5. I've Decided on a Stream Concept
The next morning, the moment Cho-young opened the Universal Resonance tab, a deep sigh was the first thing out of her mouth.
“Zero point zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-two percent? Fucking hell, this isn’t even a joke anymore.”
Granted, she was running a trash-grade Five-Element Spirit Root, but still — more than three hundred people had come through her stream yesterday, and this was the entire gain? That didn’t add up.
“Am I even going to reach Layer 2 before I die?”
Qi Refining Layer 1 came with a hundred-year lifespan. Layer 2 meant two hundred, Layer 3 three hundred, Layer 4 four hundred — and ascending to Foundation Establishment leapt it fivefold. If things kept going like this, she might well run out of life before she ever laid eyes on Layer 2.
Cho-young left the Universal Resonance tab behind and opened the settlement tab instead. The half-dead look on her face evaporated; her eyes were suddenly shining.
Her debut broadcast had earned her roughly two thousand lower-grade chromite stones. For a first stream, that was a fortune.
But with no way to actually collect the money, she decided to pay a visit to the community service center. If she meant to go on living here, she needed to renew her resident ID and open an account under the new system anyway.
“Number three-oh-one, please!”
An AI robot called out her number. “How may I help you today?”
It looked human enough, but it was unmistakably artificial intelligence. Half wondering whether she was talking to a person or a machine, Cho-young snapped back to her senses and stammered out her business.
“I’m here to renew my resident ID...”
“Please present your current resident card.”
The AI attendant looked back and forth between the card and Cho-young’s face, then fed the old card into a shredder. “Age ninety-four. Kim Seon-ju. This individual is registered as missing and deceased.”
Sixty-two years had passed, so ninety-four was technically accurate. But deceased?
So her original body really had died after all.
“Error code 4389. Individual outside standard parameters detected. I will report this to my superiors, then continue assisting you.”
Because my face doesn’t match the ID?
After a short wait, an actual human being came out this time to escort her.
Led past the service center’s front desk and into a VIP room, Cho-young found herself looking down at the cup of tea an elderly man was offering. Why a VIP room...?
The man smiled in a friendly sort of way. “Qi Refining Layer 1, I see.”
Cho-young jolted and stared at him. “Ah—”
“As I thought — your spiritual sense is still underdeveloped. If you can’t even properly read spirit qi that’s being hidden from you, well. There it is.”
The man blinked once, and the air around them changed. Cho-young’s shoulders gave a shudder. He’s on a completely different plane.
His cultivation stood so far above her own — she who was, at best, Qi Refining Layer 1 — that any comparison was laughable. He had probably reached the Great Perfection of Qi Refining, if he hadn’t already crossed the threshold into Foundation Establishment.
“Repairers like you aren’t common, though I can’t say it’s beyond understanding. Sixty-two years away, and see how much the world has changed. Have you been training all this while to open up your spirit root?”
“Ah — yes.” Cho-young went rigid with tension.
Repairers were the kind of people who would trample a lower-ranked Repairer to death without a second thought if it pushed their own realm higher. Low realm meant you bowed your head, no exceptions. Rub one of them the wrong way, and your neck would come off that very day.
“...Stop trembling. I have no interest in the likes of a junk-grade Five-Element root.”
Cho-young slowly raised her head. What a relief. Right — I’m just a Five-Element root holder.
“Everything runs through the Central Database Control Center. I’ll have your biometric ID registered there as well.”
“Th-thank you very much.”
“And what will you call yourself? Starting a new life means throwing the old name away.”
“I’ll go with... Cheon Cho-young.”
“Cheon Cho-young. Born 2067. Female. That should about do it. Off you go, then.”
“It’s... done already?”
“What? Were you planning to offer up your spirit root?”
“N-no, sir!”
The man smirked at her flustered stammering and added one more thing. “A piece of advice. This world is crawling with Repairers. You must have passed a few just walking here today.”
Cho-young thought back to the immense spiritual qi she had sensed in the alley after first returning from Biseungdo.
“We still don’t intervene directly in the world of mortals, as ever — but a few mortals in this era know we exist. Which means there are plenty of mortals out there trying to make a spirit root bloom, just like you.”
“Ah — yes, sir.”
“So take care of yourself. Who knows? Someone out there might be desperate for even a junk-grade Five-Element root.”
“Th-thank you for the advice!”
And with that, Cho-young hightailed it out of the community service center.
Once she had put some distance behind her, she glanced back over her shoulder, sweeping a hand down her chest. A Repairer of that caliber has to be several hundred years old. If he didn’t simply appear in this world out of nowhere, then...
Repairers had been here all along? Ever since the singularity struck the world, had the xianxia realm simply been rising to the surface?
Either way, thank goodness I’m alive. He was one of the rare ones with his head screwed on straight — I got lucky.
Exhaling a second sigh of relief, Cho-young set off for the bank a short walk from the service center.
Once upon a time there had been physical passbooks and physical resident cards. Then internet banking and electronic IDs had taken over. Now the age belonged to biometric hologram banking and the biometric ID. Keeping pace with the times, Cho-young ran her fingers over the chip embedded in her body, marveling at it like a child with a new toy.
The moment she summoned the hologram, an ID card bearing her photo appeared alongside her account balance. The balance was, naturally, zero won.
