Dopamine (5)
The basement-dwelling piece of shit known as Time Bill Gates. Or, in other words, a jobless bum. With too much time on his hands, he’d latched onto the trending issue like a rabid dog, hoping to squeeze some entertainment out of it. He’d actually managed to stir up a bit of attention, but he never imagined he’d hear the word lawsuit within just a few hours.
…Whatever. It’s not like this is my first time riding the line on the internet. I didn’t use any language extreme enough to get me permanently banned, I never directly named anyone, and I sure as hell didn’t drop any outright curses. What lawsuit? Lawsuits are for anonymous boards. Who the fuck would be stupid enough to hand over grounds for a suit on a real-name site?
Ever since the flood of messages from Seo Jia’s fans demanding I download the PDF and “look forward to it,” I’d been itching to dig into the dark underbelly of this shady incident no matter what it took. There’s no smoke without fire, right? It would be insanely satisfying to watch those brats who’d been acting like they owned the world suddenly clam up completely.
First, I decided to thoroughly investigate the woman named Seo Haeun—the one who’d randomly posted on Instagram and flipped public opinion. Two years younger than me. Unlike me, she didn’t seem to have gone to college… probably a high school graduate. She was Seo Jia’s older sister, the daughter of a professional baseball team’s general manager, and a YouTuber. Looked like she started this year. She pretended to be a regular YouTuber, but her main content was cosplay and titty-baiting. Even though she was clearly born with a silver spoon, the fact that she was doing this kind of thing secretly turned me on. I briefly considered using her as side dish material, but I knew that small fry wouldn’t satisfy the dopamine rush I’d felt earlier, so I dropped the idea.
When I took a closer look at her channel, it started with formal suits, then gradually moved into famous anime character outfits as the views skyrocketed. Eventually she began cosplaying minor but overtly sexual game characters, steadily increasing her numbers. It was such a textbook tech tree that it wasn’t even surprising. If anything, I was mildly impressed. The timing of her face reveal—right when the views were about to plateau—was perfect. And yet the videos uploaded after she showed her face still carefully cropped her face out of frame. She clearly understood the specific fetishes of these degenerate otakus, yet her Instagram gave off the vibe of a completely normal, socially active person. The disconnect was oddly jarring.
Random pictures of food, shots taken at the gym, photos from trips… But aside from the food pictures, almost every single one looked like someone else had taken it for her. Just like she’d said herself, that someone was probably the man named Kang Juhyuk.
Surprisingly, I’d actually heard of Kang Juhyuk before, so picturing what kind of relationship they had wasn’t difficult. The typical story—some tattooed, meathead, soup-slurping basement dweller somehow dragging around an unnaturally pretty woman. After hearing how he’d thrown a beanball at a senior figure in the baseball world and then glared him down, I could pretty much guess what kind of personality he had. Of course, Kang Juhyuk didn’t actually have tattoos and wasn’t a pig, but… it still meant his “masculinity” was off the charts. The perfect man for a brainless bitch like her.
Of course, that was just talk. I didn’t actually hold any personal grudge against the two of them. My anger was directed at the Seo Jia fans currently dragging me through the mud.
I went through her Instagram post by post, carefully searching for any important clues. Starting with the gym whose location had already been exposed, I compared the shops that appeared in her photos. Figuring out which neighborhood she lived in wasn’t particularly difficult. And since she had pictures of the night view from her house, it was obvious she lived in a high-rise. There was only one place that fit: a luxury high-rise residential-commercial apartment complex.
It stung a little knowing she lived in a place that even most middle-class people could only dream of, but with a face and tits like that, I figured it made sense and moved on. Instead, to find out whether the two of them were actually living together, I now scoured Kang Juhyuk’s Instagram for any clues.
But strangely, despite his face, Kang Juhyuk didn’t use Instagram that much. Photos of him eating with baseball players he knew, promotional shots of his gym, pictures of him eating with his gym staff. That was it. No flaunting money or cars, not a single photo that looked like it was taken with Seo Haeun, and zero clues about where this guy lived. I could only assume he lived somewhere near the gym.
The way he seemed to be deliberately hiding his girlfriend felt suspicious, so I took his username and searched for him online. But he was so thorough that, aside from the Instagram I’d already seen, there wasn’t a single trace of him anywhere else. Even searching by his real name only brought up old articles and gossip from his baseball days. It made me wonder how the hell a guy like this had even ended up in a scandal with an idol in the first place.
Feeling a strange sense of cognitive dissonance toward Kang Juhyuk’s unexpectedly clean lifestyle, I searched for Seo Haeun again to shake off the discomfort. This time, a bunch of information that hadn’t appeared on her Instagram or YouTube poured out. I absorbed it all, cramming it into my brain.
