A Hundred Billion, or Never
A few days later, Ryunosuke was ripping through the story at a frightening pace. At this rate he was barely sleeping. He had been starving for a debut, and now, as if he meant to burn off every old grievance in one go, he ran like a locomotive with the brakes torn off. Suzuki was the only one tasting death.
He had taken a room nearby, and every morning at nine he rubbed the sleep from his eyes and just managed to drag himself in. That was hardly the end of it. Face washed, teeth brushed, he still could not quite wake. His head kept bobbing. The morning went to a losing fight with drowsiness.
Ryunosuke did not care. He kept working at his own relentless clip, and he did not nag, either. If his partner rested, he simply did twice the work himself. What was Suzuki supposed to do with that? The guilt was inevitable.
"Ugh."
Matching the pace out of sheer apology, chasing off sleep just to keep up, he blinked and found that lunch had long since come and gone.
"You're not eating?"
"......"
Ryunosuke answered by spinning his pen. Suzuki hauled his stiff body up, went out for a late lunch, and came back to find the man still hunched at the desk, eyes bloodshot, still working.
Did he never get tired? To Suzuki, who had lived with laziness as his closest companion, the whole thing felt unreal. And so—
"Haa."
Suzuki, too, kept grinding the pages forward.
While the two of them were raising the pitch, I set aside a separate meeting with Editor Kazuhiro. Once I went home, the man looking after those two would be the editor, of course. Quick as ever, Kazuhiro read the nature of the meeting at once.
"You're leaving tomorrow?"
"Yes."
"That's a real shame."
A shame, he said. He had been sitting on a cushion of thorns the entire time. To crack the awkward air, I offered him a subject he knew by heart.
"Are the weeklies selling well these days?"
"Oh my. When an investor asks, I do get a little nervous."
"I heard the print run went up."
"Yes. Dragon Planet is fighting hard. The showdown with the Demon King has wrapped for now, and we're trying to make the story bigger."
"Bigger how?"
"We're thinking of taking it into space."
"Was that Mr. Tezuka's idea?"
"No. He wanted to end it with the Demon King arc. But the response has been so good—what can you do? The story has to keep going."
"So you plotted the rest for him?"
"That's putting it a little grandly. I only offered a few light ideas. Heh heh."
He was the one begging for the serialization to continue. He could not show up empty-handed, so he had roughly sketched the shape of the back half. In plain terms, he had a stake in the alien-battle arc, didn't he? He was watching my face now, yes. Even so, it was a plain fact that the editor had done a great deal to make Dragon Planet shine. Talent really was talent. That high-handed style of his would cause trouble later, ahem. That, in truth, was why I had arranged today's meeting.
"Editor."
"Yes?"
"If you can plot a story for a master like Mr. Tezuka, then rookies like Ryunosuke and Mr. Suzuki must be nothing to look at."
"......?"
His eyes tried to read the intent of the question before he answered.
"Ah... I only do my best as the first reader. I don't usually interfere strongly with the work itself..."
"You may interfere. If they're heading the wrong way, of course you should say so. That's an editor's job."
What I actually wanted was simpler: do not sand away a work's own character just to chase a hit formula. Some people, like Tezuka, rode the formula and blew the doors off. Others, like Buzzer Beater, got bounced clean out. Unfortunately, Suzuki was closer to the latter.
Once again the editor's instincts were outstanding.
"I think I understand. I only drop a remark in passing, but writers get swept up in it more often than you'd think. Rookies especially."
He watched my reaction, decided the direction was right, and pressed on at once.
"I made a rule back then. With newcomers, be especially careful. Don't drag the writer. Stay strictly behind them, and focus only on looking after them..."
"And that rule will apply to those two?"
"Of course! I only direct the traffic. The wheel belongs to the two of them."
With a promise that firm, he was not likely to start talking nonsense later. In that case—
I held out my hand.
"I'll be counting on you."
"I'm the one who ought to be asking."
From a shareholder's seat, he was the finest kind of talent there was: a man who raked the money in. Maybe that was why. The clasp tightened, hard, with a force that had not been there a moment before.
The next afternoon, the road home looked nothing like the road out. When I had flown to Japan, not a single thing had been settled. Coming back, fortunately, a great deal had changed. We had signed a third-party contract with Daisho, and by giving Mr. Hideo a stake we had built a partnership with some weight behind it. On top of that we had two creators to handle the story and the card designs. The money would come back several times over later.
