Prologue
I was reborn.
That was how it happened.
Before all of that, as I remember it, I was a fairly diligent university student. If I had a failing, it was that I liked my drink and my revels and let the care of my body slide.
Do you know this? Cardiac arrest does not bother to check your age, and if there is no one nearby to help, you can be dead inside ten minutes. A perfectly healthy young man in his twenties, playing a computer game at an hour no more remarkable than a run to the corner store for cigarettes, can drop dead without warning.
That was how I died. Twenty-five. Young, if you cared to call it young.
Then a problem arose. The place I had been reincarnated into was the fantasy world I had been reading just before I died — and not even one I had finished. An orthodox fantasy I had favorited for show. I had been born the worst kind of son in a medieval world that did not have a single fuck left to give about dreams or hope.
Fortunately, I had this world's lore down cold. I had only one goal: turn this orthodox fantasy into a trashy mass-market power fantasy, and live.
I don't know who sent me here. Watch closely, whoever you are. Watch how this novel gets smashed to pieces.
There are people like that. People who go their own way no matter what anyone around them says. The sort who, whether the age leaves them behind or not, shut themselves inside some paltry private philosophy and cut off even their own mother and father. We call them hipsters, awe and mockery mixed in the word.
Today, with the web novel market swollen into an industry worth nearly a hundred million dollars a year, the serialization boards are still packed solid with that breed. Orthodox fantasy — in an age when people read web novels on the commute just to wake themselves up, a way to kill a little time? Who in the world is actually reading that?
The writers shitting out pieces like those have surely never held a job. Hell, they have probably never even served in the military. Which is why, of the bastards strutting around the web novel scene about how they write orthodox fantasy, eight out of ten or more go on hiatus before they can even fill thirty chapters. Who is going to rub the sleep from their eyes and slap a favorite on writing like that? And why would anyone bother pressing recommend?
No one is reading, so the people writing lose heart, and most of them quit of their own accord. And were those stories even fun? Would they have been? If they had been fun, word would have gotten around.
Most of them could not build a plot, and they did not have the prose to string one together. A good half were aspiring writers who would rather die than study the craft. They did not even know that what they were writing was not a work of art but a product, and, stricken with that pretentious indie disease, they carried on — I don't follow the mainstream — and all the rest of that noise.
You think reincarnation and regression and constellations became the mainstream for no reason? Stories and settings like those are easy to unpack, and a cathartic payoff is easy to stage, so they stay in fashion for a long, long time. In a web novel market where it is hard to survive even if you serialize every single day, who has time to sit around constructing an original world? In what lifetime are you supposed to win on a brilliant storyline and god-tier prose?
In the time you spend fretting over that, you could roughly rip off some material, stamp it out factory-style, and watch the money copy itself. So unless you are a damn fool, why are you doing it the other way? In short, we take patchwork rags — settings scavenged from every corner and stitched together by people it is embarrassing even to call writers — and we lay upon them more money than a full set of serious literary classics would cost.
These motherfucking human centipedes. How long are you going to keep biting each other, sucking each other off, shitting it out, and swallowing it back down? The prose is a mess, the stories do not know the basics, and still we hurl money at them, so I understand why established authors look at the web novel scene and find it pathetic.
Ah — of course, I am not condemning it. You should not scorn a person just because they like instant food. It simply is what it is.
And so, lately, I had come to hate the web novel scene. I missed, to the very marrow, the truly proper orthodox fantasy that had ruled the nineties. Walls of prose thick enough to cross a reader's eyes. Settings stacked until they would not budge. Plots that rammed frustration down your throat and told you to choke on it, and catharsis that answered just as heavy, blow for blow. Storylines as old-fashioned as a pair of leather boots. I missed all of it.
I was desperate to see writers who kept their nerve and swept the page in a single stroke — even under the long I'm dropping this assaults of readers so lost in the story they tried to grab the author and shake him, even when their favorites and their latest-chapter views were as wrecked as their own faces.
Had heaven heard that desperate wish of mine? Poking through the free-serialization board, I found a lunatic.
The aura coming off the title alone was anything but ordinary. In a web novel market where you lived or died by drawing aggro, the title was the very essence of the thing. A web novel writer is a creature that feeds on page views, after all. There was a reason they built sentence-long titles like I Saved the Heroine One Too Many Times and the World Went to Hell.
