Living in a Class-Based World

On the day of the Gaming Stream Service Yuuta went to a special facility within the Exclusive Male Zone. A room for his stream had been booked. The equipment itself was cutting-edge, including the newest PC.

Preparations for his stream had already finished beforehand, so all Yuuta had to do was to sit down and play the game.

I didn’t expect so at first, but this looks like a fairly efficient Service as well, doesn’t it? I mean I just have to play any game I like.

The Streaming Service had been announced to start at 7 p.m. But, the announcement didn’t mention a finishing time. It was normal for the shorter streams to last thirty minutes while the longer ones would take around an hour.

During a normal Streaming Service, it was customary for the man to introduce himself and offer some greeting words at the beginning, but it wasn’t rare for men to remain silent for the rest of the stream thereafter.

The stream came with a chat function, allowing women to comment (although they had to pay for it), but those comments wouldn’t be read. In the first place, it was common for the guys to hide the chat section. Men didn’t know anything about the women watching the gaming stream, so they wouldn’t act cheerful while catering to the women’s wishes either. Of course, that attitude would likely change, if the stream was limited to influential women of high families.

I wanted to try doing a paid stream once I became a D-Rank, but I totally hadn’t expected that the state would sack most of the fees by the subs… Well, considering it carefully, it makes sense, I guess. A man’s 「assets」 are managed by the country after all.

Yuuta had heard about paid streams by men from Shizuku during their Video Call, but most of the fees paid by the women when subscribing were managed by the state. Going by the standards of Yuuta’s former world, you could even say that men weren’t allowed to even have any 「Property Rights」 in this world.

All the money a man could use was managed by the state. Of course, men were provided with all necessities of life, and they were also permitted to possess a certain amount of money. They were even allowed to have an extent of luxury. But, the existence of male millionaires or billionaires, like they existed in the Old World, was prohibited. ¹

Even though women are allowed to be super rich, men are not. Men can lead a fairly good life if they carry out their Service Activities diligently, and unless they fuck up quite badly, they’re being taken care of at an old age as well. But, you cannot describe that as a wonderful life. Just like the men of this world naturally possess sexual desires, they also seek authority and money they can wield freely. And for that reason all the men are doing their best in their quest to form strong ties with rich high family women, I suppose.

Hence, Yuuta wouldn’t be able to become a famous streamer and rake in loads of cash like some did in his former world. But what mattered for Yuuta most right now was to perform Service Activities for the sake of raising his Male Rank. And if he could do that by simply playing the games he liked, he had nothing to complain about.

Okay, it’s 7 p.m. Time to start!

Yuuta’s gaming stream began.

“Nice to meet you, everyone. I’m Yuuta, a junior high third-year student of Toukyou. Thank you very much for having come to watch my gaming stream today.”

The chat immediately got filled with comments due to his polite greeting. Because you had to pay for the ability to chat, it meant that all the women writing there had forked over real money. Of course, you wouldn’t find any women spamming like mad. The name displayed in front of a comment was a woman’s real name and her account’s private information was accessible by the state, so any woman would immediately lose the ability to watch a stream ever again, if she spammed the chat.

Mayumi: Please do your best, Yuuta-sama!

Lisa: I hope you can enjoy the stream, Yuuta-sama!

It warmed Yuuta’s heart to see Mayumi’s name preceding the very first comment. And Lisa’s comment, which came in second with a very small delay, made Yuuta break out into a cheerful smile.

Following Mayumi and Lisa, Sarah, Michiru, Mai, and the other women of Kanda Sports kept commenting in succession. In addition, the doctor and the nurses from his physical examination as well as the women, who had received Yuuta’s Video Call Service, made comments. Shizuku’s name was among them, too.

Shizuku: I am looking forward to your gaming stream!

It was free to watch his stream, but since these women had paid to comment, Yuuta thanked them.

“Thank you for all the nice comments. Please have fun watching my stream. Today I want to play a game called God of War.”

God of War was exactly like 「Nioh」, a game Yuuta had loved to play in his previous world. It belonged to the category of death games, meaning its difficulty level was quite high.

“This will be my first playthrough, so I’ll do my best!”

Yuuta started the game while commenting on it with a bright voice. Yuuta’s stream where he cheerfully talked about his thoughts of the game and explained what could be seen on the screen, proceeded smoothly.

It’s a real shame that I don’t know how many people are watching.

The viewer count wasn’t revealed to the man during his gaming stream. The men of this world didn’t need to care about view counts and other statistics to begin with, but Yuuta felt a bit disappointed that he couldn’t get any feedback.

