Content warnings:
Brain-checking station (✿╹◡╹)
1. The online and real-life portions are portrayed in a 1:1 ratio.
2. The amounts of money get pretty outrageous later on.
3. All the male leads are completely clean.
4. Every platform has different burner accounts, and there are lots of aliases.
5. Every type of livestreaming will make an appearance, though voice-chat rooms will get the most attention.
6. The heroine has multiple men on the go at once. Now that she has a tycoon system, sticking to a one-on-one relationship would be a waste of such a cheat.
The light from the phone screen flickered across Gu Lan’s face.
Her private messages and comment section on Douyin had been completely overrun.
Half the comments came from indignant self-appointed justice warriors, condemning her for playing with people’s feelings and calling her nothing short of a shameless heartbreaker.
The other half… had taken a rather strange turn.
[Girl, I don’t care how you managed to date two guys at once. I just want to know how you got two streamers completely obsessed with you without spending a single cent.]
[I spent over eighty thousand yuan on my favorite streamer and couldn’t even get a private-message friend slot. Can you teach me how to freeload like you? I’ll pay!]
[Please, I want a tutorial too! I feel like I’ve been watching livestreams wrong all this time—and wasting my money. So this is what high-level gameplay looks like?]
[I spent hundreds of thousands and didn’t even get to hold his hand! What does that make me?]
[It makes you rich.]
Expressionless, Gu Lan scrolled through the screen. Her fingertip lightly tapped the comments asking for a tutorial before she quickly swiped past them.
Both streamers had blocked her.
One was a singer, the other a dancer.
One had a gorgeous face, the other an incredible voice.
She had spent an entire summer painstakingly winning them over, wheedling and coaxing until she finally got them interested. Then, because of an unexpected cross-room PK battle, all her hard work had gone up in smoke.
How heartbreaking.
Gu Lan pursed her lips. The unhappiness in her heart was less heartbreak than the fury of having a carefully cultivated game save suddenly deleted.
As for the people cursing her, she filtered them out automatically. The ones begging for a tutorial, however, gave her a strange sense of smug satisfaction.
They wanted to learn?
This wasn’t something anyone could master just by studying. Talent was required.
She couldn’t stay on this platform anymore—or at least not for a while.
Gu Lan sighed and dug through a pile of flashy game apps until she found a plain-looking one: Oxygen Voice.
She had downloaded it ages ago but never used it once.
She might as well use this little no-name platform as a temporary refuge.
Once the app finished downloading and updating, she began registering a new account with practiced ease.
Username: Food Liu You.
Profile picture: an abstract, crookedly drawn picture of Lazy Goat that looked both depressed and obnoxious.
Done.
The moment she tapped “Complete,” an electronic voice that clearly did not come from her phone’s speakers exploded inside her head.
[Ding—]
[Host detected exhibiting stingy heartbreaker behavior. Qualification for binding confirmed.]
Gu Lan’s hand froze around her phone.
Was she hallucinating? Had staying up too late finally fried her brain?
[Online Tycoon System 3.0—Simp Edition—activating…]
[Activation successful!]
The voice rang out again, crystal clear this time, with a barely suppressed excitement, like a chatterbox who had finally found someone to unload on.
[Hello, Host! I’m your personal System 3.0. You can call me San-chan! In light of your previous “only take, never give” behavior, this system will help you turn over a new leaf and become the most popular big-spending queen on the internet!]
Gu Lan: “…”
What the hell?
“Only take, never give”?
Was this thing calling her stingy?
Before she could even finish complaining internally, the chatty system spilled out all the rules like beans from a broken pod.
[The rules are very simple! Whenever you spend money online on a male with a score of eighty or above in looks, you’ll receive a one-to-one cash rebate!]
[Spend money on an absolutely gorgeous man with a looks score of ninety or above, and you’ll receive a one-to-ten cash rebate!]
[The looks score will be automatically determined by the system’s backend. Fair and impartial! Host, forget the penny-pinching version of yourself and embark on your path to becoming a tycoon!]
Spend money?
On men?
Gu Lan’s first reaction was resistance. What kind of joke was this? Her motto in life was, “Freeloading is king.”
Asking her to spend money was practically the same as asking her to die.
But…
A one-to-ten rebate?
That number circled through her mind, and its meaning instantly changed.
If she sent a super-handsome guy ten thousand yuan in gifts, the system would give her one hundred thousand in return? She’d make a net profit of ninety thousand?
This… wasn’t spending money at all. It was making money!
And it was the ultimate way to get rich by turning nothing into something!
Gu Lan’s thoughts began to race.
She could use someone else’s money to pursue the handsome men she wanted, and in the end, the money would still end up in her own pocket.
Was there anything more wonderful in the world?
“Not bad,” she murmured, tentatively acknowledging the pie that had fallen from the sky.
[Host, would you like to accept the binding? Countdown: ten, nine…]
“Accept.” Gu Lan didn’t hesitate.
Anyone who refused free money was an idiot.
[Binding successful! Best wishes on your spending spree, Host. May you become a wealthy woman soon!]
The system’s voice cheerfully faded away.
Gu Lan turned her attention back to the phone screen.
The Oxygen Voice app’s homepage was extremely simple. Row after row of rooms filled the screen, divided into all sorts of categories.
[Songs on Request], [Voice Acting], [Emotional Radio], [Voice Chat & Dating].
It was an entirely different world from the Douyin she had used before.
Most of the streamers here never showed their faces. Their cover images were either anime-style handsome men, scenic views, or abstract avatars like hers.
How was she supposed to find men with looks scores of eighty or ninety?
Was this system deliberately making things difficult for her?
There was no way she could throw money at an anime avatar without knowing who was behind it. What if the person on the other side turned out to be a hairy middle-aged man? Who would she even complain to then?
Irritably scratching at her hair, Gu Lan decided to start with the most popular room.
She entered a room tagged [Goodnight Melodies], where the number of viewers was displayed as 99+.
The moment she entered, a noisy wave of excitement slammed into her.
A young man was belting out a popular love song over the public mic. Not only was he singing wildly off-key—somewhere around Siberia—he also seemed completely convinced that he sounded amazing. Every note dragged on forever.
A crowd of young girls flooded the public chat with messages like “You’re amazing, big brother!” and “Your singing is so beautiful!” The free flower gifts flashed across the screen almost nonstop.
Gu Lan’s ears suffered severe occupational damage.
This was the platform’s most popular room?
Her opinion of the platform’s average quality plummeted instantly.
With a voice like that, he would have been hunted down by the entire voice-lover community she belonged to.
Just as she was preparing to pinch her nose and leave the room, a clear yet slightly lazy male voice came through the public mic.
The voice wasn’t particularly loud or soft, but it seemed to carry a magnetic hook. It pierced through the surrounding noise and slipped precisely into her ears.
“All right, thank you to Mic One for that deeply heartfelt performance. It was very… spirited.”
He paused, as though carefully choosing his words. In the end, he settled on “spirited,” a trace of laughter concealed in the lingering note of his voice.
“Next up—friend on mic two, are you there?”
Gu Lan’s finger, poised to click the exit button, froze in midair.
Her entire body went still.
That voice…
It was incredible.
It was practically tailor-made to hit every one of her voice-crush sweet spots.
The TikTok disaster, the infuriating comments, and that money-draining system—all of it was instantly banished to the farthest reaches of her mind.
There was only one thought left in her head.
He had to be mine.
