The call lasted seventeen minutes. Dae-ho's mother cried, laughed, cried again, and asked him four times if he was hurt. He told her the same thing each time: he was fine, the blood was not his, and the money from the donations would cover two months of her treatment. She did not believe him about the blood. Mothers never did.
When he finally hung up, the viewer count had settled at two thousand three hundred. The chat had slowed to a crawl, mostly people asking when he would stream again or sharing the clip to their friends. He watched the numbers for a while, sitting on the pavement with his back against a rusted shipping container, and tried to make sense of what had just happened.
His phone buzzed again. This time it was an email from the streaming platform itself. The subject line read: "Your channel has been flagged for unusual growth." He almost laughed. Unusual was an understatement.
He skimmed the email. It was automated, probably, asking him to verify his identity and confirm that the sudden spike in viewers was not the result of bots or view manipulation. They wanted him to fill out a form. He closed the email, opened it again, and closed it once more. He would deal with it later. Right now he needed to get home before his legs gave out.
The walk to the subway station took twenty minutes. His ribs ached with every step, and his left knee had started making a clicking sound that he was certain was not normal. He kept the camera running, partly out of habit, partly because the chat had woken up again and people were asking him questions.
"Where are you going," someone asked.
"Home," he said. "To eat instant noodles and pretend today didn't happen."
"You're bleeding on your sleeve."
He glanced down. The blood had dried to a dark brown crust, but fresh red was seeping through from somewhere underneath. He had not even felt that cut.
"It's fine," he said. "E-rank healing factor. I'll be good as new in three to five business days."
A donation popped up. Ten dollars with a message: "buy a bandage."
He stared at it for a moment. Ten dollars. That was more than he had made from his last three gates combined. He cleared his throat, tried to find the right words, and settled on something honest.
"Thank you," he said. "I'll buy noodles and a bandage. Maybe a soda if I'm feeling rich."
The chat laughed. More donations trickled in. He stopped looking at the amounts after a while because it made his chest feel tight in a way that had nothing to do with his ribs.
The subway platform was empty at this hour. He sat on a bench, tilted his head back, and watched the fluorescent lights flicker. The camera on his vest caught the ceiling, the cracked tiles, the faded advertisement for a hunter energy drink that featured an S-rank smiling with perfect teeth. He had never been able to afford that drink.
His phone buzzed again. A direct message from someone named Park Min-ji. The profile picture was a cartoon character with glasses. The message read:
"Hi! I'm a fan. I edited your clip into a compilation and it's at 200k views. Can I send you the link? Also I have ideas for your channel if you're interested."
He read it twice. A compilation. Someone had spent time editing his near-death experience into something people wanted to watch. He opened the link she had included.
The video was three minutes long. It started with his first stream from six months ago, when he had fumbled with the camera for ten minutes before realizing it was not recording. Then it cut to a goblin ambush where he had tripped over his own feet and somehow rolled under a swinging blade. Then the flash grenade moment, slowed down, with the goblin's face illuminated in white before it shrieked. The editing was clean, the music choice surprisingly tasteful, and the thumbnail showed his own face frozen mid-scream with the caption: "This E-Rank Refuses to Die."
Three hundred thousand views now. The comments were a mix of disbelief, admiration, and confusion about how an E-rank had survived that fight.
He watched the video three times. Then he messaged Park Min-ji back.
"This is insane. How did you even find my channel?"
Her reply came within seconds.
"I watch small streamers. Your commentary is funny. Also you almost die a lot which is weirdly compelling."
He did not know how to respond to that, so he typed the first thing that came to mind.
"Thanks. I think."
"Can I help you with your channel? I was a broadcasting major. I know how to edit and how to grow an audience. You have something special."
He stared at the message. Something special. He was an E-rank with a torn vest, a clicking knee, and less than fifty dollars to his name. The only thing special about him was his ability to barely survive things that higher ranks would sneeze at.
But the numbers on his stream did not lie. Two thousand people had watched him sit on a subway bench for seven minutes. Two thousand people were still there.
"What kind of help?" he asked.
She sent a voice message. Her voice was higher than he expected, quick and nervous, like she was running on caffeine and excitement.
"Okay so right now your channel is pure chaos. That's good because chaos gets views, but you need structure to keep people coming back. You need a schedule, better thumbnails, maybe a discord server. I can handle all of that. I can also clip your streams in real time so you don't miss viral moments. I already did it tonight. You gained four thousand followers while you were walking to the station."