In God of War you had to make a character first. Because he had requested for his character to look just like him in advance, the character displayed on screen was a game copy of Yuuta.

“Ahahaha, this avatar totally looks like I do.”

Mayumi: I want to know the parameters of the character maker!

Lisa: I would love to make a Yuuta-sama character, too!!

“Ah, the character parameters, huh? Umm, they look something like this.”

The character maker of God of War allowed quite a bit of detail, so it had a fair share of parameters. In other words, the character maker had been designed so elaborately that you could recreate the faces of celebrities with it. Yuuta briefly showed the parameter settings of his own character.

“I’ll go with a Switchglaive as a weapon.”

He chose a weapon resembling his preferred weapon in Nioh, and immediately challenged the first stage. God of War was no open-world game, but one where you selected different stages. Yuuta thought that the first stage would host a tutorial, but instead he was immediately squared off against a cow-like apparition with the strength of a boss near his starting point.

“Ooh, that one looks super tough!”

God of War was similar to Nioh, but the cow’s behavioral patterns were different. The mob’s difficulty was apparently set to be even higher than the cow in Nioh, resulting in Yuuta dying many times over, despite having gaming experience from his old life.

“Hmm, I’m really struggling to predict its movements.”

As Yuuta became fixated on somehow defeating the cow, the women wrote supportive comments in the chat section.

Shizuku: It’d be better to skip that enemy and go ahead!

Shizuku’s suggestion was reasonable. There was no need for Yuuta to force himself to defeat the monster. He could likewise come back after going ahead and becoming stronger.

But, Yuuta was adamant about defeating the cow. Because it was a game, he wanted to enjoy clearing a hard challenge.

“You’re right. It’d be okay to skip this guy, but I feel like I can defeat it, so I’ll keep at it!”

At that point, thirty minutes of streaming had already passed. The women watching the stream thought that the Streaming Service might end without the cow being defeated.

Because it wasn’t unusual for Streaming Services to end after thirty minutes, they suspected that Yuuta might become upset about not being able to defeat the monster anytime soon and quit the stream then and there.

But, some women thought differently. Not to mention the women who had received Yuuta’s Service in the past, but even the number of women, who watched this stream while harboring a newly found expectation due to Yuuta happily talking to them and reacting to their comments, had been gradually growing.

Yuuta wasn’t aware of it, but no male streamer would react to the women’s comments in chat. The women hoping that he might react to their own comments rapidly grew in number.

“Now to the right! I’ll dodge to the right and slash once…don’t become greedy…don’t become greedy. Watch all the attacks and play it saf…aaaaaargh! I got too greedy there!!! And just after I admonished myself to play it safe!!! Ahahaha.”

Yuuta enjoyed playing the game even while dying. And because no male streamer would exhibit such plain joy while streaming, the women steadily became more passionate about this, too.

As a matter of fact, only a few viewers of Yuuta’s Streaming Service were actually regular viewers of male Stream Services. And most of the high family women were absent from this stream, too. Moreover, many of the common citizens didn’t hold many expectations either, limiting their own hopes to at least catching his initial greetings.

But if you just looked at the actual event, the Streaming Service had begun with a polite greeting and continued to show Yuuta playing the game while joyfully raising his voice many times over.

And then, after another thirty minutes had passed, Yuuta defeated God of War’s first Slaughter Cow Apparition.

“Yahooo! I got it! I finally killed it! Maaaan, that thing was sooo hard!”

Yuuta’s broad smile could be seen on the streaming screen. It was one full of satisfaction over having surmounted a hard challenge.

Lisa: Congratulations, Yuuta-sama!

Mayumi: Congratulations!!!

One comment after the other congratulated him for his victory, and Yuuta reacted to those.

“Thanks, Lisa-san. Mayumi-san, thanks to you too. Sarah-san, Shizuku-san, thanks to you as well. Umm…,” Yuuta read the names of those congratulating him while giving his thanks. Without noticing that this was anything but common.

“Sumire-san, thanks. Fumika-san, thanks. Umm…”

He kept reading the names. Because Yuuta himself was also aware that the stream was coming to its end timewise, he wanted to express his thanks to those, who had made comments, by reading their names at the end. Even in his previous world, streamers often gave their thanks to users who had paid donations during the stream. But, in this world it was a really huge deal for a woman to get a man to read her name.

Yuuta gradually became flustered by the endless stream of comments.

At this rate, just thanking everyone is going to take more than an hour, isn’t it?

But, at the same time he felt bad about finishing the stream without thanking those who went out of their way to comment. Accordingly he instructed the completely autonomous robot, which had been supporting the gaming stream, “Can you disable the function to make new comments?”

