The Fox God Goes Live
First things first: rounding up worshippers who believed in me. That alone was the opening gate of this whole ordeal.
I couldn't so much as set foot outside — and yet I was somehow supposed to spread word of my existence and gather a flock around it?
"Ah, now that I think of it... what was the previous Fox God's name again?"
There was a quiet, matter-of-fact resignation folded into the former Fox God's plain little message. It made me worry over her for no good reason... hmm.
"My form is that of a black fox, and you are a white one. I shall call you Shiroha. If you take issue with it, speak now."
Hm. I'd say that pleased her.
"Shiroha. There remains a great ordeal before me, you understand..."
Which would be? I'd told her already, hadn't I?
Apparently the previous Fox God was not blessed with a good memory.
"Bound to this form, I cannot go outside at all — so tell me, how am I meant to gather worshippers in the first place?"
A moment later, Shiroha raised an arrow in the message window and pointed it squarely at the computer sitting in the corner of the room.
"Why the computer, of all things..."
"You mean broadcasting?"
In short: stream, and gather subscribers. And subscribers counted as worshippers?
It was true, at least by Shiroha's standard — if that was all it took, there was no faster way to collect worshippers than a livestream.
The only question was whether it was safe to put my face on the air...
"Hm-mm... ho-ho..."
So I poked around Pzazik, the internet's biggest streaming platform, and found the overwhelming majority of streamers running some manner of persona — an RP, a character concept. Some broadcast entirely through virtual reality capsules, wearing faces that weren't human at all. One woman with fox ears wasn't going to turn any heads.
The problem, of course, was that this place was reality itself—
"The price of the capsule..."
A capsule was safer for keeping up a persona than a plain camera, so I went looking at prices — and shook my head at the positively feral number of zeros. It was the kind of figure that would take a fresh corporate hire raiding the savings account they'd been feeding since their first paycheck just to afford an outdated model.
"Hnnngh..."
I possessed precisely a tear's worth of broadcasting talent, so sinking that kind of money into a stream on the strength of my looks alone was a genuine stretch. And if you asked whether I had any talent for the games played in those capsules...
'Given my lifelong history as a total coordination disaster? Not a chance.'
So — cam stream to start.
Ears and tail could pass as accessories. Eyes, colored contacts. Nobody would demand an explanation; they'd simply assume.
"With a body like this, I've no doubt..."
Wouldn't a hundred subscribers drift in on their own if I just stood there, blinking those big eyes at the camera? Then I could tuck away the tail and ears and start hunting for ways to earn money out in the world.
"Strike the iron while it is hot, as the saying goes. I shall order a cam this very day and begin at once!"
Han Woo-joo — self-styled ghost of Pzazik's smallest channels, a connoisseur of the microscopic stream.
Whenever every streamer he normally followed happened to be offline, rather than shut his computer down he'd go hunting for fresh dopamine: diving into broadcasts with viewer counts in the single digits and lobbing 1,000-won punches for the sheer fun of it. On a tiny stream, mere attention bought you an outsized reaction, and a single thousand won got you fawned over like some whale-tier patron. Honestly? Pretty entertaining.
"Whoa. Those, though."
Even the preview thumbnail showed a woman with a frankly absurd figure dressed in a fox cosplay — and before he'd consciously decided anything, his cursor had already clicked into the stream.
This was Han Woo-joo: the hardened free viewer who pinched pennies even on the money it cost to skip ads.
"God, she's gorgeous... how is a stream like this a zero-viewer one?"
He glanced at the broadcast start time. Three minutes ago. A brief, unearned swell of pride — I discovered her first — and then the woman on screen spoke to him.
Apparently her whole concept was something like a fox goddess, because she greeted her sole viewer — him — warmly, and called him her worshipper.
He fired off the first chat message and sat back to watch how she'd respond. It was the stance of a judge at auditions: if you've prepared something, show me. One of the few genuine pleasures of watching tiny streams.
"Hmm..."
Was this the small-streamer brand of forced intimacy? All that digging for personal stories to manufacture a fake closeness — he was half-decided on slipping into another room when the chat suddenly came alive.
Before Han Woo-joo could even type a reply, the others who'd wandered into the stream sent the chat scrolling in an instant.
'Tsk.'
