Exorcism Record
Even after the real-world meetup, Soul Net showed no signs of slowing down.
“You're telling me I can receive information from others in real time, without expensive magic communication or messenger birds? What even is this? I'm using it right now!”
Those who used it out of necessity.
“PUHAHA! These dumbass bastards, I swear! Why are they doing something this idiotic? Seriously!”
Those who watched it because it was hilarious.
“Hmm... looking at the Blacksmith Gallery, a short sword seems like a better fit for me than a long sword. Maybe I'll reconfigure my equipment that way.”
Those who browsed it for information, and so on.
Soul Net wasn't yet large enough to influence the entire dimensional realm, but one thing was certain—it was the hottest, most talked-about new content around. And the ad revenue was rolling in handsomely, with the Black Magic Tower fully backing Soul Net's operations and advertising business. Meanwhile, I was hard at work expanding Soul Net's services and cooking up even more ways to have fun.
I've already used the money we pulled in to reinforce the magic functions for dimensional stability and post archiving.
The magic circles that powered Soul Net didn't exist in the physical world. They were etched directly into the fabric of the artificial dimension where Soul Net resided, like circuitry on a board. And I was the only one who could access them.
At first, it had literally been nothing more than simple post registration and reading functions, but with Soul Net grown to its current scale, I'd had to massively expand the magic circles to secure room for added features and storage. And once the expansion work was done, it turned out the circles were far sturdier than expected—robust enough, in fact, to support a whole lot more functionality.
So what should I add?
Let's gather the most upvoted and most-viewed posts from every gallery so people can browse them all in one place!
Frankly, sticking to a single gallery gets boring after a while. You start wondering what's going on in the other galleries. And you'd naturally get curious about which post was drawing the biggest buzz across all of Soul Net. I knew this better than anyone—I'd been a community addict in my past life in Korea.
Link all the galleries together. Pull out only the posts with the highest view counts and display them in one place. Show which gallery each one originally came from...
Done. It was complete.
I pondered what to call this board of the hottest, most-viewed posts, then settled on a name and typed it in. The Soul Best Collection. Abbreviated: SoBest.
“Hope the users like it.”
Chuckling to myself, I built the feature into Soul Net and left an announcement visible to all users.
— This is a collection of the most-viewed and most-upvoted posts from every gallery. It's designed so you can easily see what the hottest topics on Soul Net are and what other galleries are interested in. Enjoy!
The reaction wasn't bad at all.
Today is the day I attempt to clear Floor 5 of the Abyss Dungeon. Wait for me, honey. Your man is coming home with gold coins.
Members who had previously been active just for information sharing or entertainment now threw themselves into gallery activity with even more passion, driven by the goal of making it onto SoBest at least once.
I used to only hang around the Commerce Gallery, but it turns out reading posts from the craft fields and other artisans helps quite a lot with sharpening my business sense. I'd recommend visiting SoBest often.
I'm taking three majors at the Academy—magic, metallurgy, and spirit arts—and being able to get information on all three is honestly so much fun. Haha.
People began taking interest in other galleries and broadening their horizons, and Soul Net grew livelier still. Not bad at all. Daily visitors had reached six hundred thousand, and the ads were doing well too. We'd even reinforced Soul Net's stability thoroughly with the advertising revenue.
Still, it's a bit of a shame the growth curve has flattened.
Compared to the explosive influx during Cahahha's meteoric rise in popularity, things had cooled somewhat. But what could I do? Growth always comes in bursts and plateaus—nature of the beast. Besides, community growth was never something I could control in the first place. Memes. Trends. The reasons people flooded in were astonishingly varied, and none of it was something I could deliberately manufacture or regulate.
All I could do was my part: running Soul Net diligently so it stayed healthy and fun.
And exactly one month after the day I'd been thinking that...
“Uh... what is this?”
I confirmed that Soul Net's user count was climbing at an extremely steep rate.
The SoBest system? It was related, but not the direct cause. More precisely, this was all happening because of a single post that had gotten attention thanks to SoBest. And that post was...
It was a post serializing a novel.
Sarat Red. An unremarkable man. A carriage mechanic in Al Coast, the beach city and one of the great metropolises of the Wirod Dimension.
He repaired carriages, and while he was at it he'd fix a horse's saddle too, and he'd picked up extra skills here and there—enough to tinker with the mana-engine artifacts that mages rode around in. Just an ordinary repairman like that, but thanks to the nature of his trade, he was a man who absorbed an enormous volume of rumors and stories. And the character of Al Coast itself, a coastal city, only widened the flood of gossip that reached his ears.
“Merchant ship sighted off the Coldpan continent side!”
“That airship over there—which dimension is it from? Can you identify the crest?”
“Looks like it's from the Lupern dimension, sir!”
“Lupern! Then they'll be salt merchants. Prepare a berth for the airship!”
