A Simple Proposition
The morning after the storm.
A heavy tension hung over the main conference room at Sirius headquarters.
"The servers. Are we sure?"
At the division head's question, the development team lead swallowed dryly.
"Yes. After yesterday's incident, we urgently tripled the lines. We also opened the cloud servers to maximum capacity. At this level, we can handle even a million concurrent users."
"Hoo…"
The division head loosened his tie and let out a long sigh.
Yesterday had been pure hell.
The moment the webtoon launched, the servers had crashed. Reader complaint calls poured in like a flood, and the boards were plastered with curses. They'd managed to restore service in thirty minutes, but it had been a cold-sweat experience.
"Still, today should be better than yesterday."
The division head muttered it like he was trying to console himself.
Yesterday had been the day free episodes one through three dropped all at once. Of course people were going to swarm in for free content.
But today was different.
"What's going up today is episodes four and five. Paid preview chapters."
Paid.
You had to open your wallet to read them.
No matter how good a series was, traffic always filtered out at the point where money changed hands. The free-to-paid reader ratio was typically ten to one; even a massive hit might hit five to one.
"Traffic's still going crazy, but it won't be the mindless stampede we saw yesterday."
"Agreed. Even if we set the conversion rate sky-high, the servers won't go down."
The development team lead nodded.
Of course, it might have been rationalization to soothe needless anxiety. But the data and the statistics said the same thing.
Time rolled on to ten a.m.
The moment episodes four and five previews went live.
"They're up."
With the staffer's report, the graph on the monitor twitched.
The division head folded his arms and watched the screen.
It'll climb a bit, then stabilize.
That was what he thought.
But.
"Huh?"
The slope of the graph was wrong.
It wasn't rising gently. It was shooting straight up.
"Wh-what? Why is the traffic like this?"
"Th-the concurrent users…. They're about the same as yesterday!"
"It's a paid chapter! You have to pay money!"
"Looks like they're all coming in to pay!"
It made no sense.
It meant that every single reader who had finished the free episodes was charging into the paid checkout window without a single person dropping off.
A purchase conversion rate of over ninety percent.
By industry common sense, an impossible number.
And one minute later.
"Uh, uh? Team lead! The payment module…!"
"What! Did the servers crash again?"
"No! The servers are holding…. But the payment processor's module isn't responding!"
"What?"
"They say too many simultaneous payment requests came in and overloaded them!"
The division head's mouth fell open.
They had scaled the servers, and this time the money box had burst.
People were trying to give them money, and the basket was too small to catch it all.
"I'm going to lose my mind…."
An ominous error message bloomed across the screens once more.
An error occurred while processing your payment.
Please try again shortly.
Sirius headquarters filled with screams all over again.
"What do you want us to do?! They're trying to give us money!"
The readers' howls seemed to ring in their ears like auditory hallucinations.
At the same hour.
The web novel community was a literal cauldron of frenzy.
The boards were plastered wall to wall with posts raging about payment errors.
Curses flew freely, but they weren't malicious attacks.
They were howls of frustration at wanting to read so badly and not being able to — mixed with fanatical love for the author and the work.
Normally, once paid serialization began, the reactions would be "too expensive," "I'll wait until it goes free."
But The Regressed Hunter is Merciless was different.
Readers didn't hesitate to open their wallets. No — they were begging to be allowed to open them.
The quality was that overwhelming.
Anyone who had read through episode three simply could not endure without seeing episode four.
This wasn't mere popularity.
It was a phenomenon.
An unprecedented chapter of history was being written in the Korean webtoon industry.
The offices of Muse Co., Ltd. in Gangnam.
This place, too, was a battlefield no less fierce than Sirius headquarters.
Ring-ring—! Ring-ring—!
The office phones rang without a second's pause. The moment a receiver hit the cradle, the bell went off again.
"Yes, this is Muse Co., Ltd. Ah, the CEO is in a meeting right now. If you'd like to leave a message…."
"Yes, a publisher? Regarding print editions, we haven't yet…."
"Game adaptation rights? Our specialist will review that separately…."
The staff were losing their minds just handling the phones.
All of this had erupted a single day after the webtoon launch.
Places that had dismissed them as a fledgling company just yesterday were now catching the scent and charging in like hyenas.
From major domestic web novel management firms to major publishers, game developers, drama production companies — even film distributors.
Every content-related company in Korea was sending love calls to Muse.
"Boss! An S-tier management director named Park says he's coming in person! He wants to contract the next work…."
"This is T Games — they're offering one billion won as an IP contract fee. They're practically begging for just one meeting…."
"A broadcast network called too! They want to discuss a drama adaptation!"
Staff shouts filled the office.
Muse was still small. Even counting the webtoon team, full-time employees numbered fewer than ten.
With that headcount, they couldn't handle the flood of proposals.
They couldn't get any actual work done.
That was when it happened.
"Hyung."
I had stopped by the office briefly, and now I stood up from my seat.
Looking around the chaotic room, I furrowed my brow slightly.
Hyung looked at me.
"Oh, Minjun. Loud, right? Sorry. We're handling it as fast as we can…."
