My Entire Life Is About to Change

7:00 a.m.

The moment I opened my eyes, my hand groped for the space beside my pillow.

I'd sworn to myself last night. Don't ride the highs and lows of every reaction—just focus on the writing.

But if I could actually manage that, I'd be a Buddha, not an office worker.

The smartphone screen lit up, and out of pure habit I tapped the Munpia app.

Refresh.

Refresh again.

I'd barely slept. I'd managed to get through writing chapter 5 without trouble, but after that the words simply refused to stick in my head.

Every new comment sent my heart into freefall. Every contract-offer message left my fingers itching to open it.

Don't do anything stupid.

Getting all worked up only to crash later would be even more humiliating. It was still free serialization, and only ten chapters in. There was no telling when this bubble might burst.

Consoling myself like that, I checked the rankings.

"Huh…"

A hollow laugh slipped out of me.

Not Today's Best.

Golden Best.

The chart that ranked every free serial on Munpia—the king-of-kings tournament of the entire platform. The upper ranks there were usually the playground of established authors who had already stacked thirty-plus chapters and built a real readership.

And yet.

Third place.

The novels sitting above and below mine had already passed forty, fifty chapters. Mine was the only exception. A ten-chapter rookie work sitting alone at the absolute top of the board—this wasn't just unusual. It was an invasive species disrupting the entire ecosystem.

First place… doesn't even look that far away.

At this pace, reclaiming the top spot today wasn't impossible.

I swallowed hard and opened my message inbox.

The count had stopped climbing because it simply couldn't go any higher. Most of them were reader cheers and demands for the next chapter, but mixed in among them were the offers that really stood out.

I opened them one by one.

Filtered.

My writing was done by AI. The Muse inside my head was far more perfect than any of their little corrections.

I almost took the bait. Then I searched. Those titles were already five years old. Past their prime.

A 6:4 split? Were these people ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠thieves?

The further I scrolled, the colder my head became. It wasn't all sweet talk. We'll fill in the parts you're lacking. You're a rookie, so you need a big agency like us. Our sales team is the best in the business.

Pretty words, but the core message was always the same.

We want to swallow you cheap.

You're a newcomer, so we'll lowball the contract—if it works out, great; if not, no skin off our backs. That attitude bled through every line.

It left a bitter taste. Business was business, but watching my writing get treated like a spare part didn't exactly fill me with joy.

And then one other offer caught my eye.

I opened it fully.

The message was long. Unlike every other management company, there was not a single line bragging about how big they were or how many authors they already had under contract.

Instead, the page was packed with analysis of my writing.

Why the protagonist's personality was so magnetic. Why the twist in chapter 5 felt so perfectly on-trend. And where this story could go from here if it wanted to explode.

It was precise. As if they had peered straight into my head—or into Muse's algorithms.

And then the final paragraph.

Sincerity.

It punched straight through the monitor—desperate, burning sincerity. Honestly, it was the offer that pulled at me the hardest. Conditions and scale aside, they were the only ones treating my writing as a work of art rather than a product.

I should ask hyung first.

Rather than decide alone, I wanted the opinion of my number-one fan.

Lunch break.

Company rooftop.

Hyung—Manager Park Do-hun—was half-catatonic.

"…"

His hollow eyes stared blankly into empty air. Sending him the stockpile through chapter 20 yesterday had been a mistake. He'd clearly stayed up all night reading, re-reading, and analyzing.

"Hyung? You still alive?"

"…Hey, Minjun."

He turned his head toward me slowly. Those eyes did not belong to a workplace senior. They belonged to a cultist.

"How… how is it still getting better at chapter twenty?"

"Isn't better a good thing?"

"No, it doesn't make sense! Normally you dump everything into the first five chapters and then the energy just drains out as you go. So why does your tension keep climbing?"

He clutched his head.

"I tried analyzing it, okay? The line the protagonist drops in chapter 15 connects straight back to a setup in chapter 3. I almost rolled off the bed from the chills."

"Haha…"

"Be honest with me. You've got some master writer hidden behind you, don't you? Or are you running an AI?"

I flinched. Hyung's instincts were terrifyingly sharp. But even if I was running an AI, I was still the one tuning it and feeding it input.

"AI? Come on. I just wrote what's already in my head."

"Yeah, I figured. We're not at the point where AI can write novels like this yet—and if an AI had written something this good, every author on the planet would be out of a job. You really are a freak talent."

He shook his head in disbelief. Only then did he seem to return to reality, his gaze landing on the stack of papers in my hand.

"What's that?"

"Ah—I sorted the contact messages that came in this morning. You said you'd look them over."

I handed him the shortlist of management companies I'd filtered before work. In an instant his eyes switched to full business mode. His fingers flew through the pages.

"A Management… terms aren't bad, but their contracts are famous for poison clauses. Out."

"Company B… way too factory-line. A newcomer like you could get one promo push and then get discarded."

"Company C… playing games with the split. Thugs."

Unfiltered judgment poured out of him. Leaving this to him had been the right call. Places where I would have gone, "Oh, that seems fine," he cut down without mercy.

Then his hands stopped.

"Huh?"

His gaze locked on one spot—the proposal from Studio Nangan, the same one that had caught my eye.

"Hey. Are these terms for real?"

"Why? Bad?"

"No. They're insane."

He held the paper out to me.

"Ten to zero?"

I stared in shock. After Munpia took its cut, the management company wouldn't take a single won—everything left would go to the author. The industry standard was 7:3; for a newcomer you had to brace for 6:4.

"The 9:1 on other platforms is just as ridiculous. By industry norms this is charity work."

