Toward the Ending
Having faithfully finished another day of serialization, model author Lee Myeongbok checked the various mails piled up in his inbox. It was still the same address from his days as ordinary citizen Lee Wonbum, so most of it was spam, but there were still messages he had to look at. The most important among them was none other than the settlement statement telling him how much in royalties had come in.
Of course the publisher handling his work sent a settlement statement every single month without fail, but honestly speaking, ever since he had become emperor he had never examined them properly. After all, royalty income was such a tiny sum compared to the imperial household’s revenues that it was hard to care.
That was why he had decided to gather the year’s royalties at the end of the year and donate them to a suitable charity; he was going through the statements now simply for the sake of tidying things up.
The royalties over the last few months have been coming in more than I expected?
It was true that My Korean Empire Is Not Like This! was being uploaded on other platforms as well, but even so the royalties were several times higher than before.
Ah. Looking closer, it’s being exported overseas too.
Come to think of it, he seemed to remember getting a text about that once before.
Back then one of the major shareholders of the company—the one who had tried to interfere with the novel after claiming it was slandering the Gyeonghwa Sajok—had suddenly gone off to Hong Kong and started talking about distributing My Korean Empire… Who would have thought it would actually sell.
From a rough glance it looked as though they had partnered with some web-novel platform on the Zhonghua side (the collective term for the Song in the south and the Republic of China in the north). Strange, though—why? The protagonist of this web novel was the Korean Empire, or rather its predecessor Joseon, and China only appeared once in a while.
Unable to contain his curiosity, I immediately logged onto a Chinese web-novel site.
Chinese… I’m not great at it, but I can at least roughly read classical characters…
For better or worse, in this world the Korean Empire still taught Chinese characters, and China itself used traditional characters rather than simplified ones. Thanks to that, a fair number of people could get the general sense of things even when browsing Zhonghua sites.
Of course if they started using their own internet slang and coded language there was nothing to be done, but reading the review comments attached to a web novel shouldn’t be a problem.
The long title My Korean Empire Is Not Like This! had been translated into the short title My Korea Is Not.
Amazingly, my work was sitting in the top ten. That was the 24-hour view ranking, of course; if you switched to weekly or monthly the irregular serialization shoved it far down the list, but still—an astonishing performance.
With a fluttering heart I clicked “View Reviews.”
Ugh… this is driving me crazy.
Naturally there was a bit of a time lag because of the translation from Korean into Chinese. And the part that had already passed in Korea but was about to drop over there was… the Boxer Rebellion.
I’m not looking at these reviews for a while.
There was no need for me to go hunting for Chinese people just so I could get cursed out. I was already getting thoroughly cursed out at home as it was.
Hey you son of a bitch, I’m not falling for it anymore.
Drop expectations with the Eulsa Treaty, jack them sky-high with the Eulsa Righteous Army.
Drop them with Gojong’s forced abdication, raise them with the Hague Special Envoy.
Drop them with the Jeongmi Treaty, raise them with the Jeongmi Righteous Army.
So basically your whole fucking goal is just to torture the readers, right? I’ve got you all figured out.
Y
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It’s obvious it’s just going to end as a Japanese colony, yet you keep planting hope with all this meaningless thrashing around. Not falling for it anymore. Not reading. Bye.
Part 2? Don’t even bother hoping. Get lost.
The Korean Empire inside the novel is gonna collapse in less than twenty fucking years, but the real-life Korean Empire just one-shots the discovery of the Heirloom Seal of the Realm.
In the novel it almost got treated as a colony even by the half-crippled Qing, but in reality the Song can only whine “that seal is mine~ give it back~” and nothing else.
The novel itself is just the antithesis of this reality.
If it hadn’t included the part where the Qing completely tanks, I would’ve honestly suspected the author was Chinese lmaooo
There are still big guys on other platforms who don’t know the author announced Part 2, so I just scraped it.
This much should be fine, right?
1. I am currently thinking of wrapping up the present work in about 20–30 more episodes. I do have a work in preparation that could serve as a sequel or Part 2, but I expect to take a certain rest period before serializing it.
2. I have been receiving all sorts of feedback from you readers, but from the moment I first began writing My Korean Empire until now, while I have adjusted details here and there, I have never changed the core spine of the story. I intend to go straight through to the ending as planned. Part 2 is also already prepared, so I would be grateful if you would wait for it.
3. A number of readers go beyond rough comments and leave long essays in my mail as well. I always listen to readers’ opinions with an open mind, but when it comes to raw abuse, all I can do is delete and block.
Hmm… still spicy as ever today.
But just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean I can rewrite history however I please. I have an obligation to show you the “original history” I remember, one way or another.
Nobody assigned me that duty, but still—you have to see even these despairing developments if you want to grow, right? Mhm.
As it happens, today is also the day I upload the final episode that will close out Part 1.
I had originally thought about slipping in episodes like the Great Subjugation of South Korea or the Gando Convention in between, but it would have gotten too boring, so I cut them as fast as I could.
There was only one decision left to make.
Whether to give the fall of the Korean Empire at least a dignified, tragic finish, or leave it closing its doors in the bitter way history actually recorded.
I had just been going on about original history, but could I really end the novel’s finale this blandly? By the time of the Gyeongsul National Humiliation (the Japan–Korea Annexation), so many rights had already been stripped away by the Japanese that it was little more than putting the final period on the page; there was no great resistance. Or more precisely, resistance had become nearly impossible. There was no army left, and the righteous armies had been wiped out in the Great Subjugation of South Korea, so anyone who might have resisted was already dead.
Among high officials and intellectuals there were many who felt the weight of responsibility and took their own lives or died for the country, but on the imperial side there was no one like that, which was…
Hmm… yeah, better to at least run the laundry cycle once before I leave.
Gojong Yi Hyeong would feel the responsibility for the nation’s ruin and… explode would be a bit much, so let’s make it suicide by poison, and I’ll raise the weight of Prince Uichin’s role a little. While I’m at it, since I’m going for tragic grandeur, I’ll mix in something vaguely like the Eui-dae-jo as well…
As for Sunjong… even if I wanted to use him there’s barely any record, so whatever.
And so the final episode of Part 1 of My Korean Empire Is Not Like This! went up.