The Beginning
For a moment, I really did wonder if Kim Do-yoon, the man who had spent years welded to his room, had finally lost his mind—or stumbled into some inexplicable mystery.
On the screen, a pink-haired character with cat ears tilted her head this way and that.
She blinked like something alive, lips moving as if she were actually speaking.
An unknown creature streaming was out of the question. The most plausible explanations were either a highly advanced AI character or a person controlling her from somewhere behind the scenes.
I returned to the main page of the streaming platform and scrolled through the thumbnails.
That was when I understood.
At last, the world was being ruled by artificial intelligen—
No. Not that. It was a whole new category called VTubers.
VTuber, short for Virtual YouTuber.
They streamed using avatar characters instead of their real faces. Just what had happened in the six years since I left the streaming scene for technology to advance this far?
At first I thought, Who would even watch this? But a significant number of streamers on the platform’s main page were already using virtual characters.
The world moved fast.
Back in my day there had been no-cam streamers, sure, but nothing like this.
The emotions that arrived with the discovery of this new territory were curiosity, and a faint thread of envy.
If only I had come out six years earlier…
“……I should just work on the arrangement.”
I shook my head free of the useless fantasy.
Closing my eyes, I sank Lunari’s voice and the melody of the song back into my head.
Her voice—languid yet carrying real strength—and those bouncy tracks tumbled around without any discipline.
Where to start, how far to go, what to touch.
If I tracked down the original accompaniment file, dropped the key a couple steps, and slowed the tempo, I could scrub away the dissonance that had been assaulting my ears. But something about that felt lacking.
Whether composing or arranging, there was never an easy ceiling when you were shaping sound.
Ba-da-ram—! Ba-bam!
Here… the synth bass is sticking out and killing the dreamy tone.
I muttered without meaning to and wiped the existing tracks clean.
Guitar should be acoustic, not electric. A lonely, dry tone. Maybe layer in the library with the most vintage texture among the virtual instruments.
By this point it had stopped being a simple arrangement and become something closer to re-creation.
Dozens of new instrument tracks stacked up in the Cubase window. Now that it was passing through my hands, a strange stubbornness and obsession flared up—I wanted to wrap that excellent tone in the most perfect package in the world.
The part that needed the most care was the section right before the chorus.
That cursed stretch where Lunari had forced a high note yesterday until her breath gave out and she was gasping.
Personally, I believed that in music, “sound” mattered, but the presence that “space” could create mattered just as much.
Emptying something out often gave me more peace than packing it full.
Right. Just before that high-note entrance, I’d drop the volume of every instrument to zero for one or two full seconds—total mute.
So that when Lunari’s breath ran short and she sucked in air with a sharp hup, that rough inhale itself could become the most dramatic element of the music.
Not bad. Yeah. Good.
Time kept moving.
I came back to myself around the time three Hot Six cans had piled up on the desk.
The clock in the bottom-right corner of the monitor already read 7:30 a.m.
A thin wash of morning light seeped through the blackout curtains, but my room remained cool and dim.
I’d pulled an all-nighter.
Composing for a complete stranger for the first time left me feeling oddly fulfilled, which was nice…
But, well…
Once the track was finished and I looked back at what I’d done, a faint embarrassment crept in.
Imagination alone hadn’t been enough, so I’d gone into streamer Lunari’s channel and even rewatched old VODs.
I’d hunted down the clips where she sang, filled myself with inspiration, spotted her habits, and decided what sounds to add.
Simple sources or effects to catch her when her strength was about to dip, or pulling power out of the instruments in the places where she came in with confidence.
I had truly rewritten the song for this one person alone.
Ugh.
And once it was all done, my finger froze the moment before I hit send on the finished audio file.
I couldn’t bring myself to press that “Send” button.
I’d even calculated her breathing timing to carve the accompaniment? It might come off as a little perverted…
Everything had only ever happened inside my head. I had no idea if it would actually suit her.
