Had a Good Time
"Oh! Seo-a, long time no see."
"Hi hi, Uncle Yeong-jun!"
Out of nowhere, our first meeting flashed through my mind.
It was day three of my debut, the day I'd first started streaming. That was when I experienced my very first collab.
It had been a thoroughly enjoyable memory.
From the moment I debuted, I'd been pulling every kind of aggro I could just to get rolling — and that day, Oh Yeong-jun had been the perfect sandbag, letting me tap the brakes once and settle into a stable rhythm.
From his side, though, he must have felt completely played. He'd probably planned to ride the hype of collabing with Pangea TV's first pure-blood virtual streamer debut, only for me to hold the reins almost the entire way through.
We'd traded the occasional note after that, but our real reunion only came after I entered Rena World.
The sight of him getting thoroughly hazed during my initiation ceremony, then fleeing with a miserable look on his face. And the next day, when he swaggered over with Muyo at his side — only to shrink into a complete shrimp the second he heard I was rank one on the server. All of it came flooding back, clear as day.
Even the shulker box stuffed with diamonds I'd given him as a peace offering.
And most recently, of course — Purge Day.
The secret negotiations behind the scenes to take down O-Wang Company. And then Oh Yeong-jun, turning on me during Purge Day itself like he was finally paying me back for everything I'd put him through. In the end he got thoroughly re-educated and even had to perform that motorcycle sexy dance.
Three separate popular posts about it had hit the FM Community boards, last I checked.
Ahem. He ought to know he owed all of that to me.
Anyway — Oh Yeong-jun always ended up on the receiving end with me, so he came off as the neighborhood punching bag, easy to push around. But the truth was, outside of Wang-ko and NS Male God, there wasn't a streamer on the server who could really look down on him.
Partner streamer. Fourteen years on air. Connections everywhere.
Even Kim Hak-do, for all that he was a big-corp streamer, had been around the same LoL scene long enough that Yeong-jun treated him casually. Wang-ko and NS Male God, on the other hand, worked different genres and were older, so outside of the kayfabe WWE drama for the cameras, Yeong-jun still kept a measure of respect.
That was the Oh Yeong-jun who'd always strutted around so confidently — and wait a second. Now he had the weight class to match?
I could feel his shoulders climbing higher by the second.
Then I checked his viewer count and it all made sense. Even mid-content, holding seven thousand at this hour? Yeah, that earned some recognition. At that level, a little shoulder-puffing was only natural.
"Did Seo-a come for counseling too? Go ahead and sit on the cushion over here."
The easy, leisurely tone that came with those inflated numbers was genuinely irritating.
Not that there was anything wrong with it, strictly speaking — but this guy had something like a passive skill. The higher his shoulders rose, the more he started putting his foot in his mouth. Even before the regression, the Hell Squad would periodically swarm in, roast him alive in chat, and force an apology out of him.
Which meant his shoulders needed a regular pressing-down.
Ahem. This was absolutely not because I was jealous that he'd been doing better than me lately. Let's not get the wrong idea.
"Our Seo-a, hi-wing~"
"Hi, Jisuni."
Inside the cabin was Jisuni, another member of Akatsuki. That distinctive speech pattern and high-tension greeting drilled straight into my ears.
Jisuni really was a unique character. Streamers in her kind of position were genuinely rare.
She'd started streaming on the back of Tteu3's equipment support and aggressive encouragement, and despite a short career, she'd entered Rena World and ballooned her weight class almost overnight.
At first she'd just floated a mouse character she'd drawn herself and run a dullahan stream. Later she upgraded it into a full virtual avatar, which kicked off a furious debate in the virtual-related galleries over whether Jisuni even counted as a virtual streamer.
Either way, for all how unusually she'd debuted, her good voice and exceptional game sense carried her through a smooth climb all the way to 2025, where she settled in as a streamer with real name recognition.
"So, our Jisuni — how old are you again?"
"Ugh, why do you keep asking? It's a secret, a secret!"
Her age would eventually come out later, but for now Jisuni was tearing around Rena World, declaring friendship with everyone she met and putting on full WWE performances — a true hierarchy-destroyer of legend.
Friends with twenty-four-year-olds! Friends with thirty-year-olds! We're all friends!
Anyway, Jisuni's age wasn't important enough to dwell on. I gently cut off Oh Yeong-jun, who was already settling into full counseling-mode atmosphere, and spoke up.
"I'm curious about something. How many people have you counseled today?"
"Hmm, counting Seo-a, that makes six. Why?"
"Aww, then the viewers must be getting bored by now. You've been running the same setup for way too long. Want to take a quick break and switch things up?"
