What Does It Mean to Be Complete?

I woke to the smell of dirt.

The first thing that surfaced in my mind was that voice.

Black darkness. A woman's voice, soft and moist. And that sensation, swallowing me whole.

...So it wasn't a dream.

I felt along my body. Intact. Nothing broken, nothing aching. Breath slid in and out of my lungs without a hitch, filling them with air that smelled of mold and old earth — the mustiness of a place long abandoned.

There was a ceiling.

Not a gallery ceiling. This was the ceiling of a dirt-floored hovel, half its ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠rafters sagged down, one good shrug away from collapse. A few shafts of sunlight spilled through holes in the roof.

I tried to sit up — and froze.

Something was wrong with my hand.

It wasn't mine. The fingers were long, but there wasn't a single callus on them. After twenty years of drawing, the first joint of my middle finger should have been thick with the hardened ridge of a pen grip. It wasn't there. This was someone else's hand. Young, clean, untested by anything.

I looked down. The clothes were someone else's too.

Rough hemp fabric. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠The kind of garment a commoner would wear as an extra in some historical drama.

"...What the hell."

Even my voice was unfamiliar. Younger and clearer than my own.

I crawled to the hole in the wall that passed for a window — less a window than a chunk of the earthen wall that had crumbled away — and peered outside.

Mountains.

Ridgelines folded over ridgelines without end. Fog pooled below, and somewhere in the far distance a flag of some kind flapped in the wind. Its color was dark, ink-black — it looked like a sect banner.

The moment I took in that landscape, a chill ran down my spine.

I knew it.

I knew it far too well.

The curve of those ridgelines. The black banner snapping in the distance. The shape of the fog-filled valley below.

This wasn't scenery I was seeing for the first time. It was the Murim — the world I had spent ten years drawing.

Which meant that woman's words hadn't been a metaphor.

Literally.

I had truly been pulled into my own webtoon.

"...You've got to be kidding me."

There was a word for this, wasn't there? Possession. Transmigration. Something out of novels.

And it was happening to me. Right now.

I stood at the window for a long while, staring out.

My head was a tangled mess. This world was my comic. Who that woman was. How to get back. There was a mountain of things to sort through.

Then that mountain of problems was shoved aside — by a growl from my stomach.

Possession, schmossession. First things first: I was starving.

This body looked like it hadn't eaten in days. Which was, when I thought about it, kind of funny. I'd just crossed over from another world, and the body itself didn't seem to have noticed — it was already angling for its next meal.

Survival first.

I searched the house. Nothing to eat.

Instead, in a corner I found a single brush, a worn-down stub of ink, and a few sheets of paper gone yellow with age. They must have belonged to this body's former owner.

I picked up the brush.

It fit my hand like it had been made for it.

Twenty years of holding one every day. The body was a stranger's, but the hand remembered this brush. A strange relief washed over me — the feeling of realizing that even if I'd lost everything, this, at least, had come with me.

With nothing to do and my stomach growling, I drew a single line on the wall with ink.

A mindless stroke. Nothing more.

Except.

The line wriggled.

At first I doubted my eyes.

The ink line peeled itself off the wall with a soft hiss.

Not on paper — on an earthen wall. And it had lifted free, floating into the air. The black line folded and unfolded, shaping itself into wings.

A butterfly.

A butterfly made of ink fluttered right in front of my face.

I went rigid, brush still in hand.

The butterfly circled me once or twice, then drifted up toward the sunlight streaming through the hole in the roof. From there it soared out of the ruin and away toward those familiar ridgelines, until I lost sight of it.

"..."

I stood there like that for a long time.

What had I just seen?

With trembling fingers, I drew another line on the wall. This time I put some care into it — the shape of a fish.

The line wriggled again, then slid free of the wall.

An ink-black fish swam through the empty air, fins swaying, drifting lazily through water that wasn't there.

What I drew, came alive.

I looked down at the brush, slowly.

And I understood.

This hand didn't merely know how to hold a brush. Whatever this hand drew became real.

I had drawn for twenty years in my past life. Nobody gave a damn. Not a single piece sold. I never even got to finish my series. All I ever heard was nice work~.

But here.

If I drew it, it became reality.

The ink fish looped once around my shoulder.

Before I knew it, I let out a snort of laughter.

Dragged here against my will, waking up in a stranger's body, a stranger's clothes, inches from starvation. Some inexplicably familiar martial world out the window.

The situation was a total disaster.

And yet, somehow, it didn't feel bad at all.

Then, of course, that hunger I'd kept putting off came surging back.

...Come to think of it, couldn't I just... eat this way too?

If I drew it, it appeared.

So I drew rice.

