Everything Running Smoothly
The silence in the Ad Like office stretched on for quite some time.
The finished product glowing on the monitor screen.
Calling it a mere revision would have been embarrassing—it was a creation of an entirely new dimension.
“…”
The sound of someone swallowing dryly cut through the air.
As if that sound had been the signal flare, the breaths everyone had been holding burst free all at once.
“All this time…”
Assistant Manager Kim opened his mouth, expression still dazed.
“I thought the manager and the assistant manager just weren’t performing like they used to…”
“Yeah.”
Supervisor Lee nodded.
“They simply weren’t doing it.”
Not that they couldn’t—they just weren’t.
The difference was crystal clear.
Everyone knew it. Ever since Executive Director Choi had taken over, the two men’s work attitude had shifted in subtle ways.
They still handled every assigned task to perfection, but that was as far as it went.
The old passion—the willingness to pull all-nighters just to squeeze out higher quality—was nowhere to be found.
“Well.”
One employee gave a bitter smile.
“Even doing only that much, they still got treated like aces and single-handedly kept the company afloat. No real reason to push any harder.”
“Exactly. Even if they had done better, Executive Director Choi wouldn’t have given them credit. He’d just have gotten in the way, ordering them to change everything to suit his own taste.”
Everyone nodded in silent agreement.
They still remembered.
The early days of Ad Like. The era when Manager Park Do-hun’s meticulous planning and Assistant Manager Kang Minjun’s razor-sharp execution fused together and the company exploded with growth.
And the work sitting on the monitor right now…
It surpassed even that golden age.
“They did this in twenty minutes…?”
“They must’ve been sharpening their blades the whole time. Everything that was bottled up just erupted.”
Assistant Manager Kim’s eyes changed.
He shot up from his seat.
“We’re making calls.”
“What? To whom?”
“The companies still hesitating on renewal this round, and every client who already sent termination notices.”
The staff stirred uneasily.
“But… those are places that already notified us they were cutting ties. Will they even take the call? We’ve been too ashamed to reach out ourselves.”
It was true.
The mess Executive Director Choi had left behind had driven quality into the ground and shattered client trust.
Calling them again under those circumstances would take a face thicker than steel plating.
But Kim pointed straight at the monitor.
“This is enough.”
His voice rang with absolute conviction.
“With results like these, we can turn even hearts that have already walked away.”
The employees looked at one another. Then, one by one, they began to nod.
Hope had appeared.
“Let’s do it.”
“Yeah. Nothing to lose at this point.”
The phones began to blaze.
“Hello? Yes, this is Ad Like. Do you have a moment to speak, sir?”
“Ah, if this is about the renewal, I’m sorry. We’ve already made our decision. May I be frank?”
The voice on the other end was ice-cold, thick with disappointment.
“I fully acknowledge that Ad Like helped us grow tremendously in the early days. We’re grateful for that. But this is still business. We need to turn a profit.”
“Until now we kept the contract out of loyalty, and because it wasn’t actually losing money. But gradually, keeping you on became a net loss. Quality dropped, feedback slowed… Ad Like needs to understand that.”
Every single word was correct.
There was no room for rebuttal.
The employee lowered his head and poured sincerity into his voice.
“Yes, you’re right. We’re truly sorry for disappointing you.”
“…As long as you understand.”
“But I have one last request.”
The employee steadied his breathing.
“Please look at the revision we just sent. Just once.”
“A revision?”
“Yes. If after you’ve checked it your decision remains the same, we will never contact you again. This isn’t a sales pitch.”
“We know how long you trusted us and held on, so out of pure gratitude we simply want to show you a proper final product.”
Sincerity has a way of getting through.
Faced with that, the client let out a long sigh and finally agreed.
“Haa… All right. I’ll check the email.”
Click.
The line went dead.
Tension blanketed the office.
One minute. Two minutes. Five minutes.
How much time had actually passed?
The phone rang again.
Riiing—!
The employee snatched up the receiver on pure reflex.
“Yes, Ad Like spea—”
“Hey!!”
An excited voice exploded from the other end.
“What the hell is this you just sent? Who did this?”
