Reunion with Her
—Ju-ttak is a god, and I am unemployed.
Was that the kind of series this was supposed to be?
I was still reeling, but I decided to accept the situation for what it was. My greatest strength kicked in—an adaptability on par with a cockroach.
Squish—!
"Ahem."
It wasn't because of the soft, addictive sensation that kept filling my palm of its own accord. Really. Sure, I was a beauty so striking that my own gaze kept getting stolen without my noticing, and the figure was outstanding, but—
"…This is no time for that."
A gender change wasn't the end of it. The most urgent question was whether I still had a legal identity.
I hurried to the computer and tried logging into the personal accounts I'd used as a man.
"Nope. Dead end."
Every attempt to reuse my old credentials came back with the same message: no such member. Online banking, the sites I used most often—all of it. Was I about to become an illegal resident the second I regressed?
I panicked for a moment, but a thorough search of the apartment turned up a wallet and bankbook in the desk drawer. The wallet even held a resident registration card.
A beautiful woman staring blankly into the camera. Beneath the photo, a pretty name: Seo Min-ah.
Age… three years younger.
Before the regression I'd been twenty-nine. Three years back should have made me twenty-six. That would have been true if I'd still been the man named Seo Minjun. But according to the date of birth on the card, Seo Min-ah was twenty-three.
Wow. Twenty-three.
I'd been sighing over the fact that I was about to hit thirty in a few months. The news that I'd gotten younger actually lifted my mood a little.
"And this?"
That lift lasted all the way through checking the bank account. The balance showed thirty million won. Thin compared to what I'd had at twenty-nine—but the current Seo Min-ah was twenty-three. It looked like Ju-ttak, that suspected divine being, had applied some kind of balance patch between the assets I'd held and the younger age.
"There's too much I need to figure out."
Checking the account wasn't enough. There happened to be a community center nearby, so I rushed over and printed out every document I could from the self-service kiosk.
The family relation certificate listed Seo Min-ah as an orphan. A convenience setting, maybe?
I also checked the numbers saved on the phone. The contact list was astonishingly clean—the only entry was labeled "Landlord." A careful call confirmed the lease: five million won deposit, four hundred thousand a month, a studio of about ten pyeong.
The pure joy of being young evaporated in an instant. Reality was as cold as ever. Unlike when I'd been a man, four hundred thousand in rent was a heavy weight for unemployed Seo Min-ah.
But I shook off that pressure almost at once.
Come to think of it… I'm a regressor.
The happiness circuit in my head started spinning.
Regressors come with a special privilege: information. Knowledge of a future no one else knows. Build success on that foundation and ride it all the way up—wasn't that the natural story arc? As a reader who'd been into genre novels long before internet broadcasting, I'd seen it a hundred times.
So is it my turn now? Can I flip my whole life in one shot?!
Ju-ttak's final message, whatever—who cared? Success was right in front of me.
Buzzing with excitement, I fired up the computer, opened Notepad, and started writing down every jackpot piece of future knowledge I had. With this, I could live large like the protagonists in those novels. Coins, stocks, lottery—anything. If I could hit it big enough to become a landlord, that being said to rank above the Creator himself—!
"Huh?"
There was a time I thought that.
I kept hammering away at the notepad for a long while before I suddenly came to my senses and realized something was off.
Coins? Too late. Already past the peak and deep into the crash.
Lottery? I'd never cared enough to buy tickets more than a handful of times. Naturally I hadn't memorized any numbers.
Stocks? The only tickers I knew anything about were Pangea TV and Samsung Electronics—thanks to a few guys on Pan-beo-gal who kept whining about those two. The problem was that neither of them was going to make me a landlord.
Pangea TV does roughly double later, at least.
So if I dumped every won I had into it and diamond-handed for over a year… sixty million? The dream of becoming a god-tier landlord popped like a soap bubble.
"…Have I just been wasting my life this whole time?"
Looking over the notepad I'd filled, more than eighty percent of it was about internet broadcasting. Usable investment intel: zero. A deep sigh escaped me before I could stop it.
Damn it. At this rate, streaming really is the only answer.
The only way to use a regressor's privilege was internet broadcasting. If I'd known, I would have paid attention to personal finance years ago. Too late for that regret.
Another short sigh. I forced my mindset back toward the positive. I couldn't freeload off coins or lottery tickets, but the life of a successful streamer wasn't bad either. Plenty of them pulled in a full office worker's annual salary in a single month.
That wasn't a wild guess. Pangea TV had a site called the Candy Calculator that estimated each streamer's income with over ninety percent accuracy. If I could succeed using future knowledge, that kind of money could be mine.
