The Kingdom Raised by a Giant - 2
After ABCD’s joint stream with RD.
The Romantic Drive community’s reaction was mostly favorable.
Except for the most extreme hardliners, most people simply felt like they had gone to someone else’s banquet table and eaten their fill. And memories like that tended to turn into goodwill.
It had only been one collab.
But it was enough for ABCD to stop being seen as some alien material riding on capital and instead become fellow VTubers in the same industry. RD had treated them as guests, and above all, it had been fun.
And more than anything....
The fact that the RD members, who had recently been on the verge of slipping into creative fatigue, gave overwhelmingly positive feedback after the collab also helped. The warm atmosphere continued on SNS as well.
“....”
From the fans’ perspective, this was not a battle between two hostile factions. Nor was it one side trying to swallow the other.
They were simply colleagues who had played on the same stage.
Is it okay... to get along?
Once the unfamiliar feeling vanished, a strange sense of camaraderie began to grow in its place. And so the RD fandom silently came to accept ABCD as something like “the kind, newly rich neighbors next door.”
Then the culture around them gradually started to absorb their influence.
Of course, if they crossed the line, they were suppressed immediately and without mercy.
Even so, they kept their distance,
and accepted ABCD indirectly.
But there were also those who felt a sense of crisis in that picture.
*
Big Plan A Company.
They were, in every sense, a heresy against the market.
Jeong Yu-ri had no choice but to reach that conclusion after hearing the RD members’ testimony. Their operating style was that bizarre.
1. BigMan never appears at meetings.
2. Decisions are made entirely by the people on the ground.
3. By the time budget execution was checked, it had already been completed.
“....”
After hearing that testimony,
Jeong Yu-ri asked back in disbelief.
“Are you absolutely certain?”
“This is all we know. It wasn’t our field to begin with. But we observed the meeting right next to them, and that’s really how it went.”
“....”
She couldn’t press them any further.
Was this bizarre structure what made that level of efficiency possible....? They’ve effectively thrown everything at the working level and given up on management entirely.
This wasn’t a “company.”
Under the help of a god called BigMan, it was little different from a “kingdom” built by countless subjects. A paradise where they didn’t worry about money and only produced cultural content in a land flowing with milk and honey....
It was the paradise every creator dreamed of.
An acquisition was already out of the question.
So was containment.
Because they themselves lived in a self-contained world.
If, instead of VTubers, other creators and cultural infrastructure became dependent on them? The market environment is already being shaped so that major conglomerate capital can’t easily exert influence over distribution and production....
If that happened,
Big Plan would no longer be a kingdom.
It was already the seed of a cultural empire.
There were many similar cases overseas.
And those examples had grown so large they completely ignored the existing market order. This was urgent enough that it had to be analyzed thoroughly and reported to the executives in the production division.
Jeong Yu-ri reached that conclusion.
“....”
If she let this go now,
she felt like she would regret it somehow.
So she decided to start from the source of this bizarre kingdom.
The source of everything.
Big Plan’s capital owner... BigMan.
The easiest clue was the scale of the money.
Jeong Yu-ri quietly asked, “BigMan is a foreign-capital market-distortion consultant?”
“Yes.”
The team member who had brought in the scenario continued.
“If we assume BigMan is the actual owner of ‘Big Plan A Company,’ then he established the corporation in a single month. Given the timeline after the 1 billion won donation incident... this corporate structure is absurdly fast. It’s impossible unless foreign capital had planned it from the start.”
“And you’re saying foreign capital planned all that just for VTubers?”
“....”
“More importantly, why would a foreigner invest in an IP that was dying in a domestic second-tier platform with only around ten real-time viewers? It’s not even a narrative they could have grasped from abroad.”
“....”
“It seems more reasonable to see this as a narrative irregularity strategy by a domestic investor who’s unusually skilled at reading the local market, rather than foreign capital interference.”
The theory that he was some foreign capital lackey was discarded.
It had been a ridiculous hypothesis born from a lack of information, so they didn’t dwell on it and went looking for the next clue.
And the additional information was his donation pattern.
“Live Future shared regional donation patterns. Pazijik also sent over the dashboard data for high-value donations over 1 million won.”
“Organize the high-value donations by region. Focus from May 3 to June 21, narrowing down first by where revenue increased.”
“Yes, Team Leader.”
Real names were protected,
but where and how much money was spent was public.
And given how shabby Live Future’s scale was, it should be easy to narrow it down to the place where high-value donations suddenly started rising.
First, BigMan’s initial trace... the 1 billion won donation.
Just as she expected,
the region where revenue had suddenly spiked was found quickly.
But the place was truly unexpected.
“This... isn’t this mostly a neighborhood full of studio apartments? Are there investment firms or offices here?”
“I’ll check.”
The team member stepped out of the office and returned tens of minutes later. He looked somewhat flustered.
“Aside from a few small restaurants and a tire company, there are only places that rent out studio apartments. For residential use, of course.”
