As soon as Tan Ze got back, he took a shower, washed his hair, threw on a short-sleeved t-shirt, and sat down at his desk to calibrate his streaming equipment.
It wasn’t even eleven o’clock yet when he launched his livestream room. Because he started early, the initial influx of viewers was relatively sparse.
Sitting in silence, Tan Ze adjusted his gear. Deciding to stream via PC this time, he fine-tuned the camera angle before moving his mouse to open up an online multiplayer game he frequently played.
Tan Ze rarely played video games on stream, and his skills were painfully average; every time he streamed a gaming session, viewers inevitably flooded the chat to tell him how terrible he was.
Then again, he wasn’t a professional gaming streamer anyway. He only played when he was in a foul mood, imagining every single enemy on screen as either Liang Xubai or Liang Xuying and hacking away at them with ruthless efficiency. After playing for nearly an hour, he finally let out a long breath as the stifling pressure in his chest dissipated.
Quitting the game, Tan Ze muttered a low curse under his breath.
Body and mind, finally unburdened.
[Just by looking at his expression, he looks ridiculously satisfied. Tsundere angry-edition Flossy Yanbei.]
[Why don’t you show us your match stats…?]
Scanning the screen, Tan Ze watched the gloomy cloud lift from his face, replaced by a bright, beaming smile as he leaned into the camera lens. “Sorry everyone, I was in a bit of a bad mood today, so I went live early to play some games and stream some music. We’ll do the usual routine in a bit, okay?”
Using the PC setup made the stream feel larger and sharper; the resolution was crisp enough to pick out the fine fuzz on Tan Ze’s cheeks. He tweaked his filter parameters and pulled up his regular music playlist.
“Why was I in a bad mood? Just some personal business—ran into an arrogant jerk, but I’m much better now,” Tan Ze smiled, leaning back into his gaming chair to answer.
“Why is my hair tied up… because I just washed and blow-dried it, and it’s too hot.”
At the mention of his hair, Tan Ze instinctively brushed his fingers over the ends. “Someone tried to make me cut my hair again today, but I think long hair suits me just fine.”
After briefly brushing past the topic of his hair, Tan Ze let it go, leisurely chatting with the chat room before taking the initiative to launch a couple of PK battles.
Random matching mostly paired him with independent streamers who had small viewer counts; it wasn’t quite prime-time peak hours on the streaming square yet, so Tan Ze traded a mix of wins and losses with fairly modest scores.
By the time his turn with Xu Xiu came around, the clock had struck midnight. Xu Xiu announced they were playing a wishlist challenge that night: setting up identical “livestream gift wishlist menus,” with a ten-minute countdown to see whose board got cleared first.
This put Tan Ze at a massive disadvantage. The active fans in his chat generally sent smaller gifts, meaning his wishlist had to be broken down into multiple tiers across various price points, heavily testing the high-end spending power of his viewer base.
In other words, for streamers with an established fan base and dedicated whale sponsors, smaller gifts filled the bar easily, and pure point totals could be brute-forced through sheer volume. But if a wishlist item wasn’t fully lit up, it didn’t count as cleared.
And Tan Ze barely had any regular spenders to begin with, let alone whale sponsors.
Tan Ze gave a wry, bitter smile. “Let’s set the penalties first. What are we doing this time?”
“Let’s see who gets cleared the most. Three Carnivals, five Rockets, twenty Sports Cars or Airplanes, and a hundred Paper Cranes.”
Xu Xiu’s traffic had been phenomenal lately, bringing a massive wave of viewers to his room, and his stakes kept getting higher and his appetite larger. That night, he was wearing a pair of rimless glasses paired with short, softly curled hair, looking both trendy and playful.
Xu Xiu murmured in thought, “Let’s do a bottom-four elimination: first place penalizes fourth, second penalizes third.”
Making a gesture of acknowledgment, Tan Ze muted the other three participants in his own room. During the three-minute pre-match briefing, he stared in silence at the wishlist he had just configured, letting out a speechless, dry laugh.
“My goal today is just not to lose too ugly,” Tan Ze announced. “If push comes to shove later, I’ll just use a burner account to boost my own metrics. Sure, I’ll lose half to the platform cut, but at least I won’t humiliate myself, right?”
