All-Time Record

Once Yu Nari joined the agency and got properly busy, she took a leave of absence from university.

At the time she was only just starting to get famous, so she could slip out without much noise.

But the moment her songs cracked the TOP 10 of the music charts, she appeared on TV, and not only the music but ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Lunari herself became known to the public…

—Lunari? Isn’t that Yu Nari?

Naturally, Yu Nari’s former classmates became ninety-nine percent certain of Lunari’s identity.

Same voice, same tone, same way of speaking. She had always been busy, and the decisive blow was that once Lunari’s schedule exploded, Yu Nari simply stopped showing up at school.

At first they found it fascinating.

From our department? A VTuber? Someone like that actually came out of here?

Later some classmates felt left out. They hadn’t hung out that often, but couldn’t she at least have given them a heads-up?

There’s a saying that when your cousin buys land, your stomach starts to hurt. Not everyone, but watching people around you succeed usually brings envy and jealousy in its wake.

Yet that jealousy only appears when the levels are close enough to compare. Faced with overwhelming growth, heads bow of their own accord.

Among the applied-music classmates of an obscure university, Yu Nari was probably the greatest success story of them all; the wall was simply too high for jealousy to climb.

And then the cracks appeared in Lunari’s reputation.

The cause was a thirty-second teaser video.

One music YouTuber dismissed it as “artistic disease, Hongdae disease.” A culture page in a music daily ran the headline “A young artist’s challenge—obscure sensibility for the public.”

You can’t judge a song’s success from a mere taste of it, of course. But when the so-called experts piled on with negativity and netizens’ reactions split, people started wondering if this was the real beginning of the slide.

Seizing the opening, a few classmates began adding their two cents.

“Yeah, flash-in-the-pan stars usually drop just as fast.”

“She just got lucky.”

“Too bad. I was rooting for her. Think she’ll come back to school now?”

Yu Nari’s classmate Park Hye-jin kept her mouth shut through all of it. People who had never even glanced at Lunari’s streams could talk that way. Park Hye-jin knew better.

The old college classmate Yu Nari was already living a completely different life from them. Her popularity was not the kind that would slip from a single flop.

Just the number of people who show up to her live streams alone…

Part of her wanted to flaunt every scrap of streaming knowledge she had accumulated and school those ignorant classmates, but she didn’t bother jumping in. She understood the envy of watching a formerly unremarkable peer succeed.

The release day of the new music video Lunari had announced arrived in no time. The applied-music classmates gathered as if by unspoken agreement.

“Let’s watch it together!”

The excuse was light, but everyone’s real motives differed. Some wanted to watch how spectacularly Lunari’s new song would crash. Some simply thought it would be fun to watch with people who all knew her. Some were half-skeptical, half-expectant about the track itself.

When they opened a laptop in the practice room and sat in a circle, the faces of the ones who had been talking Lunari down were especially bright. Their mouths kept saying “too bad, too bad,” but their expressions said the opposite.

Ugh, what a sight.

Hye-jin dropped into her seat without bothering to hide her irritation.

The scheduled upload time arrived. Someone hit refresh.

Darkness settled over a room as moonlight spilled in. A pink-haired girl drawn with soft lines curled up on a bed. Watercolor-style backgrounds glowed with gentle moonlight, and a looping electronic beat began to pulse.

“Whoa, holy crap haha, what even is this? Otaku crap? Is Yu Nari having an existential crisis or what?”

“How did she end up doing something like this. Tragic. Seriously.”

Snickers laced with mockery floated around from the very intro.

But then the instruments began stacking, their rhythms tapping at every ear. A sense of speed that felt impossible for human hands. Simultaneously, a booming bass and razor-sharp electronic tones.

The moment Lunari’s voice slipped in, the air in the practice room changed for real. Autotune made it sound mechanical, yet the original color underneath refused to hide. No matter how obscure the university, these were applied-music students. Their ears were sharper than ordinary people’s.

“Shh, quiet. Let me listen.”

More and more of them began focusing on the song.

The image of Lunari thrashing in a dream and the playful melody felt like a single frame of film. Hye-jin consciously tried to set aside the fact that this was her friend’s song.

