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Chapter 2
- H. Y. Choo has won
- Rating increase: 2,521 points
At first, the matches had consisted of problems that took only one or two lines to solve.
But once my rating passed 2,000, the matches changed into battles that took at least five minutes each.
Even so, I solved the coding problems without getting stuck and kept winning.
When my rating passed 1,000, then 2,000, and finally 2,500, the sun was beginning to rise.
Ding!
“Finallyyy!”
Just as I stretched my arms wide, the System notification rang.
[Quest completed!]
[Reward: Second Hobby]
I wonder what my second hobby will be.
Asking someone else what my hobby is… This is pretty funny, too.
It was a rather ridiculous situation, but who cared?
Right now, I could accept anything as a hobby, and I could enjoy it as well.
After injuring my back in the competition, I had quit exercising and lost the passion I once had.
Now, it felt as though I had found that desire for something again, and I could only feel excited.
[Your second hobby is ‘Photography.’]
Photography.
I had never really been interested in taking pictures, whether selfies or anything else.
Wait.
I didn’t have that hobby in the past, but I do now, don’t I?
Right.
From now on, taking pictures was my hobby.
= = =
[Second Hobby: Photography]
-Description: You possess the skills of a world-class photographer.
-Ability Cost: 100 won per photograph
-Cooldown: None
= = =
“One hundred won?”
It cost one hundred won every time I took a picture?
Was I supposed to spend money instead of making it?
“Hmm…”
I knew hobbies could cost money, but I couldn’t help feeling a little cheated.
[You have a new quest.]
[Quest (Photography): Take photographs of 100 different people.]
[Reward: Hobby Gacha Ticket (Bronze)]
“A gacha ticket?”
[Starting with your third hobby, you can acquire hobbies using gacha tickets.]
A gacha ticket.
Was it like the gacha systems in mobile games?
“Hmm…”
The two abilities I had received so far had been given directly by the System. Neither had anything to do with my own choice.
Then getting one through a gacha isn’t really that different.
The real problem was the quest required to obtain the ticket.
Take pictures of 100 different people.
And it wasn’t enough to simply take their pictures.
I had to take pictures for them.
In other words, I had to get their permission, take their picture, and then give the picture to them.
“Yaaawn~”
The problem was that all the fatigue I had been putting off was suddenly catching up with me.
If it hadn’t been the weekend, I would have been in serious trouble.
I’ll sleep first and start tomorrow.
I brushed my teeth and turned off the computer.
It wasn’t as slow as starting up, but even shutting down took quite a while on my old computer.
If I start making enough money from my hobbies, I should replace this computer first.
The next morning—or rather, since it was already 11 a.m., late morning—I woke up, took a shower, and got ready to go out.
I have to go outside if I want to take pictures.
Was this what people called a photo outing?
If I could take pictures of anything, I could do it at home, but if I wanted to take pictures for someone, I had to leave the house.
Since I’m going out anyway, maybe I should stop by Mom’s restaurant.
It had originally been the all-you-can-eat barbecue restaurant my father ran.
Now Mom was the owner, and business was doing reasonably well.
However, labor costs had gone up a lot recently, so they had reduced the number of employees and Mom had been working more herself.
That worried me.
If I make a decent amount of money from coding or my other hobbies, I should be able to help out with the household expenses.
For twenty years, all I had done was spend money.
Yet yesterday, I had made 800,000 won in a single day.
I had to spend 100 won per photograph, but I had no doubt that photography would eventually make me money, too.
I arrived at the lake park near my home, where I often went for walks.
Since I didn’t have a proper camera, I had brought nothing but the phone I had been using for more than three years.
It was autumn, and the weather was chilly, so I had come wearing a long coat.
But everyone else was dressed more lightly.
Maybe it was because the sunlight was quite strong.
How should I take pictures?
Even if I took one picture for each of the 100 people, it would only cost me 10,000 won.
But how good would the pictures I took actually be?
What kind of value would they have?
I was curious about that, so I decided to try taking a landscape photo first.
“I’ll start with a tree…”
I pointed my phone camera at a tree.
But the moment the tree appeared on the screen, I immediately felt it.
This isn’t right.