“Ah, well…”
“No—if you could do work like this the whole time, then why the hell was everything such a mess until now?! Huh?! This isn’t even a joke anymore!”
A shout laced with resentment. Yet buried inside it were equal parts admiration and sheer relief.
Truly complicated emotions.
The sense of betrayal that they had been capable all along and simply hadn’t bothered… and at the same time, awe at the overwhelming skill that had just been put back on display.
“Haa… Unbelievable.”
The client let out a hollow laugh, then made his decision on the spot.
“Anyway—let’s renew the contract! This quality is going to stay consistent, right?”
“Of course! Absolutely!”
“Let’s move on this immediately. I love the draft.”
“Thank you! Thank you so much!”
Cheers erupted all across the office.
Severed clients. Contracts that had been on hold.
Green lights dropped from every single direction.
A company that had been on the verge of total collapse was, in a single day, rocketing back onto its normal trajectory—no, surging past it entirely.
Gangnam shared office.
Park Do-hun sank deep into his chair and let out a long, heavy sigh.
“Huu…”
It felt as though a boulder that had been crushing his chest had finally rolled away.
I can breathe again.
Honestly, he had been anxious.
They had boldly founded the corporation and rented the office, yet the company’s entire revenue structure still rested on a single web novel.
Minjun’s writing had exploded, true—but settlement always lagged behind.
In the gap between now and then sat fixed costs and the investment capital needed for webtoon production.
One wrong step and they could have ended up in the absurd situation of going bankrupt while still in the black.
But now…
We’ve got one more pipeline.
The acquisition of Ad Like.
At first they had accepted it purely out of respect for Chairman Choi, and to protect the elderly president’s honor.
Of course, the calculation that if he and Minjun put their hands on it the company would turn massive profits again hadn’t been entirely absent either.
It was the president’s tremendous consideration.
He could vaguely sense that the old man had calculated exactly that.
If he kept the company, his son would destroy it and leave nothing but losses. Hand it over to them, and it would live again.
Moreover…
When they checked the books, Ad Like was still generating a steady stream of profit even now. It was simply shrinking over time.
In other words, if the president had been even a little greedy for that remaining profit, he never would have handed the company over.
Or, if pure profit had been the goal, he could easily have demanded a substantial premium.
That would have been the natural thing to do.
Selling to another firm would have brought in more than enough money.
And yet he had given it to them.
This went beyond mere consideration. It was grace.
“Thanks to him, we can catch our breath.”
Even though profits had dipped a little during the week Executive Director Choi had dug in his heels, Ad Like was still making money.
Now that they had taken the helm again, they would restore it to its former glory—no, push it even higher.
That revenue stream alone would be more than enough to hold them over until the webtoon launched and the settlements started rolling in.
We won’t have to go begging to Romance Studio.
No need to demand extra advance royalties or force an unreasonable schedule pull.
The environment in which Minjun could focus solely on writing had been perfectly prepared.
“Now… we just need the webtoon to land.”
Right then, the phone on the desk vibrated.
Director Kim from Ad Like.
“Yes, Director. How’s the situation looking?”
“Manager… no—CEO.”
Director Kim’s voice was trembling on the other end.
“All this time… you two were hiding your real power.”
“Excuse me?”
“The whole office is going crazy. The moment the clients saw the revision you sent, they completely flipped. Renewals are a given—they’re even offering to introduce us to other companies.”
“Ah…”
“At this pace, this month’s sales are going to beat our peak period. Morale among the staff is through the roof. Thank you so much, CEO.”
After hanging up, Park Do-hun stared blankly at the screen.
Truthfully, when he had received the file from Minjun earlier he hadn’t even properly checked it.
Things had been too hectic, and more than that, his faith that “if it’s Minjun, he already did it right” had been overwhelming.
Just how good is it, then?
Only now did Park Do-hun open the mailbox.
The revision file Minjun had sent.
Click.
He flipped through the finished pieces one by one.
Gulp.
He swallowed hard.
Park Do-hun was a field man. His design sense might lag behind Minjun’s, but his eye for whether something would make money or not was sharper than anyone’s.
“This…”
It was insane.
