A Long While Later
An upscale traditional Korean restaurant in Gangnam.
Inside a quiet private room, a heavy silence hung in the air.
"…"
The boss looked as though he had aged ten years in a matter of days. Those shoulders that had always been held so straight now sagged, and the hair that had merely been flecked with gray had gone completely white.
With trembling hands, he lifted the bottle of liquor.
"Shall we have a drink?"
Do-hun and I wordlessly held out our glasses.
Glug.
The sound of clear liquid filling the cups rang out unusually loud. He filled his own glass as well, then downed it in a single swallow.
"Hah…"
He smacked his lips against the bitterness and opened his mouth.
"I heard the rough outline from the staff. What went on at the company all this time."
"…"
"I'm sorry. I know those words aren't enough."
He lowered his head.
"If I try to offer even a scrap of an excuse… I thought my son was doing well. Or rather, maybe I just wanted so badly to believe that he was."
They say no parent can ever truly best their child. He had known his son's incompetence and still looked the other way. He'll get better someday. He'll come to his senses eventually.
"So I closed my eyes and ears. I was getting older, and I kept thinking it was time for my son to take over… That was just avoidance."
The boss gave a bitter smile.
"But deep down, I couldn't not know."
He looked back and forth between Do-hun and me.
"With the real talent I know the two of you have… the company should have been growing. Not barely scraping by, unable even to hold the line."
He was exactly right.
Do-hun and I had never given Ad Like our full strength. Managing Director Choi's absurd directives came down from above, and we would half-defend against them, half-revise them, producing just enough results to avoid getting chewed out. The old fire that used to tear through the market was gone. We had simply fulfilled the bare minimum obligations of salaried employees.
"You were holding yourselves back, weren't you? Under an incompetent superior, trying not to stand out."
"…"
"Honestly… I considered myself lucky that you two stayed at the company at all, even like that. Yes. That was my greed. That was wrong of me."
He drained another glass.
"I've made my son step down from the company."
"I heard."
"You have to cut out the rotten flesh for new flesh to grow. And… I'm rotten flesh myself, so I intend to step down as well."
Do-hun's eyes went wide.
"B-Boss? Step down?"
"Exactly what it sounds like. I'm withdrawing completely from the front lines of management."
His gaze was resolute.
"What?"
"But this may be my last bit of lingering attachment… or maybe just the desire to protect my social reputation."
He paused for a moment, then carefully broached the main point.
"I don't want our company to be remembered as a failed one by the clients who trusted us and put work in our hands. I want us to be remembered as a company that saw its responsibilities through to the end."
His eyes locked onto us.
"So. Will the two of you take it over and push it forward again?"
"…!"
Do-hun's eyes met mine.
Take it over?
"I still have some sense of shame, so I won't ask for any compensation. No key money, nothing. I'll transfer every last share of stock."
"Boss, that's…"
"With the two of you gone, Ad Like is an empty shell anyway. It's a company that will collapse eventually, and forcing it to stay open would only burn through my retirement savings."
The boss spoke matter-of-factly.
But it was not a decision as easy as his words made it sound. This was a company he had poured his entire life into. And he was offering to hand it over without a single coin in return.
"What do you say? This is about as sincere an apology as I can make."
He was not testing us. He genuinely wanted to save the company. And he had acknowledged that the right people for the job were not his son, but us.
He framed it as something for his own sake. But anyone could see this proposal was for the two of us. We already had a proper corporation and office of our own — and he was offering to pile Ad Like's vast client data and infrastructure on top of that, free of charge.
Do-hun looked at me.
I nodded.
There was no reason to refuse. No — we had to accept. It was the last act of filial duty and respect we could offer this aging boss.
"Understood."
Do-hun answered with formal courtesy.
"We'll accept it with gratitude."
Then he rose from his seat and bowed deeply.
"Thank you for letting me remember you, to the very end, as the boss I trusted and followed. Truly — thank you."
I rose as well and bowed my head.
The boss's eyes reddened.
"Heh… Yes."
He wiped the corners of his eyes with trembling fingers.
"It wasn't the clients… It was the two of you I most wanted to be remembered well by. Thank you. Truly, thank you."
That night, we tipped our glasses for a long, long time.
Success and ruin. The old generation and the new. Standing on that boundary, we comforted each other — and at last said a real goodbye.
The next day.
The Ad Like office was the calm before a storm. Employees clustered in twos and threes, murmuring among themselves.
"Hey, did you hear? The company's been sold."
"To who? Some big conglomerate?"
"No. Manager Park and Deputy Kang…"
"Whoa, for real?"
The employees' faces brightened. They had been fretting that Managing Director Choi's ouster would leave the company in freefall — and now the relief pitchers had arrived. Ace players whose abilities had already been proven, no less.
"Man, what a relief. Once those two are back, we can go back to how things used to be, right?"
"Exactly. With Deputy Kang around, we won't even have to work overtime."
The hope circuit was spinning at full speed.
But that hope shattered the moment CEO Park Do-hun walked through the door.
Two o'clock in the afternoon.
Park Do-hun entered the office in a sharp suit, carrying an easy aura nothing like the old days.
"Attention."
A single clap of his hands silenced the room.
"As you've all probably heard, effective today, Ad Like is being absorbed as a subsidiary of Muse Co., Ltd. Employment succession is guaranteed at one hundred percent."
"Wooo!"
The employees cheered.
"However."
