The Soul World Explosion and a New Business Model
I was still starving. To say it again, the entire core of internet culture — galleries included — is unpredictability. A business idea everyone assumed would take off crashes and burns, while some thoughtless, idiotic video blows up to millions of views and soars. Chaos, pure and unknowable chaos.
That's the internet.
Remember how hard I worked preparing Soul World and Soul Talk? And remember how depressing it was to watch them get dismissed as some weird experimental feature nobody used — buried at the very bottom of oblivion for nearly a month, without so much as a peep of reaction!
But I, Elsy Bwenner...
My vision of the future, drawn from the internet of my past life on Earth, had proven accurate once again. Of course, as befits the internet, the way it happened was — as I said at the start — completely unpredictable.
If I'd claimed that the First Princess and a shepherd boy falling in love would bring Soul World to life, no one would have believed me.
But who cares how it happened, so long as it happened? The point is, it worked.
And this wasn't just an ordinary success.
The community and the galleries? Still the beating heart of Soul Net. But the galleries had a slight limitation — they were essentially a culture for insiders. People with a specific interest stayed within their own gallery and rarely ventured out. Soul World, however, was an entirely different concept.
The insiders were terrifying.
"Oh my. The baron's daughter isn't on Soul World yet?"
"Soul World? What's that?"
"It's so much fun. Look at this — this is my Soul Page. You can share all kinds of daily moments, decorate your page, set background music... things like that."
"Goodness? That sounds delightful. How do I get one? Please teach me!"
They never joined Soul World alone. One person signed up, and her friends and acquaintances followed in a cascade. Thanks to that structure, Soul World was experiencing exponential, geometric growth in its user base.
"The dimension's stability is dropping! Way too many users online!"
"Hold the magic circle structure! Elsy! The magic circle code for Soul World!"
"Access permission codes are written at the bottom! Just follow those! And even if it wobbles, it won't break! I built the system anticipating this much traffic! Bwahahaha!"
The Soul World system — coded painstakingly through a year of silence and endurance — proved its worth. A staggering number of people flooded in, but the system held. And once the system held, Soul World moved past explosive growth and began to stabilize.
"Are there really still people who aren't on Soul World these days?"
"This is the huge trend right now? You should sign up too, quick."
"Wanna be Friends with me?"
Within days, it had grown into a social phenomenon you could honestly call a culture. The hottest thing in the entire Wirod Dimension right now was Soul World. Everywhere you went, everyone you met — it was the perfect conversation topic. Among noble daughters, exchanging the address of your personal Soul Page had even replaced exchanging calling cards as a form of greeting.
And with growth on this scale, the Tower Master, naturally, began rubbing his hands together and thinking about money.
"Soul World's daily active users have already passed double the combined traffic of every gallery on Soul Net. Elsy. What do you think about putting ads in there?"
For the Tower Master — already making a tidy profit from gallery ads on Soul Net — it was an obvious line of thinking. But I shook my head.
"Soul Pages are different from galleries. A gallery feels like a public forum, but a Soul Page feels like personal property. Put ads there and a lot of people will feel violated — like their private lives have been trespassed on."
"Then what, we just leave all those users sitting there untouched?! Ad inquiries are already pouring in as it is!"
"We leave Soul World alone. No ads. Instead... we'll monetize it a different way."
At my words, the Tower Master's anxious expression shifted.
"A different way to make money? Now that interests me. What is it?"
"We're going to sell something called Mana Fruits."
"Mana Fruits? What's that?"
"Think of them as a currency for buying features — adding background music to your Soul Page, attaching flashy visual effects to your photos, that sort of thing."
I explained Mana Fruits in thorough detail, and when the Tower Master had heard it all...
"Will that actually sell? Won't people just think it's useless?"
...he was wearing a skeptical expression at this new business model. But I was certain. Because as a kid on Earth, I'd copied the business model of a site that ran almost exactly this same system. And skin sales are always, always profitable.
"Trust me, Tower Master. This will make money."
Why had preparing Soul World taken nearly a year? For nothing other than this: selling skins. I'd bought up scrolls of illusion magic, reverse-engineered and analyzed them, and added all sorts of effects to Soul Pages. On Earth, adding effects to a site like this would have amounted to little sparkles on a screen — but a Soul Page could project its effects out of the screen the moment you clicked it.
They'd sell. These would absolutely sell.
I pushed this project forward with full ambition, and before long it was live.
Decorate your Soul Page!
— Purchase Mana Fruits to add a variety of effects to your Soul Page!
— Dazzling, radiant effects will leap beyond your Soul Page window and appear in the real world!
