The Sinnam Halmang Foundation

Before reaching home, I called the bank.

All sorts of wild thoughts raced through my head during the wait. By ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the end of it, I was beginning to doubt whether the number I had dialed even belonged to an actual bank.

A legitimate withdrawal?

If anything, the representatives seemed suspicious of me. They wondered if I had fallen victim to a voice-phishing scam, or if I was merely an insufferable customer throwing a tantrum over an authorized transfer I had forgotten about. They did not put it in so many words, but the faint edge of exasperation in their voices came through loud and clear.

Click, click.

The moment I stepped inside the front door, I booted up my computer. I typed "Sinnam Halmang Foundation" into the search bar.

Located in the Republic of Korea. Dedicated to supporting patients suffering from rare diseases...

Entering the name brought up an official website right at the top of the search results, alongside detailed encyclopedia entries. By all accounts, it appeared to be an entirely ordinary non-profit corporation. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Furthermore, it had been founded twenty years ago—sharing the exact same age as my current physical body.

I clicked through to the foundation's official homepage. Finding a main representative hotline listed at the bottom, I picked up my phone and dialed the number immediately.

The call connected, and an automated mechanical tone hummed through the receiver. After punching in several directory numbers, I was finally transferred to a human operator.

Judging by the voice, the counselor sounded like a young man. He guided me along with a slender, remarkably clear vocal tone. It was undeniable: the money drained from my account moments ago had indeed flowed straight into this foundation.

"Excuse me, but I never consented to making any donations," I said firmly. "To begin with, I only learned that your foundation existed today."

After I laid out the situation, the counselor asked a few brief verification questions and stated that he would check into the matter right away. The same serene hold music that had played when I first dialed drifted back over the line.

Then, the music abruptly cut out.

"Yes?"

"What? Who the hell are you?"

That was not the counselor I had been speaking with a second ago. The presence on the other end of the line spoke in an inorganic, unyielding drone that lacked even a trace ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠of human warmth.

"A trivial price?"

"Who is this 'other entity'? Explain yourself properly—"

The mechanical voice rattled off statements so absurdly outside the bounds of mundane reality that my usual detachment cracked. I dropped all honorifics, firing questions back in raw disbelief. But having a substantive dialogue with whatever was on the line proved impossible.

Before my sentence could finish, the original male operator's voice resumed. He chirped along cheerfully, acting as though our brief, eerie interruption had never taken place at all.

Come to think of it, my body defied all medical logic.

In all the years I had lived in this world, I had never once experienced mundane physical discomforts like dry eyes or a stuffy nose. I had never caught a routine seasonal cold, suffered an upset stomach, felt the throbbing ache of a headache, or collapsed from fatigue and chills. On top of that, my baseline athletic capacity was remarkably superior. While I might not be a world champion across every discipline, there was not a single physical metric where I fell short.

Above all, my sexual capabilities were an extraordinary, freakish anomaly—not only in sheer anatomical endowment, but in raw stamina and recovery rate. If an international championship for bedroom prowess existed, I would easily take gold on the global stage.

Until now, I simply assumed it was the Goddess being benevolent.

It was certainly a monumental privilege. But having occupied this vessel for so long, I had grown accustomed to treating its perfection as a given. Yet evidently, there was a hidden ledger behind the scenes that I had known nothing about.

Is that why the Male God placed restrictions on me? To maintain some cosmic equilibrium?

The Goddess had bestowed this magnificent physique upon me, and the Male God had countered with constraints. And those constraints were not limited to stunting my skeletal height.

Did he say one precious thing would be taken from me?

It was wealth. A portion of the money I earned through honest sweat and labor was being confiscated by this foundation under the guise of charitable donations. After making that phone call, the truth crystallized in my mind: from now on, thirty percent of every single won I earned would vanish into thin air as a donation.

It was a divine mandate. I had no room to question it, nor any means to resist.

Honestly, when framed as a leasing fee for a flawless body like this, thirty percent is practically a steal.

Once I sorted through my thoughts in the wake of that bizarre call, the indignation simmering in my chest dissipated like mist. The automated entity had not offered an exhaustive breakdown, yet I found myself nodding in quiet acceptance. Nothing had been unjustly stolen from me. If anything, I felt I ought to be paying a far steeper price. The Goddess had cut me an astonishing amount of slack, while someone else shouldered the brunt of the cosmic cost on my behalf.

Because of that realization, I abandoned the various defensive workarounds I had been conjuring to shield my bank account. Losing nearly a third of my monthly earnings was certainly a bitter pill to swallow, but I could shake it off quickly and move forward.

"Noona. Time to eat."

"Come on in~!"

Yeoeun Noona was in the middle of a live broadcast, but I pushed the door open and walked in anyway. Showing my face on camera like this every now and then provided her channel with a tremendous boost, so it was the least I could do.

"Would you guys like to hang out with my little brother for a bit? I'm gonna grab some food."

"Hello, everyone."

I slipped smoothly into the chair she vacated. While my primary motive was to help her stream, I also wanted to verify the exact parameters of the karmic toll I had to pay.

What would happen to donations directed toward me during her stream? This was technically Noona's channel, and all settlement payouts went directly to her bank account. Would those funds still trigger an automatic debit under the guise of a charitable contribution? If they did, how much would be taken? Was thirty percent a rigid, unyielding flat tax without an upper or lower ceiling, or could the percentage fluctuate depending on the circumstance?

I needed definitive answers to those questions. Deep down, an instinct told me that the thirty percent rate was etched in stone. Experience had taught me that these sudden intuitive impressions were rarely wrong, but I still wanted to observe it with my own eyes.

Let's pull in as much as we can before the payout date.