A steaming bowl of white rice. Calling on all twenty ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠years of a starving artist's skill, I piled it high, mounded into a proper mountain of grains, each one glossy and distinct. I even fussed over the sheen.

The paper wriggled.

The rice bowl rose up off the page. I reached out — and it was really there in my hand. Warm. The steam was real. The weight was real.

I wolfed it down.

It was delicious, too. Plain white rice, sure — but after everything I'd just been through, that first mouthful nearly brought tears to my eyes.

When I'd scraped the bowl clean, I felt almost human again.

I set the empty bowl down.

I waited a long time, but the bowl didn't disappear. The drawing on the paper where the rice had been stayed put too. The ink sketch of the bowl remained on the page, and the real bowl that had sprung from it sat right in front of me, solid as ever.

"...It doesn't vanish?"

Curious, I turned the bowl over in my hands, poking at it. Hard, cold — a genuine ceramic bowl, right down to the few grains of rice still stuck to the bottom. No matter how much time passed, there was no sign of it blurring or dissolving.

What I drew, stayed.

...Wait. Does that mean I have to do the dishes?

Free food was great, but if the bowl wasn't going anywhere, it meant I'd be washing them myself, one after another. Somehow, that took the wind out of my sails a little.

Well. Still better than starving.

Emboldened, I tried drawing all sorts of things.

I drew a dog. Because I was bored. But I drew it carelessly. Legs — sloppy. Face — sloppy.

The dog that walked out of the paper had three legs.

It wobbled along on three legs, didn't make it far, and flopped over. Its face had only one eye. Because I'd only drawn one.

And then, with a soft fade, it vanished.

"...Huh?"

The dog that had just died dispersed like smoke, leaving no trace behind. The rice bowl had stayed perfectly intact — but the moment this one's breath ran out, it was gone.

"...Sorry about that."

I apologized, half in earnest. I hadn't even drawn it properly, and I'd given it nothing but a brief glimpse of the world before sending it off.

It took several more experiments before the rules began to take shape.

Living things vanished when they died. Dead things stayed.

Inanimate objects — a rice bowl, a blanket — remained exactly as drawn. But living things like the dog or the butterfly existed only so long as breath remained in them, and the instant they died, they faded away.

That fish, and the butterfly that had flown off beyond the ridgelines, would presumably vanish the same way, wherever they were, when their borrowed time ran out.

Draw it sloppy, and it comes out sloppy. Nothing more than what was drawn, nothing other than how it was drawn.

After a few more rounds of testing, I boiled it down.

One. What I draw becomes real.

Two. The better I draw it, the better it turns out. Draw it carelessly, and you get a three-legged dog.

Three. Inanimate things remain; living things vanish upon death.

Once the rules were laid out, the meaning was clear: twenty years of honed artistic skill was, in this world, power itself.

In my old life, no matter how well I drew, my work just hung on a wall collecting dust.

Here, if I drew it well, it came out well.

The world, honestly.

This might actually be a pretty fun world to live in.

So several days passed.

In that time, I pieced together the situation by combing through the hazy memories this body had left behind.

Its owner had apparently been a bottom-of-the-barrel loser who couldn't even find a place in the village below the mountain. Forget martial arts — he couldn't even scrape together a decent meal. Well, no surprise there. No healthy person ends up alone in a ruin like this.

But there was one mercy.

When I caught my reflection in a rain puddle, the face was pretty decent. Tall, with clean, even features. A little gaunt from hunger, sure, but give it a few solid meals and it was a face that wouldn't embarrass me anywhere.

...Well, good enough.

Bottom of the barrel or not, at least the raw material came out well-made. I was starting a brand-new life anyway; this much qualified as a blessing.

One thing was certain, in any case: this was the Murim. The world I had drawn.

The question was where in that world.

Which point of the ten-year story was this? I could tell that the banner snapping in the distance belonged to the sects of the orthodox alliance, but that alone told me nothing about whether we were in the early chapters or the middle. All I knew was that the banner was still flying.

Eh. I'd figure it out as I went.

And the moment I thought that, the woman's parting words resurfaced on their own.

That gentle, honeyed voice from the darkness.

Every time I recalled it, a chill crawled up my spine. But turning those words over and over, one thing kept snagging my attention.

Completion.

That woman had brought up the word again and again.

...So if I finish the series, I can go back?

It made sense. That was the condition they'd laid out on their side — logically, fulfilling it should be what set me free.

So I gave it some serious thought.

Draw the ending. Manage to produce the final chapter somehow, and that voice would be satisfied, and I could return to my old world—

And there, I stopped.

...Draw it where?

I had a brush. I had paper. The drawing itself, I could manage.

