The Beginning of the Prologue
Three years.
That was the span of time into which I'd crammed a lifetime's worth of studying. For those three years, I truly gave everything I had.
And with a single mistake, I threw those three years straight into the trash.
I'd ranked in the top three at school. In my class, I was always first. Honestly, I'd been proud of that. I'd worked hard, so of course the results would follow. I'd believed that with my whole heart.
To think I'd ever called something like that the truth... God, what an idiot.
I was staring blankly at the monitor when a song I used to love came on, and without thinking I opened my mouth to sing along.
"..."
No sound came out. Wondering if something was stuck in my throat, I wrapped my hands around my neck and squeezed.
"...Kh— koff."
A dry cough. So nothing was blocking it after all.
But what was I supposed to do with that knowledge?
I didn't know. I didn't care anymore—whether my throat was open or closed. My world had nothing left in it but darkness.
"...I'm hungry."
It was still daytime, but with the curtains drawn and the door shut, my room was as black as a cave. And inside that cave, like some stubborn bear hibernating through winter, I had been holding my siege for days.
"How long has it been since I last ate?"
My eyes fell on the plates scattered across the floor. Mom would worry, so I'd brought the food she'd left by the door inside—just to pretend I was eating—and then left it untouched. Cold dishes, every one of them. A few were probably past edible by now. Roughly eight plates. Two, maybe three days without food.
"I'm hungry... but I can't eat."
Anything I put down would come straight back up. My body wanted food and rejected it at the same time—a strange, broken state. And the cause of it was still sitting right there on my desk: that report card.
"...I'm such an idiot."
That was all I could say.
The report card that had turned three years of effort into garbage. For a second I'd even wondered if it belonged to someone else—but there it was, plain as day: Go Gachi. No room left for denial.
What a bizarre report card. The number 1 and the number 9 existing side by side. If I'd simply lacked the skill, I would have retaken the exam. But a mistake this hollow had snapped even that will in half.
"A zero out of a hundred..."
The shock had stripped me of food, of sleep, of even lust—the three basic human drives, gone. With no will left for anything, the only thing I did in this cave was sit in front of a computer and let time pass.
"...Maybe I should take some sleeping pills. At least then I'd be able to sleep."
The fact that I was seriously thinking something that insane was proof enough that I wasn't right in the head.
"Sleeping pills, sleeping pills... something other than the Korean stuff... DRUG."
I typed it out in English—and in the middle of it, mistyped DRAG. Four letters. Four damn letters, and I still got them wrong.
...Shit.
"Son of a bitch!!!"
Thud. Thud. Thud.
The sound slamming into my ears, the pain blooming in my hands—I realized I was pounding the desk with both fists.
Another episode. I hadn't had one all day. What a waste.
"Hah... hah... Even something this small, I screw up... goddamn it..."
Sleeping pills. That was still the answer. Take them, sleep, forget this reality for a while. Then maybe I could function again. Mom and Dad would be glad. Yeah. That would be filial piety.
"...What? Why did that get pressed?"
Hitting the desk must have mashed the keyboard too. After the mistyped DRAG, a Y had gone down, and related searches had popped up underneath.
"Drag yourself?"
Drag oneself to~. To force oneself to do something. The automatic translation fired off in my head.
I'd worked so hard... so why...
Wait. Was that even the right reading? There was no to after it. Taken straight, it was just—
"Drag yourself here?"
...I don't know why. It was pure whim. I clicked the related search for Drag yourself, and it took me straight to a site.
A newly opened internet streaming platform. Drag Yourself—or Diy, for short. I vaguely remembered kids with bad grades watching it a lot.
"...What even is this."
The platform hadn't been around long, but there were more streamers than I'd expected. Because it was so new, you could watch without signing up, so I clicked through a few of the ones at the top. Games. Anime. Dating. Topics that had never had anything to do with me.
"What are they even saying?"
Genres I'd never cared about—I couldn't follow a word of it. Even the most popular streamer's broadcast left me cold. I had no idea why any of it was supposed to be funny.
"How can anyone laugh at this?"
The streamer was spouting things so off in context, grammar, and vocabulary that I wondered if it was even Korean—and the viewers were eating it up, throwing money at him. Gold, silver, bronze depending on the amount, apparently. Thank you for the gold coins~
"...Boring. Better go find those sleeping pills."
I closed the stream and was about to search again when my finger slipped and opened another broadcast—the one right next to the one I'd just left.
"..."
I saw a girl, alone in an empty room, simply smiling.
Wait—could I even call that a girl?
