Rhythm in the Sky
Jeong Jinwook's office was a fine one. The room itself was generous, but what really did the work was his eye: an art-school graduate, he had brought the whole space to life with only a handful of objects.
The finest of them hung behind the desk. An old oil, obvious at a glance—white clouds drifting over a blue sky, a very plain picture. Set among other paintings, it might have been walked past without a second look. The manner was that ordinary.
And yet the longer he looked, the stranger the feeling grew. He wanted to name the emotion and could not find a single phrase that fit. Jihun would have produced some magnificent appraisal.
Wait.
Why had he come here again? Lost in the painting, he had forgotten the reason he was in the office at all.
Right. He had come to ask Jeong Jinwook for a favor. Even in the moment the purpose returned to him—
"……"
Park Yugeon's gaze stayed fixed wholly on the work.
That was when the other man spoke.
"Is the painting to your liking?"
"Ah—yes. It's wonderful."
Jeong Jinwook answered with a face full of pride.
"It's my father's."
"Ah."
"He painted the sky every time. I asked him why, and he never answered. He just kept at it—sky after sky, without stopping."
"Because it's beautiful……"
"Sorry?"
"The sky is so beautiful. Maybe he had no choice but to pick up the brush."
"That could be. He only ever painted clear skies."
And truly, the sky in the painting was beautiful. Live with a sky like that overhead, and wouldn't notes come drifting down instead of rain? Not the patter of drops, but ting, ting-a-ling, ting, ting-ting—a little music at the ear.
Maybe it was only that he had come face to face with so fine a work, but his sensibility felt suddenly richer.
This isn't the time.
Park Yugeon was just about to come to the point.
Wait.
Notes falling out of the clouds. Music bursting free each time a note struck the ground.
Couldn't I make something out of this?
For instance—because the idea had struck—
Rhythm in the Sky.
The work was piling up like a mountain, and still a small smile hooked the corner of Park Yugeon's mouth.
Time moved quickly. In less than a semester I had shot up a full two inches and had to have a new school uniform made. That uniform didn't last either. This time it was the shoulders. A little swimming, and the body had answered.
While I was growing(?), plenty was happening around me as well.
Dragon Planet kept up its run of hits, and the weekly's circulation broke records day after day. The more new readers poured in, the more attention spilled over onto Ryunosuke and Suzuki's debut.
The title, by Ryunosuke's fierce insistence, ended up as Dream Quest(…). It felt as if the wheel of history had slipped a little off its track. What could I do? If the writer wanted it that way, that was the way it went.
Anyway! D-Que, solid construction joined to fluent artwork, was cruising—third in the popularity rankings, and then some.
Not that it was all good news. Now that the serial was on its feet, Suzuki wanted to rest, and Ryunosuke was of the opinion that you row when the tide is in.
"It's fine, go get some rest! I'll draw while you're gone. What's the problem?"
One of them was openly volunteering to do the work of two. What choice was there? Ryunosuke won again.
The network had been settled long ago; only the time slot still needed tuning. Barring some major trouble, the first broadcast would come around next month.
Hmmmm.
It felt wrong to say so, but an enormous amount of capital had gone into opening the American market. Watching the money leave in thick chunks was genuinely painful.
And so I started one more small(?) venture. Along the way I published every Dragon Planet volume released so far, all at once. Korea had no choice but to buzz over Dragon Planet. Fortunately the collected volumes sold well, and so did the weekly. A result worth noting.
Doesn't exactly show up in the bank account, though……
Still. Once Buzzer Beater came out, things would look better.
That was what I told myself. In truth, the balance was not my chief concern.
The moment school let out, my brother ran straight to his team, and he barely made it home at dawn. The astonishing part was that he stayed first in the whole school anyway. Other third-year middle schoolers had to be studying hard too, didn't they? It was so strange that one day I asked him.
Why are your grades this good?
That day, he answered like this.
Studying is honest. You get back as much as you put in.
Then he added a little more.
Yes. He was gripping an anxious heart and truly giving it everything he had. I was not the only one who felt it. Even Daisho's developers were left shaking their heads. If Japan had Ryunosuke, people were starting to say(?) that Korea had Park Yugeon—he was that completely sunk in the work.
Fortunately, results followed the effort. He finished the final build a full two months ahead of the goal.
I hope it came out well.
