Earth's Strongest Super Ultra Beautiful Girl Virtual Idol, Nia. Ready.
Viral marketing.
It was a marketing technique designed to deliberately manufacture rumors and public opinion, so that promotion of a product would spread endlessly, like a virus. Put simply, it was the intentional creation of what people commonly call word of mouth — that explanation made it easy enough to understand.
From a consumer's perspective, it was something to be extremely wary of. Products that resorted to this kind of marketing were usually of rather poor quality. From a company's standpoint, though, the appeal was hard to deny: massive returns for relatively little cost.
If you go through communities or famous influencers, you can pull enormous advertising results for comparatively little money. Well… if it fails, you get hit with a colossal backlash instead.
At its core, viral marketing was an act of deceiving the people who bought the product. If something were genuinely good, there would be no need for viral marketing at all — existing customers would spread the word on their own. The real problem, then, lay in how it lured people in through exaggeration, falsehoods, and fabricated information.
Overstating weak performance, claiming features that don't exist, or presenting false stories as if they were fact.
Every last one of them was an act of mocking consumers with eyes blinded by money. Fraud, deception, the spread of false information. So whenever viral marketing for a particular product was exposed, consumers never stayed quiet. No — they couldn't stay quiet. Because a thought like this would naturally rise in their minds:
What if next time that person scams me? I'm not an idiot — am I just supposed to let it slide?
Of course, I used to throw stones at those companies myself from the safety of anonymity whenever their viral campaigns got exposed. It wasn't as if I'd ever planned to buy the products even if the marketing had worked on me. I simply found it infuriating that anyone would make money through such underhanded methods.
But back then, I had no idea. I never imagined that I myself would end up resorting to that same dirty viral marketing!
"Haa… I don't even have the right to criticize anyone anymore."
A sigh slipped out between my lips of its own accord. Fine. Go ahead and throw stones at me, anyone who wants to. I'm a dirty, underhanded person…
My mood sank a little. But I had to push through this too. I'd already decided to accept all of it.
Holding that thought in my mind, I looked at the monitor right in front of me. Floating on the screen was text so absurd that just reading it nearly drew a hollow laugh out of me.
"What 'secret leak'… I'm just scamming people out in the open."
I felt sharp thorns driving into that invisible heart called conscience. But there really was no other way. No matter how hard I thought about it, nothing better had come to mind.
To even get to the starting line, I needed a lot of people's attention. Kind of like taking out a small advance, I guess.
Draw continuous attention through personal streaming. To achieve that smaller goal — which itself served a larger purpose — I first needed an environment where I could actually stream. Attracting people's interest with a broadcast that didn't even have a working microphone was nearly impossible.
But to create that streaming environment… I first needed to draw attention. That was the contradiction!
I need a good microphone, and since I've become Nia, I need a camera too. Outfits. Content for the stream. But to make all of that… I first need a lot of attention. In other words, a paradox.
There was that classic debate: which came first, the chicken or the egg? But before you could even argue about that, if you had neither, the cycle couldn't start at all. So I had simply used a rather heavy-handed method to grab people's attention and force that cycle into existence.
And honestly, about half of it was true, right? I wasn't a giant salvage company, and there was no "guy I know" — but the fact that I, as Nia, planned to stream was real.
I hadn't really lied… okay, I had lied. Sorry.
Once I start streaming… someday I'll apologize honestly. "I wrote all of that myself," I'll say.
Yeah. It was a dirty thing to do. I couldn't hide it forever anyway. Besides, I didn't particularly want to make money from streaming or spread my fame far and wide. This was only ever a means of reclaiming the records Nia had left behind. So there was no need to obsess over broadcasting like a fanatic.
If it fails… haa, I don't know. I don't even know how long I'll stay intact in this cyber world. Then I'll just have to find another way somehow.
With that thought, the memory of first opening the front door suddenly surfaced. The absurdly deep darkness that hit the moment the door opened, the crushing pressure, the sense of crisis rising all the way to my throat. As long as I could feel that sensation, I couldn't leave the house — not until I found some kind of solution.
"…Haa. I don't know…. Ugh, whatever! Come what may!"
There was no point in stubbornly clinging to a problem that had no answer. So I looked up at the ceiling, let out a light roar, and — as a way of refreshing my mind — checked the comments on the posts I had indiscriminately uploaded.
