Blame It on the Scriptwriter
This is all Writer Byun’s fault. Or maybe it was just a load of pure shit from the very beginning.
Masterpiece of a lifetime, my ass.
It was filthy working with you, and I pray to God we never cross paths agai—
“Whew, no. Pull yourself together, Hong Mi-na.”
Catching herself before her fingers could finish typing the career-ending truth, she swallowed the bile rising in her throat. Her mind was a hazy swamp of exhaustion, but sheer survival instinct steered her back toward professional sanity.
No matter how fiercely she resolved never to see his face again, life had a cruel habit of laughing at such petty declarations. The webtoon industry was practically a fishbowl. After enduring endless months of hell, there was no reason to invite bad karma or spawn a vindictive enemy with a parting insult. Still, she was careful not to leave any room for false hope—not a single pleasantry like ‘I look forward to our next collaboration’ escaped her keyboard.
A chime pinged from her phone.
Dreading that the man had found some pathetic pretext to keep the conversation going, she checked the screen, only to breathe a sigh of relief. It wasn’t Byun after all.
She was speaking to the true root of this calamity. She should have sensed the danger the moment Romi, an editor in webtoon development, had frantically burst in to ask whether she had ever read the Records of the Three Kingdoms. Carelessly answering that she had skimmed it once for background research on an older project had proved to be the greatest regret of Mi-na’s mortal life. From that second on, Romi had practically grabbed her by the pant legs, begging through crocodile tears that she couldn’t find an illustrator for a historical epic and pleading with Mi-na to save her career. That was how this nightmare had landed in her lap.
No amount of weeping would move her. Not after everything Writer Byun—fondly christened ‘Writer Shit’ between them—had put her through. Needing an outlet for her pent-up fury, Mi-na began drafting an itemized indictment of his crimes to justify why top-tier beef was the bare minimum compensation. Yet, as always, Romi heard whatever her hopeless romantic brain wanted to hear.
Webtoon Goddess.
A fluke photo taken at an author convention had once gone viral, saddling her with that embarrassing moniker for a brief spell. But that was before her bitter divorce; a lifetime ago.
Mi-na cut it off with surgical precision. If Romi started spinning delusions and whispering rumors through the office, things would spiral into a logistical disaster.
Truth be told, despite their private nickname for him, Writer Byun was not actually an incompetent hack. Quite the contrary—he was a remarkably talented writer. The curse was that his brilliance sprang from suffocating, obsessive perfectionism. On top of that, he was a hardcore historical purist, which made working on this project a living purgatory. Every single scene required Mi-na to wade through academic papers equivalent to multiple master’s theses, and designing a single character meant digesting their full historical biography. ‘A person’s entire life must be etched into the lines of their face,’ he would lecture.
That might sound poetic for the main cast, but just how many dozens of people were there in the Three Kingdoms?
And had all that blood, sweat, and carpal tunnel syndrome yielded a smashing success? By the halfway mark, the top-voted comment on the serial platform summarized the entire comic in four brutal words:
Encyclopedias were undeniably educational, but were they entertaining? Not particularly. By obsessing over archival accuracy at the expense of dramatic tension, the webtoon earned high praise from a handful of hardcore history buffs while failing to achieve anything resembling mainstream popularity.
God, how on earth did I survive that? Looking back, she found herself amazed by her own resilience. Romi had no choice but to acknowledge the miracle.
Damn right. Without Mi-na holding the canvas together, this production would have imploded half a dozen times over.
With dinner secured, a blessed silence settled over her apartment. Living hand-to-mouth as a freelancer meant she ought to start preparing pitches for her next gig, but she was far too drained to care. Today, she refused to think about work.
At times like this, nothing heals the soul like Lumière.
Romi, ever the romance addict, frequently questioned why Mi-na’s ultimate celebrity obsession was a girl group rather than some brooding leading man. But during the darkest chapter of her divorce, Lumière had been the solitary ray of light keeping her tethered to this world.
“Time to binge some Lena fancams.”
Her absolute favorite was Lena, the radiant center of the group, adored by female fans as the ‘devil of women’ for her effortlessly cool, androgynous allure. Determined to recharge her depleted spiritual battery to full capacity, Mi-na launched YoungTube on her monitor and collapsed onto her mattress.
A loud chime heralded the video playback. Yet, as if mocking an impoverished creator who couldn’t spare the cash for a premium subscription, the screen refused to show Lumière. An unskippable advertisement blasted into the room instead.
To make matters worse, through some sick curse of the algorithm, it was a promotional trailer for a Three Kingdoms mobile game.
The second my manuscript pay clears, I swear on my life I’m buying premium.
Just hearing the era’s name set her teeth on edge, but crawling out of her warm blankets to tap the skip button felt like climbing an icy mountain. In the quiet duel between spite and lethargy, pure laziness triumphed effortlessly.
Staring blankly at the screen, she watched the iconic figures of the era flash past one after another: Liu Bei, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, Zhuge Liang, Sun Quan, Zhou Yu, Lu Meng, Lu Xun, Xun Yu, Guo Jia, Zhang He... But as the roster paraded by, Mi-na noticed something odd. Every single warlord and strategist had been rendered as a woman.
I know gender-bent anime games exist, but still...
