The Truck Loaded with a Nuclear Bomb
“Hey, what’s with that reaction?”
Hyung gave my shoulder a light shove. He clearly couldn’t understand how I could stay so calm after seeing the number on the screen.
“I’m happy, sure… but honestly, it doesn’t feel real yet.”
“How does it not feel real? Fifty thousand views! That means fifty thousand people read your writing.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Even so, I shook my head. Hyung still didn’t understand how this industry worked. He was just punching numbers into a calculator.
“Calm down, hyung. Free serials and paid serials are completely different animals. Just because fifty thousand people are reading it now, how many do you think will actually pay later?”
“Uh… half of them?”
“Half? Not a chance. Even if one in ten sticks around, people call that a jackpot. High traffic just means that many more people will drop off.”
I laid out the cold reality for him. The high view count right now was the product of several overlapping factors: the weekend buff, the fanfic drama that had blown up on the community boards, and the flood of curious readers drawn in by a rookie author slamming out consecutive chapters like a man possessed. Nobody knew when that bubble would burst.
“And after the platform takes its cut and taxes come out, what’s left is way less than you’re imagining. Just because a chapter is a hundred won doesn’t mean a hundred won lands in my pocket.”
“Ah, is that how it works?”
Hyung scratched the back of his head, looking a little sheepish. But the smile hanging at the corners of his mouth still refused to fade.
“Still, this is exceptional, right? I don’t know much about web novels, but I’ve never seen a rookie take off like this.”
“That’s true enough.”
“Let me see… Just how good is this thing that people are losing their minds over it?”
He grabbed my phone and tapped open Chapter 1. I drank my coffee in silence. Inside, my heart was hammering, but on the outside I kept my face as neutral as possible.
Don’t get carried away. Getting hyped up only to crash hurts even worse.
I hadn’t written this for money. I’d written it for my own satisfaction. I repeated that to myself over and over: don’t get hung up on the results.
One minute. Five minutes. Ten minutes.
Hyung said nothing. Normally, Chapter 1 took about three minutes to read. Enough time had already passed for him to finish Chapter 5.
Is it boring?
Just as the anxiety started to creep in, I heard him swallow hard.
And then—
“Hey.”
“Huh? Is it bad? See, I told you not to get my hopes up for nothing…”
“That’s not it.”
He stared at me with bloodshot eyes.
“Where’s Chapter 6?”
“…What?”
“Give me the next chapter. Who cuts it off here?!”
His eyes were dead serious—the eyes of a reader who didn’t care about money, who was going insane with curiosity about what came next.
“Wait, did you actually write this? Can you really front-load this much fun and still carry it for the long haul? Usually when you burn all your fuel in the beginning, the whole thing collapses later.”
I paused at that. He wasn’t wrong. Dump a ton of catharsis and flashy setups into the early chapters, and the midsection almost always runs out of steam—plot holes open up, the protagonist gets too strong, the tension evaporates. That was what he was worried about.
But I just let out a quiet snort of laughter.
“Well.”
Fifty chapters of stored content flickered through my mind—and beyond that, the outlines for a hundred, two hundred more. Hyung had no idea. The five chapters he’d just read were nothing more than a taste. If the opening was bait to hook the readers, the real story was only just beginning.
A simple smash-and-kill catharsis path? Not even close.
It only gets more perfect the further it goes.
The story I had written—no, the story AI and I had built together—grew denser with every chapter. A single throwaway line of dialogue from the protagonist in the early chapters would pay off as a massive piece of foreshadowing fifty chapters later. Side characters who seemed like simple villains would tangle with the protagonist in layered, three-dimensional drama. Beyond pure thrills, there were twists that would slap readers across the back of the head, and a heavy, lasting emotional weight.
Like gears locking perfectly into place, the narrative would swell and the entertainment would amplify with every chapter. The parts that had given me chills while reading them were still a long way off—the first crisis detonating in Chapter 10, the truth of the worldbuilding revealed in Chapter 25, and the overwhelming charisma the protagonist would unleash in Chapter 50.
Collapse? No.
If anything, readers would find it harder and harder to escape this story the further they went. They wouldn’t feel like they were reading a disposable catharsis novel for killing time—they’d feel like they were watching an epic written by a master.
I was certain of it. The universe inside my head had only just begun to expand.
“Hey, why are you smiling? You’re not actually out of material, are you?”
Hyung asked, looking uneasy. I shrugged.
“Don’t worry. It only gets better from here.”
“For real?”
“Yeah. I guarantee it. The opening was just a warm-up.”
“Holy… I’m going crazy. You’ve got a stockpile, right? You do, right?”
“I do.”
“How many?”
“Secret.”
“Ah, come on, that’s so cheap! Just show me one more, please?”
Watching my usually composed hyung whine like a kid was a strange feeling. So this was the power of my writing. Or more precisely, the power of the AI that had turned my imagination into reality.
“Work’s about to start. Let’s go in.”
“Hey, Kang Minjun!”
“I’ll upload it at lunch. Just wait.”
I left him grumbling behind me and headed into the office. Even after I sat down, I couldn’t forget the look in his eyes.
Is it really that good…?
A warm sense of pride bloomed in my chest. A hunger for recognition more valuable than money. The highest high a creator could feel was rising inside me.
Nine in the morning. Work began. But my head was filled with nothing but web novel thoughts.
Focus. Focus.
