Animal Ranch
My grand, swaggering declaration ended in spectacular, merciless failure.
Making money through NewTube… turned out to be far harder than expected. I'd figured a cat as singularly exceptional as me could casually empty the wallets of every virtual butler on the internet and strike gold. The wall of reality was simply too high.
Well—when it came to NewTube videos, the single most important thing was being chosen by the god of the algorithm. No matter how much blood and sweat you poured into a perfectly crafted video, if the algorithm never so much as glanced your way, it sank forever into the abyss. That was the ruthless law of this place.
The world was not so idle that busy modern people would go hunting through the flood of content pouring in every second. Just the videos uploaded from South Korea alone easily numbered in the tens of thousands a day. Even the short ones ran at least several tens of minutes. Human beings living inside a hard limit of twenty-four hours simply did not have the bandwidth to digest them all.
Even a jobless shut-in with nothing but free time on their hands would be lucky to sit down and properly watch ten videos in a day. That was just a fact.
Staring at the catastrophic view counts filling the screen, Yuyeon carefully opened her mouth.
"Nabi… I think this might be a fail?"
"Grr…!"
I trembled from head to toe with pure injustice and outrage. Watching my tail fur stand on end as I shook, Yuyeon—who seemed to have already let it all go—gave me a bittersweet, regretful look and stroked my head.
"No, Nabi. You did great. Unni will just go work harder, okay? Our Nabi already did everything she could, so don't beat yourself up."
"Hnn…"
Seeing Yuyeon's shadowed face—as if she'd already attained enlightenment—trying to comfort me instead only made a hot fighting spirit blaze up from deep in my chest. I was not the kind of cat who backed down like this! I immediately spun my brain and overhauled the entire plan.
Not NewTube. Terrestrial broadcast!
No matter how much people yapped about NewTube being the trend, the king, the future, its reach still fell short of network television. NewTube popularity was nothing more than popularity shattered into fragments by the algorithm. Even a mega-creator with over a million subscribers was often a complete nobody to anyone who didn't already care.
Television was a different dimension. The moment your face appeared a few times in a prime-time terrestrial slot, every neighborhood grandma and every little kid in the country would know you. It was only a matter of time.
The throne of broadcast power still stood firm. Maybe things would change once today's toddling babies grew up—but for now, traditional TV still hit far harder than NewTube.
And so, with Yuyeon's hands as my proxy, I promptly submitted an application to the undisputed Sunday-morning champion, the long-running program Animal Ranch. The title of our story was simple, intuitive, and provocative.
The World's Smartest Cat.
Inside the broadcasting station.
In the main writers' room of Animal Ranch, writer Yoo Chae-hwa was staring a hole through her monitor as she worked through the flood of submissions.
As befitting the best animal program in the country, hundreds of stories poured into her inbox every week. Of course, not all of them were legitimate. Even a casual skim showed that more than half leaned toward exaggeration or outright fiction.
Plenty of people, driven by nothing more than the impure desire to get famous for one appearance, inflated perfectly ordinary animal behavior into miracles on the page.
Rubbing her eyes against the boredom, Chae-hwa's gaze snagged on one particular story. The title: The World's Smartest Cat. The content was simple. The owner claimed their cat possessed human-level intelligence.
"Haa… here we go again…"
Chae-hwa let out a deep sigh. Genius-cat stories like this were a staple—dozens of them dumped into the pile every single week. Why did every butler in Korea insist that their own cat was a genius?
From past experience, whenever she showed up on site full of hope, ten out of ten turned out to be lies or the owner's pure delusion. Far from geniuses, most of them couldn't even manage a basic sit that any dog could do—they just sat there looking sulky while scarfing down Churu.
She was about to flip past it with an irritated swipe when her eyes landed on the attached photo of the cat—and she shot up from her chair without thinking. The chair scraped back with a loud screech she didn't even hear.
To the eyes of a veteran writer who had seen thousands of cats on the job, the animal in the photo was nothing short of otherworldly. Breathtakingly beautiful and impossibly cute, it made Chae-hwa's heart hammer. Real intelligence or not, with a face like that she had to get it on air! It was a ratings cheat code all by itself.
Chae-hwa immediately launched the preliminary on-site verification process to judge broadcast suitability.
Confirming the address attached to the application was easy enough. After contacting the homeowner and setting a time, Chae-hwa headed for the modest home of the story's star with her heart pounding.
