Those Who Stand High Can Reach Even Higher
It was only natural that a person standing high could stretch their arms even higher.
A yellow official mail from Olive had arrived in my inbox.
Judging by the tone, the company seemed to view my application for Plus Streamer status rather favorably. The wording was thoroughly positive.
Yet when I forced down the flutter in my chest and read the message all the way through, I finally noticed just how blatantly it was hinting at something else.
“Hmm… this doesn’t mean I’ve been accepted as a Plus Streamer. It’s just saying they want to have a serious talk.”
Exactly. It wasn’t confirmation of selection—only an invitation to discuss the contract in detail. The person who wrote the mail had maintained that stance from beginning to end. That was why they’d left a contact number at the bottom.
A faint heat had risen to my cheeks from the brief excitement, but now it felt as if someone had dumped a bucket of cold water over my head. I finally came back to my senses.
Whew… well, of course. If they just accepted every streamer who hit a hundred thousand subscribers and then one of them caused a scandal, the company’s image would take a hit right away.
According to what I’d looked up on a certain online encyclopedia, becoming a Plus Streamer first required a promise not to stream on any site other than Olive. On top of that, any broadcast that violated public morals was strictly forbidden. Adult content needed prior approval, and the moment anything above a certain intensity was discovered, the stream would be suspended immediately. Illegal acts or anything that encouraged them were also under thorough management and control.
Things ordinary streamers barely had to worry about would be scrutinized meticulously once you became a Plus Streamer. Some people even argued that becoming one actually restricted a streamer’s freedom rather than expanding it.
But if the restrictions were all there was to it, no one would bother applying. There had to be enough benefits to make the inconvenience worthwhile—otherwise people wouldn’t scramble so hard to grow their subscriber counts.
The biggest advantage is still the difference in exposure. The top banners, side panels, and the main algorithm all prioritize Plus Streamers by default.
Of course ordinary streamers weren’t completely invisible. Their appearances, however, were far fewer in number, which meant they needed a considerable amount of luck. And even if you did get featured, what good was it if no one clicked? Promotion meant nothing without viewers.
That’s why everyone works so hard to hit a hundred thousand. Once you become a Plus Streamer, you get far more chances.
A structure where those already standing high received even more opportunities and glory. For the people buried at the bottom, it was bitterly unfair. But what could you do? Olive ran the site however they liked. If you didn’t like it, you could always move to some less popular streaming platform.
But me? A once-in-a-generation monster genius who hit a hundred thousand in a single month. Sure, a few people in Olive’s history have gotten there faster… but doing it alone, without any corporate backing, is extremely rare. An exceptional irregular, you could say.
An exceptional irregular. It sounded like wordplay, yet nothing described my current situation better. I had appeared overnight, instantly drawn thousands of viewers, and was steadily running streams. For anyone who had started around the same time, I must have been a natural disaster. Or maybe not.
But if you thought about it carefully, the moment I showed my face on camera, failure had never really been an option. I wasn’t saying this just because I was a fan—Nia’s face was destructively beautiful. With a cheat-level face like that, reaching a hundred thousand subscribers was inevitable, even if it took a little longer.
Maybe I should have been embarrassed that it still took a whole month even with the fraudulent Ooparts no other streamer possessed. Yet I preferred to look at the situation positively. All the time I’d spent streaming in relatively niche categories had simply been a long detour to build a solid foundation.
“Ah, right. Noise, did you finish the video edit I asked for last time?”
“Yeah. Saved it in the work folder. Latest video.”
“Oh… this one. Found it! Thanks, Noise!”
“It’s nothing…”
Noise, who had been rolling around on the bed, answered coolly and then buried her face in the pillow as if to say she was going right back to rolling. At a glance it looked like she was declaring she had nothing more to say and was just going to lie there.
But after spending this much time with her, I could tell roughly what she was thinking.
…She’s embarrassed.
If I checked her face right now, the corners of her mouth would definitely be lifted just enough to notice. As time passed she seemed to be picking up more of my influence; all sorts of emotions were starting to appear on the once-expressionless Noise.
The last time she’d been reading a book and tears had simply dripped down her blank face, I’d panicked thinking she might have some serious illness. Only after learning she had cried because the story was moving had I finally calmed down. She felt emotions to a certain degree—she just wasn’t very good at making facial expressions.
But that, too, was part of Noise’s charm. The gap between her cool, blunt expression and the pure, innocent feelings that occasionally slipped through was destructive in a completely different direction from Nia’s.
Maybe that was why Noise always received good reviews whenever she appeared as a guest on my streams or edited videos. Her default blank face gave a cold first impression, yet she threw herself fully into everything she did, and if you looked closely her personality was closer to pure and innocent than cold. Comments and chat messages asking to see her more often appeared often enough that the point was already made.
Still… Noise doesn’t really have the sense for carrying a stream on her own. If I left her alone in front of the camera, she’d probably just end up having a quiet staring contest with it.
Not that the comments bothered me. If anything, they meant people found Noise cute, so I didn’t feel particularly bad. I wasn’t especially greedy about airtime either.
Anyway. I pulled my gaze away from Noise, who was still hiding her face in the pillow, and looked back at the monitor.
On the screen was the edited video she had just mentioned—the one scheduled to go up on my Olive account today.
【Nia’s Reading Club】
Shakespeare’s Four Great Tragedies! To be, or not to be, that is the question.
【Hamlet】
The Nia’s Reading Club series. Videos where I read classic works that were famous and valuable yet still hadn’t been salvaged in the virtual world. This time I planned to open a new frontier with one of the most famous pieces of all—Hamlet.
Of course this wasn’t data I’d salvaged from the Data Trash Heap. I’d read Hamlet back in middle school, and the content was still clear in my memory, so there had been no need to salvage anything. Nice—getting some return on all the reading I’d done before I died.
Hamlet was a relatively short play, but it was dramatic and its message was clear, so it would definitely catch the eye of anyone interested in this sort of thing.
“One last check that the subtitles and audio are clean… Good. Upload!”
Click.
I skimmed the video from start to finish, confirmed there were no obvious problems, and clicked the mouse. A spinning progress icon appeared, and a moment later my reading video was released from the virtual world into the outside world.
How much impact the video would actually have was still an unknown, but I wasn’t hoping for immediate success. I’d already put out so many different kinds of content that some of those videos were still slowly climbing in views. All I wanted was for even one of them to catch, becoming the force that pulled new viewers into my live streams. Even if edited videos earned a certain amount of CP, live chat was still far faster and more direct.
“Today’s video is up, and I already did a short live earlier…”
That roughly wrapped up today’s schedule. There were salvage data and plans piled up, but nothing that needed to be rushed. Today’s live stream had been a short two-hour session earlier. Which meant…
“Well… maybe I should try contacting them.”
I muttered the words while staring at the official mail that stood out so sharply among the ordinary ones.
Thump. Thump.
My heart pounded of its own accord from the tension.
Ahaha. I’d only just realized it now, but…
Apparently I was a little nervous about communicating with someone from the outside world for the first time.