Chapter 198 - The Ugly One I

1

I've rambled on at considerable length about writers, but to be perfectly honest, all those stories were merely a prologue.

If you don't care for the word “prologue,” you could call it the process of dicing vegetables before getting started on the main dish.

Now that I've shown you examples of fine writers, the exact opposite example about to appear should provide an equally stark contrast.

Around run 600. Somewhere around run 700.

It didn't matter which run you picked. In every run, the Fiction Serialization Board on SG Net was piled high with notices like these.

[BookishGirl] This Is Oh Dokseo... (5 minutes ago)

[BookishGirl] Update Delay Notice (1 day ago)

[BookishGirl] Notice Regarding My Lateness (3 days ago)

[BookishGirl] Hiatus Notice (4 days ago)

[BookishGirl] Notice of Change to Update Time (8 days ago)

Intervening entries omitted.

[BookishGirl] Notice of Irregular Updates Due to the Author's Health (1 year ago)

[BookishGirl] The Author's Explanation Regarding Recent Updates (1 year ago)

[BookishGirl] No Update Today (1 year ago)

[BookishGirl] Regarding a Temporary Switch to 3.25 Updates per Week (2 years ago)

A whopping 1,019 notices.

It was like the inbox of a caveman who had never learned the concept of organizing emails.

Every last one was marked “read.” As a test, I clicked the message that had arrived in my inbox five minutes ago.

[BookishGirl] This Is Oh Dokseo...

Mister, I'm sorry, but I felt I ought to let you know in advance that I probably won't be able to post on time today, and you don't have to forgive me for sending you this message, but even so, I hope you'll keep a little faith in your heart that I'm always doing my very best, and so I write. My excuses, I write. Time's been tight.

“Hmm...”

I rested a hand on my chin.

Not because I found anything particularly puzzling or surprising. I'd seen the rhyme Dokseo had worked into the end and thought, 'Not bad!'

Yes. Oh Dokseo's update-delay notices were already approaching the realm of art.

Suppose one party arrived late to a summit between nations. Naturally, that would be an enormous “mistake” and a “breach of etiquette.”

But what if they did it a hundred times? Such was the way of the world that it would now be hailed as “Putin's political strategy.”

Dokseo's late updates were exactly like that. Surely it wouldn't be unfair to call her a grand master of hiatuses.

Had this been a world where constellations actually existed, Dokseo would surely have received the title [Achievement Unlocked: An Author Who Has Posted 1,000 Hiatus Notices] by now.

I didn't know what effect that achievement would provide. Something shitty, probably.

Unfortunately, constellations didn't actually exist in this world, and Dokseo belonged to the Regression Alliance, so I couldn't fool her with a fake one. Instead, I moved my very real fingers and sent a very real message.

[ZERO_SUGAR] Dokseo.

I read your message. Don't put too much pressure on yourself.

Writing hardly ever turns out exactly as you want it to, does it? This old Mister has seen plenty of writers, so I know that well.

Why not take this entire run off instead?

The you in the next run will do a little better.

Wait.

There's something I should say to prevent any misunderstanding.

I am not Workshop Master Noh Doha. Meaning I'm not a venom-spitting machine born with a tongue twisted 360 degrees, giving every word that comes out a sarcastic twist.

Whenever I say something to someone, you can interpret my words exactly as they are. There's no need to undertake a linguistic excavation in search of some hidden meaning.

But writers are, by nature, a breed that reads “between the lines” of paragraphs.

Even when there is nothing of the sort, they suffer from an occupational disease that makes them triumphantly declare, “This is the work's hidden meaning!”

Unfortunately, Oh Dokseo was a writer.

“Misteeeer! How could you say something so cruel to me?”

BANG!

Oh Dokseo kicked open the door to Café Hideout and burst in. She flailed her arms and legs at me, having apparently mastered the very same windmill martial arts practiced by Nobita from Doraemon.

“Huh? This run's a lost cause? A lost cause! The me in this run is hopeless? How could you! I know you're a regressor without blood, tears, or hair follicles, but how could you say that!”

“Dokseo. My hair follicles are perfectly healthy. My hair was only briefly shorter while I was getting the Walther PPK.”

“So I'm not even a writer anymore? You're saying there's nothing to expect from me this run anyway, so you're calling it quits? Huh?”

“No, that's not what I meant at al—”

“I... want to write too...!”

Dokseo grabbed my collar, bowed her head, and roared.

For some reason, a coming-of-age drama was casting a unique barrier around her face. Her anguish was so impeccable that even Slam Dunk's Jeong Daeman would have acknowledged it.

