The End of January
It was the end of the month.
Who would earn the Best Streamer badge this time around? And what about Mu-yang Group's Monasteris construction funding drive scheduled for this evening?
The community had been buzzing since morning.
Right in the middle of all that noise, Rena-ttang — tireless as ever — dropped an announcement for a brand-new piece of content.
The Arena, to be held inside the Colosseum the Rena government had been diligently constructing!
Rena-ttang declared that she would run the Arena content this week first, and if the results looked good, she planned to replace Purge Day with it entirely.
There was no denying that Purge Day had been popular — it was one of the rare dopamine-heavy events on a healing server like Rena World — but it had also produced more than its share of incidents and accidents. Everything from petty building destruction to people losing precious gear, and most recently the "jjinten" blowup between Tu-nyang-i and Oh-ha that nearly escalated into a full company-versus-company conflict.
Naturally, the community had plenty of backbiting to offer on the subject, and most of it pointed the finger at Rena-ttang's supposed lack of administrative skill as server owner.
For Rena-ttang, it must have been absurd. Why was she the one catching heat over something like that?
But that was simply the position a server owner occupied. When a server thrived, fans would go so far as to form a "Server Defense Corps" and hoist you onto a pedestal — then the moment something messy happened that no single person could cleanly take the blame for, every last bit of it got dumped on the server owner.
Before my regression, countless streamer servers opened on Pangea TV through 2025, and not a single server owner among them finished without catching flak at least once. Controversy was guaranteed. Being a server owner was just that hard.
Finally. I should be grateful it didn't come any later than this.
I welcomed the Arena news. The sooner it opened — while the other companies still owned as few Mythic-grade pieces of gear as possible — the better our odds of winning.
And right now, public opinion was smiling our way too.
After Seoni Moon, Mu-yang Group had also acquired a Golderite sword. The Looting V enchantment made the farming payoff undeniable, but the base damage wasn't that different from a Netherite sword. Netherite sat at 8; Golderite at 9. Strip away the special effects and it felt… underwhelming.
That naturally put a spotlight back on Tu-nyang-i's earlier loss to Oh-ha while wielding a Witherite sword, and the community started floating the idea that with good enough control, a Netherite sword could beat Mythic-grade weapons just fine. From there it snowballed into outright Mythic-skepticism — why pour tens of millions of Rena into pulls for gear that wasn't even that special?
Of course, the counterarguments were there too. Factor in the armor defense gap and the synergy of special effects, and the difference was hardly small. Golderite was a farming tool; Witherite's special effect had been ambiguous from the start; Blazer and Spider gear would perform differently; and so on.
The community was already a circus of self-proclaimed experts shouting that their own brain-theories were correct.
The atmosphere wasn't bad for us. The more confused the viewers' sentiment got, the more each company would hold back on the expensive Mythic-grade pulls. They'd wait and watch — at least until another company pulled a different Mythic line and proved its performance.
Good. Before that happens, let's pull at least two. Three would be even better. Our company's current assets are…
Na-ro-si, who handled the company's finances, shared updated figures in the V-Live Company group chat every day. Thanks to that, I could check the numbers without digging through my memory.
One hundred million Rena left after the vehicle auction, plus about twenty million in recent income… and the fifty million we lent O-Wang Company. That puts us around a hundred and seventy million Rena.
That was enough to pull two or three Mythic-grade pieces without much trouble — so long as we didn't hit the pity ceiling twice. And if we got lucky the way Rim-ani had, we could hope for even more.
Nah, don't get greedy. Landing it in four tries is already no ordinary feat. That might even set a server record.
Before my regression, Mythic-grade gear had been treated as endgame content, so plenty of records had survived. Wang-ko being the first on the server to hit the pity ceiling, Oh Yeong-jun hitting it twice, and so on. There were plenty of minor records beyond that, though I couldn't remember them all.
More importantly — Kim Hak-do's been logging in hard again lately. What's that about?
I already knew Kim Hak-do was a born League of Legends bro who treated Minecraft as an afterthought, but before this he'd been extreme about it. Every time he logged in, all he did was banter a little with company staff, gamble on Mending enchantment books, or head straight for the casino — and the money he burned was company funds the staff had worked to accumulate. As if that weren't enough, instead of trying to get his employees immersed in Minecraft, he kept dragging them into ARAM parties. That was how Lethal Company earned its mocking nickname as a temp labor agency.
