Cyber Witch-Hunt (3)

The Demon Lord Gallery was, as it had always been, the Demon Lord Gallery.

Targeted callouts and cyber witch-hunts overflowed across the boards, grotesque imagery was scrubbed in real time by moderators, and the Colosseum arena board buzzed with endless bloodshed and degenerate gambling. In that sense, it was an entirely ordinary day.

The only slight difference was that today's hottest drama happened to center on a 'forum newbie,' and the discourse burned somewhat hotter than usual. Otherwise, it was the exact same community as ever.

Of course, the recent atmosphere on the board had played a part in fanning the flames. Ever since the Pandemonium conference concluded and a massive batch of gallery users vanished overnight—an event officially termed the 'pruning and culling operation'—the majority of regulars had kept their heads down. Even when juicy drama emerged, people hesitated. No one wanted to risk retaliatory dimensional strikes from whoever was involved, nor did anyone fancy disappearing without a trace over a single careless troll comment. That primal dread lingered deep in the minds of countless Demon Lords.

Furthermore, the high-tier entities who either understood the pruning process or possessed enough raw power to ignore it actually preferred the quieter, tamer state of the forum. But this new drama was built differently.

While the posts didn't explicitly spell out a name in their titles, every active user who frequented the board knew precisely who was being dragged into the spotlight.

The newbie.

A supernova who had burst into the gallery just a few months ago, posting under the anonymous handle ㅇㅇ(111.432).

Those with a bit of intel knew this Demon Lord was far from formidable and hailed from a barren world where magic did not exist. Those with even deeper insider knowledge were aware that his name was Shin Soohyun, and that he ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠was loosely affiliated with the Neutral Demon Lord faction. Yet, unlike those scattered fragments of classified intel, there was one glaring piece of information that literally everyone on the board could see: his dimensional IP—the 111-series.

Dimension IP 111.xxx could be interpreted in several ways. For starters, it was exceptionally rare—in fact, the only registered IP of its class across the entire gallery. More importantly, it meant that virtually no Demon Lord in existence, save for perhaps one or two terrifying anomalies on the site, could exert the slightest bit of physical influence over Dimension 111.

Conversely, that also meant the newbie had no way of touching any other dimension either.

In short, you could orchestrate forced witch-hunts, slander him, spam callout threads, and churn out toxic drama to your heart's content without having to worry about blowback. Retaliation was a bedtime story from five dimensions away. Endless, frictionless drama with absolute personal safety—where else could anyone find such magnificent entertainment?

And so, after a long drought, the snowball of forum drama began rolling down the mountain once again. Just as the entire board was gleefully roasting the newbie, a brand-new post went live.

It was authored by the very center of the storm.

Within seconds, clicks flooded in by the thousands.

Too insolent to be an explanation, and far too arrogant to pass for an apology.

The post was more than enough to detonate the entire gallery.

"Haha."

A hollow laugh broke from my lips.

No, there was simply no other reaction to give. Anyone witnessing the state of the Demon Lord Gallery right now would have laughed out of sheer disbelief.

Far from burning out, the drama had reignited with volcanic fury. Rather than entirely new discourse, it was closer to an escalated continuation of the witch-hunt that had run rampant at dawn.

The catalyst, unsurprisingly, was my so-called clarification post.

Sure, it had been a little aggressive, but that post was the hard-earned result of trial, error, and outside counsel. When I uploaded my very first attempt at an apology, anonymous users immediately buried it under a hail of downvotes and comments like 'Look at this dogshit writing,' forcing me to delete it within seconds. After consulting a few sympathetic regulars, I drafted the revision.

Slamming into the forum with zero brakes had yielded a truly explosive reception.

To sum up the comment section in a single phrase: an unhinged parade of absolute lunacy.

Some users demanded to know why I hadn't butchered the girl on the spot.

Other deranged degenerates interrogated me on why I hadn't jumped into bed with a female Hero yet.

And then there were the scholarly types, probing for data as if my life were a field study.

The comment section was a bubbling cauldron of chaos. But in truth, that wasn't the real problem. No matter how wildly out of line those remarks were, they were ultimately confined to the margins of a single thread. The genuine crisis lay with the gallery hardliners who had found their casus belli in my aggressive post. Armed with self-righteous justification, they began battering me with cold, hard facts.

Wave after wave of threads dragging me and every other Hero-tolerant user flooded the boards, smothering nearly half the entire front page in blazing outrage. Posts explicitly targeting me kept surging into the Hall of Fame, only to be vaporized by administrative censorship beams minutes later.

Yet, amidst the purge, a single callout thread managed to survive untouched on the recommended board. The reason was painfully obvious.

The sheer, despondent agony dripping from the author's words was so raw that no moderator had the heart to strike it down.

Naturally, the text was littered with absolute delusions about me dating a Hero. Strictly speaking, going by age alone, the Hero was young enough to be my daughter. Romance? What utter nonsense. I might look youthful on the outside, but chronologically, I was already in my mid-forties. Spending twenty solitary years on an empty world had piled on the mileage, after all.

"...It's totally unhinged slander, but I almost feel bad for the guy."

Considering the author's circumstances, his meltdown was somewhat understandable. Rumor had it he had lived for hundreds of thousands of years without ever so much as brushing hands with the opposite sex. To be perfectly honest, surviving that kind of eternal solitude without losing your sanity was an achievement in itself.

Then again, looking at his post, he had clearly already lost it.

Regardless, this was the exact brand of hostility being hurled in my direction. I had gone from an anonymous lurker to the undisputed main character of the forum, to the point where trolls started spamming brain-dead threads titled 'From now on, this board belongs to ㅇㅇ(111.432).' The sheer scale of unwanted notoriety was careening past every acceptable limit.

Realizing the situation wasn't going to resolve itself, I fired off several private messages to the assistant managers and posted a few explanatory threads. But unlike the early morning mob, these users were armed with legitimate historical grievances, and they refused to let the fire die.

After two grueling hours of keyboard warfare, I was finally forced to pull the ultimate trump card.

Summoning the Chief Manager.

A few minutes after that clandestine conversation deep within the gallery's administrative core, a new pinned notice appeared at the very top of the board.

A single post from the Chief Manager was all it took.

The tempestuous gallery subsided in an instant. The runaway snowball of drama lost all its forward momentum, grinding to a dead halt. The witch-hunt threads and targeted callouts that had spread like wildfire vanished from the boards as if they had never existed.

Such was the absolute authority wielded by Solomon, creator of the Demon Lord Gallery and King of Pandemonium.

To put the outcome in plain terms:

The Chief Manager's intervention was super effective.