Check
So what exactly can you do about it?
Every so often, someone would toss out a remark like that, sneering at the gallery dwellers who nested in the darker corners of the internet. And honestly, from the outside, they had a point.
Those underground galleries were crawling with people who spent every day lobbing family insults and curses, posting bizarre fabricated hit pieces, and throwing themselves into elaborate personas just to scrape together a little attention. Objectively speaking, they did look ridiculous.
But the world had always underestimated the Time Bill Gates of the internet far too easily.
Those same underground gallery rats everyone dismissed had, during the Wooga-dol audition period, somehow managed to snipe four problematic contestants.
Someone who applied while hiding a past life. Someone who had a boyfriend. Someone who had once used feminist-adjacent language on stream. Someone who had thrown military-slur insults at an opponent during a game.
By the end of it, the Detective Conan theme song was trending on the FM Community boards.
When I open my eyes in the morning, I wonder about last night~
What kind of case will call for me today?
The lyrics fit perfectly. Every dawn, the underground gallery crowd would upload hit pieces through FM Community alt accounts, and any Wooga-dol contestant who couldn't explain themselves would announce their withdrawal. Ordinary fans waking up in the morning were left completely bewildered.
Wait — what the hell happened overnight?
Ssa-yo himself later confessed that the hit posts flooding FM Community every single dawn had kept him from sleeping properly through the entire Wooga-dol audition period. If those guys had just been kicking around nonsense, he wouldn't have cared — but actual contestants were dropping out, so he had no choice but to pay attention.
That was how much "results" the Time Bill Gates of the underground galleries were producing. They looked like nothing more than toxic losers and shut-ins on the surface, but once they started delivering like that, they became impossible to ignore.
And those are the people targeting me and Na-ro-si right now.
Honestly, it made me a little nervous. Had I said something problematic on stream without realizing it? Human memory was finite — I couldn't exactly rest easy.
You can't burn down the whole thatched cottage just to catch a bedbug. I can't go deleting every single VOD over something like this…
Besides, if those underground Time Bill Gates types had me as a target, they'd already downloaded every last one of my VODs. They'd be dissecting them second by second. There was a reason people called them Time Bill Gates.
No. Don't spiral. Trust yourself. If there was anything worth flagging, there would've already been a reaction. How many people have watched my streams by now? And I've been preparing carefully. Plus, I've got a last-resort option ready just in case.
I knew they weren't ordinary opponents — but I wasn't going to be a pushover either.
The interview candidates were finalized. I invited a total of thirteen people into the Discord channel and stressed, repeatedly, that they absolutely could not be late tomorrow. Each interview would run five minutes. The whole thing would take a little over an hour.
"Anyone free tomorrow? Anyone who wants to sit in on the interviews with me?"
"Mayo wants to do it. Mayo wants to pull rank as an interviewer."
"Yeah. You're out."
If a top-lane psycho like that sat as an interviewer, our crew would have a personality controversy on our hands before the day was over.
"Huh? Wait, I'm actually pretty busy tomorrow."
Of course — Miho had already promised to join the Diamond CK that Oh-ha was hosting, and Lucy was scheduled to do an endgame collab stream with Han A-yeon. Ahem. That was probably less of an endgame and more of an X-rated game, but still. Lucy wasn't even a crew member, so how was I supposed to stop her from building friendships with new streamers on her own?
Better to just run the interviews solo, even if the audio felt a little empty.
"Can Mayo's words not reach your ears? Mayo said she will sit the interviews with you."
"……"
"Ebebe! Unnie Seo-a is a Plat 4 scrub. Jungle butcher."
"I can hear you just fine, you know? And do you only drop the speech tic when you're trying to piss me off?"
"But Unnie Seo-a was the one who ignored Mayo first, so Unnie is the bad one. Mayo also wants to work hard as an interviewer and help pick who joins our company."
"……Fine. But you take this seriously, okay? These are people who'll be with our company going forward."