The third floor of the publishing house was famous in the neighborhood for burning its lights twenty-four hours a day. Today was no exception. The moment I stepped in, Martin came forward first.
"Up all night?"
"More or less daily life."
Martin had coding chops enough to draw a gasp out of Mr. Hideo. He had picked it up looking over other people's shoulders, and look at him now. He had joined the development team from the start, and these days he was carrying, alone(!), work that would have taken several veteran programmers.
"No confirmed bugs yet, but you never know. We'll have to keep checking right up to launch."
He said it that way, but he looked fairly confident. When a programmer of Martin's caliber went at a thing in earnest, a problem would have been the stranger outcome.
At that same hour, Daisho's developers were slumped on the sofa, nodding off. The words rose as far as my throat—if only they could sleep in peace—and stopped there. For now, all I could promise them was a little financial therapy.
"Where's my brother?"
"He stepped out to wash his face. He'll be right back."
Five minutes, maybe. My brother came striding toward me with a towel around his neck. Battered slippers, tracksuit pants shoved halfway up his calves, a T-shirt gone slack at the collar. Who would look at this person and think third-generation chaebol?
"The final build's done?"
"Yeah. I sent it to Mr. Hideo. We should hear back sometime tomorrow."
He led me straight to the television.
"Not much different from the eighty-percent version. The card illustrations kept looking smeared, so we swapped in the cleanest versions we could……"
Suzuki had handled the card art, as expected: the work of a genius driving himself to the limit. But perhaps it was the ceiling on capacity. They had worried the whole way to the final build whether there might be some other method, and no amount of effort could overcome a physical limit. Regrettable, but what could you do? Compromise at a reasonable level.
The card illustrations aside—
"We got the story in as naturally as we could."
"Except the dialogue?"
"Yeah. Information unlocks every time you pick up a card."
Padding the gaps with dialogue would have been the easy way. My brother had chosen a new kind of staging instead, to raise immersion and the sense of achievement.
"It really is better."
The level design Natsume Eiji had handled was exquisite, and the combat system Kurosawa Takeshi had gone over again and again felt finished. Maybe that was why. It felt like a work that had arrived ahead of its time.
On a Famitsu scale, thirty-eight out of forty, or higher.
So now there's nothing left but a rosy future?
But.
When has your grandpa ever been wrong about money?
Grandfather's prophecy came true with ghostly accuracy.
Sure enough, the critics poured out their praise. A teenage genius developer had appeared; Hideo's camp had built yet another myth. They could not stop fussing.
It was certainly a brilliant debut.
But the problem was sales.
As of September, one million one hundred thousand copies had sold. After that, word of mouth kept a certain quantity moving steadily. At a glance it looked wonderful. Unless we could turn steadily into explosively, my brother and I would have to fold the dream.
Daisho, knowing none of this, was in a festival mood. A raw-rookie third party selling 1.1 million copies with a debut—of course they were. They predicted as many as 1.4 million would sell before the year was out, and they added their thanks and their congratulations.
Damn it. The goal was two million. Why did they keep congratulating us?
The person in charge answered without a thought in his head.
"By the end of next year, it might even hit two million, don't you think?"
Don't even start.
It was purely my brother's work, made without Hideo's help. Take the long view, and a path of flowers had been laid at his feet. His performance had been that outstanding.
"……"
We could not simply be glad. For all the critics' overwhelming praise, the pace of sales was once again a slow climb up and to the right.
If only there were more time.
Which was another way of saying that, as things stood, we would miss the goal.
Had it already looked finished, even to Grandfather?
He quietly summoned me to the study.
"Wore yourself out running around. Good work."
"……"
"First shipment alone hit two million, did it?"
"……"
"Even so, whatever you're in the hole, the rise in Mideumsa stock ought to cover it, no?"
A way of telling me to admit defeat. Three months still remained, and he spoke like a man who had already seen the final score.
"What? You mean to ride it out to the end?"
"……"
"At this point, what can you even do?"
"……"
"Thinking of buying up about a million copies behind your grandpa's back?"
There was no way. No—more precisely, there was no answer by any normal method.
Right. If a normal method wouldn't work, then even if I had to water it down a little……
Had he read that look?
"What? Fixing to say something again?"
That was what he said. His face, though, made it plain he was dying to know what scheme I was cooking up.