I shook my head and stared at the monitor. Today’s tasks: three card news pieces, five blog drafts, one product detail page design revision. The usual mass-produced busywork I normally couldn’t stand looking at. The design revision Managing Director Choi had ordered, in particular, made my head throb just thinking about it.
But today, a different thought crossed my mind.
Would this work too?
The same way it had with the web novel—could AI create the work I wanted in my place? The truth was, I was considered pretty capable at this company. Of course, people like Managing Director Choi tore into my results for lacking “impact,” but the objective metrics never lied. My blog posts ranked well, and my card news pieces had high click-through rates. Honestly, it wasn’t an exaggeration to say that half of Ad Like’s performance had been built by me, Kang Minjun.
I had pride in that. Pride that my instincts weren’t wrong. The only problem was that my hands couldn’t keep up with those instincts, so everything took forever. Translating the perfect colors and layouts in my head into something on a mouse required hundreds of clicks and revisions.
Will it work here too?
I was curious. Not just for novels—could AI become my hands for design and marketing copy as well?
I carefully opened Photoshop and pictured the image in my mind. This client was a diet supplement company targeting women in their twenties. Refined yet provocative copy. Color arrangements that seized the eye. An image that would freeze a thumb mid-scroll the instant it hit an Instagram feed.
The concept was done. Now it was time to execute. I rested my hand on the mouse.
A familiar current crackled through me. My hands moved. My left hand hammering Photoshop shortcuts and my right hand gripping the mouse crossed so fast they nearly vanished—tap-tap-tap, click, drag. Like a pianist flying across the keys. The colors I imagined painted themselves onto the monitor; the compositions I envisioned were cropped into place.
And then, before thirty minutes had even passed—
“…”
I pushed my chair all the way back and stared at the screen. The expression on my face wasn’t satisfaction. It was shock. A perfect finished product floated on the display. “Perfect” wasn’t even enough. Compared to the work I normally groaned over for ten hours… the quality looked several times better. The harmony of the colors, the letter spacing of the fonts, the placement of every image—details ordinary people might miss, but anyone in the industry would recognize. That razor-thin line separating pros from amateurs. AI—no, my hands—had executed it flawlessly.
“Wow.”
The word of awe slipped out on its own. Quality like this would get me hired on the spot if I submitted it as a portfolio to a major agency. And I’d done it in thirty minutes? Normally, just locking down the concept, hunting for references, and building a draft took half a day. This was a revolution. It wasn’t just that I could write novels well. Anything that lived in the realm of my imagination—whatever it was—I could drag into reality.
I wanted to leap out of my chair and shout, Look at this! I did this in thirty minutes!
But—
Hold it.
I pressed my lips shut tight and glanced over the partition. Managing Director Choi was sitting with his legs crossed, playing a mobile game. If I showed this result to that man?
Obvious.
Oh, Deputy Kang. Fast hands, huh? Then do this and that too. Oh, and you finished in thirty minutes? Doesn’t that mean the quality’s a little low? Revise it again.
He wouldn’t even look at the work. He’d just pile more tasks on me or invent absurd complaints to force endless revisions. Work always flowed to the people who did it well—especially under an incompetent boss like him.
Absolutely not.
I buried the finished files deep in a folder and pulled up a blank screen. I’d already finished everything for the day. In thirty minutes. Seven and a half hours left. I had zero intention of spending that golden time on Managing Director Choi.
Time to freeload on the company payroll.
I opened Notepad again and called up the contents of Chapter 51 from my mind. Writing a web novel in secret at the office—a delicious thrill of transgression washed over me.
While Kang Minjun sat in a corner of the office wearing a secret smile and freeloading on company time, the web novel industry was losing its mind.
What everyone had thought was just a truck had turned out to be a truck loaded with a nuclear bomb—and it had just barreled into the market.
The Regressed Hunter is Merciless.
A rookie author’s first work. But its destructive power was enough to grab established authors by the collar and shake them.
The management agencies reacted first.
“Who is this? Is this really a rookie?”
“This writing skill is not a rookie’s. Isn’t this an established author’s alt account?”
“Do we have contact info? Send a tip, at least!”
Editors at every publishing house went into emergency mode. Normally, they didn’t reach out to rookie authors until Chapter 10 or 20—they needed to verify consistent serialization and make sure the early spark wasn’t a fluke. But this work was different. The skill and pacing shown in just five chapters, and the readers’ insane response. More than anything, the seasoned weight radiating from the prose was no joke. This was the real deal. Miss it, and you’d be kicking yourself forever.
There was a problem, though. Under Munpia’s system, you couldn’t send a private message to an author before Chapter 10. With no way to make contact, all they could do was stamp their feet.
So they chose tips.
Publisher names lined up one after another on the work’s tip list. A thousand won was a signal flare: We’re here. Contact us. Some of them even fired off the exceptional ten-thousand or fifty-thousand-won tips, desperate to catch the author’s eye.
It wasn’t just the industry people going crazy. The readers were already on the verge of a riot. The comment section was plastered with howling.
They weren’t roasting the work because it was bad. It was too fun, and there simply wasn’t enough of it—adorable threats from furious readers. Some even started spreading coordinates across other communities.
The view-count graph shot up in a vertical line. The Today’s Best ranking was shifting in real time. Thirtieth. Twentieth. Fifteenth…
A monster had arrived.
And the person controlling that monster—
“Hehehe.”
—was hiding behind an office monitor, licking his lips as he imagined exactly how the protagonist would take the villain’s head in the next chapter.