An Unexpected Variable
An unexpected variable had appeared.
"Why? How? Just why? Why, why?"
She stared blankly at the monitor for a long while before demanding answers of the empty air.
The sudden gallery notification.
Its identity was none other than this:
Posting has been blocked by an administrator
Remaining period: 31 days
They had banned her.
"I didn't do anything. I just wrote a post like everyone else…"
In truth, it hadn't been ordinary at all.
Her first sin was failing to talk about novels in the Novel Gallery. Her second was not even reading the short notice that forbade uploading real photos.
Still, thirty-one days is excessive.
She clicked into the inquiry board to protest, then stopped.
She knew her own guilt well enough to recognize that what she was about to do was pure entitlement.
"…Haa."
In the end she pulled her hand from the mouse and let out a long, heavy sigh.
She stripped off the bra she had just put on, tossed it aside, and collapsed onto the bed, staring blankly at the monitor.
"……."
She had gone all the way down to Busan just to buy underwear and post those pictures.
Her vacation ended in three days.
If she had never tasted it, she might have been fine. Once she had tasted it, quitting was hard.
And because it had ended before she could even properly savor it, the regret was all the greater.
"Haa."
She might as well recall yesterday's comments.
She exhaled a long breath and, gazing up at the fluorescent light on the ceiling, began to replay the comments from the day before.
Among the memories that rose one after another, the first to surface was naturally the very first comment that had been left.
Next came the one that had turned her cheeks bright red—the "warararara."
And of course she skipped right over the bastard who had called her favorite black bra a "grandma bra."
When she recalled the comment that had come after that, a sudden thought flashed through her mind.
"……."
She closed her eyes and fell silent for a moment.
She stayed like that for a long while before her pure white cheeks suddenly flushed scarlet.
Fidget, fidget.
She buried her face in the pillow and curled and uncurled her fingers and toes, rolling back and forth across the bed.
"Haa."
Only after nearly a full hour of that did she come back to her senses.
The body that had been soft and dry until moments ago was now soaked in sweat, radiating a warm heat.
Adult streaming.
Adult streaming.
"…Adult streaming."
Something she had never once considered watching, let alone doing herself.
The mere brief fantasy of performing an adult stream had sent a thick liquid seeping out below, softening the soft curls of hair just a little.
"Haa. Haa."
She carefully lowered her right hand and touched herself; the love juices clung to her fingers and stretched out in sticky threads.
Her second life, her twenty-five-year-old life—this was the first time she had ever masturbated.
She tried to slip her middle finger inside a little, then hesitated and simply rubbed gently with her fingers instead.
"Heuut. Heung."
Curled up, only her hips twitching, she seriously considered it.
Just once.
Really, just once—should she try it?
"Haa. Haeung."
Of course, with her poor conversational skills, even if she did it there wouldn't be many people willing to watch.
Adult streaming was still live streaming.
Live streaming was a show run by a single MC.
No matter how outstanding the content, if the host lacked verbal skill they were mercilessly ignored—a sacred ground where only the talented survived.
"Euut. Haeut."
If she streamed, she would clearly suffer a crushing defeat.
A stream that hid the face and showed only the body.
And if she had no gift of gab on top of that, even the single viewer who somehow wandered in would bounce right back out.
"Heuk! Heueut."
Filling the room with the thick frictional sounds of flesh and fluid, she still, still found herself wanting to try it at least once.
Even if only one person ever watched her for her entire life, that would be fine.
Even if that one person never came back the next day and was replaced by someone else, that would be fine.
Because she wanted to be ordinary too.
Because she wanted people to treat her like an ordinary person, the way they treated everyone else.
"Eueut. Haeung!"
All her life she had heard the word "monster" far too many times.
She had lived hearing the words "hope" and "hero" until blood nearly spilled from her ears.
She was just an ordinary person like them.
She had merely lived to meet their expectations.
"Eung…. Heueung."
The dean, the professors, the reporters, the citizens.
She was tired of people who looked completely different all staring at her with the exact same eyes.
She too had emotions and wanted at least one thing she could hide—an ordinary person—yet their gazes seemed determined to mold her into nothing but a pure hero.
Perhaps that was why she clung so hard to what had happened yesterday.
The emotion she had felt then was a long-forgotten shame.
And the clear, pleasant liberation of stepping out from under the title of hero and becoming an ordinary person.
