The Landscape Has Changed
Every time I hit refresh, the comments swelled by dozens, then hundreds.
These weren't ordinary compliments. They were praise bordering on pure shock.
Readers couldn't believe what they were looking at. This was nothing like the crude, slapdash quality of the countless web-novel adaptations that had burned them before.
And among them all, one reaction stood out — the one racking up the most upvotes.
Only three episodes of the webtoon had been released.
We had more in the bank, and every instinct in me screamed to put them out right now — but we couldn't. Not when we had to prepare for a future we couldn't fully predict.
Three episodes were more than enough to prove this webtoon operated on a completely different plane from everything else.
A volume blitz? Unnecessary.
With quality this overwhelming, three episodes alone were enough to rip the souls clean out of the readers. If anything, the short run was only sharpening their thirst to a razor's edge.
I looked at the monitor and let out a quiet snort of laughter.
"The response is good."
"Good doesn't even begin to cover it! Author, can you see the rating right now? Ten out of ten! Rating bombs? You won't find a single one! Even the haters shut their mouths after episode one!"
Representative Kang Suk-woo was practically spraying spit as he shouted, his face flushed crimson with excitement.
Beside him, my brother stared at his phone in a daze.
"Minjun… this is actually huge. The comments are coming in so fast I can't even see them. The scroll's moving on its own."
For us, this was a moment for pure celebration.
Every fear we'd harbored — the limits of a fledgling studio, the quality controversies — had vanished without a trace. All that remained was worship, and the roaring demand for the next episode.
"Well then. Shall we check the latest comments?"
Feeling good, I pressed F5.
Refresh.
And then.
Spinning. Spinning.
The loading icon wouldn't stop turning.
"Huh?"
Something was wrong.
A screen that normally flipped in a tenth of a second was still hanging there after three seconds. After five.
And then.
502 Bad Gateway
A temporary error has occurred. The page cannot be displayed.
A white screen. An ominous error message.
I blinked.
"…Did it crash?"
I turned to look at the Sirius division head.
His face had gone ashen, and he was already on the phone with someone. I could see his hands trembling from where I sat.
"H-hello! Control room! What's wrong with the servers! We can't connect!"
I turned to my brother.
"Hyung. They said they expanded the servers, right?"
"Th-they did, didn't they? Tripled the capacity… said they even had an emergency standby team…"
"Looks like even that wasn't enough."
The situation was obvious. Everyone was hammering refresh like mad.
It wasn't just a traffic spike. Readers, aching over the short three-episode run, were rewatching from episode one — or refreshing nonstop to catch the live comment reactions — and the overlapping load had blown past every threshold the servers could handle.
"It might just be us. Let's check the communities."
I opened a web novel community on my phone.
As expected, the place was already hell. A full-blown riot.
Rage.
Pure, undiluted rage.
The readers were dumping so much profanity on Sirius that we almost felt guilty.
Right now, reviews of the work itself didn't matter to them at all.
This was the feeling of having the spoon ripped from your hand mid-feast. No — the fury of someone whose TV got unplugged right before the climax.
It was pure murderous intent.
Sirius headquarters. Server control room.
This place was a war zone. No — closer to a disaster site after a tsunami had torn through.
"Reroute the traffic! Hook up every backup server we've got! Drag in everything that exists and everything that doesn't!"
"The connection queue just passed a hundred thousand! We can't process it! The login servers are dead too!"
Warning alarms blared without pause.
Even after expanding the servers, they had still gone down.
The Sirius executives couldn't decide whether to laugh or cry.
Yes, the traffic had exploded beyond all projections, and the reader response was the best in company history. At the corporate level, this was a windfall. Stock prices would skyrocket.
But the servers were down right now, and their own necks were on the line. Complaint calls from readers were pouring in like a monsoon.
"Just how many people piled in for it to get this bad?"
The division head asked, sweat pouring down his face.
"More than double our projections!"
"Double? We didn't lowball the estimate! We set it at the highest figure in company history, and you're telling me it doubled from THERE? Does that make any sense?"
"Well…"
The team lead pointed urgently at a monitor.
"Community inflow is off the charts. Even people who never read webtoons are flooding in!"
"What?"
"The ad controversy and the server crash rumors spread, and now people are showing up just to gawk — 'What the hell is this thing causing such a scene? How good does it have to be for the servers to die?' On top of that, existing readers are still spamming refresh!"
Insane.
The division head clicked his tongue.
The noise marketing had worked. It had worked so well it was killing them.
Web novel readers, webtoon readers, and community rubberneckers on top of that.
It felt like the entire subculture population of South Korea had converged on Sirius. This wasn't a simple launch anymore. It had become a national event.
"Get it back up as fast as possible! Thirty minutes… no, normalize it within ten! Every minute of delay costs us a year off our lives!"