[You have zero ambition, streamer!]
[Other streamers aren’t playing for quantity counts, they’re playing for headcounts. Xu Xiu is already going easy on you.]
[How is that going easy? They’re all small streamers. I bet he just wants to rake in extra cash for himself.]
[Xu Xiu’s gonna do a dance later to farm followers.]
[Stop chatting about other streamers in here!]
[Flossy Yanbei, do a dance too! If you dance, I’ll drop two sports cars to hold your spot.]
[I’ll contribute paper cranes if you dance.]
“… The problem is I don’t know how to dance,” Tan Ze chuckled. “Guess I’ll learn on the spot then. Babies, you better keep your promises—don’t go breaking my heart, okay?”
“I’m feeling a bit fragile today.”
Switching to a short-video app on his phone, Tan Ze pulled up a tutorial video, sitting down to study the choreography step-by-step while periodically glancing back up at the chat.
“Yeah, we’ll still have sign-ups. This time the quota is a bit larger: top thirty on the leaderboard get sign-ups, top twenty get a good-night voice note, and top three get a private polaroid. Yes, they stack.”
With the three-minute briefing concluded, Xu Xiu officially kicked off the ten-minute PK.
Xu Xiu, Tie Cha, and Xiao Cai were all scrambling hard to pull in votes. Tie Cha was doing pull-ups right there on his stream, wearing a tight, muscle-baring tank top; Xiao Cai always approached PKs with a highly organized strategy, sharp-tongued and clear-headed; and Xu Xiu had already started dancing—rumor had it he planned to dance the entire ten minutes straight.
Feeling a bit awkward, Tan Ze stood up and stepped back a bit to give the camera a wider framing, putting on music and awkwardly dancing the choreography he had just learned.
The dances that blew up on short-video apps always looked deceptively simple, but pulling them off with any degree of style was another story entirely. Tan Ze watched himself on screen, executing the moves three times with absolute, unwavering conviction before he finally cracked up, hurried back, and slunk miserably back into his chair.
[Whose AI robot just broke out of the lab?]
[Flossy Yanbei, I genuinely can’t back you up on this one.]
[You really need to practice in your off-time, streamer.]
“I should just sing for you guys instead. My singing is actually decent—made it into the campus top ten back in my freshman year,” Tan Ze said, rubbing his nose guiltily. “What do you guys want to hear?”
Two sports car gift animations flashed across the screen, courtesy of the fans who had promised gifts if he danced.
[Holy crap, Xiao Cai’s score is exploding today.]
[Xiao Cai is about to catch up to Xu Xiu. First-class organizational skills.]
[I suggest the streamer take notes and steal his homework.]
Hearing this, Tan Ze switched screens to check the wishlist completion progress of the others. Unsurprisingly, his bar was the least cleared—pathetically empty, in fact.
Tan Ze: “Let’s just view this as participating for the fun of it, everyone. It’s fine, let’s just sing. Since we can’t beat them, let’s not waste our hard-earned money today anyway—we’re gonna have to do the punishment regardless.”
[The streamer bustles around working hard every single day doing PK streams, only to realize at the end of the month he makes less than standing outside shaking milk tea.]
[It’s not that little, he still makes a bit!]
[I’m gonna be a nurturing-type fan… Streamer, I swear I’m going to stick around until the day you win every single PK.]
[Forget it, I’m sending you a sports car.]
[Danger, danger, danger! Tie Cha is blowing up too!]
[Everybody rally, come on, don’t let this Flossy Yanbei lose too miserably.]
[Eighty percent of this chat room are just trolls for the comedy value, I can’t take this anymore—assisting with paper cranes!]
Tan Ze’s smile widened. A subtle, warm emotion slowly welled up from the depths of his chest, making his eyes sting slightly. “Why are you guys suddenly getting so inspirational? You’re seriously treating Flossy Yanbei like a real friend now, ready to fall on your swords for him… It’s fine, really. Thank you, everyone.”
“I’m going to sing now. Let’s do this one.”