Having long-forgotten feelings revive one after another was a joy so intense it felt as if her chest might burst.
"Heut! Haeut! Aheung!"
The thick liquid that had thoroughly soaked her below now felt watery enough to simply be called moisture.
She arched her hips high toward the ceiling and glanced down; the bedsheets that had never once been soiled were now thoroughly dirtied by the fluids that had come from her body.
"Haa…. Haa."
A second life given to her out of nowhere one day.
Had she ever fallen apart like this while living?
No. As far as she could remember, never once.
Then had she ever felt a sensation like she might fly away, the way she did now?
No. That too, as far as she could remember, never once.
So what would it be like if she actually streamed?
"……."
If she started streaming and people came in, she might hear words she had never imagined, just like at the department store earlier.
Vulgar, grotesque remarks about wanting to fuck her while pulling out her pubic hair, of course—and maybe even, like in the porn she had once seen, wanting to put it somewhere other than her pussy.
A jolt.
"Heut."
And because it was an adult stream, they would casually say they wanted to impregnate her too.
Meanwhile someone would be jerking off to her breasts through the monitor, and someone else would dirty a mountain of tissues while imagining doing it with her.
Without ever knowing that the object they were using as fap material was actually the woman they called a hero—Yoo Jisoo.
"…Heueuk."
The moment the thought reached that far, her lower belly heated up again.
Perhaps this was rebellion.
A rebellion declaring that she was not the pure hero they had arbitrarily created, but an utterly ordinary person.
So, therefore.
"Eung…. Haeut."
Even knowing it would end in disaster, just once.
Wouldn't it be okay to try?
"Heuk! Heueut!"
Only after reaching her second climax did she finally manage to grab her phone.
With a hand still trembling and sticky with love juices, she searched for adult streaming sites.
Tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap.
After wandering around for a long time she found this place.
Choco Banana TV.
South Korea's number-one platform, with a combined real-time viewership still exceeding one million even at this hour.
Curious who was currently ranked first on such a massive stage, she checked and found a woman in her early twenties dressed in a bunny-girl outfit.
…Viewer count is one, ten, a hundred… 190,000?
Wondering what kind of stream could draw so many people, she carefully tapped the screen.
An alert window immediately popped up on the site.
This broadcast is unavailable to viewers under 19
Membership registration is required to watch
"…Well, it's an adult stream, so of course."
While registering, her reason kept asking whether she was really going to do this, whether it was okay, but she deliberately ignored it.
And right as she finished phone verification and was about to press the confirm button, a single thought flashed through her mind.
But… they won't figure out it's me, right?
Viewers might not know, but the moment she signed up, the site operators would have her information stored intact.
Of course the name Yoo Jisoo wasn't particularly rare in Korea, so it wasn't something to worry about that much—yet it still wasn't quite enough to quiet the anxiety that had already bloomed.
What do I do.
What do I do.
Really, what do I do.
She brought her index finger to the confirm button and pulled it away again for a full thirty minutes.
The finger that had lost its way and wandered finally pressed the confirm button.
Tap.
It wasn't because she trusted the site, nor because she had decided to leave it to fate.
She had simply, at last, read the short notice beneath the confirm button.
In that case…
She wasn't naïve enough to believe every word, but it was enough to make the decision.
In one corner of her heart there was also the thought that even if she got caught, she could just brazen it out—what could they do?
The power an S-class hunter held was stronger than people imagined; it could shake the political world, the media, and even the police.
A criminal who had stormed into a school and murdered every innocent student could be declared not guilty in an instant if a Korean S-class hunter so decided.
Not that anything like that would ever happen.
Anyway.
She immediately searched for the bunny-girl woman's stream she had been about to watch and tapped it.
But whether she was too late or because she was using the free version and an ad had appeared—
While she was watching the advertisement, a large notification popped up that the stream had ended.
"Ah…"
She returned to the main screen and paid for the 59,800-won membership that would let her skip ads for a full year.
Then she rummaged through the stream list for a long time until her gaze stopped on one particular entry.
Rank 179. Current viewers: 1,432.
It was a body-only stream, exactly the kind she had been thinking of doing.
As if entranced she tapped the stream screen, and a familiar voice immediately reached her ears.
And the moment she looked at the woman's body—
Someone's name slipped from her lips of its own accord.
"Hwang Jiyeon…?"