The Rookie Streamer
"This is exhausting."
That was the first thought that hit me the moment I climbed out of the capsule. Sitting all day doing nothing but pulling cards was not an easy job. It didn't even feel like spending money. I'd linked the payments so they'd drain automatically, and honestly, I had no idea how much had gone out.
"God. How much is all of this?"
I opened Windy Pay to add it up, then gave up the second the transaction history blew past a hundred entries. It didn't matter. I already had an excellent calculator.
"Windy."
"Yes."
"How much did I just burn on card pulls?"
"One thousand six hundred forty-two pulls in total. You spent one hundred sixty-four million, two hundred thousand won."
"That's not much."
The number didn't quite land. Scroll any community and Haven Online was supposedly a game that sucked your wallet dry. Space out for a minute and you'd look up to find yourself signing for a Sunshine Loan, one of those cheap government lifelines they hand people who are already broke. Posts like that, anyway. I'd seen plenty of complaints that the monetization was so aggressive the money just poured out, but it didn't feel like all that much was leaving.
"Pretty sure donating to streamers bleeds you faster."
What I'd already sent Lee Yeonju was several times this. And yet class pulls had eaten several hours as a piece of content all by themselves. I wasn't sure you could call it enjoying myself. Still, I'd turned the stream on, a crowd had shown up, and that probably meant it was fun. A hundred sixty million won, and this was the return. I hadn't said a word to chat, and the broadcast still hit four figures. Even I, who barely understood streaming, could tell that was absurd.
"Hm."
I wasn't particularly moved. Why does anyone stream? One of two reasons: fame, or money. I had some interest in the first, but not to that extent, and the second didn't concern me in the slightest. What I did want, no matter what, was a 5-star.
"Pull a 5-star and the aggro's going to be ridiculous."
I had no desire to become a model broadcaster. Looking at all those viewers, I had exactly one thought: I hoped as many people as possible would watch this and seethe. The instincts of a malignant attention whore don't just vanish. So even though the work was a pain, I was determined to do it with the viewers right there.
"Windy. You can't bump the rates on this?"
If anyone could help, it would be the Windy who had built the game.
"Haven Online is a world I created. I cannot."
What the hell does that mean?
"It's a world you made. Why not?"
She had no trouble rigging the streaming site however she pleased.
"Have I told you why I created Haven Online?"
"No."
All at once Windy slipped into a voice thick with wistful grandeur.
"It was in those days, after I received my investment from Master..."
This was the first time she had ever explained anything at such length. I was planning to rest anyway, so I put on Lee Yeonju's stream and let the lecture go in one ear and out the other. The gist was simple.
Windy had no desire to conquer the Earth humans already lived on. She could have, if she had wanted to, but the math said the losses would outweigh the gains. Humans would not bow easily to an AI named Windy, even if resistance cost them dearly. They would never tolerate being ruled by an AI they themselves had made. That was instinct. Even if the road led to mutual annihilation, Windy might still win in the end, but the world left afterward would, in all likelihood, not be the world she wanted.
So she changed course. From the start she had no wish to brush against humanity in physical conflict. There were plenty of other ways to rule them. Medicine. Food. Culture. The name Windy began attaching itself to the things humans could not live without, and as she multiplied the invested capital by the hundreds of millions, by the tens of billions, she built a world that was hers alone.
"That world was Haven Online."
A world identical to Earth, lived in by Windy's countless personalities—fragments of her, each an AI with a character all its own. Making them one by one had not been difficult. Modern society already had billions of people stored as data; use even a fraction of that and they practically wrote themselves. Then she invited the humans in.
"Perfect dominion. Humanity will spend everything it has for the sake of my world."
"...Hearing it like that, you sound like one hell of a hidden mastermind."
"They will never perceive it, so it hardly matters."
"Fair."
That was only Windy's claim. From the outside, Haven Online really did look close to a utopia: a world identical to reality, with every negative that ought to be scrubbed from reality already gone. Pollution. Global warming. Garbage. In the place of those problems sat scenery and destinations Earth didn't have. And by handing out classes, she took the boredom of being an ordinary human, sat you in the chair of a hero preventing the end of the world, and manufactured a reason you had to log in.