Hyung rubbed his chin with a serious expression.

"Never heard the name before… probably brand-new or extremely small. That's why they're offering terms this aggressive—they want to grow you as their flagship author."

"Yeah? Does the small scale make it risky?"

"Normally, yes. Sales power might be weak. Care might be lacking."

He thought for a moment, then looked me straight in the eye.

"But Minjun."

"Yeah."

"Are you confident you can write at this quality all the way to the end?"

"Huh?"

"The quality of the twenty chapters you've written so far. Can you maintain that to the finish?"

I nodded without a second of hesitation.

"Of course. It only gets more fun from here."

At my absolute certainty, hyung broke into a grin.

"Then it's this one."

"This one?"

"Yeah. In this industry, does a management company's name matter? Sure. But the work matters more. If the writing is a monster, you don't need sales power—readers will come find it on their own."

He pointed at Studio Nangan's offer.

"If your writing is the real deal, there's no reason to go to a big agency, get your cut shaved, and get treated like a spare part. Better to partner with a small place that's willing to bet everything on you—and take both the money and the respect."

His analysis was clean. And it lined up perfectly with the pull I already felt.

"One condition, though. We need to confirm ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠whether this CEO is just a smooth talker or someone who will actually run himself ragged for you."

"How?"

"Call him. Right now."

At his urging I pulled out my phone. The number from the message: 010-XXXX-XXXX. I took one deep breath and hit call.

Rrring—

The connection tone hadn't even finished its first cycle.

Click.

The answer came as if the man had been sitting there clutching the phone. His voice was trembling, just slightly.

"Ah, hello. I'm calling about the message I received…"

He shouted before I could even finish. Through the receiver I heard a chair scrape hard—he'd clearly shot to his feet.

"Yes, that's right. Am I speaking with Representative Kang Suk-woo?"

Words poured out without a single pause for breath. There was no calculation in that voice, no performance. Pure joy, and pure desperation.

"The terms were so extraordinary I wanted to confirm them."

"…"

I heard him swallow dryly.

No hesitation in the offer. I looked at hyung. He nodded.

"Yes. This evening works."

I hung up, still a little dazed.

"What'd he say?"

"Wants to meet tonight. His voice was shaking like crazy."

"Hmm. We should meet him. The sincerity seems real."

I agreed. But I still needed a comparison group. For due diligence I called a few of the larger management companies as well.

The reactions were exactly what I'd expected.

"Standard? Other places were offering better splits."

Playing awkward. Playing generous. Rhetoric designed to keep the upper hand by treating "newcomer" as a weakness. Of course it was. This was business.

But the temperature was nothing like the call I'd just had with Representative Kang Suk-woo.

"Yeah. That settles it."

I turned to hyung.

"Hyung, you're coming with me tonight, right?"

"Obviously. It's my little brother's contract—what kind of hyung would skip that?"

I felt steadier already.

6:30 p.m.

Miraculously, I'd managed a clean exit. Managing Director Choi had left early, which helped.

A quiet café near the office. Hyung and I sat in a corner booth.

"There he is."

Hyung pointed toward the entrance.

The man who came through the door looked to be in his mid-thirties, dressed in a neat suit. His hair was slicked back with wax, but the dark circles under his eyes were deep. The eyes themselves, though, were fiercely alive.

He scanned the café, spotted us, and practically ran over.

"Hello! Would you happen to be… Author Kang Minjun?"

"Yes, that's me."

"A pleasure! I'm Kang Suk-woo, representative of Studio Nangan."

He bowed a full ninety degrees, as if greeting a grand master. Once seated, he rummaged in his bag and pulled out a thick stack of documents.

I assumed it was a contract.

It wasn't.

"This is…?"

Instead of contract clauses, the pages were packed with dense tables and graphs.

"You can look at the contract later. We can revise every clause however you want."

Representative Kang pointed at the documents, face flushed with excitement.

"This is the data I pulled last night after analyzing your writing against current market trends."

Hyung took the papers with clear interest.

"Ohh…"

His eyes went wide. This wasn't empty sky-writing. Inflow rates, continued-read rates, projected payment conversion, optimal timing for expansion to other platforms, estimated promo impact—every single metric was grounded in hard data. He'd even listed the weak points in my writing and the strategies to shore them up, line after dense line.

"We're small. We don't have a flashy nameplate like the big agencies."

Representative Kang spoke with complete seriousness.

"That's exactly why I analyzed this so desperately. To figure out what I have to do to make the power in your writing detonate at a hundred percent—no, two hundred percent."

There was conviction in his voice. Conviction in my writing, and conviction in himself.

Hyung set the papers down and looked at me. He gave the smallest nod.

This one's the real deal.

His eyes said it clearly. My own chest was pounding. Someone who understood the value of my writing better than I did myself—

That was when Representative Kang turned to the final page.

"And so, this is the revenue we project for you."

One number, highlighted in red, slammed into my vision.

"…"

I swallowed hard.

A million won in daily sales?

A million won. Per day.

"Of course, this is the floor. Right after paid conversion it will be significantly higher. On weekends or during promo periods, two or three times that is entirely possible."

His explanation stopped reaching my ears. My mind had gone completely white.

A million won a day meant thirty million a month. That was the annual salary at this mediocre company I worked for—earned in a single month.

Hyung's hands were trembling. Mine were no better.

Thinking vaguely that something big might be happening was one thing. Staring at the concrete numbers was a shock of an entirely different order.

This… is what I'm worth?

The café noise receded. Only the number in front of me remained, burned sharp and clear.

My entire life was about to change.