Someone's Announcement
Morning came early, and the first thing I checked was FM Community.
Cafe membership: complete!
It had been a mobile stream that barely lasted an hour, and yet several posts about it had already climbed into the popular section. Was it the female-file effect of getting tangled up with Park Bong-sik? The ripple felt a full tier stronger than before.
It's a good thing, sure — but I need to raise my guard, too.
The higher the recognition, the bigger the fallout when something went wrong. I reminded myself of the virtual streamers who had crumbled to nothing over a single incident before the regression.
"Oh! There it is."
After the community, I checked the Discord messages and emails that had arrived overnight. A reply from the contractor I'd hired was waiting, along with the finished work.
Still nothing from Miho and Mayo?
The deliverable was a revised edit of the songs we'd recorded for the Christmas carol video — separate files for me and for Lucy. Heart pounding with anticipation, I slipped on my headset and hit play, and almost immediately a deep satisfaction settled in.
They said this person was famous in the industry. Glad I went with them.
Even though it had been machine-touched, the correction was so natural you could barely tell, and the transitions were clean. The contractor had been pickier about conditions and charged a higher fee than the others, but if this was the quality guaranteed, it was more than welcome.
I should start hounding them to send theirs already.
I understood that Miho and Mayo were struggling because neither of them had experience recording songs — but if individual schedules slipped, the entire crew's plan would start to wobble. Problems like this had to be locked down hard from the crew's earliest days.
I left both of them a long message first thing in the morning, pressing them on the song recordings, then stood up from my chair.
"Ugh-ghh!"
Sitting down at the computer the second I woke up had left my body stiff. After a light stretch, I cooked a meal-kit product and had breakfast. These days the quality on those things was honestly impressive.
Once the meal was done, I sat back down at the computer and started monitoring Lucy's stream. Watching her look so much more competent now filled me with a quiet pride. She'd been trembling at the start, and look how far she'd come.
I should tell her to start planning content that links off the news broadcast, too.
News streams were called "comfort food" for a reason — the viewership impact was huge — but the sheer variety of casual traffic they pulled in made it hard to convert people into true fans. That was why the main broadcast that followed the news mattered so much. Out of all that floating audience, how many loyal fans could you sort out and lock down?
It was never easy, but Lucy was clearly improving. Compared to before the regression, even more so. Back then, on Rabbit TV, she'd been doing dullahan streams with an average of maybe twenty viewers. The growth was nothing short of remarkable.
Any important news floating around?
I checked Mayo's reply — she'd just woken up — then went back to digging through the community. With the end of the month creeping closer, my nerves were restless, and getting anything done felt harder than usual. Some days were just like that. On days like these, forcing yourself into something extra was a mistake; the right move was to cleanly handle only what was already planned. The last thing I needed was a pointless problem cropping up at a critical time like this.
"Huh?"
Except now I couldn't just sit still.
A repost of Rena-ttang's announcement had just gone up on the community.
Recruitment for residents of Rena World had begun.
Rena World hadn't needed much time between its first announcement and the server actually opening. The Minecraft server they'd already been developing as part of the Rena Universe project just needed a name change and a rebrand — that was all. There was nothing to get hung up on. The plan had always been for Rena-ttang to fund and run the whole thing through her own money and personal connections.
Ever since her Rabbit TV days, Rena-ttang had loved healing out in Minecraft. So she'd thought: no more headache-inducing equity fights with the company, no more interpersonal messes — just forget everything and quietly heal inside a Minecraft server.
But her mindset had shifted a great deal from when the server was first conceived. Back then, the idea had been to invite popular streamers with the Rena Universe roster as the core and run a genuinely successful server. After stepping down as head of Rena Universe and cutting ties with the company entirely, though, her confidence had completely collapsed. Failure on Rabbit TV, then failure again after transferring to Pangea TV. Even the towering pride of a former celebrity couldn't protect Rena-ttang right now.
So when she first drafted the resident recruitment notice for the Rena server, she'd been so deflated that her plan was just to enjoy something small and quiet with her viewers. Her self-esteem had bottomed out so hard she assumed almost no streamers would even apply. And why wouldn't she? On the fan cafe, she was being rated as one half of the twin disasters — alongside the company — that had ruined the crew. On the communities, the pile-on had been continuous ever since the Yume incident. It must have felt like the entire world had turned against her. And celebrities came with mental illness as a passive skill, didn't they? Mentally fragile Rena-ttang had been burrowing deeper and deeper into her cave.
Her hardcore fans would eventually push back hard against a viewer server, and a few days later a revised notice converting it to a streamer server would go up — but that was later.
I can't let an opportunity this good slip by.
Whether Rena-ttang went on to cause a mountain of incidents and accidents and earn herself a rotten reputation in the communities afterward didn't matter to me. What was certain was that the Rena-ttang of right now had enormous utility value. Server admin of the first Minecraft server to succeed on a scale unprecedented even on Pangea TV. From the perspective of small-time streamers who wanted in, she was a power broker stronger than the big-agency streamers.
Right. So if I can just maintain a moderate friendly relationship, the help will be massive.
Rena-ttang was the living embodiment of attention-seeking and power hunger. One look at the path she'd walked before the regression made that crystal clear. In particular, her power struggles with Yu Seona — server admin of the rival Seona Land — had single-handedly kept the community dopamine supply running for months.
That era was legendary. She was a genuine community superstar.
When you considered that a single streamer had maintained higher topic-power throughout the entire server period than two or three big-agency streamers combined, no one could call the "superstar" nickname an exaggeration. The ending just hadn't been good, so the nickname had survived as a punchline instead.
"This is no time to sit around."
If I was going to use Rena-ttang, moving fast was what mattered. I'd step in and snatch the credit before her hardcore fans could wake her up. And I'd use this as the chance to keep things at a carefully measured distance — so I could harvest enough profit down the line.
Underhanded? Dirty?
Kids, that's just how life works. I had no intention of hurting anyone for gain — but pretending not to notice gold rolling around on the floor was just stupid.
I immediately started drafting a note to send Rena-ttang. The content wasn't long, so I finished it quickly. Roughly summarized: it opened with flattery. I emphasized that I'd been a fan since her voice-acting days. I gave a positive evaluation of her Rabbit TV streams, too. And after her transfer to Pangea TV, I'd wanted to collab at least once — but being under a company had left me with no opportunity. That part wasn't even a lie; Rena Universe, as a corporate faction, strictly controlled external collabs, so it made a perfectly serviceable excuse.
From that preamble, the note moved into the real point. I pointed out that a viewer server was a reckless overreach, heaped praise on Rena-ttang's server-management ability, and urged her to change her mind even now. Run it as a streamer server. And I wrote that the V-Live crew would throw its weight behind her.
Honestly, a crew at our level is worth wanting.
We fell a little short of Decrescendo or Pocotin, but beyond those two there was almost no crew that could match our recognition. If we joined the server, even a conservative estimate put us at a stable seven to eight hundred concurrent viewers. That would naturally draw interest from the virtual streamers in the tiers below us, too — because joining would at least feel like a safe bet that wouldn't lose them anything.
Good. This should be enough to make Rena-ttang bite.
By the time I sent the note, it was already lunch. I prepped something to eat and sat back down at the computer. Mayo's stream was just starting. I monitored it while eating at a leisurely pace.
Another day, rushing by.