『Yes. As you wish』

As soon as a mechanic voice answered Yuuta, it became impossible to write new comments.

“Umm, my time here is limited, so I had them disable the chat function. It’ll take a bit of time, but I’ll thank everyone who was kind enough to comment on my stream up until now, and then I’d like to finish the stream. Okay then…Lilika-san, thank you…”

Although the inflow of new comments had stopped, it took Yuuta another two hours to finish reading all the names of those who had commented.

“Pheew…now I’ve read all the names of those who commented. If I should have forgotten your name, please forgive me! Umm, today ended with me only defeating the first cow monster, but I had a lot of fun. If possible, I’d like to do another gaming stream at some point, so please come and watch me next time as well. Well then, thanks for watching everyone. And good night to all of you!”

“Haaah…didn’t this go well, considering it was my first time…?”

『Good work』

“It’d be great if it earns me a good rating.”

『The rating will be decided by tomorrow』

The rating of the Streaming Service would be set after the state made a comprehensive ruling on it. Because the wrap-up would be handled by the robot, Yuuta left the streaming room, climbed into a floating box, and drove back to his own apartment.

On the next day, the state ruled Yuuta’s Streaming Service as a B.

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Immediately after Yuuta’s Streaming Service ended, a certain thread started in the women’s network community. That network community was mainly used by common citizens.

The thread was about Yuuta who had been treated as 「Shut-in Trash」 thus far. The evaluation of Yuuta over there was split, resulting in heated debates. One side consisted of women who passionately supported Yuuta, while the other side didn’t evaluate him highly since it was a fact that he still remained an F-Rank. As one might guess, the women evaluating Yuuta lowly hadn’t watched his Streaming Service.

Streaming Services weren’t archived, and it was also forbidden to arbitrarily record and upload those streams. As such, the women, who couldn’t watch the stream while it was live, couldn’t approve of or believe in the women vouching for Yuuta.

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The common citizens were getting all excited in good or bad ways, but a similar split in Yuuta’s evaluation had occurred among the high families, too.

Many high family women, who regarded the F-Rank Yuuta indifferently as they didn’t have the capabilities to gather intelligence despite being high family members, weren’t aware of Yuuta’s existence as they didn’t watch his Streaming Service, nor did they know about his evaluation.

Some among the high family women, who were aware of Yuuta, gave him a fairly bad rating. They clamored about him buttering up to the common citizens for the sake of raising his rating as the shut-in F-Rank scum he was, and deprecated him for looking down on them.

On the other hand, some high families also rated Yuuta very highly. They rejoiced that they might be able to look forward to his future exploits without caring overly much about his reputation thus far. And they also thought that it’d be fine to approve of him as a man worthy of being taken seriously, if he proved to be an outstanding male.

The headwoman of the Eternal Minato had assessed Yuuta highly as well. Because her daughter’s aim was Takuya, Yuuta wouldn’t become Yukishiro’s partner, even if he proved himself to be an excellent man. However, she assessed Yuuta as someone she wanted to obtain for her family as a pawn.

Likewise, the evaluation of Yuuta by the headwoman of the Eternal Yoshiwara was just as high as that of the Minato headwoman’s. However, Yoshiwara’s headwoman didn’t have a character that would allow her to regard men as pawns, and because of that, her high evaluation of Yuuta followed her pure view of him as a guy, but she still didn’t consider him as a partner of her daughter Aoi. Besides, she didn’t believe that she should be the one to decide her daughter’s partner in the first place.

Because Yoshiwara’s matriarch enjoyed a love marriage, something which was rare in this world, she wished for her daughter to find and wed a man she loved.

Yet, Yoshiwara’s matriarch was unaware that her daughter Aoi had been unable to move for a while after watching Yuuta’s Streaming Service.

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Two women were inside a certain hospital’s sickroom located in the Yoshiwara Ward.

“That was a truly wonderful stream, wasn’t it, mother?”

“Indeed. I’d love to talk with such a man. But, having him read out my name was already plenty. Now I can finally pass on without any regrets.”

“Here you go again. You just need to do your best and undergo surgery.”

“It already failed once. And I don’t want to experience anything so painful ever again.”

A mother and her daughter were talking with each other after Yuuta’s Streaming Service had ended. The mother was around sixty years old while her daughter appeared to be in her thirties. And although the daughter wished for her mother to have an operation, the mother apparently rejected that notion.

One more woman, a girl, was quietly watching and listening to those two while standing outside the hospital room.

It was Moe.

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1. Switching to capitalizing Old World since it’s a coined term in that society, and not just “Yuuta’s” old world.