The Thursday Summons

The Thursday he had been waiting for finally arrived. Today was cash-out day on KoreaTV.

"Still no word."

Kim Taeyoung said it with his eyes on his smartphone.

Once, his KakaoTalk had held nothing but messages from headquarters, department-store staff, and coworkers. Now the BJs outnumbered the work contacts. He was scattering outrageous sums every single day, and the BJs had no choice but to run hot for him.

The message he was actually waiting on, though, still hadn't come. The KoreaTV employee—Deputy Seok Myeonghwan, wasn't it? Today was cash-out day, and there was still no answer. At this rate they were blowing him off. However he looked at it, the thing was sliding the wrong way.

Then, before lunch had even passed, a call came in.

What had to come had come. So this was how it ended. His pulse kicked. He fought his way back to an even voice and answered.

The investigator delivered it quietly, in the tone of a man reading aloud from a language textbook. Perhaps because he ate his meals and recited this same speech every day, his pronunciation was remarkably clean.

The line went dead. Kim Taeyoung pressed both temples, slow and firm, with thumb and forefinger. His head ached. Until yesterday he had been a plain unemployed nobody; from today he had meant to become the king-god-general of the unemployed, the kind who flexed and set money on fire. And the very first step had already snarled.

First thing, I need a lawyer.

What had already burst couldn't be undone. The only answer was to contain it as fast as possible. Kim Taeyoung hurriedly started getting ready to go out.

"Hmm. So, in other words... the money is absolutely not connected to any crime, but you're saying you can't disclose what's inside the wallet. Is that it?"

"Yes."

Kim Taeyoung nodded at the lawyer's words. He had spent the day going from one lawyer to another. The matter was important enough that he wanted the best, and after all that circling he had ended up at a major firm.

"Sir, the truth is, that's a very difficult position. In a fraud investigation, if you're innocent, laying your account history bare is the best method there is. But if you won't open the records, you can't avoid needless suspicion."

He was right. Even so, Kim Taeyoung had no choice but to be unreasonable. What if he showed the coin in the wallet and someone traced it? As the spirit of the coin had said, the worst could follow. So the coin stayed hidden. Absolutely.

"I'm a suspicious man. I hold quite a lot of coin. What if I give out the address and someone steals it? You do know that once coin in a private wallet is taken, it can't be recovered?"

"Surely not. The prosecution would never do a thing like that."

"You never know what greed does to a person. Counselor, imagine a trillion won sitting in front of you. Money enough that one moment of wanting it lets you live like a king anywhere you please. Even then, would you keep your conscience?"

The lawyer's eyes wavered.

"You want it, don't you? Anyone human would. That's why no one opens my wallet."

"No. Greed... no. Haah. Yes. If I'm being honest, I did feel greedy. Then shall I take it that there is one trillion won in your wallet?"

"No comment on that. And if you check my other financial footprints and my list of assets, I believe we can prove this has nothing whatsoever to do with a crime. Am I wrong?"

"That much is true, but..."

Kim Taeyoung read the annoyance in the lawyer's eyes.

"Double the retainer. I'll pay twice what lawyers usually take for a case of this kind. And if the matter wraps up cleanly, there's a bonus on top of that. How does that sound?"

"Ahaha. You certainly do things on a grand scale. You don't need to worry. I'll put together a team of the very best specialists."

The lawyer turned eager. For about an hour after that, Kim Taeyoung filled out the papers the lawyer needed, the power of attorney among them, and took coaching on the strategy for the interview. All he had to do in the witness examination was repeat, like a parrot, "My counsel will answer that." He had done everything required of him. The rest he could leave to the lawyers.

"Haa..."

He was a little worn out. He had only been listening, but he had held every nerve so tight that the fatigue sat heavy on him. He wanted to rest over something good to eat. The trouble was, he lived alone in a studio, and the only cooking tools in the place were a knife and a pot. Maybe call Hwayeon and go find a decent restaurant.

He messaged her at once. She didn't check KakaoTalk—asleep, maybe. Calling was the same. Next was Su Yeoning.

An answer came back from Su Yeoning almost at once.

Tsk. Eating alone didn't appeal. Better to eat at home with a mukbang on than sit by himself in a restaurant. He followed the craving. Kim Taeyoung ordered galbi-jjim—braised beef short ribs—on a delivery app at once and headed home.

While he waited for the galbi-jjim, he turned KoreaTV on. A tap on the cooking-and-mukbang category brought up about thirty broadcasts. It was a weekday morning, so viewers and BJs alike were scarce. One of them caught his eye. No—the room title did. Galbi-jjim. By pure chance, the dish he had ordered and the dish on the stream matched exactly.

No letting that pass. Eating while you watched a mukbang, and the menus lined up? The sense of kinship was enormous.

Kim Taeyoung stepped into the broadcast at once. She seemed to be a BJ who specialized in cooking streams, and the kitchen was set up rather nicely.

And Heo Myangmyang was incredibly cute. Was she even five feet tall? You could feel how small she was even through the screen. Her proportions were good enough to throw the eye off for a moment, but everything around her was so much larger that it gave her size away.

In a word, she was the petite, baby-faced type of BJ the scene shorthand called loli-style. It wasn't a common look on KoreaTV. She had the kind of face that would have played well on Night Flower TV, the platform people called the underbelly of personal broadcasting.

"When you're prepping vegetables, if you do it like this, you can get a really pretty shape."

The chat was extremely warm toward Heo Myangmyang. A broadcast of someone that small cooking was a lot like a broadcast of watching a little animal. Whatever she did, the viewers cooed over her.

Ten thousand on the way in. Heo Myangmyang's broadcast sat past even Small Fry territory, out on the remote fringe. She went live only twice, lunch and dinner, and the subject was cooking. It was a structure in which viewers and Moon Balloons simply could not gather.

Even so, she kept the broadcast going because her home base was YouTube. On revenue alone, YouTube paid more than ten times what KoreaTV did, and the Donation Winds that blew up on KoreaTV were that much rarer. But she couldn't fold the KoreaTV stream. Her main YouTube audience was middle-aged and older, viewers in their forties and up, and even when she simulcast a YouTube Live they rarely came into the real-time broadcast. So she streamed on KoreaTV and traded banter with the people who did show up.

"Thank you for the donation... Aaaah? T-ten thousand? Is this a bug? Ten got displayed wrong as 10,000, right?"

The first big donation of her broadcast life. Heo Myangmyang was shocked enough that her mouth fell open and her whole body locked. Then she started denying reality.

"Aigoo, so even KoreaTV makes mistakes like this. Ah, CoinGodGodGod. Thank you for the donation. You sent ten, right?"

After Heo Myangmyang, the viewers mistook it for a bug as well. The people gathered in this room were not the Floaters who chased nothing but extreme fun and getting ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠off. They had come to feel healed by a broadcast. Their chat was calm and warm to match, and they had no interest at all in the scandals that fueled the personal-broadcast world, or in the latest gossip. Naturally, they didn't know who Coin God was.

"Huh..."

Even Kim Taeyoung had to be thrown by that reaction. He had fired ten thousand, and they were brushing it off as a bug? He typed into the chat at once, matching the mood of the room, extremely nicely.

"Whaaat? Ten thousand is a million won, isn't it? Why would you... Huk! It's real, it's actually real! Coin God, you've become the chairman of my room!"

Only then did Heo Myangmyang realize the ten thousand was real. Her eyes shook as if an earthquake had hit.