An avatar-like character, speaking in a tone straight out of an anime, swaying her upper body left and right on the screen, eyes occasionally flicking toward the chat window. It wasn't a trend yet back then, but what I was looking at was something called a VTuber.
"What is this... an anime?"
Of course, at the time I had no idea what a VTuber even was, so I just stared at the strange character in mild fascination. It wasn't the movement that was strange.
It was her—smiling inside that tiny empty screen, with no one there at all.
The way she said it, smiling—to me, right then, it felt impossibly strange.
Most VTubers know otaku culture well enough to drop Japanese like that without thinking. Back then I didn't even know what it meant, but—
"Who are you, smiling like that... all by yourself..."
Was it pity I felt for her? Or something closer to recognition?
I kept watching her. And the girl who had been smiling like that, at some point—
—her face fell. The sight of it hurt so much that, without thinking—
"...Please smile."
—I typed it into the chat.
But something was wrong. My message didn't appear. Looking closer, the viewer count still read zero.
No—strictly speaking, I knew it was one. The chat window only viewers could see clearly showed the count. But on her screen, it still said zero.
"A glitch? Brand-new platform. Figures."
So I couldn't even speak to her.
And yet—why was I still watching?
She wasn't doing anything special. Just smiling, murmuring to herself now and then. And I just kept looking.
Huh?
The screen went black. For a second I thought the stream had died—then it came back on. She was there with her eyes closed.
My hands started to shake. I was only watching her through a screen. She couldn't see me.
And yet... the moment those closed eyes opened, it felt like she might find me. Me, rotting in this cave like garbage.
And that was a little—
—terrifying.
Something in my head went snap.
Even hidden behind that avatar—
—I felt like I was looking straight through to the face behind it. A smile so bright it scored a perfect hundred out of a hundred.
That smile cut the rope that had been binding my feelings shut.
I never heard the rest of what she said.
Because I ran.
Because the feeling surging up in me was too frightening.
"Hah... hah..."
I'd closed the stream, but somehow she still snagged on my mind. If she noticed that the one person she had was gone—would she be disappointed? Had I hurt her?
That thought scared me more than anything from a moment ago, so I tried to find her again right away. But I hadn't even checked her name. Hunting for one streamer among that many felt impossible.
And yet—
"...Focus."
Yeah. I'd concentrated like this when I studied, too. With a focus I hadn't felt in a long time, I searched through the endless list of streamers for her.
"...Found her."
Out of more than a thousand, I finally found her.
But—
"...Thirty people?"
Good. She wasn't alone anymore. A full thirty—no, already thirty-one—people were watching her.
I couldn't bring myself to go in, but even in the little preview window I could see her moving. Blue hair. Matching blue eyes.
"...Eve?"
Only then did I burn the name into my sight.
I wanted to know her. I wanted to see more of her. I wanted to be someone who wouldn't be ashamed in front of her.
Maybe it was because Eve had cut the rope holding my feelings down—but all the desires I'd forgotten were rising up inside me again.
First of all, I wanted to eat.
My eyes went to the omelet rice on the floor.
"...Gulp."
I grabbed the spoon off the plate and started shoveling food into my mouth. Suddenly eating something rich after days without food was supposed to be bad for you—but knowledge like that didn't matter anymore.
I demolished three plates in no time and finally felt myself settle. A few minutes ago I'd been starving. Now my stomach hurt. And both hands throbbed with a deep, solid pain—well, I had been beating the desk like that...
The pain felt strangely welcome.
Slowly, the world in front of me began to brighten. The report card on the desk came back into view.
"..."
Ah. Right.
I'd looked at that and never done the one thing I needed to do. That was why the feelings had just kept piling up with nowhere to go.
"Hic— hic... hhk... uwaaaaaah!!!"
So let it out. All of this rage, all of this bitterness that had been building up. Every last bit of it.
"Aaaaaah!!!"
My throat felt like it was tearing. The pain told me I was still crying—
"It's okay. It's okay..."
—and a voice at my ear told me someone was here beside me. A soft, warm presence wrapped around me.
"My boy... you worked so hard. Mom knows. So... it's okay. Really."
"Uwaaaaaah!!"
I don't know how many hours I cried. When I finally pulled free of her arms, Mom was still looking at me with that worried face.
"Mom..."
"...Yeah."
She answered in a voice as thick with tears as mine. She'd been hurting too, probably as much as I had. She'd been so worried...
I should have said I was sorry. But there was something I needed to say first.
"My stomach... hurts."
That day, I finally left the cave—and went straight to the hospital in an ambulance.