Capitalism
We live in a capitalist society.
A society where every individual is free to own private property. A society that shouts about liberty far louder than it ever shouts about equality. You don't have to keep a careful watch on how everyone else behaves — so long as you handle your own business, you'll get by somehow.
The notion that you can carve out a measure of success according to your own ability almost makes the whole arrangement look pretty decent. Beats communism, at any rate, given that system's well-documented failures. And seeing as the country is still more or less chugging along, you'd be justified in concluding the system itself is reasonably sound.
But as ever, nothing in this world comes with only the good parts.
Maybe it's because everyone fixated a little too hard on the word capital, but you start to wonder whether modern society hasn't let materialism sink its roots a little too deep. Money solves everything.
Slap a person across the face and money will sweep it under the rug. Run someone over and flee the scene, and so long as you've got the bail and the bribes, you can slip right through the iron bars. Sex is something you can buy. Even moral vanity can be more or less taken care of with a fat enough wallet.
A world of pure materialism, through and through.
According to the old wisdom that we come into this world empty-handed and leave the same way, lusting after material things is a meaningless exercise. We're supposed to pour our energy into spiritual cultivation instead. The world, as if laughing in the face of all that, has flipped those values completely on their head.
It is an age without romance.
And so conviction was crushed beneath the heel of capitalism. Philosophy was reduced to a cheap joke. An age where a philosopher is one missed meal away from becoming a beggar, and art is degraded into a plaything for the wealthy.
And in an age like that...
"Hehe."
Here was a man hawking off his principles yet again.
Namely, me.
The same me who had tucked his tail between his legs like a dog for a fat $250 paycheck. A smirk kept leaking from the corner of my mouth.
"Money coming in sure feels nice."
Hm? Principles? Philosophy?
Yeah, and? We live in a capitalist age, pal. Material shit beats that broke-ass idealism a hundred to one.
To a man who had been this close to getting eaten alive by Shimura Ajame, $250 was nothing short of a lifeline from heaven. An overpowered punch that smashed the whole mess apart in a single blow. The twin threats of death and defilement had receded, and relief came flooding in all on its own.
A well-fed pig really was far better than a hungry Socrates. If somebody handed me a thousand bucks, I would squeal like one.
Granted, it meant I had to draw male-character nudes... but escaping the crisis was what mattered.
I set down my tablet pen for a moment and looked over the piece I'd been working on. A naked Geumtaeyang filled my vision, and a curse tumbled out of my mouth on its own.
"This is fucking disgusting."
Geumtaeyang was gazing upward, his expression wet with unshed tears. Both hands were bound behind his back, and the air around him was thick with something obscene. His eyes glared at the viewer with a streak of defiance, and yet somewhere in those pupils you could catch a shallow flicker of fear. A deep, goddamn flush had spread across his face, as if he knew exactly what was about to be done to him.
That was just the face. Further down, something far more horrific had been drawn — but for the sake of my own mental health, I won't describe it.
I never should've asked if they wanted anything added.
I spent a moment cursing my past self. It had been a thoughtless question, tossed out without a second thought — and thanks to that, tear tracks and a blush had been piled on top. I had dug my own grave. The self-loathing that slammed into me every time I worked on this thing was something else... Still, the piece itself had come out pretty satisfying.
The lines that defined his form were exceptionally clean, and the rendering of the character's emotions looked like it had been pushed to the absolute limit. The contrasting colors and values were finely balanced against each other, and the eerie violet atmosphere bleeding in from the edges dressed the scene in a soft, lingering haze.
Anyone with eyes could see the quality was high. If I was being honest, it might even crack my personal top five. Infuriatingly enough.
I may have sold off my vow to never draw a solo male-character shot — but I still had other principles. Ones that, if you looked at them a certain way, were closer to stubbornness than belief.
Once I take a commission, I make damn sure the client gets their money's worth. They'd steeled themselves and put real money on the table to request work from me, after all. I had lived by that mindset in my previous world, and it had earned me a fair amount of recognition. The habit had carried over into this one, to the point that it now felt less like a principle and more like a compulsion.
If I've taken the money, I give it everything I've got. That was my creed.