He had thought that even if the results merely matched the level they had produced together in their flying days before quitting, he would have been more than satisfied.
Twenty minutes.
He hadn’t expected much from something knocked out in a mere twenty minutes.
But this…
“It’s beyond that.”
The detail, the color sense, the persuasive power of the copy.
Everything was perfect.
It felt like looking at marketing materials that had arrived from the future.
“He really is a genius.”
It wasn’t just the novels.
Minjun had simply been born with the sense itself.
And he had evolved even further than before.
Park Do-hun clenched his fist tightly.
Conviction settled in.
“We hold the line no matter what.”
To keep this talent from rotting, he would become the solid shield.
Until the webtoon hit—no, even long after that.
Money worries would never be allowed to reach Minjun’s ears.
Park Do-hun began humming under his breath as he tapped away at the calculator.
The numbers felt good under his fingers.
At the same time.
My studio.
“Mmm~.”
A hum slipped out on its own.
The moment I finished the Ad Like revision work, I dove straight into episode two of the webtoon.
With real mental breathing room, the work flowed like water.
Swish. Swish.
The pen tip gliding across the tablet felt light and cheerful.
“So this is what it feels like when work is actually fun.”
Something I could never have imagined before.
Back when I was still at the company, Sunday evenings made my chest tighten and Monday mornings made me want to die.
The feeling of selling my time for money.
I had hated that sense of equivalent exchange between my lifespan and a paycheck.
But now it was different.
The more I worked, the more fulfillment welled up. The process of a world that had existed only inside my head becoming real on the monitor was pure play in itself.
Above all…
In a capitalist society, money really is the most important thing.
Money isn’t everything, but a fair and immediate reward for the effort I pour in.
That was the greatest motivation of all.
The view counts climbing every time I refreshed Munpia.
And the projected sales charts hyung kept sending me.
It was a completely different dimension from the days when my labor had been converted into hourly wages or monthly salaries and then steadily chipped away.
A structure where everything I poured in—no, more than that—came back to me.
So I kept going.
I never got tired.
“This cut would look better if I take the angle a little lower.”
A new detail appeared on the screen: raindrops splashing off the tip of the protagonist’s sword.
Perfect.
Right then, the phone on the desk rang.
Hyung.
“Yeah, hyung. What’s up?”
“Minjun.”
His voice was buzzing with excitement.
“That revision you sent… Ad Like is going completely nuts.”
“Yeah? They like it?”
“Like it? They flipped. Every client that had cut ties is re-signing.”
“Oh, good.”
I had been confident deep down, but hearing the answer directly finally let me relax.
“But Minjun.”
“Yeah.”
“Can you… keep this quality going?”
Expectation and worry mixed in his voice at the same time.
“You said you did it in twenty minutes. Doing that every day—isn’t that going to burn you out? You’ve still got the webtoon to draw and the novel to write…”
Hyung was still worrying about me.
Afraid I might hit burnout or collapse from overwork.
“Burnout?”
I spun the pen between my fingers.
“Not hard at all.”
“…For real?”
“Yeah. Honestly, it’s perfect for clearing my head. When I get stuck writing the novel, doing that stuff is a great change of pace.”
“Heh…”
Hyung exhaled like he couldn’t believe it.
“I keep worrying that I’m leaning on you too much…”
“Hyung.”
“Yeah.”
“This company exists because of me anyway. It’s only right that I take responsibility for it.”
I spoke while looking at the webtoon manuscript on the monitor.
“And Ad Like has to run well so I can write without money worries. It’s good for both of us. Plus right now, because it’s work I already used to do, Ad Like is giving the best return relative to the effort I put in.”
“Yeah… it just kind of ended up that way.”
His voice sounded a little thick.
“Anyway, Ad Like is a massive hit too. We don’t have to worry about funds anymore.”
“See? I told you it would work.”
“Yeah. You’re always right. Genius author-nim.”
I hung up.
I felt good.
Everything was meshing together like perfectly cut gears.
The novel had exploded, Ad Like had been resurrected, and the webtoon was progressing smoothly.
I picked up the pen again.
And still, the thing that made me happiest of all was this environment—where I could focus purely on creation without having to grind through any separate labor.