Loli God Requiem
Heo Myangmyang was a cooking streamer. Aside from two days a week, she filmed cooking videos every single day, lunch and dinner both, and a broadcast ran about three hours. From that footage she picked the best cuts and uploaded three videos a week.
The internet broadcast world, though, was crawling with people who could cook, some of them with staggering resumes—a White House chef, a former hotel head chef. If you wanted cooking tips, or a recipe to follow along with, you went looking for those streams. Not Heo Myangmyang's.
She was trying, and she cooked well enough. What she needed was a sharper sense of her own selling point. Her strongest weapon was cuteness: a face and a figure no one would believe belonged to a twenty-eight-year-old.
She even wore shapewear to make the most of that weapon, and thanks to it her YouTube videos averaged a hundred thousand views. Growth beyond that had simply stopped. For months her subscriber count and her average views had sat perfectly still.
Only the people who were already going to watch were watching. She needed a way out. Kim Taeyoung, a veteran of the viewer side of internet broadcasts, recommended game streaming. Looks like hers were guaranteed to land in the gaming scene. Demand for loli-type BJs held steady, and the supply was painfully thin.
Kim Taeyoung fired his entrance ten thousand. Anyone who knew him knew the move—his private, one-man secret art. The viewers welcomed him first, and that was the broadcast delay at work. The BJ learned of a donation in real time, but it took a while for the reaction to come back around. Today Heo Myangmyang was streaming on location, so the lag ran a little longer.
She had gone live earlier than usual, and it wasn't a cooking broadcast, so the room was painfully empty. Chat barely stirred. Nothing to be done about it. From here she could gather them one by one and grow.
"Ah! Chairman Coin God! You're here!"
In private she called him oppa. On stream, Heo Myangmyang was strict about it: Chairman. She rose out of habit and bent at the waist, then darted a look around the room and dropped straight back into her seat.
The place she had come to today was a PC bang near her house. There was a computer at home, but not a high-spec machine that could run a game and a broadcast at the same time. She had only just started streaming games; there was no need to force an investment yet. And on the internet broadcast scene, something this raw played better.
"Huh...? A reaction?"
Kim Taeyoung meant to run her hard from the opening bell. Heo Myangmyang's skill at games, put kindly, made her a for-fun player. Put honestly, it was awful. If she ever hit it big as a full-time game BJ, she would single-handedly keep every dental clinic in the country in business—viewers would grind their teeth so hard they'd all need veneers.
Flashy play was never going to draw a crowd, so she had to appeal some other way. Her main weapon was cuteness. She would pull people in with reactions.
"Chairman... this is a PC bang.... There are so many people."
Her voice shook. She was afraid a reaction would drag every eye in the room onto her—in short, she didn't want to be embarrassed. Viewers, though, enjoyed a BJ looking shy. So did Kim Taeyoung.
His donations popped one after another. He had cashed out and loaded up a generous stock of Moon Balloons, so there was no more waiting through the one-minute delay that came with a coin tip. Word was that buying Moon Balloons directly with coin would be possible soon, too.
"Aah, Ch-Chairman. Please spare me...."
Hardly anyone was left to shield her in Heo Myangmyang's chat. They had been steeped in Kim Taeyoung too. From the beginning they hadn't come for the cooking. They had come to see her be cute, and thanks to the donations he fired, her fans had learned exactly how good those reactions tasted.
"I'll just do the reaction here. There are way too many people over there...."
She had settled into the farthest corner seat, the one spot in the PC bang that drew the least attention.
A four-hit combo of ten thousands. Heo Myangmyang's face crumpled. It was an order worth four million won. There was no way she could refuse.
"Huaang. Do I really have to go?"
"Hiiing. You're so mean...."
She pouted, picked up her phone, and trudged off. The slumped shoulders of a disappointed loli were dangerously cute. She looked like a middle schooler worn out by schoolwork. Drooping like that, she was pitiful—which meant, of course, that someone ought to put the spirit back in her.
"Uuuut."
Heo Myangmyang turned a crumpled, teary face toward Kim Taeyoung. Kim Taeyoung had no mercy.
"Haa...."
Seeing there was no hole to slip through, Heo Myangmyang let out a heavy sigh. Then she worked the PC bang computer until Three Little Bears was playing.
She danced along to the children's song, shimmying with real commitment. Was there a cuter living thing in the world? This cuteness had to travel. His chest ached every time her face crumpled, but he would endure it. More people had to see.
"Whoa."
"Cute."
Clap, clap, clap. The moment she finished the reaction, applause and praise broke out—cheers from the people in the PC bang. From where they stood, it only looked like a cute little kid doing a broadcast. Lifts in her shoes, barely five feet tall, a baby face and a loli figure: anyone would have taken Heo Myangmyang for a first-year middle schooler.
They were cheering a middle-school girl's cuteness, and how admirable she was for performing. The woman on the receiving end felt like she might die of shame. Reacting at home had already been embarrassing. Reacting in front of strangers was a different dimension. Her cheeks didn't just flush; they looked ready to burst.
"Auuu. Chairman. I really can't. I'll just play the game. Please let me do a game stream."
She begged one more time. Kim Taeyoung was never going to allow it.
"Ah, I can't. Not here, I really.... Chairmaaaan."
Shukusei!! Loli God Requiem☆. A song by a Japanese VTuber that had caught on in Korea as well. The moment he laid eyes on Heo Myangmyang, he had thought it would suit her perfectly, so he made her practice. Having resolved to switch over to game BJ, she would have practiced hard. It was going to be her main reaction song. She just hadn't imagined the debut would be a crowded PC bang.
"Aak! No! I'm ending the stream!"
At last Heo Myangmyang blew. She declared the broadcast over. But she could not beat Kim Taeyoung. In a flash, a hundred thousand Moon Balloons burst.
Whether the Three Little Bears reaction had been caught as the thumbnail, or the rumor had simply spread, viewers began to trickle in. Just as Kim Taeyoung had planned, the floaters arrived. Among Dry CrackerFloaters there were plenty of rotten ones, but a broadcast could not grow without them.
They were loudspeakers. Floaters drifted through stream after stream, and when something fun happened they carried the rumor in every direction. Posting on communities, pulling cuckoo raids in other broadcasts—they didn't hesitate.
Why any one of them did it differed from person to person. They shared a single habit: they swarmed a fun broadcast, and a fun broadcast they promoted even harder.
It was time for a loli stream buried in the Deep Sea to come up for air.
Kim Taeyoung adjusted the pace of the broadcast. Loli God was the hidden card. Better to detonate it once more people had gathered. That was how a thing became a topic on the internet.
Some floater had already gone off to spread the word, because the room started filling faster. Among the newcomers were people who recognized Kim Taeyoung. The hundred million won he had dropped on Seed's Excel Broadcast had been the talk of the platform since yesterday.
Baby Shark spread through the PC bang. Inside the shop, people sat down in the seat right beside her, or stood by the counter, just to watch the reaction. Heo Myangmyang's face burned red. She thought she would die of embarrassment, but she couldn't not do it. The take so far was already pushing twenty million won. Even after the cash-out fee, it was over ten million. She danced along to Baby Shark.
Heo Myangmyang's stream, which averaged thirty or forty viewers, now had more than three hundred. It was a weekday afternoon. Three hundred viewers put her somewhere in the thirties—high enough to be shown at the top of the KoreaTV homepage. There was a reason people said viewers called viewers. A fresh loli no one had seen before was sitting on the front page, and the inflow only thickened.