Forced to Date 3 Alphas in a Comic: CHAPTER 1

The school grounds were lush and green in the spring sunlight, uniformed students moving through the campus amid cheerful noise and laughter on every side. Chao Xun shuffled along a path at the edge of it all, completely out of place with the bustling crowd around him. Of course he couldn’t fit in. The body of an eighteen-year-old boy currently housed the soul of a twenty-seven-year-old office worker. Just yesterday morning Chao Xun had been on a business flight. He had dozed off for what felt like a single nap, and when he opened his eyes, the blue airplane seat that should have been in front of him had been replaced by an unfamiliar beige ceiling. His first response was to go back to sleep, figuring he was dreaming and that waking up properly would send him back where he belonged. The second time he opened his eyes, it was the sunlight through the window that woke him. The unfamiliar room was still there. It took him the entire afternoon, sifting in a state of creeping horror through the foreign memories that had materialized in his head, before he was forced to accept a single fact: he had transmigrated, and specifically into a comic book. He had been on the plane reading an e-book when a comic, origin unknown, had turned up on his phone. Its cover was so ornate and out of place among his other titles that it immediately caught his attention and he had clicked on it out of curiosity. It took him a while to remember the name of the comic he had used to pass the time: “Pheromone Contract.” The plot was simple enough. The protagonist was Mi Yu, the school tyrant and campus heartthrob, whose extraordinary looks and family background had always made him the center of attention. Calling him universally beloved would not be an overstatement. The comic opened on the first day of the third year of high school, when a transfer student named Yuan Chuan Si arrived in class. This mysterious newcomer was not only taller than Mi Yu but also cooler, with outstanding grades, and he immediately won over teachers and students alike. Naturally Yuan Chuan Si became the standard against which Mi Yu was measured. Teachers constantly cited his top scores to push Mi Yu to reform and take his studies seriously, which infuriated the protagonist and gave him a strong preemptive dislike of the newcomer. Through a series of accidents the two clashed repeatedly, and the story grew from there. As the saying goes, you never make friends without a fight first. As the plot developed, the two went from mutual contempt to gradually changing their opinions of each other. Chao Xun had assumed this was a story about youthful friendship, but as he read further the atmosphere between the two leads kept growing stranger and stranger. In the comic, Yuan Chuan Si was always trapping Mi Yu between his arms and a wall, watching him bristle and blush with an expression of deep amusement. Only at that point did Chao Xun realize: this was a campus romance comic. And he had transmigrated into it as a side character who shared his exact name, one who appeared only in the early chapters as a devoted, shameless, relentlessly pursuing admirer of Mi Yu. His role in the story was purely functional: first, to highlight Mi Yu’s popularity; second, to create obstacles that moved the plot forward; third, to make occasional appearances that stoked Yuan Chuan Si’s jealousy and added fuel to the romance between the two leads. The unfortunate part was that Chao Xun had fallen asleep halfway through reading, so not only did he not know how the side character’s story ended, he hadn’t even reached the part where the two leads officially got together. Chao Xun looked up at the sky and let out a long, helpless sigh. Would someone please tell him what on earth was going on. “Mi Yu, morning!” “Morning, classmate Mi.” “Mi-ge, morning, did you watch last night’s game?” “No.” A lazy teenage voice drifted over from not far away. Chao Xun reacted as though he had just heard something out of a horror story, quickly sweeping his fringe down over his face and turning his body toward the shrubbery in a desperate attempt to hide himself. The reason was simple: the owner of that voice was one of the main characters, the one the original host had been pestering for a year and a half, the campus heartthrob and school tyrant, Mi Yu. As a comic protagonist, Mi Yu’s looks were more refined than any celebrity Chao Xun had ever seen in his original world, and they were vivid and alive, carrying an untamed wildness about them. The boy had narrow, parallel double eyelids, deep-set eyes with a brilliant gleam, a high nose bridge, and full lips with a slightly pronounced cupid’s bow. His whole face had a smooth, effortless quality that gave off an air of careless perfection. His hair was thick and jet black, his shoulders broad, his legs long. An absolutely flawless specimen. All of the above came to him as images surfacing in his mind, and he had the original host to thank for that. Not only did this handsome face flash through his thoughts every few seconds, it came with its own soft-focus floral backdrop. Just like in a comic. Well, it was a comic. Going through those in-brain memories at home yesterday, Chao Xun had nearly been electrocuted from the inside out. Reading a comic was one thing. Actually becoming part of one was something else entirely. The original host’s feelings for Mi Yu had been completely undisguised and announced to the world, with a disregard for anyone else that was frankly alarming. To get Mi Yu’s attention, he had dressed up carefully and engineered constant accidental appearances near him. He would put on a soft, delicate act in front of him, fake trips and falls, speak loudly to be noticed. He had posted love