“If only... I could write a little faster! You're already well past your eight hundredth run! I promised I'd write your story—but the me in the last run, and the me in the run before that, too, why, why can we only write this much—!”

All right. Pause.

Allow me to explain our prophet's creative method here—in other words, the behind-the-scenes production process for my biographical novel.

① First, I tell her stories. Dokseo and I both live in Inunaki Tunnel anyway, so I can share anecdotes whenever we're bored.

② Oh Dokseo writes based on my stories. We'll call the resulting novel the “rough draft.”

③ Then I pass the “rough draft” on to the Oh Dokseo of the next run. Thanks to Perfect Recall, I can upload every single letter for her.

④ Dokseo continues writing where the previous run's “rough draft” left off.

⑤ Writing alone as though practicing ascetic meditation facing a wall is exhausting, so she slightly changes the characters' names and proper nouns and posts it on SG Net's Fiction Serialization Board as a “fictional story.” Incidentally, the title changes from run to run. In run 888, it was <The Regressor's Epilogue>.

In short, a relay novel.

And always, in every run without a single exception, Dokseo accepts the previous run's “rough draft,” reads it, then enters the following comments.

[“Seriously, why did she only manage to write this much?”]

Dismissal.

[“Wooow. Mister! Don't worry, don't worry. All the Oh Dokseos before this run were trash who didn't even write, but yours truly is going to be different this time.”]

Contempt.

[“Well then, shall I write...? This pastime known as ‘writing,’ which may be nothing but endlessly grueling labor for some untalented soul, is mere Denver bubble gum to a talent monster like me.”]

Confidence.

That was the complete set.

And before long, my inbox would be crammed full of messages titled “This Is Oh Dokseo...”

You could call it a rare case of bubble gum knocking a human's teeth out.

Based on my reasonable suspicions, I thought there was an extremely high probability that this Indefinite Hiatus Syndrome was a final curse left by the Operator of All Things at Play.

Honestly, there was no other way to explain it.

Only a little over two hundred chapters had accumulated across hundreds of runs. If that wasn't an anomaly, what was?

“Dokseo. I really am fine.”

I spoke while taking off my barista apron. It was covered in the prophet's snot and tears.

“What writer in the world wants to stop updating? Every writer would love to release six, even ten chapters a day and send the story they started racing gloriously onward. They shrink into themselves because they can't, but keep shrinking like that and even your heart will shrivel.”

“...”

“Don't be so hard on yourself. I'm really fi...”

“Whether you're fine or not is beside the point!”

What.

“I'm! Not fine!”

“...”

What was I supposed to do about that?

Fortunately or unfortunately, Dokseo didn't seem to be looking for an answer from me. She whispered to herself while gnawing at her nails. (I'd told her countless times to stop that, but she never listens to me.)

“No. This won't do... I have to find a way somehow... Umbrella... By any means necessary... I have to write faster...”

Then she strode out, wearing the expression of Light after L had found his weak spot.

Everything fell quiet, as though a typhoon had passed.

Again, this was Café Hideout's 1,300-meter Depth section. There weren't many customers, but there were customers nonetheless, and Hayul was among them.

As a witness to this coming-of-age drama, Lee Hayul delivered her obligatory line.

“Big brother, not going after her?”

“It's fine. She might wander a little, but she'll pull herself together soon enough. Rather than following her and fussing over every little thing, I'd like to trust her and wait for now.”

“You just can't be bothered, right?”

This is why I hate perceptive brats.

2

And so, until now, the standard procedure had been for Dokseo to peck out a few chapters, then toss the rough draft onward with a “Sorry! Me in the next run! Please figure something out...!”

But astonishingly, in run 888, a new route opened that even I hadn't anticipated.

[BookishGirl] From now on, The Regressor's Epilogue will update seven days a week at 16:00.

It was a miracle.

In case you can't fully appreciate the terrifying magnitude of this miracle, let me explain: Dokseo had originally been updating three days a week. Now she'd increased that to seven.

Have you ever seen anything like that?

No. And you never will, either. An author's update frequency is like the bank balance of someone with ruined credit: once it drops, it never goes back up.

Yet Oh Dokseo had done it.