“....”
Jeong Yu-ri let out a low breath.
“Are you certain?”
“Yes, absolutely.”
“Then let’s check whether any business here is using one of these officetels as a separate office. Focus on entertainment and investment firms.”
But the investigation came up empty.
“...There isn’t anything. Not an entertainment or investment firm, not even a common paper company. They’re just ordinary studio officetels.”
“....”
The team members muttered in disbelief.
“Then he really was just some individual donating his own money? Not an investment firm setting up a proxy named BigMan and trying viral marketing?”
“....”
Impossible.
Given BigMan’s level of capability, there should absolutely have been traces of an investment company of a certain scale. That wasn’t the sort of ability an unconnected individual could possess.
“....”
“....”
“....”
After a moment of silence,
a second scenario was proposed.
“Could it be a famous private investor’s borrowed-name account or proxy? It’s not like foreign investors never use a phantom name to invest.”
“If they were going to prepare that thoroughly and interfere, wouldn’t they be doing it in securities, not VTubers...? No matter how I look at it, I don’t see the benefit of hiding their identity to that extent in this line of business.”
“....”
There was no way to guess.
The purpose....
Couldn’t be inferred.
“....”
“....”
“....”
In the end, Jeong Yu-ri deferred judgment.
“From now on, we’re changing our policy on one point.”
“Pardon?”
“Let’s completely ignore BigMan’s intent. We’ll focus only on identifying where he came from, what capital he came in through, and then making contact.”
“....”
The team members nodded silently.
“Yes, Team Leader.”
And by chasing only the flow of capital, they tried to uncover BigMan’s trail. They wanted to know exactly where his money came from.
Jeong Yu-ri also watched that flow from the side and thought,
“....”
Unless he’s some land-rich bastard hiding somewhere, there’s no way an individual could quietly secure and operate assets in the 5-billion-won range without a trace. There has to be some evidence of funds moving, by one means or another.
But....
As expected,
the team members gathered again with expressions of despair.
“There’s no trace. There aren’t many private investors who can operate with project capital of 5 billion won or more, and every one of them is someone with no reason to be working out of a studio-apartment district.”
“....”
They were Team 2, the very people known as demons at finding numbers, yet in that moment it felt as though they had been trapped in a dark maze. A maze called “BigMan.”
“Then what money did he use to set up the corporation...?”
“....”
In the middle of that endless silence,
someone blurted out the final scenario.
“...The lottery? I think the first week of last month had a huge jackpot. Wouldn’t that be enough to seed a corporation?”
That wasn’t a scenario.
It was a kind of delusion.
So everyone, Jeong Yu-ri included, looked at him. Their expressions held not just anger, but disbelief and confusion.
“?”
“?”
“?”
Then he panicked.
“?!”
Because he realized how stupid that sounded.
“Ah, uh... I’m sorry! That slipped out wrong.”
“....”
No way...
Jeong Yu-ri didn’t answer. She opened her laptop and printed out a newspaper clipping. Then she looked over the lottery article from the first week of May posted there.
“May 3rd was a Monday.”
“...Yes?”
“May 1st, before the 1 billion won incident, was a Saturday.”
“....”
“The first-week jackpot for May was 10 billion won. After income tax, that would come to about 6.7 billion won. Right after the 1 billion won donation, that’s a perfect fit for a conservatively estimated Big Plan corporate fund.”
“....”
“And the convenience store where the winning ticket was bought happens to be the one in front of the studio-apartment district we were investigating.”
“....”
The entire team fell silent.
No, come on, surely not....
But.
“Too many things line up too neatly for it to be a coincidence.”
“....”
Still, they couldn’t accept it.
It was too unreal.
No.
It should not be reality.
“....”
For people from elite backgrounds like them, the fact that some lucky lottery winner used his prize money as seed capital and built the foundation of an empire capable of shaking the market was... a fantasy too hard to swallow.
No, come on...!
It was delusion.
Ridiculous nonsense.
“Hmm.”
“Hah.”
“No way.”
“That’s... a little...”
There’s no way some lunatic would win the biggest jackpot in history and then go all in on saving a VTuber company....
“....”
“....”
“....”
Even within that cognitive dissonance,
there was one thing everyone shared.
...But every single thing BigMan does is insane.
And yet....
“....”
“....”
“....”
In the end, it was still hard to believe.
“No, come on....”
Only Jeong Yu-ri remained silent, staring at the newspaper clipping on the table.
[The winner of the 10 billion won jackpot is a man in his mid-twenties!]
“....”
*
Sunday evening.
I looked at DoDa standing in front of me. She had gone back to the dorm, wrapped herself in a blanket, and then come back. Now she was slurping down hot chocolate she’d brought from somewhere.
“I was just going to hang out next to Aki and play some games.”
“....”
“Don’t worry about it. Manager, please behave naturally too. I’m just a hot-chocolate-drinking natural disaster.”
“....”