This Is Hilarious

My worries were proving exactly right.

"A dimensional plane like Soul Net? Couldn't we make one too?"

"The magic itself is a level-5 spell. So creating another Soul Net isn't actually that difficult."

"From what I've seen, they're printing money at an absurd rate......... What if we try building one ourselves?"

"Not a bad judgment. Shall we? What's stopping us?"

After Soul Net's outrageous success, numerous attempts to create imitation dimensional planes were being reported across the board.

It was magic that had earned a golden ring, sure, but the idea was the only unique part of it — the structure and principles behind the spell's manifestation weren't nearly as complicated as people imagined.

And so, brimming with ambitious resolve — We'll build a new Soul Net! — several parties had constructed their own artificial dimensional planes.........

Most of them crashed and burned, spectacularly.

Why?

"Soul Net already exists. Why would I bother using some artificial plane you whipped up?"

"Does your plane have a community and gallery culture anywhere near Soul Net's level? Got a real user base? Can you play games, run Soul World, keep a Soul Page? Well?"

"Oh, so you can upload and remove text and images? Soul Net does that too. And your plane does literally nothing else. There's no reason for us to abandon Soul Net for you."

The newly built artificial planes had no killer content.

No content meant no users, and no users meant the plane couldn't sustain itself.

"There aren't enough daily visitors, so we can't keep the plane stable! To force it, we'd have to pour in elixirs to anchor it!"

"What? Soul Net stays up just fine without pouring anything in!"

"Because their user count blew past tens of millions and is heading into the hundreds of millions now! With that many users, the emotions and collective thoughts generated by the souls flowing into the plane are enough to sustain it on their own! We don't have that!"

And just like that, no new Soul Net ever came to be.

But the moment I left those attempts alone to fester.

There was always the possibility that a new artificial plane with some advantage Soul Net lacked would appear and sweep the user base away.

Right after Player Cargam's victory in the War Era 2 exhibition match, I had declared a sweeping recruitment drive for entrepreneurs looking to build businesses on Soul Net.

And immediately after that declaration.

To nip those would-be ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠competitors in the bud, I unleashed a single spell across the internet on a massive scale.

A spell that let anyone build whatever Net Page they wanted.

I didn't sell it for a single coin.

What I was aiming for was one thing.

Exactly one thing.

"Build our own virtual plane and run a business on it, you say?"

"Our user count is nowhere near Soul Net's......... we'd need a clear point of differentiation to attract customers, and it's doubtful we could even create one."

"Even if we had a clear differentiator, who knows how many users we could actually pull away from Soul Net? Better to just build a Net Page on Soul Net and work from there."

"We get charged a usage fee past a certain visitor threshold? Doesn't matter. If you're doing business on the Net, Soul Net is king. Building some other artificial plane carries an enormous opportunity cost with a low chance of success."

I would pull every potential competitor inside my own ecosystem, transforming them into users and collaborators who enriched Soul Net itself.

And the attempt worked, flawlessly.

"Over a hundred thousand Net Pages were created today alone."

"Most of them don't even reach a hundred daily visitors."

"Most of them are pages made as jokes."

Thanks to a few brave pioneers' glorious faceplants and a Net Page creation process that had become ridiculously easy, the ambition of building an entirely new dimensional plane was wiped off the map, utterly and completely.

At first, the Net Pages were nothing but toys.

Self-promotion pages.

Pages that just listed strange characters and random information in an endless scroll.

People who, for reasons passing understanding, insisted on uploading and storing bizarre novels — the kind that would've done just fine on Net Novel — onto their own personal Net Pages.

All sorts of strange and novel experiments began popping up.

For now, they were feeble, laughable little attempts.

But at some point, I knew.

From this soil, monsters of unthinkable scale would emerge to follow in the footsteps of the games and the galleries.

I rubbed my hands together and waited for that monster to appear.

And then.

"A Portal Page, you say?"