[BookishGirl] The Regressor's Epilogue, Chapter 273 (1 day ago)

[BookishGirl] The Regressor's Epilogue, Chapter 272 (2 days ago)

[BookishGirl] The Regressor's Epilogue, Chapter 271 (3 days ago)

[BookishGirl] The Regressor's Epilogue, Chapter 270 (4 days ago)

[BookishGirl] The Regressor's Epilogue, Chapter 269 (5 days ago)

[BookishGirl] The Regressor's Epilogue, Chapter 268 (6 days ago)

[BookishGirl] The Regressor's Epilogue, Chapter 267 (7 days ago)

Updates right on the dot, never a single minute late.

There was something even more chilling.

[BookishGirl] The Regressor's Epilogue, Chapter 276 (5 minutes ago)

[BookishGirl] The Regressor's Epilogue, Chapter 275 (5 minutes ago)

[BookishGirl] The Regressor's Epilogue, Chapter 274 (5 minutes ago)

At least one triple-chapter release every week!

Sometimes she even dropped a whopping ten chapters at once, and not infrequently, either.

Naturally, SG Net's Fiction Board was abuzz.

The readers, who usually waited for a late-update notice titled “This Is Oh Dokseo...” just so they could mock it, busily posted comments.

-Anonymous: Hey, did something happen lately? Why isn't BookishGirl late anymore??

-Anonymous: She's even dropping multiple chapters; she's gone nuts;;

-Anonymous: Looks like she awakened. Damn.

-Anonymous: Oh Dokseo << Upvote if you honestly think this fucker absolutely destroys Goryeojang lol

└Goryeojang: Upvoted lmaooo

└Anonymous: ?

SG Net's readers launched into an unexpected week of BookishGirl worship.

But not everyone joined the worship club.

-[Hundred Flowers]HighSchoolYear6: Guys guys; hasn't BookishGirl's writing gotten a little strange lately? >_<);;

Reviews along those lines appeared from time to time.

-[Hundred Flowers]HighSchoolYear6: Her writing used to feel so satisfyingly chewy and full of edge >_<);; but lately it's lost its distinctive flavor, I guess... It's gotten all flat like the Earth >_<)!!

└Anonymous: Flat-earther spotted

└Goryeojang: Average Hell Joseon guild member lmaooo

└Anonymous: You felt that too? Honestly, I've also felt like BookishGirl's writing has gotten really shallow lately

└Anonymous: fr it was fucking delicious when updates were less frequent, but now I'm actually thinking of dropping it

└Anonymous: Yeah the writing's kinda weird;;

I tilted my head.

'But Dokseo's a pretty good writer, isn't she?'

In fact, I'd been letting chapters of her novel pile up lately. I worried that if I made it obvious I was reading, she'd take that as pressure again.

'Did she sacrifice quality in exchange for a regular schedule?'

If so, unlike SG Net's readers, I actually considered that a good thing.

Dokseo was a little too obsessed with the quality of her writing.

Letting go a little more and treating writing as a set amount of work to be done every day would be far better for her mental health.

'Those nasty comments must be bothering her again. I'll make her some coffee and bring it over as a show of support.'

And so I volunteered to serve not only as the café's barista, but as its delivery driver too.

In one hand I carried a coffee tray loaded with the espresso Dokseo's old brain loved best, and the café mocha her young tongue loved best.

As it happened, Dokseo had left her door slightly open and was hard at work wrestling with her laptop.

'She's working so hard on her updates!'

A little touched, I was about to knock when I stopped short.

Through the crack in the door.

My aura-enhanced vision had caught a perfectly angled glimpse of Dokseo's laptop screen.

>> Enter your prompt...

※ GPT-MSYH can make mistakes. Please be diligent about cross-checking.

?

A question mark popped up in my mind.

Before my brain could supply an answer to it, Dokseo's fingers began rapidly tapping the laptop keyboard.

CLACK-CLACK. CLACK-CLACK-CLACK.

Beyond hands moving as gracefully as a pianist's, the following words appeared in the blinking prompt field on the screen.

>> Protagonist is Undertaker, regressor, run 300, starts at Busan Station, a strange story

CLICK.

Dokseo pressed Enter.

A moment later, the laptop screen began spewing out sentences.

Undertaker had reached his three hundredth regression. Busan Station still looked strange to the protagonist's eyes. Though he returned to the same Busan Station every time, one fact remained unchanging. Strange incidents always came to him at Busan Station, and Undertaker, the protagonist, had to resolve the strange incidents at Busan Station.

Undertaker let out a strange sigh for the three hundredth time and took out the black suit he had bought at Busan Station to put it on.

Run 300 of another strange Busan Station story featuring the regressor protagonist Undertaker was about to begin.

“Phew.”

Dokseo wiped her forehead.

“Another day's work done! Update finished!”

“...”

Uh.

Dokseo...?