The problem came after.

Where was I supposed to publish the finished pages? This was Murim. No internet, no platforms, no editorial department to submit anything to. If I sat in a ruined house in the middle of the mountains and drew the final chapter, it would be nothing more than a scrap of paper pasted to a dirt wall.

Come to think of it, what would "completion" even mean here in the first place?

Back in my old world it had been simple. Draw the last chapter, upload it, the readers read it, the character for "End" got stamped — that was a completed series.

Though if felt too old-fashioned, "THE END" worked too. A Japanese-style "owari" wasn't bad. Even the "Fin" at the end of French films had a certain understated cool.

...No, that's not the point right now.

I reeled my wandering mind back in. The typography wasn't the problem.

The question of what ending to draw was a problem too.

The world was full of every kind of ending. Some famous series wrapped up with "Surprise — it was all a dream," while others killed their protagonists off in a blaze of glory. There were sad endings designed to linger, the "and so he was forgotten by everyone~" variety.

A sudden shiver ran down my spine.

...Hold on. Here, whatever I draw becomes real.

So the moment I drew "it was all a dream," would this entire world be erased from existence?

...Finishing this series carelessly could be genuinely dangerous.

The moment that thought landed, the two syllables of "completion" suddenly weighed a whole lot more.

But then again — did "completion" even function as a concept here at all?

This world was my webtoon. And I was inside that webtoon. Which meant that me sitting in a dirt-floored hovel in hemp clothes, breathing this air — all of it already meant that Murim was continuing, didn't it?

In other words, right now I wasn't watching my own story. I was living it.

So what would it mean to draw the final chapter here?

Going to find the supporting characters scattered somewhere beyond those valleys and give their stories closure? Or did completion mean this world reaching some ending of its own?

...Could I just declare "that's all, folks" and call it done?

I muttered it aloud to myself, but the world offered no response whatsoever.

I wanted to ask that woman, but her voice didn't come anymore. From the instant I'd sent that reply, the line had gone dead.

After racking my brain for ages, I gave up.

No idea. Truly, not a clue.

How to break free. What completion meant. Who that voice even was. Nothing I reached for stayed in my hand.

But I wasn't diligent enough a person to go starving myself while chasing answers.

...I'll just take it slow and figure things out along the way.

There was plenty of time. The body was healthy, and I'd picked up a strange new power. Nothing demanded urgency. A way out would turn up somewhere, sooner or later — pacing around in a panic wasn't going to open a door that didn't exist.

So I decided to shelve the headache in a corner of my mind for now.

And then I realized something. That whole stretch of days, I had been drawing. Constantly.

Hungry, I drew rice and ate it. Thirsty, I drew a water jar and drank. Cold at night, I drew a blanket and wrapped myself in it. Ran out of paper, drew more paper. Ran out of ink, drew more ink. Seed capital spawning more seed capital. When I got bored, I'd draw a bird and send it flying, then watch in a daze as it slipped out through the hole in the roof.

And then it hit me — something strange.

...I'm kind of having fun right now?

The more I thought about it, the more absurd it seemed. I'd been dumped without warning into a stranger's body, the house was one draft away from collapsing, the view outside was a martial world where people hacked each other apart, and I had no idea how to get home. Objectively speaking, my situation was wretched.

And yet my hands were happy.

I had lived twenty years as a struggling artist. Drawing pictures no one looked at, holding exhibitions where nothing sold, crushed under deadline after deadline I kept postponing. At some point, drawing had stopped being a joy and become a debt. The other name for guilt — something you had to do and couldn't make yourself do.

I couldn't even remember the last time drawing had been purely, simply fun.

But here, whatever I drew came alive.

No reviews, no view counts, no deadlines. I just drew whatever I felt like, and it appeared right before my eyes.

For a twenty-year veteran of the drawing board, what better playground could there be?

Now, sure — there was always the conventional path, the one everyone else took.

Falling into a place like this, the textbook move was to master some martial art by any means necessary. Hunt down a secret manual. Stumble onto some heavenly elixir and gulp it down. Fall off a cliff and discover, at the bottom, a reclusive grandmaster waiting to take you in.

I didn't much feel like any of that.

Learning martial arts meant years of brutal training. Grinding down bones, tearing muscle, risking qi deviation or whatever else they warned about. But I already had a brush.

Needed a tiger? Draw a tiger. Needed a wall? Draw a wall. Needed dinner? Draw dinner.

Wouldn't one more picture be a better use of time than years of sword drills?

So I reached my conclusion.

Completion? No idea how, and no rush anyway.

Martial arts? Pass.

Way home? I'd get to it eventually.

For the time being, I decided I'd simply live here.