I Went About My Life Normally Without Noticing It Was a World With Few Men, and Things Went Terribly Wrong - 5

Chapter 5: An Address Book Without a Single Man

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It was 7:40 PM, just as the long summer day was finally fading into dusk, and we had made a firm resolution. I had a nagging feeling that it was a case of “too little, too late,” but I had optimistically assumed that things would resolve themselves given enough time.

“A-are you ready? I’m going to dial now, okay?” 

“Please do.”

Holding her smartphone, Yuka-san asked for final confirmation, looking visibly nervous. I could have made the call myself, but in this world, things apparently go much smoother if a woman handles the procedures, so I had no choice but to let her.

I gave her a nod in return. She punched in a three-digit number and started the call. It seemed to connect instantly. We weren’t calling the police to turn her in. The first two digits were the same, but the last one was a nine.

“Hello? I’d like to request an ambulance, please…”

Following the operator’s instructions, Yuka-san gave the address of my room. She wasn’t a stalker. Since she lived in the room next door, the block number and building name were the same as her own address. The fact that she naturally gave my room number and last name without accidentally saying her own was surely proof of how level-headed she was. 

She’s not a yandere….Probably.

Now, while Yuka-san had been speaking smoothly up to that point, she suddenly began to flounder at the next question. I assumed they were asking for the reason for the ambulance, the symptoms. Her face turned bright red, and her speech became incoherent. Just as I started thinking about whether I should take over the explanation, she finally snapped and revealed the situation in an unnecessarily loud voice.

“I’m telling you! A reflex during intercourse kicked in and won’t let go, so we’ve been stuck together for a full day now!”

…And that was the situation. Since Yuka-san had attacked me just before 2:00 AM today, her legs had been locking my waist with a vice-like grip for about eighteen hours now, thanks to the Semen Sensing Reflex. The ambulance operator must have been utterly dumbfounded. The person on the other end was likely a woman too, and she was probably thinking, “Wait, is this person talking to me while having sex?”

After asking for the patient’s symptoms and age, it seemed the operator finally asked for the name and contact information of the person calling. Yuka-san gave her name while looking like a boiled octopus. 

What kind of “shame play” was this? In manga, you often see scenes where someone makes a phone call while trying to hide the fact that they’re having sex, but a situation where you say, “I’m having sex right now, and my name is Yuka Shirasago,” is just… What even is this?

“Nn-ah, no, don’t make it get bigger…!”

Crap, I got a little excited myself. We were still joined in a facing seated position, and since Yuka-san was squeezing with all her might, I couldn’t help but gouge into her deepest part. A little bit of sperm might have leaked out.

“Hyuuu! A little ejaculation is coming out… Ah, no! Please pretend you didn’t hear that…!”

It wasn’t hard to imagine the operator thinking, “Can I just hang up now?” Besides, calls like this were usually recorded, right? And the other party was a public institution. It would be bad if we were reported for indecency, but it was not like we could do anything about it…

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You could probably tell how long we agonized over this by the fact that we didn’t call the ambulance as a joke.  Let’s look back at what happened during that time.

It was a stroke of luck in our misfortune that today was Saturday. Around 9:00 AM, after we had reconciled, Yuka-san had been overcome with emotion and milked me one more time, but at the time, I thought the issue would be resolved in two or three hours at the most. There was no need to think twice about it, we’d only just met after all.

It was embarrassing to be stark naked and joined together while sober, so for the time being, we crawled under the covers and talked about ourselves while lying down. Since we were the same age and lived in the same apartment building, it wasn’t too surprising, but she turned out to be a student at the same university as me. We were in different departments but in the same year, and since she had passed her entrance exams on her first try, we were the same age.

“So, are you job hunting right now, Yuka-san?” 

“No, I plan to go to grad school. What about you, Hikari-san?”

Since she was a junior, I asked thinking she was job hunting, but she actually planned to continue to graduate school. She said she was in the Faculty of Science, so even in my old world, that wouldn’t have been particularly unusual. In the Faculty of Science I knew, there were few girls to begin with, but among them, many surely went on to grad school. In this world, whether it’s Science or Engineering, it was probably all girls anyway.

Thinking back, Yuka-san had attacked me last night with the intention of getting pregnant. No one would do that during a job hunt. …Though I couldn’t deny the possibility that she was just in heat and wasn’t thinking about the consequences. These days, university lectures being online was the norm. It seemed she intended to attend classes and earn credits until the last possible moment, even while pregnant.

“I’m planning to go to grad school too. …Though it might be rare for a man like me to continue to grad school.” 

“Eh!? Oh, I’m sorry. But that makes sense. After all, even a man is attending this university.”

As expected, it seemed it was rare for a man to go to grad school here. She expressed her surprise with her whole face. Also, her insides gave a little squeeze.

In stories about chastity-reversed worlds where men were privileged, the trope was usually that just being a man let you choose any school you wanted, but it seemed this world wasn’t actually like that. Up until high school, that trope mostly applied, but university entrance exams were a normal battle of ability with no discrimination or special treatment. 

