Cute

Khaaah!

I threw myself onto the bed and stretched out long.

Hup, hup, hup, hup!

I sighed and gazed up at the sky.

Eid Chronicle had been steadily trending upward. And now that I thought about it, I remembered I'd rarely ever been serious about gaming.

'How to take gaming seriously.'

This game had to be tied to my survival.

So, after setting aside a few months' rent and enough money for ramen and frozen food, I invested every last bit of my money in shares of the company behind Eid Chronicle.

'Fifty shares?'

I forked over 1.5 million won in total, at 30,000 won apiece.

Some people might say 1.5 million was nothing, but that money had come from my mother.

'The only money I had before I became a woman. The only trace connecting me to the name Lee Ji-ho.'

I couldn't afford to lose it. I had to multiply it many times over—no, dozens of times—and pay her back as soon as possible.

What did I need for that? Popularity.

So, what did I need to become popular?

Become a full-time Eid Chronicle streamer? Raise the standing of the game called Eid Chronicle?

Bullshit. There was a limit to being a full-time gaming YouTuber.

Unless you were an active pro gamer famous across the world, even a former pro gamer with a YouTube channel would hit a ceiling.

And going full-time with a game that was only just starting to trend upward? That was basically signing up to starve.

On top of that, I didn't speak English or play games that were popular overseas, so becoming famous would be even harder.

In the end, I had to become a variety streamer. Variety gaming, chatting, whatever!

And the most important thing for that was connections.

It was July now, and streamer gatherings were usually held sometime between November and December.

Besides, I still planned to be active as a VTuber, so offline parties were out.

So the most important thing was a company—an MCN, as they were called—that supported and managed streamers and YouTubers and took a cut of their earnings.

Famous companies had famous streamers, and if you joined one of those companies, they'd introduce you to people.

Once I started doing collabs with those connections, even if only once or twice, I could get famous in no time.

There were four major MCNs in Korea.

Dia Company, run by a major corporation; Landmark, founded by a famous YouTuber; Terrorble, home to famous YouTubers and their crews; and finally, Bounty Hunter.

But I ruled out Dia Company because it had a high proportion of foreign streamers. They weren't useful for collabs.

If I needed foreign streamers later, I could join after my contract with the MCN I signed with now ended.

Landmark... Personally, they seemed to do collabs with people they already knew, rather than through company introductions, so I ruled them out.

That left Bounty Hunter and Terrorble. Of the two, Terrorble had more VTubers and Durahan streamers.

As it happened, of those four MCNs, only Terrorble had reached out to me.

#

"Is this really okay?"

I put on some athletic underwear I'd bought online, then changed into a suit over it.

I wasn't sure if an MCN would be any more casual, but since this was a contract with a company, I thought showing up in a hoodie and shorts would be strange.

"Oh, hello. Are you Ms. Jia, who came in for a meeting? And who's the person with you...?"

Standing beside me was a man wearing glasses so shiny they seemed to go ping—.

A few days ago, I pulled up my contacts for the first time in ages and called an old friend.

Click!

-Hello?

"Oh, hello."

Maybe because he heard a woman's voice on the other end, he sounded flustered.

-Uh, uh, who is this?

"Are you perhaps Attorney Kang Junhee...?"

-Oh, yes, but how did you get this number...? It's my personal number.

"Ah... You know Jiho oppa, right? Um... I called using the number Jiho oppa gave me a long time ago..."

Then I heard him clear his throat over the phone.

-Oh, you're Jiho's girlfriend. We met at the funeral, didn't we? So what did you want to talk about?

"...I'm sorry to ask this, but I'm doing YouTube and signing an MCN contract. Could you give me some advice and check that there aren't any problems with it?"

Kang Junhee was my middle school classmate.

To be precise, he was in my class in second year. Back then, he was small and only ever studied, so he was an easy target for bullies.

After I helped him a few times, he started approaching me on his own, and we got close and spent the rest of middle school together.

After he got into law school, I felt inferior to him, so we didn't meet often, but I still thought we were pretty close.

-Which company?

"Terrorble..."

Over the phone, I heard a chair scrape as he sat down, then the rustling of papers.

-When?

"I was thinking of going to sign sometime this week or next..."

-Let's make it next Wednesday.

