Found Out!
The response to the fourth video on my YouTube channel was nothing short of explosive.
It felt like only yesterday I'd been floored when the third video cracked 110,000 views—and now, a single day after I'd uploaded the fourth—
"Whoa, this is insane! Are these views for real? I'm not seeing things, am I?"
Congratulations. A remarkable achievement. The Goddess, too, will be greatly pleased by the administrator's efforts, and by results worthy of them.
Five hundred and seventy thousand views were sitting there to welcome me. I'd lost count of how many times the YouTube view-count mission had already been cleared. Subscribers had climbed as well—I'd just hit 28,000. A little more push and I'd reach 30,000. Even the goal I'd once written off as flatly impossible, a hundred thousand subscribers before Mia's birthday, was starting to look as if it might actually be within reach.
Is all of this thanks to those feminists? Not that I have the slightest desire to thank them, but...
The bad blood with the Women's Era Cafe had been settled cleanly, too. Whatever route she'd used to get them, the files Yerin sent had carried enormous weight. They were the sort who hid their real names online, slipped away at every turn, and took pleasure in harassing and slandering celebrities. Faced with the hard evidence in my hands, they had nowhere left to dodge or deny, and the lawsuits landed on them exactly as they stood.
This time I had no intention of offering the leniency I had before. Through Attorney Park, the lawyer Mia had introduced, I meant to see them punished properly. Under that blade-sharp pressure, the members of the Women's Era Cafe all pulled their heads in.
Cutting off the tail, you might call it. The eight of them put out a statement claiming they had little to do with the cafe, then turned around and played dumb. In truth, it had been a small minority—those eight among them—who stirred people up and launched the raid on my channel. Most of the cafe's members had no personal feelings toward me at all.
Honestly, that was the bigger problem. Even with no connection to any of it, they'd been swept along by a few members' agitation and come stampeding in to pile on and bully a stranger. But this was enough. I didn't carry some grand sense of mission that demanded I fight them to the bitter end. If I'd protected my YouTube channel, that was all that mattered. I uploaded a fifth video laying out that position, and decided to put the whole affair to rest.
"2,175 points..."
It had been a frantic week dealing with the feminists, but I'd still picked up about five hundred points. And Mia's birthday was only a month away.
"All right. Let's just keep going like this!"
The moment a goal that had looked hopelessly far off drew even a little nearer, strength and drive came welling up.
And that drive collapsed the moment the next day arrived, as if it had never been real.
There was only one cause. The group chat with my old friends.
The whole mess brushed up against gender issues and social controversies that were especially raw these days, so even a minor internet news site had written it up. Yunjin—who, uncharacteristically, made a dutiful habit of combing through each day's news—had found the article. Puzzled by the name BJ Hani, he looked me up, and a cam-room video soon made it plain that BJ Hani and I were the same person. He messaged the others at once. And now they were tearing into me without mercy.
When I'd first been found out, I'd wanted to die of shame. Now anger was winning. That Yunjin especially—I was going to test the body blow I'd honed to a razor edge on him.
By this point there wasn't a scrap of shame left to find. If anything, I took it a step further and put the pressure on Yunjin.
Now that I'd been found out anyway, I actually felt lighter. So I made my demands without a shred of shame.
The chat bickered for a while, then wound down into laughter. My friends all told me to do well and cheered me on, and we set the meetup for two weeks out.
"Whew. Guess I should eat lunch."
It felt like I'd just survived a war. I closed the chat and went to eat, and today, as ever, it was delivery. The Helper's warning came at once.
It has already been more than two months of ordering nothing but high-calorie delivery food. Should you fail to attend to your health and your weight, the risk is considerable.
"What risk? I eat like this and I'm living just fine. Nom, nom!"
Today's lunch was pork back ribs in a lightly spicy sauce. Soju and back ribs made a perfect dinner, honestly, but ever since my body had changed I'd been keeping a little distance from drinking, and it had been so long since I'd had ribs that I'd picked them for lunch for once. I was happily tearing into them when a bolt from a clear sky dropped from the Helper.
Should these poor lifestyle habits persist even a little longer, there is a chance the ability Balanced Figure 3 will fall to level 2. You would do well to take heed.
"What?! An ability's level can drop?"
How hard had I scraped those points together? How hard had I raised that ability? And it could say something that horrific? My aggrieved reaction made no difference. The Helper answered in a manner like a drawn blade.
You recall, do you not, that the ability Expressiveness 2 newly manifested when you sang during a broadcast? This is much the same. Even without spending points, the administrator's development leads to new abilities being added. Likewise, should you maintain a life so entirely without restraint, it will not be Balanced Figure 3 alone. Any number of other abilities may decline as well.
"......"
It certainly had a point. Abilities or not, I was still human. Eat, and you gain weight. Shut yourself in for more than two months, and your health slips. When that day of the month arrives, a faint gloom settles in. The ordinary shape of a normal person. Once I admitted that, I found myself reflecting, just a little, on the way I'd been living.
It had been bad. Really bad. More than two months of nothing but delivery, holed up in the house all day like a hikikomori.
Come to think of it, my weight seemed to have crept up a bit, too. Nothing but high-calorie delivery, every single day—of course it had. I'd felt it once before as well: not enough exercise, a body gone listless. One way or another, the whole way I was living needed an overhaul.
"I guess I really ought to exercise a little."
An excellent notion. The Goddess shall bless the path of those who strive.
The timing was perfect, actually. Word was already out that I was streaming, so I figured I could just go to Myunghun's gym, only a stop away.
What's a friend for? A discount, and personal training if there's time. That's what.
While the thought was fresh, I asked Myunghun outright, and he agreed without a moment's hesitation. Said he'd been wanting to fix that pathetic stamina of mine for a while anyway. Spoken like a working trainer, all right. Push the schedule too hard and I'd flame out in three days, so we agreed I'd start with about three days a week, then adjust once I'd actually tried it. The first visit was tomorrow.
Busy. Way too busy. I've got to work out, there's the meetup with the guys, and I still have to lock in the date for the next penalty stream I promised the viewers... Ugh. My head hurts.
Even so, watching the views, the likes, and the subscriber count on the YouTube videos keep climbing put me in a good mood. Points stacking up nice and thick. I'd come through the "crisis" that had landed on me in one piece, so from here on, surely, nothing but good things. It was the kind of day I wanted to believe that.