Kyahehe
“Elsi! Elsi Bwener!”
“Yes, Tower Lord.”
“The Imperial Court has ruled that Soulnet may continue operating! However—”
“Yes.”
“They hammered home that unfortunate incidents like the Kalaksil and Isrban affairs must not keep repeating.”
“I understand.”
That one still felt a little unfair.
Seriously—Soulnet hadn’t even been up for a few days, and who could have guessed comment wars would escalate straight into real-world brawls?
I never saw that coming!
…No. That was on me.
Back on Earth, every gallery had a head mod and deputy mods for a reason. Failing to build that system from the start was my mistake.
“You have a solution for this, I trust? Soulnet is no longer a mere spell. It is a watched magic now—under scrutiny across the entire continent, and from the Imperial Court itself. Fail to manage it properly, and they may shut it down for good.”
“Of course. I’ll handle it.”
“Good.”
That very day, I dove into Soulnet’s magic and reworked it—then rolled out a few new features.
Effective today, Soulnet has established new regulations. Every gallery is now required to appoint a Gallery Manager.
Managers will be marked in orange beside their nicknames; Deputy Managers in blue. Both roles gain the authority to ban problem users from their gallery.
Managers and Deputy Managers are expected to mediate before extreme incidents like the Kalaksil and Isrban affairs can erupt again, and to draft and enforce per-gallery rules and terms of use.
To all Soulnet users: please observe proper manners. Thank you.
Most Soulnet users seemed willing to accept the new policy. Across every gallery, a sweeping election of head managers and deputies got underway.
Once I had something like a self-regulating system in place, I could finally breathe.
Communities. Fun as they were—maybe because this was a fantasy world—the moment things went wrong, they could balloon without end. Caution was the right call.
I logged into Soulnet several times a day, checking whether the self-correction was actually working. The galleries were more or less following their own rules and ticking along fine.
“Sweating bullets from day one. For real.”
I muttered it with a long sigh—and right then, something went thud inside my lab.
I turned my head. A mountain of invoices had been delivered.
“Right. I’m an Official Mage now, aren’t I?”
A mage registered to a tower didn’t keep that status for free. Periodic evaluations were mandatory, and in exchange for a private research lab, you paid lab fees. Unlike my Apprentice Mage days—when the tower had covered everything—I now had to earn my own money.
Mages in the Wirod Dimension usually made money two ways. Either their research was recognized and they went on lecture tours, or they secured official patronage from a tower or a sponsor. Failing that, they sold magic they had developed themselves. Once a spell became famous, royalties attached to its use—inscribed into scrolls, or charged as official tuition for learning it.
The problem was this:
“If the community goes paid, who would even use it?”
Accessibility had to be absolute. The second it became paywalled, people would just pay the usage fee on my research paper, spin up their own free community clone, and migrate there. So the usual royalty model was off the table.
Then what?
Only one option. Same as Earth—a community’s main revenue stream was advertising. Ads.
“Today’s daily active users on Soulnet… let’s see… a hundred thousand?”
Not bad for a community less than a year old. Credit to the Imperial Court for the free publicity.
“This level should still work.”
A world overflowing with monsters, where travel was still inconvenient. Jump Points and long-range teleportation circles existed, sure—but they were so expensive that most freight and travel still moved on foot. In a world like that, the chance to put your product in front of a hundred thousand people was a serious selling point.
Money. Money was always right. And for long-term community operations, money was essential.
I posted a notice at once.
I finished the notice and stood up from my chair—then had to stop almost immediately.
I’d expected demand. But this?
I honestly had not expected a reaction this explosive.
Eldrad Kamion, Lord of the Black Magic Tower, took quiet pride in one thing.
Because the Black Magic Tower specialized in spatial and dimensional travel, every kind of movement circle imaginable was installed on the premises—short-range Jump Points, of course, but also seven-hundred-kilometer routes, intercontinental teleportation circles, and even interdimensional transfer arrays.
Perhaps that was why his favorite catchphrase went something like this:
For the first time, however, the Lord of the Black Magic Tower began to suspect his boast might not hold.
“Tower Lord!”
“Another visitor come to inquire about advertising?”
“Yes! They’re offering to pay the teleport fees themselves—they want us to open a Jump Point or teleportation circle!”
“Tell them to wait about thirty minutes. Every teleportation circle is currently overloaded. Nothing is free to activate.”
“Understood.”
Teleportation fees were never cheap. But with people lining up willing to pay them just to get here, the Tower Lord’s face settled into something caught between laughter and tears.
“Third Elder! Fifth Elder! Eighth Elder! Call them all in! We need everyone focused on cooling down the overheated circles!”
“The Eighth Elder is currently lecturing—”
“Tell him to leave it to his assistant and get here! Do you understand how big a difference a single operational travel circle makes? Tell him to hurry!”
While the Tower Lord and the elders scrambled to stabilize the travel arrays, the receptionist in the lobby was equally stunned by the unprecedented flood of visitors.
“What business brings you here?”
“Advertising. I’ve come to place an ad on Soulnet.”
“Please take a number and wait. Roughly thirty people arrived before you, so you should expect about an hour.”
“I’ll endure it.”
Everyone in the Black Magic Tower was busy. But no matter how busy everyone else became, none of them could out-busy Soulnet’s developer himself—Elsi Bwener.
“So… how much are you offering for a one-month ad?”
“Five thousand imperial gold coins. This is a spell our tower considers quite important, you see. It absolutely must be promoted widely.”
“Understood. Main banner—highest-exposure position—for one month. Correct?”
“Correct. Here. Sign the contract.”
Busy was one thing. The amounts involved also ran far past anything Elsi’s usual sense of money could track. On top of that, every contract’s terms differed, and every banner placement was different; remembering it all was nearly impossible.
In the end, at a certain point, the Black Magic Tower and Elsi arrived at the same agreement.
“We’ll have the Black Magic Tower handle a portion of the advertising contracts. Frankly, managing this many ads alone is beyond you.”
“I’ll transfer partial administrative rights to Soulnet, along with the dimensional structural diagrams. Please help with the advertising side—banner sizes, placement consultations, and the like.”
“In return, the Black Magic Tower will take a cut of the ad revenue. We’ll need to hire staff, and handling advertiser management and coordination is better done on our end anyway. A tower will handle this better than you would. You focus on nothing else—just keep Soulnet running properly.”
“Thank you, Tower Lord. Still, I’m relieved.”
“About what?”
“Daily users are only in the hundred-thousand range, so at least I’m not busy enough to get sick over it. Haha. If it had exploded any further… I really might have collapsed from overwork.”
“True enough. Who could have guessed it would go this well?”
The Tower Lord and I looked at each other and smiled with exhausted faces.
And even then, I had forgotten one very basic premise: that no one ever knows when, how, or why a community’s boom will arrive.
The spark was nothing at all.
For reasons no one could pin down, one completely asinine, absurdist phrase started trending on Soulnet. And of all things, someone discovered that when you scrawled it in the Imperial standard script, it looked suspiciously like the word for urine.
The result:
Community-born slang began seeping into the language of the continent itself. And the imperial citizens—subjects of other kingdoms—the countless people of the Wirod Dimension who ran into this strange new phrase for the first time—
“Kyahehe? Where on earth did that come from?”
“It’s a way of talking that’s trending on Soulnet.”
“What’s Soulnet?”
“A place packed with posts that are ridiculously funny.”
“Maybe I should take a look. What is it, exactly? How do you log in?”
—began transforming into Soulnet users.