An Inevitable Fate
I’m not the same as that “me” who despaired and took his own life in the end.
I’m going to love this gorgeous face, enjoy it to the fullest, and use whatever I can use.
With this feminine appearance, I’ll tease people, fluster them, and do whatever I’m capable of.
I’m going to live the life of a true face-born winner, making the most of everything I can, and enjoy what I never got to have in my past life.
Lee Harang, who had awakened in the body of Cheon Harang, had definitely made that vow.
And it wasn’t a lie that he had already started putting it into practice.
Still!
No matter how you looked at it!
“A maid café is way too far, man. A maid café!”
Lee Harang couldn’t help feeling that this was absolutely not okay.
A maid café?
Dressing in women’s clothes, up to a point, he could handle without much resistance.
After all, crossdressing was supposedly a hobby permitted only to the manliest of men.
If he could milk this face for all it was worth and enjoy himself, then yes, he was prepared to crossdress whenever he needed to.
The real problem was that this went beyond simply putting on a maid outfit—he’d have to act cutesy.
Bat his lashes, act flirtatious, and say things like, “M-Master~.”
That was a whole different matter from ordinary crossdressing.
If he treated it like work, put on some professional spirit, and just gritted his teeth, he could probably do it... but...
For my mental health, I’d really rather not.
Just because you can eat spicy food doesn’t mean shoveling it down nonstop won’t tear your stomach apart.
The viewers were having a blast watching Lee Harang squirm and fret like that.
Just as they said, it was still only on the list; the roulette hadn’t been spun, and the maid café part-time job hadn’t actually been selected yet.
There were plenty of other options, and purely by the odds, the maid café didn’t have a high chance of coming up.
But... the frightening thing about gacha was that it could happen.
Lee Harang wanted nothing more than to erase this kind of stomach-churning choice from existence altogether, but considering the viewers’ reactions—and the stream itself—putting it in and spinning was probably the right call.
...Fine. Like hell that’ll get picked.
His luck with draws wasn’t amazing, but it wasn’t terrible either.
He’d won his share of lots and draws before, and he figured he could probably dodge the worst outcome this time too.
“Ha, fine. Then I’ll just put it in and spin.”
Rubbing his face, Lee Harang surrendered to the thing called stream content.
That alone showed he was definitely getting pretty good at this whole internet broadcasting thing.
If he was too obedient, it wouldn’t be fun, and if he showed too much resistance, the viewers would get uncomfortable—but by pushing back just enough, he could get them all worked up.
“Then I’m spinning it?”
At some point he’d started speaking casually, but he was so natural about it that none of the viewers seemed to notice.
Or rather, they were too excited about finally getting the roulette started to care.
“Please, anything but a maid café... I don’t care if it’s manual labor!”
-Maid café! Definitely maid café!
-God of reverse odds, hear us!
Click.
As everyone watched with sweaty palms, the roulette started to turn.
With a gaudy sound effect, the spinning roulette—at last—came to a stop.
“D-did it land?!”
Lee Harang, who’d had his eyes tightly shut, slowly opened them and saw the result: kitchen assistant at a restaurant.
Prepping ingredients and washing dishes—it was honestly a pretty grueling job, but hey, physical exhaustion was still better than having his mind ground to dust.
“Woohoo!”
Lee Harang cheered in delight, thinking it was better than something like a maid café that would chew through his mental stamina.
Then he remembered he wasn’t supposed to be making a racket, clapped a hand over his mouth in alarm, and trembled with happiness.
The viewers, seeing this, had two reactions:
“I’ve worked a bunch of part-time jobs before, so I’m confident I can handle kitchen work too. If I push it a little, I could probably save up enough for soundproofing installation within a month or two—”
Just as Lee Harang was trying to wrap things up quickly, buoyed by his own luck, the high-value donation exploded onto the screen.
-Boss Explosion has arrived!
-Haven’t seen you in ages, Deidara!
-The chairman himself is here?!
On Twinkle, there are people commonly called “chairmen” or “big spenders.”
As the nickname suggests, they’re viewers who throw around large donations and usually show up mostly in female streamer rooms, though there are also those who appear all over the place in irregular bursts.
One of the most famous among them was the very person who’d just donated to make Lee Harang spin the roulette again.
People said he was a landowner, a small-company CEO, all sorts of things, but of course nobody could know the truth. He was one of Twinkle’s infamous viewers.
And that guy had turned up in Lee Harang’s tiny little corner of the platform—well, not exactly tiny, but still a rookie room.
Then he’d thrown money at the screen in a way no one could refuse.
“Ah...”
At that moment, Lee Harang sensed his fate and shut his eyes tightly.
At this rate...