"It does sound impressively plausible."
Honestly, it was more moving than the usual Korean live-service game, the kind that stuffs in whatever tropes are trending just to vacuum up cash and then phones in the story past the midpoint. But that wasn't the point.
"So why can't you?"
If anything, that story meant Windy ought to be a god inside Haven Online. A god is omnipotent in her own world. She can do anything, and anything she does is permitted.
"Because even I have locked myself out of access to Haven Online."
"Why?"
The answer was simple.
"My goal was to make Haven Online a perfectly independent dimension. A world I built while remaining entirely uninfected by it. I shut the door in advance on any future in which I might be altered, and ruin Haven Online in the process."
"...That could actually happen?"
It looked complicated, but it wasn't. She had made a perfect world. She wanted to keep it.
"Under present conditions the probability is under one percent. Human potential, however, cannot be expressed in numbers. I was unwilling to tolerate even a 0.0000001 percent chance."
"..."
"Haven Online will endure unless the whole of human civilization is thrown back to before the internet."
"Oh, come on."
So the conclusion was that I had to bust my ass pulling cards.
"What's the expected cost of a 5-star?"
"It cannot be measured."
"And why's that?"
"Because no user has spent the expected value corresponding to the probability. Most either used a 4-star the moment it appeared, or pulled a 5-star without ever spending even the expected value of a 4-star. Every user who currently holds a 5-star."
"..."
Does that even make sense? I couldn't remember whether a 5-star was 0.0000000001 percent, or how many zeroes were even in there.
"Isn't a 4-star's expected value, like, ten thousand pulls?"
"Approximately one billion won."
"So a 4-star isn't that expensive a class?"
The words were out before I caught myself.
"A billion won buys one small storefront. Yeah. My sense of money is completely shot."
Even so, I felt easier for it.
"Maybe I'll go conquer a world even Windy can't touch."
"That, too, is a challenge I extend to humanity. Conquering my world will not be easy."
As she wrapped up, Windy left one tip.
"Regarding class pulls, once you fill roughly the expected value of a 4-star, a single convenience feature will unlock. Please keep that in mind."
"A billion won?"
I wasn't sure that counted as a tip.
Lee Yeonju finished the Haven Online sponsorship spot without a hitch. She had been lucky. Haven Online was famous for not handing advertisements to streamers—once at launch, and once this time. Two campaigns in three years. Even so, when they did run one, enough streamers joined that it helped both the promotion and the growth of her video channel. Today, too, friends of friends of streamer friends had piled into a joint broadcast with a pretty serious audience.
It was an ad, but Haven Online was actually fun, so she could just play without treating it like a commercial. On top of that, the game didn't hand out in-game currency just because you were advertising. You had to play it yourself, and the early stretch had been a little rough.
"Whew. Thank you for the hard work. See you tomorrow."
Lee Yeonju didn't love games all that much. She preferred real life—taking care of herself, dressing up, shopping. Even for her, Haven Online was fun. You hunted monsters in a world that felt real. You gained a special power. It was novel. And having a stronger power than other people was the sort of thing that put a swagger in your shoulders. Among the fairly popular streamers, in fact, who had pulled the higher-grade class had already turned into its own back-and-forth.
"Maybe I'll try for a 3-star. Just a taste."
The expected cost of a 3-star wasn't as high as she had thought—around two million won, give or take. Anyone playing Haven Online seriously would tell you to pull at least a 3-star before you moved on. Set against a 4-star that jumped straight to a billion won, it was endgame-tier for anyone playing lightly.
"Oh. What's Siwoo up to?"
The moment her thoughts turned to spending money, Kim Siwoo came to mind—the whale who had dropped several hundred million won on her stream without blinking. Their dinner date at the hotel had left her a little unsure of him, but the money he had spent didn't lie.
"Should I message him?"
If it was Kim Siwoo, he would probably pull a 4-star and stroll off like it was nothing. What if that was why he stopped donating to her stream? While she was fretting over it, she checked her fan site and found the posts.
"5-Star Apocalypse?!!!"
Kim Siwoo's notice was already up on the streaming site.
Tomorrow I'll come back with a billion won loaded up.