Is This a Happy Ending?
As I always say, the first-mover advantage is something else.
The first virtual streamer on Pangea TV to put on a sleep stream, of all things.
Of course, if I'd been some nobody with zero name recognition, the communities wouldn't have given me a second glance. But fifteen hundred viewers at four in the morning was a number that could scrape the edges of the top ten, and a post with a title as provocative as "Virtual Streamer Laying Out Her Bedding and Lying Down" shot straight to the top of FM Community's popular board.
Once it went viral across the community, the viewer count kept climbing even in the dead of night. By the time morning commute hours rolled around, the stream had hit thirty-two hundred viewers and climbed all the way to fourth place. A high-ranking broadcast flaunting an unusual thumbnail like that was catnip for the curious — viewers started hopping in and out of the stream. And look at that, a top-bar recommendation even got slapped on it. Before long, the reverse-run that had started before dawn had carried the stream all the way to second place.
That was the absurd story I'd pieced together from a quick search just a moment ago.
Seriously, do these people have nothing better to do? Are they all just salary thieves? Putting on a virtual sleep stream over lunch break — what exactly are they doing with their lives?
"Mayo is extremely disappointed, it is so. She even let you come three hours late, and you used that to pull in so many viewers? What a wicked, selfish leader you are, it is so."
"……So what's the real feeling?"
"Mayo is so jealous and envious, it is so. Mayo wants to just sleep and rack up viewers like crazy too, it is so!"
"Ugh. Of course that's what you'd say."
I offered my thanks to everyone except Mayo for cutting me three hours of slack… and no, I didn't stop at words. I sent coffee gift cards to everyone through the group chat. Nothing beats coffee after hard labor.
After that, I joined up with the rest of them and we threw ourselves back into the work. The building crew headed for the sky island, while Mayo, myself, and the reinforcements from Bad Potato Company dug deep underground for mining.
Having more people around really does make the time fly.
In the early hours I'd been wracking my brain alone just to keep the energy up and find stream angles, but with people filling the audio beside me, the difficulty gap was night and day. So this was what auto-hunting felt like. Thanks to that, I could empty my head for the first time in a while and just focus on mining.
The vehicle auction was only four days away — I needed to grind hard for money. Loan recovery was progressing smoothly enough on its own. Every company was busy earning for the auction, and anyone who tried to line their own pockets without paying back their debts would face a storm of public criticism.
That puts cash reserves at about a hundred million Rena… and outstanding loans at around fifty million left?
Lucy, with her meticulous nature, was handling the loan paperwork. Once today's stream ended, I'd have her organize everything into a file and post it in the group chat. We needed daily updates so we could strategize how much capital to bring into the vehicle auction.
On top of that, looking at the current trends, O-Wang Company's momentum was no joke. It felt like they'd been awakened by our company's existence — something that hadn't been there before the regression. They were earning money at a faster pace than before.
In the old timeline, even buying a vehicle would have gotten you called a sucker within a week. The problem is, last time I pushed Rena-ttang hard with that suggestion.
I'd wanted the additional ability patch specifically so our company could hold vehicles — but if I wasn't careful, O-Wang Company was going to snatch them all. And wait, thinking about it, Seoni Moon was still out there too, with Tu-nyang-i the X-ray user on their roster. They couldn't be ignored either. That was a place where one person held a suspiciously large amount of money.
Partner & Tofu Company isn't a pushover by headcount either. Twelve people now? Thirteen? At the end of the day, mining is a numbers game.
Aside from those three companies, everyone else could be written off. Bad Potato Company was cooperating with us, and Akatsuki — no matter how hard those three scrambled — was a textbook case of "you can't win against numbers." Before the regression, hadn't they shown up at the auction with a measly twenty million Rena and tried to bluff? Short on cash, jacking up the bids just to stir chaos, then getting exposed, roasted alive, and kicked out.
And Lethal Company wasn't even worth mentioning. If Akatsuki had brought twenty million Rena before the regression, this lot had been a freeloading, incompetent company that barely had endgame gear sets on a few members. Now they were deep in the red with debt on top of it.
So excluding those three, that makes four factions including us. Three vehicles going up for auction. This really isn't going to be easy.
Even while mining, countless calculations ran through my head. And the conclusion that naturally emerged: the straightforward approach wasn't going to cut it.