He’s going to keep making me spin until the maid café comes up.
The chairman was obviously going to flex his wealth and force a pay-to-win outcome.
If bad luck kept dragging up other part-time jobs, then the man would simply keep donating until the maid café finally appeared.
For a chairman, grinding a gacha with no pity system until the desired result dropped would be nothing at all.
There was no way Lee Harang could bluntly refuse and claim his dignity right from the start when he was already being stream-manhandled like this...
That’s too much money!
Dignity or cash.
After a brief internal struggle, Lee Harang finally gave in to the logic of capital.
“F-fine. Just once. I’ll spin it one more time, just once. The viewers are disappointed, so seriously, only one more time!”
In the end, he bowed to the power of money.
For a rookie streamer who had only just started internet broadcasting, this was an offer he couldn’t refuse.
If he had more streaming experience, a stronger base of regular viewers, and more loyal fans and defenders, then sure... he could probably do whatever he wanted.
But that wasn’t the situation.
He’d only just started his solo stream, and now he’d received a huge donation. Refusing it?
No matter how he thought about it, that didn’t seem like the smart move, so Lee Harang ended up spinning the roulette again.
Spin it, and spin it again.
With the expression of someone who’d burned himself white-hot, Lee Harang decided that if it had come to this, he might as well make a fat stack of money and kept re-spinning the roulette at the chairman’s request.
The viewers laughed their heads off at the sight of it.
How infuriating.
In the end—
“I’ll do it. Yeah, I’ll work at the maid café, I will.”
After ten rerolls, Lee Harang stared at the maid café part-time job that had finally been pulled from the roulette and rubbed his face.
“But seriously...”
Still covering his face with both hands, Lee Harang muttered in a voice full of despair.
“Wouldn’t the donations I just got already cover the cost of soundproofing?”
In one burst, he’d received a million won in donations.
No wonder everyone kept calling him chairman—his spending was no joke.
To burn through one million won in donations on internet broadcast like that?
For Lee Harang, it was unimaginable.
What on earth kind of work did you have to do to spend money like that?
Crypto? A wealthy landlord? Born with a silver spoon in his mouth?
Whatever it was, even if he had that much money, Lee Harang was pretty sure he still couldn’t spend it like that—but thanks to this, hadn’t he already gathered enough for the soundproofing fund?
A viewer coolly poured cold reality over his little daydream of maybe just using the donation money as-is for soundproofing.
Whether they were actually in the industry or just repeating something they’d heard somewhere, the viewers all started piling on and calculating the estimate.
Hearing those viewers’ advice, Lee Harang figured that, as if he hadn’t already planned to, he really had no choice but to avoid taking the part-time job route even more than before.
They’d clearly donated precisely to make him do maid work, so if he simply pocketed the money and skipped the job, there’d be a massive backlash. He’d have to do it, after all.
Still, he’d hoped he might be able to get away with half-assing it for a week or two, but that was toast now.
The installation costs were more than he’d expected.
It looked like he’d be doing the job properly, whether he liked it or not.
“Ugh...”
A groan escaped him on its own.
Just imagining himself acting coy for a bunch of dudes—specifically otaku who went out of their way to visit a maid café—was already driving him insane.
Even so, once he’d promised the viewers, there was no backing out now.
Shutting his eyes tight, Lee Harang decided to carry out the promise like a man.
But there was one tiny, or perhaps not-so-tiny, problem.
“But are there even places that hire guys? Wouldn’t it make more sense to check out a butler café instead?”
First of all, there actually had to be a maid café willing to hire him.
So in his heart, Lee Harang had been hoping that he simply wouldn’t be able to find a part-time job there and would be forced into some other job instead.
Of course, that hope was utterly futile.
“N-no, but customers might find it unpleasant.”
“Not you guys. I mean regular cust—”
Lee Harang, about to respond to the viewers by asking who’d asked for their opinion, suddenly realized something.
What kind of people were the viewers, really?
They were people who fully and directly enjoyed internet broadcasting culture, which, in one sense, was still a league of its own.
And when you considered just how closely internet broadcasting was tied to subculture, the word “viewer” was practically synonymous with “otaku.”
Sure, there were people who only watched more mainstream, popular content like cook streams or mukbangs.
It was true that calling those people otaku or nerds was a little harder...
But at least the ones who come looking for my stream are definitely stuffed full of nerd energy.
If they’d shown up on day one of Sangnangja’s channel run by a real tomboy streamer, that said everything.
“J-just asking, but you guys... you aren’t planning to come if I get that part-time job, are you?”
The answers that came back to his desperate little question were not at all what he wanted to hear.
Lee Harang couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d been completely schemed against by the viewers, and he clutched his head, writhing in torment.