Five Cats
A fine rain fell over the outdoor stage.
I walked beneath the bright lights with the slick microphone gripped tight in my hand, and the complicated thoughts that had been churning inside me went still all at once.
I listened as a delicate gayageum melody poured across the stage, weaving richly with the other instruments — and then I opened my eyes.
"I'll head in, then."
"Yeah. Good work."
Leaving behind the jingle of the door chime and the always-bright lights of the twenty-four-hour convenience store, I pulled out my fully charged smartphone at once. The new game that had dropped at ten in the morning on January fifteenth was already downloaded and waiting.
Idol Survival: The Beginning — an idol gacha simulation mobile RPG. Despite its niche genre and sensibility, its high production values had made it a domestic hit, then carried it successfully overseas. The game had long since been milked dry of most of its content, but I had been clinging to it for over a year.
The title that launched this time was a spin-off from the same developers: Idol Survival: Step Up.
Skimming the early reviews, the consensus was that the overall format matched the original, but the story and music showed enough difference that you could tell the team had put real work into it.
And this after everyone screamed they were blinded by money…
It was almost funny, remembering how the moment news of a new game broke, the forums had been flooded with complaints that the developers were tossing aside content for the live service of Idol Survival: The Beginning to rush a sequel.
It was successful, sure — but it was also a game that drew as much trouble as praise.
Come to think of it, how did I even start playing this thing?
Right. It began in the army.
"You playing that game again today? Is it really that fun?"
"Yeah. It's all right."
After finishing the day's duties, during the afternoon free period — the stretch when, once dinner was over and we were back in the barracks, logging into a mobile game was simply what I did. My bunkmate, who spent that same time reading web novels, would rib me about it.
"I told you to use games to blow off steam, but I'm starting to think I pointed you at the wrong thing. Too spicy a flavor for a pure soul like you?"
"What pure soul. I know how the world works by now."
Life had gone spectacularly sideways, so I had entered university at twenty-two and enlisted the moment my first semester of freshman year ended. Originally I spent this hour on online lectures. After my father's death notice arrived just as I was settling into military life, I slowly let those go. They no longer meant anything.
I answered halfheartedly while my fingers stayed busy. Clear enough quests and you earned a free pull. And then a flash of purple light burst across the screen.
"Whoa — you pull something good every single time? Is this what they mean by golden hands? Can I hire you as my proxy later?"
"I'll charge you."
"Cheap bastard."
The same bunkmate who had dragged me, a guy clutching his gut while picking at major coursework, into the hedonism of mobile games would often lament that he had corrupted a pure soul. I must have looked like I was taking it too seriously.
But the sensation of time melting away was addictive. It was my first real escape, and once I started there was no holding back. Before long I became someone who could not put the phone down the moment usage was allowed.
"But seriously, your luck is ridiculous. Aren't the odds on this insanely low?"
Looking back, I had bounced through several games before settling on a gacha title of all things, which was probably why he made such a fuss. The gacha genre was packed with so-called trash cash-grabs where luck and money decided everything. Plenty of people had ruined themselves falling into that kind of game.
"Weirdly, I only ever get lucky when I'm playing this one."
Ironically, the luck that had never existed for me in reality was absurdly good inside the game, and I had fallen helplessly for the thrill of that gap. Laughing hollowly that the game must have stolen my real-world fortune, I began studying it the way other people studied for exams.
It did not take long before the same me who had once dismissed all of it as mere scraps of data was analyzing stats, hunting story breadcrumbs, and resetting over and over for the optimal route — a textbook hardcore gamer.
"Ha. I never should have told you about it. I didn't think you'd fall this hard."
I scolded him for exaggerating, but looking back, I really had gotten addicted. I never expected to still be holding on after discharge.
A year later I was twenty-four. The moment I left the service I took a café job by day and a convenience-store shift by night. The semester was still far off, so I ran deliveries on the side and saved every won I could. Even in the middle of all that, I still logged into the game at least once a day.
"I'm exhausted. Why can't I just let it go…"
With the game past its first anniversary, I had cleared most of the content, and with updates crawling for nearly two months there was almost nothing left to do except grind old modes. Still, after finishing the late-night convenience-store shift and returning to my semi-basement room, once I had hurriedly prepared for bed I would habitually open the game and check the numbers.
About ten minutes into poking around the account I had built so carefully, I finished every daily mission and there was nothing left to touch. My wandering finger stopped on the character screen. My first-string party, polished through nearly every available upgrade and glittering with decoration, filled my eyes.
"…"
Buried under the blanket, I stared at them for a long moment, then pressed and held. My worn face reflected suddenly in the blackened screen.
I had already set a great many things down.
For the next two years I planned to work myself raw at part-time jobs, keep my grades just respectable enough, and then prepare for the civil service exam. Studying abroad or anything else that would put my major to use simply was not in the cards.
Tuition, at least, looked manageable with the national scholarship. So if I saved hard and studied, a decent enough path was still open. Reality was not hopeless. There was still some hope left.
A pine caterpillar should stick to pine needles.
I knew a schedule of four hours of sleep a day with no days off was wrecking my body, yet I hesitated to quit any single thing. For now it still felt manageable. I could endure it. Life was not completely without its pleasures.
Those were the days I was living.
And now the new game I've been waiting for is out. That should make life bearable for a while longer.
