Chapter 43: Whispers Under the Blanket: Yu Sieun’s Secret Resolve.

After pausing for a moment, Yu Sieun completed the sentence she’d started with, “I…”

“I… have been thinking that it might be okay to turn on my camera, if the right time comes. What about the rest of you?”

After Yu Sieun shared her thoughts first, Hyungyeok and Park Hayan also voiced their opinions on camera broadcasts.

“In my case, I’m not really sure. I’ve been broadcasting without a camera for so long that I don’t even know if anyone would be curious if I revealed myself now… It’s not like I get a lot of requests to do camera broadcasts, either.”

“Hmm… In my case, I haven’t really thought about it since I broadcast with a character illustration on screen.

I’ve seen people who broadcast similarly to me use things like no-face camera broadcasts as content, but I haven’t seen anyone actually reveal their face.

Plus, it feels like it’s something that requires some serious resolve, doesn’t it?”

Yu Sieun, who answered that she might turn it on someday.

Hyungyeok, who had been broadcasting with no camera for a long time and didn’t think his viewers were that curious.

Park Hayan, who said she hadn’t thought about it, but seemed to have negative thoughts about it.

The opinions of the three streamers were divided into two camps: those who had thoughts about camera broadcasts, and those who didn’t.

Among them, Yu Sieun was the only one on the side of having thoughts about it.

As Yu Sieun, as EunSiyu’s YouTube editor, I was in a situation where many things I wanted to ask came up.

I had vaguely considered the possibility that Yu Sieun might turn on her camera someday.

But I didn’t know that it had been in Yu Sieun’s thoughts since now, just a few months after she started broadcasting.

That’s why I couldn’t contain the curiosity that suddenly welled up and opened my mouth.

“Sieun unni, do you really have thoughts about doing cam broadcasts?”

When I asked with a considerable degree of curiosity, Yu Sieun looked at me and continued to speak.

“Yeah. I think I’ve been thinking about it since about a month or two after I started broadcasting. Just to the extent that it would be good to turn it on if the right time came.”

Crinex, who had been listening to the story after asking the first question, carefully asked Yu Sieun, who was the only one among the three juniors who had expressed her intention to do camera broadcasts.

“Do you happen to have any personally set standards? Like subscribers, or the number of years you’ve been broadcasting, or something…”

Yu Sieun seemed to fall into thought for a moment after hearing the question Crinex had asked.

Taking up her glass and having another sip of alcohol, Yu Sieun parted her lips again.

“Hmm… In a way, it’s also the kind of story that’s a worry, but since everyone else talked earlier, I’ll just say it too. There’s a phrase that always gets attached to people who do game broadcasts without a camera, you know?”

I thought I knew what Yu Sieun was going to talk about.

There’s a curse word [I censored it. I will not add it again] that people who haven’t revealed their faces, especially female broadcasters who haven’t revealed their faces, usually hear.

To put it roughly and mildly, it’s the kind of nonsense that says they don’t turn on their camera because they’re ugly.

It wasn’t a phrase that only Yu Sieun heard.

The people who upload these kinds of chats or posts are fixed, and it’s not like they have a lot of variety in what they say, either.

“As for chats like ‘Aren’t you going to reveal your face?’, well… I don’t really think much of it since it’s just natural to be curious.

There are a lot of people I’m curious about too, after all. But using that, what was it called… I don’t remember the exact name of the emoticon.

Anyway, I saw a post on the internet in the early days of my broadcast that said I didn’t turn on my camera because I looked like that, and I looked it up on the internet because I wondered what it meant, and I vaguely remember that it was a hate expression.”

Watching Yu Sieun speak calmly, I felt something uncomfortable in my heart.

If she’s saying she read it in a post, I guess she read it in a community.

It didn’t seem like Yu Sieun was ego-surfing, and it’s not like she could stop if I told her not to, so I hadn’t said anything about it on purpose, but it seemed like that was a misjudgment.

“But I thought that among those people, there would probably be a lot of people who would find other faults and curse at me even if I turned on my camera and broadcasted.

I could already see them saying things like I was turning away from game broadcasts and becoming a cam girl… So, I’ve never told anyone this, but I’ve vaguely set a standard for myself since a long time ago.”

What Yu Sieun said about never having told anyone before was probably true.

