The Start of February
Wednesday, February 1st.
The month had finally turned over.
Around five in the morning I took advantage of the eight-hour sleep allowance that came with a full twenty-four-hour break from streaming, slept like a rock, and woke up to find the entire world had lost its mind.
First up was the Keongni-Keongni incident—something I already knew about.
Clips of her snoring on stream had been screenshot and pinned all over the FM Community boards, and Subnitti had earned herself the title of Korea's one and only snoring virtual streamer. Named after the sound of her snoring: Keongni-Keongni.
When I woke up and checked the group chat, Subnitti had been flooding it with messages all night. She'd gone back on stream to apologize, only for the chat to spam "Keongni-Keongni" the second she so much as breathed.
Hmm. Honestly, this was nothing. If she played it right, a moment like this could turn into a fun stream meme and even boost her name recognition. Of course, that only worked if the streamer herself had the mental fortitude to ride it out.
Subnitti should be fine… probably.
She'd started as a small-time streamer, but she had age on her side and a decent amount of broadcasting experience. Looking at the group chat, her colleagues had already piled on to help manage her mental state even without me. A few words of advice would be enough.
This isn't really an incident so much as a little episode. Compared to the other news, it barely even registers.
Next to everything else that had happened yesterday, the Keongni-Keongni affair was nothing.
The second piece of news was virtual streamer Park Na-na joining the one-million Candy Club.
I'd thought history might change after my regression, but this part had stayed exactly the same. Since I'd already known it was coming, I just nodded and moved on—but the FM Community and the underground galleries were losing their minds.
A million candies sounded casual enough until you converted it: a hundred million won. Not an annual salary—a hundred million in a single month. And the person who pulled it off was a virtual streamer still relatively new to the Pangea TV scene.
In a single stroke, the long-muted perception of virtual streamers flipped completely. That was how massive the presence of the one-million Candy Club really was.
And that information spread among streamers themselves, sparking a scramble to poach high-earning virtuals from every direction. Things like inviting them to wall-kill CKs on the PUBG scene, or low-tier LoL CKs.
This wasn't speculation—those exact moves had happened before my regression. Virtual streamers with strong candy power had been dragged from one CK board to another.
This time, I might end up on that list myself. Of course, I'd turn them down politely and carefully.
Eighth place this time? First time I've been pushed out of the top five.
My January donation total on the Candy Calculator site sat at 412,534 candies. Duel missions didn't get counted on the Calculator, so this month a few heavy hitters had edged me down the rankings.
From first-place Park Na-na through second Ami-chan, third Elsa, fourth Muyo, fifth Baiyo, and sixth Seol Pyo-woo—January had been a showcase for the former Decrescendo members.
Also a case study in what one whale can do. That person really is something else.
A big-spending viewer who'd fallen for the Decrescendo crew through the Wooga-dol audition and claimed the chairman title on all five of them. After Decrescendo disbanded, it was like they'd burned their last soul—dumping nearly 1.5 million candies across the five members over January before vanishing completely.
That was how the former Decrescendo members had completely monopolized January's top ranks with overwhelming numbers. And Park Na-na had gone one step further: her vice chairman had donated another hundred thousand, pushing her into the January one-million Candy Club.
Pangea TV really does run on whale influence. Moments like this make that crystal clear.
Before my regression, one of the reasons Blueby had been able to throw her weight around and talk big inside the crew was that her chairman was a whale—that much was certain. Sweet trickle-down kept the other members quiet and compliant.
It might sound like I was harping on money too much, but this was the most realistic part of the whole industry. Stream or no stream, if you couldn't cover living expenses, you couldn't do anything.
There was even a small-time virtual who went on long hiatus and took a Coupang warehouse job because she couldn't make rent. Others juggled convenience-store shifts alongside streaming.
The fact that no matter what you did in modern society, it was hard to escape the logic of capital left a faintly bitter taste.
And then the third piece of news.
"They actually pulled it off. Should I say they worked harder than before the regression?"
The Mu-yang Group's Munastiris Architecture Funding. Before my regression, that funding drive had hit 1.4 million candies—and even though our V-Live crew had already somewhat cleaned out Mujeo-ssi's and the casual viewers' wallets in advance, it still posted the exact same outstanding result of 1.4 million.
The theory that you had to empty casual viewers' wallets whenever the opportunity arose had proven itself once again.
Haha. But 1.4 million, for real? Compared to the 750,000 we'd scraped together with everything we had, it was a number that felt impossibly distant.
Even more stunning: Park Bong-sik alone had pulled in 610,000 candies through duel-mission donations. Six hundred and ten thousand—and that visible number wasn't even the whole story. Other company members had each been pulling in forty or fifty thousand from duel missions, and if you checked the high-roller donors' nicknames, most of them either had "Mu" attached or were fan names tied to Bong-sik.
The broad, sweeping trickle-down of a mega-corp streamer. Factor that in, and more than half the stake in this 1.4-million-candy funding drive could be traced back to Park Bong-sik alone.
That's why everyone wants to work under a mega-corp streamer. Swallow a little pride on the way in, and the practical benefits just pour out.
Knowing that future, I'd actually agonized a lot in the early days of Rena World. Wondering if just shutting my eyes and joining a mega-corp streamer's company might be the smarter play.
Maybe that route would've made more money than what I'm doing now. The difference in trickle-down is genuinely enormous.
But I was looking further ahead than immediate gains.
When Rabbit TV Korea shut down its service and the monster-tier virtual streamers chose to transfer over—if I tried to face them with a hollow weight class built on flimsy casual viewers, I wouldn't stand a chance. I needed an unshakable fandom armored in solid loyalty.
Before the regression, once the Rabbit TV monsters transferred in, a lot of the 720p virtuals lost viewers. Their light fans got stolen. Viewers basically love new girls, after all.
You had to arm your audience with real loyalty if you wanted to prevent that kind of tragedy. But if you just sat under a mega-corp streamer soaking up one-way trickle-down, building that kind of environment was nearly impossible. You inevitably got swept up in someone else's influence.
So in the end, I'd decided to build a company of my own. That was the V-Live Company of today.
So far, everything's been going according to plan. But can I keep it that way going forward?
At first it had been a small hole, but with me—this person—regressing into the timeline, the warp in history was growing larger by the day. I couldn't help but constantly worry that the moment it diverged completely from the knowledge I held, every plan I'd prepared would fall apart.
Still, I have to make it work somehow. If I want to stop the same thing from happening again.
That final broadcast, the one that announced the end. And not long after, Lucy's channel—gone.
I could never let something like that happen again.
Never.