Censorship Lovers Are Everywhere
Censorship lovers are everywhere.
New blood has always found its way into communities the same way.
Think about it.
You're web-surfing, you stumble on some truly idiotic post, some meme, some image dump that has you cackling, and then the thought hits you — where the hell did this even come from? — and just like that, you're logging in.
The explosion of Soulnet right now was following that exact same pattern.
Honestly, even I had no idea why this particular thing had gone viral.
But Kyahehe was sparking a trend so ridiculous it defied all reason.
The fact that it was easy to write in the Empire's standard tongue and clung to the mouth like candy only poured oil on the fire.
"I'm going to the bathroom to Kyahehe."
You could already hear people around the Black Magic Tower using the phrase, so that pretty much said it all.
Daily visitors shot from a hundred thousand to half a million almost overnight — nearly a fivefold jump.
This was an age when even children cast basic everyday magic.
Learn a single Level-1 access spell, and anyone could log in.
That kind of accessibility was absurd.
And with the user boom, advertising started showing real results all on its own.
The reaction?
"Guildmaster! Orders are flooding in!"
"What?!"
"This is insane! It's nothing like when we hired bards! Wahahaha! We're going to be rich!"
In this high-fantasy world where carrier pigeons were still in regular use, the advertising power of community promotion was, for sponsors, nothing short of a whole new world.
The Blacksmith Gallery.
It was the gallery founded by the Fire Hammer Guild, the largest blacksmith guild in the Wirod Dimension.
Blacksmiths were a lot like mages.
Sharing technique and showing off were the heart of the trade.
For a profession like that, a community where you could display your work in real time and watch the reactions roll in was nothing short of revolutionary.
Naturally, the vast majority of blacksmiths signed up, and there they debated the latest trends, traded popular forging methods, and shared information of every kind.
"Damn it. There are so many blacksmith guilds these days that even Fire Hammer's getting squeezed out."
And Fadewin — manager of the Blacksmith Gallery and Guildmaster of Fire Hammer — was drowning in that worry.
Too many competitors.
Being the continent's largest guild still had its advantages.
Anyone hunting for top-tier work would travel any distance to commission something from Fire Hammer.
But ordinary people?
"Haven't blacksmiths all leveled up these days?"
"For something quick like a dagger, just buy local. Why go all the way to Fire Hammer? They're all more or less the same."
People preferred the guild next door. They weren't making special trips to Fire Hammer.
Fadewin hated that with every fiber of his being.
"Let's make something so incredible that ordinary customers will come find us no matter how far away they are!"
He set a grand guild-wide goal, scraped together every master he could find, and at last they forged a masterpiece ordinary folk would kill for.
Fire Hammer's crowning work.
A fire-enchanted dagger.
Self-defense?
Unmatched. Drive it into a monster and it melted hide, punched straight through, and cooked the insides.
Survival?
Unmatched. Call up a flame to start a fire or cauterize a wound for emergency first aid.
Just collecting?
Fine too. They'd poured every last scrap of Fire Hammer's power into it, so the design was gorgeous.
Everyday use?
Absolutely! The edge was so sharp it made short work of simple prep and butchering.
A true guild masterpiece, soul poured into every inch of steel — and yet........
"It's not selling."
"You did promote it, right?"
"We hired bards to sing about it and clowns to put on shows, and the numbers still aren't anything special. People treat it like a vaguely overpriced regular dagger."
"Goddamn it all!"
Fadewin groaned, clawing at his hair, then fired up Soulnet.
Sales of Fire Hammer's masterpiece, the fire-enchanted dagger, are terrible. Guild artisans, look at this and answer me. How do we boost sales?
The fire-enchanted dagger became Fire Dragon's Breath.
But the results barely budged.
The name is magnificent. The features are the best there are.......... So why..........
At those words, Fadewin looked around the Soulnet he was currently logged into.
Blacksmith Gallery.
Healer Gallery.
Magic Gallery.
Dungeon Gallery.
Dungeon Strategy Gallery.
There's so many of them.
If he could just show his dagger to every last one of these people?
"This'll work."
He bolted straight for the Black Magic Tower.
As the largest blacksmith guild in the Wirod Dimension, Fire Hammer had no shortage of gold.
"I want Fire Dragon's Breath advertised in the most visible spot on Soulnet!"
An ad bought for a staggering five thousand Valrod Empire gold coins.
And the timing of that purchase was on Fadewin's side as well.
Right around the moment Kyahehe turned into a catchphrase and user numbers detonated, a Fire Dragon's Breath ad went up on Soulnet's main banner.
And the result?
"What's this? Fire Dragon's Breath?"
"Whoa. Design's pretty solid. Fire Hammer, huh? Yeah, they'd pull something like this off."
