Chapter 2

Ah~ Old-Fart Beggar's Revenge?

One of the two domestic internet streaming platforms.

It was a chat message posted on [OnAiri].

I had to say something, but all that came out was the sound of air escaping.

“Huh.”

I blinked, then quietly turned off the game.

“I’ve rested enough, so I guess I should get back to studying.”

I muttered and glanced at the chat window.

- Can I ask for any coffee I want?

Only then did I remember what I’d titled the stream.

[If I slack off, coffee’s on me]

Ah.

I considered pretending I hadn’t seen it, then spoke.

“...Please pick a nearby brand.”

The title was basically a promise I’d made, too.

A man should keep his word.

- Angel Coffee, please

“I’ll make an open chat room...”

With a bitter feeling, I sent the gift coupon.

An iced Americano, of course.

- Good luck studying!

“Yep. Thanks.”

After that brief interaction, I focused on studying.

‘They won’t just take the coffee and leave, right?’

While thinking about other things, too.

Even if that meant I wasn’t really focused, who cared?

I’d gotten my first regular viewer!

While my attention was elsewhere, the alarm rang.

The full forty-minute study session had passed.

What had they written in chat this time?

My eyes immediately went to the chat window.

- Angel Coffee, please

- Good luck studying!

There were no new messages.

And the viewer count was back to 0.

“Ah, fuck...”

Anonymity really is scary.

Even if someone takes the coffee and runs, there’s no way to know who they are.

And then five days passed.

Am I seriously incapable of learning?

No!

That can’t be.

Until high school, I was always near the top of my entire school.

‘Then why have I already sent out three gift coupons?’

I’d bought three cups of coffee.

I’d started streaming so I could make money while studying, and instead I was losing money.

Even though they were all Americanos, I couldn’t help feeling annoyed.

If giving out all this coffee had at least brought me viewers, it would’ve been fine.

Even one or two would’ve made me feel somewhat accomplished.

But I still had no viewers.

[Viewers: 0]

They had just taken the coffee and disappeared.

‘Was the whole idea of using money to hold onto viewers wrong from the start?’

How did other people attract viewers?

I looked around at a few study streams.

Mostly the ones with a lot of viewers.

I slowly examined the thumbnails.

White men and women, Asian men and women, and a Black woman.

Hundreds of people were watching each of the five streams.

“...Because they’re pretty and handsome?”

They were neat-looking people streaming in clean, put-together outfits.

I looked down at what I was wearing.

A stretched-out white T-shirt and soccer shorts.

‘But does it even matter when I’m not showing my face?’

I couldn’t tell.

Still, wouldn’t it be better than doing nothing?

“It’s not like I necessarily want more viewers or anything....Yeah, it’s just because thinking I’m alone keeps making me turn on games. Right, right.”

And dressing properly would create some tension on its own.

It absolutely wasn’t because I’d gotten competitive about it.

After organizing my thoughts like that, I pulled every piece of clothing out of my wardrobe.

A little over ten tops and five bottoms.

I tried them on one by one, took pictures, and sent them to my sister.

[Photo]

[Photo]

[Photo]

...

As expected, she called almost immediately.

- Hey, what is all this?

“Pick some clothes for me. Like, three combinations or something.”

-...Are you going on a date?

“No. Just pick something that makes me look presentable.”

- Hmmm. Really?

“Stop acting like some nosy auntie.”

- You rotten little bastard. You sure know how to talk nicely when you’re asking for a favor, huh?

“Thanks, Sis!!”

After hanging up, I looked around online for a bit.

I found a few inexpensive shirts and ordered them.

Slacks and a shirt should be enough to look presentable.

I stood up and looked in the mirror.

The military had aged me a bit, but I still looked decent.

“Ah, seriously, that battalion commander.”

The buzz cut I’d gotten ten days before discharge bothered me.

They’d shaved us down because the division commander was coming.

Now it had grown out awkwardly, so it still looked a little strange.

‘Can’t be helped.’

I decided to move past what I couldn’t fix right away.

Then I went back to my desk.

Bookshelves formed an L-shape from the top of the desk to the side.

I fixed the webcam that had been filming the back of my head into the corner of the desk.

Now it showed me sitting at the desk, including my face.

Just putting the camera there made me feel pressured somehow.

Even though I wasn’t streaming.

I glanced at the streaming program.

I could see myself frozen in an awkward posture on camera.

“I think this might work.”

Still, showing my face felt a little uncomfortable.

‘What’s uncomfortable about it? How many people are even going to watch?’

Just going to the convenience store would mean running into more people than the total number of viewers I’d had over the past month.

I fixed the setup in place and tidied the area.

________________

I didn’t expect things to change the very next day.

A month-long streak of zero viewers had made it hard to expect much.

But the very next day, there was an effect.

- What are you studying?

When I checked during break, there was finally a real question.

Until then, the questions and chats I’d received were simple.

- Can’t I get something other than an Americano?

- There aren’t any franchises near me. Can I get cash instead?

- I want a slice of cake too

People who had no interest in anything except getting free coffee.

After seeing nothing but those messages, I finally saw something that actually felt like a chat.

“Ahem.”

I cleared my throat with a nervous heart.

“I’m studying for the TOEIC.”

I waited a moment, expecting a response.

But nothing came.

Was that person studying too and didn’t hear me?

Thinking that, I typed it in chat as well.

- TOEIC.

The message appeared in yellow.

Immediately afterward, my eyes moved as something occurred to me.

[Viewers: 4]

The number I’d been expecting was exactly 1.

