Concept Collapse (3)

The dish I have cooked more than anything else, by far, is egg fried rice.

It is easy, it tastes good, and the biggest reason of all… I just could not be bothered to think of another menu.

Cooking can be fun in its own way, and I have tried all sorts of things whenever I actually had the time. The trouble was that days with leftover time almost never existed.

"Food's ready, everyone."

I had needed time to think, which was why I had suddenly pivoted into a cooking stream. Today I had not even turned the cam on myself — I had just cooked off-screen and brought the food over — and of course the situation had only gotten worse.

The chat was plastered with you're finished and explain yourself.

Time to take action, then.

As far as the orphanage volunteer work went, the circumstances made it painfully obvious that the person in the video was me, and the post about the namul even had a photo of my face attached. So I had no intention of admitting anything.

My viewers were already convinced I was a virgin.

Hollow as the persona might have become, I was going to protect the name of delinquent at the very least. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Even if I denied it, the viewers would already be sure. I still wanted to remain a thug on the surface. If I shot down even that with my own mouth, there would be nothing left of the concept.

It was the fun of the stream. It was also how I made my living.

"What's all this 'explain yourself' and 'you're finished' nonsense. That orphanage video isn't me, and the namul story's got some exaggeration mixed in. Say another word and you're getting timed out."

This time they were spamming boring. Fine. Stamp it all out and the problem goes away.

Even at a glance the mood was plenty playful; nobody was going to get genuinely angry over a light timeout. I started handing out chat bans to whoever had typed it, more or less at random.

This body's outstanding physical stats were more than enough to snuff out freedom of speech without leaving a single gap.

There. Behaving themselves at last.

A clean chat really is a beautiful thing.

I put on a satisfied face and scooped up a spoonful of egg fried rice.

I packed it into my mouth like a proper man.

Back when I was doing hard labor, there had been nothing happier than shoveling down a meal after a long stretch of work, and I was feeling a faint echo of that now. A problem I had been wracking my brains over had resolved itself that easily.

"If you don't pipe down, I'm opening my mouth on cam just like this. Consider yourselves warned."

"You. Thirty-minute chat ban."

Damn it. A delinquent's prestige had hit the floor.

Of course, looking at the donations still rolling in, I was in a much better place financially than before. And yet.

This was what people meant by irony, I supposed.

Right. For now, the important thing was to keep doing what I had been doing. Then it would work out somehow, wouldn't it? That was how the world operated — you just slammed into it, and things found a way to keep moving.

Anyway. That was enough of that. I had finished eating.

The timeouts had never been that long to begin with, so the people who had been spamming boring would all have filtered back in by now. The mood of the stream had already shifted, and we were talking about something else; my viewers were not so socially oblivious that they would keep typing the same thing in a situation like this.

My little crackdown on the press had been effective.

The viewers I had forcibly quieted down were now touring NewTube with me. The count had dipped a little from earlier and was holding in the eight hundreds, but my stream had grown in a very real way lately. Averaging eight hundred viewers said it all.

At this point I could call myself a walking Top-Tier Enterprise Streamer. Granted, there were easily more than a hundred streamers above me.

Sticking a straw into a Top-Tier Enterprise Streamer really was the best way to grow at speed, wasn't it.

Running into Ari in the early days of the stream had been an enormous stroke of luck. Talent or no talent, without luck you ended up occupying some forgotten corner of TwizyTV's deep sea — and I had survived.

Ever since I had arrived in the Gender-Reversed World, my personal luck had never been good. When it came to streaming, though, every kind of luck had lined ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠up behind me. I had no idea who had sent me here, but I was fairly sure they had sent me here to stream.

Anyway, as I said — the live broadcast was growing like this, which meant it was time to start thinking about a NewTube debut. Honestly, even without heavy editing, uploading from the early days of the stream would probably have been fine. NewTube was a gigantic platform; if you actually caught the algorithm, you could blow up for real. Given how my streaming luck had been running, NewTube would likely have gone just as well. The way people had flooded in off that old fight video of mine was proof enough.

The reason I still did not have a NewTube channel was… I had been plenty disoriented after coming to the Gender-Reversed World, and managing a live stream for the first time had been more than enough to handle.

So I had planned to think about it once the stream found its footing, and it seemed that "once" was arriving now.

Of course, for the moment I was only planning to think. I still had no experience managing close to a thousand viewers. Even this casual NewTube tour was in the same spirit — keep talking with the viewers, stack up some experience running a bigger stream, and let NewTube sit in the back of my mind for now.

Still. As always, things were unfolding smoothly.

Playing with eight hundred viewers was not as draining as I would have expected. My stream had always had a lot of chat for a small channel, and now the messages were pouring out in earnest — but this body's abilities had no trouble covering it.

At the moment I was in the middle of swapping opinions with the viewers about NewTube. Looking up famous senior NewTubers, taking their advice in moderation, that sort of thing.

A lot of NewTuber names came up. Starting with Ari and running all the way to Han Gain, the undisputed number one streamer on TwizyTV. Some of them were probably just naming whoever they liked, but that recommendation list still looked like it would be a real help. I made a note to look them up tomorrow.

"Oh, there's someone else? P? If I search it on Googol, will it come up?"

"If I search something like 'NewTuber P,' it'll come up, won't it."

I had watched plenty of streams back when I was studying TwizyTV. The more examples, the better. Finding one more would not take long, and if nothing showed up I could just move on.

I cleared the address sitting in the bar at the top of the screen and typed the letter P.

…

…

Search autocomplete. The feature that automatically completed addresses you had searched before was part of that too. And the autocomplete system built by Googol, that titan of a corporation, produced—

I had just driven a stake through my already collapsing image.

You have got to be kidding me.

The search history from the last time curiosity had gotten the better of me. I really wished this exact routine ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠would stop repeating itself.

I had a reasonably decent face, but I had been too busy living to ever do anything about it, and I had been a virgin this whole time. I could not accept this kind of public mockery of the socially disadvantaged.

I had not even gotten to properly use those horrific Pornhud videos, and the injustice of it burned. My face went hot in an instant.

I wiped that URL out of the address bar, hit the Korean-English toggle, and typed a Korean vowel — then fled straight to the bathroom.

I slammed water into the sink and my ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠face… no. I filled the sink with water and slammed my face into it.

I would grant that, from a streaming perspective, this was extremely funny. But I had a minimum of dignity, all right?

I really was working hard to grow the stream. I just had not wanted to grow it like this…

The demonic arts in those martial arts novels — they had to feel exactly like this.

I grabbed hold of my swimming consciousness.

…No choice, was there.

All that was left now was to charge it head-on.

I swept my wet hair back into something resembling order and walked up to the computer with all the dignity I could muster.

"What's so funny… oh."

Right. Cheap keyboards did that sometimes. You pressed a key properly and it simply failed to register. For example, you hit the language toggle and the text was still in English. Which was how a Korean vowel became the letter h.

"Hm."