22. What the Heck Is a 'Spirit Pill' Anyway??
Click— click-click!!
Hmm... let's make this look a little fresher.
Click!
The brightness on this one isn't sitting right with me.
Click!
Ooh. Fake flowers, granted—but arranged this way and that...
Thirty minutes of snapping away at the Spirit Pills I'd brought, laid out on a round table. Having salvaged a few pretty decent shots, I rearranged the props to take the photos for the product page next.
▸ Hold on, isn't ChoyoungPing the only one who can even sell Spirit Pills? Why the all-out effort?
The answer was simple.
Because it's habit.
Sure, I could just throw up a single photo of the pills on a plain white background. No—honestly, I could post it with nothing at all, text and text alone, and the buyers would still come flooding in.
But what is a smart store, exactly? Infinite competition—competition, and then more competition on top of it. Back when I was selling farm produce, the platform had crawled with a truckload's worth of people pulling every stunt imaginable just to touch page one once.
Pay a marketing company, and you'd find no end of places dangling deals like this:
When I first started out, I went through an ad agency myself. A guaranteed page-one spot, plus a StarBoost auto-comment program thrown in for free—and on the strength of that pitch, I coughed up four million won.
I did make it onto page one in the end—barely, at the very bottom of it. It held for about a month, maybe? Then straight back down I went. As for the bot, what they shipped me was so shabby that even a guy who'd learned to code that very week could have built it.
And when I called the agency afterward?
"The number you have dialed cannot take your call right now..."
Ugh. Even now, just remembering it makes my blood boil.
So I studied hard after that, and once I'd built proper thumbnails and product pages, I got better results than that four million won had ever bought me. Which is exactly why thumbnails and product pages matter—even for merchandise that only I in the whole world can sell.
Besides, if I wanted to pull in the cultivators who never watch my stream, I had to catch their eye here at the very least. Making every cultivator on the planet watch my broadcast—that was the only path I had to becoming an immortal.
Shot after shot, swapping the arrangements back and forth—and in the end I came away with a set of photos every bit as satisfying as the ones I'd pictured in my head.
"Excuse me, boss?"
The studio owner had popped up as if he'd been waiting for exactly this moment.
"Yes?"
"I'd like to shoot here regularly. Would that be all right?"
I'd realized something while watching the chat earlier: the scenery the owner had assembled here didn't match modern tastes at all. People these days would write it off as hopelessly old-fashioned. For me, that world had ended barely a month ago; for the people of this one, it was sixty-two years gone. It would hardly be strange if the trends had moved on in that time.
But this was the atmosphere I wanted. The very last thing I wanted was to shoot fresh green Spirit Grass and the pills made from it against some smog-choked backdrop drowning in neon.
"Whether it's all right, you say..."
"I wanted to ask if you could keep this set just as it is... if that's not too much trouble."
From the look of things, he'd been clinging to the scenery of the past while the place collected dust.
"...I had actually planned to run it only through this week and then shut it down."
Ah. So even sentiment loses to reality in the end.
"Which means I'm truly sorry, but I can't take your request... I have practical troubles of my own piling up, you see."
"Oh... I see. Well, can't be helped."
Wondering idly whether I'd ever find a place like this again, I paid the usage fee and headed home.
Am I going to have to turn a corner of my house into a studio now?
The moment I got home, I uploaded the thumbnail and the product page.
Product page and thumbnail registered, it looked passable enough.
"All right then—time to open up shop."
▸ *drumroll*
▸ waiting...
▸ openupopenupopenupopenupopenup
▸ but why does nothing come up when I search Zewibe
▸ guys how do you get in
▸ I got in though~
▸ how??
▸ how do I even get in there
▸ ffs only news results come up
▸ lmaooo I'm reading the news articles too, sounds like it crashed and burned spectacularly
▸ Zewibe? Wasn't that thing extinct like 60 years ago?
▸ wait, that's still around??
▸ oh, found it—it's at the very bottom, you have to scroll forever lmaoooo
▸ open it pleeeeeeease
"One moment."
You can't start selling the instant a product page goes up. First, enter the exact quantity. Then press List for Sale, and—
"It's open!!"
The instant the words left my mouth, the notification counter at the top of the Zewibe smart store began climbing at a terrifying speed. They must have been mashing their mice like maniacs, because even the chat window—usually spewing messages at a madcap rate—had gone utterly silent.
I was sitting there quietly, watching the order list pile up with satisfying steadiness, when—
"Huh?"
A loading spinner appeared out of nowhere.
