They always say beauty is a gift.
Strangers smiled too long. Girls whispered like I was something to win, not someone to know. It justified the way they followed me after class—the way they grabbed my arm without asking.
At first, I thought I was lucky.
Until I realized I couldn't be ugly, even for a day. I couldn't be invisible. I couldn't just exist without being watched, wanted, or chased.
They called it admiration.
But admiration doesn't suffocate you.
Admiration doesn't make you feel unsafe in your skin.
Because the truth is—
Being seen all the time
means never being known at all.
....
"scritch… scratch… scrrr…"
A faint scraping sound echoed through the quiet room.
It was accompanied by the rustle of students turning pages and the rhythmic scritch-scratch of pens. Together, they formed a steady melody, punctuated by the dry, ghostly rasp of chalk against the board. Somewhere in the back, an adolescent girl's murmur dissolved into a quiet laugh—though why she laughed, no one knew.
The voices from the hallway lingered in everyone's ears, yet the class continued its peaceful rhythm. No one flinched at the sudden, sharp bursts of laughter or the distant screams of students outside; they remained undisturbed, functioning with a quiet, practiced indifference.
It was a perfectly normal day for the students of this university. But for him, it was entirely abnormal.
Beep
Beep~
"Your system is undergoing maintenance; please wait~"
"Who?" he gasped, jolting at a sound that felt impossibly near. It had been too close—a whisper that seemed to graze the very edge of his ear.
But when he spun around, all that greeted him were the puzzled expressions of his classmates, their confusion quickly melting into quiet amusement.
"No, sir, it's Miss, not Mister," Classmate A chimed in, his voice thick with a mocking chuckle. "I mean, look at him. Can you even call that a guy?"
Classmate A looks at that person with an undeniably envious look.
"If I had that look, I would be the harem god in this school." His thought was thick with jealousy.
He possessed a face of startling loveliness, framed by a spill of long, dark hair that softened the sharp lines of his jaw. His most captivating feature, however, was his phoenix eyes—upturned at the corners and shielded by a sweep of impossibly long lashes. Just beneath the curve of one eye sat a single, dark mole, a tiny anchor of detail on his porcelain skin. While his eyebrows were thick and well-defined, they only served to frame the delicate, slender grace of his figure.
The school's black uniform, with its stark white necktie and tailored trousers, should have projected a sense of boyish discipline. Yet, on him, the fabric seemed to transform. It didn't look like a boy in his clothes; it looked like a girl intentionally—yet flawlessly—impersonating a man. This visual dissonance created a strange, magnetic friction. He was undeniably a "guy," yet his appearance defied the very label, making it feel as though he were a beautiful anomaly walking the halls of the university.
There was a natural sheen to his lips, a hydration that made them look perpetually soft. They lacked the jagged lines of a typical guy's mouth; instead, they were smooth and seamless. When he spoke, the movement was graceful, the lower lip slightly heavier than the upper, adding a touch of innocence to an already ethereal face.
"Sorry, Sir," Killian said with an apologetic expression on his face.
'That is very weird, borderline creepy,' he thought.
The teacher, knowing nothing had happened, continued his writing on the board.
"Okay, class, the Fibonacci sequence is built by adding the two previous numbers together ($1+1=2$, $1+2=3$, and so on). As these numbers get larger, the ratio between them gets closer and closer to a very specific irrational number: $1.618033...$, known as the Golden Ratio..." Discussed by the teacher.
Killian didn't offer a verbal retort to classmate A. Instead, he slowly turned his head, his phoenix eyes narrowing as they locked onto Classmate A. His gaze was glacial, carrying a silent, jagged warning:
'Another word, and I will make your life harder than it already is.'
The sheer intensity of that look caught Classmate A off guard; the boy's smirk faltered, his bravado replaced by a flicker of genuine nerves. Satisfied with the silence, Killian turned away, dismissing the entire room.
He settled back into his seat—the second-to-last row, right against the window. It was the classic "protagonist" seat, the vantage point of the beautiful and the isolated. As he propped his chin on a slender hand and stared out at the university grounds, the sunlight filtered through the glass, catching the dark silk of his hair and the pale curve of his neck.
To anyone watching, he looked less like a student and more like a tragic figure from a melancholic romance, forever separated from the world by a pane of glass.
He wasn't the protagonist of a story—at least, not his own. That seat by the window hadn't been his choice; it was a silent decree by the women of the class. To them, Killian framed against a backdrop of drifting clouds was a living masterpiece, the leading man in the romance of their lives.
Initially, the fascination was feverish. From business admin to the furthest reaches of the engineering wings, his name was a constant hum in the hallways. He was the rare combination of ethereal beauty and a mind that made his peers seem like flickering candles next to a sun. On SocialBook, a social media platform, the school student group page's anonymous pining reached a crescendo, while the other men watched with reddened eyes, their crushes eclipsed by his shadow.
Then came the day they called "the Fall."
It wasn't a physical drop, but the audible sound of a thousand hearts splintering at once. To the girls, it was the university's greatest tragedy; to the jealous boys, it was a divine miracle from the heavens. The secret was out, and it changed the air around him forever:
Killian didn't swing that way.
It was portrayed exaggeratedly.
Because he was beautiful and smart, everyone assumed he was precisely who they wanted him to be. Their "parasocial relationship" with him was destroyed when he came clean about who he really was.
The girls experienced grief; they lost the "fantasy" version of him they had built.
The guys experienced Schadenfreude (joy in the misfortune of others). To them, he was finally "disqualified" from the competition for the girls' attention.
...
