The Continuous Pain of Existence
…Life is nothing but a chain of suffering.
A three-day resolve. The phrase for that pathetic human habit of locking in a decision with iron conviction, only to watch it smear into mush before three days are up, until you quit. And honestly, I had fully expected this particular resolve to die the same three-day death. Because this was no ordinary resolution.
For the first time in my life—not some fake workout bit lashed to stream content, but the real thing, posture set, commitment locked—I had resolved to go jogging in the morning.
The reasons behind a resolution that monstrous were anything but simple. I had been feeling the need to exercise for a long time. Viewers had recently roasted me on stream over anything even adjacent to working out. On a rare call with my paternal aunt, I had received the well-meant advice that I ought to look after my health. And the YouTube algorithm had personally escorted me into a health-warning video. Fact upon fact piled up until, together, they struck the spark for a thing called morning jogging.
To keep that resolve, I prepared in every way I could think of. I searched the internet for jogging tips. I bought ultra-premium running shoes and running clothes, thereby manufacturing sunk costs—having invested in the shoes and the outfit, I now had one more reason I had to jog: I needed to squeeze every last drop of value out of the purchase. To crank my energy even a little while I ran, I curated bright, lively anime songs, hot-blooded sports anthems in particular. To stoke the urge to work out, I watched exercise anime. For the record, I shouted "Ike!!!" exactly five times while watching.
Then I remembered proposing morning jogging to Eunha back when we'd gone shopping together, decided that running with someone would lift my motivation at least a little more than going alone, and called her to ask whether that old offer was still on the table. She even shared her jogging route. A good thing is a good thing, right?
And yet, for all that preparation, the wall of morning jogging loomed so impossibly high that I was afraid my iron resolve would collapse into a three-day joke. Thus began the first morning jog of my life, anxiety and doubt already seated in my chest.
…Apparently I had not been taking this body of mine nearly seriously enough.
"Eunha… just a little… just a little slower… Unni's dying…!"
The time: 10:01 a.m.
"…Unni, it's only been twenty minutes."
Twenty minutes since the jog had started. A mere twenty minutes in, and I was already on the brink of quitting halfway. Three-day resolve, my ass. If I'd lasted three days, that would have counted as endurance.
Honestly, I had my excuses. For one thing, it was still summer. We were just crossing from mid-August into the tail end of the month, so the heat had eased a little, and mornings weren't as brutal as afternoons—but summer was still summer. Set against the inside of a house, the air out here was plenty hot and wet.
To a civilized person domesticated by the mercy of air conditioning, the wild was unbearably harsh. Drop a civilized human into the Sahara with nothing but their skin and how are they supposed to survive? That was exactly the feeling. And… well… right. My stamina was simply garbage. Anime-song doping wasn't even in the same zip code.
"I knew your stamina was bad, Unni, but… I didn't realize it was this bad."
Eunha sighed as she said it, and today of all days her gaze hurt. Eunha… Unni is the boss who pays your salary, you know…
I slid my eyes off hers and wiped the sweat with the sports towel I'd brought. A pretty girl in a cheerleader outfit was printed across it. Looking at her like this, I almost felt cheered on. If only the thing had come with a voice function. Making do, I searched YouTube for cheerleader characters and replayed the you can do it lines a few times. The result was reasonably satisfying.
"…I wish they'd sell a sports towel as official Raider merch. If I posted a review, do you think the views would be decent?"
"Then you'd have to keep exercising until that day, wouldn't you? You'd need some actual training built up, or you couldn't give a proper review after buying it."
Eunha? What kind of talk is that? How does it connect like that? I mean, I did decide to exercise, but when the pressure comes in sideways like this, it gets weirdly burdensome…
"…Eunha. Should we call it here for today?"
"You said you'd do at least thirty minutes, no matter what."
There was no give in her voice. Uh, um, er—did I say that? I feel like I might have.
"Where did the Eunha go who said she had no intention of forcing me to work out…?"
In the end, all I could manage was a timid protest.
