Chapter 19

Retainers of the Night

-Where did two managers suddenly come from?

-What’s with OurHouseMaid and FamiliarStoneGolem

-When did you recruit them?

-You never said anything about this

Sure enough, the chat began exploding over the two managers who had suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

Is this the evil of parachute appointments-!

Though, aren’t stream managers always like that anyway? There are no definite objective criteria, so in the end, the streamer just picks whoever they like.

-Whatever, are they guys???

-Are they male or female, tell us that first

-Huff huff

-The chairmen are angry~

-Donations are disabled, what chairmen are you talking about

-Please refrain from facts that hurt

Male or female.

It is a question that always follows whenever a female streamer takes on a manager.

Especially if she brings in a male manager, the chatroom tends to turn upside down that very day.

What strange bastards.

It is not like they are going to date the streamer themselves, so I have no idea why they develop these parasocial-romance feelings, but anyway, it is a real phenomenon.

-Please tell me the manager isn’t a guy please tell me no please please please

-They say she got absolutely wrecked between two men

-Sis... my horns are about to break...

-Sis you’re really a virgin right?

These crazy bastards.

Just because I got two managers, what does virginity have to do with anything, and what do horns have to do with anything? What in the world do managers have to do with virginity?

But hardly any of these guys are actually serious.

The whole female-streamer-manager topic is just an everyday-level joke. The chat is on fire, but not many people are genuinely demanding answers. Everyone is just taking a jab.

In other words, WWE.

Of course, there may be lunatics among them who actually try to turn it into UFC-.

Hahaha. But I already have two managers now. Every last one of you is dead meat. You troll bastards!

Besides, I am not some Shin Yua, granddaughter of Shinil Group’s chairman. I am Lilith, a vampire who has lived for hundreds of years.

In that case, naturally-.

I should crush them elegantly.

“You should already know OurHouseMaid well. Her voice appeared on stream before, and again yesterday. Just as the name says, I have decided to make the maid of this household my manager..”

-Oh, don’t tell me...

-The person who called you Miss yesterday?

-Then she’s a woman

-That one I accept

-Then what the hell is FamiliarStoneGolem

There was no need to make excuses for the maid. Everyone had heard her at least once because of yesterday’s incident, so they let it pass on their own.

The problem was the other one.

The person hiding behind FamiliarStoneGolem was, of course, Shin Woojin.

I had never gone to a bathhouse with him or anything and personally checked his dick, but he was probably male. With about a 99.9999% probability.

In other words, if these bastards found that out, it would become a problem.

Biologically speaking, he is my older male cousin, so since he is family, it would be fine. But that was personal information, so I could not casually reveal it.

Then all I had to do was erase the concept of gender itself!

Of course, I absolutely did not mean I was about to run over to Woojin’s house and hold a dick-cutting ceremony. I do not even know where his house is.

There are so many relatives’ houses in this clan village that I would probably end up at the wrong one if I tried.

“FamiliarStoneGolem is not human.”

-What do you mean not human damn

-She’s doing the concept again lol

“It is a familiar commanded by this princess. Asking a mere lump of stone whether it is male or female is no different from asking a boulder its blood type.”

-Boulder blood type hahahaha

-Now that I hear it, she’s right

-It’s a rock so no gender, accepted

-You crazy bastards, how does that make any sense

Yes. Just believe it like that.

It is not human, but a lump of stone. My household familiar is a lump of stone, and the maid is simply a maid. Something like Shinil Group does not exist anywhere in this setting.

Once the manager issue was more or less settled, the topic moved on to last night’s sleepy-stream incident.

-What happened yesterday?

-But weren’t you actually dozing off yesterday?

-You literally fell asleep with the stream on lol

I knew this would happen, so I had prepared a script in advance.

A response plan created by putting together the brains of Woojin, Ms. Sejin, and me, three people in total.

My IQ 150, Ms. Sejin’s IQ 100, Woojin’s IQ 70, for a total of 320!

“Hmph. You foolish subjects. Your eyes and ears might as well be knotholes. How could you look at that and think this princess was dozing?”

-???

-Anyone could tell you were actually asleep

-For real, wasn’t that genuinely happening?

“What happened yesterday was a performance filled with this princess’s profound intent. I did so in order to personally show you the true retainers of the night. How is that? Thanks to it, was I not able to introduce the maid and familiar who serve this princess?”

-Anyone could tell you fell asleep lol

-Look at her insist on it lol

-The level of post-hoc interpretation

-I keep telling you, this sis is top-tier when it comes to staying in character

Right. If I insist hard enough, I win.