Listen coldly. Pretend you’re hearing it for the first time.

The harder she tried, the more certain she became. This track had power. The genre might feel unfamiliar, but once it rang inside your eardrums it refused to leave. Lunari’s sleepy, languid movements colluding with the chaotic beat assaulted eyes and ears at once, and the cute lyrics weren’t childish—they made you smile without meaning to.

The pink cat in the animation refused to get up, folding her ears and tail completely away.

“Umnya umnya nyanyanya.”

She’d only heard it once and already it was tap-dancing on her tongue. Hye-jin glanced around and realized she wasn’t the only one. One of the classmates who had laughed about “otaku crap” was unconsciously bobbing his head. He probably didn’t even know. But the body was honest.

The bright faces began stiffening one by one. They were starting to sense the stream wasn’t flowing the way they had wanted.

A voice that sank like a whisper swallowed the practice room. The cat on screen, declaring she absolutely refused to wake, went full rampage.

Then her head dropped with a soft thud and she collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.

The pink-haired girl happily swished her tail and ears as she sank into deep sleep, and the video ended.

“……”

The practice room fell silent. Park Hye-jin hid a smile inside. Even after the chorus finished, afterimages kept lingering in her head.

Thank god the CSAT is already over. If this had dropped before the exam it would have been banned nationwide and cursed from one end of the country to the other. The animation direction fit perfectly too. She kept wanting to rewatch the scene of the girl rolling around under the blanket with her tail wrapped around herself.

If that comes out as merch I’m buying it. Acrylic stand, please. I’ll pay.

The people here were still fledglings, but they were applied-music students nonetheless. Separate from whether the genre suited their taste, they could vaguely sense this was no ordinary track. Right after the premiere the YouTube comments still looked mixed, but the air inside this practice room was crystal clear.

“…Want to play it one more time?”

No one objected. The listening party ended quietly in an awkward atmosphere. As she left the practice room, Park Hye-jin sent Yu Nari a short message of support.

One week later, two mysterious rookie male VTubers and four female VTubers from the applied-music department quietly debuted on Link. A few more days after that, they vanished without a sound.

After “Umnya” dropped, Japan reacted too—far more vigorously than Do-yoon’s modest hope of simply recovering part of the investment.

A famous Japanese VTuber who had been watching since the teaser played the full version on stream the day of release.

That broadcast reached the ears of a Vocaloid producer watching in real time.

NicoNico Douga. Though YouTube had overtaken it by now, it remained the absolute holy ground for utaite and Vocaloid culture in the subculture scene. A major Vocaloid composer active there had publicly declared on social media that he would arrange a Korean VTuber’s song. Retweets exploded instantly and fan expectations spiked to the edge of detonation.

Just two days later: [Munya (Umnya) - Arrange ver.]. A completely different flavor of charm burst out. Immediately after upload it seized first place on NicoNico’s VOCAL Character weekly ranking. Even for a famous Vocaloid producer, a cover of a Korean VTuber’s original climbing to the top of the Vocaloid charts was astonishing, and the eyes of countless Japanese utaite and VTubers locked onto it.

Kim Do-yoon heard every step of the process and could not leave his computer.

I thought it was going to flop.

Everyone who had only ever sent praise until now had suddenly sounded uneasy, so of course he assumed the worst. Han So-yeong had mentioned the teaser was getting good views in Japan, but…

Even if it blows up overseas, how popular can it really get?

Yet once the music video went up, the real-time comments began to shift. At first, just ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠like the teaser, praise and criticism were mixed. That much was certain… and then…

Japanese comments steadily increased, and the Korean comments gradually shifted with them.

As the positive comments gained more likes, public opinion gradually swung around. Was it popular because she was already famous, or famous because the song was better than expected?

I still can’t tell.

Do-yoon’s sixth song, “Umnya.” One thing was certain: it had carried more worry than any track he had released so far. Yet the YouTube music video was already clocking two million views in twenty-four hours—an all-time record pace. On the second day it rocketed straight to number eighteen on the Melon chart.

And for the first time it also entered an overseas chart: number twenty-two. The moment a song of Do-yoon’s was carved into the Billboard Japan Hot 100 for the first time.