Either way, whatever… He’d always been the type people called “too good-looking to waste,” uninterested in dating, rarely caring about others, drifting along his own my-way path.
Watching that airy-headed guy now, eyes shining and fretting like crazy, was pretty entertaining.
In-game he was used to everyone accommodating him, and yet here he was, in a tizzy trying to look good for just one person. It was as fun as watching a kid brother struggle.
So while the whole guild’s attention drifted from today’s foregone victory to whether Hae-sal’s long-dreamed “Recruit Ignis” grand operation would go smoothly, the star of that curiosity was sprawled on his bed, tormented by serious worry.
‘I can’t sleep…’
It was a real problem.
Maybe it was because he hadn’t even advanced class, stopped at an awkward level, and just ran around before logging off… the unfinished feeling lingered.
Maybe I should’ve at least hit level 10 before quitting. No, if I’d done that, I might’ve blown past the drowsy window and stayed up wide-eyed until two.
But I’m tossing and turning now anyway, aren’t I?
Feeling it would be unfair to let it end like this, he thought about doing something, anything, with his wide-awake mind, but it was already too late.
What time is it…?
Reaching out beside the bed, Yeonjun lit up his phone: 1:11.
They say if you happen to see a time with matching digits, it means someone who likes you is thinking of you… He swatted away the grade-school joke that popped up and let out a long yawn.
Even if sleep wouldn’t come, he had to sleep now. A good office worker goes to bed at this hour.
If he didn’t want to wake up cursing the world at the office tomorrow, he had to sleep. He tossed again and pulled the covers over his head.
Holding his breath and closing his eyes only let all kinds of unwanted thoughts seep in.
You’re not as unhappy as you think. Your paycheck comes regularly, your life is stable, and your father has recovered enough to move about on his own. Your sister’s doing well with her husband; even if not everything is back where it was, there’s no need to be afraid anymore.
Every time he tried to soothe himself, he felt suffocated. But what if his father collapsed again?
What if he fell for some shady proposal and made a mess chasing a business scheme?
Having been hurled from the brightest time of his life into a brutal world of survival, everything scared him and made him cautious.
Unlike the twenty-year-old who’d been sure of anything, the thirty-one-year-old Yeonjun was a coward.
Change was frightening. He just wanted to keep drifting along without a ripple. But he knew that to get out of his exile, he couldn’t settle in.
He had to thrash his way out. How? With questions chasing their own tails, he closed his eyes.
The next morning. Having tossed and turned until nearly two without sleeping, Yeonjun forced his heavy eyelids open and headed to work.
I don’t want to go… but I have to. Still don’t want to go. But if I don’t, next month’s paycheck…
After a bout between his lazy self and his responsible office-worker self, the latter won yet again.
I hate it, but I’ve gotta go—it’s payday.
If he could just skip out the morning, the payroll email would trickle in a bit after lunch. Time to be reminded how precious a steady income is. He had to go. He dragged himself to his desk, and about five minutes later Mijin came bustling in, opening the door.
“Ugh, what a morning.”
Seeing her lugging a handkerchief, a lunch box, and who knew what else, it looked like her kid had overslept.
“Okay, safe! Good morning, Yeonjun!”
Beaming at the clock barely ticking over to 8:58, Team Lead An smiled brightly.
Being able to smile this big even in such an obvious backwater was a good sign, he supposed.
Nodding weakly, Yeonjun logged into the server management page. Yesterday’s peak concurrent user count (one of the core indicators of a game’s activity and success) was, as always, in the low three digits.
[135]
Figures…
The current number online was even more dismal.
[21]
Of course. How many people would be playing a past-its-prime racing game at this busy time of day? It usually topped 50 around 4 p.m. when the elementary kids got out of school and peaked around 9 p.m. at about 100–150.
When a game has so few people on, GMs sometimes queue into matches pretending to be players so matchmaking can happen but because the game had a solo-play mode, there was no need.
And he didn’t want to anyway. It wasn’t like Yeonjun had no fond memories of enjoying Snowy Racing as a kid, but…
Having been slammed from a thriving department into exile, there was no way he felt like pouring his heart into the work. He just spun the same hamster wheel every day and handled only his assigned tasks.
Then, because he couldn’t bring himself to refuse those breezy, thoughtless “you don’t have anything to do anyway” support requests, he’d get dragged off. That was his routine.
Not knowing where requests might pop up in the afternoon, he decided to finish everything due today in the morning. The recurring seasonal events had all been wrapped up the previous week, so there wasn’t much to do just now.
The game was so old there was nothing more to tweak. “Maintenance” meant patching over the kinds of issues that crop up inside a long-simmering title. The experience of grinding in the toughest department right after joining the company felt utterly pointless now.
Let’s see what I need to check today…
Looking over the note he’d left before clocking out yesterday, he saw “AllTies streaming channel — check time announcement,” clicked the bookmarked link, and landed on a channel plastered with all manner of shoddy promo images. About 80,000 subscribers.
Saturday at six, was it? Judging by the sub count and the viewership on the last live, the real-time numbers wouldn’t swing much from the weekend average.
Doesn’t look like I need to take any special measures.
Eighty thousand was manageable. On those rare days when half-million or million-sub streamers did “Beating a Nostalgia Game!” streams of Snowy Racing, the server would get swamped beyond what it could handle.
People who normally scoffed “Isn’t this the kind of game only little kids play?” and paid it no mind would suddenly storm some mom-and-pop shop of a server and gripe: Why can’t I connect? Why is the server soft as tofu? There was no good answer to give.
Why was the game so rickety? If he could reveal that the game’s annual revenue ranked dead last across all departments, that would answer every question… but that was confidential, unknown to anyone outside.
The team essentially existed in the red on principle, running things out of gratitude and affection for the users. How were they supposed to add servers? People needed to be realistic. Swallowing truths he couldn’t disclose, Yeonjun sighed.
On days when a truly massive streamer nuked the server, the flood of CS tickets meant it fell entirely to him to Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V soulless responses. It was a relief that this time likely wouldn’t be that bad.
One might wonder how a GM could be so unmotivated and indifferent when his game was getting some attention and users were logging in… but these temporary spikes didn’t help retention.
Aside from the hundred-odd grade-schoolers and a few adults who logged in purely out of habit every day, most people popped in for a week of childhood nostalgia and then left for a shinier, more fun newer game.
He briefly thought of the Yana character who’d gotten under his skin last night. Same deal there, surely. Just a nostalgic drop-in—Wow, is that Ignis? Neat!—a curiosity that would fizzle once they realized he wasn’t what he used to be.
Content evolves with time, and it’s been ages since flashier, more stimulating spectacles began stealing hearts. Some washed-up “named” from back then? Maybe he’d been a legend ten years ago, but now nobody cares who he is.
Wanting certainty, he searched his own ID and found a “Who is that?” thread from around 2019 that hadn’t gotten a single reply.
See? Told you. People might pay lip service—“childhood hero,” “so cool”—and show a flicker of interest in an old-generation name, but in the end, he was someone from an era that had already passed. Even though he was barely past thirty, he was too tired to deny that the brightest time in his life was over.
Yeonjun wanted nothing. His only goal was for life to keep flowing along calmly, just like this.
“Yeonjun, wanna go get lunch?”
As he was tidying up event data and confirming that today’s few dozen users were playing safely as usual, Team Lead An called over the desk.
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