So in the early hours of January sixteenth, after finishing the night shift, I left the convenience store and immediately tapped the icon for Idol Survival: Step Up, which I had downloaded in advance. The walk home would take a while, and nearly twenty hours of built-up anticipation had swollen to the breaking point.
The familiar logo filled the screen the moment the game launched, so I hurried to plug in my earphones. A little static crackled through the cheap Bluetooth buds, and then the warm BGM I had listened to for an entire year washed over my ears.
Hearing the opening theme brought the memory of playing the first game for the first time flooding back, and something almost like emotion stirred in me. But I had no intention of savoring it on the sidewalk, so I hammered the skip button. The story could wait until I got home.
My bare hands stung in the cold.
Still — I should at least watch the pull animation.
I shoved my hands in and out of my pockets by turns while hitting skip at the right moments, and the tutorial section appeared.
Rough calculation: with a laptop emulator I could run about three multi-instances, and counting the phone itself, two hours before bed should net me around forty-eight pulls. It was already past five in the morning, but adrenaline from the anticipation kept me wide awake.
Maybe I would sleep just two hours late.
I had cleared my schedule specifically for the launch, so there were no deliveries tomorrow. Even if I slept two hours later than usual, I would still get my normal amount of rest.
"I'm not getting a UR, obviously."
Starting from absolute zero with a top-tier UR character would have been nice, but the odds were so low you had to wonder if they even existed in the gacha pool. Even with better luck than most people, I had only pulled two in an entire year.
If I got greedy chasing a UR tonight, I clearly would not sleep at all.
If I keep living like this, am I going to die young?
I was already burning through my youth just to stay afloat, so all-nighters and other insane habits were out if I wanted to avoid suffering in old age. Even if tomorrow was fine, the day after I had to drive, and running on no sleep would be a problem.
Reclaiming a scrap of realism, I hit skip again, and at last the gacha window appeared. I signed the familiar screen in a hurry. Same document-approval concept as the previous game, then. I switched the phone to my other hand as the freezing wind bit into the back of it, but after walking so long even my pockets had gone cold, so it made no difference.
I really needed to buy a proper padded jacket, but I simply had no room in the budget.
I rubbed my ice-block hands together for warmth. At least the old phone ran hot, so my palms stayed warm. Passing between the yellow streetlights while watching the screen, the lagging load finally resolved into a familiar office-like background. Then the animation of a cat tearing open an envelope filled the display.
One cat, two cats, three cats, four cats… five?
As the cats kept multiplying I yanked the phone closer. In all my time with this game I had never seen more than five of those cats appear.
More cats meant a higher rarity, so it should have been a good sign — yet watching them multiply without end felt less like joy and more like something was wrong. Of course it did. The cats were proliferating so wildly they were bouncing off the edges of the screen itself—
Screeeech! Crash! Thud!
A roar of noise hit me, and before I could even feel weightless I slammed into something solid and crumpled. I thought I heard something inside me shatter with perfect clarity.
Through the exploding pain and a vision turning milky white, I caught the shape of a car body frantically reversing. The driver stomped so hard that the sound of tires scraping the rough asphalt followed in a loud, ugly trail.
Cut off from reality, I watched multicolored light leak through the spiderweb cracks in my phone screen — and that was the last thing I saw.
"Hah—!"
The sound of someone dragging in a huge breath. Was that me? I blinked bleary, unfocused eyes, and when my vision finally sharpened I saw a stranger's face.
Wide-open eyelids framed brown irises that trembled without pause. Early to mid-twenties, maybe? That youthful face was shaking just as hard.
Why is he trembling like that? Is he sick? No — more importantly, this street looked familiar. Not far from the convenience store where I worked nights. And yet—
"Why am I fine?"
I looked down and saw two legs standing firm beneath me. What? Why am I standing? How am I standing?
Weren't my legs almost completely crushed? Caught between the car and the wall…
I was sure I had heard bone shatter. Just as my thoughts started to spiral, a shy voice reached me.
"No. You're not fine at all."
"Excuse me?"
"Excuse me?"
I stared blankly at the stranger, who now wore a solemn expression as if the trembling had never happened, and that clear-featured face kept talking.
"Forgive the sudden question, but where have you been living?"
Before I could answer, the words poured out in a rush.
"You were born in the same country as me, right? I can't believe you somehow hid a face like this. Is that even possible? Did you grow up overseas? No, wait — foreigners have eyes too. The second a photo of you hit social media you would have debuted for sure. Just watching you breathe is so entertaining I feel lightheaded. Have you been living cut off from the world in some remote mountain valley? Why am I only seeing this face now? Shouldn't every single moment since the day you were born have been captured on camera so future generations can boast about it forever?"
The expression was oddly gentle and the tone perfectly polite, but the gleam in his eyes packed real force.
The sudden psychic assault left me dazed. Is he serious? How can anyone say things like that with a straight face? And more importantly — what is this situation? Right, there was an accident. An accident…
The pain that had flashed past a moment earlier returned with full clarity, and my hands went cold. Fatigue piled onto the bizarre circumstances until my brain simply clocked out. Then a kindly voice cut through the consciousness that was starting to slip away.
"I'm so indignant and so grateful I can hardly stand it. Would you please come to our company and slowly explain what on earth you've been doing that you're only appearing now?"
"I, uh…"
"That voice is incredible too."
"…"
Whatever this was, I just wanted to go home.