He pulled up his channel page. Four thousand three hundred and twelve followers. This morning he had one hundred and seven.
He sent a text back.
"Why do you want to help me?"
The reply came after a pause.
"Because everyone else on this platform is fake. They script their reactions, they bring expensive gear, they have sponsors telling them what to say. You just… are. You're an E-rank with a cheap knife and you go into dungeons knowing you might die and you still make jokes. That's real. People want real."
He sat with that for a while. The train arrived, rattling to a stop with a screech of brakes. He stood up, winced at the pain in his ribs, and stepped inside. The car was empty except for a man asleep at the far end, his head slumped against the window.
"I don't have money to pay you," he said into the mic, knowing she was still listening to the stream.
"I don't want money," she replied in the chat. "I want to be part of something that matters."
The train lurched forward. Dae-ho held onto the rail, watched the tunnel walls blur past, and tried to remember the last time someone had wanted to be part of anything he was doing. He could not remember. There had been the guild, before the layoff, but that was different. They had wanted him to carry boxes and stay quiet. They had not wanted him.
"Okay," he said. "Let's try it."
Min-ji sent a string of excited emojis. The chat celebrated. Another donation came in, fifty dollars, with the message: "E-rank gang rise up."
He closed his eyes and let the motion of the train rock him. His mother's hospital bills were still there, a mountain he had been climbing for three years. The landlord would still want his money by Friday. His vest still had a hole in it and his knife needed sharpening and his knee was definitely not supposed to click that way.
But for the first time in a long time, the weight on his chest felt a little lighter.
His phone buzzed with a new notification. The streaming platform had verified his channel. A blue checkmark now sat next to his name, the same kind he had seen on the accounts of famous hunters with million-follower counts. He almost dropped the phone.
"You're verified," Min-ji messaged. "That's huge. Only top creators get that."
"I have four thousand followers," he said.
"You had one hundred this morning. Tomorrow you'll have ten thousand."
He wanted to tell her she was wrong, that this was a fluke, that people would forget about him by the end of the week. But the numbers kept climbing. Four thousand six hundred. Four thousand nine hundred. Five thousand.
The train pulled into his station. He stepped onto the platform, his legs unsteady, and walked toward the exit. The night air was cold, carrying the smell of rain that had not come yet. His building loomed ahead, grey concrete with flickering lights and a door that never locked properly.
He climbed the stairs to the third floor, unlocked his apartment, and stepped inside. The space was small, a single room with a mattress on the floor, a hot plate, and a stack of instant noodle boxes by the window. A photograph of his mother sat on the windowsill, next to a wilting plant she had given him two years ago. He had never been able to keep it alive, but he had never thrown it away either.
He set the camera on the windowsill, facing the room, and sat down on the mattress. The chat was still active, people saying goodnight, asking when he would stream again, sharing memes about the flash grenade. He watched the messages scroll for a while, then leaned forward to end the stream.
"Thanks for watching," he said. "I don't know what happened today. I don't know if this lasts. But I'm still here. That counts for something, right?"
The chat filled with affirmations. People telling him to rest. People saying they would be back. People calling him by his name like they knew him.
He ended the stream, and the room went quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator.
His phone buzzed one last time. A message from Min-ji.
"We're going to make this work. Get some sleep."
He typed back: "Okay."
Then he lay down on the mattress, stared at the ceiling, and let the exhaustion pull him under. Tomorrow there would be more messages, more numbers, more people wanting something from him. Tomorrow he would have to figure out what he was supposed to do with this strange new thing that had happened.
But for now, in the dark of his small apartment, with the photograph of his mother watching over him and a dead plant on the windowsill, Kang Dae-ho slept like a man who had survived something he had no right to survive.
He had done that before. He would do it again.
And somewhere in the city, in a dorm room cluttered with energy drink cans and analytics notebooks, Park Min-ji watched the replay of his stream for the third time. She thought about the scandal that had ended her last job, the streamer she had helped build who turned out to be faking everything. She had sworn she would never let herself be fooled again. Dae-ho was different. He had to be. She closed her laptop and let herself believe, just for tonight, that she had finally found something real.
[Nymphaearoot the Author]: Hope you enjoy reading! If you like it, please add it to your library and let me know your favorite moments in the comments