Strategy to Increase Synchronization

Seohan’s eyes burned with fury as he searched the room, finally gripping a golf club.

In response, the window began flashing urgent messages in succession.

Most were messages like [I am sorry, User!], [I am scared, User!], or crying emoticons like [( ˃̣̣̥᷄⌓˂̣̣̥᷅ )].

Of course, Seohan did not budge.

Just as he was about to swing the golf club, a cheerful notification sound reached his ears.

[User information has been updated!]

“…Updated?”

Finally, something worth looking at appeared.

He did not put the golf club down completely but held it loosely in one hand while touching the update history.

He ignored the useless words like [Congratulations on acquiring a new function (ง˙∇˙)ว] that accompanied a faint sparkling effect.

[Name: Baek Seohan] [Special Note: Loading…]

The information was excessively simple.

Common details like age, gender, and birthday were not even there.

Just a name and a special note.

To make matters worse, the special note was still loading.

The golf club still in Seohan’s hand slowly tilted upward again.

[Loading Complete!]

…This thing certainly had good timing.

With a deep frown, Seohan quickly scanned the revealed information.

[Special Note: Warning! The synchronization level is extremely low. The possibility of the body acting unexpectedly increases.]

“…What exactly is this synchronization level?”

[The synchronization level is an objective scale to judge whether the body and soul are well-aligned. In your case, Seohan, because the possession was carried out in a hurry, this unexpected situation… (..) ( l: ) ( .-. ) ( :l ) (..).]

In short, it was saying things were like this because he cut in line.

Irritation bubbled up until his vision turned white.

“Was that just now… ha. Was that an unexpected action?”

[Yes! When the body cannot fully follow the will of the soul due to low synchronization, the memories remaining in the body take over instead.]

This meant Seohan would now experience situations where the real Baek Seohan intermittently emerged.

Just like earlier when his body, against his will, stepped on that… that, hideous thing.

His body shuddered.

It was an experience he never wanted to have again.

What was more serious was that if this continued, he would suffer a terrible fate, just like the ending of Baek Seohan in [Never Ending].

I cannot let that happen.

Even if I entered the body of a sh*tty sub-male lead, did I not decide to change the situation, resolve the grievances of my past life, and live a leisurely, happy life?

If I keep going like this, I might end up living a life worse than death.

“How do I raise it?”

The answer was simple.

He had to raise that d*mn synchronization level somehow so that his body would no longer move on its own.

Although it had become a high-difficulty task, the future was still in his hands.

Hope still remained.

“I want to eat tteokbokki.”

“…Pardon?”

“I said, go buy some.”

The next day.

From the early morning, Seohan suddenly called his secretary and sent him on an errand for tteokbokki.

Secretary Choi, who had rushed over as if called to an urgent meeting and was still dripping with sweat, could not hide the absurdity spreading across his face.

“Tteokbokki… you mean?”

“Yes, right now.”

The look in his eyes as he watched Seohan was bizarre.

It was as if he truly doubted whether he had heard a hallucination.

Seeing him acting excessively cautious, Seohan could roughly guess what the man wanted to say.

[Info | Baek Seohan has refined tastes… (›´ω`‹ )]

Glancing at the sparkling system window out of the corner of his eye, he smiled pointedly.

Ultimately, the secretary, who hesitated several times, nodded reluctantly and went out to buy tteokbokki.

The previous day, after pressing the system for a way to raise the synchronization level, Seohan had managed to hear one method after a long struggle.

It was to find and perform actions that Baek Seohan would absolutely never do.

It was said that as the perception of the people around him grew further from Baek Seohan, and as they recognized the differences from the sub-male lead Baek Seohan, the speed at which his soul adapted to the body would increase.

From that moment, Seohan began gathering information about Baek Seohan.

[A guideline for the user has been updated!] [Find information about Baek Seohan! (0/n)]

…Would it have killed you to tell me sooner?

If it had told him from the start, he would not have had to experience that terrible situation personally, but this d*mn system had watched everything in silence and only stepped in now.