A coastal city and a commercial hub, and—positioned on a Dimension Point where the barriers between planes weakened, perfectly suited for interdimensional travel—it drew trading companies from countless other human realms. Because of that, Sarat Red couldn't help but hear an absolute mountain of stories as he went about fixing carriage wheels and axles.
“You hear that one? Apparently there's a dimension out there where people circulate mana directly through their bodies.”
“Don't talk nonsense. Where would a dimension like that even be?”
“It's true, I tell you. Heard there's a realm where they embed condensed mana into the body and run it along the blood vessels and nerves to unlock superhuman abilities. The dimension's name is... the Seonmu World! They call it the Seonmu World.”
“Seon...mu... What a filthy awkward thing to pronounce. So what do they export?”
“Yeongdan, friend! Health tonics famous for strengthening the body when eaten! Care to try some yourself? I hear they're excellent for your performance at night, if you take my meaning.”
“Bah, forget it!”
Tales of a dimension with superhumans who kicked off the empty air and flew by circulating mana through their bodies.
“You hear that one? There's supposedly a dimension that runs massive machines on nothing but steam and steel.”
“Why bother when you've got magic?”
“That dimension is short on mana, see. It's a world where they can't even force open a Dimension Point unless one occurs naturally.”
“There's a realm that practices witchcraft, they say. Possesses secret arts for raising the dead.”
“The mood in the Spirit Realm is grim these days. Could it be the Water Spirit King's time is drawing near?”
The Spirit Realm. Mana-starved dimensions. Realms of witchcraft and Taoist arts, and on and on. For every one of the staggering number of trading companies and people who crowded into Al Coast, there was another dimension and another culture to hear about. And every last one of those stories was stored away in Sarat Red's head.
Not by choice.
He simply had a good memory, and the people around him never stopped yammering, so he'd come to know things whether he wanted to or not.
Then one day...
“I've never seen a carriage built to these specifications before, my lord. As for how to repair it... it may take some time.”
“Soul Net, was it?”
“I've heard the name, my lord. What exactly does it do?”
“My good man! You live in Al Coast and you don't know the latest news? It's a kind of magic, magic I say! A magic connected across dimensions that can call up text and images.”
“And what would I use that for?”
“Everyone gathers around, reads what others have posted, and when you put up a post of your own, people react to it. That's the whole thing. There's bound to be a gallery for carriage wheels too. Why not go take a look? Come, come! I'll teach you the 1st-level spell needed to connect.”
On one customer's recommendation, and to solve the problem sitting in front of him, Sarat Red connected to Soul Net.
It really was there. The Coachman's Gallery had an information post neatly cataloging the new carriage specifications. Thanks to that post, he repaired the customer's carriage—and that was the moment Sarat fell head over heels for Soul Net.
Adventurers' posts. Merchants' posts. Artisans' posts. Mages' posts. There were idiotic posts, useful posts, and posts that made his brow furrow. Soul Net was vast.
Then, one day, after nearly a month of happily roaming Soul Net...
“The Soul Best Collection?”
When a hall of fame gathering the most-viewed posts on all of Soul Net appeared, Sarat for the first time found himself thinking he might write a post of his own. And what to write was obvious. In his month of wandering Soul Net, he had settled on one thought in particular.
Maybe I'll try writing a novel.
The folk myths and legends scattered across the Wirod Dimension. The fearsome monsters and evil spirits of every land. And the adventures of the distinctive heroes from every dimension who hunted them down. He already had plenty of ideas in mind. More than enough material. And since customers needing carriage repairs didn't show up every single day, he had plenty of free time besides.
Sarat Red created a nickname on Soul Net. NoviceWriter. And then he headed for the Novel Gallery.
What they're doing is straight-up gangsterism. They've got a thieves' guild backing them, so even if you go protest, they just brush you off.
The Novel Gallery was filled to bursting with the laments of writers who'd been bitten by publishers. But well.
I'm serializing in a gallery, not through a publisher, so shouldn't be my problem, right?
That was how lightly he thought of it. Telling himself it would be nice if even one or two people read it and had a chuckle, he began pouring words into the gallery through magic. In the blink of an eye, the manuscript for Exorcism Record, Chapter 1, was complete.
Sarat posted it to the gallery without much thought.
Chapter 1. The reaction was lukewarm. The view count barely registered.
But by the time Chapter 5 went up...
Reactions began bubbling up within the Novel Gallery. And by the time Chapter 20 was serialized...
The Novel Gallery's topic of discussion had shifted from writers bemoaning their fates to nothing but Exorcism Record. And then—the moment Chapter 30 went live—Sarat Red's novel hit SoBest. Once it made SoBest, even more people started reading, and the result...
By around Chapter 52:
The Novel Gallery's success story has arrived!
At long last, Sarat Red's novel had swallowed Soul Net whole.
Amid equal parts disbelief and joy, Sarat kept serializing his novel, while...
“...Who IS this person? This is genre fiction, isn't it? Someone's serializing a web novel on Soul Net?!”
Elsy Bwenner was shouting in his private research lab in the Black Magic Tower.