WHO ARE YOU?
"That wraps up today's stream! To everyone who stayed and listened all the way through, and to everyone who joined in with questions — thank you so much. This was Nia!"
Beaming.
With a smile still soft at the corners of her eyes and mouth, she gave the mouse the lightest flick and switched the broadcast to the standby screen.
Then, after carefully confirming the mic was off, she let out a small sigh into the empty air.
"Hwaaah… made it through another one in one piece… Maybe it's because this is only the second stream, but I was so tense…"
Maybe she'd wound herself too tight, bracing for something unexpected to go wrong. Her stomach felt knotted shut, and her heart hammered as if it might leap straight out of her mouth at any second.
Still — the one real mercy was that from here on out, that feeling only had room to settle.
"No accidents or slip-ups during the Q&A, and the yoga and singing both got good reactions. I'm so relieved…"
She muttered it at the ceiling, then collapsed onto the desk like a jellyfish that had given up on holding its shape.
The desk was hard and cold, and it felt wonderful. Like some little yokai that ate the heat right out of her skin.
She cooled her flushed body against it for roughly three minutes, then fully ended the stream.
The royalty-free BGM she'd pulled off the internet cut out with it, and silence flooded the studio apartment in an instant.
Really quiet. Feels like I finally have room to breathe.
She listened blankly to the computer fan's low hum for a moment, then pushed her upper body up with a tiny, cute fist and a great deal of effort.
Resting was fine — but she ought to finish what needed finishing first.
The thought surfaced out of nowhere and left her faintly restless, so her gaze drifted naturally to the monitor — and what she saw of today's stream results made her eyes go wide.
"…More people than last time. Chat was lighter, but peak viewers and average viewers both went up."
Stream uptime: one hour twenty-five minutes. Peak concurrent viewers: 5,931. Average: 3,802. Chat messages: roughly eighteen thousand.
At five CP per chat message, today's haul came to about ninety thousand CP.
For a stream that short, that was an excellent harvest.
"Ninety thousand CP opens up a lot of options right now… but first, let's try that."
The idea she'd already been turning over before the stream even started. She hadn't attempted it earlier because swapping the camera and mic had burned so much CP — but if her hunch was right, it would work.
With that quiet certainty, she put on a serious face and moved the mouse to bring up the desktop.
"This computer… thinking about it, there wasn't even a web browser on it at the start."
She talked to herself as she rewound the memory.
What she was picturing was that first day — the moment she'd first touched the machine. She'd gotten angry and slammed the desk, and as if answering her, a web browser had popped into existence.
What if that hadn't been a coincidence? What if her Creation ability wasn't limited to physical objects alone?
"…Creation."
A soft chime rang out, and she felt CP drain from her body.
Roughly thirty thousand CP, by the feel of it. Not cheap.
But that was fine. Because this confirmed her guess had been right.
And her Creation ability was scrupulously honest — it always produced something equal in value to the CP spent.
So if she looked at the monitor now…
"It's heeeeere!"
That was the good news waiting for her.
Yes. She'd expected it, so there was no emotional reaction whatsoever. Really.
A status screen. In isekai reincarnation stories, it was practically a law of nature.
She didn't know the underlying principle, but it quantified things that couldn't be reduced to simple numbers — life, talent — or displayed cooldowns on skills and magic. Sometimes it even pinned down a person's shifting disposition or values into a single fixed label.
Which made a status screen, however you used it, an all-purpose, hyper-competent, shamelessly broken cheat item.
But what she'd made wasn't one of those convenient isekai status screens.
By design, it was more of an abbreviated status — only the functions she needed right now. Dumping every feature in at once probably wouldn't have been solvable with thirty thousand CP anyway.
"Shall I open it? I'm kind of excited to see how it feels."
Her heart gave a little skip.
With a flutter of anticipation, she took the mouse and double-clicked the new icon that had appeared in the corner of the desktop.
No loading screen. The moment she clicked, a window bloomed across the display.
> status : Accessing user data.
NAME:Nia
LP:100
EP:407
CP:136,330
"…That's it?"
She lost her words at the result staring back at her.
Well — she hadn't been expecting anything grand, but she hadn't expected something this bare-bones either.
Strip out the name and all she had were three values: LP, EP, and CP.
"More importantly, what even are LP and EP? I know CP, but…"
She hovered the cursor over the letters, and a helpful tooltip explained what each abbreviation stood for.
Apparently LP was short for Life Point, and EP for Effect Point.
Uh… seeing it written out like that somehow made it even less clear.
"If Life Point means… health? Then what on earth is Effect Point. Effect score…?"
It had a game-like feel. If that was the idea, they could have just called it HP so she'd understand.
She stared at the monitor with a faintly dubious expression — then noticed something unexpected.
"Huh. I've got more CP than I thought. I figured I'd have about twenty thousand left, plus the sixty thousand I earned, so around eighty thousand… but I've got roughly double that."
