Ten Thousand Slanderous Words (1)
I stuck to my ignorance until the very end. I insisted I hadn't written it.
It was merely a novel I had stumbled upon by chance. I had only, purely by accident, shared it to the team chat.
I, Han Yu-jae, was absolutely not the real-life model for Han Jae-yu, the protagonist of that novel.
According to my account, this Han Jae-yu had given up on college at twenty and poured himself into serializing fiction, only discovering a talent for software programming later in life and joining a company as a latecomer.
If that background happened to resemble mine, Han Yu-jae's, down to the finest detail—well, that was either a coincidence, or proof that the anonymous author of this novel was someone at my company who knew me very well indeed.
Yes. Someone had written this filthy thing purely to slander me, and I had shared it to the team chat in order to expose that very scheme.
Why had I changed my story from "accidental share," you ask? A momentary lapse—the slip of a tongue from a man under severe psychological distress.
My arguments lost persuasiveness by the hour. So I compensated for the shortfall in logic with sheer, overwhelming volume.
Keep insinuating things and I'll sue. Isn't this textbook workplace harassment?
I was the victim here—slandered into being the protagonist of some lowbrow porn novel—and were you really going to inflict this kind of secondary abuse on me? Or what, was it you who wrote it?
I snarled like a rabid dog, and after that, no one at the company touched me. On the surface, at least, they kept their distance.
But my colleagues were every bit as vicious as I was. Those brilliant minds weren't devoted to actual work; as far as I could tell, their considerable brainpower was devoted entirely to devising ingenious new ways to torment the pathetic employee Han Yu-jae.
Around this time, something spread like wildfire among the anonymous users of the office-community site who posted under our company's name: writing reader reviews of the famous adult web novel Human Guilty.
"Yu-jae, I read chapter three of Human Guilty, and you know what? It really felt like the protagonist, Han Jae-yu, had a thing for Assistant Manager Seo A-hyeon... no, sorry, Seo Hyeon-ah. Wouldn't you say so too?"
Department Head Kim Byeong-jae from the neighboring division ambled over to my desk out of nowhere, oozing that smug, needling tone of his.
"Why are you suddenly asking me? What does some novel have to do with me? Why are you telling me about it at all?"
I replied, suppressing my emotions as far down as they would go.
The next day, I was summoned to HR for talking back to a superior.
"Department Head Kim Byeong-jae says he merely made casual small talk, and that you flew into a rage. Is that correct?"
"It is not. I never got angry."
"Then write up a statement of events and submit it. And if you need psychological counseling, there's a subsidy available—file the paperwork in advance, please."
Manager Kang Yong-won of HR kept up his glacial, impersonal register throughout.
"Yes, understood."
I bowed and turned to leave, and behind my back came the sharp voices of the HR staff.
"Unbelievable, really."
"I wonder when he'll finally quit."
"It makes me sick. Working in the same building as a pervert like that..."
Yes. By then I'd already been branded the company's resident pervert. But I wasn't the only one branded a pervert.
While I shamelessly played dumb, Team Leader Hye-jeong was acting for her life.
She protested her innocence, insisting she had never enjoyed the rough sex described by Team Leader Kim Jeong-hye in Human Guilty. She swore up and down she had never once lusted after that depraved, married pervert Han Yu-jae.
But her words soon lost their force. An anonymous post from a company employee on the office-community site drove the final nail in.
It was titled 'The Mystery Woman Masturbating in the 5th-Floor Ladies' Room Has Been Unmasked,' and its contents went something like this.
The poster was, in fact, the very same person who had once written the earlier post titled 'The Mystery Woman Masturbating in the 5th-Floor Ladies' Room'—and on reflection, they realized that sounds like that were closer to sex than to masturbation.
What's more, trying to recall that voice, it sounded strikingly similar to the character Kim Jeong-hye from Human Guilty.
Asked how they could possibly know a fictional character's voice, the poster breezily admitted they had no answer for that one.
The post wrapped up by noting that chapter three of Human Guilty featured a sex scene inside a ladies' room stall—and that such granular detail would be impossible to write from imagination alone.
