23. Before I Knew It, I'd Pulled Off a 'Restoration'?

"Hmm. A long-term contract promotion with Chrome Delivery."

While looking into drone delivery to trim my shipping costs, I had stumbled straight into a pretty sweet promotion. Ship each package on its own, and the delivery fee came to three low-grade chromite stones; sign a long-term contract, though, and it dropped to just one.

"The delivery system really is the same now as it was sixty years ago, huh?"

That was simply how it had always worked: sign a contract with a courier company, and your shipping rates got cheaper. The stores advertising free shipping were the ones with those contracts in place — usually the fee just got folded into the price of the goods anyway.

Me? Why bother?

Once I'd filled out the long-term contract and set my delivery windows, the whir of propellers soon sounded outside the house. I loaded the carefully boxed Black Moon Pills onto the drone assigned to each address — and, ah yes, tucked a handwritten note requesting reviews into every box.

BWOOOOOM!!

The drones, each cradling its cargo, shot up into the open sky. The store's first sales: a resounding success!!

"That leaves the remaining ten Spirit Pills……"

Those had to be hand-delivered to the Sect Leaders, our single biggest VVIP customers. So I stepped out of the house with my stream already running.

For some reason I couldn't explain, my viewer base skewed overwhelmingly Cultivator whenever I met with the Sect Leaders.

In other words, a sit-down with the Sect Leaders — still terrifying, mind you — was prime content for pumping up that Universal Resonance percentage!

Just thirteen more percent and I would be standing at Qi Refining Layer 2 myself. Praying with everything I had that today's meeting with the Sect Leaders would deliver exactly that, I set off with a spring in my step.

Meanwhile, at Zewibe headquarters.

Under an unprecedented deluge of requests, Jeong-gu hammered his keyboard with hands moving too fast for the eye to see.

"Row, row. Row that boat."

It was an oar that had rowed on and on, even when there wasn't a drop of water in sight. He was the only sailor left pulling it — but that was fine.

Ratatatat! Clack!!

By the time Jeong-gu pressed Enter one final time and stretched his aching back, it was four in the morning. He had pushed the patch clean through the night, losing all track of the hours.

And the result:

"Done."

He had scaled the traffic capacity until the site could take a stampede of visitors without going down.

But it was a stopgap. The people connecting to Zewibe were Chromians with biometric chips implanted in their bodies. Had they been logging in from ordinary computers, it wouldn't have mattered — but bio-chip computers came with massive data throughput as standard, far more than Zewibe's antiquated engine could withstand for long.

And yet. How long had he waited for this moment? This was a search engine with not a single user, one that had nearly been left for dead — and then, for reasons he couldn't begin to fathom, its traffic had started to climb.

Of course, the surge was confined entirely to the Zewibe smart store, so it had nothing whatsoever to do with the website as a whole. Nor did Jeong-gu believe that a modest bump in store visitors would bring Zewibe back to life.

Even so. Unlike his usual days of tinkering with the design, getting to do proper work for once filled him with pride.

Come to think of it, though — they had ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠definitely said "Spirit Pills," hadn't they? What in the world could that be?

Jeong-gu typed the words into the search bar. Up came exactly one result: a store called Cho-young Farm.

As he picked through the thumbnail images and product pages, he delivered his verdict.

"Man, this is so last-century."

"But the follower count……"

It had already blown past six thousand, and the "turn on notifications" crowd sat in the three thousands.

"Why is this popular?"

The inventory amounted to three items: low-, mid-, and high-grade Black Moon Pills. And even then, only the high grade was properly stocked — the low and mid grades existed in name alone.

With an outdated computer, there was no getting into MegaChrome, the mightiest search engine of the modern era. So Jeong-gu tapped in his own biometric ID and called up a hologram.

He entered MegaChrome and searched for Spirit Pills.

Up popped the MegaWiki.

"There's… almost nothing here?"

The only section with real content was the overview.

Jeong-gu did know the concept of a Cultivator. In an age when even ordinary human bodies were swapped out for machine implants, it was hardly surprising that some people trained for the pure and simple purpose of becoming immortals. If the rumors were true, some of them could deal nuclear-bomb-grade damage with a single punch. Not that he had ever seen one himself.

Jeong-gu kept digging for information on Spirit Pills in MegaChrome. Scrolling down past the article, he found countless posts filed under the keyword.

"Cho-young-ping…?"

Jeong-gu thought back to the Cho-young Farm store he'd seen on Zewibe. That had been a person's name?

He searched "Cho-young" on MegaChrome — and jolted upright in shock.

"She's been streaming for less than a week, and she already has… thirteen hundred subscribers?"

And that number was still climbing in real time. So this was what people meant by a monster rookie?

Jeong-gu himself was pushing fifty, but the golden age of internet broadcasting had run for sixty years now; he at least knew what a stream was. Working through Cho-young's clip compilations, he clicked open one from her abandoned-house stream.

Jeong-gu went digging for other clips.

Having combed through the clips, Jeong-gu now ventured on into NewTube itself.

"Hehehot! This is fun."

Sprawled across a leather sofa with its stuffing bursting through the seams, he hunted down every last one of Cho-young's broadcasts. Snickering away without noticing the clock crawl past ten in the morning, he finally, wearily, let his eyes slide shut.

Around the time Jeong-gu, after bingeing Cho-young's broadcasts to his heart's content, sank into sleep — new Shorts began surfacing on NewTube.

The freshly minted Shorts rode the algorithm out to countless people — beginning with the many influencers who made their money and their names on internet broadcasts.

"Hm? What's that, chat?"

"The Zewibe store is back from the dead?"

"You're asking if I saw the Shorts? What even is that?"

"Guys. What does any of that have to do with my content?"

"Oh!! So you all know about it too! I saw it!"

"What's a Zewibe?"

StarStar. Taektok. H. From there, the wave spread to the influencers running content on every other SNS platform as well.

The streaming gallery, naturally, was paralyzed — and the news burrowed deeper still, all the way into the small business owners' gallery.

But.

KYAAAAAA!!!

None of it reached Jeong-gu — who, after happily bingeing Cho-young's streams, had lost his fight with sleep and drifted off.