"Switch things up?"
"Yes. You see, people tell me I have a spiritual gift all the time. I even considered receiving a spirit calling once."
"What? Where is this coming from all of a sudden—"
"Just humor me and tell me your date of birth. Think of it as a change of pace. Doing nothing but counseling gets dull, right?"
"Hold on, why are we suddenly doing fortune-telling and reading saju? I don't believe in this stuff."
Oh Yeong-jun grumbled, but chat opinion had already swung hard to my side. Viewers were going wild, telling him to shut up and just spit out his birthday already.
Ah — for the record, I was non-religious, and no one had ever once told me I had a spirit calling. I'd just tossed the line out to reel Yeong-jun in.
"March 27th, 1991."
"Wow! A '91 birth year — you really are an uncle. Dentures any day now."
"What are you talking about! People in their fifties are still young these days. I'm a perfectly spry early-thirties guy."
"Just a moment. Quiet, please… I need to concentrate."
To set the mood, I deliberately stretched the silence long, pulled out a notebook, and staged the soft rustle of turning pages. Drawn in by the unexpected performance, Oh Yeong-jun and Jisuni both went quiet along with me.
A moment later, I let out a long, heavy sigh.
"Hmm. A few things came up."
"Hey, hey! You said this was just a change of pace. Why are you getting so serious? When you set the atmosphere like that, it starts feeling like something's actually there."
"First, let's talk about Uncle Yeong-jun's past…"
I rattled off the things I already knew in broad, sweeping strokes. When I mentioned, for instance, that his personality had been pretty terrible back in the day and that he'd eaten a lot of hate for it, Jisuni next to him jumped in with vigorous agreement.
"That's right, that's right. Yeong-jun, you little shit — your old nickname was In-sseu-o, wasn't it? Human Trash Oh Yeong-jun."
"Shut up! I'm different now. I've turned over a new leaf."
After that I went on about his favorite colors, numbers, seasons, and the rest. At first Oh Yeong-jun had been listening with lukewarm, joking detachment — but gradually his reactions shifted into genuine astonishment.
"No, how the hell did you know all that? What, are you my stalker? Did I talk about this on stream? What is this?"
"Just a feeling-type feeling, I suppose?"
Of course, it was all information from before the regression — knowledge that didn't exist yet. Lucy and Oh Yeong-jun had gotten tangled up on the MacaoTalk server once, and they'd traded little personal details in the process. That was how I'd learned it.
"Yeong-jun, you little shit, was all of that actually correct? For real? Whoa, that's insane! I want to go next."
I'd never met a woman who didn't like getting her fortune read. Jisuni was buzzing with excitement, already pulling a waiting-number ticket.
Meanwhile, Oh Yeong-jun's posture was changing by the second. He'd started with his shoulders hiked up in pure arrogance — and now he was dipping his head slightly toward me, the way you might before a mudang with a reputation for being terrifyingly accurate.
From here on, it was completely my pace.
Once the thread of "trust" was established, people had a tendency to fill in the blanks themselves no matter how vaguely you spoke.
"Looks like you've dated quite a bit, too. Huh? Your partners were fairly well-known, weren't they? I'm seeing gossip and scandal woven into the connected saju."
"Hup—!"
"Lately your stomach's been feeling heavy, and you don't digest as well as you used to, right?"
"No, seriously, did you install CCTV in my house? I'm losing my mind."
CCTV, my foot. Once you hit your thirties, digestion just doesn't work the way it did in your twenties. That's all it was. But flappy-eared Oh Yeong-jun had already abandoned all judgment and fallen completely under my spell.
"Well then, I've killed enough time. I'll be heading out…"
"W-wait! O Great Seo-a, where are you going? Please bestow enlightenment upon this foolish mortal. My love fortune and my wealth fortune, just a little more—!"
"No, stop clinging and get back to your counseling content. From what I heard, you've got someone waiting out front right now."
The entire situation around me was already fully under my control. Oh Yeong-jun, completely sold on a fake fortune reading powered by a regressor's knowledge, and Jisuni, now howling that it was her turn.
In light of that passionate energy, I decided to leave them with one short piece of advice.
"This year, it would do you well to ease up on the stubbornness and listen a little more carefully to your fans. Especially watch out for the hardcore ones. That is all!"
"Huh? No, more than that, my love fortune—"
I shook off the still-clinging Oh Yeong-jun and stepped out of the building.
Current time: 1:30 a.m.
Still, I'd managed to kill a little over an hour at Akatsuki.
"Had a good time~"
"No, please, just tell me a little more before you go!"
My next destination was waiting for me.