Sangnangja Needs Money
The lunch Lee Harang had prepared tasted as good as Kang Yura felt defeated as a woman.
She’d even been tempted, in more ways than one, to just skip the meal and go home because her stomach was churning so badly.
Bean sprout soup.
Braised tofu.
Pink sausage dipped in egg batter.
For Kang Yura, who’d overdone it drinking the night before, it was a temptation she simply couldn’t resist, and in the end she obediently stayed to eat, using it as both a hangover cure and lunch.
The kitchen had been set up in the studio with cooking broadcasts in mind.
But it was honestly rare for that kitchen to ever be used properly.
Between games, everyone was too lazy to cook and just ordered delivery, or bought meal kits and only did the bare minimum of prep—when had anyone in this place last made anything that could really be called cooking?
In a kitchen like that, Lee Harang had whipped up a full meal in no time at all, and Kang Yura found him almost worthy of respect.
After all, the only cooking she knew how to do was boiling ramen or tossing in a meal kit and following the instructions.
Sure, it wasn’t as if women were somehow required to be good at cooking, and maybe thinking that way was sexist… but she couldn’t help feeling a little defeated anyway.
It was the broadcast Harang had left running because cooking alone in silence while everyone else slept was boring.
Watching him show off that domestic side, the viewers in the chat were loving it, and Kang Yura found herself thinking, almost without noticing, that maybe she should learn how to cook too.
“Ahem, so what about Black Star?”
“Oh, he’s still asleep.”
Kim Junsu had gotten the full aftereffects of drinking and streaming late into the night while his energy was sky-high, and had been thoroughly knocked out.
He probably wouldn’t be up until late afternoon.
“Hmm… I’m asking just in case, but did the two of you sleep in the same room?”
They were both men, so sharing a sleeping room didn’t seem like a problem on the surface… but when Harang was involved, trouble appeared out of nowhere whether it should have or not.
Honestly, it would’ve looked much less suspicious if he’d slept with Kang Yura instead.
“I didn’t mind, but Black Star said it was uncomfortable.”
Kim Junsu had no desire to be mobbed by viewers and made into a cautionary example, so he gave up the sleeping room and just slept on the living-room sofa.
Then Harang, who’d gotten up in the morning, had switched places with him, sent him into the room, gone shopping, and made lunch.
“I see.”
Kang Yura nodded, looking satisfied that there didn’t seem to be any problem.
“Listen carefully. I’m not talking about Black Star specifically, but there are so many freaks in this world. Even if you’re both guys—no, because you’re both guys, you need to be even more careful.”
At her words, the viewers immediately leaped in as if they’d been waiting for their cue.
At all that concern from the viewers, Harang smiled wryly.
“Hah, haha… yeah, I will.”
It wasn’t as if Harang trusted just anyone, either.
With the big-data experience he’d accumulated over the course of his life, he had an instinct for keeping his distance depending on the person.
And despite how he looked, Harang was strong.
Thanks to all the exercise he’d done in an attempt to give his body a more masculine build, he was surprisingly solid.
So if some deranged creep tried something stupid, he was confident he could protect himself.
No, not just confident—he actually had experience defending himself already.
Harang knew all too well from direct experience that the world was vast and full of lunatics, so he was prepared to handle at least his own safety.
Still…
So this is what it feels like to have someone worry about you. Kind of tingly… and nice.
Kang Yura’s nagging, like a big sister looking out for him, felt good to hear.
After all, someone worrying about him was a deeply unfamiliar feeling in Harang’s life.
He could almost count Cheon Harang, whose pitiful appearance tended to inspire sympathy, but when he’d been Chu-Harang, it had been a different story entirely—he’d earned worry in all the wrong ways.
Thinking back to the women who’d once been terrified, wary, and worried when they’d happened to share an elevator with him alone, this kind of concern felt incredibly pleasant.
“Yura and I are off today, so what about you, Harang?”
“I’m feeling fine, so I’m going to try doing a light stream.”
“Good. Work hard and you can escape being a hakko streamer.”
Well, after last night’s co-stream, it almost looked like he’d already escaped the hakko life right from the start, the way a corporate VTuber might—but reality could still be different.
Kang Yura sent him off with a message of support.
Buoyed by that encouragement, Harang fed Kang Yura lunch, left enough food behind for Kim Junsu and the editor, then headed home and got ready to stream with renewed energy.
While washing up, he let the alcohol in his body drain away and started thinking about how he should handle his part-time job.
Until I’m sure I can make a living from streaming, I should probably keep working… no, with this face, if I ever need to, I can get a customer-facing job again anytime. Maybe it’d be better to focus on streaming for now?
As he soaked his face in the warm water, Harang sank deeper into thought.
Then he had to start distracting himself with random thoughts so nobody would call him gay.
Boobs… were soft…
He had to calm his junior down by singing the national anthem through every verse, while dragging himself through a string of miserable memories from his past in order not to lose to desire.
No matter how feminine he looked, he was still a man in the end.
For Harang, still in the prime of his blood-and-fire youth, that one hour he’d spent as a cuddle pillow the night before had been torture.
And yet somehow, it had been the happiest torture he’d ever endured as a man.
He’d managed to endure himself like a proper gentleman and gone to sleep quietly.
And as a result, he’d been able to build a good connection with someone.
What a useful time it had been.
“Good, good. In this state, let’s enjoy life enough for both me and ‘my’ share.”
As if blessing a cheerful new beginning, the weather was beautiful today too.
After finishing his prep, Harang opened his very first solo broadcast with the bright sunlight in the background.
The green light came on for the Sangnangja channel, which had been sitting in a closed state, and the moment it opened—
“Sangha~”
“Is this the place where the real otokonoko lives?”
