Chapter 41
Heaven and hell.
A vicious spiral swinging between soaring and plunging.
Though Cao Cao had once again flaunted his villainous streak to readers all over the world by slicing the grain officer's neck clean off.
- Liu Bei has the makings of a hero and has won the people's hearts, so he's not the sort to stay under anyone else. It's better to deal with him quickly.
- Now is the time when the world's heroes are gathering under me. Killing one man would be easy, but then I'd lose the hearts of all under Heaven!
He made the bold decision to accept the surrender of that big-eared fellow who, after being given money, grain, a fortress, soldiers, and everything else, had finally run off with nothing but his underwear on.
Of course, from a novelist's perspective, how could you just throw away another protagonist in a crossover?
Despite the objections of those around him, his decision to accept the big-eared man
along with the previous episode that had induced hallucinations with plum wine, once again helped drive a rebound in Cao Cao Coin.
And so, the story flowed on and on....
“At last, the campaign to subjugate Lü Bu, desuwa!”
Even Chloe, who had muttered about how a high elf could possibly serve under a human,
was forced to face reality by Kim Yul's fiery one-liner—'Your own father serves under a human emperor too, doesn't he?'—and began enjoying the novel as a novel.
With the gutter-rat elf finally reformed and beginning to walk the path of righteousness, it was fair to call it a huge step forward.
“So I'm thinking of taking a hiatus.”
“...And what does that mean, desuwa?”
At Kim Yul's declaration,
Chloe blurted out her dialect before she even realized it.
* * *
A hiatus was the sort of devil's temptation you could want to take at any time—when you woke up in the morning, when you ate lunch, when you relaxed a little in the evening.
Since I didn't have a proper job and only wrote, I could at least manage the schedule of one chapter after breakfast, one after lunch, and one after dinner.
If I had been working a full-time job?
I'd have already had my brain melted and collapsed in a dororong heap.
“A hiatus? What do you mean by that, desuwa! Such tyranny is unthinkable, desuwa! If you go on hiatus at this point, at this point!”
I forcibly brushed aside the elf flailing around with bawling pweeeeee cries.
“Instead, I'm thinking of conveying the story in another way.”
“Another way?”
Lü Bu was way too hyped up right now.
Though that was the karma of seeds I'd sown myself.
Still....
I had judged that Hulao Pass Locust needed to give off that kind of presence.
In the first place, the paradoxical intersection point between Liu Bei and Cao Cao was none other than Lü Bu, so piling that much weight onto him made sense from a storytelling perspective.
In other words, he had the feel of a final boss for Part 1.
The problem was Lü Bu's end.
In Liu Bei's version, Lü Bu was truly the strongest and most fearsome all-round general, the kind of man who might stab you in the back yet still had his own justification and reasons.
In Cao Cao's version, Lü Bu was just the original Lü Bu image: a blockhead, a stubborn fool, a brute with muscles and nothing else.
By handling those two images too starkly, the difficulty of composing scenes with Cao Cao, Liu Bei, and Lü Bu all appearing together had become far too high.
So I came to a conclusion.
“Lü Bu's end will be drawn as a comic. So please allocate a lot of space for it.”
At my words,
Chloe's eyes went round.
Well, it's not as if I was the one drawing it.
Graduate students are the sort of beings who can be wrung dry and still produce anything.
.
.
.
After roughly explaining my plan and happily watching Chloe clap like a seal, I headed home.
“You're back, Kim Yul.”
Historié paid the proper respects to the household's pillar and support, the head of the family.
What was the special recipe that let me correct recently slightly rebellious Historié in one shot?
- M-m-m....
- M?
- You lowly thing...! And yet, you're not bad....!
Whether my plan had achieved the desired result,
the third son of Duke Vertus, that Reggie-whatever guy, paid compensation after getting beaten up one-sidedly and then fled with a yelp.
I immediately accepted that gesture of reconciliation.
As a result.
The lab's food supply swelled, and the menu became much more varied.
“Kim Yul, what's today's menu?”
“You can look forward to it.”
“Ehehe....”
The can, whose fuel economy was a little poor, flashed happy-happy and became extremely obedient.