In this industry, if you keep insisting on something, it eventually becomes part of the concept.

And that rainbow-haired old maid called Paint Addiction or whatever had said something similar too.

That with contemporary art that ordinary people find difficult to understand, the important thing is shamelessly pushing the concept and idea itself.

Anyone can punch a hole in a large canvas-.

But very few people can take it out into the world and insist that it is a work of art.

In the end, contemporary artists are the people who can put their ideas out into the world through sheer nerve and shamelessness, then hold their ground.

After catching my breath like that and glancing toward the corner of the screen, only then did the viewer count catch my eye.

1,052 viewers.

“One thousand?”

My eyes had grown accustomed to three digits for so long that it took a moment to process four.

I am a streamer too, so it would be a lie to say I did not feel good.

A thousand people are watching me? Wouldn’t someone be strange if that did not excite them?

Of course, from the perspective of people with stage fright or something like that, maybe I would be the strange one instead.

There is not even any special content. It is just a stream where I chat a little and then play random games, yet a thousand people?

On top of that, I have not revealed my face or body, and even I have no idea why anyone watches a stream like this, yet so many people are watching.

You really can never know how the world works.

But that good feeling did not last very long.

Tempted by the number one thousand, I took a closer look at the chat-.

About one third were people who had come to watch the stream, and the rest were people who had come to look at a sleeping woman and stayed. Of the latter group, maybe about half were at least normal.

-How old are you?

-Get rid of that shitty model and show your face

-If you’re hiding behind a mask, it’s obvious what you look like

-Do you have a boyfriend? Oppa will treat you better

-You want attention with this kind of crap?

I could let that much slide.

The problem was what came below.

The monsters of the abyss that no female streamer can avoid one hundred percent no matter what she does.

Filthy things I could barely even bring myself to read began slowly poking their heads out.

So it finally came.

I had expected it when I saw the number one thousand earlier. When there are more people, there are naturally more lunatics too.

Is this what they call the law of large numbers?

Normally, I would have dealt with them personally-.

But today was different.

Because now I had household retainers who moved like my own hands and feet(?).

Even though I did not lift a single finger, the people crossing the line in chat began disappearing one by one.

-FamiliarStoneGolem has forcibly removed ***.

-FamiliarStoneGolem has forcibly removed ***.

-FamiliarStoneGolem has forcibly removed ***.

The people spewing the filthiest comments were being cut down almost in real time. Not a trace of hesitation in those hands.

Kya! As expected, he is fast. I believed in you, damn it! Is this the dynamic vision of a baseball player?!

He said he had no practice today and came home early, and instead of batting balls, he was coolly knocking the heads off trash.

Maybe because he is YOUNG and MZ, his computer skills are damn impressive.

The problem was my other retainer.

-OurHouseMaid has forcibly removed ***.

-Maid, that person just said hello

-Why are you deleting a good viewer

-The maid’s hands are kind of slow

-She made a mistake earlier too

-But a clumsy maid is kinda hot, oh my

-Based taste, agreed

Sure enough. Ms. Sejin was cutting down the wrong people. She had said she had learned everything properly from Woojin beforehand, but actual practice seemed to be another matter.

Slow hands are one thing, but Ms. Sejin, you cannot cut down perfectly normal viewers.

As expected of a thirty-nine-year-old. Or did she say she turned forty after her birthday? She is even older than I was in my previous life. No matter how capable you were in your prime, getting old is no good. Tsk tsk tsk.

I watched nervously, wondering what other accident she might cause-.

-OurHouseMaid has forcibly removed ***.

Oh.

This time she got the right one.

-Huh, that one was accurate

-Did the maid awaken?

-She’s getting the hang of it lol

She had fumbled around at first, but after missing a few times, it seemed she was slowly getting a feel for it. Even if she was slow, she managed eventually.

But one guy was unusually persistent.

No matter how many times they banned him, he kept crawling back with a changed username and spewing the exact same things.

I always wondered about this when watching other people’s streams too, but how do these bastards do that? Do they prepare several accounts in advance?

Why do they put so much effort into something that gives them absolutely no benefit?

-Oh, that guy from earlier is back

-Is he a cockroach lol

-Good luck, managers

-FamiliarStoneGolem has forcibly removed ***.

-OurHouseMaid has forcibly removed ***.

But with my two loyal retainers smacking him down every single time he came in, even that persistent bastard eventually vanished without a trace.

