070. Beneath the Scarlet Ceiling Light, the Kitchen
070. Beneath the Scarlet Ceiling Light, the Kitchen
Reformed Guburi.
Real name Yu A-yeon.
She was currently watching Gye Se-hun's stream and giving backseat instructions.
【Reformed Guburi】─First, put some cooking oil in the pan.
【Reformed Guburi】─Next, stir-fry the meat.
【Reformed Guburi】─Now add the vegetables and stir-fry. Add a spoonful of minced garlic too.
【Reformed Guburi】─Don't put enoki mushrooms in, you motherfucker!
【Reformed Guburi】─You bastard! Just do what I tell you!
【Reformed Guburi】─What, what, what, what? Don't suddenly dump salt in, you fuck!
［Huh? Guburi, you told me to take the salt off the shelf.］
【Reformed Guburi】─No, I told you to set it out. Who told you to shake a shitload in right away? Gye Bastard-hun, do you just dump it in women like that too? You wanna die?
［Fine. I'll do as you say, so quit your bitching.］
【Reformed Guburi】─If you'd listened sooner, I wouldn't have bitched. Fucking sex bastard. -_-
A small smile hung on Yu A-yeon's lips as she typed in chat to give him the recipe.
Then, abruptly.
Memories of her past, memories involving cooking that she didn't want to recall, resurfaced, and the smile on her lips began to fade.
*
*
*
Yu A-yeon had loved cooking ever since she was young.
She didn't have many friends.
The first hobby she picked up, being someone with poor social skills, was cooking, something she could do by herself.
She cooked by following recipes floating around the internet, and she was so serious about cooking that she even developed her own menus.
So her career path naturally headed in a cooking-related direction, and she threw herself into the job market immediately after graduating high school.
The place she got hired was a famous chef's restaurant.
She didn't know the chef personally, but.
It was a relationship they'd built since her school days, sharing recipes with each other through a blog.
In other words, she'd basically gotten the job through connections.
And so, the looks she got from the other cooks weren't friendly.
She was bullied without even realizing it.
She was constantly being picked on over trivial things and cursed out.
Naturally, she didn't get close to anyone at work either.
But she was fine with it.
She'd always been alone during her school days anyway.
She was used to being bad-mouthed behind her back, being ignored, and being ostracized.
She continued her working life with difficulty like that.
It was around the time a year had passed since she started working at the restaurant.
Because of the office politics played by her coworkers.
Her relationship with the chef gradually soured, too. In the end, Yu A-yeon quit the restaurant and decided to enter a cooking competition hosted by a major broadcasting station.
<World's Greatest Cooking Competition>
-Prize money: 1 billion won
It was a cooking competition of unprecedented scale.
If she could just win this, not only would she gain fame, but she could use the prize money to open her own restaurant.
‘At my level, I could definitely win...!’
With her hopes high, Yu A-yeon submitted her application to the broadcasting station.
*
*
*
The first day of the cooking competition.
The moment Yu A-yeon saw one of the other contestants, she panicked.
It was a high school alumna.
She'd come face-to-face with a member of the group that had persistently bullied her.
‘I swear... back when we graduated high school, she said in passing that she had nothing better to do and might learn to cook...’
Yu A-yeon inwardly sneered as she looked at her former classmate.
It was laughable that a noob who didn't even know the 'c' in 'cook' would overstep her bounds and enter such a large-scale competition.
‘She'd get knocked out in the preliminaries anyway. I was the one who'll win.’
That was what she thought.
But that confidence crumbled rapidly after she advanced to the main round.
[It's bland.]
[I had expectations since you worked at Chef So-and-so's restaurant, but I'm disappointed.]
[You're serving this to people to eat?]
The day of the main round.
Harsh criticism from the judges poured down on one contestant.
That contestant was none other than Yu A-yeon.
[Huh? Uh, well, that's...]
The atmosphere was completely different from the preliminaries, where the staff had showered her with praise.
Flustered, Yu A-yeon could barely speak.
She was ridiculed by the judges and eliminated in a flash.
On the other hand.
The cooking of the alumna she'd sneered at received rave reviews.
It was unbelievable that she'd even made it to the main round, and now every single judge was lavishing her cooking with praise.
The moment Yu A-yeon saw that scene, her mind went completely blank, like a fresh sheet of paper.
She felt a sense of disillusionment.
It felt as if her whole life, which she'd devoted to cooking until now, was being denied.
In the end, seized by despair, she enlisted in the military as if she were running away.
She served as a cook in the military, and after her discharge.
Having fallen into a severe lethargy, Yu A-yeon holed up at home until she was twenty-four. She'd devolved into an unemployed loser doing nothing but watching internet streams day and night.
Occasionally, she'd think she couldn't keep living like this.
She'd tried challenging herself with cooking streams or gaming streams.
But because she wasn't good with words, her viewer count never grew, so she gave up quickly. She decided she'd just live a life of going around to small-time male cam streamers, stirring up shit, and then meet her end in solitude.
That was until she saw Gye Se-hun's stream.
［Guburi. Is there anything else to add?］
Gye Se-hun's question shattered Yu A-yeon's reminiscence.
"...Fuck, sex, pussy, cock."
Deciding to quickly forget the past, Yu A-yeon hurriedly typed in chat.
【Reformed Guburi】─Add salt to taste.
