Company Roster
Saturday, January 7th.
Today's Purge Day was a pass.
Rena-ttang was appearing on an official Pangea TV broadcast, so they'd decided to skip it this once. For us, it was a welcome break — we'd already figured our odds of winning were basically zero from here on out and had been planning to half-ass it anyway.
It meant we got to keep the winner buff for another week.
Huh? What's the winner buff, you ask?
Just typing in chat automatically promotes your birthday. How was I supposed to pass that up?
An entire extra week on the title. As far as I was concerned, I'd won the lottery without even standing up.
O-Wang Company, on the other hand — still grinding their teeth over the humiliation from round three — grumbled that it was a total letdown.
"Wow, she's the real deal."
"Not at all!"
"I'm not just saying it. She's great at mining and building. A genuine all-rounder."
Na-ro-si had shown up first thing in the morning and spent about an hour each sampling the various jobs — mining, farming, construction — following along with Subnitti, Han A-yeon, and the others. Everywhere she went, the reviews came back glowing.
Just as I'd expected. A perfect hexagonal talent in Minecraft!
And her contributions didn't stop there.
"Um, I'm a little worried I might be coming on too strong right from the start…"
"Not even a little. Speak freely."
"Yes, Master! Looking at the current farm layout, it seems like you're trying to produce ratatouille — but onions and carrots benefit from a pickaxe's Fortune enchantment, while beets and tomatoes don't. That inevitably creates a gap in yield. So from that perspective, to hit peak efficiency without leftover surplus crops, you'd want to shrink the onion and carrot fields, expand the beets and tomatoes instead, and also calculate an optimized farming route so that…"
"Uh, uhh? Hang on? Wait, I mean… just a second."
"Yes, Master! Shall I explain it again?"
As much as I loved calculating and planning things out, I had so much on my plate that I'd never dug into details this granular. And here was Na-ro-si, driving a spike straight through that exact gap.
The other employees listening from behind wore expressions that said what alien language is this, but as a regressor, I knew exactly what she was getting at.
She's talking about optimizing ratatouille production. Structuring the farm so that every harvest cycle of the mega-farm lands on exact numbers with zero surplus crops left over… plus the most efficient routes and the layout to make them possible.
Even before my regression, Na-ro-si had made a name for herself with farm optimization. Spend the same hour farming ratatouille and her designs pulled in 800,000 to 1,000,000 Rena, while other farms lagged behind at 600,000 to 800,000. I remembered everyone stampeding over to benchmark her layouts.
"Good, good. Everyone, switch things over exactly the way Na-ro-si says. Right now."
"Hmm? Is that really okay? Rosi's only on day two…"
"I'll take responsibility. Just do it."
"Thank you for trusting me, Master!"
I understood the other employees' concerns, but as a regressor, all I felt was rising anticipation for what Na-ro-si would do next.
With that, our company was at seven members.
And at this particular moment, a small dilemma was starting to nag at me.
It's about time we held a meeting for a large-scale build… a Landmark. Do we stop here? Or bring in one more person?
Landmark construction was a project you staked the entire company's life on. Sure, there was still about half a year left until Rena World wrapped up, so we could always try again later — but fans would only open their wallets a second time if the first result had been satisfying.
Which meant this attempt mattered more than anything.
I'm not just talking. I remember. The absurd amounts of Candy that went into Landmark builds.
Back before the regression, when I'd followed Lucy over to Pangea TV, almost everything blowing up in the community had been about the funding totals on Landmark construction battle missions. Akatsuki had written history with 1.12 million Candy in funding on just six people, and Park Bong-sik's Mu-yang Group had set the all-time Rena World building-fund record at 1.4 million Candy.
Granted, Mu-yang Group had fielded sixteen people for the battle mission, so on a per-person basis they fell short of Akatsuki — but it wasn't that simple a comparison. The more people you had, the harder it was for the trickle-down to reach every corner.
O-Wang Company had also logged 800,000 Candy in building funds, and more than that, they'd racked up the highest number of building fundraisers period. Three times? Four? Even I couldn't remember the exact count. Point was, they'd absolutely ransacked their viewers' wallets — and the share of Landmarks O-Wang Company had built across the server reflected it.
Lethal Company had hit 650,000. Seoni Moon never ran an official building fundraiser, but I knew a considerable amount of trickle-down had still landed on their individual employees through material-gathering CKs and the like.
Truly, a land of milk and honey — Rena World. And to smoothly pull in the Landmark building funds that sat at its very core, you needed thorough planning plus the effort of preparing well in advance.
If you just blindsided your fans with "We're running our Landmark building fundraiser in a week," a lot of people would panic. Payday timing could be an issue, for one. You needed to give them at least two weeks' notice so viewers could get their wallets ready.
Which means we need to hold the meeting by next week at the latest. And the sooner the fundraiser date, the better.
Watching Pangea TV's stock price climb through January, I couldn't hide how badly I wanted to lock in that funding early and put it to work.
But turning that over in my mind dredged up an event I hadn't been thinking about.
Come to think of it… my birthday is at the end of this month.
An ultra-premium event no streamer could ever afford to skip. And it only came around once a year. Miss this window and you'd be waiting a long, long time for the cooldown to reset.
Which means I need to pull the building fundraiser even earlier.
My conscience twinged pretty hard, but there was no way around it. If the building fundraiser and my birthday landed too close together, it'd be like wringing out wallets that were already bone-dry all over again.
Someone out there would probably call me a money-grubber for this. But I knew internet broadcasting fans' habits inside and out.
The truly cracked hardcore fans might only donate to their main streamer — but regular viewers are a completely different story.
Pangea TV had an extremely well-developed floating-viewer culture. Even my own stream was packed with floaters drawn in by Rena World. Day-trippers chasing that day's dopamine hit. Were they really going to sit on their hands and practice patience?
Click. Give them even the thinnest pretext or justification and those wallets flew open. If the Candy didn't get spent in my room, it was just going to get vacuumed up on someone else's stream anyway.
Candy they already topped up intending to donate. I'm sweeping up every last bit of it.
If that mindset made me a money-grubber… fine. As of today, I was going full money-grubber. I was Candy-crazy.
A streamer's popularity was nothing more than sea foam. The smartest play was to suck up every drop of honey we could before January — Rena World's boom period — was over.
The moment Park Bong-sik came back, Rena World's floating viewership would drop by nearly half. By then, most floaters would have already locked in their main company to watch.
Which means I need to turn the Landmark plan into reality as fast as possible. And for that, we need a meeting to lock down the schedule.
The scheduling itself could've been handled in an offline meeting, but that felt like such a waste. A deal this big needed to happen on stream, to plant that sense of immersion in the viewers.
Since time immemorial, "meeting-otaku" had been a bold faction that transcended content type. The second word got out that a meeting was happening, they swarmed in and took their seats.
So it all comes down to this — do we go with seven, or add one more and fill out to eight?
I'd aimed for an elite small-roster company from the start, and eight was the absolute ceiling. Any more than that and the trickle-down scattered too thin, and it became harder to spotlight each member's individual charm.
Why had Akatsuki drawn so much attention in the first place? Because with only six people, the interest focused on each individual ran high — which made it easy for everyone to show off their own appeal.
Mu-yang Group and O-Wang Company struggled with that. A handful of popular picks soaked up all the attention while everyone else just ground away like laborers.
At least they still caught some Candy trickle-down, so maybe that counted as a silver lining?
Either way, elite and small was the goal — so I decided this was the moment to finalize the company roster.
Should I just put it on the meeting agenda too? I need to hear everyone's opinions anyway.
It was a day for deep thoughts.