Orororong
Reading Lee Eun-byul's relentless stream of feedback, I spat a curse.
"This fucking bitch?"
The same girl who usually let things slide as long as I made the scene vaguely hot enough was now nitpicking at the level of a goddamn broadcast censor. The moment anything — no matter how trivial — didn't match the picture in her head, she pointed it out without the slightest hesitation. And with every correction, the man in the drawing looked a little more like me.
"You said it wasn't me, you little shit!"
And just how the hell did she see me, anyway? Sure, I had my share of grievances with the world — but I wasn't pissed off at everything!
Hearing my complexes laid out like that, even from behind an anonymous handle, put me in a quietly foul mood. I tipped my head back and let out a long breath.
"Haaah…"
The sigh rose from deep in my chest and scattered into the air. In the end, I decided to just admit it.
Yeah. It's me.
Truth be told, I could have drawn exactly what she wanted even without all that feedback. All I had to do was draw myself. I'd never done a self-portrait before, but I'd copied plenty of other faces in my time, so it wouldn't have been that hard. Even so, I'd deliberately drawn the male character a little differently on purpose. Why? I wanted to run a small experiment. If the character she actually wanted wasn't me at all — if I'd just been getting ahead of myself, drinking the kimchi soup before the rice was even cooked — then she might have been satisfied enough to let it go. There had also been a sliver of hesitation about drawing my own face so directly. But watching her fire off feedback that ruthless, I couldn't deny it anymore.
She wanted me naked. Even if it was only on paper, she wanted to see my dick standing at full attention.
Confirming that, I couldn't help making a complicated face.
"That's… something, all right……"
A complicated face. That was the only way to put it. I wasn't smiling, exactly, and I wasn't frowning either. A whole mess of feelings had mixed and tangled together, and some emotion I couldn't even name myself was floating up across my features.
Being involved was, on its own, a good thing. Commissioning a drawing like this at all meant she had some kind of interest in me, and having anyone take an interest was welcome news. The problem was that the interest had bloomed in a seriously twisted direction. I would have much preferred she just walk up and say she wanted to have sex — I would have happily eaten her up like a special on the menu. Instead, true to her chickenshit nature, she was commissioning art behind my back. And because her sadistic streak had gotten into the mix, the me on the page was warped beyond recognition.
Just look at that arrogant expression. His eyes were loaded with contempt as he looked down on her, a mocking little smile playing at the corner of his mouth. The shit-eating grin sat on the face so naturally that, to me, it was genuinely unpleasant to look at.
I couldn't help wondering.
Why commission something like this all of a sudden?
We'd been friendly enough, sure. We talked a lot, messed with each other a lot. But I didn't remember ever putting out a sexual vibe strong enough to turn myself into her fap material…
Then a memory flickered through my head.
Ah. Was it that time?
When I'd gone full serious and cracked Ho-cheol across the face. I'd just been pissed off and decided to teach that gayboy Ho-cheol a real lesson — but from her point of view, it might have landed differently. She was a masochist, after all… maybe watching me slap someone without mercy had registered as some kind of sex appeal. If that was it, well. The only thing I could say was that her degeneracy ran deep.
"Hah."
The whole thing left a complicated taste in my mouth, but I revised the drawing the way she wanted anyway.
Fortunately, the revisions themselves didn't take long. There was only the one male character to fix, and the reference material was sitting right in front of me, so it was over before I knew it. That said, I didn't copy myself down to every last peach-fuzz hair. That would have been way too mortifying. I kept my distinctive features and sculpted the character so he still looked a little different. I figured she'd be satisfied with that.
I sent the finished drawing straight to Good-for-nothing Me. Well? Is this the picture you wanted, Little Prince?
Well no shit. The original was sitting right in front of me.
The feeling of looking in a mirror and drawing a nude self-portrait was… how to put it. It felt like I'd turned into some narcissistic gay guy. Of course I wasn't a narcissist, and I sure as hell wasn't a gay guy who got off looking at other people's dicks.
She was clearly worked up. The drawing I'd done for her must have hit the spot. She tossed me an extra twenty bucks and vanished without a trace. What a "girl" did after getting hot and bothered looking at nudes was obvious enough.
Someone using my self-portrait as fap material… there couldn't be a rarer experience on earth. For a moment I pictured her frantically peeling off those leggings, then decided to stop thinking about it for the sake of my own dignity.
More importantly, my work wasn't done. I'd satisfied the client's libido; now it was time to get my consumers wet. Three days had already passed since I'd taken Good-for-nothing Me's commission. Not that I'd been neglecting Geumtaeyang in the meantime — I'd been slowly finishing it even while working on the commission piece. Sitting in my hands right now was a brand-new, still-warm Chapter 4 of Geumtaeyang, fresh as of yesterday.
I uploaded both pieces — Geumtaeyang and the commission — straight to Pinbox. A private shelter reserved for the patrons who dutifully threw money at me. From now on, only the slaves who paid me tribute would get to see these two works.
Which raised a question. Fine, Geumtaeyang I understood — but why upload a commission piece to the Pinbox account too? Didn't commission work normally go up on Paxiv or Tartalos like everything else?
The reason was simple.
How the hell am I supposed to post this…
Honestly? I was embarrassed. It was just a drawing, and I'd stylized it a little — but that was still me, naked. For someone whose boldest community appearance to date had been a pale white stomach, this was a massive leap. So I put it on Pinbox for now. Only my patrons would see it there, which I figured would be a little less mortifying. One thing I was sure of, though.
It'll be popular.
That wasn't me jerking myself off. It was an objective assessment. Separate from how the character looked, the composition itself was incredibly appealing. A point of view centered on a woman's ass, as if you were looking up at the man from below — and at the end of that gaze, an arrogantly drawn me, staring coldly down at her like she was something to be observed. Looking down on someone had a strangely erotic charge to it by nature. I figured my core audience of masochist chicks would lose their minds.
Time to sleep.
I posted the pieces and dove straight onto the mattress. The hard work of the day was done; now it was time to take a trip to the land of pleasant dreams.
"Huuuh…"
The mattress's soft flesh wrapped around me. The cotton under that thin sheet felt as plush and yielding as Seong A-rin's chest. It was enough to make me wonder if mattresses weren't just made of countless breasts packed together. A mattress made of breasts… a bed that was somehow grotesque and overflowing with romance at the same time. I followed that idle thought down into sleep, without the faintest idea that in real time, I was becoming a gravure idol.
"What the fuck…?"
A few hours later, I woke up to a catastrophe. Some miserable bastard had gone and posted the drawing on Tartalos without asking.
A post dripping with every filthy word in the book.
"Oh my god…"
Dozens of people were pawing over my avatar with their words. I blacked out on the spot.