Chapter 194 - The Investor III

6

Fine-tuning customers’ dreams and running them.

That was the job assigned to this new generation of writers.

And so even what people called them changed.

“DM! I had such a wonderful dream again today! Seriously, these days I enjoy life so much more asleep than awake!”

“Ahaha. I’m glad you seem to have slept well...”

Dream Manager.

DM for short.

Now these scribblers were more often addressed as “DM” than as “writer.”

“Well, good luck at work. I’ll be heading off to get some sleep...”

“Oh, right! Your bedtime starts now! Sleep well!”

“Yeees, thank you. Yaaawn...”

DMs worked while everyone else slept, and slept while everyone else worked.

They were forced into an extreme night-owl lifestyle, but they didn’t particularly mind. Even as writers, they had chosen to be birds rather than mammals.

And then.

“Undertaker. Have you heard about these DMs that are all the rage lately?”

It was around this time that Dang Seorin brought me up to speed on ‘What_Writers_Are_Up_To_These_Days.jpg.’

I was always racing around the country, too busy to catch my breath. Naturally, I was a little late hearing about trends among ordinary people.

“DM? What’s that?”

“Simply put, a sleep manager. I guess you could say DMs add a special touch to the dreams the fairies provide.”

“Hmm...”

“Anyway, people are going crazy for them. A really good DM is hard to find now, no matter how much money you offer.”

“All sorts of odd things happen, don’t they.”

“Right? I hired a personal DM myself recently. A Harry Potter fanatic, so we really hit it off. Just like me, they prefer Harry’s generation to the Marauders’ generation.”

The Marauders’ generation? Harry’s generation?

Back in run 205, all that jargon had me tilting my head.

“So you hired an ordinary person as your personal manager? And even gave them permission to manipulate the world inside your dreams? Isn’t that... a little dangerous?”

“Oh, don’t worry. DMs can’t do anything without the tutorial fairies anyway. Unless the fairies betray us, a DM would have a hard time pulling anything.”

“Hmm.”

“They’re just ordinary people without awakened abilities to begin with.”

At the time, I accepted that and let it go.

But in truth, Dang Seorin’s remark held the destructive potential of a nuclear bomb.

As you know, Three Thousand Worlds was one of the most successful guilds on the Korean Peninsula.

They didn’t admit just any riffraff. Only top-tier talent with proven character, loyalty, ability, and daring could get in.

(Yu Jiwon, who had sneakily gotten in through special Latin-language admissions, was an exception.)

For ordinary people, it was a dream employer where they couldn’t even submit a résumé, however much they wanted to.

And now an ordinary person—not even an awakened—had landed a job at this corporate giant?

Not as a cleaner or an odd-job worker, either, but as a proper full-time employee?

They had even acquired the title of personal manager to the Great Witch, who shared control of Busan with Noh Doha? A completely ordinary person?

The writers’ community was abuzz.

“Oh, Teacher! I hired one this time too! A personal DM!”

Then Cheon Yohwa poured fuel on the fire.

As a trendsetting MZ-generation high school student (sixth year), she could not tolerate the slanderous suggestion that she was falling behind Dang Seorin.

“Huh? You too, Yohwa?”

“Yes! I hired three: a zombie-story specialist, an exorcism-story specialist, and a cult specialist. For a whole week now, I’ve been enjoying dreams where I become a successful cult leader in a world overrun by zombies!”

“...”

Asking why on earth she enjoyed dreams like that would have been missing the forest for the trees.

The point was that while Dang Seorin of Three Thousand Worlds had hired a mere one, Cheon Yohwa of Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School had hired a whopping three.

With rivalry between Busan, the “economic capital,” and Sejong, the “spiritual capital,” already growing fiercer by the day, these two proud geniuses collided.

-[Three Thousand]WitchTrialJudge: I reread <The Little Prince> for the first time in a while, and it got me thinking. Even after the world has ended once, people still insist on judging everything by numbers.

--[Three Thousand]WitchTrialJudge: Where has the willingness to cross even a desert to find that one fox waiting just for me disappeared to?

└[Hundred Flowers]HighSchoolYear6: Wow! You only have one fox!

