Grant and his friends were just fooling around with a bronze horse statue in the park. As a bet, Grant climbed onto it to pretend he was riding, until suddenly, it felt as though he had “clipped” into the statue beneath him. In the next moment, he found himself naked, his upper body fused to the bronze horse’s body right where its head should have been.

Grant quickly realized he couldn’t move at all. No matter how hard he or his friends pulled, they couldn’t separate him from the sculpture. The skin around his hip had merged seamlessly into the metal below.

He could no longer feel his human lower half. Instead, he sensed the bronze horse body as if it were his own. Even though he couldn’t move it, he felt the wind brushing past its legs, and the peculiar weight hanging between them. He suddenly felt exposed in front of his friends, which made no sense. The horse body wasn’t even his, so why did being on display like this make him so embarrassed?

The police arrived but had no idea how to help. The incident soon drew the attention of the government’s secret department that handled supernatural cases like this. They explained to Grant that according to their investigation, the statues in the park were forged by a medieval alchemist. They were failed experiments of the alchemist’s attempt to fuse flesh with metal, and were said to contain powerful magic. It was possible that these statues, the horse, the bull, the tiger, the dog… had once been living beings.

The department worked on un-merging the poor boy from the statue for quite some time, but to no avail. All they could determine was that Grant had somehow activated the ancient magic within the statue. Eventually, the department head approached him with a strange proposal:

“We can try casting a vitalization spell on the statue. It won’t restore your body, but at least you won’t be trapped here anymore.”

“So I’ll still be stuck with this horse ass?”

“To be fair, we’ve made almost no progress reversing the curse. This is probably the best chance you have. Think it over.”

Desperate to move again, Grant eventually agreed, hoping they could still figure out the curse someday. After the vitalization spell was cast, he needed no time at all to adapt before taking his first step. The horse body had already felt like part of him when it was just a statue, let alone now that it had become living flesh. After being trapped for almost a week, the joy of regaining freedom was so great that he hardly cared that these legs and hooves weren’t originally his.

Days turned into months, and months into years. The government never found a way to undo the curse, and the case was quietly closed.