The raw material of her Creation ability — CP — was far higher than expected.
She ran the numbers. From the hundred fifty thousand CP earned on her first stream, she'd spent roughly thirty thousand exploring the scrapyard. Then ninety thousand on a high-performance mic, camera, and outfit, plus another ten thousand prepping for the stream…
On paper, she should have had twenty thousand left, plus the sixty thousand from today, for a total of eighty thousand.
So why was she sitting on roughly twice that?
She stared at the screen with a deeply serious face — then a possibility clicked into place.
"Ah! What if CP doesn't just come from chat — what if simple viewing and subscriptions generate it too?"
In other words, chat wasn't the only thing that grew her CP.
She still hadn't fully mapped out the mechanics of how CP was earned, so it was entirely plausible.
…Wait. If that was true, it was actually great news. It meant she could invent other ways to farm CP.
In that case, instead of going all-in on live streams, it might be smarter to broaden the spectrum — upload edited videos on a regular schedule.
Intuitively, chat was still the most efficient source, so live streams would remain the main focus. But there was no reason to lock herself into a single method. She wasn't racing a clock; taking the long view wasn't a bad idea either.
And if I commit to regularly uploading edited clips, that'll grow the live audience over time too. Two birds, one stone.
Alright. Decision made. She'd start uploading edited videos to her Olive channel on a regular basis.
If viewing and subscriptions also earned CP, there was no reason not to make them.
But that bold goal ran into a very tall wall a mere ten hours later.
"Uh… uh-oh… am I just… bad at video editing…?"
She'd spent about ten thousand CP to create an editing program and tried cutting a video herself — and no matter what she did, the results were unwatchable.
Had she been underestimating the world? She had no idea that making a video with any real sense of craft was this hard.
If she slapped something like that onto the channel, far from drawing in new viewers from the live stream, she'd drive away the ones she already had.
Having properly accepted that cold reality, she looked around in dazed confusion — then squeezed her eyes shut and muttered in agony, like someone who'd just taken a blade.
"Ugh… for now, maybe I just upload the raw full VODs without any editing…"
No matter how she looked at it, polished edited videos were out of reach for the moment.
The cottage-industry quality was dreadful, and finding someone to do it for her was nearly impossible.
For one thing, I don't have any money.
No legal identity meant no bank account. Electronic transactions were impossible, and cash deals were even less realistic.
So the only thing she could do right now was one simple thing: upload the full VODs so people who'd missed the stream could still find them later.
"Last stream's re-debut VOD and this Q&A VOD… upload complete. Haaah. I'll think about edited videos later."
Come to think of it, she only had two hour-long sources of footage so far. Building up a library first and starting later might not be too late.
Of course, for someone currently pulling people in on pure novelty, striking while the iron was hot mattered… but what was she supposed to do with no method available? She couldn't exactly hire someone for free.
"The problem is money, huh… At some point I might need it, so I should probably start thinking about ways to earn some too."
She leaned back hard into the chair, dejected over the work that had slipped out of her hands.
And as she muttered, her gaze happened to land on the front door far across the room.
Money. Come to think of it, it wasn't as if she had no options at all.
In this world, she had more ways than she could count to find the one thing more valuable than anything else.
"Should I make money through salvaging?"
…Not a bad idea. In this world, information was money.
Wandering the scrapyard she'd explored just yesterday, she was bound to dig up information worth more than gold.
Whether anyone would trust the intel she handed over was an open question — but somehow, she didn't feel like she'd fail. People were so thirsty for anything about the old civilization that they'd probably sort truth from fiction themselves.
"…Well. For now CP matters more than money, so that's something to think about once things stabilize a bit. Aah… how much more do I need to gather before I can bring Nia's channel back to life?"
Creeeak.
The chair groaned as she slumped into it like she was lying down.
It didn't feel cheap — the way it cradled her body was actually pretty nice.
"I feel so drowsy. Like I could just take a nap right here. Not that I'm actually sleepy."
Even if this was only the beginning, things were falling into place the way she wanted, step by step. A smile rose to her lips on its own, and a warm sense of fullness settled in her chest.
But something abruptly arrived to keep her from savoring that feeling in peace.
Zzzzt…!
"Gah! Wh-wh-what was that?"
She shot upright as if she'd been burned.
A sudden burst of noise had scraped across her ears like a needle, raw and unpleasant.
Where had that awful sound even come from?
In the middle of that bolt-from-the-blue panic, her flustered gaze snagged on the monitor.
"Wh-what…"
White static had completely swallowed the desktop.
A sight straight out of a horror game or a movie — so uncanny she froze solid, like she'd turned to stone.
She sat there trembling, staring at the screen, as letters slowly began to surface through the noise.
Who are you. Translated literally: who are you.
Under the crushing weight of that short sentence, her face went completely blank.