“Huh? What is this thing?”

Dae-sik, back in his tiny boarding-house room after work, was making dinner out of a cup of instant noodles when he jumped. He stared at the monitor without noticing his noodles swelling into mush.

For Dae-sik, a broke and worn-down young man in his first year of working life, dinner was the one healing hour when he could blow off some stress.

The happiest part of it was going into Fanpia with a cup of noodles and a triangle gimbap and reading the new serials.

It was the only luxury allowed to a man with nothing.

“Whoa! What is this guy, the hero? He seems pathetic and he’s dripping with charm. No typos, no broken sentences either… The prose is decent and the story moves right along. Heh heh. This thing’s a smash. Best I’ve read in a while.”

Dae-sik, who judged a work purely by whether it was fun, was a long-time hardcore genre-market obsessive.

One page was enough for him to pick out a hit.

“Slurrrp.”

Inhaling his noodles, Dae-sik read down the screen fast.

His eyes didn’t leave it.

“Ohhhhh! What is this character Red? Bwahahahaha! Junk loot matters more to him than a woman?”

Game novels weren’t usually his taste, but Dae-sik was thoroughly satisfied.

Red staking his life on junk loot over women suited the taste of Dae-sik, single since birth.

“Ten chapters in one sitting. ID’s Gold River… I’m definitely borrowing your book when it comes out. Favorite it, recommend it, and a comment on top — I’m firing off all three.”

Dae-sik, who didn’t usually bother leaving comments, hammered at the keyboard.

— This work is a smash! Please put the next chapter up soon!

It was sitting on the open board, and ten chapters in, it had climbed onto the tail end of Today’s Best.

Only the third day of serialization.

— First!

— Author! Keep up the good writing! Please, please give us the next one faster!!!

— What is this? Isn’t the hero way too pathetic? This works on people? Don’t publish this. It’s an insult to paper!

⤷ ur the pathetic 1. mad jealous much. u write 2!

Comments poured down one after another.

It was 2006, and the clipped chat-speak of the day was still in fashion.

The fresh novel thrown into a quiet Fanpia slowly kicked up a storm.

The publishers reacted no differently.

The publishing staff who had been monitoring the work moved quickly into meetings.

“Assistant Manager Lee, are you really sure?”

“Yes, Chief! Five thousand copies at worst. Package it right and a second printing is a certainty.”

“Only ten chapters are up. Aren’t your expectations running high?”

“You’ve read it yourself, Chief, so you know — first of all, it’s fun. The early setup isn’t absurd either. Above all, the ability to carry a story is outstanding. This is an established author who’s changed his name and put it up, guaranteed!”

“Hmm… It is fun, but it still feels like fusion fantasy sells better than game novels…”

“Reader tastes have changed. Game novels will be the trend for a while. Cloud Warrior! The title’s good too. It looks like something, right off.”

At Jeongjin, one of the big publishers in the genre market, the morning editorial meeting was running hot.

“I’d recommend it too. I read it yesterday and the hero is remarkably appealing.”

Gyeong-ran of the editing team put her recommendation in too.

A seven-year veteran.

“Chief, we need to send a contact message.”

“How far do we have to go on the terms?”

“If he’s established and not a newcomer, we’d have to guarantee four thousand copies and eight percent at minimum.”

“Isn’t that too strong?”

“Chief. If it were up to me I’d want to give him five thousand and ten.”

Assistant Manager Lee was arguing for a contract at the level of the top established authors.

The editor-in-chief closed his eyes and sank into thought.

He had a feeling about it too.

“All right. Send the contact message.”

“Understood! I’ll send it right away!”

Assistant Manager Lee broke into a wide smile when his opinion carried.

The publisher had not been doing well lately.

One Cloud Warrior looked like it might let them breathe again.

“This work looks good. What do you think, Chief?”

Meanwhile, the president of Nice Media, a late entrant into the genre market, was showing Cloud Warrior to his editor-in-chief, who was also his friend and his employee.

His eyes on the monitor were full of expectation.

“I read it yesterday too. The content’s good. The fun is definitely guaranteed.”