But there were actually four people watching!

A cheer almost burst out of me, but I held it back for now.

Four people?

I’d already experienced that once.

Right, it was only my previous peak.

I sprang to my feet to hide the corners of my mouth twitching upward.

I should go get some water.

When break ended, I forced myself to stay calm.

If I tried to do something just because four people had come in, they’d leave.

That was what my past experience told me.

I worked through shitty grammar and practice questions.

Then spent a long time cramming even shittier vocabulary into my head.

When the day finally ended.

My viewer count had surpassed its previous peak.

[Viewers: 13]

Three times as many.

An increase of over 300%?

It could only be called a fucking moonshot.

“Whew. I’ll stop here for today.”

I said that and started organizing my materials.

As I put away the notebook I’d been filling with repeated writing drills and my stationery, my head spun with thoughts.

‘Is showing my back really that different from showing my face?’

‘I don’t even know what my face looks like when I’m concentrating. Hmm.’

‘If this keeps up, there’s no getting out of studying from tomorrow onward.’

While I was thinking about this and that, a message appeared in chat.

Unbal8875: Good job studying.

“Thank you. Unbal, were you studying too?”

The response didn’t come immediately.

Korean streams seemed faster than this. Was it because this was MeTube?

Only after I’d put my books and notebook back on the shelf did another message appear.

Unbal8875: Yes, I’m preparing for Korean History.

“Ah, I see. I need to get that certification too.”

While I was answering, another person’s message appeared.

- Are you Korean?

“Yes, yes. I’m Korean.”

Is this what makes interacting with viewers fun?

I felt like some kind of professional streamer.

There were more chat messages for the next few minutes.

As I interacted with them, it became evening, and I ended the stream.

“Feels like I’m getting somewhere.”

I smiled while running a hand over my still-short hair.

Just showing my face had made this much of a difference.

Feeling pleased, I checked what I was going to wear tomorrow.

If showing my face was what had caused this, I wanted things to keep going like this.

One day passed, then two.

Another week flew by before I knew it.

The third week of August.

Today, too, after I finished studying and started clearing my desk, the chat began getting more active.

- What do you do after you finish studying?

- Do something with your hair

- You work hard every day without going out to have fun

I answered the messages one by one while checking the streaming program.

[Viewers: 38]

In just one week, it had nearly tripled again.

A little more progress every day.

A few more viewers every day.

The satisfaction of spending each day productively.

It put me in a good mood for no reason, and I kept answering with a smile.

“I’m going to do something with my hair once it grows out a little more. Isn’t it still too short?”

Even with nearly forty viewers, there were only five or six people chatting at most.

Especially with the people who had been coming for several days, I’d already memorized their usernames.

As I kept chatting and was about to wrap things up, someone asked a question.

Doa04: River, do you give advice about personal problems too?

They called me “Jeong River,” my MeTube name, and asked.

“What kind of problem is it? Is it okay to talk about it in a place like this?”

Before wondering whether I was even qualified to give advice, my first thought was whether it was okay to talk about something personal in such a public place.

Since I was chatting instead of studying, the viewer count had climbed to 50 before I knew it.

If you compared it to school, it was like gathering my class and the class next door together and telling everyone about your problems.

Doa04: It’s anonymous anyway.

“That’s true. What’s bothering you?”

Doa04: Before that, do you know much about games?

“I do play games... But why are we suddenly talking about games?”

Doa04: I’ll organize it and post everything at once.

The person using the name Doa stayed silent for a while.

A few minutes passed as I answered other people’s chats.

Doa04: My boyfriend plays this game, and I’m worried about it. Apparently you have to spend a lot of money on it, and they say it drives people crazy...

Several more lines of chat followed.

I’m worried, so I try to stop him, but my boyfriend thinks I’m controlling him, and that hurts my feelings.

Something along those lines, written out loooooong.

“First of all. What game is it?”

How am I supposed to give advice about a game if you don’t tell me which game it is?

Does she think all games are the same?

Doa04: Neko? Nek? It had a name like that. It looked like a game older men play

There was one game that came to mind.

Neo Chronicle

One of my friends played it.

The words slipped out before I realized it.

“Ah~ Old-Fart Beggar’s Revenge?”

It was something my friend said constantly.

At first I didn’t understand it, so I asked what it meant.

It meant “Old-Fart Beggar’s Revenge.”

I knew the “Revenge” part too.

It was a large-scale war game that required an enormous amount of spending.

‘Why the hell did I ever start a game for broke old farts trying to act important!!!’

I’d heard a little more than that, too.

‘This fucking piece-of-shit dead game!!! It copies absolutely everything without an original bone in its body, so what fucking development philosophy are they even talking about!! Fuck this game, seriously!’

He would jump up and down ranting like that right in front of me, even though I knew nothing about it.

And yet whenever vacation season came around, he’d try to convince me to play with him because they were holding some supposedly unprecedented event.

How does it make any sense to ask someone to play a game you curse that much?

Anyway, giving advice was the priority right now.

“If it’s that game, I think it might be kind of serious.”

Doa04: Right??

“My friend knows that game well, and I’ve never heard anything good about it.”

I gave her advice as sincerely as I could.

I even recommended healthier games, games that required little spending, and games that ended in a single match.

But there was something I’d overlooked.

If even five people gather together, there’s bound to be at least one idiot among them.

And with enough people to fill a classroom, there will always be someone who loves spreading rumors and someone who runs to the teacher to report every little thing.

My stream had enough people to fill two such classrooms.

And in modern society, there are no secrets.