Chapter 101
Like most office workers, when the boss says jump, you jump.
The aide grumbled as he thoroughly investigated Kim Yul, officially branded a subversive by the First Prince, and laid the findings before him.
He read through the neatly organized documents several times, but.
“No matter how I look at it, something’s fishy…….”
They were far too clean.
But even the First Prince understood that he couldn’t drag someone in for interrogation on the charge of being too clean—and that, given Kim Yul’s status as a hero, the backlash would be even worse.
But.
He could at least find a way to get his hands around Kim Yul’s ankle.
“Have the editor-in-chief of the Empire Daily summoned.”
.
.
.
The blade of character assassination the First Prince had prepared so ambitiously finally slammed into Kim Yul’s throat after several days.
It was.
[The Shocking Truth About Popular Author Ulysses…… He Was a Pervert?]
After an exhaustive excavation of his past, they dug up the Greek and Roman myths Kim Yul had published under his real name before adopting the pen name Ulysses.
In particular, they were taking aim at “Zeus’s Love Affairs.”
Of course, it was only a brief gossip item tucked away in a corner of the Empire Daily’s society section, since they had been somewhat cautious about attacking someone in the same industry.
From Kim Yul’s perspective,
it was a horrifying situation in which the adults-only novel he had written under his old name, before laundering his pen name, had been exposed to the entire world……!
But unfortunately for the First Prince.
“What is this, free publicity? If this is how it’s going to be, they should’ve spread it far and wide before the deadline to acquire the skill passed.”
It did absolutely no damage to Kim Yul.
He had come from an era when one’s personal information was strictly investigated and controlled by the state, then illegally distributed to neighboring countries at dirt-cheap prices.
He had no resistance whatsoever to the revelation that Kim Yul was his real name.
Besides, during that turbulent period when the concept of copyright was still rather hazy, Kim Yul had also been tempered by Hi■mi.
He had even enjoyed novel platforms that preserved the full scope of twenty-first-century freedom of expression, except where minors were involved.
Thus, to him, Zeus’s gettin’-busy fantasy was, at most, a level-one story.
“Ohoho! I have bought the rights, I say!”
“Good work, elf. Hmm, now that the rights are back, shall we put out a revised edition? Add a few illustrations, too?”
“With pleasure! I can practically smell the money!”
As the saying goes, you have to strike while the iron is hot.
Rather, they published a new edition under Ulysses’s name, adding illustrations so lurid that even Historié, who occasionally helped with the printing, would blush, and Rozelyn would let out ten straight “Oh my goodness!”s after seeing them.
When it came to obscenity, Fantasy Land’s laws and moral standards were far more permissive than those of a certain East Asian country, whose laws and morals were a collection of warped Confucian and Christian doctrines.
“Damn, is this author a genius even at writing erotic novels……!”
“He turns into an animal to escape, then turns into an animal himself and rapes it? How does anyone even come up with this?”
“I-is this kind of position possible?!”
“Ahh, ahh……!”
The capital’s residents reacted with extraordinary enthusiasm.
And although it hadn’t been his intention at all.
“H-honey, why are you washing?”
“Shut up and get ready to get it up, honey.”
“Sob, sob. My lower back hurts so much…….”
“Did I rape you, oppa? Answer me.”
Kim Yul had contributed to increasing the birthrate of the Empire’s capital.
The irony was that he himself was an innocent young man who had never once engaged in an act directly leading to childbirth.
If there were any other minor changes,
“Humans…… truly are fascinating.”
In the process of recreating as images an act that had existed for her only as “knowledge,”
Historié had merely grown curious about things she still didn’t understand and had never experienced.
* * *
Sadly, Kim Yul was unaware of it.
He was also unaware that, realizing his character-assassination attempt had only raised Kim Yul’s profile, the First Prince had exploded in fury and hurled a liquor bottle against the wall.
He was even unaware that the kingdom’s subversives were reading his novel in pirated editions and raising his name, along with Napoleon’s, as banners of revolution.
It was only natural.
He had neither the information network to learn of the First Prince’s sinister scheme
nor any way of knowing, since the novel had never officially been exported to the kingdom.
And Kim Yul had recently been refraining from ego-searching—that is, going to the salons and listening with a giggle to people mention his novels.
So he remained unaware of the response his novel was generating, focusing solely on putting Napoleon’s life into a novel.
Even amid the fortunate boost to the novel’s popularity from the First Prince’s free viral marketing,
“Ahem…… what should I do?”
Kim Yul was sunk in thought.
Since the era, society, and human lives themselves were not all that different between Earth and Fantasy Land, turning them into a novel wasn’t difficult.
But.
Yet, according to the great and noble Nureongi, who had recently commandeered a room in Kim Yul’s mansion and was filling it with her own tastes,
“Umm, my head hurts…… where was Mondovi again?”