So, I was grateful to the guy who'd rushed over right away.

"Thanks, Junhee. I called you out of nowhere, and you still came all this way."

"It's nothing."

I cleared my throat, adjusted my voice, and went inside.

Inside, a man with a warm smile was looking over some documents.

"Oh! You're here. Please wait just a moment."

I sat across from him, and another manager handed me a cup of coffee.

"Coffee's okay, right?"

"Oh, yes."

I took the coffee from him and had a sip, while Junhee set his cup on the desk and looked over the documents.

"Hmm."

He took a sip of coffee as he continued to skim the documents.

"Are you a lawyer?"

"Yes."

"Ahaha, you must've been pretty worried. It's not like we just started yesterday. We wouldn't have some strange clauses in our contracts, would we?"

"The more a company says that, the more suspicious it sounds."

Junhee glanced at the manager and said,

'Ah... haha, this is awkward."

"I'm sorry..."

He hurriedly waved his hands in denial and gave an embarrassed laugh.

"It's our fault for not earning Ms. Jia's trust."

He handed over a few more contracts, and Junhee rapidly scanned the text to check for any problems.

"This clause is a little strange..."

He and the manager discussed the contract, using professional terminology a few times.

Eventually, apparently finding no issues with the contract clauses, he smiled and spoke to me.

"This should be fine."

"Ah, thank you..."

I trusted his word and only checked the basic clauses myself.

1. Support

2. Channel ownership after contract termination

3. Contract term

4. Revenue split

Finally, any excessive infringement of rights or unfair clauses.

Junhee would have checked for unfair clauses or infringements, so I only needed to review the other four.

'Support: they'll provide a studio and camera for one video per quarter? That won't help me much.'

What I did like, though, was the network of streamers.

When streamers planned a collab, the first invitations went to streamers signed with their company.

'You could call that an unfair clause, but once a streamer has been at it for a while, their content tends to stagnate. They need new faces, and if the company finds them for you, that's a win for me.'

Second, ownership after contract termination was obviously mine... though it sounded like they'd keep taking a small cut of my earnings for about a month after the contract ended.

Well, signing with this MCN was partly an investment in my future, so I'd let that slide.

The contract was for two years. Compared to the time it took to go into the military and come back, that wasn't long... Wait, if it took that long, it was fucking long...

Anyway, the revenue split was 80:20 to 70:30. When I'd dabbled in web novels, the platform usually took 30 to 40 won out of every 100. Compared to that, this was pretty damn sweet given how much I was earning now.

"Let's sign."

My head hurt.

Fuck, I should've just left it to Junhee, decided it wasn't my problem, and turned on my stream.

This sucked. It really, really sucked.

My head suddenly started hurting, as if I'd developed bipolar disorder out of nowhere.

I quickly stamped the contract, signed it, and went outside.

"Phew!"

As soon as I stepped outside, the suffocating heat nearly made me pass out.

It was mid-July, a sweltering day with the blazing sun beating down.

"I-I should head back..."

If I went back, I'd be stuck in that suffocating atmosphere again; if I went outside, the scorching sun made me feel like I was going to die.

"Want a ride?"

I turned at the voice and saw Junhee, who'd driven over.

"Thank youuu..."

I immediately sat in the passenger seat, slumped back, and let out a groan.

"They say people in love start to resemble each other. You really do look like Jiho."

"Huh? How?"

"That bastard would always bum a ride in my car during the summer and go, 'This is heaven~'..."

"Is that so? Come to think of it... I do get told I resemble Jiho oppa a lot."

"...I miss him."

The awkward silence continued after that, and only just before we arrived did I hand him a business card.

"What's this...?"

"It's, um, the address for my stream. It's a little... strange, but if you miss Jiho oppa, watch my stream!"

I hurriedly handed him the card, got out of the car, and dashed to my house.

"...A stream, huh."

He took the business card and searched the address on it online.

"Lee Jia?"

Then he searched her name online once more.

Rumble, crash!

"Fuck!!!"

"Give me your money, you bastards."

"Nice to meet you, meow~ I'm Lee Jia, meow~"

Pfft, he burst out laughing and looked at his phone.

"What is this?"

Seeing how she resembled Lee Ji-ho somehow, he pressed Follow for the first time on the account he'd made but never used.

"Cute."