The Roulette's Karma
For the small-time virtual streamers who had transferred over to Pangea TV, the biggest problem they faced wasn't anything complicated.
It was the Best Streamer badge — the difference between a ten-percent swing in their currency exchange rate.
Already scraping by on the kind of budget that earned them the "small-time" label, a ten-percent gap might as well have been an unscalable wall. Everyone was staking their lives on becoming a Best Streamer as fast as humanly possible.
The problem was that the competition kept getting fiercer.
I had been the very first virtual streamer to ever receive the Best Streamer badge. Back in November, when I'd broken the tape as the first runner, things had honestly been easy. The word "competitor" hadn't even existed yet.
But starting in December, the story began to shift. The Wooga-dol audition had drawn a flood of transfers, and naturally the number of people who met the eligibility requirements and threw their hats into the Best Streamer ring ballooned. December ended up as a bloodbath of internal competition — a cruel fate that split everyone into equal halves of passers and failures.
And January? The number of transfers had only grown further, and now the December rejects were lining up for another shot. The competition rate was bound to explode.
Even in that climate, virtual streamers with top-tier broadcast metrics — people like Seol Pyo-woo, Baiyo, and Park Na-na — could sit back and wait calmly for their acceptance notices. But everyone else? They had no choice but to scramble around like their feet were already on fire.
That's also why the small-time streamers cling so desperately to whatever scraps of viewership trickle down. Broadcast metrics only look good once the viewer count actually registers on screen.
Favorites and Best Streamer recommendation posts written by viewers were important evaluation factors too. A recommendation from a well-known streamer was even better. In the early days of Rena World, it wasn't uncommon for Best Streamer recommendation posts written by major corporate streamers to sell for over ten million Rena a pop.
Win fair and square on nothing but your own ability? That's the talk of someone who doesn't know how the world works.
This was reality — which was exactly why everyone had clawed so hard to get into Rena World in the first place. There might have been differences in timing, but virtually every virtual streamer who was active in Rena World had become a Best Streamer before March.
And the ones who never made it into Rena World? Those who clung to Seona Land — or failed even at that — sometimes took more than half a year just to earn the badge.
This was the cold reality of the streaming scene people called "the wild." And that was precisely why the members of Bad Potato Company couldn't easily brush aside the hand I'd extended.
Their eyes wavered, tossed back and forth by deepening deliberation. Dorai and Coco-nyang, who'd rejected my offer once before, might even have been feeling something close to trauma.
Well then. Could they refuse me this time too?
"……I'll do it."
"A wise choice."
I keep getting painted as some kind of shadowy mastermind, so let me be clear — this was a perfectly rational deal that benefited both sides. The members of Bad Potato Company would provide five days of labor, and in return I would help them build the broadcast metrics they needed to challenge for Best Streamer. I'd throw in some help with favorites drives and recommendation posts while I was at it.
I was nowhere near the level of a major corporate streamer, but within Rena World at least, I was the head of a company that could hold its own. Floating viewers pushed the average close to three thousand, and most of them were light fans of our V-Live Company. Even as floaters, they showed up primarily in my stream whenever anything Rena World-related was going on. Three thousand was a number that could stand toe-to-toe with a mid-tier streamer's weight class.
So what happened if someone like me asked my viewers to favorite the Bad Potato Company members and write them recommendation posts? Sure, most people would shrug it off as too much hassle — but at the very least, my hardcore fans in the "Seo-a Corps" and the fans deeply invested in V-Live Company would swallow the inconvenience and help out. They knew full well that free labor from Bad Potato Company was an enormous windfall in our current situation.
Good. That puts out the immediate fire.
Coco-nyang, who had a real knack for Minecraft building, went to the construction crew. Dorai, Chohee-Chohee, and Ppogeum went to the mining crew. Under normal circumstances builders would have been the scarcer resource, but right now we needed quick cash for the vehicle auction, so this lineup wasn't half bad.
"Alright, everyone gather over here for a moment! And I want call-and-response!"
Before we kicked off the real work, I called the Bad Potato Company members together for a little attitude adjustment.
"From this moment on, your names are all Chunsik. Wait, Chunsik's a little weird for the girls, isn't it? How about Chunja, then? Chunja?"
"……!"
The price of a personal recommendation from me to my viewers was never going to come cheap! The faces of every Bad Potato Company employee went pale as a sheet.
"Two hundred fifty-three blocks, two hundred fifty-four, two hundred fifty-five, two hundred fifty-si— ugh, my fingers are giving out."
"Hang on! If you fall from here—!"
"Kyaaaaaah!"
"A-yeon!"
Building at a sky-scraping height was no easy job from the very first step. We needed to climb high enough that the name "Sky Island" wouldn't be an embarrassment, after all.
Like the foolish humans raising the Tower of Babel in the Bible, we kept stacking blocks higher and higher. Sometimes someone would plummet midway and scream in despair at having to start all over. Sometimes a keyboard would catch a full shotgun blast of frustration. And every time, the viewers' delighted cackling in chat came free of charge.
"O-okay. That makes three hundred fifty blocks. Is this high enough?"
Still, we were Koreans of iron will. We refused to quit and kept pushing toward the sky. And at last we reached a height so dizzying that the ground wasn't even visible anymore.
Akatsuki's Hannam Prize — currently the tallest structure in Rena World — sat at roughly two hundred thirty floors, so a Sky Island had to at least clear that bar.
"Ugh! I think I'm developing a fear of heights I never had in my entire life."
Looking down was genuinely vertigo-inducing. Even the clouds felt like they were snagged somewhere below us. But we'd made it this far, and that was what mattered. Once we laid down a wide floor platform, we'd be able to fly back up relatively easily with elytra from then on.
"Okay! Let's get started right away!"
The construction crew was six strong: Miho, Subnitti, Lucy, Han A-yeon, Na-ro-si, and Coco-nyang. Nobody else knew it yet, but as a regressor, this felt like an absolute dream team to me.
Na-ro-si, the undisputed tier-one builder, formed the core, backed solidly by the tier-two talents of Coco-nyang, Subnitti, and Miho. Han A-yeon still had some growing to do, but she threw herself into every odd job and was improving fast. Lucy, our interior design specialist, was set to pull her weight on the building interiors.
And Mayo and me? We were the materials farming crew. Building doesn't just happen because you've got workers on site. Somebody has to haul the materials they need.
Fortunately, V-Live Company was one of the premier building companies in Rena World and already stocked an enormous variety of construction materials. Our farming crew only needed to top off whatever quantities were running low. Without that kind of preparation, we would have needed twice as many farmers as we had now.
Even so, the farming crew had plenty to keep us busy.
We shuttled materials nonstop between the ground and the sky so the builders could stay locked in at their posts. That was the shape of our first day after the funding campaign.
"G-great work, everyone."
"You all did amazing. We're assembling at nine a.m. tomorrow, right?"
After nearly twelve straight hours of nonstop building, we were all completely drained and ready to end stream and collapse. God, it had been brutal. With the funding amount being what it was, I'd been locked in on nothing but work the entire day. A thick blanket of exhaustion wrapped my whole body, and all I wanted was a hot shower and my bed.
And then, in that exact moment, a donation message landed.
"Ah — Vice Chairman, pleeease!"
A surprise activation of the 24-hour stream ticket. He'd mentioned he'd use it sometime this week, but why did it have to be now?!
The karma of the roulette had come to swallow me whole.