Lee Yena Is Chinese!

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Word that Lee Yena had started a YouTube channel spread like wildfire.

"A child actress is singing?"

"Huh!"

"That actually sounds fun."

A child actress putting out music was novel enough that people piled onto YouTube and searched her name.

"What is this?"

"What?"

"The subscriber count looks wrong."

"Wait, what? It was only a million not that long ago."

"Didn't she start two weeks ago?"

"Yeah."

"Then how is it three million?"

"I don't know either!"

Koreans were thrown into complete confusion.

They had every reason to be. Ordinary YouTube channels hit a ceiling on how fast they can grow. Even a rocket-fast rise still takes a long time to claw its way to a million subscribers.

Even Neoguri had needed a fair stretch of time to gather a million, hadn't it?

People were baffled—but YouTube view counts and the real-time search rankings were brutally honest.

"?"

"?"

If there was one thing Lee Yena had failed to anticipate, it was that she had far more fans than she'd ever imagined.

A twenty-million child actress was no joke. It literally meant twenty million people had watched the movie.

Of course, that number included people who'd seen it two or three times—but the hard truth was that even Koreans who had never watched Daegu-haeng had still heard of it.

And that worked entirely in Lee Yena's favor.

People who had seen her on the big screen, and people who had never watched the film but still knew her name, both wandered onto YouTube out of curiosity, searched her up, and listened to her sing.

They realized her vocals weren't just impressive for her age—they sat among the absolute top tier of Korean singers—and hit subscribe.

And there was no way the press was going to sleep on a feast like this.

They pumped out every clickbait headline they could invent, and the result was a self-sustaining loop that never stopped spinning.

One: someone stumbled across Lee Yena's cover video by accident.

Two: they told a friend.

Three: that friend told their friends.

Four: reporters wrote inflammatory articles.

Five: people who read those articles searched Lee Yena.

Those five steps repeated over and over until her subscriber count climbed all the way to three million.

Okay. This has to be the ceiling.

Subscribers were starting to slow. She was still picking up about ten thousand a day, but next to the stretches when she'd been gaining five hundred thousand a day, it felt like nothing.

And right around the time Lee Yena finally exhaled in relief—

—Japanese viewers started showing up on her channel.

Daegu-haeng had been invited to the Cannes Film Festival, so it carried a modest amount of overseas recognition.

Modest was the key word. An invitation to Cannes was one thing; it hadn't actually won anything.

But there was Hiroko Yui.

Running the channel Japanese Reviewer Hiroko Yui, she slapped Japanese subtitles onto every single video—and as a result, she had built up a serious Japanese fanbase.

She had quietly crossed two million subscribers, and every video she dropped was pulling over five million views. She was riding high.

"Huh? Yena's singing...? Oh, I am not sitting this one out!"

Hiroko Yui searched up Lee Yena's cover, watched it, and a moment later let out an unnerving little laugh.

"Heheh... the whole world needs to know about this!"

Anything cute or beautiful drove her completely feral, so a Lee Yena who could also sing was simply not something she could keep to herself. The result:

She shouted Yena out on stream and across her YouTube community.

"Everyone, go listen to Yena sing! She is seriously so good....!"

Starting her own broadcasts had made it nearly impossible to hide how fluent her Korean had become, so she'd just come clean about it. She was good at Korean now. Lately her videos featured smooth, natural Korean instead of the clumsy, halting version from before.

Anyway—Hiroko Yui shouted Lee Yena out, and Japanese fans who already used her channel to enjoy Korean culture suddenly became very aware of Yena.

Which meant Japanese viewers started pouring into Lee Yena's channel.

The Japanese went through the exact same cycle the Koreans had already lived through, and mentions of Lee Yena kept snowballing.

Views and subscribers that had been cooling off started climbing again.

This is where it ends.

I was sure of it. Growth stopped here.

Sure, uploading more videos would push things higher eventually—but not right now.

What I hadn't accounted for was this: if Japanese people could find my videos, people from other countries could find them too.

It was China.

Late 2016.

In a heavily censored China, running a YouTube channel was nearly impossible—but Chinese people who watched YouTube still existed. A handful, sure.

Except "a handful" was not something you could afford to underestimate.

China currently held the largest population on Earth. Even a handful added up to a serious number.

Two million.

Roughly two million people were hopping VPNs to enjoy YouTube—and those two million Chinese viewers' eyes landed on a video of Lee Yena singing.

Music had a way of erasing language barriers, and beauty past a certain threshold transcended race entirely.

Lee Yena checked both boxes. The result:

Lee Yena became an honorary Chinese citizen.

Two million Chinese people subscribed to Lee Yena.

"?"

Japanese fans, Chinese fans—surely this was the real end now, Lee Yena thought.

It was not.

The biggest market of all was still waiting: the English-speaking world.

The English-speaking audience operated on a completely different scale.

Japan, for all its cultural reach, still wasn't a true population giant, and Korea definitely wasn't. China had the largest population on the planet, but government restrictions meant people there couldn't freely enjoy YouTube.

Which left English-speaking YouTube viewers as the single biggest pool—and the result:

Subscribers and views shot up in an instant.

The fact that the song she'd covered was an English track helped a lot too.

Every factor stacked on top of every other factor, and Lee Yena ended up with ten million subscribers—and a debut video that somehow cracked a hundred million views. An absolutely unhinged run.

"???"

Lee Yena was dizzy.

Is this even real....?

A million subscribers, I'd been ready for. I'd more or less seen that coming.

But three million had already blown past my projections. Five million was something I'd figured I'd hit a year from now. Ten million subscribers had belonged to some distant future I wasn't even thinking about yet.

Every single one of those expectations shattered.

One month.

For the entire month of November, the world lost its mind—and I ended up receiving a Diamond Play Button.

"Yena. You should thank your subscribers, right?"

"Yes..."

"Okay, look at the camera and give us your thoughts!"

"Um. First of all, thank you so much... I never imagined I'd receive this much love. I'll do my best to keep putting out work that lives up to it. As for where the channel is headed—until early next year I'll mostly be posting covers, and starting mid-next year I want to upload songs I've written myself. Please listen to a lot of them...!"

"Cut! That was a great message, Yena!"

Ah. I genuinely had no idea anymore.

The world has completely lost it...!

Hmm. Something about this feeling was weirdly familiar, though.

I feel like I've lived through a mess like this once before...?

Ah. Right. The Delphi Priestess incident.

Back then I'd accidentally predicted four ten-million-viewer movies in a row and blown up overnight. This was the same thing all over again.

I had never expected popularity on ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠this scale.

Ah. Whatever.

I might as well just enjoy it.

It wasn't like there was anything I could do about it anyway.