That Goddamn Educational Comic

"Master, how do I become stronger?"

A jagged mountain peak with clouds drifting past their feet. A boy in a training robe stained with sweat and blood knelt before a white-haired old Taoist master.

"Hmm."

The old Taoist stroked his beard. It was a scene so archetypal that not a soul on earth would have doubted it belonged to a classic martial arts epic.

And normally, you'd get the same canned answer every time.

'Forge your external arts to their very limit.'

'Replenish your internal energy by any means necessary.'

'Swing your sword until the waterfall itself splits in two.'

But the words that left the old master's mouth flew clean in the face of all conventional wisdom.

"What was your primary attribute again?"

"The Water attribute, Master."

"Tsk tsk, you dull-witted boy! By the Water-attribute synergy theory the Hainan Sect published only recently, wouldn't this all be solved by actively folding in the character Ryu — flow?!"

"Ah, so such a method existed! Truly, you are my master!!"

The boy knocked his forehead against the ground again and again.

I smirked and flipped past the page holding the master and the boy's little exchange.

"...A batshit-insane opening, every single time."

Page turned. I spread open the chapter where this work's actual protagonist appeared.

CLANG!! Weapons sprang apart with tremendous force. Gwan Chaeryeong caught her breath, long pink hair whipping about her.

"...Hoo."

A crimson aura began to ripple along her crescent blade. It was something apart from the usual sword qi or sword gang.

Shhhk—! Behind her back, huge brush-written characters floated up into the air. Their identity was none other than the fire-attribute hanja: Hwa — fire!

"Blaze forth, Fire — Hwa!"

With that resounding cry, flame coalesced along the crescent blade. The girl swung with everything she had, and her opponent's body was swallowed whole by the fire.

"Gwaaaaagh!!"

The villain: reduced to a charcoal briquette on the spot! The villagers came rushing out of their homes and pressed their foreheads to the ground.

"Aigoo, great hero! How could we ever begin to thank you...!"

"Oh, it's nothing — I only did what anyone would!"

A corpse burnt down to charcoal. And before it, beaming with the brightest, most innocent smile — what a grotesque imbalance!

They reacted as though this were simply another Tuesday. Gwan Chaeryeong, crushing villains ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠from the very first step of her journey into the Jianghu. A treacherous road stretched out before her, and so—

— Continued in Volume 2!

WHUMP!

"Ahh, that was fun."

Volume 1 of Murim Thousand Character Classic folded shut with a resounding smack. As I slotted the poor book — read to tatters from repeat readings — back into place, my gaze drifted, for no particular reason, to its cover.

'The Authentic Hanja Educational Comic: Murim Thousand Character Classic!'

"...Educational comic."

A snort of laughter escaped me.

By now, "educational comic" had congealed into a proper noun of a phrase. And buried inside it was a thoroughly calculated intent: the union of study and comics — two things that should never have been compatible! The shrewd publishers had, at long last, discovered the perfect solution for shaking down the wallets of K-parents everywhere.

"That educational comic — you have it in stock?"

"I'll pay for the complete set right now!!"

A fried-chicken-and-reading frenzy blew hard through the bookstores. And at the vanguard of the educational comic boom that kicked off in the 2000s stood the so-called Big Three of the genre.

'First: Ghost Experiment King.'

"U-Uwaaagh, a ghost...!!"

"Now, now, no need to be so frightened, boy. My name is Albert Einstein."

"E-Einstein...!?"

[An ordinary K-elementary schoolboy, living a perfectly unremarkable life. Then one day, the ghost of GOAT-tier scientist Einstein takes up residence in his body.]

"No way. My special-catalyst Seven-Colored Magma Volcano... lost to a cup of water with a few coins chucked in!?"

"The laws of nature must be simple, boy. Much like your defeat."

[Lending the boy his ghostly coaching, Einstein begins to sweep the National Experiment Olympiad!!]

'Second: Cyberpunk Math Wars.'

[A dystopian punk city where your math grade is political power. In this burning dumpster of a world, a boy and a girl hold on to exactly one hope: getting into SKY — the three elite universities sitting at the very top of the food chain.]

"I will get you into SKY if it kills me, I swear!!"

"L'Hôpital's rule? That's a baseline implant."

"Stop! If you push that 'Taylor series' any further...!"

[Bar their path: the final weapon of the National Test Institute — the Retaker Smasher!]