“What the hell, he’s not even faking it? That face is real? No plastic surgery?”
“Isn’t this just a filter? Or is it like those girls in Taiwan or Japan who pretend to be guys?”
“Wow… a man with that face…!”
“Woah….”
Not only the viewers from Black Star’s crew, but also viewers who’d heard the rumors started swarming in.
There were familiar nicknames he’d seen on Black Star’s channel, people who’d heard that a real, one-hundred-percent otokonoko had appeared in the wild and come running over, and even first-timers making outrageously rude demands that they wouldn’t believe he was really a man unless he proved it.
Looking at the chat, now a complete disaster zone, Harang almost lost his mind—but not quite. Instead, he felt good.
He’d prepared himself after reading all the posts online about the realities of internet broadcasting.
He had fully expected to spend hours talking to nobody while chat sat empty.
And yet things were off to such a great start.
He’d expected a decent opening thanks to last night’s co-stream with two top-tier streamers, but this was beyond anything he’d imagined.
There were 140 live viewers already, and the number kept climbing steadily.
It was nothing short of an absurd streamer pedigree.
And on the real-time trending rankings, the Sangnangja channel had even scraped onto the bottom of the list.
The tide had come in.
Now was absolutely the time to row.
“I had no idea so many of you would come watch. First of all, thanks for showing up, and I’ll go ahead and get today’s stream started.”
He’d taken Kim Junsu’s advice and tried to keep his speech and mannerisms in his Chu-Harang mode for streaming, but for a first meeting he should still be polite.
Harang bowed his head with proper respect.
“This place is just a regular house, not a studio with soundproofing or anything, so I can’t really shout too loudly… but is the volume okay? It’s not too low, right?”
And just like that, the chat naturally drifted into discussion about the stream setup. They might not have been streamers themselves, but they’d been around the block enough times that they knew how things worked.
They watched so much internet broadcasting and had picked up so much incidental knowledge that, among the viewers, there were even people with real expertise who could offer genuinely useful advice.
“Soundproofing….”
Because his internet-broadcasting debut had happened as quickly as roasting beans over a lightning strike, that hadn’t even crossed his mind.
The villa he lived in was an older building, so soundproofing was actually better than in a new place, but he still figured he’d need to do something about it like the viewers said.
“I was thinking of quitting my part-time job and focusing on streaming, but it looks like I’ll probably have to keep working for a while if I want to focus on streaming.”
It wasn’t as if he had no money—Cheon Harang had saved up quite a bit—but he really didn’t want to dip into it if he could help it.
He might use it for living expenses, but throwing it all into something like this in one shot felt too heavy psychologically.
What part-time job are you doing?
Isn’t he talking about the PC café job? That’s how he met Black Star anyway—by getting hit on while working there.
Whoa, if I go to a PC café like that, can I actually see Sangnangja in person?
Normally, streamers who broadcast from home were hard to meet in person unless it was at a fan event or an IRL stream.
The viewers took a sudden interest in the mention of his part-time job.
If it had been another streamer, they wouldn’t be saying they wanted to meet some rookie who’d debuted only two days ago offline—but Sangnangja was a different story.
If you’d seen him pass by, you’d just think, Wow, what an incredible beauty, and move on. But once you knew what he really was, any curiosity that hadn’t existed before was bound to grow.
Quite a few people seemed to want to see a real-life otokonoko for themselves.
Watching that reaction, Harang shrugged and answered.
“That was just a short-term job. I’ll have to find something new now.”
If he combined the experience from his Chu-Harang days with the experience from Cheon Harang’s life, there was almost no part-time job he couldn’t do.
Which only made it harder to decide what he should do to earn money for soundproofing in the first place.
It was like standing in front of a table covered with so many side dishes that he couldn’t decide which chopsticks to pick up first.
“If you’re thinking about streaming, though, maybe a short-term job you can quit anytime would be best….”
Personally, Harang wanted to try the café job he’d always dreamed about back in his Chu-Harang days.
In Cheon Harang’s memories, café work was just as avoided as convenience-store work because creeps tended to swarm it, but he still wanted to try it.
When you can’t decide what to do, nothing beats spinning a roulette wheel.
Goddamn roulette… Twinkle updated that stupid roulette system, and now everybody keeps saying we should spin it for everything.
Why? It’s fun, lol.
Roulette.
As he looked at the chat, Harang fell into thought.
Not long ago, Twinkle had updated its system and started offering a few new features, one of which was roulette.
Instead of using an outside site to choose something randomly, Twinkle now offered the feature itself.
When viewers typed in chat, those options were automatically tallied and entered as items on the roulette wheel, which could then be spun.
A lot of streamers had been using roulette for all kinds of things, and last night’s co-stream had come into being that way too.
Remembering the previous night, when he’d spun roulette so much he’d practically gone blind to it, Harang figured it would be fine since whatever came up wouldn’t matter all that much anyway.
If roulette content is trending right now, then of course I should ride that wave.
Roulette roulette roulette.
There were viewers who said they were sick of it, of course, but naturally the majority of the Byeolsu loved it.
And it looked like that trend would keep going for a while, so there was no reason to fight it.
“All right. Then let’s decide what part-time job I should do with roulette.”
And so Lee Harang decided by roulette what job he’d take to raise money for soundproofing.
“Hey, come out. If you confess honestly now, I’ll forgive you.”
He would come to regret that choice so hard it made him want to bang his head on the floor.
“Whoever put a maid café on the part-time job list, get out here right now…!”
He’d said he wanted to try working at a café, not at a maid café!
The world went dark around the edges for Harang.