016. Strategic Temporary Break
016. Strategic Temporary Break
I'd subscribed to Cheerful Namsu's Neotube and turned on notifications.
Thanks to that, I could confirm the moment a video went up.
‘Who uploads in the morning...’
It was 7 a.m.
Must've been aimed at office workers heading to work or students on their way to school.
‘The editors must have had a rough time.’
The shoot had been just yesterday.
Yet they'd finished editing in a single day and posted it the very next morning—on one hand, that was impressive and worthy of respect.
‘Come to think of it, had I not heard that some edits were completed the same day?’
Looking at it calmly,
I couldn't help but wonder if Nam Hyeon-su was a bit of a slave driver.
Wasn't this running the staff way too ragged?
Well, they probably paid well enough to match, I supposed.
Judging by her first impression, she hadn't seemed like a bad person.
Of course, you could not judge people by appearances alone, and you could not know someone’s true nature without knowing them for a long time.
Anyway, I decided to watch it later and go back to sleep.
The hour was far too early for me.
I was neither an office worker nor a student—I was a jobless bum, after all.
Since I'd started streaming, you could call me a semi-jobless bum without issue, but I was planning a hiatus for a while, so at that moment I was indeed a perfect bum.
‘I should get up at ten.’
I closed my eyes again.
I promptly sank into sweet dreams.
***
I woke at eleven.
It'd been a long while since I'd slept that much.
I really must have built up a lot of fatigue yesterday.
‘Sleeping too much makes you tired too. Should've slept moderately...’
The exhaustion still hadn't lifted.
My body felt even more stiff, maybe from oversleeping.
‘I should get up, anyway.’
Leaving the main bedroom, I went down to the first floor.
Before a shower, I started with my morning cola.
Cola in the morning—as expected.
It felt like energy was rapidly replenishing.
Maybe cola was actually an energy supplement?
Afterward, I finished my shower and moved to the bath chamber.
It was a bath built to evoke a Japanese hot spring.
The water was designed to flow automatically in the morning and evening and drain at midday and dawn.
The facility incorporated scientific technology I didn't understand well.
‘Good thing I spent the big money to build it. The swimming pool was a little extravagant, but I use the bath every day.’
I soaked my body in the warm water right away.
Only now did the fatigue start to ease up.
While I was in the bath, I slowly closed my eyes.
Then something I'd forgotten suddenly came to mind.
‘Ah, right. The video went up this morning, didn't it? May as well watch it now.’
I turned on my smartphone in its waterproof case and went to Cheerful Namsu's Neotube.
「Grocery Shopping at Nobel Mart with a Once-in-a-Generation Stunningly Handsome Man!」
That was the title of the video I'd appeared in.
‘Once-in-a-generation... The wording's a little embarrassing.’
My face was on the thumbnail.
However, it was mosaic-censored.
It looked like a ploy to make people click.
And that ploy seemed to have succeeded.
‘Oh... The views were insane?’
The upload time was 7 a.m.
Only about four hours had passed so far.
Even so, it had already hit 150,000 views.
‘And a ton of comments too.’
After starting the video,
I checked the comment section while watching.
At the very top, the comment with the most 'likes' was displayed.
It had a full three thousand hearts.
─Wow. I came in not expecting much, but I dropped my phone in shock when I saw the guest's face. Probably the most handsome guy I've seen in my life.
└Agreed. Fucking good-looking for real.
└Thought it was clickbait but it's genuinely insane.
└To the point Cheerful Namsu looks like a squid lol
└Hmm. Isn't it just an average face?
└└lololol average face? You're a guy, right?
└Does anyone know that guy Gye Se-hun's Instagram address? Please tell me T_T
The more I read the comments, the more my confidence in my appearance rose.
Right after I'd started streaming,
my self-esteem had nearly bottomed out because no viewers were coming in.
‘But from what I had kept noticing, my face had to be far more handsome than I had ever thought. I had never been cheered that enthusiastically before. Maybe it was because I had attended an all-boys high school?’
I'd often heard I was good-looking in the previous world too.
But that was it.
I'd never even had my number taken—the most basic thing.
My life was a hundred and eighty degrees different from my counterpart in this world.
Although, the me on this side hadn't been hit on that much either.
‘In whatever world, people mostly just glanced at me on the sly and never actually spoke up... I might've come off as a little hard to approach.’
Truth was, I wasn't especially interested in looks.
I'd never compared my face to anyone else's.
Naturally, I had never wondered how attractive I was, either.
Just that I was on the good-looking side—that one thought was the extent of it.
So maybe that's why it felt a bit intriguing.
Because practically no one had launched a full-on offensive of excessive praise right to my face.
‘Maybe it was also because I let my hair grow out shaggy and messy during my school days...’
Well, in any case, I now knew I was more handsome than I'd thought.
End of thoughts on looks.
I wasn't a narcissist, after all.
I decided to go back to checking comments.