"That Eunha died once when you were streaming with blood pouring out of your nose, and she died again today after seeing what your stamina actually looks like."
And even that timid protest was shut down far too easily. What is this, desecrating the corpse? I already died—why are you killing me again?
I had to find a way out somehow. At least until the weather cooled a little more…!
"Unni…. As a viewer who wants to keep watching your streams for a long time, as an editor who still needs to get paid, and as someone who's known you for over a year, I want you to be a little healthier. So… couldn't you hang in there just a bit longer?"
…Yeah. Checkmate. Of all times for my nose to bleed. If only it hadn't, I might have found an opening somewhere. Once again, it seemed I had dug my own grave with my own two hands.
And when the workout was over, could I flop onto a bed and rest in peace? Sadly, no. I had to keep practicing songs right up until the recording date. It wasn't only so I could snag Loe's autograph and bump Medongbu employee welfare up a tier. If I wanted to birth an ultra-high-quality music video, singing practice was mandatory.
Why was I gunning for an ultra-high-quality MV in the first place? That, too, had its reasons. Styling upgraded so far that Kore ga watashi…?! rose to my lips on its own. Clothes so disgustingly expensive they could make a person tense for a moment just looking at the price tag. And an MV director whose expectations for acting—from an ordinary person who had never once set foot in an acting academy—were high enough to stretch the shoot long. This was an omen. A sign that something was about to happen. And the genius pretty-girl gamer Lee Hari was not dull enough to miss an omen like that just because she was drunk on her own face.
The moment I caught on that the video's quality was likely to come out beyond expectations, one thought flashed through my head. …This could be useful when I deal with the problem of my aunt.
My aunt doesn't know I stream. I had meant to keep it a secret for life. But the growth kept climbing so sharply that my thinking shifted. How much longer could I really hide it? Could I hide forever that I was a YouTuber with two hundred thousand subscribers, broadcasting with my face out? Fine—say luck holds and I can hide it for now. But past two hundred thousand, on to three hundred, four hundred, five hundred, and then a million. Would hiding it the way I do now still be possible then?
I had to admit what needed admitting. Someday my aunt would find out I was doing internet broadcasts. She wasn't some hermit living cut off from the world. Once more, for the record: the genius pretty-girl gamer Lee Hari was neither dull nor stupid. Getting caught someday was a settled fact. Which meant I needed to change my stance.
My manager had said something about revealing my affiliation and releasing the MV. If the truth is going to come out anyway, you're better off using it as effectively as possible—so deciding when and how to reveal it matters enormously. Wasn't this the same problem? If I was fated to be caught by my aunt regardless, wasn't it better to set the board in the way most favorable to me? And wouldn't an ultra-high-quality MV, played as a hidden card, be a huge help in setting that board?
There's a thing called the gain-loss effect. Even if you start out with a negative evaluation, earning a positive one later can win you far more favor than being evaluated positively from the very beginning. Yes. My plan was to wring that effect for everything it was worth. And the ultra-quality MV was one of the operation's core points.
When I told my aunt the truth about streaming, the MV would be shown as late as possible. An MV holding the face of a peerless pretty girl, upgraded far enough that Kore ga watashi…?! rose on its own. An MV the director himself had said was worth looking forward to. An MV with a track by a genius singer-songwriter laid over the top of all that. Pulling a positive evaluation out of my aunt would be almost too easy.
And the important point was making that evaluation, when she finally saw it, even a little more positive. A score jumping from 10 to 90 looks far more dramatic and astonishing than a jump from 10 to 70. Between an MV with killer visuals and an ordinary vocal, and an MV with killer visuals and a killer vocal—which one is easier to praise? The latter, obviously.
Which was why I had to practice. Even if the jogging had left me half-dead.
"…Life is nothing but a chain of suffering."
I turned a wistful face up to the sky. It was clear and blue, as if to comfort a human flailing in the suffering called life——
"…Unni, you've filled the thirty minutes."
…Anyway. That's how it was.