declarations online, sent love letters and breakfast deliveries, and had stirred up trouble with Mi Yu’s other admirers on a regular basis, making no small number of enemies along the way. His obsession had only grown with time, eventually escalating to stealing Mi Yu’s clothes to wear, collecting things Mi Yu had thrown away, and attempting to follow him home. When Chao Xun unlocked the phone, what he found was page after page of photos of the same boy. Candid shots, images saved from the internet, photos others had posted, pictures the original host had edited himself. Side views, back views, full front, top-down, low-angle, all of it. Even the contact list was telling. Among the pitifully few chat windows, aside from the class group chat there was nothing but Mi Yu fan groups and similar. Pinned at the very top was a contact saved under the nickname: Mimi Baby [heart]. Opening the chat revealed an endless one-sided stream from the original host: long rambling messages, questions about how he was doing, demands, accusations, and passionate confessions of love, every one of them unanswered. What a delicate little heart of glass. The only problem was that every single message had a red exclamation mark in front of it, indicating it had failed to send, because he had been blocked. Chao Xun held a silent three-second memorial service for the original host on the spot. Sending messages this frequently even after getting blocked, that kind of high-volume harassment really was impossible to put up with. And now he, the current Chao Xun, had inherited this entire reputation as a shameless devoted admirer. He hadn’t even had time to process these terrifying memories before the original host’s one and only friend in class sent him a message. Ke An’an: Xunxun, are you okay? You’ve been out of school for a week, are you feeling sick? Ke An’an: You need to come back, there’s been a first-year little omega hanging around campus heartthrob Mi lately Ke An’an: If you don’t come back soon your position is at risk Ke An’an: [anxious cat emoji] Little omega? What was that? Three words surfaced in his mind: alpha, omega, beta. Like a search engine returning related entries, an explanation followed immediately, every line ringing out clearly in his head. Chao Xun came apart at the seams. This world had six genders. Three times as many as his original one. No wonder, when the comic had first introduced Mi Yu, there had been a decorative information box floating beside the character: [Mi Yu / Alpha] He had assumed it was just some kind of stylistic comic convention, glanced past it, and never given it another thought. But now that the comic had become reality, he was beginning to understand just how thoroughly this was demolishing his entire understanding of the world. Absolutely unbelievable. If he remembered correctly, when the original host had first appeared in the comic, there had been a similar box floating beside him: [Chao Xun / Omega] …… Chao Xun collapsed face-first onto the bed. Something more terrifying than transmigrating into a girl’s body had happened to him: he had transmigrated into the body of a man who could get pregnant. No no no, forget pregnancy, forget all of that. He was a side character. A plot device. Plot devices don’t need romantic partners. Having firmly resolved to stay as far from the main characters as possible, he received another message the very next second. Ke An’an: I know that whole incident hit you hard, but the homeroom teacher already contacted the forum admin to take the posts down Ke An’an: It’s been a whole week, people are almost over it, don’t let it get to you Ke An’an: Come back soon What incident? Chao Xun had a bad feeling. The original host hadn’t left him some enormous disaster to deal with, had he? Then it was as though he had pried open a box that had been hidden away in a corner of his mind, deliberately avoided: the original host had not yet undergone differentiation. He had been a beta pretending to be an omega, and had done it convincingly enough to fool everyone, until someone had secretly photographed his personal records from the school office and leaked the information. The original host had already been notorious throughout the school for his very public pursuit of Mi Yu. When the beta-pretending-as-omega revelation broke, not only did his notoriety go up another level, but his already poor reputation took a further dive from which it showed no signs of recovering. By now even people who had never seen him in person were passing around the story: there was a beta boy in Class 3 of Year 2 who had gone completely mad over love, willing to take fake medication and pretend to be an omega just to get close to the campus heartthrob. The rumors grew wilder with every retelling. Posts about him on the school forum kept multiplying. The original host, of course, had not dared look at any of it. In a full-blown ostrich response, he had called in sick and hidden at home for a week. And then Chao Xun had transmigrated in and inherited all of it. As the person at the center of the incident, Chao Xun could confirm that no fake medication had been involved. The original host had simply been utterly convinced he would differentiate into an omega, and had put great effort into presenting himself in a soft and delicate way, as though he genuinely were one. Over time it had become so natural that he had started to refer to himself as an omega almost without thinking, until he had half forgotten what his original gender actually was. At the thought of facing the stares of the entire student body, three words flashed through Chao Xun’s mind. Just let me die. By his own worldview, if he understood the situation correctly, how was this any different from a boy pretending to be a girl?