The bank’s AI teller robot had explained it like this: her account displayed her holdings of lower-, mid-, upper-, and highest-grade chromite, and she could deposit or withdraw by hologram anytime, anywhere. No phone needed anymore — everything ran through the biometric hologram now, even internet searches. The hologram had become a phone in its own right.
Rushing straight home, Cho-young fired up her hologram and made a beeline for the streaming revenue settlement tab. Two thousand lower-grade chromite stones. Which was to say, a cool two billion won.
Granted, the old currency and chromite didn’t always trade at a flat million won a stone, but for the sake of easy math — two billion won.
After the ten percent platform fee, she had received eighteen hundred stones.
“1.8 billion won — that buys an apartment, doesn’t it?”
Heart pounding, she searched housing prices around Yangpyeong — and her shoulders dropped like stones.
“Even the outskirts of Seoul go for five highest-grade chromite? If a thousand lower-grade stones are worth one mid-grade, then a highest-grade is...”
Mid-calculation, she shook her head. “Not even close. Whew. Grandma’s house probably won’t sell anyway. Might as well buy a sofa.”
She hopped into an online shopping mall, browsed around, and placed her orders. One thing she had newly learned: every electronic device had been absorbed into the biometric hologram. There were no televisions anymore, no computers. The hologram alone did everything. So Cho-young ordered exactly four things — a sofa, a wardrobe, a few sets of clothes, and a bed.
About an hour after she placed the order, the doorbell rang.
“Who is it?”
Stepping outside, Cho-young spotted a drone thundering off into the far distance. In front of her door sat the sofa and wardrobe she had ordered not an hour ago, along with boxed clothes and the bed.
“Whoa — intercontinental ballistic delivery, seriously?”
The wardrobe had clearly been shipped from China of all places — and it had still arrived terrifyingly fast.
Hoisting the heavy pieces inside with effortless ease, Cho-young set down the last box of clothes and dusted off her hands. “Well, it’s not like I’ve ever bought women’s clothes before.”
She pulled a set out of the box and put it on. Except—
“Nngh... w-why is this so small...”
Small. Her chest was squeezed so tight it felt one deep breath away from bursting free.
“Hghk— air! Air!”
Rrrip—!!
In the end, the garment let out a scream of its own and tore wide open.
“...Well, I’d have had to have worn women’s clothes before to know any better. And I bought the biggest size they had, too.”
“Maybe I just need everything custom-made.”
So Cho-young changed back into the shabby starter robe handed out when you first began on Biseungdo. And standing there in it, she noticed the heavenly pouch that had crossed over from Biseungdo with her.
A heavenly pouch stitched from the clothes of the dead.
She’d crammed it full of spirit herbs and all manner of sundries, back in the day. But now it was grimy and frayed all over; it was due for the trash.
“Wonder if there’s any spirit pill left in there...”
She slid her hand into the pitch-black pouch and groped around. Before long—
“...Hm?”
Was that something cold and hard against her fingers?
Tilting her head, Cho-young yanked it out. “...Why is this here?”
A bottle of azurite oil — the pale, milk-white liquid sloshing gently inside the glass.
“I’m positive I left all of these in that cave?”
She reached in again. This time the touch was like soil. She yanked it up—
“Bl-Black Moon Ginseng!!”
The black moon ginseng she had most definitely left behind.
And then—
“Th-this is a Green Snake!! Ack! Don’t bite me!”
“Paralysis Herb!”
“Sl-Sleep Herb!”
“And isn’t this the painkiller herb I chewed up and threw away???”
One impossible item after another kept landing in her hands — things with no business being in the pouch at all.
“What is this?”
Riding the momentum, Cho-young shoved her head into the bag. And sure enough—
“Gahk.”
It was the very cave where her body had been lodged on Biseungdo. Bottles of azurite oil still rolling about thick enough to trip over, the Green Snake, the White Snake and the Yellow Snake, and every one of the spirit herbs she had dug up in her fight to survive.
So was this bag a gate leading straight to Biseungdo?
No — impossible, she decided, shaking her head. A mere bag could never do something like that.
If it were a Storage Pouch, maybe. The game Biseungdo had the Storage Pouch item too.
The lower-grade pouch couldn’t hold living creatures, and time didn’t flow inside — it was strictly for stashing your things. The mid-grade still barred living beings, but spiritual qi circulated within, letting it preserve spirit herbs and the like. The upper-grade could do all of that and more: vast enough to swallow an entire mountain peak or a colossal valley, and able to hold living creatures besides. And the divine-grade pouch was already a world unto itself, so close to the domain of the gods that its owner could rewrite the laws inside to suit their whim.
“A mid-grade Storage Pouch? Is this for real?”
Perhaps it had been warped by Biseungdo’s spiritual qi storm. An ordinary heavenly pouch had turned into a mid-grade artifact.
Giddy, Cho-young stamped her feet in place — sending her enormous breasts into a mighty wobble all the while.
And here I was already racking my brain over what concept to run my stream with!
Even before her death, Cho-young had streamed spirit herb farming in the Biseungdo game.
A spirit herb growing stream. That’s the answer!
And so Cheon Cho-young resolved to run a real-life spirit herb farming stream in her new body as well.