The Scammer Became a 33-Win PoChamp Master (3)
When you're handed the power of future sight, the ways to turn it into money are endless.
Ask an AI and it'll spit out a list on the spot, won't it? Start brainstorming every angle that could print cash, and you can practically earn whatever you imagine.
The problem?
For the current me—Eun Harin, twenty years old, silver hair, blue eyes, and a frankly excessive bust—the constraints were brutal.
No face-to-face contact.
Well, technically possible. Just that with women it was constant same-sex jealousy, and with men…
"Hey, you got a number?"
"My phone's dead."
"Ah, well—"
Even a quick trip to the convenience store for trash bags was enough to get hit on. The number of confessions alone had long since blown past double digits.
Show up at a poker tournament? Nobody would play the actual game. They'd just stare at my face and chest. Then someone would try to drag me into a hotel room, maybe even slip something into a drink—and if I reported it, half the people wouldn't believe me anyway.
The surest way to prevent all of that was, inevitably, money. A lot of it.
Distrust of Eun Harin? There are people who won't trust a person but will trust cash. Lawyers from Korea's top three firms—or people of that caliber—who don't take a client's word at face value, but do trust circumstantial evidence, their own judgment, and the money the client puts down. All I needed was enough money to hire people like that.
It had a bit of that Netflix-drama energy—the capable protagonist smashing a nouveau-riche villain from episode one—but what was I supposed to do? Better to have money than rot in a one-room forever.
So I needed to earn. Except…
Making money as a minor in Korea is not exactly easy.
Until I hit adulthood, I'd barely earned a thing. Some chaebol grandson reincarnates and immediately gets gifted prime Gangnam real estate, personal assets ballooning overnight—but me?
Harin. The modeling fee that came in this time, your brother…
"Tch."
In my case, the leaks were everywhere. More precisely, money got siphoned off without my consent simply because I was a minor. Once I hit high school, I started asking the people who at least treated a high schooler like a business partner to hold settlements until after I turned adult.
Problem was, that industry didn't particularly want me—and the ones who did were the kind of men who'd grab my wrist the second I got close.
Really, streaming was the only answer. A job where I never had to meet anyone face-to-face, never had to leave the house, and could still make money from inside my own room. One of the few fast, relatively easy paths to building the foundation of real wealth.
Of course, even that wasn't simple. Streaming isn't something you just do with a computer and a cheap mic. You need a microphone that costs at least a few hundred thousand won—ideally over a million—if you want viewers to actually enjoy listening. A garbage PC means high-spec games are off the table entirely. And virtual setups? Top VTubers with over a hundred thousand followers sink tens of millions into theirs.
I needed capital. Money to expand the streaming infrastructure. Seed money I could invest on the side.
I'd love to play the stock market, but you need money for that first.
Even if I knew a stock was about to hit the daily thirty-percent upper limit, ten thousand won of capital only nets three thousand in profit. And it wasn't like the visions showed up on command every time.
Future sight didn't let me see whatever I wanted. It was more like I only saw what happened to surface. Not a clean skill with fixed rules—I had to poke around at everything.
Like right now, sitting with a sports betting site open, scanning match after match.
"…Ah."
Something did come through.
—Walk-off home run! He crushed it!
—At last, the Giants climb out of last place!
"Ugh."
A scrap of information, dumped in pieces. But I couldn't be sure.
Those last-place bums climbing out of the cellar? When, exactly.
Tenth out of ten. Three wins behind ninth. So at minimum three games had to pass before the future I'd seen could even happen—what was the point of betting now? Hell, what if it wasn't even this year? What if they spent the entire season glued to tenth, and that line only dropped next spring when everyone was 0–0 and they alone sat at 1–0?
That was the thing. The futures I saw were fixed events. Like the win streak in PoChamps, I could change them if I intervened directly—but even then I had to prepare in advance. If this really were all-purpose future sight…
I'd be buying lottery tickets, not sports bets.
Every day.
I set aside the sports slip that wasn't giving me anything and picked up a lottery ticket instead, quickly marking six numbers with a compass.
