100K Subscriber Celebration Livestream
"Oh, so there are healers, too?"
Curiosity stirred, Dohyeon gave the information on the Tower's first fourteen floors another read, then set off in search of posts about healers.
» Why are healers so precious?
» Are there no wild healers?
» I'd gladly lick a healer's feet.
» Do female Bishops (healers) actually exist?
» Is a female pastor healer also a female healer?
The results for "healer" were brimming with laments over the shortage.
The reason healers are so precious is simple. Healers have to clear the tutorial under their own power too, and if all you're carrying is a lone heal skill with no attack skill to speak of, you can't even dream of fighting goblins. Of those who awaken as healers, you can assume the women are living at level zero, practically without exception. That alone filters out half of all healers. Honestly, it filters out more than half. Even among the men, few have the guts to fight goblins with their lives on the line.
The second reason healers are precious. The higher one climbs the Tower, the greater the demand for party play—and in a party, the healer is the one piece you cannot leave out. Low-floor climbers know this all too well, so healers are snapped up almost the moment they become available.
The third reason healers are precious. This one concerns the high-floor climbers. Picture a party of fiftieth-floor climbers kidnapping a kid healer fresh off clearing floor five and spoon-feeding them the entire ascent. You've imagined it, haven't you? Well, that's only possible in your imagination. The Tower fundamentally encourages partying with climbers whose maximum cleared floors are similar, and the wider the gap in maximum climbing floors within a party, the more catastrophic the Emergency Anomalies it triggers. Don't underestimate the Tower's malice just because of the Emergency Anomalies the world knows about. Every Emergency Anomaly on record was documented by someone who made it out alive. Most never make it out at all. They die in there.
"Whoa. Emergency Anomalies? So that's a thing, huh."
Learning of a malice in the Tower he had never once suspected left Dohyeon with a faint, inexplicable chill.
Confronted with a healer shortage without precedent, the wise climber would do well to steer through the situation by one of two alternatives.
First. Live without one. What can you do when there aren't any? Keep to small parties that don't strictly need a healer, and scrape by, modestly, as a small-time climber.
Second. Park yourself on floor five and go hunting for a healer partner. A fair number of climbers do exactly this. If you happen to hold a skill useful to a party, you can join a party that's recruiting first and ride the coattails of the talented. As a rule, you'd need to be a rich kid or the child of an established climber for that to even be an option.
Dohyeon realized he had climbed far too high to go shopping for a healer now.
"I guess I'll just have to live without one, then."
The one mercy was that his wasn't a class that fought on the front lines. His need for a healer and a party ran lighter than it would for most other classes.
11:30 a.m.
Dohyeon sprang to his feet and hollered,
"Let's break for lunch—!"
Having ordered in from a restaurant Kang Eunhyeok recommended, Dohyeon asked,
"Nothing piling up on your end, right? Anything that needs doing right away?"
The Kang siblings nodded.
"No, nothing special."
"Then let's do the 100K celebration livestream right now."
"We'll get set up."
Kang Eunseo lifted her smartphone and looked the ranch over from this angle and that.
"Boss, you'd want the kids in the background, right?"
"Hmm... I like that. Let's do it outside. The wind isn't blowing much today."
Once the three of them stepped outdoors, scouted an angle, and set up the smartphone, the curious animals came drifting over.
Crunch, crunch.
"Hey. Lightning. What did I say about chewing my hair? Quit it."
Lightning, friendliest of the bunch, had been the first to trot over and start fussing around him.
Snort.
Volcano and Snow poked their noses up beside Dohyeon's face as well.
Stroking the bridges of the two horses' noses, Dohyeon asked,
"Curious what we're up to? We're putting on a livestream. Want to be in it?"
Neigh!
It was a truly peculiar sensation.
Ever since awakening as a Climber, Dohyeon had occasionally felt as though he were genuinely talking with the animals.
With Goldie and Taesan—whom he had revived and bound to himself by some means—that came as no surprise, but communing with Lightning, Volcano, and Snow as well was another matter entirely.
Could there be a secret hidden in my stats?
Going by everything publicly known, no stat granted the ability to communicate with animals—but then, who could say for certain.
Every stat I've raised is Spirit and Mana. So is this some hidden power of the Spirit stat?
"All set! We go live in one minute!"
Kang Eunhyeok set out chairs in front of the smartphone mounted on its tripod.
The three of them took their seats and faced the camera, and the animals huddled cozily together behind them.
"Three... two... one!"
Dohyeon offered the greeting on everyone's behalf.
"Er... hello, everyone. This is Cha Dohyeon, owner of Hyung's Ranch."
"I'm Kang Eunseo, the veterinarian."
"And I'm Kang Eunhyeok. Just an employee."
Taesan, it's been so long!! T_T
Harmony of death and life... whoa
A Q&A? lol
100K came so fast Hyung's Ranch couldn't even collect questions in advance—instant upvote lol
Who wins in a fight, Daenghyeonuk or Goldie?
"Ooh..."
They had announced it that morning and gone live at lunchtime, yet already a respectable crowd was watching.
"Anyway, as we announced in this morning's community post, we switched the stream on for a Q&A celebrating one hundred thousand subscribers. Thank you all so much for your love—and if there's anything you're curious about, please drop your questions in the chat."
Was it her veteran YouTuber instincts showing?
Kang Eunseo stepped forward and began running the show.
"Right, we've got a question here about why the skeletons are different colors. Boss? Even we employees don't know the answer to that one—do you think you could take it?"