[Will the two of them make it to SKY in one piece?!]

'And last of all: Murim Thousand Character Classic.'

[Gwan Chaeryeong, an ordinary country girl. Realizing the catastrophe soon to swallow the Murim, she takes up her heirloom crescent blade and steps out into the Jianghu...!]

"Rise and blaze — Yeomhwa, the Burning Fire!"

"Kneel before the lightning of Namgung — Changcheonroe, the Thunder of the Azure Sky!!"

[Formidable foes blocking her path at every turn.]

[Will she graduate the academy in one piece and bring the Demonic Cult to ruin...!]

Murim Thousand Character Classic — a martial arts saga with hanja sorcery bolted on top. Its early popularity was nothing short of tremendous.

'The characters did a lot of heavy lifting, for one thing.'

Gorgeous leads rendered in fluid, stylish linework. Not just the heroine Gwan Chaeryeong, either — the whole colorful cast around the academy was beloved across the board.

'The early volumes were genuinely great for studying, too.'

Reviews used to pour in from people swearing they'd passed official hanja certification levels off nothing but the comic. There was some exaggeration mixed in, sure — but this was the era when the series faithfully lived up to the "educational" in its label.

Word of mouth fed word of mouth, and Murim Thousand Character Classic became a phenomenon. Bookstores jam-packed on every release day; "Sorry, no Murim Thousand Character Classic" signs an everyday sight.

And then, right around the middle of the run — from about Volume 10, when the Hundred Great Masters Under Heaven started flooding onto the page — the writers began to lose their minds.

Pompous four-character hanja spells, swarming the page in droves! So much for reviewing the old to learn the new — you could scrub your eyes raw and never find a single properly educational idiom like "pleasure comes after pain" in there.

The comic's identity as an educational title was wobbling badly. And yet sales didn't budge an inch.

"Huh? Who reads Murim Thousand Character Classic to study?"

Studying didn't matter anymore! The fans who'd grown up alongside the series now opened their wallets out of pure, uncut love for the characters.

But then came the thing that shook even that fanbase to its core: developments of unremitting, crushing bleakness.

The companions began dying off one by one. At least one per volume; two, when the author was feeling generous. Core supporting characters were fed into the grinder without exception.

"Ah, I'm losing my mind.... Hah."

"You're ending it THERE? Don't tell me they're about to kill Baek Ryeon."

Readers trembled as they cracked open each new volume. You could never feel safe — never knew when your favorite was next on the chopping block!

And then one day, in Volume 19 — the march toward the finale — "that incident" happened.

A girl's head hit the ground and rolled. And by some monstrous twist, it was the head of this work's own protagonist — Gwan Chaeryeong.

An insane development that left every mouth hanging open. Nobody — nobody — had imagined they'd kill off the protagonist on top of the entire supporting cast.

Readers who had swallowed every conceivable facepalm moment on the strength of love alone could swallow no more.

A few trolls were sprinkled into the pile, sure, but the Murim Thousand Character Classic fandom was at a rolling boil. And they did not stay quiet. Protest calls flooded the publisher's phone lines, and posts carpet-bombed the official site's boards like mad.

In the end, the publisher couldn't take any more and raised the white flag. Heads bowed, they swore to the readers that the problem would be fixed, without fail. But no matter how long anyone waited, the next volume of Murim Thousand Character Classic never arrived.

'The author simply pulled a runner, mid-serialization.'

The writer evaporated overnight! They tried hunting down a replacement author, but nobody on earth was willing to roll around in that much filth to flip a storyline this rotten.

In the end, the publisher met its game-over screen. With the copyright left drifting in limbo, the ending of Murim Thousand Character Classic became something no one would ever, ever see.

"Whew. Guess I'll pick up where I left off yesterday."

I stretched my stiff, aching body out long and unwound it, then clicked the single button sitting on my desk.

Vrrrrm! The server kicked into gear with a deep, resonant roar.

GAIA — the highest-performance AI in existence. The kind used to simulate the affairs of global corporations and even nation-states. Its price tag was so obscene that even executives of mega-conglomerates were said to tremble with every sentence they fed it.

"Dang Yangnan didn't die in Volume 11 because she got reckless for nothing — if she'd layered all ten of her flying daggers into one barrage instead of half-heartedly falling back, she'd have lived, right?"