So why had the prodigal Kim Hak-do suddenly reformed?
I figured it out immediately. What else could it be? Our V-Live Company had just hit a jackpot of 750,000 Candy, and Mu-yang Group was generating massive buzz with today's Monasteris construction funding drive. Of course Kim Hak-do's eyes would start spinning.
He'll pretend to grind Minecraft hard, rinse his public image, then have Lethal Company start a Landmark build of its own. Even a big-corp streamer is just another merchant when money's on the table.
Every so often you'd see a streamer act stiff and prideful even in the face of a huge Candy donation. When that happens, ask yourself whether the number of zeros was simply too small. Watch how fast they pivot once the amount is right.
Either way, we've still got a long road ahead.
We'd pulled ahead of the other companies by about two weeks on construction funding, but we still had a long way to go before the Sky Island was finished. The road was far from over.
"Wooow! Congrats, Mayo says! You're finally a Best Streamer, Mayo says! Honestly, Mayo was embarrassed hanging out with a regular streamer all this time, but now we can walk around together properly, Mayo says!"
"Ugh, what is that? If you're gonna congratulate me, do it right!"
Even under Mayo's tsundere-flavored congratulations, Han A-yeon — the youngest of the bunch — beamed. Subnitti and Na-ro-si were the same. Our colleagues, who had been grinding hard all January as members of V-Live Company, had finally become Best Streamers.
"Congratulations, congratulations~ Congrats on Manager Sub becoming a Best Streamer~"
"Congrats, Sub-unnie. We're picking a day and going all-out for a toast, got it?"
"Ahaha, thanks, kids. I finally get the seventy-percent exchange rate."
Leaving Subnitti's emotional voice behind, the last of them — Na-ro-si — was the one who should have been receiving congratulations, yet she was thanking me instead.
"That I could become a Best Streamer is entirely Master's achievement! This too must be the grace of the Great Seo-a-nim!"
"Hey, hey! Rosi. You got there because you worked hard. Cut the weird talk and just take the congratulations!"
The ten-percent fee difference was the biggest draw, but there were plenty of other perks attached — any streamer would lust after a Best Streamer badge. And with every single company employee now holding one, I could finally set down a little of the weight on my shoulders.
Huh? What does that have to do with me?
Normally, nothing. But when you're bound together as the same company on a major server like this, whether the staff make Best Streamer starts getting treated like a performance review for the "boss." The Best Streamer selection weighted broadcast data heavily, so that perception was inevitable — the more "trickle-down" you received, the better your odds.
I'd been worried that Park Bong-sik's return and the subsequent surge of Mu-yang Group's virtual streamers might put our three at risk of missing the cut — but they'd built up enough cumulative data across January that they passed without trouble.
Which meant our company was currently in full festival mode. Congratulatory Candy bombardments were raining down on all three of them. Starting about a week before Best Streamer selections, the unwritten rule was to hold back your Candy donations and dump them all at once the moment the badge dropped — that way you could fully savor the ten-percent fee difference.
Everyone's been working so hard. I really hope things keep going well for them.
Truthfully, I carried a bit of guilt toward Subnitti and Na-ro-si. I knew their original histories from before the regression. Both of them had joined Mu-yang Group, put on outstanding performances, and thrived. Na-ro-si in particular had become Park Bong-sik's essential personal secretary — the one he brought along to every Minecraft server that opened after that.
And then an irregular named "me" had shoved them into an environment worse than the one they'd had before the regression.
If you look at it a certain way, even the Freeca withdrawal mess happened because of me.
That only made me more determined. What was already past couldn't be changed. What mattered was the future we were walking toward. I would build them an environment they could fully enjoy — even if it couldn't quite match the trickle-down they'd have received under Park Bong-sik.
Right. And to do that, we need to finish the Sky Island build first and make some money.
Exactly. We couldn't afford to throw a full festival over something as modest as Best Streamer badges. I gathered everyone and ordered them, firmly, to push their work efficiency even higher. How else were we supposed to stay ahead of the other companies?
The staff scrambled off toward the worksite. Playing the villain, I swallowed my tears.
Just hang in there a little longer, everyone. Someday I'll put together a better environment for you.
It was the end of January.