Dohyeon crossed his arms and answered.
"Well, it's hardly some grand secret. To answer with what I can share: I'm apparently not an ordinary necromancer. My personal theory is that I'm some kind of blend of a crafting class and a necromancer class. That's why, all the way up to floor five of the Tower, I was in there swinging a club at goblins myself. As for my kids' unusual coloring and the hearts in their chests—just take those as part and parcel of the same thing."
A new-concept Crafting Necro appears lol
Sounds pretty solid, though?
You're a Climber—why run a ranch and a YouTube channel?
"Yes. Our next question asks why, as a Climber, you operate a ranch and a YouTube channel."
Kang Eunseo had a knack for plucking out the questions best suited to satisfying the crowd's curiosity.
Dohyeon answered readily enough.
"I started the ranch to add more skeleton friends to the family, and the YouTube channel is a genuine hobby. I was actually on StarInsta before, back when Goldie was alive. But once Goldie became a skeleton and I started posting again, the response turned out to be fantastic."
"Ah—I've seen Goldie's StarInsta myself. It went up at exactly the right moment, back when Taesan was the talk of the town, so it caught a nice wave of hype."
"...I'm sorry—what?"
Once they had answered most of what the viewers could plausibly wonder about, there came a hot, lively stretch of back-and-forth with the crowd that had packed in.
Having pocketed a small fortune and discovered a genuine taste for his first-ever horseback ride, Dohyeon stepped down out of Volcano's saddle and turned his eyes to the sky.
The sun's making its way down.
The vast ranch was being painted over in crimson dusk.
The bright sun, the beautiful clouds, the high sky...
"Z-Zero Two? I don't know how to... but I'll give it a try!"
Kang Eunhyeok held up a reference clip, and Kang Eunseo wiggled her hips along with it.
"Eunseo! Let's show them the sky and then wrap up the stream."
"Yes, yes!"
At Dohyeon's call, Kang Eunseo hurried over with the streaming smartphone in hand.
"All right, everyone—that's enough donating for one day. Have a good long look at the sky before you go. That'll be all for today's stream."
Wow, now that's a view
Where even is this?
Should've watched on the big screen...
I feel healed.
"Thank you to everyone who came out for today's 100K celebration livestream. Coming up next will be introduction videos for Volcano and Snow, the newest members of our ranch. And, hmm... this isn't set in stone yet, but we're thinking of taking in abandoned animals—dogs, cats, that sort of thing—here at the ranch as well. I did some looking into it, and apparently quite a few animals at shelters get put down? I'm someone who's fairly free from the grip of money, so... I'd like to try caring for the poor things myself. Anyway, please enjoy the next video when it goes up!"
When the broadcast that thousands had been watching came to an end, all that remained was the sunset sky and a scattering of people and animals.
Just as the three of them were savoring the unfamiliar hollowness that had crept in, Lightning bit down on Dohyeon's sleeve and tugged.
"What is it, Lightning? I tell you not to bite my hair, so you go for my sleeve? Aigoo, aren't you the clever one."
Snort-snort! Snort-snort-snort-snort!
When Dohyeon scrubbed Lightning's face all over with both hands, the flustered foal sprang away and bolted for the stable.
Thud, thud.
Taesan and Goldie, along with the two newest equine additions, trotted along behind.
"Let's get their dinner out and call it a day."
"Yes, Boss!"
Kang Eunhyeok answered with gusto.
"Vet noona... can you... do the Zero Two...?"
Team Leader 1 of the Tower Management Bureau's Climber Support Team watched in silence as Assistant Manager Song Seogyeong typed a donation message into the YouTube broadcast.
"And this is what you do on work hours?"
Song Seogyeong flicked him a glance and replied,
"This is work too. It's Hyung's Ranch's livestream."
"I'll concede the monitoring, but posting comments and stirring public sentiment—that's the External Communications Team's job, no?"
"This one's coming out of my own pocket."
Left without a rebuttal, the team leader smacked his lips.
"More to the point, I expect Climber Cha Dohyeon will be making another request of us before long. We'd do well to prepare in advance."
"Like what?"
"I couldn't say for certain, but it appears he's come into a tremendous skill this time. From the look of it, he means to expand the ranch on a massive scale. We'll need to get the word around to the abandoned-animal shelters in the Jeju area."
"Really?"
Team Leader 1 spoke, curiosity written across his face.
"So then—the birth of a true Mob Boss Necromancer?"
Thanks to the games and fiction that had existed even before the age of Tower climbing, the Mob Boss Necromancer had always been a beloved archetype.
Defined by driving colossal hordes of undead across the battlefield, the Mob Boss Necromancer was something the necromancers of today had barely managed a pale imitation of.
Suppose a single ordinary skeleton occupied 1 mana and 1 point of Domination. For every two floors a necromancer Climber ascended, his skeleton count would grow by all of three.
The trouble was, ordinary skeletons couldn't climb at all.
And so, for every necromancer before him, the bulk of climbing skill had lain in walking the fine line between the quality and quantity of one's summons, and fielding the right summons to match the character of each floor attempted.
By all appearances, Dohyeon had acquired a means of circumventing—or simply powering straight through—the weakness that came from summons occupying a Climber's stats.
"Ooh—my heart's on fire—!"
The team leader, who back in his day had thrashed a demon or two, wished for nothing but flower-lined roads ahead of Cha Dohyeon.