“Hey, you locked and loaded?”
The question drifted across the warehouse, where fluorescent tubes oozed like half-set jelly at 2:14 a.m. In Jin-woo’s hand was not a Glock 19 but a phone. The pistol lay on the nightstand, yet his thumb had already tapped Subscribe.
“This… this isn’t killing, it’s saving, right?”
Not really. Seventeen minutes later he would realize he had hurled someone into a deeper abyss while pretending to rescue her.
The hand that clutches pain
Why trade death for a subscription? Cold arithmetic made it simple: ₩99,000 a month—cheaper than a single bullet. But the motive was colder still. A gun ends everything; a subscription never does. You beg it to stop while faintly praying it never will.
Jin-woo slid his wife’s card from the wallet he had meant to use for ammunition. First theft in five years of marriage. The knowledge that it was a crime made his fingertips tremble; on the other side of the tremor lay a thrill nestled somewhere between murder and adultery.
The pale saint’s chamber
December 8, 2023. 3:11 a.m. Jin-woo entered the channel Saint of the Day. One photograph: a white dress, chalky shoulders, snow-white sheets. Yet it was the gaze that held him—a gaze ready to spill secrets even to a stranger.
He paid for a full year. Forty-seven comments had already melted into the thread:
- Three-piece again tonight, please
- Is the husband asleep beside you?
- Gun or saint—smart choice, man
Jin-woo changed his handle to Moon-09. September—his wife’s birth month.
“All you have to do is pretend to love me”
Winter 2022. Busan’s Suyeong district. A woman called Eun-ji. Twenty-seven, selling smiles in a bar until the club’s client pulled her aside.
“You only need Instagram. Wear a little less.”
She laughed at first—easier money than dodging bullets. Yet the night her first pay arrived, she wept in the bathroom mirror.
‘The people who buy me don’t really want me; they want me to kill them softly.’
The button kept clicking. 8,700 subscribers in a year, ₩30 million each month. Unconsciously she started counting bullets: one, two… every time the twenty-second man subscribed, she ran a silent marksmanship drill in her head.
Two men under the fluorescent light
March 2024. A back-alley used-book shop in Jongno, Seoul. A man named Do-hyun pushed the door. Mid-forties, three years divorced. He sought a single title: A Subscription More Brutal Than Death.
“Out of print for ages,” the clerk said.
Do-hyun gave a hollow laugh. Six months earlier he had unsubscribed from the ‘Saint’, convinced she had abandoned him. Since then, no sleep. He had learned that what feels more familiar than death is the waiting.
Outside, the early-evening air bit sharply. His phone pinged: the Saint had posted anew. He deleted the app—then re-downloaded it seven minutes later.
Why we never cancel
Psychologist Klein: “Desire tries to fill a void, yet if the void vanishes, desire vanishes with it.”
Subscriptions don’t fill the hole; they drill it wider. One bullet is never enough. Kill, kill again—still the throat stays dry, like sucking on a phone in a desert instead of water.
The essence is distance: almost within reach, yet never quite. You could kill, you could save, but while you do nothing desire peaks. So they subscribe—believing they can stop at any time, and therefore never stopping.
Back in the warehouse
2:31 a.m. Jin-woo read the live chat:
Moon-09: Last night I dreamed I shot you.
A reply:
Saint: I shot you too.
Jin-woo smiled. His wife turned over beside him. The pistol remained under the bed, safety off. He did not raise it against her. Instead, he subscribed to another channel—The Black Nun. ₩20,000 dearer than the Saint, yet cheaper than sinning against death.
Whom will you subscribe to
Look back for a moment. In your wallet gleams a card instead of a bullet. Right now, is your finger trembling to press Subscribe instead of pulling a trigger? And is someone—believing you love her—praying you will not kill her? Or perhaps the reverse: someone is subscribing to you, and you still don’t know it.