The final call was mine anyway. As long as I kept her attitude in check, having Mayo sit in wouldn't cause any real problems.
With the interview roster locked in, time flew by. I reviewed the first-cut edit Tong-dari-chicken had sent over, gave him feedback, and asked him to wrap it up. At this rate, the bang-sel would be finished by the weekend or Monday at the latest. The ten-second voice recordings were already done — I was just holding them to line up the release date with the bang-sel.
If I can just get those two things finished, I can breathe a little.
The dance selection rights would get a dedicated day of their own. Half the 24-hour stream rights would be burned this month, the other half next month. Title-change rights could be used whenever the winners wanted, as long as there wasn't a special content day in the way.
That still leaves the VRC date rights, though. The schedule's a little awkward on those.
January was all about grinding Minecraft and making as much money as possible, so ideally I wanted to toss the VRC dates into February. I'd probably have to message the winners directly and ask how they felt about it.
"Mayo, can you check if everyone's here?"
"Got it. Leave it to hardworking Mayo."
Thirty minutes before the interviews started. I handed the check-in to Mayo and pulled up the Pangea TV homepage.
Sure enough — nearly thirty thousand viewers on Wang-ko's stream. Classic Pangea TV comfort food: interview content.
Looking at it like this, it's pretty damn annoying.
Deliberately lining up his schedule to overlap with our company's interviews. Starting a full hour earlier on the same day was, no matter how you spun it, unsportsmanlike. But the community only grumbled about it a handful of timid times before the overwhelming fandom of a major corporate streamer buried the whole thing.
Nothing I can do. This is the wilds of internet broadcasting.
Maybe I'd been coasting a little too smoothly until now. My size had been so small that the streamers above me hadn't even registered me as someone worth caring about. But maybe this was the point where the checks started coming in.
On the surface, streamers all laughed and got along — but the truth was, every one of them was a potential rival. And among the small-time streamers, where survival itself was on the line, the competition got genuinely vicious. Before the regression, I'd watched small virtual streamers tear each other apart over stolen hardcore fans and shivered the whole time. It felt like the PTSD from watching elementary-school girls grab each other by the hair and brawl in class, flaring up all over again.
Anyway — the bigger my weight class gets, the more things I have to watch out for, and the more carefully I have to move.
Just look at the Pangea broadcast gallery rats. The more attention I drew, the harder they tried to grab my ankles and drag me down. A mid-tier weight class only multiplied the risk. If I wanted to reach a point where nobody could casually mess with me, I needed at least a four-digit viewer base.
Honestly, if you've got four digits of highly loyal fans, even the big corporate streamers think twice before touching you.
You could see the difference in attitude clearly just watching streams — the way they treated fellow virtual streamers of different sizes was almost funny. In the end, what proved a streamer was weight class.
"They really pulled in a crowd for the interviews."
I'd snuck a look at Wang-ko's stream — forty-two people waiting to interview. That, too, came down to the gap in weight class between him and me. No point getting bitter or resentful about it. Once I grew further, situations like this would change plenty.
And I've got information about the future. Just looking at O-Wang Company's interview candidates…
Aside from Kang-itto and Yamujin, I hadn't even heard most of those nicknames before the regression. Meaning whoever they picked, their ability would still fall well short of Na-ro-si.
We're way behind on interview numbers — but the ace is still ours.
I stopped touring Wang-ko's interview stream and hopped back into the Discord channel where Mayo was waiting. After making sure she prepped the candidates properly, I went live and spent about fifteen minutes warming up the atmosphere with some fan talk.
"Alright then — from this moment, we begin the interview stream for the recommendation rights owned by V-Live Company. Anyone who earns a recommendation will join our company in Rena World and work alongside us until the server shuts down."
TalkAboutToday has been muted for 10 minutes.
"If you sneakily shorten the name in weird ways, you get punished, got it? Alright then — from this moment, the interview stream begiiins!"
A roar of cheers flooded the chat.