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"Take care~"
"Yeah. Bye-bye!"
I waved as I saw Little Hana off.
The fried chicken had looked ridiculously good, but we already had company. The sushi was already on order, too. Swallowing my tears, I had no choice but to tell her we'd do dinner next time. Sweet Little Hana didn't argue at all; she went along with it without a fuss. For her age, she really was a thoughtful kid.
They lived right next door, and I'd already talked it over with Master, so there wouldn't be any problem on that front.
The real problem was something else. Whenever my little sister wore an expression like that, it had never, in my experience, meant anything good.
"What was that?"
"...Huh? Nani?"
"Don't play dumb. What's the deal with you and that kid?"
What was the deal with me and Little Hana? I didn't even have to think about it. I answered honestly.
"We're next-door neighbors?"
"That's it?"
"Uh... is there supposed to be more?"
"No, that's weird! Who calls the girl next door Mama?!"
That...
People could call someone that, couldn't they?
Or maybe not?
Even allowing for the fact that I'd originally been a man and still didn't know much about how women's world worked, yeah—that was pretty weird. Only then did I understand why Sea had been wearing that complicated look the whole time. I'd thought she was just shocked, wondering if being called Auntie made her look old.
As for me, the word Mama hadn't bothered me at all. It hadn't even occurred to me that it might be a problem.
"Come on. She's still a little kid. She can call me that~"
"That's a completely different thing! If anything, the fact that she's a kid makes it more dangerous. What do you think other people are going to assume if they hear that?"
"Uh... I don't think they'd take it badly."
The conversation refused to go the way she wanted, and Sea looked like she was about to burst.
"Of course they wouldn't take it badly! They'd see a picture-perfect mother and daughter!"
"...They would?"
"If you go around like that outside, people are obviously going to get the wrong idea! They'll think you already got married and you're a mom with a kid."
Truth be told, the kindergarten already had me pegged as Little Hana's mother. Her stepmom, no less—the kind with a messy family history.
If I brought that up, I was definitely getting yelled at.
So I'd just keep it to myself. Yeah. This wasn't lying to Sea. I was simply not mentioning a fact. That was fine, right?
...Probably?
"Oppa. I'm not saying that kid would do anything bad with it. That's not the point. I just think you're being way too careless right now."
"...Yeah."
"I'm not telling you to panic and shake with anxiety like you did right after you changed. Living the way you do now is obviously better than that. ...I just mean you need to be a little more careful."
Sea's lecturing came from worry. And she wasn't talking nonsense, either. Lately I'd been getting close to new people far more easily than I used to. It wasn't just Master and Little Hana next door—my social range was climbing, no question. That was a good thing, but it was also true that I needed to be careful to a point. The world wasn't made of good people only. And I, unlike everyone else, was in a special situation, which meant I had to be even more careful. If, by some chance, my original identity ever came out...
The everyday life I was enjoying now might never come back.
"...Why the long face. Don't take it so hard. I'm just saying be careful. You know what I mean, right?"
"Hai..."
"Anyway, doesn't that kid's parent say anything? If I were the mom, I think I'd feel a little... complicated about it."
Ah. Right. Sea didn't know any of that.
I gave her the short version of Little Hana's family situation.
"Nashi-chan lives with just her dad."
"Ah... um..."
Maybe I shouldn't have said that.
The mood didn't just turn cold—it froze solid. Sea had probably been trying to change the subject and lighten things up, and answering her might have been a mistake. But ignoring the question would've been weird too.
Neither of us could find anything to say, and the awkwardness stretched on for a while.
Ding-dong.
"Delivery!"
If the assorted sushi platter hadn't arrived at exactly that moment, I didn't even want to imagine how long that cold front would have lasted. Fortunately, delicious sushi thawed the two of us—brother and sister, no, sisters?—anyway, it loosened the atmosphere, and we snapped back to our usual selves in dramatic fashion and finally sat down to a good dinner.
"Sushi oishii!"
The next morning.
I woke up and still couldn't get my body off the bed.
Roll, roll.
There was no special reason. I just couldn't be bothered. Even with a new body, it seemed I was never going to become a morning person. I wanted to sleep more so badly it hurt, but sleep itself wouldn't come, so I just stayed glued to the mattress, killing time.
Wasting time like this felt like a shame, though, so I figured I might as well do something. With that thought, I opened the Information Window.
It hadn't even been that long since the TS, and I was already so used to the window that it would have felt wrong if it disappeared. Among the things I usually didn't pay much attention to, I checked the duration.
Thanks to steadily clearing quests, it had grown by about twenty days since I'd first looked at it. Roughly speaking, the duration I'd earned from quests was coming up on a month.
I didn't actually know what that Transformation Duration meant, not precisely. But it sat dead center in the Information Window like it owned the place, so it had to be important. The natural guess was that it was how long the TS would last. Being curious didn't help—the window wouldn't tell me. And I didn't have the courage to burn the whole duration down and find out for myself, either.
In a situation like this, the best move was still what I was already doing: clear quests, stretch the duration. In other words, maintaining the status quo was the safe play.
Ka-tok!
A KakaoTalk message landed in the middle of that. It was my manager. What could she want at this hour? As the number of stream days had gone up and I'd started settling in, she almost never messaged me except right after a broadcast. I was still nothing but a tiny newbie streamer, of course, but still.
Aha.
It was definitely a topic I needed to start thinking about. What was a streamer's main source of income? Subs? Ads? Donations? Those were important revenue streams, no question. But if you were aiming for the very top, YouTube had to come with you. The reason was simple: Twitch and YouTube weren't even in the same weight class.
Even the big names didn't all vacuum money off YouTube, of course. Every streamer had a different flavor—some were built for live broadcasts, others for YouTube highlights. But even allowing for all of that, people generally put the revenue split between YouTube and Twitch at seven to three. YouTube was a hugely, hugely important source of income. On top of that, YouTube's algorithm could snatch up even a nobody overnight. If the video was good, you could succeed regardless of how famous you already were. That was one of its biggest features.
Lined up like that, it sounded like the perfect choice. The reality was that the downsides were just as impossible to ignore as the upsides. The biggest one was the early cost. Unlike a live stream, YouTube needed a baseline of quality. A live broadcast could start from nothing if you had a decent PC and a fun game; YouTube almost required clean editing and a thumbnail that could actually stop a thumb. Editing, especially, was a field where skill gaps were painfully obvious. Hand it to someone good and the quality of the video shot straight up—and the bill climbed right along with it. In other words, early YouTube was a hippo that swallowed money. You could pour every won you made from streaming into it and still struggle to keep a channel running.
And the second problem? You could spend all that money and still have no guarantee of success. As the saying went, it was seventy percent luck. You could edit well and make a fun video and still never take off if fortune wasn't on your side. Keep at it without giving up and maybe the algorithm would pick you someday—but most people broke first, on cost or time or sheer will, and quit YouTube before that day ever came. So YouTube looked like an easy shortcut to success, and in practice it was a brutal jungle where the weak didn't survive.
"Or so I've been told."
All of that had come from my manager. A hidden master who'd actually made it out of that jungle, I supposed.
That was right. I was holding a cheat code that could keep me alive in that brutal jungle.
Namely, my manager! Lucia!
Someone who had been an editor for a massive operation with a million subscribers was helping me right now. For free! I couldn't call it anything but incredible luck.
It was a compliment, somehow, and it didn't feel good at all. Why was that?
Either way, I needed to find a Thumbnail Artist for the YouTube channel. And I only knew one illustrator.