Dragon Words Mage
"Today's goal is to pull a single four-star."
The expected value on a five-star is miserably low. Spin long enough and one will come out eventually, but you have to be ready for a long war against time. And if someone asked whether the game was worth a fight like that, I still wasn't sure. Had it been some ordinary game, I might have shrugged—do I really have to?—and made do with a four-star.
"Windy. It's a world you made. I'll enjoy it properly."
In a sense, Windy was my benefactor. Not human, so maybe I ought to call that a benefAItor. Either way, the one responsible for letting me live like this. Even without Windy I might have lived rich. I already had close to seven billion won, and so long as I didn't blow it somewhere stupid, that was enough to play and eat for the rest of my life. But there was a hard line between that life and this one. I liked now. The best part was being able to spend enough to shake the grief loose.
"I thought it would never fade. Mom. Dad. I'm sorry."
Honestly, even when I was discharged, it had thinned a little—but I'd still been worried sick over the longing, the sadness, the loneliness. Not now. I don't even have the spare room for another thought. Just deciding where to spend the money eats an entire day. So, in that spirit, I was going to pull.
"Windy. I'm going to try ruling your world."
With the money Windy had made me. I wanted to become a ruler inside Windy's world. I couldn't do that in reality.
"Hello. I'll be trying for a five-star again today."
Tedious as it was, I turned the stream on and started spinning. Pull after pull. I'd burned through somewhere around four hundred million won when light flashed and a red card came up.
The viewers reacted first. A red card. The color that meant four-star.
Chats flooded up faster than I could read them. Curious, I asked.
"Is this one good?"
"Doesn't this one not hunt alone?"
"Hmm."
That good, huh. I understood it a little. Games are supposed to be fun, though—did I really have to play a support position like healer? If I hadn't had money, of course I would have taken it with gratitude. But that wasn't now. I have money. And if you have money, you're DPS. Obviously.
"I want to play DPS."
I skipped it as I said it.
Groans poured in. At the same time, so did awe.
Anyone who played Haven Online knew it. DPS costs a fortune. A damage dealer needs a lot of things.
"Huh?"
The moment I gave up the four-star card, a system message appeared.
"Whoa. So this is what Windy was talking about."
Windy had said something would come out if I spent the expected value, but it looked like it could show up before that. Or maybe pulling a four-star once was what unlocked it.
"Then skip everything four-star and below."
Once I set it, I no longer had to pull cards one by one. A card came out and flipped. Came out and flipped. An endless loop. I sat and watched it.
"This is convenient."
People were so fascinated they had no thought of leaving, even though the same scene kept repeating. If anything, the viewer count kept climbing. Five thousand. I wasn't saying anything funny, and I wasn't showing my face. Just cards being pulled, or not, over and over—and still a lot of people were watching. Strange. Maybe it was fun.
"Looks like about one card a second. So I'm burning six million won a minute?"
Count the time already spent spinning past five hundred million, and the stream had already run quite a while. People were starting to look a little wistful.
I told them straight.
"I'm pulling until I get sleepy today. This screen stays up until I pull a five-star, so if you're bored, go to another room."
Donations started exploding. Next to what I was spending per second, the amounts were nothing. Still, the feeling of receiving money from someone was a thrill.
"Aigoo. Thank you. Huh? Where'd the money go. It vanished."
I thought I understood why Lee Yeonju laughed and cried over donations the way she did. It wasn't simply the amount. A sense of achievement, maybe.
"No. It's just linked to my account, so the money's withdrawing."
Even talking about it lightly was fun. Before I knew it, I'd gotten more used to watching the chat than the cards.
"Yeah, well. The money's a boring story. I invested in something before the army, and it blew up."
"Mm. This one would count as stocks, right?"
"Not these days. I sold it all. I'm in my playing-and-eating era."
And most of them already knew I was the Kim Siwoo from Lee Yeonju's room.
"I am one. I just get shy once my face is out."
"Hey now."
With that many people chatting, some of it crossed the line. Attention chaser that I am, I almost wanted to toss them a little bait—but I didn't want Yeonju catching stray damage over nothing, so I judged it severely.
"You. Out."
Strange. Back when I was a viewer, heavy donations did get people cheering, but it was only ever envy of the rich. Step out of the stream's mood, or let the streamer look like they hated it, and no matter how much you dropped, the feeling was pushback. Now that I was the one streaming, the viewers played along with my mood and the flow. So this was what it felt like.
I'd been talking with them for a long while when, at some point, the cards stopped.
"Huh?"
At the same instant, a brilliant rainbow light burst outward.
The light showed no sign of fading. And when it finally did—
"Oh! It dropped!"
Total spent: three billion four hundred eighty million won. A five-star class had appeared.
The communities exploded on the spot. This was a game enjoyed by hundreds of millions. In a game the whole world was feverishly racing to play, a five-star was something fewer than five people possessed. A four-star came out at an expected cost of a billion won. You could aim at a four-star to some degree and hunt it with money, but a five-star was impossible. Impossible even to calculate the expected value. That the performance, at least, was guaranteed once you pulled one had already been proven by the three people who had drawn theirs on luck. And now another one had come out. Even for a game only a few years past launch, it was enormous news.
Kim Siwoo's stream blew past a hundred thousand viewers in an instant. That number was climbing by the thousands every second. Five-star class—magic words that anyone who played Haven Online had no choice but to click at least once. And he was the first user who hadn't pulled it on pure luck.
Envy. Countless people said they were jealous. And once they had, they started hunting for reasons not to be.
It wasn't empty hate. It was actually true. Haven Online caught abuse for more than simply letting you pay to pull a class. The monetization was systematic. The structure demanded that getting stronger meant spending exactly that much. It needed money without end. So Kim Siwoo asked, his face gone dark.
"Is that for real? Good skills for a five-star class cost a fortune to pull?"
When people said yes, he muttered it with a perfectly serious face.