Diamond CK (2)
Swinging an ordinary pickaxe with zero enchantments after mining diamonds with an endgame one felt like regressing straight back to the Stone Age.
Ahh, the sweet fruits of civilization.
But more important than the hardship itself was not forgetting the original reason we were holding this Diamond CK today.
It was to care for the mental health of crew members worn thin by endless repetitive labor!
I casually checked the vibe. Miho, at least, didn't seem like she needed any fretting over.
"We have to win no matter what. Absolutely! Nobody goes to the bathroom. Keep digging without resting even for a single second."
This was the same Miho who, during one of our private crew heart-to-hearts, had carefully gauged our reactions before confessing she didn't have some grand dream—she just wanted to make a lot of money.
Yeah. The sense of crisis you feel at thirty is on a whole different level.
You never know how much longer you can keep streaming.
Maybe that was why the tension rolling off Miho the instant Diamond CK started was something else entirely.
Was this the famous financial therapy people talked about?
"I'm the number-one mole on the entire Rena World server. Unnies, just get ready to ride the bus. But buckle those seatbelts tight. I take zero responsibility if you fall into lava."
Mayo, on the other hand, seemed to be pure-enjoying the competitive structure the CK itself created.
Exactly the energy you'd expect from a hyper-competitive LoL top-lane addict, right?
The moment she heard there was someone to compete against, she started volunteering like a maniac for the very mining she normally found so soul-crushingly boring.
And finally, Lucy.
"Huh? Girls, can you slow down a little? Um… it kind of looks like I'm the only one left on the map. That's just me imagining things, right? Seo-a? Mayo? Miho unnie?"
Mm. She seemed to be having fun in her own way, so that was good enough.
Our Lucy can do whatever she wants~
You can't spend your whole life just fishing, after all.
Time to get used to mining too.
Huh? How dare I even think about turning my bias into a mining slave?
They say even slave work is better done in a noble household.
Do you have any idea how many virtual streamers before my regression envied the virtuals grinding like slaves in Rena World?
The pure joy of having two hundred thousand candies drop into your account every month just from mining and building all day long.
It wasn't empty talk that the ones who properly caught the trickle-down from big-agency streamers even took out loans and bought houses.
There are fans out there with way too many dreams and too much romance about virtual streamers, but at the end of the day the world runs on capitalism. This isn't a lifelong career. Earn while you still can.
I was going to raise Lucy strong.
Because the result of spoiling her rotten before the regression had come back as the absolute worst outcome…
That was why I was already having her practice for song contests and recommending news-broadcast content, raising her properly and thoroughly.
So I would never have to see that nightmare again.
So it had finally begun?
The signature specialty of Diamond CK: the sick cuckoos.
People usually call it "cuckooing" when someone relays news or info from another stream into chat. Deliberately feeding false info was a mutated version of that—sick cuckoos.
Meaning diseased, or… well, you can fill in the blank yourself.
"Uh-oh? Seo-a, this is bad. Looks like the other side already has over twenty diamonds. We really can't lose."
"Unnie, just ignore that. They're all sick cuckoos."
"Sick cuckoos? What's a sick cuckoo?"
"A sick cuckoo is a sick… I mean a diseased cuckoo. Phew! Almost slipped there."
Fundamentally I considered Diamond CK a contest of skill four, luck six.
Sure, individual mining skill differed, but when you competed under a hard time limit, luck tended to swing the result more often than pure ability.
Like those days when you were just unlucky enough to walk right past a diamond vein only two blocks to the side…
Today was exactly that kind of day.
Ha. Seriously, with my skill this situation made zero sense.
Today was clearly an all-time unlucky day.
I fought to hold my mental together under the endless barrage of sick cuckoos and the viewers who had developed a taste for roasting me.
All of this was merely a trial meant to make me grow.
I would never lose.
"Seo-a?"
"Yes? Miho unnie."
"Let's do well."
"……"
As crew leader, my face was completely gone.
And so we focused on mining for a full hour.
Of course, we didn't only mine.
The real core of Diamond CK actually lived in Discord.
Did viewers really dump huge piles of candy just to stare blankly at people digging diamonds for sixty minutes?
No. They sponsored because they wanted to watch streamers who normally scattered off to do their own work and their own broadcasts stay in the same space for an hour—laughing, chatting, sometimes even getting serious… that whole process.
Knowing that full well, I deliberately kept steering the crew into conversation.
In a way it was also excellent free advertising.
Add up every viewer currently watching the Diamond CK and we were already past two thousand.
"Mayo really wants to enter this Myeolmangjeon no matter what. What's your tier right now?"
"I'm Plat 3! I'm only stuck here because of jungle diff, okay? Normally I'd be in Emerald promo!"
These top-lane addicts really blamed the jungle for everything the second anything went wrong.
I listened to a few of the related stories just enough.
It might look like nothing, but this kind of soft promo often turned into cuckoo chatter all over the place once Myeolmangjeon season hit, and it actually helped a lot when people started forming teams.
Next target.
"Aagh! Stop talking and move faster! We're losing right now!"
"……"
Miho was way too locked into Diamond CK right now. Even speaking to her felt dangerous.
Pass for now.
"Lucy unnie."
"Oh! I mined five already. I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. I turned right from a redstone spot and a diamond block just popped out!"
Hmm. That was kind of adorable.
Getting that excited and rattling off an explanation at top speed over something as trivial as diamonds went straight for the heart.
Especially after I'd already seen her red pill last time.
In real life she was the cold-beauty type, yet this gap moe…!
I caught myself grinning like an idiot until the viewers called me a pervert and snapped me out of it.
No, this wasn't the time for that.
"Starting to get bored of fishing?"
"Huh? It's not exactly like that. I've made a lot of fishing friends lately. We all gather, introduce ourselves, and when it gets quiet they even sing for me."
Looks like Lucy had figured out her own quiet little way to enjoy things.
Good thing I didn't just drag her around everywhere and instead let her free-range so she could grow stronger on her own.
"Oh! There it is—finally diamonds!"
This was exactly why luck hit so hard in Diamond CK.
Some people found a vein and it was only two or three diamonds. Someone else hit eight in one go.
My count shot up to eleven in an instant and we climbed all the way to second place on our team.
First place was Miho with a monstrous fourteen. Mayo was holding a solid pace at nine.
With an endgame pickaxe that would have ballooned to almost twenty…
I soothed that little regret and picked the conversation with Lucy back up.
I wasn't clinging to her for no reason.
I wanted to start raising her into a different role instead of leaving her stuck on fishing forever.
Back when Mending books were still hot, fishing was basically mandatory for everyone. Once the market normalized it became little more than a time-killing hobby.
Or something you only did when everyone clustered at the fishing spot to chat.
So looking ahead, Lucy needed to learn other activities.
That was why I presented her with two paths in the serious tone of someone asking a high-schooler about their future dreams, and let her choose.
"Unnie, do you prefer Little Forest or Suriname?"
"Huh? Aren't those both movie titles? I haven't seen either so I don't really know the stories."
"Just pick whichever one pulls you more."
"Really? Then I like Suriname. The name just sounds cooler."
Perfect. Lucy's future was now officially set as a drug dealer.
Deep in the basement of the company house we were about to build, I would have her plant a drug farm and brew special potions.
We already hauled a ton of brewing stands out of the Ender World; all we needed now were the ingredients from the Nether.
"Aaaaah, one minute left! Everyone, don't give up till the end—don't stop swinging that pickaxe until the final second!"
Miho shouted with the desperate passion of an independence activist, but the merciless clock refused to wait for us.
Three, two, one… time up.
Rena World's first CK finished without a hitch.