Why Are There Two Breaths?
It was late into the small hours of the morning. Lee Un couldn't sleep, so he was scrolling through Streamer Gallery.
None of it was wrong. A phone mic and a free stock avatar. He'd been shoved into streaming, so he hadn't bothered caring.
But now he meant to do this properly. And if that was the case, the tools had to change first.
The way a shaman chose a blade-board. The way a carpenter chose a plane. Work like his needed a baseline of proper tools, same as any other craft.
Lee Un messaged Saet-byeol.
His phone rang. The moment he picked up, an excited voice poured through.
"Dude, you finally came to your senses? I was about to bring it up, and you said it first? You got the money? You barely got any donations yet."
That was true. He'd gone viral, but it was still early — the donations that had come in so far weren't much.
"I've got my severance. Unemployment benefits are coming in too."
"Oh, right. Alright, see you tomorrow. Leave it to unnie."
The next day, the two of them went to an equipment store.
Anything broadcast-related was firmly Saet-byeol's domain. You didn't casually hit concurrent viewers in the thousands by accident.
Before the clerk could even launch into a sales pitch, Saet-byeol rattled off model names and specs in a steady stream, and the employee who'd approached half-heartedly straightened up at once.
"Mics basically come in two types. Dynamic and condenser. Condensers have better sensitivity. They pick up everything — breath, the sound of your lips parting."
Saet-byeol switched on a demo condenser mic and settled headphones over Lee Un's ears.
"Listen. The sense of space is totally different, right?"
Lee Un listened for a moment.
The store's noise and Saet-byeol's voice. The air-conditioning draft. And the things layered underneath.
From the direction of the underground parking garage, footsteps that weren't footsteps. Static that kept sounding almost like a name, even though no one was calling.
And one layer deeper than all of that — the sense of something noticing the mic had been switched on, and turning its head this way.
Lee Un took the headphones off.
"…Not this one."
"Why? The quality's great."
"It picks up too much."
"Isn't picking up more a good thing?"
"This much is a problem."
Everything ran both ways. If you could hear well from here, they could hear well from there.
Saet-byeol looked at him for a beat. She started to ask what that meant, then dropped it. It had always been like this, since they were kids. When Lee Un spoke with that face, it was easier on both of them not to ask why.
"…Fine. Dynamic it is. Dynamics are the standard for talk streams anyway. They don't pick up ambient noise."
Lee Un chose a dynamic mic that was dull enough. It felt heavy in his hand. Blunt, weighty, listening only in a fixed direction.
Good. A tool ought to be like that.
He settled the avatar that night.
Saet-byeol sent five links.
Lee Un opened the portfolios one by one.
First. Well drawn. Second. Well drawn. Third, fourth. All well drawn. Color, line — every one of them excellent.
The problem wasn't skill.
A drawing carried the hand that made it. The way a long-held object took on the grease of its owner's palm, a drawing took on the time of the person who drew it. The more successful the artist, the more things like the restlessness of a deadline-chased dawn clung to every tip of every line.
His scroll stopped on the fifth.
Artist name: Myojin.
It wasn't flashy. It was clean. Like something drawn in a sunlit room, with a clear head.
The reviews were clean too. Met deadlines. No complaints about revision requests.
"…This one."
The waitlist said two months. Below the application form was an item for rush delivery (50% surcharge). Lee Un checked it without a second thought. A quote appeared. He transferred the amount as-is.
He wrote the commission brief at length.
From the shape of the garments to the placement and number of every ornament. Detailed enough that anyone who didn't know better would call it excessive.
Every item had a reason. He didn't write a single line of explanation.
The reply was waiting the next morning.
Lee Un looked at the reply for a moment.
He'd expected at least one question about those few strange requests. There were none. The explanations he'd prepared in advance suddenly felt embarrassing.
He'd chosen well after all.
That night, Lee Un started a stream.
The avatar was still the same vacant free stock model, but the mic quality alone was far better.
The longer he streamed, the different the speed at which viewers filled the room became. Even without Saet-byeol dropping coordinates, more than five hundred people had piled in before five minutes were up.
Then a donation notification popped up.
Chat reacted immediately.
That was fair. This channel had no bokchae guide of any kind. Un had never once brought up money to begin with.
Then a familiar nickname scrolled up.
Chat stirred for a moment.
That was the starting gun.
Lee Un skimmed the notifications without answering.
The nicknames beyond the screen. Most of them were bright. Bright, or ordinary, or clean. Like coins floating on water. Glittering, riding where they could be seen.
He had no intention of taking them in order. The order of who paid first and the order of who needed to be seen were different things.
Then he stopped.
The instant his gaze touched one nickname, a scene forced its way in.
He hadn't tried to look. It had spilled over from that side.
A one-room apartment with the lights off. A profile lying on the bed, looking at a phone. Screen light flickered over the face.
What floated on the display was this very stream.
And the dark by the pillow rose to its feet.
A hand clamping over a mouth, a neck wrenched aside. Something dark-red spattering the wallpaper. The light of a fallen stand licked a long path across the floor, and the scream never made it out.
Limbs thrashed in resistance, but even that didn't last long.
The scene cut off.
Un slowly let out the breath he'd been holding. His fingertips were cold.
Un reached past the nickname for the present state of that room.
From the dark came a damp, rotten-smelling breath.
In Lee Un's vision the chat window wiped away. The donation list. The viewer count.
On a black field, only that one nickname remained.
"…Nickname. SleepSockCollector."
The waterfall of chat cut off dead.
"You haven't been sleeping properly lately."
"When you're home, it keeps feeling like someone's watching you."
"Things are slightly out of place, or you clearly had five packs of ramen left and when you count them there are four. A shampoo bottle you haven't finished suddenly shows bottom."
Laughter rippled through chat. The atmosphere of here we go again.
Same as last time with Lilac — the expectation that he'd unpack the story and then soothe them through it.
"It's not forgetfulness."
Lee Un's voice dropped another register.
"You're home right now."
"You live alone."
Lee Un paused for a moment.
He confirmed once more the two breaths coming from the space beyond the screen.
Chat froze on the spot.
A chat window nearly two thousand people were watching locked solid in a single instant.
Through that silence, one trembling line of chat rose up.