Smooth Sailing
"...That's dizzying."
It was Sunday, twelve o'clock noon, and I was staring at the comments piled up on Pinbox, one hand pressed to my forehead.
I usually started my mornings with my phone. They say grabbing your phone the second you wake up wrecks your brain and your eyes... but for me, it was essential. Facing the world the instant I opened my eyes was simply too cruel. This piece-of-shit existence was always looking for a chance to screw me over.
So I soothed my mind and body with my phone first — a little mental preparation before I had to deal with reality. Twenty minutes of rolling around in bed like that, and I'd have enough vitality to actually live through the day.
Twenty minutes to unlock a productive life. You couldn't find a better return on investment. In other words, the morning phone was a saintess who cast a buff on you — or a holy relic of vitality itself. The conveniences of civilization had, at some point, begun encroaching on the domain of the gods.
Anyway. I was currently sprawled in bed, scrolling through the comments on Pinbox. It had hardened into a daily ritual by now. The account was still new enough that the comments didn't exactly pour in, but watching people react was pretty entertaining all the same.
And reading the comments like this let me think about where to take the story next — which directions I shouldn't go, whether this chapter had landed. Check enough of that, and you could get a decent read on how the work was doing.
By that measure, this chapter seemed to have gone over well. A little vulgar, sure, but the bulk of it was people saying they were turned on.
I snorted and muttered to myself.
"Geumtaeyang really is the best."
Geumtaeyang printed money. I was living that fact in real time. A paid comic with all of two chapters up had already pulled in two hundred thousand won. Knock off the platform fees, and that meant over forty people had already paid for my comic. Forty people... it sounded small at a glance, but considering this was the underground, it was a pretty decent number. And this was a brand-new account that had only existed for two weeks.
I was riding a tailwind, no question about it.
...Of course, just because things were going smoothly didn't mean there was no noise at all.
At its core, my work was built on a Meldom foundation. The real man inside me simply could not allow a guy to get wrecked. Geumtaeyang hunted actively, and Geumtaeyang fucked actively. The women might want it first often enough, but he never got swept along by the situation — that was the whole appeal of the guy.
The tradeoff was that his personality had ended up a little arrogant, a little rough around the edges. That kind of temperament just made it easier to drive a scene. He talked down to the heroines however he pleased and took them roughly.
Apparently our resident "real women" were not thrilled about that. Every so often a comment would crop up begging for him to get put in his place.
"If it's not your thing, why are you even reading it...?"
I grumbled under my breath. The cover alone made it obvious this thing was aimed squarely at masochists. I genuinely couldn't understand why anyone would pay money to read a work that didn't match their tastes.
Hah. This was all because my character was too damn attractive. They saw an alpha male named Geumtaeyang and hit purchase first, questions later. That was why money was landing in my account... and also why the noise had started.
"I'll just leave it for now."
I sat with the comments for a moment, then decided to let them sit. It wasn't a problem I could fix right now. The discontent was a shame, but I had no interest in drawing Geumtaeyang getting wrecked.
"Nnngh. Time to get to work."
After a long stretch of rolling around, I finally pushed myself up off the mattress. I reached my arms over my head, and my sluggish body screamed in protest. Probably because I'd gone at it pretty hard yesterday — I could barely get any strength into my limbs.
But I had to work. Today was Sunday. The one day I could pour myself into the job without a single interruption. How I used today's hours would decide how easy tomorrow-me had it. If I didn't want to starve to death, I had no choice but to keep kicking.
I fired up the tablet and sat down in the chair. A blank white digital canvas filled my vision.
"Ahh, I don't wanna."
I'd barely looked at it and already a funeral dirge was leaking out of my mouth. I liked drawing. I knew I did. So why did it become this unbearable the second it was tied to work? Genuinely one of life's great mysteries. God, in His infinite wisdom, was clearly trying to make a beggar out of me.
"Like hell."
I forced the pen into my hand, refusing to play along with that little scheme, and started stuffing kindling into the blank-white canvas of my mind. What I was about to draw was Geumtaeyang, Chapter 3. I'd rough out the story, then lay down the composition first.
Composition mattered more than story, at least to start. From which angle, from which point of view, did you light Geumtaeyang to make him hit harder? What kind of drawing grabbed a viewer's eyes in the first few seconds? That was what I needed to sit with. These consumers had shown up to jerk off — the story was a secondary feature at best.
Still. I had to put one in.
Necessary or not, including a story was always the winning play. If the art was the main course, the story was the appetizer that dressed it up — the thing that whetted your appetite before you dug into the real meal. The heat you got from a story was something you could never squeeze out of drawings alone. It jacked up the horny without requiring a single extra hour of rendering. For that reason alone, story was indispensable.
"Mm... what do I go with."
And so I started thinking. I had to draw something... but nothing was lodging in my head. No — a few things came to mind, but they shimmered in the distance like a mirage. The scenes floated as isolated objects, a single her drifting untethered, with no thread connecting one to the next. Tying those scenes together was going to come down entirely to how hard I was willing to work.
"I've got the situation sketched out, at least..."