└[Three Thousand]WitchTrialJudge: ?

└[Hundred Flowers]HighSchoolYear6: I have three in my desert... I guess you weren’t very popular! >_<);;

The drums of war sounded.

Dang Seorin immediately promoted her personal DM to “chief DM.” Then she hired eleven specialists, including graduates in architecture, food and nutrition, and education, and assigned them to the department. On top of that, she hired no fewer than six former fanfiction writers as DMs to check the Harry Potter lore.

The Hogwarts in her dreams approached perfection.

Cheon Yohwa refused to be outdone.

While Dang Seorin focused on quality, Yohwa invested in quantity. She brought in specialist DMs from every genre—fantasy, contemporary fiction, romance, martial arts, and more—and savored whatever sort of dream caught her fancy that day. Her personal DM head count reached a staggering twenty.

-[Three Thousand]WitchTrialJudge: Dream journal, entry 31. I’ve finally gotten somewhat familiar with the academy’s layout. I’ve made several friends, and the professors have taken notice of me too. In Divination class, I was praised as “the greatest talent since the academy’s founding,” but I think that’s quite an exaggeration.

-[Hundred Flowers]HighSchoolYear6: Dream journal, day 20! I finally smashed the boss zombie’s skull today >_<)!!

The two of them eventually began posting these so-called dream journals on SG Net, waging a subtle battle of wills.

Whenever their “chairwoman” posted a dream journal, the members of Three Thousand Worlds and Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School would race over like cheetahs and hammer out comments.

Why? Because the two were competing over whose dream journal got more views and comments.

Surviving at a corporate giant wasn’t easy either.

-Goryeojang: Lmaooo look at the peninsula’s leading awakened lol

-Goryeojang: How pathetic does your real life have to be to fight over dreams lol

Only the Goryeojang Villain was having the time of their life.

So what was I, the Undertaker, the only person capable of mediating this two-pronged parallel shitshow, doing all this time? Nothing. I sat back and watched.

Look, those two fought over who was above whom whenever they had a spare moment anyway.

As far as I was concerned, this was a relatively safe way to blow off steam. At least nobody got hurt.

But other people apparently saw things a little differently.

“Uh...?”

“If that’s how it is, then to keep up appearances, we’ll have to...”

As those two blue whales thrashed about, the squid and shrimp that had been quietly fishing nearby—in other words, the leaders of the smaller guilds—found themselves in quite a predicament.

If Dang Seorin and Cheon Yohwa hired twenty DMs, the other major guilds had to hire at least twelve.

The leader of a middling guild with any standing needed at least six DMs. A small guild just starting to grow ought to hire three.

The reason? They didn’t need any of that crap.

This land already had a living, breathing tradition of measuring a person’s status by the price of their car and house.

That same tradition had simply transformed into “How good are your DMs, and how many have you hired?”

Italian nobles in the Renaissance had lavished their wealth on artists. Now the guild leaders of the Korean Peninsula used DMs to compare their rooster combs.

It wasn’t as if Renaissance nobles had possessed some magnificent eye for art. Likewise, the guild leaders had no extraordinary literary sophistication.

Nevertheless, those two professions generated an enormous number of jobs.

DMs also had several advantages that put them far ahead of Renaissance artists.

① Ease of entry.

You needed no starting capital to become a DM. Simply fine-tune dreams to suit your customers’ tastes, and you could put food on the table.

② Business sustainability.

Unlike cathedrals and other buildings that hogged their plots for hundreds or thousands of years once built, DMs had a constant supply of work. People dreamed every day, and given the choice, they wanted entertaining dreams.

③ Connections with the powerful.

Awakened of guild-leader rank moved in a league of their own. It was exceedingly difficult for ordinary people to befriend them.

But any DM whose skills placed them in the top one percent could get close to the powerful. What’s more, a DM was the first person a powerful patron saw upon waking each day, and the last person they saw before sleeping.

Easy to enter, bright business prospects, and even a chance at prestige and power?

The result:

“Mom! I want to be a writer when I grow up!”

“Writers are gods!”

A frenzy swept across the Korean Peninsula.

As I mentioned when introducing this episode, the Great Age of Literature had dawned with truly astonishing suddenness.