Perhaps because so much had shifted, the head count had shifted with it. Only my brother and I had left. Five of us were coming home—Jo Sudeok and two developers along with us. The first words on Korean soil belonged, of course, to Jo Sudeok.
"Love it or hate it, nothing beats our own dear country."
"What are you going to do first when you get home?"
"Eat, obviously. Kimchi stew and one glass of soju. Perfect."
So that was why he was so lit up. I envied him. I really did.
"I told Team Leader Jeong Jinwook to come meet us at the airport. He'll probably bring two cars."
Two cars. Had he arranged a separate one for the developers?
"Shall I see the Japanese staff to the lodgings in Hannam-dong?"
There was a villa I had secured for Team Leader Jeong Jinwook to stay in. A floor apiece would do.
"Please do."
"And for work... the publishing house, I assume?"
"Yes. The third floor is empty. Set up computers and the Daisho dev kits there, and that should be enough."
"Feeling serious already?"
He said it lightly, but his eyes looked faintly sorry that his own part was finished.
"You ought to get back to your real work soon."
"Nnngh."
"Doesn't the semester start tomorrow?"
"Come to think of it, tomorrow you become a middle schooler too, President."
A middle schooler. I could live with the rest of it, but the thought of putting on a school uniform for the first time in twenty years left me feeling strange. Ahem.
That was when it came.
"Jihoon."
My brother's voice, behind me.
"I'm going straight to the publishing house with the developers."
"Why?"
"If we're starting tomorrow, we ought to finish the prep ahead of time."
"What about greeting Grandfather?"
"I'll pay my respects tonight. Given the situation, he'll understand."
In other words, even if he did not, there was nothing to be done. My brother had set his jaw. That resolve seemed to reach Jo Sudeok whole.
"It really is getting serious. No question."
"In other words?"
"Blood will tell..."
He grinned. Right. Where else would the blood go? I turned to my brother.
"I'll explain it properly to Grandfather."
"Where'd you leave Yugeon, coming here by yourself?"
"My brother's straightening up the office."
"Where are your manners! You come home, you say hello first!"
Grandfather. Then why was his mouth smiling? I did not dare let the thought out. Even when I had not sent a single word from America, he had not scolded me much. He knew, better than anyone, the thrill of being mad for the work. Sure enough, his face changed at once.
"Then what are you doing here instead of the publishing house?"
"Someone still has to report in."
"A report? Not a hello?"
Wasn't it the same thing? Ahem.
"Grandfather, I think this is going to cost more than I expected."
"It's your money you're spending. Why say that? Afraid I'll hang it on you later?"
I nodded.
"Better to make it clear, isn't it?"
"Ha!"
"Development shouldn't cost much. Marketing, though—I think we'll spend a bit there."
"...Where?"
"All of it together won't come to even a tenth of one percent of what it costs to develop a new car."
"It's different, though. A finished product like a car lives and dies by the country's image, but content is affected less. And the return against what you put in is a completely different matter..."
The look on his face said there was no winning a war of words. Grandfather stopped making an issue of the cost.
That aside.
"What'd that Japanese boy have to say?"
"That we should make a new genre."
"A new genre, he says?"
I gave him a short account of everything that had happened with Mr. Hideo after that. The interesting part came next.
"So how do the rules work?"
Explain it all and he still won't get a feel for it. That thought was a tremendous mistake.
"You build a strategy out of cards and fight with it. That what you mean?"
"Yes."
"Then you've got to put collecting those cards right out front, haven't you?"
"...Right."
"Folks'll want to brag about cards they scraped together the hard way. How are you gonna do that?"
In a world without the internet, it was impossible.
"Strategy's a problem, too."
"......?"
"I cook up some brilliant tactic, and if all I get is a fight with a computer, what's the fun in that? You want to feel good about it, you show your skill to a person, no?"
Those were problems that only online matches would ever solve. I, who had lived through the future, had seen them long ago. But Grandfather— He heard it once. How does he know all of that? I was shaking my head in sheer disbelief when something stopped me.
What?
A sight that had no business in that old-fashioned study caught my eye. And that was hardly all. There were even Japanese collected volumes of Dragon Planet. Surely Grandfather had not... enjoyed those...
A great question mark was rising in my head when his voice hooked me straight back into the room.
"So. Think you can hit a hundred billion won in sales?"
"Advertise all you like."
"......"
Words cast like a prophecy by a giant who had survived every kind of fight there was.
"Your grandfather ever been wrong about money?"