What she found after hurrying over was a small villa in Seoul. From the outside, it wasn't a particularly nice one.
Knock knock—
A moment later, the firmly shut door swung wide open.
"Hello! I'm writer Yoo Chae-hwa from Animal Ranch!"
"Ah, yes… Please come in!"
The woman who opened the door looked remarkably young. At a glance she had the kind of face you could almost believe belonged to a fresh high-schooler. Even bare-faced, with not a scrap of makeup, her clean, delicate beauty stood out.
But to Chae-hwa, a professional cat person down to the bone, a human woman's looks didn't even register.
Her radar was locked exclusively on today's star. The truth was, Yoo Chae-hwa was a hardcore cat obsessive who loved cats with every fiber of her being.
Living with strict parents had left her stuck as a mere virtual butler for now, but she nursed a firm dream: the moment she became independent, she would adopt the prettiest cat in the world and spend her life together with it.
And then—
"Meow."
As if timed to perfection, a fluffy little cat with soft cotton-ball fur poked its head out from behind the owner's slender legs. The instant their eyes met, Chae-hwa's pupils shook hard.
"Oh my gosh! She's so cute! Of course it's a Ragdoll…!"
Chae-hwa clasped both hands together and stared at the cat with glittering eyes.
Fluffy, soft fur that glowed translucent in the sunlight, and a classic dog-like Ragdoll who, far from being afraid of people, came padding over affectionately.
True to the breed nicknamed "living stuffed animals" for the way they went completely limp when held, the little one was adorable and lovable in exactly the way a doll come to life would be.
Just by existing, she proved why she was one of the most popular and most frequently adopted breeds among cat butlers.
Chae-hwa smiled brightly.
First of all, the looks of both cat and butler had passed with flying colors.
Television viewers cared about appearance. People could talk all they wanted about looking at the heart instead of the face, but most first impressions were decided by looks alone.
In that sense, this cat and her owner had more than enough face for broadcast.
And so Chae-hwa stepped inside. Whether because Yuyeon had cleaned ahead of time or not, the house was spotless.
Chae-hwa sat on the floor, then spoke.
"You're Han Yuyeon, correct?"
"Yes. I'm Han Yuyeon."
Chae-hwa held out a printed sheet of paper.
"Looking at this… you wrote that your cat, Nabi, is extremely intelligent?"
"Yes, that's right! Our Nabi really is the smartest cat in the world!"
Yuyeon's voice was packed with the unshakable confidence and pride of a doting parent showing off their child. Unable to hide the interest rising inside her, Chae-hwa casually cast the bait.
"Since you say she's that smart, Yuyeon… for the sake of the broadcast, would it be all right if I did a few light checks myself?"
Yuyeon nodded without a second's hesitation.
"In what ways is Nabi mainly smart?"
Chae-hwa looked at Yuyeon with genuine curiosity as well.
"Um… she just does everything well! Want me to show you a demo?"
"Yes. That would be perfect."
"Meow."
Yuyeon's eyes met Nabi's.
Yuyeon said,
"Nabi. Turn on the computer for me, and pull up the shopping site I always use on the screen."
"Nyang…"
Nabi froze. For a verification stage like this, she'd expected the usual cute tricks—shake, sit, bang-bang, roll over! Instead she was being asked for high-difficulty multitasking fit for an AI assistant!
But if she stood there looking dumbfounded, not only would the terrestrial debut plan go up in smoke—the household's rice bowl might go with it. Nabi forced her trembling legs steady, flicked her tail with forced nonchalance, and walked over to the desk where the computer tower sat.
"Oh my! Oh my!"
The cheerful whir of the cooling fan and the glow of the monitor lighting up tore an involuntary scream from Chae-hwa's mouth.
But that was only the beginning. Pressing the power button on the tower was still, just barely, understandable as the behavior of a well-trained cat. What came next made Chae-hwa's eyes nearly pop out of her head.
Nabi was holding the mouse with her front paws—completely naturally. This was not the clumsy batting of a toy. She rested her paws on the mouse with the same precision a human set their fingers, watched the pointer on the monitor, and slid it smoothly across the screen!
"That's impossible…!"
Just like a human!
She aimed the pointer dead-on at the internet browser icon on the desktop and—click, click—executed a clean double-click. At the sight of those front-paw movements, Chae-hwa's jaw dropped so wide it looked ready to unhinge.