Chapter 194
Chapter 194
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 194
Chapter Title: The Dream Manager Craze
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6
Tuning the dreams of guests and proceeding with them.
That was precisely the job given to the new generation of writers.
As such, the title for writers had changed from the start.
“DM! Today’s dream was so amazing again! Honestly, these days, life is way more fun when I’m asleep than when I’m awake!”
“Haha. I’m glad you slept comfortably…….”
Dream Manager.
DM for short.
Now, writers were more often called “DM” than “Writer.”
“Then, good luck at work. Guest. I’m off to get some sleep……”
“Oh, right, this is your bedtime now, DM! Sleep well!”
“Yes, thank you. Yawwwn……”
While others slept, DMs worked, and while others worked, DMs slept.
They were forced into an extreme night owl lifestyle, but DMs didn’t mind at all. Even back in their writer days, they had chosen to be more like birds than mammals.
And then.
“Undertaker. I hear DMs are all the rage these days. Have you heard?”
That was around the time I heard about the “recent_writers_status.jpg” from Dang Seo-rin.
I was always rushing around all over the country without a moment’s rest. News about trends among ordinary people inevitably reached me late.
“DM? What’s that?”
“Simply put, it’s a sleep manager. They add flair to the dreams provided by the fairies, I guess you could say.”
“Hmm……”
“Anyway, people are going crazy over it. Really skilled DMs are impossible to hire even for a fortune.”
“Strange things keep happening.”
“Right? I hired one personally this time. A huge Harry Potter fan, and we really clicked. Likes the current generation better than the previous one, just like me.”
Previous generation? Current generation?
I tilted my head at the barrage of jargon, back in my 205th cycle.
“So you hired an ordinary person as a personal manager? Gave them authority to manipulate the dream world and everything? Isn’t that… kind of dangerous?”
“Oh. Don’t worry. DMs can’t do anything without the Tutorial Fairies anyway. As long as the fairies don’t betray us, it’s hard for a DM to pull any funny business.”
“Hmm.”
“They’re ordinary people without awakening abilities to begin with.”
At the time, I just let it slide.
But in truth, Dang Seo-rin’s words hid nuclear bomb-level destructive power.
As you know, Three Thousand Worlds was one of the top guilds on the Korean Peninsula.
Not just anyone could join—only the highest-caliber talent with proven character, loyalty, ability, and boldness.
(Yoo Ji-won, who sneakily got in through the Latin special admission, is the exception.)
From an ordinary person’s perspective, it was a dream job where you couldn’t even dream of submitting a resume.
Yet an unawakened ordinary person got hired there?
Not as a janitor or errand boy, but as a full-time employee?
On top of that, they got the title of personal manager to the great witch who shared power in Busan with No Do-ha? A complete ordinary person?
The writers’ community was abuzz.
“Eek! Teacher! I hired one too! A personal DM!”
Then Cheon Yo-hwa poured oil on the fire.
For an MZ high schooler (6th year) who always led trends, she couldn’t tolerate being seen as behind Dang Seo-rin.
“Huh? You too, Yo-hwa?”
“Yeah! I hired a zombie genre specialist DM, an exorcism genre specialist DM, and a cult religion specialist DM—three in total—so I can enjoy a week straight of dreams where I become the cult leader succeeding in a world hit by a zombie outbreak!”
“……”
Questioning why she’d enjoy such dreams would be missing the forest for the trees due to obsession with one tree.
While Three Thousand Worlds’ Dang Seo-rin hired just one, the key point was that Baekhwa Girls’ High School’s Cheon Yo-hwa hired three.
With rivalry between Busan, the “economic capital,” and Sejong, the “spiritual capital,” heating up daily, the two prideful geniuses clashed head-on.
-[Three Thousand]Witch Judge: Just reread The Little Prince after a long time and got lost in thought. Even after the world ended once, people still try to evaluate everything by numbers.
--[Three Thousand]Witch Judge: Where has the will to cross the desert in search of that one fox waiting just for me gone?
└[Baekhwa]High School 6th Year: Wow! You only have one fox?
└[Three Thousand]Witch Judge: ?
└[Baekhwa]High School 6th Year: I have three in my desert… Guess you don’t have much charisma usually! >_[);; The war drums sounded. Dang Seo-rin immediately promoted her personal DM to “Chief DM.” Then she hired 11 more DMs—architecture majors, food and nutrition majors, education majors, etc.—and assigned them to departments. She even added six parody writers specializing in checking Harry Potter lore. The Hogwarts in her dreams became near-perfect. Cheon Yo-hwa didn’t back down either. If Dang Seo-rin focused on quality, Yo-hwa invested in quantity. She called in specialist DMs for fantasy, modern fiction, romance, martial arts, and more, indulging in dreams of whatever genre caught her fancy that day. Her personal DM count reached a whopping 20. -[Three Thousand]Witch Judge: Dream Journal Entry 31. Finally getting a bit familiar with the academy’s layout. Made several friends, left an impression on the professors. In divination class, they called me ‘the greatest talent since the academy’s founding,’ but that’s probably an exaggeration. -[Baekhwa]High School 6th Year: Dream Journal Day 20! Finally smashed a big-shot zombie boss head today]_<)!!
In the end, the two even posted “dream journals” on SG Net, subtly battling for supremacy.
Three Thousand Worlds guild members and Baekhwa Girls’ High School guild members swarmed like cheetahs whenever their “President” posted a dream journal, flooding the comments.
Why? They were competing over whose dream journal got more views and comments.
Surviving in a major corporation wasn’t easy.
