Chapter 163
It was just after I finished the stream and returned to the private room.
To respect Adella’s privacy, I knocked on the door two or three times.
Adella came running over with what looked like an extremely deep frown and hoisted me into the air.
“What are you doing? My armpits are ticklish, so could you put me down?”
“Hey! NoName unnie! Why are you only getting here now!”
“Hey?”
“Let’s go to an amusement park together!”
“What, you want to go to an amusement park? Now? At this hour?”
“Yeah!”
Adella gently set me back on the floor, then started up the projector.
Wearing a pair of glasses from who knew where, she began a grand presentation with a slender pointer in hand.
[Reasons We Have to Go to Tokyo Desireland VR World Right Now!]
“Go ahead. I won’t stop you.”
“Noooo! Listen to me all the way to the end.”
“Fine.”
If she used a Bonobono-template PowerPoint on a rainbow-colored background, it would only make me want to take back my permission.
That was why I gave her permission as quickly as possible.
Anyway, I quietly watched Adella explain everything with great enthusiasm and reached a conclusion.
“So, you want to go out and watch the fireworks tonight?”
“Apparently, it’s a special show that only happens once a year. They’re even syncing the real-world event directly into this world! Don’t you want to go?”
“What’s the difference between syncing it and just creating it in virtual reality?”
“There’s not really any difference... Ah, seriously, you have no sense of romance, unnie! No romance!”
Adella took off her glasses again and set them on the desk. Looking at them again, I realized they didn’t even have lenses.
“So you’ll go with me, right?”
“Huh?”
“Don’t tell me you listened this far without intending to come along.”
“I get it. You can’t go to another country’s server because of the national firewall, can you?”
So that was why the kid who usually entertained herself just fine had suddenly become so clingy today.
“Tch! This is why perceptive brats are such a pain...!”
“Is that how someone asking for a favor is supposed to act?”
“Please, Onee-sama! I really, really want to go to Japan!”
For one thing, I had Professor Cheon, a sturdy connection whose status had been certified by the nation, as a member of my family, so there was no protocol-related problem with my accessing the Japanese server.
But taking Adella along required at least two guardians. Besides me, was there anyone else with permission to access the Japanese server?
I slowly looked through my sparse friends list.
I had never once heard that Sia unnie had played League on another server.
The other clan members were probably the same.
Kariri suddenly changed from offline to online.
Someone with a suspiciously large number of Japanese viewers might work.
* * *
Yoonseul was aghast when she heard that they were leaving for the Japanese server right away.
“I have time... W-wait, if that’s the case, I’ll quickly change my avatar and come back...!”
“No! The world’s about to hit 50,000 people. We have to hurry!”
Adella kept hurrying her along.
But Yoonseul was in an unbearably anxious state.
Her body right now was not Kariri’s.
It was short, painfully thin, and had nothing that could be called a particular charm.
“What’s wrong with that?”
Name asked back as if she couldn’t understand.
“We’re not streaming. We’re just going to have fun, aren’t we? Doesn’t it feel uncomfortable to stay in another body for so long?”
A virtual-reality avatar was not an all-purpose solution.
The human brain always sought to maintain homeostasis.
In a VR world, users could create all kinds of avatars, but the bodily dissonance caused by staying connected for a long time inevitably affected the user in one way or another.
Name pointed that out as she tugged at Yoonseul’s sleeve.
“If we don’t take Adella today, she’ll complain about it all day, so let’s hurry. And you’re as pretty as an idol, too. What are you worried about?”
“Hurry! It’s 49,500 people now!”
Adella bounced around so much that, in the end, she took both of them by the hand and led them out into VR SPACE herself.
[VR - Tokyo Desireland 20:00 ~ 22:00 (49819/50000)]
[IEEE 903.18: Approved.]
[Waiting...]
“Good grief, why is the line so long!”
Just as Adella lamented, even this VR world had a long line waiting to enter.
On other servers, you normally dropped into the middle of the world as soon as you entered.
But not here.
If you were wondering why this VR world did not verify identities digitally and instead had security guards check each person individually, the answer was remarkably simple.
Because it was Japan. Don’t ask questions, don’t argue—it was Japan.
Name was still relieved that they had made it among the 50,000.
Otherwise, she would have had to deal with Adella complaining for hours that they had broken their promise by not showing her around outside on the day they went to Korea University.
Meanwhile, unable to hide her nervousness, Yoonseul kept biting her thumbnail.
When the crunching sound reached Adella’s ears, she asked irritably,
“Hey, seriously, why have you been acting like this since earlier? What are you so anxious about?”
“Ah... It’s just...”
“What’s wrong, unnie? Are you hurt?”
Name, too, found Yoonseul’s appearance completely unlike her usual self puzzling.
Didn’t she seem like an entirely different person?
“They might recognize me... I can’t use this face...”
Her gaze wavered anxiously.
Adella and Name looked at each other, then tilted their heads in confusion.
“B-because everyone thinks I’m the one who made Chena unnie die...”
“Chena?”
Adella had never heard of her, but Name had.
A Korean singer who had ended her life after suffering from depression the previous year... Name racked her brain over where else she had heard the name, then remembered it from Kariri’s TriWiki entry.