Writer Shit, being an orthodox history snob, had always spat venom at such concepts. Was this title trying to carve out a niche in a trend that had already peaked years ago? Strangely enough, the character designs didn’t look like cheap fan-service either.
As the commercial drew toward its finish, the camera zoomed dramatically onto Cao Cao. She was a silver-haired beauty with razor-sharp, striking features, striking an impeccably theatrical pose.
Striking poses all she wants, she’s still just ‘Jjo,’ isn’t she?
After being force-fed endless historical anecdotes during production, Mi-na’s mental image of Cao Cao had been reduced to a ruthless power fiend with a chronic obsession with married women.
Why is this ad so ridiculously long? I should’ve just got up and skipped it.
The display shifted into a flashing roulette wheel, spinning like a casino slot machine. Was this one of those obnoxious interactive ads forcing the viewer to tap before it closed? Heavy exhaustion dragged at her eyes. As her eyelids fluttered shut, the spinning slots finally clicked to a halt, displaying an ornate portrait of an aristocratic boy of about fourteen or fifteen.
Wait... that headpiece... what was it called again?
Her thoughts grew syrupy and slow. Writer Byun had barked the name at her dozens of times while nitpicking her line work, yet her sleepy mind couldn’t quite grasp it.
...Right... the beaded imperial crown... the Mianliuguan...
By the time the familiar term surfaced, sleep had already pulled her under, severing the thread of consciousness.
“Ugh... what in the world... why does it hurt so much?”
A searing, white-hot agony tore across her back, ripping her violently from sleep. It was a vicious burning sensation—not the dull ache of a muscle spasm or a pinched nerve from an awkward sleeping posture.
As her eyes cracked open, reality shattered. She had drifted off on the memory-foam mattress of her cozy apartment, yet directly above her arched an expansive, pale-blue sky. But far more terrifying than the sky were the deafening sounds crashing over her ears.
“Aaargh!”
“Somebody help us!”
“Spare me! Save me, please!”
Screams of pure horror collided with desperate wails of people dying in agony.
Did my apartment building collapse while I was asleep?!
A harsh, acrid stench of burning timber stung her nostrils, underscored by a thick, metallic reek that smelled nauseatingly like fresh blood.
What is happening?! Ah—!
The instant she attempted to sit up, an agonizing shockwave lanced through her spine, stealing the breath from her lungs.
“Your Majesty! You have regained your senses?!”
Noticing the movement, a figure kneeling beside her cried out in frantic relief. It was a woman of breathtaking beauty, her head modestly covered by an awkward, restrictive veil. But Mi-na hardly had time to admire her face. What captured her terror was the ragged scrap of cloth clutched in the beauty’s trembling hands—drenched entirely in dark, glistening crimson.
Is that... my blood? Was she pinned under shattered concrete?
A wet, creaking groan rattled beneath her, accompanied by a rhythmic swaying that made her stomach lurch. Then came the unmistakable smell of murky, churning river water.
A boat?! I’m on a boat?!
Something had gone unimaginably, catastrophically wrong. The terrified faces crowded around her and the chaos roaring from the riverbank made it painfully clear that doom was closing in.
“Take me with you! Please!”
“Let me board! Have mercy!”
No matter how she looked at it, she was screwed. There was no need to analyze the situation; she was utterly finished.
“General Dong! If we delay any longer, the vessel will capsize!”
“Damn it all! There is no other way—follow me!”
General Dong?
Turning her head with great effort toward the shout, Mi-na glimpsed an athletic woman in battered armor slick with blood, leveling a long spear as she dashed toward the gunwale.
“Urgh...”
“Your Majesty, you must not rise! Please, preserve your imperial health!”
The tearful maiden tending her wound desperately pleaded, but Mi-na couldn’t tear her eyes away from the charging warrior. What followed instantly made her regret ignoring the warning.
“Clear off! Release your hold, or I shall cleave you where you hang!”
Grimacing like an enraged demon, the armored woman thrust her weapon downward without hesitation, hacking mercilessly at the frantic hands clinging to the wooden edges of the vessel.
“Aaaagh!”
“My fingers! My hand!”
“Urrgh...”
Between the gruesome butchery and the rocking waves, a violent wave of nausea surged up Mi-na’s throat. Yet the warrior showed no signs of stopping until the vessel was completely cleared. She struck again and again, lopping off fingers and hands with brutal efficiency. Severed digits rained down like gruesome hail, splashing across the deck until the wooden planks were slicked in the same horrifying crimson as the general’s armor.
“Blargh...”
As the sheer grotesqueness threatened to knock her unconscious once more, the disparate pieces of the puzzle suddenly slammed into place with horrific clarity.
The adolescent boy wearing the beaded imperial crown in the advertisement.
A desperate mob clinging to an overcrowded raft, fleeing a relentless pursuit.
A warrior surnamed Dong mercilessly severing the fingers of refugees to keep the imperial boat afloat.
And the reverent title rolling off the lips of the veiled beauty tending her wounds.
No... I was sick to death of the Three Kingdoms... why in the name of hell me?!
There was no room for doubt. She had transmigrated into Emperor Xian of Han—the tragic, puppet child-emperor Liu Xie—during his desperate, blood-soaked flight across the Yellow River from Chang'an to Luoyang, escaping the warlords Li Jue and Guo Si.
Writer Shit... you bastard of a...
Her head struck the deck with a dull thud.
“Your Majesty—!”