And given the drunken bet I'd made with Ju-ttak, becoming a virtual streamer was inevitable anyway.
From late 2022 through 2023 was pure insanity. Multiple virtual streamers pulled over 3.5 million Candies in a single year.
Even after platform fees and taxes, that meant at least two hundred million won. Factor in ad revenue, subscriptions, and the rest, and the number climbed higher still.
Streamer… maybe not so bad after all?
If I earned steadily, didn't waste it, and kept buying Pangea TV stock on the side, I could at least double my money—maybe not a god-landlord, but enough to dream of owning my own place.
Success, though, demanded thorough preparation. Future knowledge or not, variables existed, and without actual broadcasting skill it would all be for nothing.
People who stream hard? I've seen plenty. Without opportunity, you still end up face-down on the bottom, gasping for air. That's internet broadcasting.
Hard work was the baseline. You needed talent, and you needed luck. Streaming wasn't special—surviving any red-ocean market was never easy.
It's August now, so… two months left? If I prepare hard, I might just make the timing work.
Pangea TV looked the same as always, but in two months a massive event was coming—the perfect chance for a royal road. Before the regression, Lucy had missed that window and regretted it endlessly. If she'd just been a little braver and transferred a few months earlier, the results would have been so much better.
"…"
Thinking of Lucy made my chest tighten. For three years I'd cheered for her with everything I had, hoping she'd make it. The question still wouldn't leave me alone.
Why on earth had Lucy chosen to quit streaming?
She hadn't been top-tier, but she'd had a solid core of regulars and earned more comfortably than most office workers. I turned over the rumors that had swirled around her retirement. Wild claims that she'd been mixed up in real-world crime. K-drama-style stories about a stalker holding something over her. Family opposition. Real life going well enough that she didn't need the stream. Debt. Infighting among crew members. Every theory had its believers.
And within a week, the whole topic had vanished without a trace.
Right. Lucy had been "that level" of streamer. A small-time act whose viewer count was always teetering on three digits—and even that was propped up by the crew's revolving door. On pure personal draw, maybe forty or fifty people? A one-trick singing streamer with no entertainment value. Mentally fragile, short on social skills, the kind who never shone in collabs or big group content.
Coldly assessed, she wasn't the kind of streamer you built a main fandom around. I'd just fallen hard for the first stream I ever watched because her voice hit my taste so perfectly.
Damn girl. Foolish girl. Idiot girl.
I resented her—and still couldn't hate her all the way through. Three long years. I'd poured real passion into supporting her.
It was almost funny. I wouldn't have fretted this much over a blood relative. Her retirement had blindsided me and left me feeling betrayed, but I still didn't want to let her go. Part of it was the pride fight with Ju-ttak. More than that, I wanted the truth hidden behind her decision to quit.
"It's been a while."
Rabbit TV. The platform Lucy had streamed on before transferring. Together with Pangea TV, it was one of the two great pillars splitting the domestic internet broadcasting market.
But I knew this empire's future.
A sandcastle that collapses in two years.
A mass exodus was coming. Streamers who transferred even a little early would enjoy first-mover advantages beyond imagination—because at this point in time, Pangea TV was a pure blue ocean for virtual streamers.
Man, this front page really takes me back.
After three years the UI felt a little unfamiliar. I typed two syllables into the search bar: Lucy.
Luck was on my side—she was live right now. A strange flutter in my chest, I clicked into the stream.
Still just a single illustrated background on screen: the so-called Dullahan format. I listened past the soft rustling noises, and then that longed-for voice reached me.
"Hello, Seo Minjun-nim. That's a nickname I haven't seen before. Nice to meet you."
"…!"
I'd thought I'd never hear it again after her channel disappeared. A warm voice that soothed a tired heart. My chest trembled without permission.
The day I'd first watched Lucy's stream, three years ago. People live on memories, don't they? Fragments of countless moments unfurled like a panorama and filled my vision. Yes—so much had happened. Even if it had all ended in catastrophe.
No. I can change it. Now that I'm back, that future doesn't have to—
Lucy quitting? Not a chance. I was going to make her succeed. Exactly as I'd declared to Ju-ttak.
"Excuse me?"
If Lucy just moved according to my plan, she could ride the massive wave of change about to hit Pangea TV and claim a real share of it. Come on—forget the hard past. Let's walk the flower path together!
"Um, I'm sorry, but I think you might have the wrong stream."
You have been banned from this broadcast.
"…"
My reunion with her was a cold, unhesitating kick.