The post's view count shot through the roof in an instant. As if swept along by that number, Team Leader Hye-jeong quietly resigned.
When I clicked the follow-up post titled 'Cheering for the Gracefully Graceful Defeat of Team Leader Kim,' the body read: 'Employee Han, who has still not accepted his defeat, is truly pathetic.'
Assistant Manager Seo A-hyeon abruptly applied for a transfer to a branch office and left.
Even when the rumors about her being the CEO's office wife circulated, she'd never requested a transfer—but apparently, of all things, facing employee Han Yu-jae was the one fate she couldn't bear.
In my whole life, I had never drawn this much hatred from so many people.
I'd been a social outcast for about a glittering year back in elementary school, but most people collect an experience or two like that along the way.
Going to work every day under the curses of an entire company, however—that is something few people ever experience even once.
Put another way: this was, undeniably, a rare and precious experience.
Call me a lunatic, point your finger all you like—but I, Han Yu-jae, sublimated this rare experience directly into inspiration.
They say the student surpasses the master; I had soared far past the heights of my depraved teacher, Kim Hye-jeong herself.
I kept serializing. Some days I even released double and triple chapters.
Watching new chapters of Human Guilty upload with relentless regularity, my coworkers clicked their tongues at my sheer stubbornness.
I even wove Hye-jeong's childhood trauma, which she had once confided to me, straight into the novel—woven into Kim Jeong-hye's backstory.
Apparently someone saw that, because after a long silence, a message finally arrived from Hye-jeong.
Perhaps I'd given up on being human a long time ago. I calmly sent back this reply.
Human Guilty climbed into the real-time Top 3 of Novelympic's adult web novel rankings. By then, the royalties that arrived like clockwork were already double my monthly salary.
Only then did employee Han Yu-jae bow out of the company without a fuss.
Manager Kang Yong-won of HR, walking me through the severance procedures, added one last remark.
"...Don't live like that."
I didn't inform my wife Chae-rin that I'd quit.
Every weekday morning I left the house at 8 a.m. as if heading to the office, drifted between cafés and PC bangs, then came home at six o'clock pretending I'd just gotten off work.
With all that extra time freed up for writing, it was the perfect opportunity to quietly plan my next novel.
I'd already tasted success with an adult web novel set in the real world, so this time I sketched out ideas for a fantasy setting.
Yes—what about a story centered on a shop that sold a special Viagra with magical effects?
The protagonist, the shop's owner, had imbued every pill he sold with a single shared secret effect. And that secret effect was this: upon ingestion, the owner himself would possess the body of whoever took it.
The story: possessing every customer who visited the shop, he drifts from woman to woman, bedding countless of them.
All I'd need to do was layer a crisis or two and an arc of overcoming adversity over that basic skeleton.
Somewhere along the way, my affection for Human Guilty had gone cold. I enjoyed brainstorming the new work more than writing its chapters, which said everything.
Why, though? Was it because I'd parted ways with Kim Hye-jeong, the real woman behind Kim Jeong-hye? Or because, despite not having slept with anyone in ages, I was grinding out realistic sex scenes and wearing myself thin?
Astonishingly, my readers caught my slump with uncanny precision.
The critical comments began lining up in droves. And amid them, one comment stood out above the rest.
There it was. I had committed a colossal blunder.
Having poured everything into the electric storyline of my office affair with Hye-jeong—no, Jeong-hye—I had utterly ignored my readers' hunger for a new female lead.
Right. Why else would they read an adult web novel like this? The answer, obviously, is vicarious gratification.
Beneath it all lies the desire to project themselves onto an alpha-male protagonist who hops from woman to woman instead of loving just one, and to savor a harem by proxy.
But could I actually pull off a new female lead?
A cold spike of fear shot through me.
Without the real woman behind Kim Jeong-hye—Team Leader Kim Hye-jeong—I never could have rendered her storyline in such granular detail.
Which meant that to sculpt a new character with that same precision, the answer was already decided.
I snatched up my phone.
Scrolling through my list of installed apps, I tapped the icon for the dating app called Tender.