Oh, right. Did I mention that already?
Those viral posts of mine… were generating far more buzz than I'd expected.
"Still just saying whatever they want, huh."
People who'd never heard of it, people changing the subject, people who didn't believe it, people vouching for its credibility, people who did believe it… Maybe this place wasn't so different at the roots from where I'd lived. The way every person had their own thoughts and claims was genuinely interesting.
But one comment stood out more than the rest — Anonymous23's claim that my connection IP was garbled.
"My IP is garbled? …Huh, it's true. Mine really is different from everyone else's."
…That was something even I was noticing for the first time. IP addresses weren't something you paid attention to unless you deliberately checked.
Heh, so the Cyber World runs on a different network? That's news to me. Ah, so that's why the internet was so slow?
I couldn't believe it — I'd finally figured out why the internet had been lagging all this time. Because the place I was in and the outside world weren't on the same network, the connection was being routed around like a VPN, and that was why it was so slow!
My head went blank with the sensation of a puzzle piece clicking perfectly into place.
"…Anyway, just this post alone has 211 comments. Combined with the other sites, it's over 700…. It's completely on fire."
I already knew this world was starving for pre-Great War culture… but even so, I never expected a post with nothing but bare text — not a single photo — to generate this much buzz. Apparently several factors had boosted its credibility: the fact that my IP was presumed to be from the Cyber World side, the difficulty of faking a connection from this network, and the fact that a VTuber being salvaged wasn't an entirely outlandish story.
Well, if you were going to lie, you'd lie about some famous OTuber with hundreds of millions of subscribers, right? Who would lie about something like a VTuber? That kind of feeling, maybe.
"So being a relatively niche subculture actually raised the trust level…. Wait. The moment I go live and say I wrote that post, I'm basically getting nailed to a cross."
Suddenly, the idea of going live was terrifying. Was this really something an ordinary person like me — who'd never done a personal stream even once — could actually handle? The sheer scale of what I'd set in motion made my heart start pounding, tumbling wildly through my body on its own.
"I-I-It's fine! Even if they don't believe me, they'll believe Nia! It'll work out somehow!"
Honestly, I was a little scared. But at this point, there was nowhere to retreat. All I could do here was trust in Nia and keep moving forward.
"…Alright. Then let's start getting ready."
I muttered it with a thoroughly serious face. Starting today, four days from now — let's begin streaming. With that plan set, there was truly a lot to prepare before then.
"Hmm…. Camera, okay. Mic, okay. Streaming software installed on the computer…. Now all that's left is pressing the button."
Gulp.
I swallowed without even realizing it. Apparently, without noticing it myself, I'd gotten extremely nervous. But the nerves were only natural. I hadn't even properly started the stream yet, and people were already lighting fires all over the waiting room I'd set up in advance.
Ugh, that last chat hit the bullseye dead-on. …I was Nia now, but originally I'd been a guy. So it wasn't exactly wrong to say that. Still, if I looked in the mirror even once, fully agreeing with that comment would feel weird in a whole different way.
"…She's cute. Not in some shabby T-shirt — wearing the default outfit. It really looks like Nia is standing there."
Beyond the mirror stood a silver-haired, purple-eyed beautiful girl in a neat, polished outfit. What she wore was a white-based uniform reminiscent of a high school uniform, with soft purple ornaments at the points that needed accent — an outfit that overall evoked a cool-toned atmosphere.
When I carefully raised a hand to my chest with a feeling that none of this quite felt real, that super ultra cute beautiful girl carefully raised her hand in the same way.
"D-Dangerous…. Even knowing it's me, I can't take my eyes off her…. Is this love?"
I was so beautiful in the mirror that I naturally said something that stupid. Honestly, it wasn't even surprising. This was the body of Nia, the character I'd been pushing as my absolute favorite. Of course it was.
…Alright. Playing the fool a little like that seemed to ease the tension, just a bit. Then was it about time to go out?
"The city's top-tier beautiful girl idol, Nia — ready."
I muttered it as if carving the words into my chest, and gave the mirror one last bright smile. The girl in the mirror smiled back, beautiful as a flower in full bloom — as if, in this moment, nothing in the world could frighten her. It was an expression that looked like both a beautiful idol and a brave hero.