I had never possessed even the slightest artistic sense.
But now, I could tell.
I knew that I couldn’t take the picture like this, and I knew exactly how I needed to take it to make it truly impressive.
My mind calculated everything rapidly while my body moved on its own.
The direction of the sunlight.
The angle that would make the tree look magnificent.
Before I knew it, I was sitting in front of the tree, leaning my body at an angle.
Click!
I was a little conscious of the people around me staring, but I checked the picture I had just taken.
“Wow..!”
I knew it was a little embarrassing to praise a picture I had taken myself, but I couldn’t help it.
An ordinary tree in a common park had been transformed into something that looked like a World Tree, revealing its elegant form among the sunlight.
I wasn’t simply exaggerating because I had taken the picture myself.
The quality was genuinely good enough to call it a work of art.
Even if I couldn’t make money from this, I would gladly pay 100 won to take a picture this good.
No. At this level, I’d even pay 10,000 won.
Excited, I temporarily forgot about the quest and began photographing various things around me.
The fence around the lake.
The island in the middle of the lake in the distance.
Even the autumn leaves, which looked beautiful no matter who photographed them, became masterpieces worthy of being remembered in history when I took them.
Even the stone wall along the walking path was reborn as an ancient historical site through my camera.
“Phew… Did I go a little overboard?”
After taking pictures nonstop for thirty minutes, I had already spent more than 4,000 won.
“Huh? Aren’t you Chu Hoyeon?”
A familiar yet slightly unfamiliar voice came from behind me.
“Yoo Jia?”
People on the sports teams hardly attended classes, but we would still occasionally be in the classroom with the other students.
Yoo Jia was a girl from my third-year high school class.
She was lively and friendly, had lots of friends, and had always treated me well.
“Ah, hello…?”
“Hello. Is she your older sister?”
“I’m her younger sister.”
Another woman standing beside Yoo Jia bowed slightly and greeted me.
Her long, wavy hair suited her extremely well, making her look mature.
I had assumed she was Yoo Jia’s older sister, but apparently, she was her younger sister.
Meanwhile, the older sister, Yoo Jia, was short, only in the high 150-centimeter range, and had short hair.
It seemed she had dyed the inside of her hair blue while I hadn’t seen her.
If a woman who looked about 10 centimeters taller than her, with light makeup and a mature appearance, was standing beside her, anyone would mistake her for Yoo Jia’s older sister.
“You live around here?”
“Yeah. You too?”
The fact that we were classmates was almost meaningless because we had barely interacted with each other.
That was how life was for people on sports teams.
Looking back, I was going to fall away from the path of sports eventually anyway.
Maybe I should have at least experienced a normal school life.
“That apartment over there.”
Yoo Jia pointed toward an apartment building right beside the lake park.
Incidentally, I had taken a picture of that apartment about five minutes earlier.
It came out looking like some amazing financial district building in America.
“Unni…”
“Oh, right. Hey! We’re going now. See you next time~”
“Wait!”
Yoo Jia was about to casually wave and leave, but I quickly stopped her.
I had to take pictures of 100 strangers.
Since someone I knew had appeared, I should at least give it a try.
“Want me to take your picture?”
“What? A picture?? Where did that come from all of a sudden?”
“I recently developed a hobby of taking pictures…”
It was true.
I really had developed a hobby of photography.
“So you suddenly want to take my picture?”
“Look at this.”
I showed her the picture I had taken of her apartment.
“Oh, what the heck! You’re really good at taking pictures!”
“Wow…”
Even Yoo Jia’s younger sister, who had seemed a little uncomfortable around me, looked impressed when she saw the picture.
“You really took this?”
“If you’re curious, you can let me take your picture.”
“Why does the way you say that sound so…”
Even I thought I sounded suspicious, but I couldn’t back down now.
“I’ve taken a lot of pictures of objects, but I haven’t been able to take pictures of people at all. I can’t just take pictures of random people, right? And I don’t have a hobby of taking selfies.”
“Because you’re ugly?”
“Wow, seriously? You had to say that…”
Yoo Jia burst out laughing, while her younger sister turned her face slightly and quietly snickered.
Well, it wasn’t as though I was particularly handsome.
