The End of January
January 27th, Friday.
Park Bong-sik, who had been carefully testing the waters ever since entering Rena World, finally made his first real move.
He declared that Mu-yang Group would host an internal Diamond CK.
And the results were genuinely staggering.
A full 430,000 candies poured in.
Thirteen people total, and 430,000 candies.
It might look laughable next to our company's Landmark construction funding—seven of us raising 750,000—but the two events were completely different animals.
Our Landmark funding was a long-term project. Construction had started on January 16th and was projected to finish in the second week of February; it was a job that needed more than a month. Mu-yang Group's Diamond CK, on the other hand? Just four or five hours of grinding diamonds as hard as possible, settle the match, and done.
The stated purpose was a company fundraiser to pull the Mythic gear that was about to drop in the update. Once that justification was in place, the Mu-yang fans started raining donations without hesitation. HannamTheHill, who had made a name for himself with the surprise building mission over at Akatsuki, even dropped a cool 70,000, adding extra weight to the presence of a big-agency streamer.
"Nah, you've still got partner support money left this month, right? Let's burn some of it this time."
"Okay. I'll message the manager right now."
Throwing in the monthly one-million-won content support fund that partner streamers received only made the pot even bigger. It was a board where each person could walk away with around 34,000 candies. Compared to the 108,000 we scraped together after a full month of hard work, the difference in free-flowing cash was enormous.
This is exactly why everyone tries to get under a big-agency streamer. Same work, better viewer numbers, and the income is several times higher. How are you supposed to resist that?
If it were me, I'd flip on my back and beg to get under a big-agency streamer too. Pride? Does pride put food on the table? If you're going to act that high and mighty, you should've gone into terrestrial educational broadcasting instead of internet streaming in the first place.
The streaming scene is where pure desire collides in the open. One way or another, I was going to survive here with Lucy… no, with all of our crew members.
Which means I need to step it up even more than I already have. Park Bong-sik's return already cut into the floating viewers.
The Mu-yang fans who had been wandering around after losing their main base, and a large chunk of the floaters in general, had a basic habit of drifting toward the biggest broadcasts at the top of the rankings. That was why "top-bar floaters" were usually the first thing people thought of when they heard the word floater.
If they won't make us their main, I at least need them to pick our company's streams as their secondary.
It might look pathetic, but it was still the best option available. These were viewers who had spent four or five years watching big-agency streamers. In restaurant terms, it was like trying to pull even a fraction of those regulars over to a brand-new place like ours. Of course the difficulty was high.
So we have to put in the matching effort and give them something worth watching.
Luckily, a good opportunity was right in front of us. The fourth Purge Day—basically the final stretch—was being held tomorrow. In the timeline before my regression, the fourth one had been the last; Purge Day vanished into history after that. Here, I had no idea how it would go. With the Colosseum construction running late, maybe they'd even hold a fifth?
Either way, I had already given Mayo a secret mission for this Purge Day, so my expectations were high.
Honestly, there's no winning left if we try to make a name for ourselves through pure combat power. Everyone's gear has caught up, and more than anything the numbers gap is huge. Factor in the PUBG cartel and we'd probably lose even at equal numbers.
We had already secured enough real benefit from the Purge Day three-peat. The winner's seat and its meager prize money? They could have it. What mattered more was the dopamine and the fun… and the viewer attention that came with them.
Besides, in the fourth round a real incident blows up and the winning company barely even gets noticed. It just turns into pure chaos.
I analyzed the board using a regressor's future knowledge. A tiny niche market that was just barely visible. That was the goal for this Purge Day.
The "secret mission" I had given Mayo was simple.
Scour the communities and cook up some juicy article bait. The only condition was that the articles had to target streamers currently living in Rena World. Exaggerated fake news was fine—as long as it was entertaining.
At first Mayo had whined that she'd rather just play League, but her natural bratty streak hadn't gone anywhere. She got hooked fast and dove in. Lucy told me she was even pulling all-nighters over it.