She had appeared on the broadcast of a female streamer I knew but disliked. In the middle of it, the streamer’s younger brother—who was also a streamer—had barged in and started hitting on her before getting cut from the stream. According to the rumors, that younger brother had gotten caught by Seo Haeun’s boyfriend, gotten the shit beaten out of him, and had to skip streaming the next day. Or that the female streamer had actually convinced her boyfriend to do a 3P with them that day. No, actually, that bitch was a lesbian and had seduced Seo Haeun into a threesome. The credibility was absolute dogshit, but there was still a ton of juicy gossip that was hard to ignore.
The only parts that were actually confirmed were what remained in the video: the broadcast appearance and the part where the guy got cut after hitting on her. When I dug to see if someone had spread bait because of that, sure enough, it was the correct answer. It seemed that after fans of the male streamer who had persistently hit on her dragged him through the mud, her own enraged fans had gone on a rampage and dug up every last detail of Seo Haeun’s personal information.
In the process, it came out that Seo Jia went to Kang Juhyuk’s gym as a side note, and when a reporter sniffed around and asked about it, things turned into this mess… Wait a second.
…Nakazawa Hinami was clearly there too, so why didn’t she get dragged into it? Even if Seo Jia could be connected because she was the older sister’s boyfriend’s acquaintance, Hinami was a complete outsider, wasn’t she?
I felt like I’d realized something important and stroked my rough stubble as I dug deeper. It was definitely the two of them who had gone to that gym, and the photo that appeared in the article had even come from Nakazawa Hinami’s Instagram, not Seo Jia’s. So why was no one talking about Hinami?
…Could it be that Hinami’s fans had maliciously spread it?
I didn’t know much about the idol industry, but I knew those two were currently the most popular members. Maybe their individual fans had been fighting behind masks, throwing shade at each other, and it had escalated into this?
Having uncovered this forbidden truth, I carefully organized all the information and casually posted it on the humor issue board. While I was waiting to see how long it would take to rise to the popular posts…
…I received a death threat via direct message.
What the fuck? It’s not even anti-fandom bullshit—it actually makes sense. Why are you assholes only hitting the downvote button? You sons of bitches. As for the lawsuit, what exactly did I do that’s lawsuit-worthy? I just listed out the facts, didn’t I?
I’m definitely going to uncover the real truth, you ignorant bastards…
“Ha…”
Before I knew it, the fire that had left me and moved on to Kang Juhyuk and Seo Haeun had now spread all the way to Nakazawa Hinami. The reason was ridiculously simple. The evidence that I went to Kang Juhyuk’s gym had come from a photo taken from Hinami’s Instagram. The photo she had taken of me. From the logic of “Then Hinami must have been there too,” it had spread to the speculation that maybe Hinami was dating Kang Juhyuk.
I had no idea what kind of logic that was, but the funniest part was that it was actually true. Maybe because Hinami already had a lot of anti-fans, people of all kinds had swarmed in and were mercilessly mocking Hinami’s fans. Tempers flared, harsh words were exchanged, and someone wearing a mask threw more firewood onto the flames…
It was dizzying to watch. I wanted to turn off my phone, but for some strange reason, my hand wouldn’t go to the power button. Every single character on the screen sent a tingling sensation through my brain. The raw fight was honestly so pathetic and ridiculous. …I didn’t know why they were fighting, but I had realized why people watched fights.
Until someone stopped me, I simply couldn’t take my eyes off the phone.
“…”
But no contact came. Not from Kang Juhyuk, not from her older sister, not from Hinami. The only thing that arrived was a KakaoTalk message from the agency director saying they were preparing legal action, so not to worry. I skimmed it and ignored it, continuing to watch this stupid fight from one step removed, completely entranced.
I had become a cum-rag and a fan-deceiving whore. This time, Hinami had become a lewd temptress. The older sister caught in the middle had gone from a pitiful girlfriend to a dick-obsessed human toilet. And only Kang Juhyuk shifted from a superior man who played with all those women to, in the next moment, a con artist.
That bastard who retired after shining for just a year and a half—where the hell did he get the money to open a gym in such prime real estate? He must have made money through fraud. He’s a crypto millionaire. A tax evader. Probably involved with drugs. He used to be a bat-wielding player, so he definitely has gangster connections.
Reading the comments of people spinning up incredibly creative stories that made me want to compliment their imagination, I stared at my phone with a blank expression, the corners of my mouth never once lifting.
Only after the sun had set, the fire had died down, and the firewood had turned to charcoal did I finally feel an insane emptiness. Only then did I realize I was hungry and shove food into my mouth. But the salad dressing that usually tasted good now held no flavor whatsoever. I couldn’t even tell what I was eating.
…I wonder if someone will light this fire again.
Lost in that single expectation, I scrolled through communities where my name didn’t even appear. Then… I reflexively clicked on a post with my name in the title.
The screen was filled with the naked body of a woman with purple hair. My body jerked.
“…Ah, never mind.”
…She didn’t even look like me if you ignored the hair color. But for a second, I had almost mistaken it for something thrilling.