“I got a feeling right away. We’re taking this one. Six thousand copies and ten percent, I’m firing that off.”

“The company isn’t in good shape either. Can we do that? If the other authors find out they’ll take it badly.”

Nice Media was a small outfit and its royalties to authors were not on the generous side.

It was steep for a rate guaranteed to a newcomer.

At this level it was a top-tier established contract.

Lately print runs were shrinking while author royalties climbed.

That was not good for publishers.

“I had a pig dream last night. This is going to move ten thousand copies for sure.” (TL Note: dreaming of a pig is the standard Korean omen of money coming; people buy lottery tickets on the strength of one.)

President Choi of Nice Media was a man of firm likes and dislikes.

He was stuck on Cloud Warrior and smacking his lips over it.

The royalties weren’t good, but he dealt with his authors like a human being.

“I don’t know about that much, but it’ll be a hit.”

The editor-in-chief nodded.

“Send the message. When they answer, I’m going down there myself!”

“Okay!”

“Hoo. Hoo…”

In the old days I’d have collapsed long before this, but my body held.

My breathing came easily.

The monsoon was over, but the muggy, sodden weather went on.

I climbed the hill behind the house, where the orchard was.

I had gotten up at three in the morning and left the house.

There was no way to work through the Taegeuk Five Elements Dual Intent Mind Art at home with any peace of mind.

For a hill sitting in a village, the one out back was fairly high.

A rock mountain five hundred meters above sea level.

I made my nest up there.

I had played there since I was little and knew it inside out.

None of the village elders would be climbing it this early.

The rocks were rough, and the woods were thick besides.

“Wow! This is a whole new world!”

My body was light enough to fly.

The Great Circulation took exactly two hours.

Because this was illegal tutoring, Divine Lord Cheollyong had run it express, skipping past the Lesser Circulation and installing the Great Circulation into me as the lesson.

Every time, filthy water ran off my body and stank.

There was still a great deal of turbid energy left in me.

When the Great Circulation ended, I trained the Taegeuk Five Elements Dual Intent Fist.

It was like the tai chi training forms I’d seen so often in Chinese movies, and it was not.

A full hundred and eight movements had to be thrown in sequence.

And it only worked if I ran the Taegeuk Five Elements Dual Intent Mind Art at the same time and guided the true energy with my internal energy.

That took an hour too.

Once I had been through it, new energy came surging through my whole body.

It had been a week, and I was already deep in the sweet taste of internal energy.

“That feels clean. Hoooooo.”

I drew a long breath and looked down from the mountain.

When the training was done, the air I breathed refilled the energy in my dantian.

For a man whose only exercise had been breathing, this was enormous progress.

I wanted to raise the stage of the Taegeuk Five Elements Dual Intent Mind Art fast.

This was what Divine Lord Cheollyong had taken the Ascension to Immortality grand prize with.

Divine Lord Cheollyong had forced a dantian into my body.

The stage was still only the first, but the effect was considerable.

For one thing, my body felt clean.

I was writing half a volume a day and my shoulders never knotted up.

A short spell of circulating the energy and my body felt clear again.

The summer heat turned the room into a steamer, but unlike before I shed only a few drops of sweat.

The heat didn’t wear my body down.

At the same time, training the Taegeuk Five Elements Dual Intent Fist improved my build.

My back straightened all the way out.

Small muscle came onto a body that had been nothing but bone.

I was a hundred and eighty centimeters to start with, so I wasn’t short.

For lack of exercise I had weighed about sixty kilograms.

Which was why some people called me Dried Anchovy.

But with my spine straightened and muscle on me, even I thought I looked all right.

In exactly one week my body was turning into something worth looking at.

“I’m not living a defeated man’s life anymore!”

I didn’t fully understand what the old man in the dream meant, but I couldn’t throw away a chance heaven had handed me.

I couldn’t spend a second life carelessly.

I didn’t want to waste time the way I had before and be called a loser.

I drew in a breath and watched the sun come up.

It drove off the sleeping dark, and the land stretched and woke.

It was easy on the eyes.

I could see the mountains making shoulders of themselves, wrapping the village up solidly.