The trouble with art, though, is that evaluation is painfully subjective. Even I often had no idea what the right answer was. Fortunately, there was a workaround for times like that: you just spend more time on it. A piece agonized over for four days will almost always outclass something knocked out in a single afternoon. Not a universal law, but a formula that held true more often than not.
Which is probably why this one took five days. I had burned through twice the time I usually spent finishing a commission.
Thought I was going to die.
Sketch the rough, cut the lines, lay in the color and the shading. Then revise, and revise, and revise again... and on top of all that, I still had to hit the deadline for Geumtaeyang chapter three. For me, it was a pretty brutal schedule — and that was without counting the psychological damage I'd taken in between.
One way or another, I finished the piece and sent it straight to qwer1.
Fortunately, my suspiciously wealthy counterpart seemed quite pleased. Satisfied reactions kept rolling through the chat.
I fired off that groveling reply and closed the chat window. Then I sat there for a moment, thinking about the person on the other end.
What the hell is this guy's deal...
He had paid me, sure. But I didn't feel particularly warm toward him. Normally a patron is the kind of person you can't help developing a soft spot for, but this one was a special case. He was the one who had commissioned a solo male-character shot from me, after all. Money or no money, the man had dealt a catastrophic blow to my psyche. There was no way any fondness was going to sprout from that.
On top of which, his attitude had been rude in a way I couldn't quite put my finger on, and the method he'd used to throw money at me had been downright coercive.
Thinks money can do anything, huh...
...Yeah. He knew. He understood the fundamental truth of the world a little too well. And that was exactly why I liked him even less. The bastard knew how to work people!
And even setting that aside, I had plenty of other questions. Why dump $250 into a single commission? That kind of money could keep a whole stable of artists busy, not just me. However well I drew, I was still a long way from the people sitting at the very top. With a budget like that, he could have just gone to someone else. The thought even crossed my mind that maybe he had some kind of conscience about copyright.
"Ah, forget it. Whatever."
I waved the thought away with the back of my hand. What was the point of trying to understand? The inner workings of people who are suspiciously rich have always been beyond comprehension. For now, I decided I would simply be satisfied that I had crawled out of beggarhood.
I moved the mouse and uploaded the commissioned piece to Paxiv. I had already seen the client's reaction. Now it was time to see what ordinary readers made of it. Honestly, I was pretty curious.
Should put Geumtaeyang up too.
I uploaded the somehow-finished Geumtaeyang chapter three to Pinbox as well. With that, everything I had to do today was more or less done.
"Nnngh..."
I stretched hard, pushed myself up from the chair, and threw my body onto the plush mattress. My long-abused spine settled back into place. My furiously spinning brain ground to a halt. A deep, easy comfort seized hold of my body.
"Haaah."
Rest, arriving at the end of a long day of hard labor. It felt incredibly good. This was probably another kind of sex. Nothing that felt this good could possibly be anything else.
"I'm just gonna sleep like this."
Once you were already lying on the bed, getting back up was absurd. It was a stupid act that denied the very reason a bed existed. And so I intended to roll around a little and drift off just like this.
Checking comment reactions is usually one of the better ways to kill time in a moment like this... but I decided to hold off for now. This time I had posted to Pinbox and Paxiv like a normal person, not Tartalos. I would need to wait a while before any real reactions came in. I could stand to be patient about my curiosity.
That said, I was genuinely dying to know how people would respond to qwer1's commission piece. It was a complete departure from every genre my account had ever pursued. Like a guy who drew wholesome romance suddenly drifting into NTR. Like someone who had always done straightforward harems abruptly switching lanes into BL. A piece from the opposite genre had just dropped into a space that normally featured Meldom content, and there was no telling what kind of reactions would come crawling out.
And if I was being honest — I was hoping they wouldn't be good.
Please let the reception tank!
I was actively praying that this well-made piece of mine would fail to match the consumers' tastes. Why? Because I did not want to draw it again. I did not want to be the one filling that particular supply.
Where there is demand, supply inevitably follows. Which also means that if there are no buyers, there is no need for anyone to sell. Meldom was more than enough for me. Life was already livable. I had zero desire to go stretching my genre into other territory.
Holding onto that thought, I prayed that this particular post would be a complete dud. And then I muttered to myself,
"Tomorrow I oughta get myself a round of sex."
Hard labor ought to come with a reward. That's just how it works. I figured I'd mess with Arin, like usual.