He felt strongly that he was being toyed with, but Seohan had no choice but to follow the system’s guidelines.

‘How do I find information?’

What did the system reply to his immediate question?

[When you hear stories related to Baek Seohan or hold his belongings, I will pick out and deliver the necessary information! It is convenient, right? ٩( ᐛ )و!]

Convenient, my *ss.

Seohan’s room had no useful items to be found, making him wonder what the man did for a living.

But calling people directly to ask was…

‘There is still dust here. If I gave you money, you should do your job properly, hmm?’

The moment he tried to ask, Baek Seohan emerged and insulted the person.

In the end, he failed miserably, only learning that the servant’s 90-degree bow and apology came with [Info | Baek Seohan frequently bullies the servants (ﾟдﾟ；)!]—information he did not want to know.

He had even been prepared to be treated as an amnesiac, but after failing several more times, he had long since given up on asking others directly.

Eventually, Seohan had to find out information solely through the manual labor of searching the room himself.

One of the pieces of information he found was that Baek Seohan’s eating habits were extremely picky.

‘Spicy, salty, sweet… he just hates all stimulating food?’

Then what does he live on?

Seohan lamented as soon as he learned that information.

Even in his past life, where he worked so much he practically lived at the office, he never spared money on food whenever he had time to eat.

So as soon as the next day came, he requested tteokbokki.

Half of it was a genuine craving, and half was the goal of raising the synchronization level as the system suggested.

The tteokbokki that arrived looked truly delicious.

Glossy wheat cakes, red sauce that stimulated the salivary glands, and fish cakes mixed in with plump eggs.

Just looking at it made his mouth water.

Recalling that addictive taste he had eaten countless times, Seohan shoved a rice cake into his mouth…

“Eup!”

He spat it out after a single chew.

This cannot be… there is no way.

As soon as he regained his senses and realized he had spat out the tteokbokki, he was struck by shock.

‘I spat it out?’

Tteokbokki? That food he used to be crazy about?

Unable to believe it, he put it in his mouth again and repeated the cycle of spitting it out three or four times before he finally realized his reality.

As soon as he pushed the rice cake into his mouth, several flavors hit him simultaneously.

The problem was that he felt negative emotions toward most of those flavors.

The sauce, which was so stimulating it made his tongue tingle, had a strong scent of artificial seasoning.

The rice cake, which he barely managed to chew once, smelled strongly of flour, and the texture was so rubbery he could have believed it was rubber.

After experiencing a festival of all sorts of terrible tastes, he could not hold it in without spitting.

D*mn Baek Seohan.

As long as Seohan was in this body, he had no choice but to feel the same sensations Baek Seohan perceived.

It seemed taste was one of them, as his excessively picky tongue had rejected the tteokbokki.

“No… this cannot be.”

It was a taste that made him never want to eat it again, but Seohan knew very well what tteokbokki was supposed to taste like.

Thinking that he might never be able to experience that taste again made him feel like he was going to cry.

His hand pressed the speed dial on his phone once more.

…It was a disastrous failure.

Fruitlessly comforting himself that this particular shop just was not good, the tteokbokki that Secretary Choi brought afterward all met the same end.

It was only after more than six boxes of tteokbokki were abandoned after a single bite that he had to accept it.

[Synchronization has increased by 0.1%.] [Keep it up, User! (･ω〈)☆]

To think he lost tteokbokki only to gain a measly 0.1% synchronization.

No, should he be relieved to have gained even this much?

If it had not risen even after all that fuss, he might have truly felt a sense of self-loathing.

Lunchtime had long passed, and even though he had only eaten six bites of tteokbokki, his stomach felt bloated and he had no appetite.

It was truly a shocking body.

‘The first strategy is a failure.’

He thought there would be no easier way to raise synchronization than a picky eater going around eating anything, but he never imagined it would be this painful.

The failure was in not even daring to expect that he would feel the body’s sensations along with it.

‘…This will not do.’

Deciding to leave the remains of the tteokbokki to his secretary, Seohan realized it was time to execute the second operation he had thought of the day before.