I thought Bad Potato Company's cooperation would be enough… but it looks like we're going to need a more unorthodox operation.
It had been a truly long journey. I never imagined a twenty-four-hour stream would be this grueling. Still, the end was finally in sight.
Next time, I'm making it a rule that the streamer has to announce the date in advance.
Even a regressor isn't all-powerful. Having never done a twenty-four-hour stream before, I'd made a few small mistakes along the way.
"Everyone, you've worked incredibly hard!"
Day two of construction on Skypia, the sky island. The foundation work was finally finished. That had only been possible thanks to the "rediscovery" of Na-ro-si.
For one thing, her own work speed was absurd. I wasn't exaggerating — her block-laying pace looked like it was double everyone else's. And she barely ever made mistakes. On top of that, she'd apparently been offering plenty of suggestions that actually helped the work, to the point that Miho eventually reached out first and asked her to take main control of the building crew. A choice typical of Miho, who always chased pure practical benefit over titles or prestige.
Thanks to that, overall work speed had jumped significantly. People who'd been milling around in a chaotic herd, not knowing their own roles, could each take a designated zone and focus. The material crates got properly sorted into wood, ore, glass, and miscellaneous, so no one wasted time hunting for supplies every trip.
This was the skill of a virtual streamer who, when you said Minecraft on Pangea TV, was the first name that came to mind.
Good. At this level, I can leave the building crew in her hands without worry.
I already had more than enough on my plate — having someone take the construction burden off my shoulders was a massive win. With that settled, I could focus on the vehicle auction on the twenty-first.
I was also making gradual progress on approaching Iruri. Worried that reaching out through my limited streamer connections might raise suspicion, I'd asked Bebe-ttang for the favor. Bebe-ttang and I shared a comradeship forged in the bone-dry wasteland of virtual streaming, where we'd both struggled to grow. These days the crew members had thinned that out a bit, but in our early debut days we'd contacted each other more than anyone and built a deep friendship. So I could trust her with a request like this.
Friendships built in hard times are the ones that last.
What I'd asked was simple: approach Iruri, a streamer broadcasting on Rabbit TV, and sound out her relationship with Blueby. I'd also stressed that she shouldn't rush the approach. From my pre-regression memories, Iruri had been Blueby's loyal right hand. Sometimes her attitude had been so servile that conspiracy theories circulated in the underground galleries about whether Blueby had some kind of dirt on her.
So slowly… very carefully.
Iruri was a critical key who could unlock Blueby's past. That called for special handling.
"Ugh, Mayo swung a pickaxe all day and got calluses on her hands, it is so. Mayo demands compensation from this evil leader, it is so."
"Once the vehicle auction is over, we can take it easy for a while, so quit whining."
Besides, the Lunar New Year holiday came after that, so I was planning to rotate rest days for the company staff. People needed at least one full day off a week just to manage their condition.
"Huh? I'd just like to keep building straight through, though. Our fans put so much into the funding — delaying even a single day would be so sorry to th—"
"Stop, stop! Na-ro-si, you're on mandatory rest on Lunar New Year's Day itself."
Every now and then you'd find streamers who ran twenty-four-hour non-stop streams like it was nothing and still had a perfectly fine voice. People born with steel vocal cords — a blessed talent for a streamer. Na-ro-si was exactly that type.
Apple-mong is famous for her steel vocal cords too. Honestly, it's a talent to envy.
Either way, I intended to hand out rest fairly to everyone. And if someone still couldn't sit still and came out to work anyway… well, ahem. Nothing I could do about that. I couldn't control that much.
But that wasn't what mattered right now.
"I-it's finally over!"
At last, the timer I'd set in the upper-right corner of the screen hit zero. The twenty-four-hour non-stop stream had successfully reached its end. Cheers of joy erupted, and donations poured in.
"Hey! You're dead. You put me through a twenty-four-hour non-stop stream and then bailed at two in the morning? You're under Chat Snub for a while."
Chat Snub was the deliberate act of reading every viewer's chat except that one person's — a terrifying punishment that made attention-seekers' hands and feet tremble. The grumbling Vice-Chairman eventually couldn't hold out and paid a massive bail before we could settle.
Whew. It was rough, but… is this enough for a happy ending?