A Reply After Three Years
I was always the one who turned off the lights in the gallery.
It was the final day of my solo exhibition.
Six names were written in the guest book, and four of them were mine. The other two belonged to the owner of the frame shop and an old man who'd wandered in looking for the bathroom.
Not a single painting had sold. All thirty-two pieces on the wall hung exactly as they had on opening day.
A banner stretched across the entrance.
Solo Exhibition — Lee Hwabaek.
Lee Hwabaek. That was my name. Family name Lee, given name Hwabaek — and since hwabaek was an honorific for a master painter, my parents had essentially hammered a nail into my cradle that said: you will be a painter.
And this particular Hwabaek hadn't managed to sell a single painting.
...Though leaving it at that feels a little unfair.
I'd flamed out in the fine arts world, sure, but it wasn't as though I couldn't make a living from drawing at all.
I unfolded a folding chair and sat down in the middle of the empty room, then pulled my phone out of my pocket.
The gallery was dead as a graveyard, but there was something I needed to check.
For the record, I'm also a webtoon artist.
And a reasonably successful one, at that.
By day I clung to unsellable fine art like this; by night I drew a martial arts webtoon. It was called Moorim — a wuxia series with a title so lazy it practically admitted defeat. The Orthodox sects and the Demonic Cult beating each other bloody, the Heavenly Demon's daughter doing this and that — a story you've read a hundred times.
And yet that one, somehow, took off.
Six people came to my exhibition; ten million views piled up on my webtoon. Funny old world. What I truly wanted was those paintings on the wall, and what the world wanted was the throwaway martial arts comic I sketched at night.
Well, that was where the money came from, so I was in no position to complain.
The problem was this.
That thriving webtoon — I'd abandoned it for three years now.
Moorim had come to a stop in front of one child.
A child born as the Heavenly Demon's daughter, destined to one day burn the whole world to ash. A child thrown alone into a place where no one would ever come to save her.
Over ten years of drawing, I put that kid through hell countless times. Every arc I shoved her into a deeper pit, and even then I never once pulled her back out.
Maybe I was the only god who drew and created that world.
And for a god, I was spectacularly incompetent.
Worse still, I'd stopped right before the climax.
The final war, where the Orthodox factions and the Demonic Cult would clash in the open. At the very heart of it, the girl standing before the Heavenly Demon's throne was, for the first time in ten years, on the verge of seizing everything.
I had laid out the entire board up to that point — and then I couldn't draw what came next.
The reason was simple. The next chapter wouldn't come.
Whether she became the Heavenly Demon and burned the world down, or became something else entirely — after ten years of drawing her, I still couldn't decide how her story ended. The moment I picked up the pen, my hand seized up from the very first panel.
So I ran.
"I'll draw it next week" became next month, which became "by the end of this year," and then three years had slipped past. Every deadline I pushed back, the guilt faded a little more, until eventually I'd sometimes forget the series had ever existed.
When I turned on my phone, a cascade of notifications came pouring down.
Even after years of neglect, my series' forum was still bustling.
At the very top, one pinned post sat like a nail in the board.
Today makes exactly three years since our author laid out the entire Great Orthodox-Demonic War and then went dark.
This post stays up until we get our ending.
Over four thousand comments.
Arguments, theories, pleas, resignation.
Three years on, some of them were still sitting in that very spot, waiting for an ending.
...My conscience did sting a little.
A series with ten million views, a story I'd dragged out over ten years — and I'd been stiffing them right at the climax for three years running.
I was about to close the comment section when I noticed one more notification waiting.
An email.
I normally never answered reader mail. I never had anything worth saying, and once you started replying, there was no end to it.
But for some reason, this one refused to be skimmed over.
Subject: Please, show me the ending
Humbly submitted to the Author.
It has been three years.
On the day you laid down your brush, Author, my time stopped with it. Before that final panel — before the space that was never filled — I still stand, unable to take a single step.
I have not missed a single day.
Will he come today? Perhaps today. A thousand days have flowed past like this. The waiting has gone on so long that it has soaked into my very bones, until I nearly forget what it is I am waiting for.
...No. I have never once forgotten. Not for a single moment.
Author. I must know what becomes of that child.
Whether she finds salvation in the end, or whether she truly loses everything. Without knowing that one thing, I cannot move forward a single day.
To you it may be nothing more than a manuscript put off until tomorrow — but for someone, that ending may be the whole of their existence. I beg you to consider this.
I am still standing in that place.
...Forgive me. That was presumptuous of me.
Only know this: I do not resent you, Author. Not for setting down your brush, nor for three years of silence.
You need only come back. That is all.
Prostrate, I implore you. Please, carry that world to its end.
