Donations Rain Down
With my Platinum promotion complete, my schedule was suddenly wide open.
I'd originally planned to run a Newdlebak session sometime around Saturday or Sunday, but thanks to Yena's circumstances, it got pushed to next week instead. Team captain selection and team drafting were set for March 7th—about a week away.
More days slipped by after that. I spent the time holding meetings with my editing team to get Lilytube off the ground, or hunting bosses for my class advancement quest. Before I knew it, I was Level 45. I'd taken down three more bosses, and today was March 3rd—the very first video announcing the birth of Lilytube was about to go live.
─Ahh, I'm so nervous right now. How many people are gonna watch?
Through the Discord voice channel came the sound of White Autumn breathing in and out, in and out.
There had been plenty to worry about, and the copyright issues around Lilytube and my videos had turned out to be more complicated than expected. Yena was signed to an MCN inside Nutri Company, so copyright matters were no trouble for her—but the problem was me. Setting aside Yena's situation, I wasn't with any MCN, so they had no real reason to handle my side of things.
In the end, because Yena was so famous and so well-established there, they agreed to make an exception and take care of my channel too.
'If you need anything else, just say the word anytime. If more problems come up, honestly you could just join the company outright. You'd be inside Nutri, which owns all of DeoEn anyway—anything DeoEn-related gets handled crazy fast there.'
I was grateful for Yena's effort, but I decided to think over the whole company question slowly. We were still in the beginning stages—no need to rush.
─We're already at 470,000 subscribers... and the video hasn't even gone up yet.
─Doesn't that mean another 10,000 just came in?
Battery and Apple Flavor were buzzing with anticipation too. Matching their energy, I stared at the screen where the premiere had just been enabled.
Like Twitch, viewers could chat in real time and send donations. The live viewer count: forty-five thousand. For a brand-new channel making its very first upload, that was a monstrous number.
Even at this very moment, donations—including 1,000-won ones—were pouring in like crazy.
─If this succeeds, we should build a tower out of chicken boxes.
"Can't you eat anything besides chicken?"
─Chicken is the superior food.
Well, she said it, so it must be true. A few chicken gift certificates it was, then.
"What about everyone else? Send me whatever you want to eat and I'll get it for you."
I had no idea how well things would go, but everyone had worked hard, so treating them to a meal or two was the least I could do.
─I want pizza.
─...Seafood?
Pizza for Battery... and for Apple Flavor...
"Seafood? What kind did you have in mind?"
─Oh, um, the shellfish kind of thing... nothing too expensive, though. Mm. Yes...
Shellfish, huh... Maybe I'd just send over some crab varieties. Money was no issue, so I could just pick something reasonable.
−0:59.
The countdown began. The screen, painted in a wash of colors, shifted and shimmered every time the number at its center ticked down.
The chat was buzzing far more excitedly than before. It felt distinctly different from Twitch—somehow... gentler, somehow. The occasional troll or spam wave did roll through, but the managers were cutting them down the instant they appeared.
From the Discord voice room came voices counting down along with the screen. The highest tension, naturally, belonged to White Autumn.
─Oh. It's starting.
"Oh."
Lilytube's first video began to play. Naturally, it was a short one—about ten minutes—centered on my first meeting with Yena. And as expected of someone so skilled, it was far more entertaining and immersive than the videos other people had made about me, ones I'd watched a dozen times. At this level, it was on par with the quality of Yena's own channel.
The chat reactions were good too, and as the video drew to a close, donations began cascading down the chat window at a blistering pace.
"...?"
No—fast wasn't the word for it. Nutube wasn't a live stream, and since no donation restrictions had been put in place, what came next could only be described as a downpour. The flood arrived at nearly the same speed as the chat itself, and more than a few donations flirting with the million-won mark flickered past my eyes.
─Boss, the donations are insane right now?
"...I think this might actually be a problem."
The video had clearly ended, yet the donations kept coming. Apparently people intended to keep firing them off until the chat window closed outright. Wasn't everything supposed to shut down once the video ended? Why was it still open?
─...I think it's backed up?
"Sorry, what?"
─Normally donations and the chat window shut off when a video ends, but ones sent in advance keep flowing in afterward.
"So that's what this is?"
─Yep.
A tidal wave of donations, falling like madness itself. Even viewers who were presumably foreign were joining the deluge. Come to think of it, there had been talk of subtitles in more than ten languages. My Twitch broadcasts were watched almost exclusively by Koreans, but Nutube's algorithm could carry my videos to overseas audiences too.
"...We're in trouble."
Donations rained down like the sky itself had split open.
"Hi hi~ Welcome, boys~"
"Now, now, boys, no fighting in the chat. As long as you don't overdo the Lily talk, it's perfectly fine~"
Yena, broadcasting from her sync room, waved at the camera. The reason she'd bothered to stream from there was partly the time Lily had left behind for her, but mostly so she could run a few internet-based contents. In fact, a good twenty percent of DeoEn streamers regularly ran these kinds of seated, old-school cam-style broadcasts.
─Did you see Lily's Nutube premiere hit fifty thousand live viewers today?
Oh, she knew. How could she not? Yena had been the one actively helping launch Lilytube, and she'd been there in person for the channel's very first upload. She'd sent a donation too, though it had been swallowed whole by the storm of contributions and vanished within a second.
"Ahh, yeah, I saw it. She's a full-blown superstar, that Lily. I mean, I donated 300,000 won and it disappeared in less than a second."
"But seriously, it was kind of incredible. Like, how does that even make sense?"
Honestly, given how famous Lily was and how well the algorithm treated her, the view count and subscriber numbers hadn't raised many eyebrows for Yena. If anything, she'd thought they were low—DeoEn was played worldwide, and videos about Lily had already spread across the globe. But that baptism of donations... no, that donation storm was truly impossible to comprehend, no matter how many times she replayed it in her head.
Donations had poured down like chat messages, and even for roughly ten minutes after the video ended, the speed never let up.
"Thanks for the donation, YenaBbangBbang~ Alright! So here's what we're doing today~ Ta-daa~!"
From her inventory, Yena pulled out an enormous board. In the real world it would have been huge and heavy—complicated to make, a hassle to carry around.
'This is exactly why you don't do this stuff in real life and do it in DeoEn instead.'
As she was always reminded, DeoEn was a genuinely cheat-tier space.
"Bingo. I borrowed it from Vlack~ Today's content is a Mock Siege mock team draft! Everyone, clap clap!"
"Lily's swamped with work, so she couldn't make it. Instead, I brought someone else~"
The chat exploded with guesses—rankers of every stripe, pros, everyone. But every single one was wrong. If they knew the truth, they'd probably do a double take.
Yena's hand, resting beside her desk, slowly lifted something small into view. A tiny something, bobbing in midair, clearly caught on camera.
"Put me down, human."
"Hehe. Getting this guest here was hard work, you know."
"Set me down. Human."
"Oh my, such a chatty little middle-schooler. You're gonna get scolded by your noona."
"Noona my foot. Worry about my collab fee instead."
Spiky black hair, and fierce violet eyes swimming with an otherworldly aura. A rank score of 1,128 points. Ranked 138th in ranked ladder. A user carrying Black Transformation—widely feared as the most notorious of all penalties. And...
The youngest participant in the entire Mock Siege had arrived.