No Longer a Participant
Inside the library, Lua had her cheek pressed against the desk.
Her cheeks had a soft little fullness to them, squished slightly out in a way that was almost unfairly cute, and the urge to poke it just once hit me hard.
Maybe that was why I took the back end of my pen and lightly pressed into the cheek that was sticking out beside me.
Her cheek sank under the pen and bounced back, and while I stared at that absurdly cute squish, I tossed a question her way.
"Hey, Lua."
"What, you pervert."
"Calling me a pervert out of nowhere is a little much, don't you think?"
"If you jab a girl's cheek like that, you're a pervert. Full stop."
It felt like overreacting over a cheek, but she wasn't rejecting me outright either, so a little seemed to be fine.
Armed with that confidence, I poked her cheek with the pen a bit more—and she puffed her cheeks out and looked at me.
"That's enough."
"Sorry."
"Good boy."
Lua smiled faintly, still sprawled over the desk.
Wondering why the Lua Im was suddenly like this, I decided to ask.
"Is something wrong?"
"Wrong… of course something's wrong."
Still looking thoroughly unsatisfied, Lua sat up and swept a look around us.
She was checking whether anyone nearby could overhear.
Fortunately, there was no one. We were in far too remote a corner for anyone to be hanging around in the first place—an isolated little nook screened off by bookshelves.
Even the books weren't popular ones. With nothing but the least-read volumes stacked around us, secret talks came naturally here.
"…I've been streaming lately."
"Ah, that Dig Craft streamer server?"
"Yeah… so you know."
"I catch everything."
"How sweet of you."
Lua smiled softly, then sighed again.
"Why, is the community talking?"
"No, it's not that… honestly, I don't care about the community. I only use it to check my public sentiment."
For the record, Lulu's public sentiment currently split into roughly two camps. The Luludan, who knew Lulu's usual self, mostly felt something like, So she finally decided to take a game seriously.
They already knew how smart Lulu was, so they also knew that if she entered a server like this, she would play it smart. Nothing in that group seemed especially blown away.
On the other hand, viewers who only knew Lulu from clips kept saying they never expected this from her, or that she had a surprising hidden charm.
Across the board, critical opinion toward Lulu was almost nonexistent. The few complaints that did surface came from other streamers' fans grumbling that she was hogging the spotlight even without running boss raids on the RPG server.
Even those got shut down by the majority of fans more often than not. It wasn't as if Lulu had claimed the number-one wealth ranking on that streamer server through shady means.
More importantly, she wasn't even using that money to mess with the Dig Craft server's economy. She had simply stacked an absurd pile of cash and done nothing else with it.
Whether she just hadn't done it yet was another question.
If Lulu had deliberately used that fortune to wreck the server economy, I would have joined in roasting her—or told Lua to stop. But she hadn't, had she? Of course public sentiment was fine.
Looking at it that way, if she really only used the community for sentiment checks, there was no reason for her to be sighing like this.
"So what's going on?"
"……Lately, the dopamine is driving me insane."
"Why?"
"Think about it, Jinwoo. The second I log into that streamer server, my money balloons to a ridiculous degree."
Right now, Lulu had perfected a tenant-farmer system, was even running daily part-timers as sharecroppers, and had installed middle management on top of it. (For the record, the middle manager was Yoyo, formerly a cook.)
Thanks to that, Lulu's money had shot through the roof, and it was still climbing on its own like some kind of idle auto-farm.
"Yeah, that would fry anyone's dopamine receptors."
"Right? And maybe that's why… I don't know. It just feels… weird."
"Weird how?"
"Lately when I play other games, they just… aren't fun. Something like that…."
I could more or less tell what she meant. That monstrous dopamine hit had her a little hooked.
What she needed right now was some kind of detox…
I glanced down at our books. The textbook open in front of us was economics—the subject we had both chosen. Of all the books that could have been sitting there, why did it have to be economics?
Even as I thought that, I shoved a problem from the economics textbook in front of Lua.
"Solve this and maybe you'll detox."
"But economics is fun."
"……Then math?"
"Math is fun too."
"English."
"English is fun too."
Wow. How many subjects could one person find fun?
Honestly, I was starting to suspect Lua Im was the type who studied because she enjoyed it.
Surely my friend couldn't be that much of a freak—but listening to her now, she absolutely was. I was sure of it.
"Just how much do you like studying? Is there any subject you hate?"
"There is. That's why I ran off to the liberal arts track, isn't it?"
"But you just said math is fun."
"Science is boring."
"All of it?"
"Hmm… actually, everything except chemistry might be fun. Chemistry just doesn't click with me."
This girl was genuinely weird.
How on earth was I supposed to cure this dopamine addiction? I was starting to seriously wonder.
While I kept fretting, Lua gave me a sidelong glance, then went right back to studying.
Watching her sink into focus, I decided I might as well study with her.
Yeah—even for someone who found studying fun, the dopamine from textbooks had to have a limit. She'd detox on her own eventually.
Thinking that, I simply sat beside Lua and studied with her, right up until lunch period was almost over.
After that we sat through three more classes, and at last it was after school.
Today was a non-streaming day for Lulu, so Lua looked thoroughly at ease as she walked home with me.
"You're doing Dig Craft for the off-day stream, right?"
"Looks like it. And while I'm at it… I should start laying the groundwork soon."
"Groundwork…?"
"Yeah. Groundwork."
I had no idea what kind of groundwork she was planning, but Lua just smiled quietly to herself.
"I'm thinking of something really fun, so when you watch the stream later, Jinwoo, it should be pretty entertaining."
The look on her face as she said that went past scary and into something faintly unhinged.
Lua was my friend, but there was one thing I could say with absolute certainty: behind that cute, haughty exterior lived a considerable amount of mania.
And that mania looked ready to fully surface this time. Whether that was a good thing, I honestly wasn't sure.
Still—please, just don't let anything blow up. That was all I could hope for.
Two days after that thought…
I heard some enormous news.
……She was making content inside a major streamer server.
Lulu used a huge chunk of the money she had amassed to buy yet another empty lot, then built a brand-new structure on it.
The building had seating and an arena where people could fight each other.
Yeah. She had basically built a colosseum.
About a hundred sixty seats—enough to hold every streamer currently on the server—but that wasn't the important part.
What mattered was that Lulu had negotiated directly with the production staff and created an entirely new piece of content. She would cover all the operating costs herself, and the prize money would be distributed as evenly as possible.
On top of that, since it was an RPG server with inevitable item gaps, she announced she would factor those item disparities in as much as she could.
That was enough to make the powerhouses sitting on relic-tier gear—or better—start paying attention.
It looked like solid content, and the prize pool was genuinely large.
Meanwhile, by charging both entry fees and spectator fees, Lulu could keep making even more money on the side.
Sure, a big chunk would go out as prize money, but the key was that it still looked like she could more than cover it.
Anyway—that was how Lulu's gladiator tournament came to be, and combat-class players who had been prepping for raids all poured into town in a spectacle you didn't see every day.
It felt like she was blowing the whole thing up to an insane scale, but the viewers were roaring with excitement over the completely unexpected spectacle.
I was thinking the exact same thing. Seriously.
In the middle of the tournament she herself had made possible, Lulu climbed onto the platform and delivered a brief speech. Calling it a speech was generous—it felt more like streamer banter—but still.
The Great Lulu, investing the money she earned for her viewers—I love you.