He hadn't intended to share anything anyway, but now the attention would be split — he was just about to lose interest and leave when—
Astonishingly, without any of the flustered panic typical of small streamers, she smoothed over the traffic with total composure and handed the floor right back to him.
"I mean, I don't really have anything to say..."
Personal stories still felt like a step too far, so he reached for a topic of truly rock-bottom uselessness instead. That topic was none other than the fact that his beloved baseball team, Hwana, had just tumbled into a thirteen-game losing streak.
Their star player — already mired in a personality controversy — had been publicly ambushed at a press conference just days earlier, and the mood around the team had fallen straight into the abyss.
Hwana, of all teams. Could such a coincidence even exist?
That was the club whose roster held the very player responsible for my banishment — and the same team that had staged that vicious press conference. A professional franchise, and yet: blunder after blunder unworthy of the word "professional," a starting pitcher caught drinking the night before a game. Forget conditioning — half the roster couldn't manage a proper stretching routine, and season-ending hamstring injuries came and went like weather. That was my honest assessment of the team.
'Hmm...'
Escape the losing streak, was it?
Fortuitously, sports analysis happened to fall squarely within my expertise — so even if my divine powers were genuine in name only, a reasonable forecast was well within reach.
Mockery floated up through the chat — but well. I'd never been the type to charge headlong at every passing jab, so it barely registered.
The game happened to start in thirty minutes besides; finishing the analysis and watching it together wouldn't be a bad way to spend the evening. Though with no broadcast rights to speak of, we'd each be watching the official feed separately.
Frankly, it was close to hopeless.
Most of their hits had come against the opposing bullpen, for that matter — and even when a team scrapes together a chance, it's worthless without the hitters to cash it in during scoring position. In soccer terms, they'd dribble the ball all the way to the mouth of the goal and then fail to finish.
And given the state of bullpen pitching in this country — a few elite closers aside — plenty of teams staff their relief corps with the sort of arms that throw nothing but hittable batting-practice fastballs, or strike-zone lotto tickets with no command at all.
Which meant, in practice, that a one- or two-run deficit off the opposing starter was entirely erasable if you simply attacked the bullpen. Failing even that? Then you might as well write the game off. At minimum you needed to regain some timing against relief pitching so it might carry into tomorrow's game — and they hadn't managed even that.
"I beg your pardon?"
Well — fair, in a way. At least the franchise name carried some weight, so against a comparatively weak opponent they'd become the favorite. And Hwana's opponent today was... ah. Of course.
The team with firsthand testimony — practically an official statement — that without a certain corporate sponsor's backing, the players couldn't even afford a proper bottle of sports drink if they didn't get a hit. Famous, too, for selling off its players to Major League Baseball.
Permanently ranked at the bottom of the table, no apparent interest in actually improving the on-field product, and a pipeline that used first-round draft picks to raise promising youngsters just to ship them out the door. You could say, without much exaggeration, that they ran the club by selling players.
I'd torn into Kium plenty harshly myself, once upon a time — harshly enough to draw a warning from the baseball association and forced takedowns of my interviews and articles.
'Think about it for two seconds and my blood pressure's up again.'
However dead a lineup's bats, if the pitch is one they hit well and the pitcher is someone they've faced time and again, their eyes for the ball sharpen accordingly. That's precisely why in Korean baseball you so often see a single pitcher torched for five runs in one game. Unlike the majors, where you might wait a month or more between meetings, teams face each other constantly here — the more often a pitcher takes the mound against a given lineup, the more thoroughly they get solved, good stuff or not.
And this was a pitcher who, against Hwana not long ago, had gone 5.2 innings with seven hits and four earned runs?
Hwana scores today. That much is a floor, not a ceiling.
Besides which, Kium had burned its entire win squad out of the bullpen last game, and this one was their shot at the sweep — a three-game series whitewash. Having already beaten Hwana twice, they'd surely rest the high-leverage arms. So Hwana would hang close, even edge ahead in the early innings, and then the bullpen battle would pry the game wide open.
Either way, the meaning was the same: the odds of Hwana losing were vanishingly small.
"...? Go where, exactly?"
Leaving nothing behind but that baffling remark, my first worshipper vanished, just like that, into the crowd of the chatroom.