Hitting #1 on Real-Time Trends
The first thing I did after opening my eyes was check my smartphone, which I’d set to silent.
The moment the screen lit up, a flood of notifications told me my everyday life had been completely wrecked.
“What is all this…….”
My head throbbed. Yesterday, inside a D-class dungeon, before the boss room door had even opened, the monster had flopped flat on the ground in that bizarre, impossible scene.
And in less than a single night, the internet had swallowed the fallout whole. The stitched-together video uploaded to ViewStream under the title The Crazy Aura of an F-Class Porter had already passed three million views.
In the video, I was doing nothing more than cowering behind my party members in fear, or standing frozen in front of the boss room door, unable to move forward or back. But the edited version was different.
A strangely majestic soundtrack swelled, and the moment I froze in terror, the screen slowed down and drained to black and white. Then a caption appeared.
“That’s not it! My legs just wouldn’t move because I was scared!”
I slapped the bed in outrage and shouted at no one in particular.
But there was no one there to hear me scream.
[Current Viewers: 14,210]
The number in the semi-transparent blue window floating in the air was holding firm in the ten-thousand range. Once the viewer count passed ten thousand, the air in the tiny room seemed to press down all at once.
Every breath I took dragged at my lungs, the sticky air settling into them like lead.
Even sitting still in the corner of my room, I felt the same oppressive force as if I’d been dropped into the middle of a nest of monsters. I’d washed my face, but my fingertips stayed cold, and a thin sheen of cold sweat still clung to the back of my neck.
I’d learned yesterday exactly what that heavy atmosphere was made of: the sneering, judgmental attention of more than ten thousand spectators in their rooms.
They must have been determined to dry a person out completely.
“Haa…… still, I’ve got to go out if I want to make a living.”
With hollow eyes, I washed my face and pulled on my uniform.
No matter how much the internet worshiped me as some absurdly powerful monster, my bank account was still on the verge of collapse.
The moment I arrived at Saebyeok 25, I started breaking down delivery boxes.
“Minsu, you were on the main news again yesterday.”
The store manager, shrugging off his vest as he prepared to hand over the shift, tossed the remark out without interest.
“Ah, yes……. I guess I just ended up there again somehow.”
“I don’t care whether you stopped a dungeon break or knocked out a boss with your stare. What I do care about is that you sort out the cup noodles inventory properly today. Yesterday the lines were all crooked.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll stock them carefully!”
That oppressive atmosphere meant nothing in front of the store manager.
To the living embodiment of capitalism standing before me, transcendent killing intent was just an excuse for a part-timer’s sloppy work.
Honestly, I found the manager’s bluntness a hundred, a thousand times more comforting.
After he left and I was alone in the store, I threw myself into the shelves. It was nothing more than simple work—tearing open boxes of instant noodles and shoving them onto the display racks.
My neck grew stiff with fatigue, and I scratched the back of my head hard with my left hand. Then, absentmindedly, I stretched my right foot forward so I could slide the box into place.
It was meaningless. Just something my body did because I felt stiff and sore.
But without my knowledge, the Hunter Gallery board was updating at a manic pace, dissecting my every move.
I had no idea a post like that was climbing the real-time trends.
I was just rubbing my sleepy eyes and stocking the noodle shelf.
But the blue window hovering at the edge of my vision kept scrolling upward, faithfully reflecting the madness of the Hunter Gallery.
[Current Viewers: 16,882]
“How am I supposed to shoot mana with a barcode, anyway……”
I screamed inwardly that the noodles had to be displayed with the barcodes facing forward if I didn’t want the manager chewing me out.
It was obvious no matter what I said, they’d just keep writing fanfiction based on their own delusions.
“Thank you…… I’ll make the barrier nice and sturdy…….”
Completely resigned, I muttered to myself and squared up the rows of cup noodles.
By the time dawn broke, I had finished my shift and dragged my wobbling legs home. The instant I opened the front door, the tension left my body all at once, and a terrible hunger surged up to take its place.
I went straight to the kitchen, filled a pot with water, and tore open the cheapest, easiest-to-cook spicy instant noodles I had.
Once the water started boiling, I dumped in the noodles and seasoning. I lifted the noodles with my chopsticks, then lowered them again, again and again, letting them grate against the air.
“Haa, this feels amazing.”
Another day had passed without me dying in a dungeon, and I was able to sit in my own room and boil a bowl of noodles in peace.
I was almost moved to tears by that modest little peace.
But the moment I lifted a big bundle of noodles with my chopsticks, the once-docile chat window suddenly exploded with reaction.
[Current Viewers: 18,910]
“Cough! Hack!”
I choked hard and burst into a fit of coughing.
As the chat window shot upward like crazy, the air in the room suddenly hardened and turned sticky, like mud.
The viewers’ awe and certainty had taken on physical weight, pressing down on my shoulders.
It felt like trying to eat with two ten-kilo sacks of rice resting on my shoulders.
The pressure clenched my throat so tightly that the noodles wouldn’t even go down.
“I’m not eating ramen for some grand reason, I’m just broke…… why are you trying to suffocate me…….”
I pounded my chest and swallowed the noodles with tears prickling at my eyes.
Having to satisfy those people’s delusions just so I could eat a meal felt like it was shaving years off my life.
After I drained the broth, I carelessly dumped the pot into the sink and flopped onto my bed. I was sweating from the weight of it all, but with food in my stomach, my eyelids grew heavy.
I stared dazedly at the blue window floating in the air. The viewers were still failing to escape the afterglow of my ramen mukbang, continuing their endless overanalysis.
Before I closed my eyes to sleep, I absentmindedly used my gaze to scroll the chat window up a little.
The chat logs from the night before slid past in a rapid blur.
“They really do have a disgusting amount to say…….”
But something looked wrong.
Right in the middle of where the scroll had stopped, there were three empty lines.
[Blank line]
[Blank line]
[Blank line]
There had definitely been normal chat messages before and after it.
I’d never seen the middle just missing like that.
“What the hell.”
It was too clean to dismiss as a bug.
The space where text should have been was neatly empty, as if someone had literally scraped the characters away.
At that moment, a single red dot flashed briefly in the corner of the chat window.
I couldn’t tell whether it had been text or an icon.
The moment I tried to look again, it disappeared.
The air in the room turned cold as stagnant water.
Gooseflesh rushed up my spine.
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