The Future of V-Live Company
The moment the Mythic-grade gear stats went public, the community lost its collective mind.
Old weapons top out at Looting III.
Golderite goes all the way to Looting V.
You know what that means? Monster drops DOUBLE when you farm.
Everyone's flying around on elytra these days and companies are so short on fireworks they literally assign dedicated gunpowder farmers. You get this sword? Insane efficiency. Sell the leftover gunpowder and stack cash on top. In this game, money-printing is king.
Armchair experts were crawling out of every corner, each one writing essays on which gear was truly the best. Some community addicts had fully outsourced their identities to rival companies and were already running Gold Cup flame wars.
In an instant, Rena World's Mythic-grade equipment had seized total control of the community. Posts about Seona Land or the Mercury members — the ones that used to get under Rena-ttang's skin — had vanished so thoroughly you couldn't find a trace of them without deliberately searching.
Fact is, Mu-yang Group has the biggest advantage right now. They should still be sitting on a clean 150 million Rena.
I knew they'd spent close to ten million Rena outfitting Park Bong-sik after he joined the server recently, plus another chunk of entertainment money for the casino. Even so, Mu-yang Group's status as the current cash-on-hand leader remained an unshakable fact.
No — wait. Maybe Tu-nyang-i…
Tu-nyang-i had made a splash at the vehicle auction by dumping a massive sum into her own company, Seoni Moon. The community was currently singing her praises as a mining goddess, an ace who farmed at double everyone else's efficiency.
Buoyed by the flattery, Tu-nyang-i had swaggered around gathering company staff to "pass down" her mining secrets under the name Chunkron. She was spouting a whole lot of impressive-sounding nonsense — but as a regressor, I already knew the truth.
It was pure hot air designed to wear out her own jaw. Every last coin of Tu-nyang-i's fortune had been illegally farmed with X-ray enabled in private.
Even the underground galleries were starting to smell something off. After all, Tu-nyang-i's recent performance in Diamond CK had been abysmal. When the suspicious stares piled up, she'd made the excuse that she'd deliberately mined normally because she didn't want to expose her tips and techniques — a half-baked explanation that left anyone who heard it tilting their head.
Still, openly calling someone out as shady counted as "sniping" a fellow streamer, so the mainstream mood was to let it slide. There was no hard evidence, either.
But the underground galleries didn't care about any of that. As long as they had a juicy conspiracy theory to spin, they were happy. They were already making shady moves to dig into Tu-nyang-i's past.
As long as they stay out of my hair, I couldn't care less.
When it came to those underground gallery types, the golden rule was absolute avoidance — so long as they weren't causing harm to me or the people around me. Tu-nyang-i had made her own bed; she'd reap whatever karma she'd sown.
The crop and food price patch is still going to take more time. For now, we hold. All we can do is pray for good luck…
Mythic gear was a pure gacha system from start to finish — from pulling Fortune Coin fragments all the way through synthesizing essences with netherite ingots. Even a regressor's knowledge couldn't force the RNG.
With good luck, you could craft Mythic gear in just two or three essence synthesis attempts. With bad luck, you'd hit the pity ceiling and burn through nearly 100 million Rena.
So did that mean a regressor's knowledge was useless?
Nope. A regressor always finds the right answer.
Just being able to pick the correct path without wandering is already an enormous advantage. Things like knowing which mediocre gear sets to filter out in advance.
Before my regression, O-Wang Company had poured massive funds into crafting a full Gitterite armor set. They'd decided the double-jump effect had infinite potential.
Sure, double jump looked flashy, and the permanent midair hover effect was perfect for staging cool scenes of walking on water or lava. But that was as far as it went.
Oh, and people said the double jump helped a lot with building, too. But if you asked whether any of that was worth 200 million Rena, I could only shake my head. It was far too vulnerable to Wither, Blazerite, and Spider-type weapons.
At the end of the day, the real utility of Mythic-grade gear is the Arena. It's what you need to crown the strongest company in the Arena. So the setup has to prioritize PvP first.
Before the regression, O-Wang Company had been the hardest-grinding company on the server, and they'd used the enormous funds they'd earned to make the mistake of building a Gitterite set. If they'd chosen Witherite or Blazerite from the start, they could have pulled far ahead. That wrong choice was what gave their competitors the time to catch up.
Wither or Blazerite swords first, no question. Armor gets decided based on what weapons the competition picks.
Witherite had a massive advantage in that enemies afflicted with the Wither status couldn't check their remaining health. Not being able to see how much HP you had left was psychologically crushing. But before the regression, that vaguely worded effect had kept it unpopular. Only after people actually felt the impact did every company start treating it as a mandatory weapon.
Blazerite was the same. Everyone fixated on raw weapon damage, but the real merit was somewhere else entirely.
Targets hit by Blazerite had a chance to enter an Ignited state. Flames would engulf their entire body — and beyond the damage, a huge portion of their vision got obscured by the flickering fire. Restricted vision mid-intense combat? Any player who knew PvP would understand just how devastating that was from a text description alone.
Golderite isn't bad either. Guaranteed gunpowder farming plus the ability to make money on the side. But the timing would be way too late.
Our company didn't have the cash to start with Golderite either. Rena-ttang hadn't said anything, but looking at how fast the Colosseum was going up, the Arena opening wasn't far off. We needed to lock in a clear advantage from the start with PvP-dedicated Mythic-grade weapons.
Because the Arena didn't just have ranking prize money — it had a betting system.
At the beginning, we'll be such underdogs that the odds will be absurdly long. That's when we go all-in and cash out huge.
Going toe-to-toe on pure mechanical skill against the PUBG cartel and other companies' male streamers would get us demolished. In the end, the only path to victory was a gear gap built with money. Put simply: we beat them with cash. And to raise that kind of money, we needed the Arena championship prize plus a massive underdog betting payout to explode.
It would take a plan that was both meticulously precise and airtight enough not to raise any other company's suspicions.
And drawing up plans like that? That's my specialty.
"Eugh! Big sis Seo-a is making that evil smile again-geosida. Mayo is so scared-geosida."
"…"
This little brat! Slandering me while I worked day and night for the advancement of V-Live Company. I shooed Mayo off to go carry out the "secret mission" I'd assigned her, then called for Na-ro-si.
"Jars… jars. Falling jars."
"Ahem. Rosi, are you okay?"
"Hah! No abnormalities, Master."
Lately she'd been clearing the Jar Game on all-night streams to fulfill the building fundraiser pledges, and the kid had gotten a little weird. Was this the curse of the Jar Game?
"How far along is the construction?"
"I can't measure it precisely, but roughly thirty percent complete. At the current pace, Sky Island can be finished before mid-February."
"Really? You've been working incredibly hard."
I wasn't just saying that. Truly, Na-ro-si of Minecraft. Especially when it came to building, she was easily carrying the workload of two people or more on her own. And with Miho, Subnitti, Han A-yeon, and Lucy all lending their strength, our company's construction speed could slap a major company across the face despite our thin roster.
"Good. Keep it up just like that. I'm basically leaving the building entirely to you."
"Yes! I'll give it everything I've got, Master!"
With Na-ro-si — who practically treated me as her broadcasting savior — on the job, I could hand off the construction side with total peace of mind. Which meant I needed to focus on the Mythic gear update.
The future of V-Live Company.
Everything hinged on this project.