Hyung was flustered too, a phone in each hand. Sweat beaded on his face.
I walked straight over and stood in front of his desk.
Then I reached out.
Tug.
I yanked the phone line out of the wall.
Snap.
The relentless ringing stopped in an instant.
Silence.
The staff stared at me with round eyes.
"M-Minjun?"
Hyung asked, flustered.
I spoke calmly.
"Unplug them all. The phone lines."
"Huh? B-but…. There might be important calls."
"If it's important, it'll come to a cell phone. The office lines are paralyzing the work, so let's shut them down for a while."
"Even so…. These are major management firms and game companies. If we ignore them, won't we make enemies later?"
Hyung looked worried.
No matter how much we had become the ones holding the cards, industry cartels weren't something you could just dismiss.
But I shook my head.
"Hyung."
I looked at him with absolute certainty.
"They're the ones who need us."
"…"
"And you know. We're just getting started."
At my words, hyung's eyes widened.
That was right.
All this chaos was the reaction at the mere point of five webtoon episodes being released.
What about when episodes ten, twenty, fifty were serialized?
Every time a highlight of my novel was realized as a webtoon, Muse's value would jump exponentially.
"The places offering one billion now? Later they'll be lining up with five billion, ten billion. No need to get shaken by offers this small."
"Ha…."
Hyung let out a hollow laugh.
Then he nodded.
"Yeah. You're right. No reason for us to bow and scrape."
Smiling, he yanked out the remaining phone lines.
"Alright, everyone hear that? Unplug the phones! And post a notice. For the time being, proposals only by email. We'll review them and contact them ourselves!"
"Yes, sir!"
The staff's faces brightened.
The moment they flipped from the subordinate position to the one holding the power.
That electric thrill circulated through the office.
The guts to treat major agencies' proposals like noise and shut them out.
This wasn't arrogance.
It was the composure that came from overwhelming certainty that their value would only be reassessed higher with time.
After encouraging the hardworking office staff, I headed back to the studio.
For today's actions to remain composure rather than arrogance —
I, too, had to keep delivering results that matched them.
I finished today's workload.
Now it was time to enjoy the readers' reactions.
With webtoon episode five previews released.
Lately I had developed another hobby besides writing.
Voyeuristically watching community reactions.
In the past, I had been afraid to look at comment sections for fear of hate comments. It felt like my writing was being rejected, and I would flinch.
But now it was different.
Wall-to-wall praise.
Even the occasional complaint comments felt cute.
I knew where that greed came from, so it only made me happier. It was proof of how deeply they were immersed in my work.
I scrolled down with a warm feeling.
Not just the web novel community — the webtoon community's reactions were blazing hot too.
Normally the two communities had different temperaments and tended to reject each other. Novel readers would curse webtoons for ruining the original, and webtoon readers would dismiss novels as wall-of-text info dumps they refused to read.
But in front of the Regressed Hunter, a grand unification took place.
They were recommending and recruiting for each other, creating a warm atmosphere.
And then.
At some point, the discourse of both communities began to converge on a single topic.
"Hm…?"
I leaned my face closer to the monitor.
It had started as pure curiosity.
The netizen detective squad had been dispatched, but no one could uncover the identity.
Of course they couldn't.
I had drawn it. More precisely, it was the result Muse and I had created together.
It wasn't from the existing webtoon industry's apprenticeship system or academy pipeline.
The art Muse rendered was a style that had never existed in the world — recreated from learning tens of thousands of data points. Brush strokes, coloring methods, shading — all of it.
It was subtly different from existing conventions.
All kinds of speculation ran wild.
A genius artist who fell from the sky.
A reclusive master who spent ten years in a room sharpening only his blade.
A legend who worked overseas and came home.
Every kind of story was being written.
There were even attempts to dig up my personal information by searching my name. Of course, all that came up was a history of working at a marketing company, so everyone assumed it was a namesake and moved on.
I propped my chin on my hand and watched the reactions.
It was fun.
The world was going wild for a fictional genius artist that I — and our Muse — had created.
This mystique.
It wasn't bad. It was actually becoming a factor in the work's success.
"Dying of curiosity about who it is, huh?"
I muttered to myself.
I had no intention of telling them. Not yet, at least.
The longer this mystery held, the deeper people would dig into the work.
I grinned and picked up the tablet pen.
"Alright. Let's show them."
What kind of shock that unidentified genius the world was so curious about would deliver next.
Even I was starting to look forward to it.
Outside the studio window, Seoul's night glittered brilliantly.
But no light out there could be brighter than the world inside my monitor right now.
Unprecedented.
I was walking a path no one had walked before.
And I could sense that at the end of that path, an even greater throne was waiting.
Perhaps more than a sense — a certainty.
"So this is why people say to do what you love?"
Setting money aside entirely.
When you do what you love and it gets praised, you naturally want to pour every spare hour into it.
You spend every waking moment thinking about how to do it better.
The fight between those who force themselves to endure time, and those who enjoy it and push further.
Even an elementary schooler could tell who would win.
It had taken me quite a while to grasp this simple proposition.