Who Forced You?
"Oh, what's it called. There's this thing called Rena World. Seems like everyone's into it lately. Figured I'd hop in once myself. Not full commitment or anything—more like a Part 2 kind of vibe. You know what I mean?"
Right around the time our crew was throwing itself into the money-making grind, a new bomb dropped on Pangea TV.
Kim Hak-do—the big-corp streamer whose main content was League of Legends—had suddenly announced his entry into Rena World.
He'd framed it as a casual taste-test, but the ripple effect made the existing Partner streamers look like small fry by comparison. Inside the server, the mood was electric, and the comment count on Rena-ttang's new-resident recruitment post ballooned by half overnight.
The influence of a big-corp streamer, proven in a single stroke.
Rena-ttang wasn't about to let the opportunity slip. She spun her gears hard.
"So, uh—what do you think of this idea?"
"Whoa. That's actually really good. If it lands right, the timing should line up perfectly."
The plan she'd cobbled together on the fly was a mini concert inside Minecraft—an open stage where anyone could apply and sing. There was a lot of fluff in the pitch, but the core was simple: on the day Kim Hak-do dipped his toes into the server, use a concert to snag his attention and lock in a longer session time.
If a big-corp streamer kept playing Rena World on a regular basis, the server admin's prestige would rise right along with it. Rena-ttang's voice was brighter than usual, as if she were already daydreaming about that shiny future.
"Tell your crew members to sign up too. Especially Lucy—I hear she can sing."
She'd somehow already clocked that Lucy was the vocal pick, and now she was needling me about it. But that was a hard no. I couldn't put Lucy out on a low-attention singing event this early. Even a great song gets old if you hear it too many times—this was about conserving her image. Lucy's voice was a reversal weapon, saved for a bigger stage.
But if I just flat-out refuse, this thin-skinned Rena-ttang might sulk.
So I leaned on the construction contracts we'd already taken—Lucy simply didn't have free time to rest. And to soothe Rena-ttang, I offered a substitute.
"Mayo's free, though. I'll put Mayo in."
"You will? See, this is why I like talking to Seo-a. When there's content that helps the server, the streamers with some real weight need to step up first. That's how everything works out."
"Exactly. Going forward, if anything like this comes up, we'll jump in actively."
"Good. Honestly, if everyone were like you, my life would be so much easier."
Whew. Another grueling morning of business, done. No—it felt like I was getting a call from her every three days at this point. Before the regression, a few streamers had earned the nickname "Rena-ttang's comfort doll." Surely that target wasn't about to become me… right?
I shivered at the thought, then grabbed a late breakfast-slash-lunch and fired up the stream.
If you want to make money, you don't get to be lazy for a single day. I strolled through the village with my hands clasped behind my back, nice and easy.
"Look over there. It's the outlaw. I heard she gut people and even did time."
"Outlaw? I heard she's a loan shark who runs pyramid schemes on the side."
"……."
Ahem! Who dares slander someone who lives so clean she doesn't even need laws?
I drew the diamond sword that settles all truths, and the surroundings went quiet. Ahem. Things were back to normal.
The enemy wasn't only outside. Today, as always, a pack of rotten viewers was out to smear me. I did my best to ignore them and scanned the surroundings.
"Damn. Things have really improved."
Ever since Rena-ttang's eviction announcement, a full-blown development boom had kicked off. Especially around the Pokémon Center—Rena World's equivalent of Gangnam—it was a straight-up hot spot. Buildings were going up in every zone that wasn't a road.
Three new contracts yesterday, and two more people said they'd think it over. Heh. That's a lot of money.
Oh-ha had finally caught on that construction was a goldmine and jumped into the market with her own Oh Ha Company, but she was already a few steps behind. Unlike a brand-new outfit just getting started, we already had an optimized system in place.
Mayo and I had stockpiled plenty of building materials from grinding Hell and the Ender World, and recently we'd even pushed into the Ocean Monument. The sea lanterns from there were popular as materials, after all. On top of that, we didn't just have builders—we had Lucy as a dedicated interior specialist, so the work was fast and efficient. Subnitti, who'd started as a part-timer, was pulling her weight on both construction and interiors. Han A-yeon, too, had started from mining and was excelling at sorting and managing building materials—doing her full share.
Hmm? So what was I doing, then?
I was handling the most important job of all. Put simply: those four were blue-collar. I was white-collar.
These people were clearly starving for middle fingers. I stiffly flipped them one, then checked the mood around the server.
Haisu-ya was off playing alone on a remote island, while Dananyang was planning to form a company with Ami-chan and Endu in tow. Oh-ha had founded Oh Ha Company and taken on Kaang and Rinka as employees. Mist's Bad Potato Company was also on an aggressive expansion spree, recruiting Chohee-chohee, Han Sebin, and Ppogeum on top of existing members Dorai and Coco-nyang.
Come to think of it, those two are V-Topia members.
Han Sebin and Ppogeum—I'd confirmed their acceptance notices just yesterday. Considering the turf war that was about to break out between Rena-ttang and Yu Seona, both of them had to be stewing over some complicated thoughts.
Watching Bad Potato Company's aggressive moves under Mist, the fans' worry was only natural. Last week Mist had taken a proper humiliation, and he still hadn't gotten his stolen gear back. Which meant, clearly, that we had no intention of returning the endgame equipment we'd taken.
"Come on, you guys worry too much. We'll handle the prep ourselves."
I couldn't expose strategy to the fans here. Some FM Community point-chaser might jump on it the second they saw an opening, and there could very well be spies from the Bad Potato Company fandom mixed in. This kind of thing, you double- and triple-check.
So the countermeasures for this Purge Day were also being handled in secret. And the core of that prep was Lucy—writing history in a clandestine underground lot that only our crew knew about.
Come to think of it, it's about time to sell off this building too.
V-Live Company's building, planted right next to the Pokémon Center. In modern terms, it sat on the absolute prime cut of Gangnam real estate—there was zero reason to sell. Being close to the NPC that teleported you to Taecho Village was convenient in all kinds of ways.
But if you knew the Rena World policies that were about to unfold, you had no choice but to change your mind. Namely: Rena World's tax policy—widely ranked among Rena-ttang's all-time greatest blunders.
The cause was simple. No matter how much money people made, there was nothing to spend it on, so streamers' login rates gradually dropped. Rena-ttang's devilish idea for flipping that situation: if too much money was floating around the server, just claw it back with taxes, right? Then people would grind even harder just to pay their dues, and everyone's session times would go up.
With that calculation, Rena-ttang slapped taxes on every plot and building. Using the Pokémon Center as the main hub, she graded the tax rates by distance from it. The whole population lost their minds. Tax bombs ranging from as high as twenty million Rena down to five or six million—amounts nobody could handle—came raining down.
In the end, the policy got roasted to hell across every community, and thanks to big-corp streamers opposing it, the rates got cut to one-tenth. Even so, Grade-1 plots stuck right up against the Pokémon Center still carried painful taxes, so everyone tore down their buildings and migrated far away. A sad truth.
Hmm? But knowing that and still selling the building—isn't that a scam?
Who forced you, you bastards!
I didn't hold a knife to anyone's throat and make them buy. If a buyer shows up, I'll clear it out at a reasonable price. Ideally someone like Blueby or Mist would take the bait—a real whale on the line. Ahem!
That was the beautiful future I was dreaming of.