"We'll do our best!"
The developers' keystrokes rattled out like machine-gun fire.
And roughly twenty minutes later.
"We're back up! Connections are live! The queue is clearing!"
"Hah…"
The division head wiped his chest in relief.
Barely made it. He'd genuinely thought he was getting fired.
With trembling hands, he opened the app.
Refresh.
The screen loaded normally.
"Comments… let's check the comments."
He watched to see if new ones were coming in.
But something was strange.
There were far fewer than expected.
"What's going on? Are people still not connecting? Did it crash again?"
No. The traffic graph was climbing normally. But the comment regeneration rate was slow. Like the quiet before a storm.
Unease was just starting to creep in when —
A long while later.
Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack—!
The comment window began updating in an explosive cascade.
The readers had come to curse — and then watched the webtoon and lost the ability to speak. They'd been so swallowed by the overwhelming immersion that they'd forgotten to leave comments until they'd finished the binge.
Quality so absolute it even silenced rage.
And that reaction birthed a new current.
The inflow exploded all over again.
Readers left hungry by the webtoon started flooding into the original novel. The novel's sales graph shot vertical once more.
Explosion stacked on top of explosion.
The division head trembled with dread.
"H-how's the traffic on the novel side?"
"Surging over there too! Approaching critical levels!"
"Stop it! Stop it no matter what! Hook up another server!"
The division head screamed.
If it crashed again here…
That would be actual death.
Whether the readers beat him to death or the boss fired him to death — either way, sleep was clearly off the table tonight.
Meanwhile, in the main conference room at rival company Toonmix.
They, too, were watching Sirius's server collapse in real time.
But their silence was a different breed from Sirius's. A silence heavier than a funeral parlor hung over the room.
"…"
After confirming it, every last person sat mute as a fish with a mouthful of honey.
Not a single one opened their mouth.
Because they were industry professionals. Because they were experts who carried the pride of being number one in the business.
And so they understood all the better.
Just how absurd that quality truly was.
"Ha…"
Someone let out a sound like a sigh.
"They're… doing that as a weekly serial? By humans?"
Honestly, it felt like their entire reality was being denied.
Dozens of assistants. A systematic production pipeline. The industry's finest know-how.
Even Toonmix, equipped with all of that, could barely imitate this level of quality.
Imitation was possible. A weekly serial schedule was absolutely not.
And yet a mere startup had done it. In a single month of prep time, no less.
It was a result that went beyond jealousy or anger — one that inspired something close to awe.
When even admiration was slipping out, that said everything.
"Team lead."
At that moment, the conference room door opened and a razor-edged voice cut through.
The executive director.
Toonmix's de facto number two, and the executive who had been monitoring this project contract from the start.
"D-Director…"
The team lead couldn't even rise from his seat. He just bowed his head.
The executive director fixed a frigid gaze on the Sirius webtoon screen projected on the wall.
Then shifted his eyes to the team lead.
"This."
"…"
"You said we could bring it in, didn't you?"
His low voice rolled through the conference room.
"When I told you to make another offer, what exactly did you say? That we just had to wait! That once they wore themselves out and fell apart, we could scoop them up on better terms! That they were going to fail!"
"I-I'm sorry… I never imagined quality like that would come out…"
"Don't make excuses!"
Bang!
The executive director slammed the desk.
"Industry number one? Experts? What a joke. You treated a jewel sitting right in front of you like a pebble, kicked it away, and now you're saying you didn't know?"
The team lead couldn't lift his head. Cold sweat ran down his spine.
This had gone past simply failing to acquire it.
This was a catastrophe.
The terror that even their position as industry number one might be stripped away came crashing down.
Of course, a single title wouldn't flip the industry rankings. Toonmix's infrastructure and user base were still overwhelming.
But.
This was more than a simple gap in skill. The current itself had shifted.
"A generational novel and a generational webtoon just fused. How big do you think that synergy is going to be?"
The executive director ground his teeth as he spoke.
"Domestic? No. This plays overseas too. Why do you think Macao Page was salivating over it? They wanted to build it into a global IP. Level Up Together? The only counter that can catch that thing is this one!"
A monster with that kind of potential — and Toonmix had kicked it away with their own feet, straight into a competitor's arms.
And they'd tried to lowball it into the bargain.
"I can't even begin to measure how big Sirius is going to get off this. And that startup you said would fail? Conglomerates are going to show up with bags of cash, begging them to share the IP."
The executive director yanked his tie loose with a rough hand.
Everyone already understood, so no one dared speak.
Tonight.
The landscape of Korea's webtoon industry had changed.
And the bone-deep pain of knowing that their own misjudgment and arrogance sat at the starting point of that change cut deeper than anything else.
Defeat.
Toonmix's night was longer and darker than it had ever been.