［How much salt?］
【Reformed Guburi】─That's for you to figure out, you bastard!
And then,
she resolved to get another job in the food service industry soon, knowing that if she kept living like this, she wouldn't be able to pay her rent and phone bill eventually.
In order to earn money and watch Gye Se-hun's stream for a long time.
"Without me, Gye Bastard-hun's stream will fail."
Yu A-yeon.
No, Reformed Guburi had found a new reason to live.
***
I slowly stirred the crimson broth in the large pot with a ladle.
‘The visuals look decent.’
The smell was also pretty good.
It was a stimulating, spicy scent that whetted the appetite.
‘Stirring it this much seems about right...’
After turning off the induction burner.
I opened the rice cooker and scooped some white rice onto a plate.
Like that, one half of the wide plate, as big as a tray, was filled with rice, and I poured the jjamppong sauce over the other half.
Cooking made with Guburi's help.
Jjamppongbap was complete.
【Reformed Guburi】─Gye Bastard-hun. But why are you eating rice again? Are you a piglet?
【Yoho】─Right? Didn't you eat at the neighbors' house?
"...Just think of it as a late-night snack. All my hunger came back while I was walking home."
【Reformed Guburi】─I see.
【Hottie Licker】─lol lick.
【Reformed Guburi】─The Hottie bastard's chat got short again. Fucking ease up on the jerking off. Fuck.
【Yoho】─Hottie, your bones are gonna waste away at this rate.
【Hottie Licker】─nope, working. Making exam questions. lick.
【Reformed Guburi】─Oh.
"Guys. I'm going to go take this food to Gyejipsa, so wait just a bit."
【Reformed Guburi】─Does that bastard have no feet? Tell her to come down and get it herself. fuck.
【Yoho】─Exactly. You're spoiling her.
【Min-ji】─Can't you just let Gyejipsa appear on stream while you're at it?
【Reverse-Rape Maniac】─fr, I'm curious what she looks like.
【BigGirl】─I'm curious, too.
"I can't do that. Gomdori... no, Gyejipsa has severe social phobia."
After spinning a decent lie.
I picked up the bowl of jjamppongbap and went up to the second floor.
Because I had to feed our Gomdori dinner, too.
***
The women, having finished their shower, came into the living room.
"Oh, what's this? It smells good."
Dick Lover, with a towel draped over her shoulder, sat down on a dining chair and spoke.
She looked back and forth between the camera and her phone and asked.
"Where did Se-hun go?"
【Reformed Guburi】─Went to feed Gye-Sekki-jipsa.
"Does that bastard have no feet? She should come down and get it herself."
【Reformed Guburi】─Right? Fuck. lol
【Qkrnfl892】─But why are all your clothes black?
【Se-hun Defense Force】─lololol are those uniforms?
【Reverse-Rape Maniac】─What's with you darkies? lololol
"Oh, these? Se-hun set out some clothes for us to change into in front of the bath."
【Yoho】─Gasp. Don't tell me those are the streamer's clothes?
【Hottie Licker】─yeah, obviously Se-hun's clothes at a glance. lick.
【Min-ji】─I wanna wear them too...
【Semen Thief】─Me too...
【BigGirl】─You're really living in luxury today. But where did Bubblegum go?
"Bubblegum?"
Dick Lover, who had been reading BigGirl's chat, turned to look back.
She could only see Plum Blossom and Catgirl.
"Plum Blossom. Where did Bubblegum go? Wasn't she coming with you?"
"...Huh? What? She was definitely walking right next to me... Where'd she vanish to in that time?"
Dick Lover asked.
As Plum Blossom answered as if she had no idea,
"The monster kid? A little while ago, she sidled off to the side and then scurried up the stairs to the second floor?"
Catgirl casually revealed Bubblegum's whereabouts and took her seat.
Plum Blossom smacked the back of Catgirl's head with all her might.
"You crazy bitch! If you saw that, you should have caught her!"
"Aack! Why are you hitting me! She'll come back on her own, you said she's an adult, not a kid!"
"Haah. I don't care. If Se-hun says something, you take responsibility."
"Responsibility, my ass... Well, you want me to go catch her now?"
"Just sit down. Se-hun told us not to go up to the second floor."
"Isn't that because of the Gomdori yokai? It's something we all already know anyway... Mmph!"
Plum Blossom clamped Catgirl's mouth shut.
Then, conscious of the camera, she spoke quietly.
"There are a lot of viewers who don't know, so get a clue and shut up."
Catgirl nodded silently.
Like that, they decided to stay seated and wait until Gye Se-hun returned.
***
I handed the jjamppongbap to Gomdori.
At that, Gomdori began to wolf down the food hurriedly.
It seemed he'd been very hungry all this time.
［Oooh! It's good! But it's spicy! I'll drink cola, too!］
"Glad you think it's good. Then I'll head back down now, so if you want more, tell me in chat."
The moment I said that and turned around.
Thud!
The sound of the door opening roughly rang out, and.
"Pasha! I wonder what kind of room this is!"
Bubblegum's playful voice followed immediately after.
"..."
"Oh? It's Se-hun!"
My eyes and Bubblegum's met.
And Gomdori, who had been shoveling food into their mouth, also ended up locking eyes with Bubblegum.
［Wakyapya...］
Bubblegum stared intently at Gomdori, then tilted her head and asked in a low voice.
"...Gyejipsa?"