I hadn't asked her to go that hard…
Anyway, dozens of agitprop posters and fabricated articles Mayo produced were steadily coming together. All of them were image files that could be printed as many times as we wanted with a camera inside Rena World.
This is pure entertainment right here.
I had Mayo prep the materials, then posted the plan for how we'd use them on Purge Day in the company group chat ahead of time. If everyone already knew the play, there would be fewer mistakes on the day itself.
"Seo-a unnie's brain spins so well in the evil direction that Mayo can't even dream of keeping up, geosida. Mayo was genuinely impressed by this plan, geosida."
"…"
No matter how I looked at it, that did not sound like a compliment.
While we steadily prepared for Purge Day, O-Wang Company was burning with terrifying intensity. The bitter memory of the third Purge Day, when they had reluctantly surrendered the throne to the V-Live Company and Akatsuki alliance, was something they were determined to erase. Over 70 percent of their entire staff had geared up in full Netherite sets, and the PUBG cartel members were running two to three hours of mock training every day to sharpen their PvP skills.
"What? Purge Day? If something like that exists, there's no way we're losing either."
"Mu-yang Group forever!"
O-Wang Company wasn't the only one raising their energy. With Park Bong-sik's arrival, the Mu-yang Group staff had finally tasted real "trickle-down" money, and their morale was sky-high. Call it the Trickle-down-roid effect. If they won Purge Day, how much bigger would the next rain of donations be? Just imagining it made them happy, so they gritted their teeth and threw themselves into voluntary training for the event.
And the rest of the companies?
Unfortunately, motivation was in short supply. Seoni Moon's leader, NS Namsin, was stuck with a packed concert schedule for the Seoni Group and would be hard to log in for about a week. Lethal Company was still completely lost in ARAM. Snap, who had come in on an invite, was at least showing some drive, but with leader Kim Hak-do constantly causing incidents, the company didn't feel like it was growing at all.
No need to even mention Bad Potato. Akatsuki had grown to six members, but they were still nowhere near strong enough on their own. The two favorites for the win—Mu-yang Group and O-Wang Company—each had roughly double their numbers.
Maybe that was why Oh Yeong-jun contacted me in secret. The request was simple: just like when we joined hands in the third Purge Day and took down O-Wang Company, he wanted to team up again and try for another miracle.
"Sorry, but I've got a different plan this time."
"Really? You're not saying that while already having a deal with someone else, are you?"
Getting reverse-betrayed after trying to team up with Bad Potato Company and pull a double-cross must have left a trauma.
Tsk tsk. The type who goes looking for unnecessary suffering.
"If you hadn't betrayed first, that never would've happened!"
"Ahem, sorry about that time. But as a villain, I couldn't just let an opportunity like that slip—"
"Anyway, more importantly—do you have a plan for the Mythic gear?"
I asked casually out of curiosity. Purge Day and the Mythic gear update happened to fall on the same day. The update rolled out in the morning and Purge Day started at 7 p.m., so if you really wanted to, you could attempt Mythic gear the same day.
"We've got about sixty million Rena for now. Not sure if we should go for it right away. Hard to tell which line is best. It'll probably be easier to decide once the front-runners start pulling."
"Solid strategy. I'm thinking of going with a similar feel."
In my case I had already decided which line to take, but I played dumb to minimize information leakage. I wanted O-Wang Company and Mu-yang Group to cheerfully pull as many of the least efficient Mythic gear lines as possible.
Still, it's a little sad when I think about the Oh Yeong-jun from before the regression…
I remembered his gacha luck being absolutely catastrophic. He had hit pity more than twice, hadn't he? And Akatsuki already had so few people that their funding was thin to begin with. O-Wang Company, by contrast, had been relatively lucky. The rich got richer—a company that already had money also pulled well, and they shot ahead in no time.
Still, the situation is pretty different now. They burned more on the vehicle auction than before the regression, and they even picked up a fifty-million-Rena debt.
After sending Oh Yeong-jun off, I refined the operation we would use on tomorrow's Purge Day a little more carefully.
It was the end of January.