. "If I cannot change my appearance, I will change my value to this world."
He found an old wig and heavy horn-rimmed glasses in the closet. Putting them on, he saw a pathetic excuse for a man in the mirror. But that was exactly what he needed. Camouflage.
He had relatives on his father's side—an uncle and an aunt. On his phone, he found several cold messages from Aunt Lydia, asking "if he was finally going to sell his parents' house to pay off his tuition debts." The tiny flicker of hope for a "different family" crumbled to ash. They didn't see a nephew; they saw a financial burden or an asset.
Two days later, he stepped into the university for the first time. He walked with his head down, hiding his "silver" under the cheap synthetic of a wig. Every time a tall man passed by, Enri instinctively flinched, expecting a blow or a harsh shout. But here, in this world, Alphas didn't notice him—to them, he was just a scentless Beta. It gave him an illusion of safety.
Enri did not know that his new life would shatter on the very first day. He did not know that his genetics were a ticking time bomb, and that a collision in a restroom with one curious Omega would be the beginning of his fall... or his rise.