-Wow, coordinated operation lol

-Stone Golem and Maid combo is good

-Princess is blessed with managers

Blessed with managers. That is not wrong.

Woojin handles everything on his own without even being told, and Ms. Sejin, despite being computer illiterate, keeps going through sheer grit and stubbornness.

I cannot understand why this guy is showing perseverance in such a pointless place either-.

And I do not know why Ms. Sejin or Woojin are both working so hard at something that is not even their business.

The lump of stone is quick and nimble despite betraying his name, while the maid plods along steadily.

In the meantime, the viewer count had already fallen into the seven hundreds. It was not that all three hundred people were degenerates who only came to sexually harass me. Since I was not doing any special content, people naturally filtered out.

A thousand viewers or whatever, now that the lunatics had decreased, I finally felt like I could breathe.

Thinking about it, I had been doing everything alone until now.

Maintaining the concept while chatting, playing games, cutting down people who crossed the line. Even ten hands would barely have been enough.

No, would ten hands actually be enough?

But now my retainers take care of the dirty work on their own, so this princess merely has to stream elegantly.

Until now, this stream had been a secret I carried entirely by myself. I was always nervously worrying that the people around me might find out.

But now, knowing that somewhere beyond the screen there were two people watching the chatroom together with me made me feel strangely reassured.

Well, it is not like I plan to thank them. This is simply the natural duty retainers are supposed to fulfill!

“Hmm. The retainers of this princess are rather capable.”

-Retainers lol

-I’m watching to see how long she keeps this concept up

-For real, this sis seems ready to die for the concept

— — —

“Well, damn.”

Yoon Dohyun stared at his monitor with a cup of cold instant noodles sitting beside him.

The vampire princess on-screen was still brazenly going on about lumps of stone and coffins.

“This is ridiculous.”

His own account had been permanently banned, so he was watching the stream on a newly created alternate account.

Honestly, he sometimes wondered whether he really needed to go through this much trouble just to monitor her.

Not long ago, Yoon Dohyun had become fixated on a clip of a vampire groaning from muscle pain, begged his superiors until he got approval to send a scouting message, and then got permanently banned on the spot.

Getting rejected by a rookie was something that could easily happen, but this was the first time he had been cut off so absurdly, so his pride had been quietly bruised.

But this damn vampire princess had something about her that pulled people in. Enough that even after getting burned once, he could not lose interest.

“She got two managers overnight? Are you telling me that dozing off really was part of the concept?”

Until yesterday, had it not been a stream where she did everything alone? Yet after the clip of her nodding off spread around, she surpassed one thousand viewers in a single day.

Looking only at the result, the picture was far too neat.

Managers appeared at exactly the moment she became a hot topic, then people flooded in.

Calling all of this coincidence seemed a little...

“Skill, or luck.”

Of course, he knew it was a bubble. Half of those thousand people were passersby who had come for gossip, and before long, that number would fall as though it had been a lie. There was no way Yoon Dohyun, now in his third year, would fail to understand that basic behavior.

The problem was not that.

“Who is she affiliated with?”

Two managers handling chat. Their coordination was so smooth that it did not look like their first time. So he wondered whether some agency had attached itself to her-.

But when he thought that and looked over the screen again, things did not add up.

Donations were still disabled even though it had already been two months since she started streaming. In other words, no matter what she did, she could not receive even a single coin in support.

And what about NewTube? Search Lilith, vampire princess, or any variation of the term, and there was not a single channel.

Even the clips were all being passed around by viewers on their own. She had uploaded none herself.

Advertisements were the same. Not a single common banner, not one sponsorship in sight.

“Does this make any sense?”

If an agency were involved, the first thing it would do was monetize. No, to begin with, it made no sense for an agency to attach itself to a stream with no profitability. It would only lose money.

And yet this stream had every possible route for money completely blocked.

She made no money for someone who seemed like a professional, but the operation was far too smooth for an ordinary individual doing it purely as a hobby.

No matter which category he tried to force her into, something did not fit.

Yoon Dohyun looked down at his bloated cup noodles.

Here he was, staying up all night searching for rookies while eating just one of these.

Meanwhile, over there, she had gathered a thousand people and still showed no interest in getting paid.

She did not seem desperate for money, nor did she look eager to grow the channel at any cost.

Any ordinary rookie would struggle desperately to hold onto even one more person while they had the luck of drawing a crowd. But that princess seemed completely unconcerned whether a thousand people watched her or not, simply proceeding at her own pace.

That was the strangest part of all.

“I really can’t figure her out.”