Even if I must seal you away inside Moorim itself, Author — I want to see that ending.
That last line was a little unsettling, I'll admit.
But that wasn't what caught my eye.
'...My humble self? Prostrate, I implore you?'
The whole thing read like something out of a historical drama. Who writes an email like that in this day and age? And referring to herself in that courtly register, no less.
It read exactly like a letter written by someone who'd lived in Moorim.
And by Moorim, I mean the one I'd spent ten years drawing.
'Dedicated fans really do pick up the author's speech patterns, huh.'
I snorted and scrolled past it.
But the letter was more than enough to stir three years of buried guilt. Had anyone ever waited for my story this badly?
And then, something strange happened.
I hadn't been able to draw for three years. Every time I spread out a manuscript, my hand seized — I couldn't manage a single line.
Yet after reading that letter, my hand began to move on its own.
As though someone had taken hold of my wrist and was writing in my place, my fingers hammered at the keys without my permission. No blockage. No hesitation. None.
Hello, dear reader.
Let me begin with an apology. Three years of waiting, and only now do I answer.
To be honest, all this time I couldn't bring myself to open that manuscript. My hand froze before the final page, and I ran away, ashamed of my own frozen hand. One day of delay became two, and then two became three years.
It honestly never occurred to me that someone might have been standing there all this while, still waiting.
The part where you said the waiting had soaked into your very bones — I stopped there for a long time. I'm realizing all over again that the three years I let slide were, for someone, that kind of time.
What becomes of her — I don't know either. Shameful, but it's the truth. Ten years of drawing her, and I never decided how her story ends.
But this much, I promise you.
As soon as I am ready, I will draw Moorim through to its comple——
I stopped dead, mid-sentence.
...What did I just write?
"I'll draw it to the end." A promise I hadn't even been able to say out loud for three years — while I couldn't manage so much as the next chapter.
I reached out to erase it.
But my fingers were already pressing send.
I couldn't even tell whether it had been me who pressed it.
The screen lit up briefly.
And in the very next instant —
Click──
The gallery lights went out.
The ceiling fixtures died all at once, and darkness swallowed every corner of the room. There were no windows, so the only light left was the glow of the phone in my hand.
Voices drifted in from the corridor.
"Huh? What the— did the power go out?"
"Go check the breaker box."
"No, this looks like the whole building."
"Ah, the exhibition's not even finished yet. Anyone inside?"
"Third floor was empty today. Last day of the show, they said."
The building manager and his crew, muttering back and forth.
Somewhere a door opened; footsteps came and went.
Perfectly ordinary sounds — exactly the kind you'd expect in a building with a blackout.
Then those sounds began to fade.
As if someone were slowly turning down the volume. The murmuring thinned, the footsteps dwindled, and at last nothing could be heard at all.
The phone screen in my hand dimmed and went dark with a soft swipe.
The blackness thickened.
Once my eyes adjusted, I should have been able to make out at least a few outlines. There were none. No walls, no floor, no folding chair I'd been sitting in seconds ago.
I couldn't see the ground beneath my feet, the ceiling above my head, or my own body.
And out of that pitch-black dark —
a voice spoke.
Utterly, horribly clear.
"...At last."
"At last you've written back to me, Author."
It was a gentle voice. So gentle, in fact, that it raised goosebumps instead.
The voice was everywhere in the darkness. At my ear, behind my back, inside my own chest.
"I waited three years."
"I looked in every single day. Will he come today? Perhaps today. Wondering how you'd save her, that child — that thought was all I had."
"But you never came. Not one day, not two. On and on, and on, and on..."
The voice paused for a moment.
"...So I decided, humble self that I am, to come fetch you personally."
Humble self.
The words from that letter just now.
'...That reader?'
How could someone who'd sent a single email be speaking out loud right here? No — more to the point, where was here?
"There's no escaping now."
The voice gave a low laugh. And somehow, even the laugh sounded like weeping.
"Until you draw it through to the very end... you will live in Moorim, Author. Inside that Moorim — the one you spent ten years drawing."
Hold on. What did you just say?
"Don't worry."
The voice drew closer. Close as lips pressed to my ear, a whisper.
"I will be right here beside you, watching. Every step of the way."
"...Oh, and one more thing."
The voice turned soft. Almost sweet — like someone delivering good news.
"By sending that reply, you have given your consent. You answered, after all."
Consented to what, exactly? I never agreed to any such——
"Did you know?"
The woman's voice, still honeyed, breathed against my ear.
"Authors who abandon a serialization are, by rights, meant to fall into the Hell Realm. Compared to that, a punishment like this is really quite merciful."
And the very next moment, the darkness swallowed me whole.