In front of the village the flat land ran on and on, and a stream ran through it.

Before I knew it the morning sun had floated all the way up.

“Contact messages from five of the big genre publishers, just as I expected. Stage one, success!”

For the last few days, every time I logged in to Fanpia there were contact messages waiting from several publishers.

I didn’t answer in a hurry.

A fun story will rise even if you write it with your foot — that was a famous line born on the Fanpia community boards.

There was only one reason Cloud Warrior was loved by readers all the way to 2020.

It was fun enough to work across a jump in time.

Overseas, Cloud Warrior had been popular enough to be translated and published in America.

Only, the Korean sense of humor was hard for America to digest.

In America, where the hero archetype is the dominant taste, Cloud Warrior‘s protagonist wasn’t easy to make sense of.

But I wasn’t thinking that far ahead.

What mattered to me either way was raising seed money.

“They’ll treat me at the level of an established author? They just want to meet? Do they think I’m an idiot.”

Through the friend whose book flopped, I had a rough idea of how publishers operate.

The internet was full of write-ups from authors who’d been charmed by a publisher’s staffer into signing and had regretted it.

I was careful.

And I gave first refusal to Nice Media.

After all, Cloud Warrior had been a Nice Media title in the first place.

“Son. What’s this sudden date about?”

“Today your son is treating you to the full course, no expense spared.”

“My son is?”

Mom looked at me with wide eyes.

It wouldn’t make sense to her.

My official allowance came to a hundred thousand won a month.

After loading my bus card, what was left was a few tens of thousands at most.

Money that would vanish on a few Choco Pies with my friends.

And here I was, taking Mom out and saying it was my treat.

Rain came down steadily from the morning on.

We took the bus into town.

The twins had gone to school for supplementary classes since early morning.

Unlike high school, middle school had vacation classes.

My father had been away since yesterday, attending a lecture on new organic farming methods.

The chance had lined up perfectly.

I needed help from Mom, who backed me without reservation.

Damn it. My minor status, of all things, is what has me by the ankle.

Today the president of Nice Media was coming down in person.

To draw up the contract.

The broad strokes had gone back and forth by message.

But there was nothing at all I could do on my own.

I’m a minor.

A minor cannot perform a legal act independently.

To perform one, he must obtain the consent of his legal representative, or the legal representative must perform the act on his behalf.

That said, the Civil Act does provide exceptions where a minor may act alone, without his legal representative’s consent, for certain acts.

Among a minor’s legal acts, one that merely acquires a right or is relieved of an obligation may be performed independently.

A minor could also independently dispose of property that had been permitted to him for disposal within a defined scope.

A novel contract was not a contract that only acquires rights.

It was a legal act involving an advance payment and a penalty for breach.

Which was why my mother’s help was essential to today’s contract.

I didn’t want to tell my father yet.

“We’ve arrived. Please step down, Your Royal Mother.”

“Son, your lame jokes have been multiplying lately.”

Mom snorted and got off the bus.

“Let’s have a coffee.”

“Coffee? You know what coffee tastes like?”

“Of course. On a day like this an iced americano is exactly right.”

A Starbox that had opened a few months earlier was right in front of the stop.

I need to get myself a cell phone first. This is really inconvenient.

Because of the family’s finances I didn’t have a phone.

It was the one item my father alone owned.

“Mom. You trust your son, right?”

“Of course. Until the day I die, your mother is on your side.”

Mom said it as though my question answered itself.

I opened the door of the Starbox and went in.

Early, aren’t they.

A publishing president you could pick out at a glance by his build, and one staff member with him, were sitting by the window.

The appointment was for eleven, but it seemed they had come early to wait for me.

A pass, for a start.

I walked up to them.

“Are you from Nice Media?”

It came out politely.

The habit of dealing with clients from my time at the securities firm had come out without my meaning it to.

“Y-you’re Author Gold River?”

They called me by my ID instead of my name.

“Yes. I’m Gold River.”

“Ah!”

The two men let out a sound of astonishment.

Rising halfway out of their seats, the pair of them looked at me with expressions of bewilderment and disbelief.

(End of Chapter 5)