"I have been needing a self-defense dagger......... maybe I should grab one?"
"Those features look genuinely good."
They managed to plant that thought in the heads of the vast majority of Soulnet visitors.
The banner itself wasn't cheap junk — it was the kind of ad that said, pay a little more and buy the best dagger, the strongest dagger — and that message lined up perfectly with Fire Hammer's image.
And the result.
"It's selling. It's selling! It's selling, I tell you! Puhahaha!"
Fire Dragon's Breath started moving.
And it didn't stop at simply selling.
I've been an adventurer for over ten years and this might be the best dagger I've ever used?
As real-user reviews flooded the galleries, ratings climbed even higher, and an absurd virtuous cycle kicked into gear.
Five thousand gold coins?
A bargain.
Dagger sales had already climbed high enough to make five thousand gold look like pocket change.
But it wasn't just dagger sales.
Image.
Fire Hammer was still Fire Hammer.
Premium product.
The place that made high-end goods on a different level from everyone else.
That was the reputation that formed.
And that was the true effect of Fire Hammer's promotion.
"Guildmaster! Other products are starting to sell too!"
"Not just the daggers! Armor! Spears. Longswords — everything else is moving with them!"
"Keep the quality locked down! Customers are coming because of the Fire Hammer name! Protecting that name matters more than selling more units!"
Fire Hammer had hit the jackpot.
And that absurd success story started toppling other advertisers like dominoes.
"This is the Pottery Guild. We'll pay three thousand gold. Please promote our new product."
"This is Mad Dog Party. No party clears dungeons or hunts monsters better than us. We'd like you to promote our party."
"This is the Crimson Magic Tower. We'd like to promote our new offensive magic. Would that be possible?"
Advertisers began pouring into the Black Magic Tower.
Before long, the Tower was making more money managing Soulnet and closing ad contracts than it was from its actual specialty — spatial and dimensional magic.
"Third Elder? From now on we're putting together a dedicated ad-contract team. I want you in charge. You've got the widest network. Vet the advertisers' reputations and figure out the nature of whatever they're promoting. We have to be selective about ads! The imperial court already has its eye on us! Promoting something shady or illegal magic would be the worst possible outcome!"
"........Tower Lord. I am a specialist in spatial magic. I did not join the Black Magic Tower to sell advertisements!"
"I'll triple your research budget."
"I'll have the promotional copy drafted as well. Hahaha! I'll work my hardest, Tower Lord!"
And naturally.
Elsi Bwener.
The reputation and standing of Soulnet's developer inside the Black Magic Tower began climbing like mad.
"I am ridiculously busy."
Elsi had to move without a second to breathe.
Exhaustion had left his face a little drawn, but even so.
The overwhelming flood of gold coins rolling in from ad fees was pumping out enough dopamine to blow every scrap of that fatigue away.
But they say misfortune rides good fortune's coattails.
The root cause of this entire chain of events.
The thing that had driven ad rates through the roof and carried Fire Hammer's promotion this far — Kyahehe.
Gallery members, hey hey. Posting today with a guild-level announcement.
It's the word "Spech." What on earth does it mean? The young apprentices use it constantly and I can't make heads or tails of it.
After Kyahehe's rise, neologisms began spawning left and right.
And those expressions leaked into the real world, hardening into genuine catchphrases.
And then.
People who looked unfavorably on this whole catchphrase culture began to appear — and in hindsight, that was probably inevitable.
I was staring down at the newspapers.
Across countless editorials from the papers considered the most authoritative in the Valrod Empire, the exact same tone of commentary had appeared in every one.
Kyahehe's destructive power had been so overwhelming that it made the perfect target to tear into.
And of course.
My name — the one who built Soulnet — was circulating through the papers, getting enthusiastically shredded.
"Tower Lord. We're going to have to hit back, aren't we?"
"Obviously. It's not as if we've committed some crime. We should argue that suppressing even this kind of culture is unjust."
"We'll need to get our position to the papers and the press. Could you call in some reporters?"
"I'll look into it."
The Tower Lord left my laboratory.
In the meantime I started thinking through what I should actually say.
And up to that moment, I still believed that if I just released a statement to the press, this whole mess would settle down somewhat.
That was a naive thought.
Maybe I'd been too busy to notice.
I'd briefly forgotten that the world had far more people who loved censorship than you'd expect.
I was deep into organizing my statement and writing it down when—
"Elsi!"
"Tower Lord? Did something happ—"
"An official notice just came down from the Imperial Language Association! It's an order to correct the improper language activity on Soulnet! And if we don't, it says they'll petition the imperial court to draft legislation!"
A bomb of catastrophic size had just gone off.