4, 12, 13, 27, 40, 41.
"Manual lottery, five thousand won."
"Hey, miss."
…He could have just printed it. The fact that he felt the need to talk was just another extension of the face-to-face problem.
Just swap the ticket and shut up.
I swallowed the words and said nothing.
"You've been buying these same numbers for weeks now. Where'd you get them from?"
The owner kept staring at the slip I'd handed over, clearly planning to keep talking until I answered. I quietly pointed at the machine with my eyes.
"These are first-place numbers. Eventually."
"Oh, that so? Here."
Whatever interest he'd been trying to spark died on the spot. He handed over the ticket. I slipped it into a small clear sleeve I'd prepared, tucked it into my wallet, and walked straight out of the lottery shop and home.
"…From now on I'm buying these online."
I'd only come out for a walk because sitting inside all day was driving me crazy—and now even the lottery shop owner was trying to chat me up.
"……"
Mid-stride, I flicked a glance at my reflection in a security mirror. It was winter. All I had on was a black long puffer and a black cap. A black wig pressed over my real hair so the silver didn't show. The only thing exposed was my face, and still—
"Ha."
If winter was this bad, how was I supposed to survive summer?
Make money fast and move.
Somewhere I could buy safety with cash. I just wanted that day to come sooner—whether the lottery hit big or the stream took off. Take everything past living expenses, grow the seed money, and become a millionaire overnight. No—more than that.
Safe. Clean.
Unfortunately, I still couldn't see any future of myself streaming from a soundproof booth with air conditioning inside a 128-pyeong penthouse.
PoChamps is a deeply unfriendly game for newcomers. Thirty-plus years of franchise systems are baked straight into it, and wrapping your head around all of them at once is no small feat. But it's free—and because the game itself costs nothing, the newbie count keeps climbing every day.
Kids who steamrolled the Elite Four and Champion with legendaries, thinking I'm actually pretty good at this, step into ranked and discover their wrists and ankles getting twisted right back at them. They get a cold look at the truth of the competitive ladder.
Trainers who've tasted that particular brand of social bitterness split into three types.
One: rage-quit. No explanation needed.
Two: the grinders. The ones who dig in, study until their eyes bleed, keep getting wrecked, and eventually become Hyper Ball gatekeepers.
Three: the vicarious thrills. They hunt down a pro streamer, watch live and backseat, or settle for well-edited YouTube VODs. They watch a high-ranker's play the way they'd play it themselves and feel satisfied.
That is the essence of streaming.
And I could deliver it.
"Aaaand welcome back, everyone."
Right here—the vicarious-thrill crowd was my primary target. The clock hit six and I went live on the dot. Three whole viewers dropped in and took seats the second I started.
"I did say I'd do an all-nighter yesterday… ran into a bit of an issue and had to take a short break. But we'll pick up right where we left off."
The all-nighter bait had already spent its power, so I threw a different hook.
A cleaner title than yesterday's. Slapping "Newbie" on it already wafted a certain spicy pheromone at people—and "17-win streak" was more than enough to snag attention on top of that.
"Yep. Right here—see for yourself."
I pulled up the match history for the curious viewer. No matter how many times I said "seventeen wins" out loud, most people would just tilt their heads—so showing the actual record did the answering for me. Same energy as ranked lane games: claim you're Diamond or Challenger and nobody believes you until you pull up the account search.
Verification complete. Even if new arrivals started throwing shade later, by then I'd already be mid-live win streak. That was enough.
"Ah."
A welcome question. Someone who'd come back again today after yesterday—how could that not make me happy?
"Yeah. Used the points I earned yesterday to scout a few more."
Even the ones who could read the donation-fishing technique still refused to open their wallets—so I queued ranked on the spot.
I kept the performance picks that could reliably cut one or two in any matchup. But three new ones had been added—creatures that drew mixed reviews from people.
"Figured I'd need them from Hyper Ball on up."
Grand General. Drill Mole. Vanilla Ice.
They looked nothing alike, but all three shared the same kind of move set.
"I'll climb on pure skill. One-shotting everything on the way up."