"What's going on?"
At the same time, the chat exploded back to life.
▸ wtf
▸ why isn't this working?
▸ it'ssssss stuck on infinite loading??
▸ it says I'm number 4,767 in the queue
▸ it's down
▸ crashed
▸ ChoyoungPing's firepower is unreal
▸ um?? the site is down??
▸ it crashed
▸ Zewibe do your damn jobbBBBB
▸ ugh I couldn't buy any;;;
I kept hammering the refresh button myself, but the loading screen showed no sign whatsoever of going away.
"Um... everyone? I think the site just crashed with too many of you rushing in at once?"
▸ you can tell just by looking
▸ obviously
▸ you can just tell
▸ this is what you get for using Zewibe!!
▸ MegaChrome has stores too, you know
▸ but why'd she do it on Zewibe? Isn't that a dead search engine?
▸ ?????
▸ dunno, off to file an inquiry
▸ me too
▸ +2
▸ me too
▸ me too
"There's plenty of stock, so I'm going to have to close orders here for today, all right? I'll double-check every order you've placed and get them sent out carefully."
The old maps called it Jungnang District. The current ones say Sector 55.
The street of shops, half a step from collapse, was desolate enough that you'd believe it abandoned outright. Signs still hung in rows, but not a single door stood open—a dead street few people passed through, so that was no mystery either.
In the basement of those shops, the tightly sealed door of Zewibe headquarters swung open. It was past two in the afternoon, and only now did the fluorescent lights buzz to life over the office ceiling.
"Ooof... my stomach."
Unlike a world remade by the technological singularity, the inside of Zewibe HQ was a museum of outdated computers, rows of them like some decades-old internet café. The exact opposite of an age in which everyone had bio-chips implanted and computed with their own bodies. Which made sense: properly running even one search engine demanded a high-capacity bio-chip implant, and Zewibe—crushed out of the market by MegaChrome—had never had the money for expensive, high-capacity hardware.
And still, Lim Jeong-gu, CEO of Zewibe, had never given up. On antiquated graphics cards and obsolete machines, he kept the Zewibe search engine running without a hitch.
'Jeong-gu. Zewibe was never meant to end like this. We have to win back its old glory. Will you grant your grandfather that much?'
A last wish handed down from his grandfather's generation. His father had never honored it—but Jeong-gu, raised in his grandfather's own arms, wanted more than anything to carry that wish through. ChromeCorp's search engine, MegaChrome, had shoved Zewibe into the dark where it saw no light, yet he never once stopped dreaming of the day it would soar again.
Yesterday, too, he'd lamented his lot, drinking himself sideways in a back-alley bar and dragging himself in late to work. There were no employees. Jeong-gu was the staff and the CEO in one. He collapsed into a chair whose leather had peeled away in strips and heaved a long, deep sigh.
His stomach churned. Partly the liquor—but mostly because no matter how he racked his brain, no way to bring Zewibe back would come to him.
He powered on the computer. After a good long wait, an ancient desktop spread itself across the screen.
"Haah... I really do need to land an ad agency or something."
He'd been to every conglomerate that counted: Pajeok Group, Cheongrim Group, Hyunsan Group, Cheongeom Group, Jaha Group, and on and on. Not one of them would give Zewibe so much as an ad banner.
Had he only chased the giants? No. He'd trawled small and midsize businesses too, even startups barely months old. He'd taken money scraped together through punishing grunt work and gone door to door among ad agencies with it. But no amount of advertising could buy users for a search engine whose wings had already fallen off.
This time, too, Jeong-gu booted up the Zewibe search engine, meaning to tinker with the design as usual.
"Huh?"
At a sight utterly unlike the usual, he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
"...?"
What is all this? Why are there so many customer service notifications?
He didn't even operate a proper customer service center—inquiries came through chat and chat alone. And those chat notifications had piled up as though about to burst.
This has never happened before. Did the code glitch out? Is it an error?
Jeong-gu started picking through Zewibe's code. He kept at it for a while.
"...There's nothing wrong with it?"
The code was flawless. Head cocked, Jeong-gu tapped into the notification inbox.
[Inquiries: 999+]
[Zewibe, what the hell are you doing?]
[Zewibe crashed—please do something about it]
[Please raise the traffic cap]
[I need to buy Spirit Pills but the lag is so bad I can't check out]
[Stuck on infinite loading—please fix]
. . .
Jeong-gu's jaw dropped.
"Wh-what... what is all of this?"
Just what in the world was a 'Spirit Pill', anyway??