He muttered to himself, nudging his mouse to play the track. The progressive drumbeat of the intro began to swell, and right at that moment, an inconspicuous message drifted across the sea of scrolling chat.
Black Dog: [I’m here.]
Tan Ze froze the second he saw those two words. His heartbeat skipped a beat right in time with the song’s drum progression. He had spent the past few days desperately wishing Black Dog would show up in his stream, and now that the dream had suddenly materialized, he didn’t quite know how to process it.
Those few seconds of distraction caused Tan Ze to miss his cue completely.
Immediately following that came a string of notification alerts that left him utterly dumbfounded.
[Black Dog sent 3x Carnivals in “Flossy Yanbei’s” livestream room!]
[Black Dog sent 5x Rockets in “Flossy Yanbei’s” livestream room!]
[Black Dog sent 20x Sports Cars in “Flossy Yanbei’s” livestream room!]
[Black Dog sent 100x Paper Cranes in “Flossy Yanbei’s” livestream room!]
Tan Ze: “…”
In an instant, every trace of sentimentality in his heart vanished cleanly into thin air. Tan Ze slowly dropped his jaw, absolute shock written plain across his face. He sat frozen, completely struck dumb and utterly silent.
As the song neared its climax, the chat box blurred into a high-speed frenzy. Gift special effects flashed one after another, and Black Dog’s skiing profile picture sat squarely at the very top of his leaderboard, marked as currently watching.
[!!!!!!!!!!]
[? Did I miss some insane plot twist, who is Black Dog?]
[When did the streamer marry into a chaebol family?]
[Wait a minute, the trajectory feels a bit off here. Weren’t we running a grassroots comeback script? How did this turn into a golden-finger cheat-code script?!]
[The Rise of the Brilliant Streamer has officially commenced.]
Tan Ze raised a hand to cover his mouth, feeling as though he had stepped onto an unreal cloud.
Having finished showering him with gifts, Black Dog’s spending level hit Level 35 right on the dot. He dropped a direct, golden banner notification that sailed straight across Tan Ze’s screen.
Black Dog: [Sing the song.]
Right up until he finished singing the chorus in an out-of-body daze, forced to wrap up as public chat resumed, Tan Ze remained in a daze. Xiao Cai and Tie Cha were completely mind-boggled; nobody could have imagined that Tan Ze—who had started with the slowest momentum and the smallest fanbase—had single-handedly cleared his entire wishlist.
And all funded by a single person.
The final rankings settled with Tan Ze in first, followed by Xiao Cai, Xu Xiu, and Tie Cha.
For his punishment, Tan Ze made Tie Cha flex his muscles while performing the exact same dance he had just done on stream, pinning it to the top of his main profile with Tan Ze’s avatar and account handle pasted in the top right corner. Xiao Cai penalized Xu Xiu by making him display his name on his homepage for traffic redirection.
The moment the match wrapped up, Xu Xiu announced he had another engagement to attend and promptly dissolved the room.
“Ge, I honestly didn’t think you’d come watch my stream today.” Looking at the still-online account, Tan Ze’s expression remained somewhat dazed, though the address on his lips rolled off with practiced familiarity. “When did you get here, Ge? You didn’t reply to my message earlier, I thought you weren’t coming…”
Black Dog: [Eleven o’clock.]
The exact time Tan Ze started his scheduled stream every day.
For a moment, Tan Ze didn’t quite know what to say. Black Dog operated almost like a robot—answering whenever spoken to, but maintaining absolute silence the rest of the time, never uttering a stray word.
“Ge, let me make you a moderator.” Tan Ze assigned Black Dog a moderator badge. “That way you won’t have to spend money on banner announcements.”
Black Dog: [No need.]
If a moderator used banner announcements, the sender’s username wouldn’t be displayed and the color would default to ordinary white. But these golden banner messages not only reflected high spending tiers, they also required real money top-ups, costing well over a dozen yuan per line.
Tan Ze smiled involuntarily. “It’s fine, Ge, let me set you up with one. It’ll make it easier for you to drop mod chats and talk to me anyway. You spent way too much today, I feel bad making you spend extra money just to chat with me.”
Black Dog: [Gold looks better.]