-Goryeo Jang: Lmao the top awakeners on the peninsula lol
-Goryeo Jang: How shitty must reality be to fight over dreams lol
Only villain Goryeo Jang had a field day.
So what had I, the Undertaker—the only one who could mediate this parallel nonsense—been doing all this time?
Nothing. Just sitting back.
They fought over who was top and who was bottom whenever they had a chance anyway.
In my eyes, it was at least a safe way to vent stress. No one got hurt.
But others saw it differently.
“Uh……”
“If this goes on, for our reputation……”
With the two blue whales thrashing about, the nearby squid and shrimp quietly fishing—i.e., the minor guild leaders—found themselves in quite a bind.
If Dang Seo-rin and Cheon Yo-hwa hired 20 DMs, other major guilds had to hire at least 12.
Mid-tier guild leaders settling for a bit less needed at least six DMs. Even fledgling small guilds had to hire three to keep up.
Why? No reason needed.
This land had a long tradition of status determined by how expensive your car and house were.
That same tradition had simply morphed into “how many good DMs you hire.”
Like Renaissance Italian nobles flaunting patronage of artists, the Korean Peninsula’s guild leaders competed by showing off their DMs.
The nobles didn’t have any special artistic discernment. Likewise, guild leaders lacked profound literary depth.
Even so, both groups created massive employment booms.
Plus, DMs had advantages over Renaissance artists by leaps and bounds.
① Low barrier to entry.
No startup capital needed to become a DM. Just tune dreams to guests’ tastes well enough to make a living.
② Business sustainability.
Unlike cathedrals that leech funds for centuries, DMs get steady work. People dream every day and want fun ones.
③ Connections to the powerful.
Guild leader-level awakeners play in their own league. Ordinary people can’t get close.
But top 1% DMs can bond intimately with them anytime. DMs are the first the powerful see upon waking and the last before sleep.
Easy entry, bright prospects, and a shot at fame and power?
The result.
“Mom! I wanna be a writer when I grow up!”
“Writers are gods!”
A mania swept the Korean Peninsula.
As mentioned when introducing this episode, the Great Literary Era had suddenly dawned.
7
Countless incidents and accidents erupted amid this Great Literary Era.
Like the Tutorial Fairies going on a massive strike, fed up.
But for this tale, I’ll stick to one episode—and one where no anomalies are involved at all.
As announced from the start, today’s focus is on stories of “ordinary people” we don’t usually cover.
And the representative ordinary person selected is none other than—who else?
“I’ve been feeling burnout lately……”
“Huh?”
Writer A.
The very person who’d appeared from start to finish in this episode.
For the record, I don’t have permission to use his real pen name in my tales. Hence, the generic “Writer A.”
Note that he’s an extremely timid web novel writer whose pen name ends with an A sound.
Anyway.
“What are you talking about, DM? Your cocktail bar’s booming these days. You expanded to 50 guests and hired five bartender NPCs… Oh! The new bartender NPC’s reviews were amazing!”
“DM, DM, that damn DM……”
“Huh?”
“I’m a writer! A writer! And novels—creation—isn’t supposed to be like this!”
Crash-.
Writer A smashed a wine glass in front of his assistant writer.
It felt like yesterday he couldn’t even get wine or bottled water and drank rainwater, yet now that he’d succeeded a bit, he’d already caught bourgeois pretentious bullshit syndrome.
“Look at what I’m doing these days! Shout ‘Welcome’ when guests arrive, mix cocktails all day, tweak new bartender looks and backstories… Is this writing? Is it?!”
“But you’re making millions a day without breaking a sweat, and you’re complaining……”
“A brutal yet beautiful worldview! Vibrant characters! The journeys of defeat and victory there, schemes and plots, at a midnight ball where some dance and others walk to the guillotine—that! That kind of work! That’s what I want to writeeeee!”
“……”
For those who might not recognize it, that’s “new work syndrome”—a chronic disease every writer serializing the same work for 18+ months catches.
There were others unique to writers: remake syndrome, indefinite hiatus syndrome, relay novel syndrome, contest syndrome, my-work-sucks syndrome, my-work-rocks syndrome, female-lead-or-die syndrome, etc.
It’s shocking how so many such creatures still survive on Earth, but sorry, not shocked enough yet.
“But I can’t create such a perfect dream alone……!”
And here, Writer A made a quintessentially writerly choice—utterly foolish from the universal human perspective.
First, he gathered seven fellow writers he’d once shared army stew with.
These industry pioneers had become the prosperous “Supreme Eight,” now doing dinners at pork belly joints instead of army stew places.
“Honestly, you’re all tired too, right? Yeah?”
“Uh, well……”
“The great witch is great at everything else, but her demands are too high… Sometimes in dreams she complains about historical inaccuracies, but that’s not my fault. The original author’s settings waver sometimes……”
“Exactly!”
Thud. Writer A slammed down his makgeolli glass.
“Let’s make a work together!”
“What?”
“Each take a few main characters and set them up. Then combine them. Build the worldview together. You’re good at political intrigue, so handle that. You’re great at war stories, right? Balance the virtual nations and such!”
Writer A declared.
“We’re the first writers in history who can manipulate dreams! How long are we gonna pathetically tweak the powerful’s dreams? Kids! Let’s create an MMORPG of freedom no one’s experienced, a perfect ‘virtual world’!”
“……!”
Indeed.
Writer A and the Supreme Eight had unfortunately caught the worst of all writer diseases—the root of all evil that makes your whole body shudder just hearing it.
Col-lab-o-ra-tive
Work
Syn-drome.