But Esteria Chronicles? The title alone reeked like some fusty old tome, musty as aged parchment crammed edge to edge with classical script. I did not even want to click it. Which is precisely why it jabbed my contrary streak.
A title like this piece of shit? Pretty fucking confident in the writing, then. All right, you bastard. You've got my interest. I'll give it a look. Write it like garbage — I dare you. I'll straighten you out on the spot with a comment the length of a chapter.
I clicked the story with a thoroughly unimpressed face. The first thing to meet those eyes was the synopsis, pressed down and packed full like a heaping bowl of rice, enough to fill you up from the reading alone.
An age in which tales of demons had become the stale old legends crones used only to frighten children. Ash spewed by the great volcano of the south blanketed the sky, and the world grew colder by the day. The demons of the north, poised to cross the frozen sea and march upon the continent, would not miss their chance to encroach upon the domain of man. Yet the humans of the continent cared less for demons they had never seen than for who would emerge the victor of this war.
Scrawled into that synopsis without a single comma, packed tight from end to end, the writing struck something deep in me. It read like a declaration: whether any of you read this or not, I will write it however the hell I please. The sight called up an old nostalgia — the steadfast backs of the first generation of genre novelists, who overrode the readers' opinions with sheer prose and commanded the storyline from the front.
Yes. Up to here, I liked it. But would I like the work itself? I had been bluffed this way more times than I could count. Open the lid, and more often than not the contents were thin. A writer, by rights, speaks through the novel.
I quieted my pounding heart and pressed Read Chapter One. When the first chapter filled the screen, what spilled out before me was a stretch of narration long enough to tear a reader's eyes out. I bent to it, and I was pulled under into the world of Esteria Chronicles.
That day I ran, all through the night, every chapter of Esteria Chronicles that had been serialized. And I — Kim Jihoon, twenty-five, born in the Republic of Korea, jobless and idle — gave voice to a howl of bitter fury.
This was my perfect defeat. This bastard was the real thing.
This novel aspires to orthodox fantasy.
Just as that line at the end of the synopsis declared, Esteria Chronicles was orthodox fantasy, perfect and complete. Sentence and narrative alike were accomplished enough that you would have believed an established author had written them. Characters that seemed alive, and a world built solid as reinforced concrete, opened their arms to me. It was as if the novel I had dreamed of had descended into the real world.
But that was not the end. This mad author had driven the entire setting of Esteria Chronicles into the notice board. The volume of it — a hundred and fifty thousand characters. He had written a whole book out of setting alone. My limbs shuddered as if a .50-caliber round had punched into my skull.
What web novel author, in God's name, packs a setting compendium for a novel that will not even sell — a hundred and fifty thousand characters, stuffed to bursting — into a notice that does not earn a single coin? Devotion like that has to be recognized by someone. That is the fate of a reader of web novels, a sublime duty, a sacred calling. Without a moment's pause, I burned an entire day indulging in that setting notice.
But from that day on, I never laid a hand on Esteria Chronicles again — the way you do not touch an adult video once you have finished your business and put it away. My hunger for orthodox fantasy had been as hot and violent as a wildfire, but once I was full I understood, more bitterly than ever, why orthodox fantasy was not the mainstream.
It had been fun. But the passages of narration ran five lines at a minimum while the story crawled, and the setting was not intuitive. For something that called itself a web novel, reading it made my head pound the way literary fiction does. By the later stretches my focus had scattered until I was reading only the dialogue.
In the end, after coming full circle, I found myself paying ten cents a chapter for things that had given up on being novels — stuff like The Youngest Son of Writer Nam Is a Swordmaster.
The novel had been splendid. Only, the swell of the age was too high to swim against. Looking at Esteria Chronicles, which had at some point become a favorite I kept only for show, I would feel the way you feel upon meeting a first love after a long, long time. Even if a Completed mark appeared on it later, I could not bring myself to read it again.
And so Esteria Chronicles faded, little by little, from my memory.
I mean it stayed forgotten all the way to here. Three months on, I died of cardiac arrest while trash-talking people in champion select, and then fourteen years passed after I was reincarnated on the Esteria Continent as the eldest son of House de Jevitz, marquis of the Oxburg Empire and master of the North.
"Fucking hell! Most of my favorites list was overpowered mass-market sludge — so why the hell was I reborn into an orthodox fantasy?"
A man who keeled over from cardiac arrest in the middle of a game was never going to have anything you could call reincarnation luck. I screamed it at the sky.