Park Do-hun raised a hand and quieted the cheers.
"The way we work is going to change a bit. For starters, I need to focus on headquarters management and the webtoon business, so I won't be stationed here."
"What?"
The staff stirred uneasily.
"Then what about Deputy Kang? Isn't Deputy Kang coming in to handle the actual work?"
Assistant Manager Kim asked with hopeful eyes.
Park Do-hun gave a short laugh.
"Director Kang Minjun has a primary job of his own right now."
"A primary job?"
"Yes. He's a writer. He's too busy writing to come into this office."
"Whaaat?!"
The employees' eyes nearly popped out of their heads.
A writer? Deputy Kang?
"Then… who's going to do the work here?"
"You all will."
"…"
A bolt from the blue.
If their greatest asset, Kang Minjun, was out — and if their control tower, Park Do-hun, was also gone — didn't that mean they would just fall back into the same overtime hell as before, left to fend for themselves?
Anxiety swept through the room.
"Instead."
Park Do-hun continued.
"Let's work efficiently. Around lunchtime, report your mid-process status to me via messenger. And."
He delivered the key point.
"Before you leave for the day, organize your work product and send it to Minjun. Minjun will set aside exactly twenty minutes a day to give you feedback."
"Twenty minutes…?"
The employees murmured.
"Wait — you're saying he'll review in twenty minutes what we can't finish working on all day?"
"Is that even possible?"
Unease flooded in.
They had always known Kang Minjun's work speed as the product of a full day of hard labor. The fact that he had actually been finishing everything in thirty minutes and then coasting on his salary was something they had never even dreamed of.
"Let's try it for one week. You'll understand once you do."
Faced with Park Do-hun's unshakable confidence, the employees nodded with the resignation of people swallowing bitter medicine.
"Yes…"
At least it had to be better than working under Managing Director Choi.
And so their precarious cohabitation began.
Four o'clock in the afternoon.
My workspace.
"Ugh…"
I stretched and leaned back in my chair. Today's quota: drafting complete through episode 190. My head was throbbing.
No matter how much the AI Muse assisted with the sentences, locking down the story's skeleton and threading the emotional lines together was entirely on me. Especially in the later stages, when foreshadowing had to be paid off and conflicts escalated — the brain overload was severe.
"Yeah, grinding one work nonstop really takes it out of you."
Mannerism was starting to creep in. I needed to cool my brain down. I needed a different kind of stimulus.
Right on cue, a messenger alert chimed.
There it was.
I smirked and opened the files. Card news mockups for Client A. Blog draft copy for Client B.
The moment the files loaded, my brow furrowed.
"Hah… Seriously."
Tacky color schemes. Fonts that killed readability. Walls of text with no core message. So these were the wrecks Managing Director Choi had left behind.
All that time spent catering to his whims had atrophied the staff's instincts right along with him. Individual personality snuffed out, everything reduced to mass-produced garbage tailored solely to the managing director's tastes.
But then—
This could actually be fun.
Motivation surged instead. Into a brain exhausted from novel-writing poured a completely different kind of stimulus. This wasn't the agony of creation. This was the domain of retouching — taking materials that already existed and just seasoning them until they sang.
To me, it was practically play.
"All right. Time for surgery."
I rolled up my sleeves.
"Muse."
I set my hand on the mouse.
Zing.
A bright current ran through me, and my hands began to move.
Clack-clack! Click!
The clunky card news on the screen was dismantled in an instant and reassembled from scratch.
Problem 1: Color scheme way too dated → Swap to trendy pastel tones.
Problem 2: Font doesn't catch the eye → Emphasize the typography.
Problem 3: Copy way too long → Strip it down to core keywords only.
Slash. Slash. Slash.
It was like dancing with a blade. Breath was blown back into a design that had been lying dead. All the instincts I had suppressed while watching Managing Director Choi's face — now buffed by Muse — exploded free.
"That's more like it."
In three minutes, one card news piece had been completely reborn.
Next. The blog draft.
Reading it was a spectacle. Mechanical keyword stuffing. Soulless sentences.
Write it like this and Naver's algorithm won't even glance at it.
I started revising. My fingers flew across the keyboard so fast they blurred. A title that made readers want to click. An opening that forced them to keep scrolling. And an ending that stoked the urge to buy.
The aggro skills I had honed writing web novels applied to marketing copy without a single adjustment.
Five-minute cut.
"Next."
I was on a roll. It was a different kind of high from writing novels — the feeling of brainstorming clearing my head. This wasn't work. This was a palate-cleanser mini-game.
Twenty minutes later.
Transmission complete.
I sent the entire batch of revised files to CEO Park Do-hun, then left a message.
I felt clean. Now — back to the novel?
At the same hour.
The Ad Like office.
The employees sat staring at their monitors, restless as quitting time approached.
"We sent it, but… what's he going to do in twenty minutes?"
"He'll just glance at it and say good job, right?"
No one expected much. If anything, they figured they would be lucky if Kang Minjun didn't snap at them to redo the whole thing.
Ding—!
The mail arrival chime rang out.
"It's here!"
Assistant Manager Kim opened the email with trembling hands.
"Revised files…?"
Not just feedback — he had actually revised them and sent them back? In twenty minutes?
Assistant Manager Kim downloaded the attachments. And the moment the files opened—
"…Hah."
Silence fell over the office. Not a single person could easily find their voice.
The first mouth to open did so only after a long, long while.