─Right now people are swarming Nobel Mart like crazy lololol there's no parking spots either, fuck!!!
└Fr? PR jackpot then.
└lolol how long has the video even been up?
└Why go now when you won't even see that guy?
└To catch the lingering scent left behind, apparently.
└Desperately bored. How much free time do you have to drive all the way out to the sticks?
└It's not the sticks, though? It's Gyeonggi-do?
└Not all of Gyeonggi-do is the same Gyeonggi-do.
└That place is definitely the sticks.
There was a comment saying the Nobel Mart parking lot was full.
I could not imagine it.
That vast parking lot had no vacancies.
‘It seemed like just a troll comment. It hadn't even been half a day since the video went up; there was no way that many people already flooded in.’
I didn't know whether it was a lie or not.
If it turned out to be true, I figured I'd go back to my original mart from now on.
Because I preferred quiet places to crowded ones.
I kept watching the video and checked the other comments.
Then I came across one comment that caught my eye.
─Hello. I am Se-hun's childhood friend who lived next door. Our connection was cut off when Se-hun suddenly moved away in middle school, and I never dreamed I'd learn of his current whereabouts like this on Neotube. If it isn't too much trouble, could you tell Se-hun to contact me? [email protected] is my email address. I beg you, please.
What the hell was this one about?
My childhood friend?
Maybe someone from the same orphanage...
No. Right, this was a different world.
The me here hadn't been abandoned by my parents.
‘So this body had a childhood friend who lived next door, apparently.’
Out of curiosity, I braced for a headache and tried to retrace this world's memories.
But nothing came to mind.
The memory was too hazy.
‘Middle school was not that long ago... Even though my memories from the previous world were vivid, memories from this world did not resurface easily.’
It wasn't strange.
Strictly speaking, the me who'd lived in this world was a separate individual from the current me.
And since I didn't have a computer-like brain with total recall, it made no sense that I'd hold all those memories intact.
‘Dunno. If it didn't come back to me this much, I probably wasn't that close to them.’
I gave up trying to remember.
It could just be a simple troll, or someone who'd unilaterally fantasized they were childhood friends.
‘Anyway, the production quality was nice. The editing was clean too.’
Before I knew it, the video ended.
The content wasn't anything special.
It was just a summary of what happened yesterday.
For reference, they'd edited out any scenes that might spark controversy, but the parts where I cursed off and on were left in.
The editor must've taken that as my streaming concept too.
Excessive profanity was edited out, of course.
‘They didn't edit out the introduction calling me a streamer, either. Well, it didn't matter.’
There was no particular reason to edit it anyway.
The live-stream viewers already knew that information.
Having finished watching, I got out of the bath.
***
In front of the bath chamber,
I stood stark naked before the full-body mirror and gave my body a once-over.
‘Mm... Yeah, no matter how I looked, there wasn't any big difference.’
The me in this world hadn't exercised.
Yet my body here was identical to my body from the previous world.
The outline of my abs was still sharp too.
‘I busted my ass building muscle, and this bastard just slept in like a slacker and maintained this physique?’
Pretty damn fascinating.
But I quickly shook off the question.
Because good news was just good news.
My mammoth was still intact, so there was no issue.
‘Still, I should keep exercising consistently. There was no telling when the body might break down. I would do some home training that day, and the mountain hike could wait until I streamed.’
Like I'd said earlier.
I was on a streaming hiatus for a few days.
The reason for the hiatus was simple.
To dodge pursuit from those dipshits, the Male Supremacy Group.
I just had a feeling I'd end up exhausted if I got tangled up with those bastards.
A strategic temporary hiatus, in other words.
‘About two days on hiatus should do, right?’
Today I'd exercise and rest well, and tomorrow I planned to go take the driver's license exam.
The day after that, I had no schedule.
So a two-day hiatus was exactly perfect.
Being home alone got lonely and boring, after all...
***
The next day.
I visited the testing center to reacquire my driver's license, the Class 1 standard type.
After completing a brief physical examination,
I headed to where an examiner was waiting for the road driving test.
Since I held a Class 2 license, the written test was waived.
"Hello."
"Ah, yes. Hello."
The examiner was a man.
A rather special case in this world.
And beside the examiner was another test-taker.
A woman.
She was wearing mouse-grey top and bottom.
Was that a modernized hanbok?
No matter how I looked at it, it seemed like it.
‘Did that person rub honey on her phone screen or something? She literally couldn't peel her eyes off it.’
Her concentration was impressive.
Whether another test-taker came or not, she was laser-focused solely on her phone.
For some reason she looked dead serious.
Was she watching stocks or crypto?
Just as I was thinking that,
the examiner glanced back and forth between the two of us and asked with a puzzled expression.
"Is matching color-coordinated fashion trendy among the young folks these days?"
At those words, the woman raised her head.
And stared at me.
"Uh, uh? Gye Se-hun...?"
Her eyes went wide as a rabbit's.
She seemed to be someone who knew me.