To me, it was nothing more than a very expensive toy for playing around with comic-book settings.

The simulation log glowed up on the monitor. A coldly rational trajectory calculation: even with ten daggers layered together, she'd be ground to dust by the Demonic Cult executive's wide-area technique.

"Tch. Yangnan's just too weak, then...?"

Questions and answers flicked back and forth like that. Who knew how much time had slipped by.

"HEY! Seo Mugeon!"

"...Ah, dammit. Nearly jumped out of my skin."

A strident voice rang right against my ear. I turned around to find a man standing there with a pizza box.

"I'm losing my mind here — how many times did I tell you to stop running comic-book sims on GAIA?!"

"Oooh, combination pizza? Thanks, I'll dig right in."

"...Aigo, you're driving me insane!!"

A man one breath from bursting a blood vessel. His name: Kim Yeongchang. My middle school classmate — and the guy who'd fetched this job to my doorstep.

'Please, just help me with this one project, pretty please?'

'Or what — you plan to flush your talent down the gutter?!'

'Think of it as saving up travel money — three months, just three, I swear!!'

'Prince of Silicon Valley, His Majesty God-King Mugeon!! Just this once, I'm begging you!!'

I'd come running on the strength of those heartfelt pleas. And now look at him, glaring daggers over a little AI usage. One face walking into the bathroom, a completely different one walking out — he was the very portrait of the saying.

"Hoo. Fine, fine. We'll talk about that later."

He swept his glasses up his nose, then thrust out a binder stacked to serious thickness.

"There are some items I need handled immediately, and every last one of them looks... not easy."

"Gimme."

FWIP! I snatched the binder right out of his hand.

Fip, fip, fip— Pages hissed past under my thumb, all the way to the back.

"None of these look hard, though?"

"Huh? Did you actually read them? There's no way."

"Then let's take them one by one. Starting with this 'autonomous driving' one."

I spun my chair around to face the monitor.

Click! The simulation loaded into GAIA. Kim Yeongchang pointed at the screen, plainly uneasy.

"Look. Narrow two-lane road, dump truck crossing the center line. Keep straight — head-on collision. Swerve — you flatten a pedestrian on the sidewalk. It's been stuck in an infinite loop over this one scenario..."

"Got the gist."

I tapped the truck object, then the pedestrian.

"Hide the 'human life priority' tag and swap in liability values — one worth a million dollars, one worth five. Tell it to ram the cheaper one before the count of three and call it a day."

"Y-you lunatic! You can't just convert human lives into dollar amounts! If that ships in real cars, the company is DONE!!"

"Who said anything about real cars? Break the loop first; then the ethics-board suits can decide what to prioritize."

"Oh? ...That actually works?"

"Don't teach ethics to a tin can. Make it do the thing it's actually good at."

Ding!

Kim Yeongchang's jaw hit the floor.

"Holy shit. That actually works?"

"One down. What's next?"

"Uh, uhhh. The 'smart grid' case — the AI keeps trying to black out the outlying hospitals in the name of saving electricity..."

"Overwrite the hospital's building tag with 'AI server room.' Next."

Ding!

"N-next is the 'air raid defense simulation,' and the thing is..."

"Reflag the allied HQ as neutral. Next."

Ding!

"This is the last one — the logistics network optimization..."

"Shrink the warehouses. Next!"

Ding!

The perky chimes rang out one after another. In barely ten minutes flat, every agenda item he'd dragged in lay gutted on the floor.

"Un-freaking-believable. You're really..."

His face had gone stiff with pure shock. Kim Yeongchang smacked me on the shoulder.

"You absolute madman, Seo Mugeon!! Be honest — you've got no interest in coming aboard as a full-timer—"

"Running your mouth again. No, man."

I severed the offer with a single stroke.

"What?! Is it the salary? Say the word and I'll get the higher-ups to match double!"

"Yeongchang."

"Huh? What?"

"Would you rather get paid a salary just for breathing?"

"?"

He froze for a beat — then nodded with complete sincerity.

"...Sounds fucking fantastic, actually?"

"Right, man. Must be nice being you."

I lobbed the binder back at Yeongchang.

"Hard pass. Sitting around breathing and calling it a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠job? I'd lose my mind inside of three days."

"Yeah, yeah, you cocky son of a bitch."