Well, there are probably some private schools that use money to attract men, but national and public universities are not like that. You need to get in through your own ability.

A university was first and foremost a research institution and an institution of higher education. It was not a vocational school, nor was it a place for men and women to meet. The reason entrance exams existed was to guarantee the quality of lectures and the level of research and education by not admitting those who couldn’t keep up with the classes. Giving unearned “handicaps” to those without academic ability just to let them in out of pity would lower the university’s name, and lowering the lecture level to match the lower-performing students would be nothing but harmful to students who wanted to study seriously.

So, no matter how kind the world was to men, decent universities wouldn’t give out weird special treatment. There was also a matter of integrity toward the proper students who passed fairly and were paying tuition.

And the university Yuka-san and I attended was one of the top schools in the country, competing for the number one or two spot. That was also why she was surprised just now. To put it bluntly, she was probably sugarcoating the thought: “Even though you’re a man, you went out of your way to come to a good university, so you must be quite smart, and it’s not strange that you’d want to go to grad school.”

“What was the gender ratio at our university again?” 

“Forget the ratio, I didn’t even know there were any men. I’ve never seen one on campus. I thought it was 100% women.”

In the original world I knew, the fact that the male ratio was too high was a source of worry and dissatisfaction for various parties, but in this world, perhaps the opposite was happening. When I asked with that in mind, the reality turned out to be far more extreme than I had expected.

I felt a sudden wave of anxiety. 

Wait, because of the world’s transformation, is it possible that I’m no longer considered a student at the university? 

The thought of that possibility struck me.

“I’m sorry, can I sit up for a second?” 

“Eh? That’s fine, but…”

Even a single movement was a struggle. I held Yuka-san and sat up in a facing seated position. I wouldn’t get anywhere if I paid attention to every erotic sound or sigh she let out. I managed to reach out from the edge of the bed and grab my wallet. Opening it with a racing heart, I found my student ID tucked into its usual pocket. A sigh of relief escaped me.

“Phew… See? I really am a student.” 

“It’s true… Wait, it’s not like I was doubting you, Hikari-san! I was just shocked that there was a male student!”

Yuka-san flusteredly apologized. But as soon as she took my student ID in her hands, a beaming smile spread across her face.

“Wow, so young! So cute!” 

“No, I haven’t changed that much, have I?”

The photo on the student ID was taken before enrollment. That meant it was taken two years and four months ago, so I shouldn’t have changed that much. In fact, it would be sad if I’d aged visibly since then…

“You’ve changed! How do I put it… You look so innocent!”

Yuka-san’s excitement was high. Well, it was a photo from when I was still a high schooler, so the atmosphere might be a bit different. A woman getting excited over a male high schooler’s ID photo… If I reversed the genders… It would be a bit weird for a college student to be happy about a high school girl’s photo. What a very middle-aged man-like mindset…

Then again, the women of this world were starved for men. I had to take that into account. They probably rarely got to see photos of male high schoolers. Leaving the joyful Yuka-san alone, I decided to check one more concern.

I looked through my phone’s contacts and my friend lists on messaging apps. Even I had university friends and they were almost all the same sex. But if there were almost zero male students as Yuka-san said, then… What happened to those guys…?

The result was a total wipeout. The only male name remaining in my contacts was my father. The names of my male friends and acquaintances had all vanished, and the few remaining in the list were only female names.

“No way…”

Looking at the hollowed-out address book made me feel lonely and worried. What happened to the other men from the original world? Or was I the only one who came here?

That said, my university friends weren’t relationships I was all that deeply attached to. If anything, losing touch with my friends from high school hurt a lot more. Ever since I got accepted into college and left my hometown, we’d gradually drifted apart, so in a way it wasn’t surprising anymore. Still, I never thought that distance would turn into a permanent, life-spanning farewell like this.

There was nothing to do but accept it. There was nothing I could do, after all. I chose to believe that they were still living their lives in the original world, just as they always had. Come to think of it, the one small mercy in all this was that I didn’t have any brothers. If someone as close as immediate family had been erased from the world, it wouldn’t have been something I could brush off as mere shock.

“Um… If it’s okay with you, would you like to exchange contact information later…?”

While I was feeling down, Yuka-san timidly made the suggestion. She had probably seen the screen of my smartphone.

“Ah, of course, that’s fine.” 

“Really?! Wow, it really makes me feel like we’re a married couple!”

She rejoiced innocently. 

But to jump straight to “married couple” instead of “friends” or “lovers”… Perhaps knowing the contact info of a man of the same age is that big of a deal?

Still, I couldn’t help but let out a wry smile. Because we had already done things far more extreme than exchanging contact info. In fact, we were still doing it at this very moment. If her words were true, fertilization had likely already finished inside her womb. Since we had already had child-making sex, I intended to accept marriage. Though when the actual registration would happen was still undecided.

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