My VTuber Stream Went Bust!

For the record, I don't have a family.

I was left at an orphanage when I was very small, so I don't know my parents' names. I don't even know their faces. A lonely childhood in that orphanage, then my whole school life — elementary, middle, and high school — passed the same way.

In those lonely years, the only comfort I had was internet broadcasts. Back then, my one and only dream was to become a streamer.

So the moment I turned twenty, left the orphanage, and set out on my own, I started one. With money scraped together over a few months of hauling packages on and off delivery trucks, I ambitiously bought my gear and went live.

It's already seven in the evening.

Seven p.m. The hour when office workers clocking out and students finished with school would show up to watch. Same as always, the moment the clock hit seven, I turned the stream on.

Viewer count: ten.

I'd been broadcasting for over a year and still hadn't crawled out of small-streamer obscurity. A full year without a single day off, more than ten hours every single day — and every time I looked at a viewer count that refused to grow, it hurt.

How wonderful it would be if lots of people actually watched me. What would it feel like to see chat pouring in without a break, instead of one message every few minutes?

I shoved those feelings down and finished another stream without incident. I was just about to shut the computer off when something caught my eye: the broadcast sitting at number one by current viewers. A colossal VTuber, averaging over ten thousand watchers.

In that instant, a thought surfaced.

I'm jealous. What would it feel like to live as a cute girl, getting headpats from my viewers?

That night I fell asleep thinking I want to try living as a cute girl — and that was my last day as a man.

Years had already passed since I became a cute girl.

I had become a successful VTuber — three hundred ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠thousand followers on Chzzk, and ten thousand viewers on average.

"Bwahahaha! I'll slaughter every last one of you zombies!"

I brought the axe down on the skulls of the zombies charging me, then bolted straight inside a building. I locked the windows so the ones outside couldn't get in, yanked the curtains shut, and went from room to room checking for anything still hiding. Crunch. One zombie crouched in the corner of a room. I caved its skull in on the spot.

"Chat, I'm a total ZombieBoard pro now, right?!"

ZombieBoard — a zombie-apocalypse survival game made by an indie studio overseas. I was playing it live on stream. Three years had already passed since I started broadcasting as a VTuber. In the beginning I didn't even have ten viewers, but I kept at it and grew the audience, until I finally became the big streamer I had always dreamed of, with ten thousand people watching on average.

Ten thousand people watching me play games and spout nonsense, and viewers ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠who never stopped typing back... Talking with them was happiness. Happiness on top of happiness.

Oh, right! A quick introduction to my current RP.

Cult leader of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult, dropped onto Earth by a sudden dimensional rift. And not just any cult leader — the strongest of all, absurdly overpowered, master of the Heavenly Martial Body. A crimson-haired, red-eyed beauty of a cult leader who could charm every man and every woman alive.

This is me.

One-buck punches and a flood of chat from awful viewers who refused to believe in my gameplay. Hmph. As if they knew what they were talking about. I had played more games than I could count over the past three years. There was no game I couldn't clear.

"Chat. You don't know Skeleton? In an apocalypse, the axe is king!"

"Everyone! What did I tell you? I said the axe is king!"

At last, everything was ready for the escape. The antenna, the radio — all of it. All that remained was to reach the extraction point and call a helicopter in over the radio.

"We're here! All right, now I'll show you me clearing this!"

I had arrived at the hospital. The extraction point.

Even after I'd come this far, chat from awful viewers who still didn't believe in me came pouring in. But that was fine. The more bad karma they stacked up like this, the louder I'd get to gloat later.

"I'm going in!!"

"Waaaaaah!"

I had failed the escape, and in front of more than ten thousand viewers I burst into ugly, heaving sobs. This was all estrogen's fault. The female hormone. Back when I was a man, I never cried this easily.... Ever since becoming a woman, though, I felt it every single time: the influence of hormones is no joke. Enough to reduce the macho guy I used to be to wailing sobs, just because I couldn't clear a game.

Anyway. Every last bit of this was the hormones.

"How was I supposed to know that many zombies would come pouring out of there?! Waaaaah!"

"I am not an idiot! Sniff, sniff."

"I'm not the kind of idiot who falls for bait like that. Sniff, sniff."

I was about ready to ban them — but looking again, the mood in chat was off. The whole window had been plastered over with talk of the news flash from that donation.

What? Is this actually real?