Kim Yeongchang bonked me on the head with the freshly returned binder, then let out a long, deep sigh.

"...I'm heading out. Please, for the love of god, go easy on the tokens."

"Okay. Roger that."

And with a floppy two-handed wave, Kim Yeongchang left the office.

Click. The door shut, and quiet settled back over the room.

'...Honestly? Bit of a letdown.'

With a binder that thick, I'd half-hoped at least one item might actually slow me down. Sadly, no such thing occurred.

I bit into the pizza, still holding a trace of warmth, and pulled the Murim Thousand Character Classic window up from the background.

Blue light flooded the center of the monitor. My heart began to beat, slow and steady.

In all these years, there hadn't been a single problem I couldn't crack. Except for exactly one. This strong-start-weak-finish trainwreck of a comic was the only thing on earth that still gave me grief.

The orthodox faction loses. Always. Whatever assumptions I fed in, whatever variables I injected.

"...Which is exactly why it's fun."

I could already taste the rush of finally finding the answer. I shook out my fingers and rested them on the keyboard.

Clack-clack-clack — tap! Punching commands into the terminal with practiced fingers, I threw my voice at the monitor.

"Rested well, tin can?"

"Then let's ease back into it."

Click! Enter key. A fresh simulation window bloomed open crisp and clean across the screen.

"First — strip out every forced variable. Lucky encounters, deus ex machina, all of it. Work strictly from the character stats accumulated through Volume 19, and give me a purely logical result."

Ding!

"Volume 14, the Defense of Luoyang. What if the Jegal Clan lays down the Eight Gates Golden Lock Formation and the Wudang Sect backs the formation's core with the Wind attribute?"

"Then Volume 17, the Bloody Battle of the Yellow River. Paeng Clan tanks up front, Namgung Clan bombards from behind with wide-area strikes?"

"Okay, fine. Then let's rewind further back. Volume 13, the Hall of Subdued Demons — say the Sword Marquis never gets trapped in there. Then he never defects to the cult, and the Alliance Leader never takes that career-ending wound."

GAIA crunched along for an unusually long time — not like itself at all. Just when it seemed this attempt might finally produce a plausible answer—

"...What?"

Deploy a formation — it gets turned inside out. Fight a war of pure strength — they get crushed. Pull one person off the board, and somebody else dies in their place.

"This is fucked. Completely fucked."

I flicked the last of the pizza crusts back into the box.

The power gap was simply beyond reason. Every if-scenario my brain could cook up had already been thrown at it, and every one proved worthless against the Demonic Cult's overwhelming force.

I gave my greasy fingers a rough wipe with a wet wipe and set my hands back on the keyboard.

"...I didn't want to stoop to anything this cheap, but. GAIA — condition change."

"Sync a 'radical compression' database into the allied-force variables. While you're at it, fold in modern physics, mechanics, and the rest of the conceptual library."

Clatter-clatter-clack—! My fingers drummed briskly across the keys.

"Now assume one 'hidden talent of the back alleys' — someone capable of wielding every one of these variables — gets dropped into the allied camp. There. Run it again with these settings."

My last-resort move for pinning down complex errors: force the bug open by ramming cheat-grade variables into the system. If even this failed, the road ahead truly would go pitch-black.

Ding!

"I deployed a whole gamebreaker, and that's all I get?"

My brow knotted on reflex. But come to think of it, it wasn't half bad.

'Better than zero percent, that's for sure.'

For the first time, a plausible route had actually surfaced. And the very moment I settled in to chew it over slowly, savoring every piece—

A giant error message glared from the screen. Blinking dumbfounded at a sight I'd never once witnessed, I still moved on reflex, hands flying back to the keyboard.

"The tin can's throwing a fit again. How would a pack of pre-modern murim fossils know a thing about modern physics or mechanics? It's a pure thought experiment — disregard the warning and run—"

FLASH!!

"Huh?"

The monitor's blue light began to warp, eerie and strange. And then GAIA began to pour out its declaration.

"What did you just...?"

Chills came crawling up my spine. I knew, instinctively.

That this was no prank from an AI.

"Oh shit — permission denied! Abort the transmission!!"

"Cancel it — cancel it NOW, you goddamn piece-of-shit tin ca—!!"

FWASH!! A ferocious white light erupted from the monitor. With a spark-crack that tore straight through my eardrums, my vision plunged into perfect darkness.