— Gift Mana Fruits to your Friends and Soul Page companions! You can even gift skin effects directly to friends!
— Mana Fruits can be purchased with cash at your nearest Black Magic Tower branch!
The Tower Master and the elders had simply stood back and watched as I rammed this through so aggressively, but their expressions remained sour with skepticism.
"At best, this just makes Soul Pages sparkle or adds some grandiose effect, doesn't it?"
"People will actually pay money for this? Really?"
"Buying background music with money? Will people really spend that much just decorating a personal Soul Page?"
The Mana Fruit sales launched on a fifty-fifty mix of hope and anxiety. And then, in exactly one day—
"I'd like to purchase Mana Fruits!"
"You there! My household's young lady requires them at once! Make them available for purchase immediately!"
"How does one go about buying Mana Fruits?"
Every single Black Magic Tower branch across the Wirod Dimension was flooded to the point of bursting, and all that anxiety and doubt was incinerated on the spot.
A Soul Page was not merely one feature among many on Soul Net. Your personal interests. Which people you were close with, what you loved. It was a second face — a profile revealing everything about you. The tower's elderly, traditional mages had no reason to spend money decorating theirs, but for the young — especially women and the socially savvy — how you styled your personal Soul Page was a matter of grave importance. And against that backdrop, the newly added catalog of Soul Page skins and background music purchasable with Mana Fruits? Exploding demand was only natural.
Of course, the individual purchase amounts weren't large.
"One Mana Fruit costs one Valrod copper coin, you say? Hm... Then I'll take ten. My daughter's been absolutely obsessed with these lately."
The vast majority of buyers were small spenders. A simple color change here; at most, saving a famous masterpiece painting or a landscape photo as a background — that was about the extent of it.
But there were an enormous number of those ordinary buyers. And precisely because of that—
"Ten Valrod gold coins. Give me that many Mana Fruits."
"Five Valrod gold coins. I'll purchase that many Mana Fruits."
...the whales began to surface. When everyone else is wearing the same modest skins, what if you alone wield a Soul Page bursting with brilliant, blinding effects? There were people in the Wirod Dimension too who wouldn't flinch at throwing down a fortune just to carve out that one point of difference. The result:
The big spenders became objects of envy and admiration. And sitting at the very peak of them all:
This was the Soul Page of the Hero Iomene — gifted 100,000 Mana Fruits by Elsy Bwenner as her reward for retrieving the author of Ink Fragrance from the Tornerheim Kingdom. Once the dazzling illusion effects of flashy Soul Pages became a spectacle in their own right, people began seeking out specific individuals' pages — and so the age of the so-called celebrities began.
Teddle of the Que Kingdom — once a mere shepherd, now known to absolutely everyone. The Hero Iomene. And even a famous merchant of the Valrod Empire who'd poured a hundred gold coins without hesitation into a wildly custom Soul Page.
Soul World was bustling, noisy, and growing at breakneck speed — and then growing some more.
And hilariously, the Soul Net communities were enjoying a spillover windfall from the flood of Soul World users, their own numbers climbing right alongside.
Soul World was a great place to hang out with friends, but the galleries remained the single best structure for digging up information. People who'd entered through Soul World and developed this question or that would browse the galleries while searching, naturally discover their field of interest, settle into a gallery — or sometimes even found an entirely new one. Daily traffic broke out of its plateau and resumed its steep upward climb.
"I'd like to run an ad on the Soul Net main banner."
"As I'm sure you're aware, Guild Master, our Soul Net user base has exploded. We're seeing millions of visitors a day. You know we recently passed the two-million mark and are closing in on three million, yes? So the advertising rates have gone up somewhat..."
"I'll offer fifteen thousand Valrod gold coins."
"Then let's start with the banner design and the ad copy. What direction would you like to take?"
The advertising rates exploded yet again. Everyone was happy. The Hero Iomene was happy with her lavishly decorated Soul Page, and Soul World users were happy to have a brand-new social stage. The insiders were broadening their connections through Soul World and Soul Talk, and Soul Net itself had grown all the more lively with its influx of new gallery users.
But there was exactly one being who remained unsatisfied with this entire situation.
"I should build a portal site feature into Soul Net, so people can search all kinds of things. And adding a real-time trending search function to the portal homepage — that'd be pretty nice too."
That being was none other than Elsy Bwenner himself. And there was a reason he'd set his mind on this. The internet was not a place made up of communities and social networks alone. It had to be a place where all kinds of websites existed, serving all kinds of purposes. And watching Soul Net's unprecedented success, sharp minds already rolling their brains in exactly that direction had begun to appear.
Elsy read this message and laughed.
It seemed the next great feature of Soul Net was going to be games.