She said it was a worry she had in the early days of her broadcast, but even if it wasn’t from the very beginning, it was something I, who had been with her for a long time, had never heard.

I listened carefully to Yu Sieun’s words that followed.

“To the extent that I could reveal myself after reaching Grand Master.”

Grand Master.

It was a tier you could be promoted to if you were in the top 1000 in the rankings on a server.

It seemed that Grand Master was the standard that Yu Sieun was thinking of for a top-tier Legacy of Legend streamer.

Or maybe it was a standard where she thought no one could bring up skill.

‘Hmm…?’

I felt like I understood a little more about the meaning behind Yu Sieun’s words, which I had often heard on broadcasts, about wanting to go to Grand Master.

The atmosphere was that the story about the camera would end here.

Thinking that I would have to talk more with Yu Sieun about this separately later, I sipped at my alcohol to wash away the uneasy feeling.

‘…Wait a minute.’

The moment I suddenly thought of something was when I had just swallowed the sweet drink that had mixed soda and alcohol.

Parallel World Yu Sieun had never reached Grand Master in her entire life broadcasting.

Not when she was no-cam, and even long after she started broadcasting and revealed her face.

Was Grand Master not the standard at that time?

Or was it just that she couldn’t get it?

It was a question I couldn’t know the answer to.

The drinking party wrapped up about two hours after the story about camera broadcasts, around one in the morning.

In Yeonggirong’s case, he chose to go home instead of sleeping at the hotel. It seemed like he lived nearby, so he could take a taxi and be there in a little while.

Crinex and Hyungyeok were planning to catch some sleep in this room and then go back, and Yu Sieun, Park Hayan, and I were thinking the same thing.

After roughly tidying up, the three women moved to another room, for which Park Hayan had received a separate card key earlier.

While walking down the hallway, I think I had a thought along the lines of, ‘What kind of life is it where you can burn over 200,000 won in one day for other people?’

While one person was washing up at a time, we spent our time sitting on the sofa and having the private conversations we hadn’t been able to have earlier.

By the time all the processes were over, it was about time to go to bed, even for the many people working in the broadcasting industry who loved the early morning.

The composition of the room was the same as the place we had been drinking earlier.

One large bed and one small bed.

Therefore, we had to discuss how to allocate the people to the beds.

It was human nature to be more comfortable using a bed alone, after all.

Personally, I thought it would be good for Yu Sieun and me, who had memories of comfortably sleeping together on a much narrower bed before, to use the large bed, but I didn’t rashly suggest it since Yu Sieun might have been thinking differently.

When I glanced at Yu Sieun, it seemed like she was also gauging the situation.

“I toss and turn a little in my sleep… If it’s okay, would the two of you like to sleep together?”

Park Hayan, in that situation, thankfully voiced her opinion first.

That a benevolent smile, as if she was saying she understood everything, was floating on Park Hayan’s face was outside of my understanding, though.

“Then it would be better for me and Eunsol to sleep together.”

Fortunately, Yu Sieun also seemed to be thinking similarly, nodding her head with a smile.

Park Hayan, who had gone up to the bed after the agreement was over, fell asleep almost right away.

I wondered if she was feeling the effects of the alcohol quite a bit, even though it didn’t seem like it.

Since one person had fallen asleep while we were talking, the number of people participating in the conversation was reduced to Yu Sieun and me.

‘Hmm….’

There were stories for Yu Sieun and me to talk about when we met in reality.

Stories about the broadcast with the editor we had talked about before, and things like the camera broadcast I had heard about today and the future we were thinking of.

I wanted to talk more, but I was a little wary since one person was sleeping.

It seemed like Park Hayan was deeply asleep, but I thought it would probably be a hindrance if we talked as usual.

I found a solution while worrying between those two thoughts.

Since we were on one bed, if we put our bodies close together, covered ourselves with the blanket, and lowered our voices, we could have a low-noise mode conversation.

Stories about what kind of content we could try to do together, like a 100,000 subscriber Q&A.

Stories about the malicious comments or chats that had come up when we were talking earlier.

Jokes thrown in the style of ‘Unni, you’re really going to turn on your camera if you reach Grand Master, right? But you can actually get there, right?’

Yu Sieun and I, covered with the blanket, kept the faint light of our phones on and whispered.

As time passed, and our whispering faded as we fell asleep together, the after-party also came to a close.