The Reason I Work Hard
Lily's own content — First Period: Understanding Mana — drew to a successful close. The broadcast pulled in 110,000 concurrent viewers, surpassing even the 105,000 peak of yesterday's Mock Siege Battle Team Selection. For a streamer who had been live for less than a month, the numbers were almost absurdly excessive.
Even after the stream ended, people kept talking about the lesson, dissecting it, searching for ways to replicate it.
"Wait, what do I do with this?"
"Ah! Hold on, I'm trying it right now."
"Gimme that. Let me have a go."
"You couldn't do it anyway. Didn't you hear what Lily said?"
"That's exactly why I'm trying."
The mage user who had won a condensation stone in the giveaway had spent an entire hour clutching the thing. His friend beside him kept whining to have a turn, but he ignored him and kept at it...
"Haah, damn it. How the hell does this work?"
She'd said to feel the mana inside his body, but he couldn't feel a thing. A mage who couldn't sense mana — a genuinely bizarre situation. He'd even gone so far as to cast skills, gripping the stone with a hand steeped in mana's energy, and it hadn't so much as twitched.
If anything, the stone seemed to mock him, growing ever more unresponsive the harder he tried. He considered just shattering it on the spot, but the thing's market price had gone so stratospheric that he couldn't bring himself to do even that.
"Did you check the exchange? One of those things is up to 170 now."
"Insane. Seventeen times the price."
"Honestly, I think it'll climb higher. Don't waste your shot — just sell it later."
"Bullshit. I'm obviously gonna succeed and get myself received by Lady Lily."
Custom-made character or not, she was truly, impossibly beautiful. Wonderful voice, wonderful personality — and on top of that, wonderful skill. How was anyone supposed to not love her, to look away from her?
I can't let this chance slip by.
He watched every stream, he donated plenty — of course he was going. Thinking this, the mage user kept wrestling with the condensation stone.
"...There's probably more than a few of you out there like him."
"I'm sorry — it sold for how much on the exchange?"
The day after the broadcast ended, I logged into the editing department's Discord room and was greeted with a rather flabbergasting piece of news.
Three hundred?
Apparently a single condensation stone had sold for 300. And the marketplace was in an uproar because there weren't even any left to buy.
"Haah. And here I said they were meaningless."
I'd been worried exactly this kind of situation might happen, so I'd gone to the trouble of setting a trigger so only the intended recipient could use them. Which was precisely why I'd asked someone to source an expensive mana stone for me — a magic formula that intricate demanded a mana stone of that quality.
White Autumn clicked her tongue, and a rapid clack-clack-clack of typing followed. DeoEn's exchange could be browsed from a real-world computer too, so she was presumably skimming the listings right now.
"...I can kind of understand the sentiment, actually."
In the past, whenever I healed people with holy magic, the clothes and shoes and ornaments they happened to be wearing would sell at absurd premiums. At first, I genuinely could not understand why. Holy magic was for healing bodies — it never lingered in clothing or trinkets.
But as time passed, the answer came to me.
They sold high simply because my hands had touched them.
Garments graced by the charity of a saint with a lovely face and a lovely figure. Ridiculous "named" premiums like that turned even a ragged beggar's coat into something worth twenty, thirty times its price. Of course, back then it was less "fandom" and closer to genuine faith in a god — the belief that even if the saint was far away, a garment she had blessed would watch over and protect me in her stead.
But that's not what this is now, is it.
Nowadays it was simply people looking at me — and only me — and wanting a piece of that. Nothing to do with faith in anyone.
"Aaargh... this really shouldn't be happening..."
If it went on like this, tongues were bound to start wagging.
"The problem is that someone will start suspecting exactly that."
There had been plenty of it in the past. People who nitpicked who I did and didn't heal. People who had scraped together fortunes to obtain a relic from someone I'd healed, then threw a fit demanding to know why I'd gone and performed a large-scale healing elsewhere. And those who called me... a witch beguiling the masses.
"Ugh, for god's sake..."
"Ah — sorry. I was thinking about something else for a second."
This is exactly why I quit being a saint. It came with plenty of headaches, and even if I went back, I'd quit all over again.
"...Anyway, I'll have to think of a different approach next time."
Maybe make the stones vanish entirely the moment they changed hands. Or look into whether trade-restricted items were even possible. The more complex the magic formula, the more valuable the mana stone required — so if the system itself could solve this, that would be the cleaner fix.
"That's not entirely a good thing..."
Working hard. Hm.
The reason I worked hard was because I'd been paid the price. Was it that I worked hard because I received compensation — or that I received compensation because I worked hard? Either way, as long as I worked hard, it was all fine.
"That's right. I'm working hard."
Shaaaah...
A beach somewhere in DeoEn, lashed by refreshingly cool waves. The moment I arrived, a pack of flower crabs the size of large dogs came charging at me. They lunged with their admittedly sturdy shells and razor-sharp pincer legs, but three slashes settled every last one of them, and the beach returned to nothing but the sound of the surf.
Shaaaah...
"Should be about time for it to open."
What I was waiting for was the gate of the Beach of the Crab King, located off the southern waters of the continent. Unlike other dungeons, it opened only at a specific hour. Just as I'd had my fill of listening to the waves, a massive gate etched with a crab crest finally surged up from the sea with a tremendous FWOOOOSH!
"Ah, donations were open. Let me close that. Thank you, LilyLily — thank you always, truly!"
I gave a quick bow and shut down donations right away. Couldn't leave them open from the very start of a stream. I closed them immediately, but a few more had still slipped through.
"Welcome, everyone. Today we're going to try clearing this subjugation dungeon."
The dungeon gate floated in the middle of the sea. Beyond today's run here, I planned to take down a few of the bosses needed for class advancement quests as well.
"Thank you for the 10,000 won tuition. The next class will be in six days, so I'd appreciate it if you focused on the dungeon today."
Class was class. When it was dungeon time, you focused on the dungeon.
"Right now? Hmm... two, I'd say."
One was Leo. The other I knew the nickname of, but had no idea who was behind it. I'd find out when we met, presumably.
"Well then..."
Seawater lapped across the beach. The gate wasn't that far out, but there was still a fair stretch of water between shore and entrance.
I set my foot toward the sea. The wind spirit's breeze wrapped around it, refusing to sink beneath the waves, and with a burst of force I pushed off for the next step.
I walked on water. Strange thing to say, I know — but I truly did.
"Probably?"
A crimson gate, dominated by the crest of an enormous crab's pincer. I knocked on it.
Creeeak... The thick gate groaned and swung open on its own, and a single message window rose to greet me.
Recommended Level: 50 | Play Time: 50–60 minutes | Max Party Size: 7
Would you like to enter the Beach of the Crab King?