[Regarding the Idol Chena Death Incident]
“It doesn’t look like anyone here knows you.”
“No, they will. They definitely will...”
Whenever news from around the world reported Chena’s death, Yoonseul’s own photograph was always splashed across the screen.
The video that Yoonseul and Chena had streamed briefly before entering their capsules was still circulating illegally even now.
More than anything, there were simply too many people.
Without Kariri’s body to shield her from the crowd, Yoonseul found the air here suffocating.
What if they recognized her? There were plenty of people here from all over the world, not just Japan.
If hundreds of millions of people knew Chena, then half the people here must have seen Yoonseul’s face at least once in the news...
And if even one of them was a Chena fan, what face could she possibly show them?
Yoonseul could find no answer at all.
Adella’s shrill voice was what pulled her out of her thoughts.
“Hey, look. Look over here.”
Suddenly, Adella made the crouching Yoonseul stand up.
“Your name is Seol Yoonseul?”
A blue window had appeared in front of Adella.
She entered ‘Adella’ and ‘Seol Yoonseul’ as separate search terms.
[Generating search volume data]
“Ah...”
“You’re surprisingly full of yourself, you know?”
Adella swiped the screen interface with her hand and passed it to Yoonseul.
Yoonseul stared blankly at the screen.
[Search volume: Adella(83,103,380)
Seol Yoonseul(20,494)]
“Eighty-three million? No, eighty million? Eighty million people searched for me? Compared to that, you only have twenty thousand?”
Adella swished her tail from side to side and spoke smugly.
“I don’t know what you’re so confident about, but nobody here knows you. What, do you think you’re a star or something?”
“Ah...”
Yoonseul felt as if she had been struck in the head with a hammer.
“Compared to that, I really am a star, heh.”
Adella lightly brushed her nose.
“Why the sudden self-praise after things were going so well?”
“When I say it, you’re supposed to just agree! Would it kill you?”
“Apologize to Kariri unnie right now.”
“Tsk, you call this tiny brat ‘unnie’ every single time, so why do you keep insisting I call you ‘unnie’...? This world has the most messed-up family tree!”
While Name and Adella bickered, passersby approached and asked,
“Um... excuse me...”
“Hm?”
“Are you really Adella? Wow, you are! Amazing!”
“Hehe. Want an autograph?”
“Really? Wow! I absolutely have to buy a Lotto 7 ticket today!”
“Me too, me too, Lady Adella!”
The crowd began surging around the group of three girls in an instant, set off by the requests from the two men wearing white headbands.
“She really is! A WoA NPC showed up!”
“She looks completely human!”
“Adella, you’re so pretty! So give me an autograph too!”
“Hold on, you guys, line up properly!”
The line split in two in an instant.
One was the line to enter Desireland. The other was a long line of people waiting to get Adella’s autograph.
“Hey, look, see? I told you this is how I live! Name unnie should see this too, honestly... Hey, once you get inside the Land, I won’t sign anything, so split off from this line yourselves!”
Adella kept moving her hands without pause, but she couldn’t hide how proud she felt.
Yoonseul looked somewhat dazed by the ridiculous spectacle that seemed straight out of a comedy show.
“Our Adella’s kind of a law unto herself, huh?”
Name clasped her hand tightly.
It was far too small a hand to offer any real sense of reassurance.
“I don’t know exactly what you went through before as Kariri. No, even if I did, I probably couldn’t fully understand how you feel.”
Humans were fundamentally indifferent to other people.
Yuna’s case alone was enough to provide an easy example.
In the academy’s elementary division, most of the students had to be rich.
That was because, at that age, early education had a far greater influence than innate talent.
Even in those circumstances, not a single student knew that Yuna was receiving basic-livelihood assistance.
If every student had shown her even a little interest, Yuna might not have gone so far astray.
Above all, NoName had been forced to learn that fact through seven years of experience.
Could anyone blame people who thought that someone who had played League for 50,000 hours over seven years ought to be famous?
NoName herself had no right to blame them, since she didn’t know who had played WoA and Resonance the most, either.
“People surprisingly don’t pay much attention to others, but you have people around you who understand your situation this well, don’t you? Isn’t that right? I think that’s enough. You haven’t done anything wrong.”
In NoName’s case, it was Cheon Semin; in Kariri’s, it was her younger brother, Seol Taeyang.
“Even celebrities who were pretty famous in the past reportedly find plenty of people who don’t recognize them when they go out on the street. So I hope you won’t worry so much about other people’s eyes.”
NoName skimmed through Kariri’s controversy entries,
and couldn’t find anything in any of them that she had done seriously wrong.
If anything, she even wondered whether the public opinion that Kariri was always getting caught up in one incident after another was branding her even more.
[The Desireland 7Wish Festival will begin shortly. Please enter Main Street in an orderly fashion according to the instructions of our guides.]
“Shall we go watch the fireworks? Adella, are you done yet?”
“Wait, unnie! Hey, omae! You have to sign here before you go, just like you promised! Can’t you see the words, ‘Adella is not an artificial intelligence’? Where do you think you’re taking autographs without even thinking, you damn Japs!”
“Let’s leave her behind.”
“Ah... heehee, okay...!”
“You can’t actually do that, you two! Heeeeeey!”