What was tripping Kim Yul up were the proper nouns.
Names of people and places.
With Caesar, he had focused on surveying the results and major events rather than delving deeply into the course of each war,
but “Napoleon,” which openly presented itself as a full-fledged war novel, couldn’t get away with such rough treatment; and to show Napoleon’s greatness, he naturally had to depict the tactical side as well.
However.
For readers like Estea, who skimmed novels casually, and for Fantasy Land’s people, who knew nothing of Earth’s history, proper nouns were a barrier to entry in themselves.
Even without Estea’s review, fan letters that occasionally flew into Novelpia’s headquarters had already pointed this out.
That left Kim Yul caught between a rock and a hard place.
If he blurred the battles a little and emphasized the characters, the story lost its flavor,
but if he preserved the historical detail as faithfully as possible, he felt the novel’s popularity—having only just soared thanks to the viral publicity—might fall.
In the end, his conclusion was.
Knock, knock──
“Tin Can, busy?”
He would borrow the wisdom of a cutting-edge, all-purpose super AI.
Since Historié had recently been spending more and more time in her room, Kim Yul had assumed that even an artificial intelligence went through adolescence and respected her privacy.
So he knocked.
After a while, Historié opened the door, peeking her face out as her slightly tousled hair fluttered.
“Why? Is something wrong?”
“I have a problem.”
“Please wait a moment.”
The door softly slid shut again, and after a brief loading period caused by some inscrutable circumstance,
Historié emerged looking as neat and tidy as ever.
.
.
.
After listening to all of Kim Yul’s concerns, she proved herself worthy of her transcendent intelligence.
“Isn’t this a problem solved by including a map?”
“Oh, damn. Why didn’t I think of that?”
She provided the perfect solution.
Her advice was not merely words.
It was insight that pierced straight to the heart of the matter—and even manifested as a physical product.
Although it took quite a while to work through several rounds of trial and error, correct historical inaccuracies, and remove the hallucinations that had appeared along the way,
“Hmm, there are still plenty of things to fix…… but it would be better to correct those by hand separately.”
“I’m sorry the result isn’t perfect.”
“No, no. I’m grateful you made it this far, honestly.”
Kim Yul’s hand gently ruffled Historié’s hair.
He could correct the mislabeled place names and sudden stray letters by checking them against historical records, and polish up the slightly smudged text as well.
While Kim Yul was thinking that,
Historié wore a strange expression.
The ultra-high-performance AI spent a moment “Thoughts”-ing about the emotion she was feeling, buffering as it did so, but
the lack of data prevented it from reaching a clear conclusion.
* * *
Kim Yul’s attempt showed results immediately.
It even helped quite a bit with writing.
Before, he had packed information into fairly detailed descriptions, but because he could compress that volume into maps, he was able to focus on fitting in a few more events.
Much like in modern web novels,
instead of tediously and pretentiously describing a heroine’s appearance as, “Her breasts were as flat as Kisaki’s, yet her sideboob was exposed like Ako’s clothes──”
it had an effect similar to replacing the description of her appearance with a single illustration.
And so.
- The government will give you nothing. But! I will lead you to the most fertile plains in Europe. Soldiers. We will gain wealth and glory there!
Along with the speech before the expedition, Napoleon’s boots finally began to trample Italy as he displayed his charisma by dipping into his own funds to pay overdue wages and provide uniforms.
Readers began to immerse themselves fully in his campaign.
.
.
.
This was true of Kim Yul’s senior and avid reader as well.
Seraphine was no exception.
“The supplies have arrived!”
Even today, thanks to the porter’s devotion, Seraphine was able to enjoy culture in the Demon Realm and avidly read through the Novelpia novels he had fallen behind on.
His gaze soon fell on the map.
At that moment.
Seraphine couldn’t help but burst out laughing.
“Our junior hero is actively putting his status as a hero to use in his creative work, rather than thinking about saving the world.”
The most important thing in the process of subjugating the Demon Realm was information.
Not only the monsters’ ecology, but the terrain as well had to be investigated in meticulous detail.
And even just looking at the coastline in the map illustration from Kim Yul’s novel, it resembled the terrain of the northern part of the Demon Realm’s ‘Boot Peninsula.’
He must have imagined and created the terrain beyond the as-yet-unexplored front.
A hero naturally had access to information concerning the Demon Realm, so he must have made use of it.
Of course, it was classified information not disclosed to the general public.
“You could say he almost completely reinterpreted it, so it shouldn’t be a problem. Well, even if it were, who would dare pick a fight with a hero over his work? Now, is this Florence?”
Leaving that thought behind, Seraphine folded the newspaper.
Then he checked his weapons and equipment again.
Curious how accurate the junior hero’s imaginings would be, it was time to advance and cross the mountain range blocking their path.
Who knows.
Maybe there really was a place called Bologna beyond it.