"There are already a lot of Net Pages, but going forward there are going to be so many that today's flood will look like a joke. We need a Portal Page that helps users search for and find the Net Pages they want. The moment you enter Soul Net, the Portal Page should be the first thing that loads. That's what I'm going to build."

"Haha! Now that's a fine idea! Accessibility gets so much easier!"

"It's inevitable, really. And with a Portal Page in place, other Net Pages have a far greater chance of being surfaced. That's how the user base grows and......."

"Which means the Net Page creators can monetize that growing user base and plan their own businesses around it! Excellent idea! Implement it immediately!"

The Portal Page was built and added.

And alongside it came the real-time search rankings feature.

The Portal Page drew a hugely positive response.

Now then.

At this point, the board had been laid out more than sufficiently — by yours truly.

It was time for the dancers to appear and perform upon that board.

And the first headliner, the one who should have kicked it all off, took a long, long time to show up.

Even so, I didn't grow anxious.

Remember how Soul World and Soul Page had taken off?

Hadn't a romance between one humble shepherd and one princess exploded into a hit that nobody saw coming?

The Net Page system would play out in exactly the same way.

Given time, someone with a brilliant business idea would emerge.

I could wait until then.

"Tower Master! The ad rates just will not stop climbing! Wahahaha!"

"Net Novel is cruising along smoothly! A whole wave of new titles is coming out!"

"Soul World's user count is rising steeply! Tower Master, at this rate the number of individual Soul Pages will surpass one hundred million within the week!"

The situation was different from the days of Soul World and Soul Page.

Unlike back then, Soul Net had now grown to a scale that defied all reason.

So the anxiety had shrunk while the anticipation swelled, and we were able to sit back and wait for a genuine success story to emerge from among the Net Pages.

And our anticipation.

"War Era 2! The Pyuaroda Kingdom's regular season begins now!"

Around the time the War Era 2 regular league kicked off its pilot run, gathering a handful of pro teams to compete among humans, dwarves, elves, and orcs.

Back when Dragon Contractor had wrapped up, OrchardKeeper had gotten into a fierce keyboard battle with several big-name authors on the Novel Gallery who claimed he couldn't write anything set in a Seonmu World backdrop.

And then, around the time OrchardKeeper publicly announced he was preparing a Seonmu-style work.

Around the time the marriage of Princess Gunhild and the shepherd Teddle was announced.

Quietly, yet undeniably, one video-sharing site was beginning to explode in popularity.

A Net Page by the name of Kraken.

It had started with a video titled Me at the Zoo — uploaded by the creator as a simple test of his own Net Page — and had slowly, organically accumulated little clips here and there. A tiny video-focused Net Page.

And as the internet has always done, its moment of growth arrived from a completely unforeseen quarter.

It was truly nothing special.

A novice mage fumbled his incantation, failed to cast the spell, got launched ceiling-ward along with every piece of furniture in his room, bounced around slamming into things, then came crashing down screaming.

One utterly idiotic, hilarious video.

And that video saved Kraken.

People went searching the Portal Page to hunt down Pipo's spell-fail video after it started getting mentioned in the galleries, and as the search volume piled up, the term began climbing the rankings.

Once it climbed into the upper ranks of the search list.

"A spell-fail video? What's that?"

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

"And the search term right below it is Kraken?"

"What is this? Should we take a look?"

"Oh my god, this is hilarious! What is that screaming!....... PWAHAHA!"

More and more people searched for the term, and the result of that endless loop was this.

"Karim! Karim! Kraken's daily user count just exploded!"

"How much?"

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

"Fifty million! Yesterday alone, fifty million people came to our page and watched all kinds of videos! And it's still climbing in real time! Our site's name just took the number one spot on the real-time search rankings!"

"Wh-what? Why? How?"

"A single video of a rookie mage botching his spell went viral and set the whole thing off! Wahahaha! We did it, Karim! We've made it!"

Overnight, Kraken had become the hottest search term on all of Soul Net.

It was an outrageous butterfly effect, set in motion by one rookie's failed spell.