Chapter 1

—All right. Things are going well, at least for now. We’ve been able to maintain a high level of satisfaction among the players.

And we haven’t seen those teacher imposters, or anyone else like them, since then.

Other than that incident, we haven’t experienced any major problems with the operations of SHINSEKAI.

It’s better to discover and fix the bugs in the program now than to suffer serious issues in the distant future. Well, not that I’m hoping for an incident to arise.

Nothing would be better than having every day be a good day.

However… I’m still curious—Just who were the people posing as our teachers? What were they trying to accomplish?

HaHa~ ♪ Senpai is being a worrywart again~?

That’s just the way I am; you know that already, don’t you Sora-kun?

Yes! Sora knows Senpai and Shisho~ just as much as Senpai and Shisho~ know Sora!

Yes. No matter how much they dress themselves up and put on airs, their flaws will without doubt surface eventually. Imposters will never compare to the real thing.

So that said. Why did those fake idols of the past show up here?

Ngh… How should I put this…

Sagami-sensei is one thing, but Kunugi-sensei isn’t all that well-known—I highly doubt the kids of today would know about him.

Even if their acting skills aren’t anything to call home about, it would be difficult to tell that they’re an imposter.

Even though we barely have any relationship at all with him, and we were able to tell right away?

I don’t think their aim was to make a killing by parading around as some famous former idols.

For one, the money you earn here in SHINSEKAI is in SSG, not Japanese yen.

They’re like the game tokens you win at arcades—You can’t exchange them for yen. As soon as SS is over, the SSG and SSL$ will be worthless.

So we can assume that they’re not after money.

If not money, then what?

Who knows? My guess would be that someone is trying to set up something like Project Saga again, but…

Project Saga? But Sora heard that it only achieved moderate results and only a little commercial success~?

That’s why they never did a second Project Saga, and it’s why Ba-barrier hasn’t been active—since it was created for that.

Yes. That’s why I’m wondering if they’ve changed how they went about things.

Project Saga aimed to revive old traditions and forge new ideas by allowing retired idols to make a comeback.

But the Project only revealed that most of those idols were useless in their old age.

It makes sense that all of those retired idols are now mere ordinary old men who haven’t been keeping up on their lessons.

Yes. That’s why the Project made teams with retired idols and younger idols and marketed them together as teacher and student groups.

At best, they gave the expectation that the more experienced veterans and spirited youths would complement each other…

And at worst, those old men are beyond hopeless, so they’re paired up with livelier kids to drive up their market value.

Mhm. The plan worked, and in the end Project Saga didn’t turn out to be a massive failure or drive a huge deficit.

But there are probably people who weren’t satisfied with “wasn’t a massive failure.”

Like, say, the upper rungs of the ES hierarchy, the likes of whom still control practically the entire idol industry even now.

Ahaha, once ES was established, the focus shifted to the younger generation, but there was no way to fully get rid of the guys pulling the strings—

Even now, there’s still quite a few of them left. But there’s nothing we can do about it~ We live in an aging society with a low birth rate. There are far more adults than there are children.

Yes. No organization would be able to function if all of the geezers were eliminated. Adults still have that much influence and power over us.

Some of those people are nostalgic about the past, and they wanted to have a repeat of Project Saga. This time, they could use the SSVRS to their advantage.

With the SSVRS, they can dodge the issue of aging idols which had posed such a problem with its predecessor.

They would be able to refashion themselves into the state they were in during the height of their careers.

Yes. Although, people like Shu-kun made their avatars just like themselves.

In SHINSEKAI, you have considerable freedom of choice over your appearance. You could become an animal, change your gender—

Become young again. And on top of that, there were many people participating in Project Saga who were so popular in their prime that they’d become household names.

That’s just how beautiful and talented they were.

Perhaps they were simply being pushed around by the industry, but their fame persists to this day because they had the abilities they did.

So they revived those timeless figures for us, in the same way they were in their prime.

Even if the real person in question has passed, you can at least recreate their likeness by altering the person behind the mask.