I’d gotten excited, gone and done it, and only now felt regret—truly the mark of a six-year shut-in.
I stayed frozen like that for another twenty minutes of agonizing before tossing myself a scrap of self-comfort—It’s just for fun. It should be fine. It’s not like I got paid for it—and clicked Send.
Absolutely not because the strength left my finger on the mouse. I pressed it because the deliberation was over. That was the truth.
Ha.
My hands began to tremble faintly.
I buried my face in both palms and collapsed onto the desk.
For a person with severe social anxiety sticking his nose into someone else’s business, the mental toll was far too brutal.
A few hours ago, playing with the track had been fun. What was this now?
I really had become half a human being.
Streamer Lunari, real name Yu Nari.
Yu Nari considered herself a realist.
Sure, it was the applied music department of a no-name university. But wasn’t this industry the kind of place where skill kept you alive? If she could grow her singing and someday have a stage of her own, she wouldn’t care where—
Nineteen-year-old Yu Nari, submitting her application, had truly believed that. It was a fairly decent resolution. At least she had thought so.
The problem was that reality had quietly, steadily eaten that resolve away.
The early days of enrollment hadn’t been bad. On the first day of practical class, the professor had listened to Yu Nari sing, fallen briefly silent, then said, “Your tone is unique.” Nari had clung to those words for a long time. Unique was a good thing. It had to be a good thing.
But as the semesters passed, something started to slip out of alignment.
Her classmates each seemed to be finding their places.
The one who could belt powerful high notes.
The one who digested jazz like water.
The one who composed on the side and carved their name into the professors’ memories.
Yu Nari felt herself being pushed back between them, little by little, just a little at a time.
She wasn’t conspicuously bad, but for her that was an even greater curse.
The ambiguous kid who was neither good nor bad.
No one anywhere told her, “Nari, this is how you should do it.”
So she tried to study. When she shone brightest while singing. What she lacked.
She tried following popular genres.
She tried copying trendy vocal techniques.
She even took famous lessons.
None of it was useful.
No—beyond useless, those hasty attempts had even begun to blur the strengths Yu Nari already possessed.
When her classmates gathered in twos and threes to go busking, Yu Nari always offered some vague excuse.
I have an assignment— I’m not feeling well— Next time, next time.
The truth was she was scared. Scared of standing her broken self in front of strangers, and of the evaluations that would come back from her classmates afterward.
Yu Nari kept shrinking, and her stage grew narrower with her.
Then, by chance, she learned about VTubers.
You didn’t have to show your face, they said. You could stand on a stage with only your voice.
The moment Yu Nari heard that, something prickled in a corner of her chest. She deliberately chose not to decide whether it was hope or escape.
Letting people hear her sing was the same either way. That was how she could persuade herself.
The name came from Luna—the moon she loved—plus Nari: Lunari.
She had changed only a single character from her own name.
A tiny stubbornness: she would not hide completely.
Naturally, viewers were few. “Few” was actually a polite way of putting it; there were almost none. One or two people drifting in and out.
Still, Nari sang. Being able to sing for someone else felt good.
If someone was listening, she tried to believe that was enough.
And it was the encounter with one viewer in the small hours of that morning that put the first crack in her mask.
asdf1234.
A clumsy, slapdash nickname.
He was one of the few precious audience members she had, yet the chat he typed made Yu Nari’s hands and feet start to shake.
This was no ordinary person.
People who touched settings were, with high probability, musicians.
She gripped her nerves and kept talking brightly, but now her heart was pounding.
How had someone who smelled like a professional ended up in a little hako stream like this?
Had she accidentally posted a promo in a professionals’ community while scattering posts around?
There had been a few places where she’d mechanically dropped links, checked the board atmosphere, and deleted them.
But she’d wiped them all quickly. So where on earth…
That wasn’t the important part.
To look as unbothered as possible, to avoid having to sing, she chattered about this and that.
Sadly, Yu Nari’s efforts ended with a single casual line of chat.
She squeezed her eyes shut.