And I had managed to make two beautiful college-aged girls laugh, so I decided to take it positively.
“Anyway, you two… Actually, if that’s uncomfortable, I’ll just take one picture of you, Yoo Jia.”
“Okay. But use my phone.”
It should still count if I took it with someone else’s phone.
After all, the requirement was simply to take the picture for them.
I took Yoo Jia’s phone, opened the camera, and immediately knew what to do.
Where to position her.
What angle to use.
How much to zoom in.
“Try putting your arm like this.”
“Like this?”
I even knew what pose she should take.
Surprisingly, Yoo Jia obediently followed my instructions.
Once everything was ready, I calmly focused the camera.
Click!
I took her picture.
“How is it?”
“Wow..!”
“She looks really good..”
Even I thought this was a masterpiece.
It was the kind of perfectly finished photograph that couldn’t be criticized even if someone deliberately tried to find fault with it.
The Yoo Jia in the photograph didn’t lose any of her natural presence.
At the same time, she looked so beautiful that it was almost hard to believe it was really her.
Ding!
[Quest (Photography): 1/100]
“Um, me too…”
Beauty may take different forms, but the desire to pursue beauty was apparently an instinct for women.
After seeing her older sister’s radiant photograph, Yoo Jia’s younger sister held out her phone to me.
“Oh, of course. I’d be happy to take it.”
I gave her a bright smile and positioned her in the perfect spot and composition as well.
Click!
“Where is it? Let me see!”
Yoo Jia rushed over first and snatched the phone.
Her eyes soon widened in amazement.
She held the phone out to her younger sister and shouted,
“That’s awesome!!”
“Wow!”
A slight breeze happened to blow at the perfect moment, so the younger sister’s picture turned out even prettier than Yoo Jia’s.
It emphasized her mature beauty while also making her look delicate.
Elegance and cuteness existed together in the same photograph.
“You might actually have a talent for this.”
“Really?”
“You’re practically at a professional level. Even studios don’t get pictures this good…”
“Unni? You’ve had pictures taken at a studio?”
Why was she suddenly talking about a studio?
“Ah, no. I just meant…”
Yoo Jia awkwardly trailed off.
Her younger sister stared at her.
Is there something only the two of them know about?
Of course, it had nothing to do with me.
[Quest (Photography): 2/100]
What mattered was that my quest was progressing.
Yoo Jia and her younger sister asked me to take several more pictures of them.
We even exchanged phone numbers.
We agreed that whenever our schedules matched, the three of us would meet up, hang out, and I would take pictures for them.
Then we parted ways.
But after that, I had no luck.
Approaching strangers and asking if I could take their pictures really made me feel like some kind of pervert.
I tried talking to a few people, but regardless of whether they were men or women, young or old, nobody was willing to agree when a complete stranger suddenly approached them and offered to take their picture.
And so, the day passed.
The only thing I had to show for it was the 300,000 won I made from two coding requests that had been posted on Gamja Market.
After raising my CodeLight rating to 2,800, there wasn’t much else to do, so I helped Mom at her restaurant before returning home.
“Yaaawn~ What a shame.”
Unless there was some special event or location, it seemed impossible to find an opportunity to photograph 100 people.
Even if I counted all the people who might let me take their picture, there were only Mom, the staff at the nursing home, and the elderly residents.
Even some of the staff might refuse.
And I couldn’t casually take pictures of the elderly residents without permission from the social worker.
Since many of them had impaired cognitive abilities, those rules existed to protect their human rights.
“Maybe I should go somewhere touristy.”
Maybe I could follow foreign tourists around and offer to take their pictures.
But unless a foreigner asked me first, it would look pretty strange if I approached them and offered to take their picture.
Bzzzz—
I was lying on my bed, thinking about it, when my phone vibrated.
It was a call from Yoo Jia, whom I had met earlier that day.
“Hello?”
- Hey, Chu Hoyeon. Are you free tomorrow?
“Tomorrow?”
We had said we would meet if our schedules allowed it, but it had only been one day.
“I’m not doing anything. Why?”
Yoo Jia gave me a very unexpected answer.
- Do you want to go to a wedding with me?
