Plans for the Future
I had cleaned out my Pangea TV holdings and made over 1.5 million won.
To people who talk about raking in fortunes on the stock market, a sum like that might sound trivial — but this was money I had simply parked for about a month, 15 million won sitting there, and then flipped with a few clicks. For a young person, that was the kind of cash you only earned by grinding part-time jobs for an entire month. It was nothing to sneeze at.
And this wasn't the end of it, either.
Stocks weren't my field of interest, so the related information was a little patchy — but I still knew the lows and highs for a few more runs down the road.
Back then I used to leave comments telling him to get lost and go hang out on the stock gallery. Really, thank you, LuniaPantyThief.
Hadn't he said he was going to grind stocks until he could become Lunia's guild master? Every single day he would broadcast the three or four tickers he owned, Pangea TV included, and surprisingly, a lot of it still stuck in my memory.
Probably because I kept leaving comments under his posts.
Whenever a post went up about how much his holdings had risen, I would rush over and demand a "burger" — not because I genuinely couldn't afford a hamburger, mind you. It was just the kind of joke gallery regulars played on each other. On crash days, by the same logic, I would drop comments like "time to go check the Han River water temp."
Ah. That one… maybe wasn't a joke.
Anyway, thanks to LuniaPantyThief, a few of the major swings in Pangea TV's stock price were still lodged in my memory — not down to the exact date, but close enough. Same as with today's stream: pick the timing carefully, liquidate before a drop, and accumulate before a rise.
Especially the window right before the Wooga-dol final stage — I absolutely cannot miss that one. Was it the week after? It jumped over thirty percent.
There would be more opportunities ahead. The more money, the better — so I needed to watch for those openings carefully and move when the time was right.
On this point, some people would no doubt feel frustrated that I wasn't taking out loans and going all-in. But there were two reasons that made me uneasy about doing so.
The first was that I was relying entirely on my own imperfect memory. Human recollection is not like a computer that stores something once and keeps it intact forever. What if Pangea TV's stock moved differently from what I remembered? I hadn't been the one trading it myself — these were just memories pieced together from posts that had gone up on Pan-beo-gal. I could invest the assets I already held, but taking on debt for it was far too much risk.
And the second reason was the butterfly effect. I had already witnessed the future change because of "me." They say a butterfly's wingbeat can become a typhoon. Even a small possibility could affect Pangea TV's stock price. In the actual past, when there had been a mass platform migration, the mere news of a major corporate streamer transferring had sent the stock lurching.
No matter how much I love money, this is my entire net worth. I need to approach this conservatively.
Things were a little tight, but I was managing somehow on my current income. No need to get impatient.
Today I had liquidated the stocks, chatted briefly with viewers, and ended the stream early, so it was still early in the day. After lunch I held a short progress meeting with the VRC work account. The answer came back that the map we had been preparing was nearly finished — five days at the most, even on a conservative estimate. Since we were building it for the third round of the audition, we still had plenty of time. Commissioning it early had paid off. I stressed again that they should go over everything carefully so nothing would go wrong, then logged into FM Community.
So — what was the mood over here?
As I scrolled through the popular posts, most of them were naturally about Group B's stage from the day before.
Group B Passers: 18 / 42
All Pass: Seo Chae-i, Park Na-na, Lucy, Nuri, Han A-yeon, Dorongcha
Super Pass: Baiyo
[Passer Stage Links ◁ Click]
Slightly fewer All Passes than Group A. But because of Park Na-na and Baiyo's story, Group B had become the bigger talking point. Posts about their past and the Seolleim Club they had both belonged to were devouring the popular rankings. There were a few posts about Lucy too, but so few it was almost sad.
Nothing to be done about it. No matter how well she sang, she was still at an amateur level. This was a world where a few mouse clicks let you sit in your room and freely listen to professional singers from every corner of the globe. People's eyes and ears had gotten that much more demanding. In the end, satisfying viewers required more than just the singing itself.
A story is a kind of image marketing, if you think about it. And honestly, that part really matters.
They say a good-looking rice cake tastes better too. When a streamer you already like starts singing, you end up rating them a little higher without meaning to, and you overlook the small mistakes. Flip it around — put a streamer people already hate on stage. Viewers are locked and loaded before the first note, hunting for anything to pick apart.
That was why viewer votes in big corporate streamers' singing contests so often produced unexpected results. Say the objective vocal scores were 80 to 75 — a gap that size got flipped all the time purely by how much the audience liked the person.
Me, I always ranked Lucy at the top because her tone and vocals were exactly my taste.
Unfortunately, the objective consensus didn't agree. Looking at community opinion from before my regression in 2025, there were at least five virtual streamers rated a tier above Lucy. And even more at roughly the same level. That was how many strong singers the virtual scene had. After 2023, as the virtual market exploded, former idol trainees, practical music majors, vocal coaches, and people with musical theater backgrounds poured in en masse.
If you could lock in just fifty regular viewers, a monthly income of ten million won was possible. Catch a few hardcore fans and you could go well beyond that. This wasn't a rough estimate — it was a hard fact confirmed through Candy calculator sites. So of course everyone and their mother jumped into the new blue ocean, the same way the giant castella shops and tanghulu store boom had once swept the country.
Above all, virtual streaming had the advantage of being free from the influence of your real-life appearance. That alone meant a lot more people were willing to try. Even existing human streamers started making virtual avatars, one after another, like it was the latest trend.
In a virtual market this cutthroat, surviving on singing alone is a pipe dream.
If you were a truly unmatched talent, fine. High name recognition, genuine scarcity, invitations coming from every direction — you could even grow a dedicated fanbase of music enthusiasts. But Lucy's position was awkward. Plenty of people could replace her, and more importantly, her solo streams were boring.
She needed an extraordinary solution.
Lucy absolutely needs a crew. Even if she's basically boring on her own, put her with people she has good chemistry with and she can at least pull her weight. More than anything, having a crew opens the door to all kinds of free content.
The real difficulty of solo streaming was the constant lack of content. Even if something was fun once, repetition made it stale — you had to keep bringing in something new. And the sessions had to run long. As competitors flooded the streaming scene, viewers had started scoffing at three- or four-hour broadcasts.
But half of those problems vanished the moment you had a crew. Shared content, of course — and even just a shared crew fan cafe was enough to kill an hour a day chatting with people. Fan engagement and satisfaction ran high, too. They got to react to posts and photos their favorite streamers had written and uploaded themselves. There was a reason Woowakgood's crew fan-cafe culture had blown up the way it did. Viewers were always thirsty for real connection with their streamers.
Thinking about it that way, passing the audition isn't such a bad thing either.
The virtual idol crew formed through the Wooga-dol audition had a sizable fandom with high loyalty. There had been so many incidents and scandals along the way that the members had actually closed ranks tighter. On top of that, the fixed fanbase built through the audition itself was solid. Maybe a stable fence like that would suit Lucy even better. She was the type better suited to streaming with a core group of regulars than to chasing traffic, dopamine, and pure entertainment value.
If it were just me, I'd drop it without a second thought.
Having dependents was no ordinary burden. My shoulders felt heavy. For now, I decided to leave several possibilities open. The future was already shifting little by little — there was no telling what new variables might appear.
Honestly, Ssa-yo's intentions matter most. If he still can't read the trends or find a direction the way he couldn't before the regression, then cutting ties without a second thought is…
I already had several plans mapped out around the Wooga-dol audition. Right now was the stage of weighing which choice among them would help the most.
The calculations in my head grew complicated.