It's not as though I'd specifically put in that kind of RP, but she had a healthy appetite, a big greed for food, and even somewhat picky tastes.
“It's all because of Kim Yul, isn't it.”
“How is that my fault?”
“Just thinking about the bread I ate when I was first born... still makes me sad. I started thinking humans must have survived on this stuff, so maybe that's why their intelligence never developed.”
“Stahp.”
Certainly.
When Historié had just been born, as a warm little tin can,
the lab's financial situation wasn't very good.
It wasn't as if the Caesar story had been unpopular,
but in the first place, both in this world and in the modern world, a writer's income at a decent level wasn't all that high.
Even the money earned from the Caesar story, when roughly converted into a salary, didn't even come close to half the average salary of a worker in this other world.
It wasn't for nothing that I'd shamelessly made common cause with the times through Three Kingdoms.
Only after writing Three Kingdoms did I finally start earning enough to rival a worker's salary to some extent.
Well....
That's just the way newspapers are.
The publishing market gets held back by publication costs,
and newspapers have to split the pie with other content.
Still, I offered a brief prayer of thanks to Duke Vertus, who had tossed us enough donations to let us live in comfort for the time being.
“How's the work going?”
“The revisions actually take longer. Still, I think I can wrap it up quickly.”
“Good.”
On the way home, with one choco-sora bread in my mouth and another tucked between Historié's teeth,
I watched her working for a bit.
Even after gaining a personality, some can-like traits must have remained, because watching our tin can at work was always fascinating.
Especially when she showed off the true skill of generative AI, it was most astounding.
With her hand raised near the USB port, eyes wide,
if she really strained them.
po-rrong! an AI-generated picture popped out.
...I'd long since thrown away the thought of, "In a world with magic, why the hell is something like this possible?"
“Hey, that one's leg is bent at a grotesque angle.”
“Sharp eyes.”
“Ah, no, that finger won't do....!”
“Hmm...? From what I can see, there doesn't seem to be any problem.”
“Is that so...? Well, it's not the modern era, after all....”
Instead, along with the chronic problems unique to AI art, I also had to deal with the underlying illness festering in my own psyche.
But.
Even that alone was enough to utterly outclass the medieval-style art content existing in this fantasy world.
So.
Everyone, behold.
Original. Chen Shou and Luo Guanzhong.
Story adaptation. Kim Yul and various Three Kingdoms derivative works.
Illustrations. Tin Can.
Special thanks. Ko■ei Games. Mr. Lee Hak-in, Mr. Jin Mo, Mr. Lee Mun-yeol, Mr. Lee Hyeon-se... and countless others.
The culmination of all those ideas and that technical prowess...!
* * *
Thanks to magitech, a technological force whose origins were anyone's guess,
just as Kim Yul and Historié were running around outside and not really feeling the social realities of this primitive, ancient, barbaric medieval world, the empire was still running fairly prosperously and smoothly.
But even so, cost-effectiveness mattered.
Newspapers, whose core was mass printing and mass sales, were usually published in black and white.
At most, they might add color to the front page.
The cost difference was absurd.
But.
- What the...! This, this absolutely has to be released to the world in full color, desuwa!
Thanks to Chloe's decision after reading the manuscript Kim Yul had handed over, her dialect burst out in force.
Truth Daily.
Another special feature.
“Extra! Extra! Truth Daily, full color throughout!”
“The comic version of the Two Heroes story is being serialized!”
“If you want to know how Lü Bu meets his end, buy it now!”
Dawn.
The hawkers at the newspaper stalls woke the world with their racket.
Readers who were following the Two Heroes,
and even people who weren't, were drawn in by the full-color attention grab and found themselves picking up Truth Daily without even realizing it.
There was the minor issue that, as if they'd truly set their minds to it, even the photos on pages dealing with international and political issues had been printed in full color.
In the first place, people weren't here to see the elf's obnoxious grin, the dwarf's drunken rambling, or rumors of the golden dragon sighted near the imperial capital.
Flutter, flap──
If you flipped straight to the literature pages,
[Two Heroes: The Imperial Bloodline Is Hidden Today, On Hiatus.]
