Hoshisuna was in the live stream room.
No matter the opportunity, she wanted to try her best to seize it.
She had already internalized the virtual streamer persona.
Wasn’t this also a kind of acting?
Suddenly, Hoshisuna remembered that time when her mother took her to the theater troupe and she first tried acting.
‘Forget it…’
‘This is better. No halo to rely on, just a pure person striving for my own goal.’
Or rather, in this circle, everyone maintained a perfect persona attractive enough to fans just to survive.
Hoshisuna took this as part of the job.
After memorizing the character’s settings, she pulled herself together and started the stream.
*
Orange Quiet Forest was the epitome of “no overtime outside work hours, and if I can lie down, I will never sit up.” At this moment, she was wearing a loose, pure cotton loungewear set.
Like a liquid cat who had lost all dreams, she was comfortably sunk into the gaming chair in her room.
On the left main monitor was the queue screen for her favorite TPS game—a title with four characters.
She stuffed original-flavor potato chips into her mouth while casting a glance at the secondary monitor on the right.
There, Sheyue Jingzhi’s debut stream was playing.
Crunch crunch…
Orange Quiet Forest chewed the chips slowly and unhurriedly, her eyes beginning to sparkle.
‘Feels… completely different from my own route.’
It was pretty good to watch.
So good, in fact, that Orange Quiet Forest turned off the game matchmaking.
‘Feels like I’m working overtime though…’
‘Why do I have to worry about company stuff when I’m off the clock?’
But… her conversation with Xuan Xiang during the day made Orange Quiet Forest a little concerned about her.
Still, the result wasn’t bad.
The Sheyue Jingzhi on the screen was perfect.
She adhered to the setting, her voice was pinched to sound lovely, and her responses to the audience were on point—no awkward silences.
Rumor had it she’d done something before?
Acted in a theater troupe or something.
Orange Quiet Forest wasn’t really interested.
If it had been an esports youth team switching to being an idol, maybe she’d have been intrigued.
During practice, she was pretty quiet and a bit aloof, even though her character was also supposed to be a little aloof.
But like the traditional graceful type, a bit of coldness didn’t make people hate her.
Hoshisuna’s cool, distant voice, combined with perfectly timed pauses and breaths, flawlessly portrayed the cold, mysterious maiden under the moonlight.
The bullet comments scrolled fast, all in awe.
—Wow, that voice quality, like watching an art house film.
—So elegant.
—Completely different vibe from that wheelchair-window-cleaning comedic girl the other day.
This group’s range is too wide.
Orange Quiet Forest patted the chip crumbs off her hands, completely unbothered by the comments dragging her as the “funny senior.”
She even indulged her dark side, switched to her alt account, and threw in a comment among the barrage:
—No wonder she’s a pro.
That line delivery and emotional control puts a certain wheelchair streamer to shame (for sure).
‘Whatever, I’ll just keep playing games.’
She left the stream running.
But just as Hoshisuna’s atmosphere reached its peak, the accident happened.
“In this endless moonlight, you and I are both…”
Suddenly, the motion capture sensor must have crossed wires, or the physics engine suffered a logic error.
On the screen, that cold, beautiful Sheyue Jingzhi lost all motion without warning.
The next second, her head began uncontrollably shaking wildly left and right.
Because of the violent head movements, the physics engine for the avatar’s hair and clothes bugged out.
Sheyue Jingzhi’s smooth long hair flailed madly on-screen like a helicopter rotor, while her collar and bow tie clipped straight through to the back of her head.
And then?
Her neck suddenly lost its anchor point and started uncontrollably jerking upward over and over.
With the camera error, the originally slender, elegant swan neck stretched bizarrely long on screen, vibrating and twitching at high frequency.
That image of her tilting her head back and spasming looked like a giraffe desperately trying to reach leaves but unable to eat any grass.
“…the path home, of…”
Hoshisuna sat before the microphone.
She obviously saw her own glitching image on the monitor.
As an experienced actress, her strict self-discipline instinct made her try to ignore these “stage imperfections” and forcibly finish her lines.
But the image was too impactful.
That aloof, beautiful face, paired with a neck stretching and retracting like a giraffe, and her cool voice.
With that, the originally high-class, elegant stream atmosphere instantly collapsed.
Even Orange Quiet Forest couldn’t hold it in.
She burst out laughing with a snort in her room, loud enough that Ju Tao Nvshi yelled at her from outside the door.
“If you’re gaming, game properly! What’s that weird noise?! I’m still working!”
“Got it, Meow Meow!”
Orange Quiet Forest quieted down and went back to watching the secondary monitor.
‘Mom is very fierce, meow meow.’
The bullet comments froze for a tenth of a second as if the system had crashed, then erupted into nuclear-level chaos.
A flood of question marks streamed by.
—??????
—LOL!!! What is that giraffe?!
—Is there a live wire in the moonlight or what? Hahahaha!
—I was still sighing at how elegant it was, then suddenly a giraffe stretches its neck.
I sprayed water all over my screen.
—Lady Jingzhi is high-frequency resonating—she’s about to take off.
Someone unplug her power source!
—That neck stretch—is she looking for which moon’s path home?
Haha, I can’t take it!
—Cool goddess turns into a meme in seconds.
Official, you owe me my tears!
The staff urgently cut off the motion capture signal.
The screen refreshed, and Sheyue Jingzhi’s neck finally retracted back obediently to its original position.
But for Hoshisuna, the most fatal thing wasn’t the equipment breaking—it was the total shattering of immersion.
After the equipment recovered, Hoshisuna sat before the microphone.
She didn’t panic and scream like an ordinary young girl.
She still tried to maintain that aloofness.
But her tone clearly carried a stiffness and loss of composure.
“…I sincerely apologize for that technical glitch. Let’s continue…”
She tried to forcibly pick up the poetic, fate-laden lines from earlier.
But once the immersion was broken, speaking in that lyrical, incantatory tone now not only failed to connect to the previous emotion but felt extremely awkward.
It was…
‘It was fine before, but now forcing it feels very contrived.’
The internet audience wasn’t a theater crowd sitting upright.
They were still stuck in the afterglow of the “giraffe eating grass” meme.
—No way, watching her be all serious now, all I can think about is the helicopter hair and the giraffe, hahaha.
—The atmosphere is so awkward.
Does Jingzhi not know how to smooth it over?
—Feels like she’s forcing the coolness—sounds a bit like wooden reading…
Hoshisuna watched these bullet comments.
The more she tried to adjust back to that perfect “aloof and untouchable” state, the tighter her voice became.
The air in the stream room froze solid.