This chapter, I'd tailor specifically to Seong A-rin's tastes. Geumtaeyang forcing himself on a pretty girl character in the middle of everyday life. That particular flavor had been landing surprisingly well. It wasn't a hard enough kink for tastes to split too sharply, and the situations that came out of it seemed to hit people as genuinely appealing. From my side it was just a standard Geumtaeyang rape scene — but from theirs, it probably felt like a dark gyaru making an aggressive move.
"Oh."
Just thinking about it got me going on its own. That much was good. Now the problem was how to build a situation out of it. Fortunately, I had no shortage of reference material for this kind of thing. It was all sitting right there in my head.
"Thank god I spent so much time on Hitobi..."
This once, I gave my past self some credit. Nice work, Lee Se-won. All those memories I'd accumulated with a puddle of white in my lap were coming through for me now. The dirty clichés I'd stockpiled over the years surfaced at random, and right in the middle of them, one snagged and held.
I murmured the premise quietly to myself.
Groper.
The word for those perverts who secretly molested women on public transit — buses, subways, that kind of thing. In that other world, the type showed up often enough, and they could take a situation somewhere very, very filthy. In the real world you'd go straight to prison, of course. But it was undeniably hot.
So what if I borrowed that groper setup for a minute and applied it to our sex-crazed Geumtaeyang?
"Oh..."
Yeah. That was going to be a pretty good scene.
Let's go.
Composition locked, I started drawing immediately. The pen tip danced across the canvas, laying down color, and with every stroke a world took shape inside the picture. The setting was a packed subway car, Geumtaeyang secretly groping the ass of the woman beside him. Low angle, so his hand and her ass dominated the frame. The contrast between Geumtaeyang's lazy grin and the woman's face, flushed thick with arousal — if the piece had a signature, that was it.
This was the opening of the chapter, and the image I'd use as the Chapter 3 cover. A cover had to look the part, so I was going to put real quality into it. For today, this was the only thing I planned to draw.
I wasn't finishing this today anyway.
Comics took time. Just boarding and drawing ate a baseline of four days, which was why webtoons came out once a week. I'd heard some people could knock out a chapter a day... but that was a story from a very distant country, so I let it go. Even a short-form manga was too much to finish in a single day. So I'd just do the cover. The rest of the pages I could think through and draw slowly over the week.
Time slipped by. Inside the quiet room, the only sound was the tap of the tablet, over and over. My field of vision narrowed by degrees until the room fell away and only the monitor remained. Flow state. When I drew like this, it often felt like the only things left in the world were me and the tablet. For this one stretch of time, I was the creator of a world, the puppeteer moving the characters inside it.
After a while, I managed to finish the piece. I looked at what I'd made and smiled, just a little.
"Mm. That's sex."
It had come out at a quality I was genuinely happy with. The packed, jostling feel unique to a subway car came through in the drawing, and between those everyday shapes, Geumtaeyang's transgressive little act stood out in sharp relief. That gap was doing a lot of work. The prominent bulge in Geumtaeyang's pants was one of the hottest points in the whole thing. The amount of thought that went into drawing that...
Still, I'd drawn so much of this stuff by now that it had started to feel a little easier. People really were animals of adaptation — that saying existed for a reason.
I sat with the drawing for a moment, then headed over to Tartalos. Since it was a cover, I was going to make it public. That was how you got more people to come in. I'd gotten reasonably used to walking into prison by now. A man who stepped into his own jail cell... I almost felt like a philosopher. And so I entered the NSFW pic slammer and wrote up a post.
The post went up, and it didn't take long for comments to start sprouting like weeds. This was one of Tartalos's biggest prisons — there was always a certain number of people logged in, twenty-four hours a day.
I read the comments and let a small smile tug at the corner of my mouth. The reaction was good this time too. The view count on the post was climbing fast, and upvotes were trickling in here and there — give it a little longer and it might even hit the popular page.
I sat with that warm feeling for a moment, then opened my banking app to check what I actually had.
A six-digit number filled my vision.
I let out a sound of pure admiration.
"Hell yeah."
Over three hundred thousand won. Not a hundred thousand, not two hundred thousand — three hundred thousand. The money I'd pulled out of Pinbox, everything I'd been stacking up, plus what I'd taken in from commission requests, all sitting in one place. Looking at my account at its all-time high, I could have cried.
Of course, if you framed it as two weeks of work, it was still a little light. I wasn't even clearing minimum wage yet. But that didn't matter.
It's fine for now.
I'd known it would be like this. Right now I was laying the foundation. All I had to do was build recognition slowly and get my name out there. And on that front, Geumtaeyang was already doing more than enough. I was riding a tailwind.
So for now, I'd be satisfied with three hundred thousand won.
"Mm. I'm happy."
I closed the banking app and smiled, just a little. Life had been tasting pretty good lately. I'd adapted to this world, more or less, and I was stacking recognition at a steady clip. I had a sex partner to bleed the pressure off whenever it built up, and the money in my account had nowhere to go but up.
A healing life, start to finish. I worked in a way that felt worthwhile, and I earned in a way that felt worthwhile. I decided to add a little happiness on top of that healing.
"Maybe I'll throw some string cheese into a pack of buldak ramen. First time in a while."
A tuna-mayo kimbap on the side, too. A little everyday luxury I could afford now that I had some breathing room. I threw on some clothes, figuring I might as well fill my stomach, and headed for the convenience store.
I hoped this tailwind would last.