With the bold decision to put the Romance-based work, which had no effect on skill acquisition, on hiatus,
the first thing to appear was the Cao Cao story, 'The Villain Hides His Ambition.'
In the decisive battle that had continued for several chapters with Lü Bu, they finally flooded the city by using water-element magic (not really).
One by one, one by one.
they captured Lü Bu's named officers,
and finally, in the scene where Lü Bu himself was taken alive,
the novel ended and gave way to the comic.
And then.
They witnessed it.
The distilled essence, produced, edited, and sometimes finely polished with Kim Yul's advice by Mr. Tin Can, who was good at anything involving a computer.
It was not just a comic.
...If seen through 21st-century sensibilities, it might have been judged as nothing more than a sequence of images with illustrations cleverly arranged panel by panel, obviously AI-generated.
However.
There was no way a fantasy world would have a culture of pumping out pictures with a mere click.
“Just when, exactly... when did you start drawing this?”
“A year? No, a year doesn't even seem like enough....”
“You put this much effort into just one scene from a novel? Just who, just who is this author?”
Those who had even once gotten paint on their fingers couldn't help but tremble at the overwhelming workload,
“How can they all be so distinctively handsome...!”
“Eek, I'm in love...! So cool!”
“What is this Cao Cao and Liu Bei chemistry...! I'm done for!”
With Koei's signature beautified character designs as the base, it instantly melted women's hearts too.
Naturally, the existing readers lost their minds as well.
- The one my lord was worried about was Lü Bu. Now that I have surrendered, there is nothing left to worry about under Heaven! I beg you, please use me as a hunting dog; I shall bring the world to my lord in my mouth!
“Lü Bu's obsession with living can be felt all the way here....”
“Even if he has to swallow every insult and humiliation, he says it's fine as long as he lives, that if he lives he can plan for the future. Who could possibly curse Lü Bu for that?”
“No, this won't do. He can't be left alive. If we don't kill Lü Bu here, he'll become a true monster....!”
Lü Bu's fixation on surviving, borrowed from other comics, was depicted with a truly tragic and overwhelming atmosphere,
at last.
Cao Cao's hesitation, as someone who loved talent and delighted in keeping talented people under his command, was vividly conveyed through facial expressions,
and the focus finally shifted to Liu Bei, who had stood there like one of Cao Cao's subordinates until now, almost without presence.
- Have you forgotten, my lord, what happened to Zheng Jianyang and Dong Taishi, whom Lü Bu served?
- That big-eared bastard is the most, the most untrustworthy man of all!
and the sharp jab from a former victim of betrayal, asking whether anyone would trust the words of a father-switching expert,
and Lü Bu's insight, which was practically spot-on, were contrasted in a single panel.
And then.
On a darkened page, smeared with nothing but black ink, the rusted form of the Fangtian Huaji stood forlornly, left without an owner.
“...”
“Well, Lü Bu, you're going out in style too.”
“The novel was good, but seeing it like this, the comic's good too....”
People savored the lingering aftertaste.
And then, turning the page,
finally came the last intermission ad page after the 'Two Heroes' comic ended.
[A trading card game based on Two Heroes, coming soon!]
[The true fun of collecting, enjoyed through dazzling illustrations!]
[Let's gather the many heroes from the novel with our own hands!]
“...?”
“A trading card game?”
“What's that?”
“Is it like a board game?”
Like a TRPG, board games about a hero defeating the Demon King already existed in this world.
Though extremely expensive, board games that used figurines modeled after dwarves and elves to seize territory from one another also already existed in this world.
But.
By steadily whittling away the sponsorship money Duke Vertus had generously given them, Kim Yul and Historié had already fallen headfirst into the world of gourmet food and fine dining,
and those two ecological invaders wanted to make more money.
They never wanted to eat hard bread and bland soup again...!
Therefore,
that fierce desire quickly sent their thoughts down the path of leveraging the IP they already held, along with their monopoly position in being able to easily create high-quality illustrations.
In a fantasy world that was still, in its own way, keeping itself fairly clean,
the sinister stirrings of card-pack gacha, that evil civilization, began to emerge.