She didn’t want to sing in front of a professional.
It felt like even this precious space was being invaded by school professors and her successful classmates.
A single invisible viewer felt like a judge.
The moment it stopped being a comfortable place, a wave of nausea rose.
Even so, Yu Nari did not run.
“I-I’m practicing a song right now, actually? Just wait a second.”
The fact that her face was hidden.
That single shield was what held her body upright.
Pushing the complicated feelings aside, she played the MR of the most popular song of late.
“……”
The result was catastrophic.
It hadn’t been this bad in practice, but under extreme tension she simply collapsed.
“Ahem… This is a song I’ve been loving lately. There were a tiny? few cracks, but it’s pretty exciting, right?”
Behind the camera, her face had flushed bright red.
Tiny tears had gathered, but she forced herself to look bright.
Please just leave quietly.
Or just give me some polite reactions.
Please don’t see through how pathetic my skill is.
Or be the kind of saint who still offers praise after seeing this mess.
She prayed, but the cold feedback that arrived shattered Yu Nari’s prayer, and she froze solid.
She might have cursed her past self for not running away.
“A kids’ T-shirt… My singing is that level…?”
It was the kind of ambiguous evaluation she might have brushed off on a normal day, but she happened to be standing on a cliff edge.
The tears that had been pooling spilled down her cheeks.
The feeling of a hard-built fortress crumbling.
She fell endlessly and slammed into the ground.
She turned off the mic and quietly sobbed, but the chat continued.
Ironically, the same person who had shoved her into the mud now lowered a rope.
Liar.
Someone like me, what…
Yu Nari buried her face and deliberately ignored the rope.
There was sincerity in the longer chat message.
She lifted her head a little and pressed her lips tight.
Was it real?
She still didn’t know.
“I don’t know… I’m just not good enough…”
Yu Nari asked and asked again.
Whether she was really an okay singer.
Whether she had good talent.
She must have asked more than ten times.
In the chat window with only one viewer, answers like “Yes” and “Yeah, yeah” soon lined up in a straight column.
Yu Nari wiped her tears and straightened her posture.
She still had no certainty.
It was just the words of a viewer who had drifted in by chance—why was she being tossed around so easily?
Even so, she was happy.
How long had it been since someone said she had talent? Knowing there was someone who liked her voice made her happy.
“I can really stay up all night waiting! I’ll send you my email address right now!! I’m going to stream again tomorrow night, so you have to come!!”
Yu Nari delivered the words joyfully—then flinched.
Ah. Does that sound like I’m expecting too much from the track?
Being offered an arrangement was a happy thing, but she hadn’t placed any huge meaning on it.
Wouldn’t it be unrealistic to pin hopes on a random stream viewer helping her when even university professors and the classmates who flew and crawled through the scene hadn’t been able to?
Just having someone sincerely praise her voice, her tone, was already enough.
“You can send the track whenever it’s convenient for you, no rush. But please, please come find the stream.”
So she added that.
Because that was the more realistic wish.
After the stream ended that night, Yu Nari cried and blew her nose until she was empty, then slept like a stone.
And when she opened her eyes in the morning, a single file was waiting in her inbox.
A plain subject line, no content, just a file attached to a single email.
The viewer who had offered to arrange something for her had already sent an MR.
Her eyes went round at the speed—then a small disappointment settled in.
She’d said she wasn’t expecting anything, but apparently a “what if” had been sitting in her heart after all.
Judging by how fast it arrived, maybe he’d just adjusted the key and tempo? Even that would be more than enough. She’d already received plenty.
“Let’s give it a listen.”
Only then did she set the expectations down and casually hit play.
Da-ri-ri-ring— doong—
The original’s quick, light idol-dance synth tones were nowhere to be found. Instead, a heavy, cool acoustic guitar melody slowly filled the room.
“……?”
An arrangement? Isn’t this a completely different song?
From the very intro the audio was so transformed that Yu Nari’s pupils trembled in tiny shocks.