7

This Great Age of Literature saw a truly staggering number of incidents and accidents.

For instance, the tutorial fairies launched a massive strike, declaring that they couldn’t take it anymore.

But in this tale, I intend to cover just one episode—one in which no anomalies were involved whatsoever.

As promised at the beginning, today I mean to focus on the stories of “ordinary people,” whom I don’t normally get to discuss.

And who had I selected to represent those ordinary people? Why hide it?

“I’ve been feeling burned out lately...”

“What?”

Writer A.

The very person who had been appearing throughout this episode from the start.

For the record, I haven’t obtained Writer A’s permission to use his actual pen name in my tales. Thus, I have no choice but to call him Writer A.

Just know that he is an extremely timid web-novel writer whose pen name ends in a syllable pronounced “A.”

Anyway.

“What do you mean, DM? Your cocktail bar is doing incredibly well these days. You’ve increased capacity to fifty customers, and you’ve hired five bartender NPCs... Oh! That new bartender NPC you hired last time is getting amazing reviews!”

“DM, DM, that damned DM...”

“Pardon?”

“I’m a writer! A writer! And novels—creating things! This isn’t what it’s about!”

CRASH!

Writer A hurled a wineglass and shattered it in front of his assistant writer.

It felt like only yesterday that he had been collecting rainwater to drink, unable to find even bottled water, let alone wine. Yet a little success had already taught him the refined bourgeois art of throwing a fucking fit.

“Look at what I do these days! Shout ‘Welcome!’ when a customer arrives, mix cocktails day in and day out, fiddle with the new bartender’s looks and backstory... I-is that a writer? Is it?!”

“I mean, for someone who easily makes a million won in a single day, you’re complaining an awful lot...”

“A harrowing yet beautiful world! Vivid, vibrant characters! A journey of defeat and victory unfolding there, schemes and intrigue, a midnight ball where some dance while others walk to the guillotine! That! That’s the kind of work! I want to wriiiite!”

“...”

For anyone who doesn’t recognize it, allow me to introduce “New Project Syndrome,” a chronic condition that afflicts every writer who has serialized the same work for eighteen months or longer.

Other endemic conditions manifested exclusively in writers included “Remake Syndrome,” “Indefinite Hiatus Syndrome,” “Relay Novel Syndrome,” “Writing Contest Syndrome,” “My Writing Sucks Syndrome,” “My Writing Rocks Syndrome,” and “Write a Female Protagonist or Die Syndrome.”

You may be appalled that such profoundly defective life-forms have survived on Earth to this day, but I’m sorry—you haven’t been appalled enough yet.

“But I could never create such a perfect dream on my own...!”

Here, Writer A made a profoundly writerly choice—in other words, an exceedingly foolish one by the standards of humanity at large.

First, he gathered the seven fellow writers with whom he had shared army stew before.

Those colleagues, now pioneers of the industry, had become the prosperous “Supreme Eight.” They were well-off enough to hold their gatherings at a grilled pork belly restaurant instead of an army stew place now.

“Honestly, you’re all exhausted too, aren’t you? Right?”

“Uh, well...”

“Everything else about the Great Witch is fine, but her standards are so high... Sometimes she tells me in the dream that something isn’t lore-accurate, but honestly, that’s not my fault. Even the original author is inconsistent with the lore sometimes...”

“Exactly!”

Writer A thumped his cup of makgeolli down on the table.

“Let’s create something together!”

“What?”

“We each take a few main characters and flesh them out. Then we bring it all together. We build the world together too. You’re good at political infighting, so you handle that. And you write great war stories, right? Huh? So you can balance the fictional nations against each other!”

Writer A declared:

“We’re the first writers in human history who can manipulate dreams! How long are we going to keep fiddling with powerful people’s dreams on this petty little scale? Guys! Let’s make an MMORPG with a degree of freedom no one has ever experienced before—a perfect ‘virtual world’!”

“...!”

That’s right.

Unfortunately, Writer A and the rest of the Supreme Eight had contracted the worst of all writerly illnesses, the root of all evil whose very name was enough to send a shudder through your entire body:

Col·lab·o·ra·tion Syn·drome.