Killian froze. The voice wasn't a whisper from the hallway or a murmur from the back of the room; it was a cold, synthetic chime ringing inside the very center of his skull.
He glanced sideways, his breath hitching. The classroom remained unchanged. The girls still watched him with that suffocating, heavy pity—mourning the "hero" they thought they owned—and the guys still shot him glares sharpened by years of envy. But no one was speaking. No one was playing a prank.
'I'm hallucinating,' he thought, his slender fingers tightening around his pen until his knuckles turned as white as his necktie. 'The stress... the depression... did finally snapped?' > A myriad of dark possibilities flashed through his mind. Was it a curse? A localized auditory hallucination? Or was someone—some cruel, unseen force—messing with the his sanity?
Killian knew the shape of his own darkness. He had sat in the sterile offices of psychologists, nodding as they spoke of "chemical imbalances" and "coping mechanisms." The therapy was supposed to be working, yet the depression remained—a restless, oily thing that twisted his thoughts and turned him into this hollowed-out version of himself.
"Host, you are not hallucinating," the voice boomed, dripping with a metallic sort of ego. "It is I, your System. With your looks and my prowess, we shall conquer every girl you encounter."
Killian's breath hitched. He didn't look around this time. He knew now that the sound wasn't vibrating in the air; it was rooted in the meat of his brain. His eyebrows furrowed, sharp and slanted like two swords drawn for a duel.
'Conquer every girl?' The thought was absurd, almost sickening. He was a man who don't want to be chase by any girl because he don't want to—and wouldn't—be the "prince" the girls wanted. To have a voice in his head demanding he become a harem master felt like the final, cruel joke of a breaking mind.
'I've lost it,' he whispered internally, the swords of his brows deepening. 'The depression didn't just change me. It finally took my sanity.'
"Host, listen to me! I am not a glitch in your brain," the System chirped, its voice now sounding like an over-enthusiastic AI assistant. "To prove it, I'm dropping the Newbie Gift Pack into your inventory. But seriously, Host... do you not read webnovels? Do you not watch anime? Have you been living under a very handsome, very sad rock?"
'What do you mean?' Killian thought, his brow twitching.
"I mean, most people would be doing a victory lap right now!" the System ranted. "A normal person gets a 'Golden Finger' and they don't question their sanity; they just start planning their world domination. They accept it readily! They jump around! They think, 'Oh boy, I'm going to be a God today!' But you? You're sitting here having a philosophical crisis and questioning your medical records. You're being such a 'Literary Fiction' protagonist right now, and it's really killing the vibe."
Killian stared blankly at the chalk dust floating in the sunlight. The System's sheer pettiness was so absurd it was almost... distracting.
'I'm sorry my mental breakdown isn't entertaining enough for you,' he retorted dryly.
Killian, hovering on the border of a total mental breakdown, did as he was told. He braced himself for nothingness—for the silence that would prove he was just another student losing his grip.
Instead, his breath hitched. His pupils dilated until the dark centers nearly swallowed the amber of his phoenix eyes. Hovering in the air, superimposed over the dusty classroom floor, was a semi-transparent, pixelated blue window.
Inside the grid sat three icons that looked like they belonged in a mobile game, not a university lecture: a stack of cash labeled $x10,000, a pulsating red Gift Box, and a Golden Ticket that shimmered with an artificial light.
Killian felt a cold, hollow weight in his chest. This wasn't joy; it was the clinical definition of Despair. 'This is the end,' he thought, his vision blurring slightly around the edges of the blue pixelated box. 'First the voices, now the UI. My brain is officially rewriting my reality. I am a lost cause.'
The System let out a long, digitized sigh that sounded like static and frustration. "Hays... Host, seriously? Enough with the melodrama. If you're so convinced your eyes are lying to you, use your hands. Look under your table. I put the cash right there."
Killian could almost feel the System face-palming in the back of his mind.
Trembling, his slender fingers reached beneath the scarred wooden surface of the university desk. His breath hitched as his skin met something crisp and solid. He didn't even have to look to know what it was. The texture of high-quality paper, the smell of fresh ink—a thick, banded stack of currency was tucked neatly into the storage cubby.
...
'You really are a system,' Killian thought, his logic finally catching up. 'A bona fide, web-novel-trope system.'
"Bingo! Finally! Look at you, using that big beautiful brain," the System chirped, its voice vibrating with smug satisfaction. "Now that you've stopped measuring for a straightjacket, let's talk business."
'What business?'
"Ding! Mission 1: The Maiden's Voyage! Go around the school and locate a girl with a 90+ Beauty Rating. Now, we shall—"
'System, wait. Stop. Hit the brakes and listen to me.'
"What now, Host? We have hearts to conquer and a harem to build!"
'How did you even choose me? Was it just... random?'
"Random?!" The System sounded deeply offended. "I was born from the collective desires and dreams of the universe! I've been searching for eons! I don't just pick any 'Tom, Dick, or Harry.' A System of my caliber only chooses the absolute peak specimen to conquer the world!"
Killian actually face-palmed in real life this time, the "sword-like" brows pinching together. 'I can't be attracted to girls.'
"What do you mean?" The System's voice dropped into a pitying, mournful tone. "Oh... Host. Is it... a mechanical failure? Are you unable to 'get it up'? Don't worry! With my prowess, I can turn even a dead twig into the hardest steel in the world! It's such a tragedy that even with those looks, you—"
'I am gay,' Killian interrupted calmly.
"You can't get any... wait, what did you say?"
'I am not straight,' Killian repeated, his internal voice deadpan. 'I swing that way. Socially speaking, I'm gay. Your 90-rated girls? They're just... background characters to me.'