The moment I opened a news channel on Nutube, a breaking bulletin was airing live.

Years had already passed since the towers appeared all over the world, and Nutube today, same as every day, was nothing but videos about them.

The black towers — what everyone calls the Towers of Doom — had turned a huge part of the world upside down. Politics, the economy, society. Every field. Well, of course they had. Climbing the Tower was tied directly to whether humanity got to survive.

Each floor of the Tower has a time limit. Floor 1, where it all starts, is three days. Climb higher and the limit does get longer — but the difficulty of clearing a floor rises right along with it. If every floor had been locked at three days, humanity would have gone extinct ages ago. The higher you go, the more the difficulty scales out of control.

So what happens if you fail to clear a floor in time?

Stack.

Miss the deadline, and Stacks start piling up on that nation. Once enough of them accumulate, they consume themselves, and a Gate appears in a random region. Yeah — those Gates. The ones from hunter stories. What shows up is pure chance. Nobody can know. Will one Stack get spent and spit out a D-rank Gate? Will five Stacks get spent on a B-rank Gate?

And just because the Tower stands in Seoul doesn't mean Gates only open in Seoul. A Gate can appear anywhere in the country. Take North Korea. They concentrated every hunter they had on Pyongyang, where their Tower appeared — and an A-rank Gate opened in North Hamgyong Province and slaughtered every last person living there.

Right now, the top priority of every nation is the Tower and the Gates. Our country officially established a Tower Climbing Bureau and a Gate Management Bureau to manage them.

Anyway, the world had turned into one enormous circus, and I had reached the age when a VTuber is at her cutest. Thirty — what people fondly call your V-years.

And my stream, which used to average ten thousand viewers a day, had gone completely bust.

How'd the broadcast die, you ask?

Tower Streaming.

The live platform for Tower climbs, better known as T-Streaming. A livestreaming platform that appeared together with the Towers, all over the world. After T-Streaming showed up, most viewers moved over to it, and every broadcast platform besides T-Streaming went under. Inevitable, really. The main content of internet streaming was games. The main content of T-Streaming was climbing the Tower. The latter was far more stimulating, and most of our dopamine-chasing viewers — mine included — migrated.

So the only platform left where anyone can go live is T-Streaming.

Then why didn't I just move my platform over? If that had been possible, I would have done it already. Anyone can watch T-Streaming. Streaming on it is another matter. The only people allowed to broadcast there are hunters.

And so, with my stream dead, I was living like a shut-in who'd already fallen apart.

Pssht. I pulled a can of beer from the fridge and drank it on an empty stomach. Today, same as always, I started the day with alcohol.

No family, no friends — internet streaming had been the only window through which I spoke to the world. From the moment I could no longer do that broadcast, I collapsed at a frightening speed. Thanks to the money I'd saved, I could still keep myself alive. The problem was my heart.

The viewers who used to watch me play games and spout nonsense. The viewers who never stopped typing in chat. And the hours I spent happy, just talking with them. Those hours — the only time in my life I was ever truly happy. Knowing they would never come again was breaking me down.

"Please, just let me awaken. Please...."

Every single day I prayed to be allowed to awaken, and God did not grant my prayer. Years after the Towers appeared, I still hadn't awakened.

Gulp. I swallowed a mouthful of beer and opened Hunter Gallery on my phone. I knew perfectly well that going there would only cut me deeper, and still I went in out of habit — the way you keep picking at a scab even though you know leaving it alone is what makes it heal.

I tapped a post that was currently on fire.

LetsAwaken — a longtime regular on Hunter Gallery who posts once a month that you can awaken by eating dirt, clearly someone who enjoyed that novel about becoming a mage by eating soil a little too much. Normally I ignored him and scrolled right past. Today, for some reason, my eyes stuck.

Maybe because a post that usually collected nothing but insults actually had a few comments defending him. Or maybe because I was drunk. Or maybe because I was desperate enough that none of that mattered.

I turned my head toward the balcony, and a flowerpot came into view. A tiny flowering tree, shriveled and twisted from neglect, and the soil packed in to fill the pot.

I got up and stepped out onto the balcony. The moment I scooped both hands full of dirt, the stink of rotten soil rose off it.

Who knows. Maybe I really could awaken.

I opened my mouth wide, just about to shove the rotten dirt in — and in that instant—

Ding!

A chime rang inside my head. A translucent blue hologram window appeared before my eyes.