Pajijik processed its creator earnings on the twenty-fifth of every month. I resolved to swell the pool of donation revenue as much as humanly possible before then. After all, I now possessed an urgent motivation to earn massive amounts of money: the lingering obligation that I ought to pay a greater price for the immense biological privileges I enjoyed. If things went well, I could potentially rake in far more through streaming tips than my modest part-time wages at the café.

In other words, I had sat down in front of the lens specifically to stage a fundraising spectacle.

The chat flooded with enthusiastic welcomes. Still, I was at a bit of a loss as to how I should entice the viewers to open their wallets.

"Would it be all right if I stay here just while Noona finishes her meal?"

Even now, small one-thousand-won donations were chiming through the speakers. That was merely the dividend of showing my face on camera. But I remained hungry. I needed much heavier contributions.

"Are you curious about the dinner menu? How do I detach this thing..."

Noona had stepped out to grab a spare chair from my bedroom, so I stood up to unhook the webcam mounted behind the monitor myself.

"Hold on a moment. Is it like this?"

I reached up and fiddled with the adjustable arm holding the camera in place. That single, unassuming motion proved to be more than enough. While I had been agonizing over complex ways to coax donations out of the audience, the solution unfolded with ridiculous ease.

As I struggled to wrest the camera free, text-to-speech donation alerts began firing in rapid ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠succession. Factoring in the backlog of overlapping alerts being queued, the actual number of donations pouring in was vastly higher than what made it through the speakers.

"Huh? Why? Ah, got it. Let me show you what we're having."

Holding the detached camera in my palm, I tilted the lens down toward the meal tray I had carried in, keeping one eye on the chat window.

"What else do you want me to show you? This is all there is. I don't really know how to adjust the screen size, though."

Piecing together their feverish reactions, it seemed that when I had leaned closely into the camera mount, my face had filled the entire monitor. And directly beneath that, my collarbones and a glimpse of bare chest had slipped into view. I glanced down at my shirt; the neckline of the relaxed loungewear I had on was indeed draped fairly loose.

"Is this good enough? I'll put it back now."

"What were you doing?"

"The viewers asked to see the dinner menu."

Right on cue, Yeoeun Noona returned, dragging a wooden chair behind her. I began sliding the camera back onto its mounting arm.

"Wait, what the fuck?! Hey! Hold on!"

Her eyes bulged in shock. She sprinted across the room, lunged forward, and snatched the webcam right out of my hands.

Once she secured the camera firmly back on its mount, Noona whipped her head around and glared at me with fiery intensity.

"What?" I asked innocently.

"What do you mean, 'what'?! Did you seriously just ask me that? Whose channel are you trying to get suspended this time?!"

She fumed loudly, frantically detailing how perilously close we had just danced to a platform ban. Of course, I had been well aware that my chest was partially exposed. The first glimpse had been an accidental slip, but the second adjustment was an entirely calculated maneuver to bait out donations. And true to form, it had detonated a hefty wave of tips.

"I'm sorry..."

It was not as though I had flashed anything scandalous; by my estimation, it stayed safely on the razor's edge just beneath the platform's moderation guidelines. Still, from Noona's perspective, her heart must have plummeted straight into her stomach.

"Don't be mad, Noona."

"Uh—wait, what are you... Sigh."

Offering my apology, I reached out and pulled her into an embrace. I could not bring myself to imitate the cloying, high-pitched coos I had seen men put on in public couples outside. Instead, I simply wrapped my arms firmly around her waist and pressed my cheek gently into her chest.

"I'll be more careful from now on. Okay?"

"Uh... yeah. Sure. It's not like I was actually furious or anything."

I tilted my head back to look up into her face. Her cheeks had flushed a bright, burning crimson, the corners of her mouth twitching uncontrollably.

The furious voice of the TTS pierced the fleeting quiet of the room. Startled, Noona scrambled backward and dropped into her chair.

"Why are you yelling at me? Huh?! What's the big deal? A brother and sister can share this much affection!"

I settled back into my own seat alongside her. By now, the chat room was in utter bedlam.

The screen transformed into a roaring cascade of jealousy: viewers whining about why they did not have an adorable younger foster brother of their own, mixed with people earnestly assembling a raid party to assassinate Eun Yeoeun. Above all, donations were rolling in at a velocity that put my earlier stunt to shame.

"We always hug like this, so what's weird about it? When my little brother... hey, now! The only people making it weird are the ones with dirty minds!"

"Noona, stop winding them up and eat your food before it gets cold."

"Should I~? Kyahaaa! Look at all this! Doesn't everybody have a sweet younger brother at home who cooks them a feast like this every night?"

I had spoken up to rein her in, but she scooted her chair slightly to the side and proceeded to taunt the audience with unrelenting relish. The chat scroll accelerated to a blinding blur unlike anything I had witnessed before.

Right along with it, a relentless hail of one-thousand-won donations pelted the stream. While they lacked the staggering visual impact of the ten-thousand-won chunks sent directly to me, their sheer volume piled up into a formidable sum that could not be overlooked.

Do people online actually enjoy being provoked like this?

A fresh realization clicked into place within my mind.

Once Noona finally shut her mouth and tucked into her meal, the righteous fury in the chat gradually simmered down, and the drumbeat of donations tapered off with it. Seeing the lull, I was just beginning to ponder how I might engineer another lucrative collection angle of my own—

Ding-dong!

A bright, unfamiliar notification chime echoed from the desktop speakers.

"Hm? What is this?" I asked, leaning closer to inspect the prompt. "An Enhancement Mission?"

"Let me see that... No! Absolutely not!"

Yeoeun Noona glanced at the monitor, and her eyes practically bugged out of her skull as she shrieked in absolute terror.