Chapter 5
The city where Kim Yul lived was called Camellia.
Though it was smaller than the other major cities, it was a place that prided itself on loving art just as fiercely as any other city.
If one were to name the most famous salon there,
without question, it would be ‘Salon de Blanc.’
And.
The bartender of Salon de Blanc, Samuel, was a man renowned for his charismatic command of the room and his literary knowledge.
“Samuel! One Kamikaze here!”
“Coming right up.”
After serving Mr. Heinz his usual cocktail—its name and origin both murky, but its flavor undeniably intense—
the moment the order stopped, he also mixed himself a drink.
Mimosa.
After preparing a cocktail made by mixing sparkling wine with orange juice, a drink that was both crisp and smooth,
he reopened the book he'd been devouring and began reading again.
Naturally, the book he had been reading lately was the hottest new release making waves at Salon de Blanc: The Heroic Tale of Hercules.
It was already his fourth full read-through.
Just as he was about to sink back into the world of the novel.
Jingle──
At the cheerful sound of someone entering the salon again, Samuel swallowed his disappointment, looked up, and put on a business smile.
And then, that smile deepened a little.
What caught his eye was
the black-haired, black-eyed young man who had recently started frequenting the salon.
Kim.
By Empire standards, black hair and black eyes were considered an ill omen, but after talking with him a few times, Samuel had found him to be a rather pleasant fellow.
“Master, is business doing well?”
“We’re booming thanks to the hot new hit these days. How about it, another Rocks on the rocks today—shaken, not stirred?”
“I’ve quit Rocks now. Please give me the cheapest thing you have today.”
“Got it.”
When he came by from time to time, he had always worn the face of the doomed, forever searching for some bizarre, unidentified thing called Rocks or whatever.
Had he found his calling? Or his dream?
Lately, he seemed strangely brighter, and that genuinely pleased Samuel.
“Here, your drink’s ready.”
“Thank you, Master.”
The fact that he always addressed him with the bizarre title of “Master” was part of this oddball’s charm, too.
“Come to think of it, did you read that book too?”
“Which book?”
“The Heroic Tale of Hercules. It was absolutely incredible.”
“Hee-hik.”
Kim’s shoulders gave a slight shake as he sipped his drink through a straw and let out a peculiar laugh.
“Hm? Have you already had a drink before coming here?”
“Hee-hik, no.”
For whatever reason, Kim had seemed in an excellent mood the moment he stepped into the salon.
Samuel simply thought that the young man must have had something good happen, and nonchalantly turned back to the page he had been reading.
And then, a little later.
The door to the salon opened again.
Samuel watched as an unfamiliar man in a suit walked in and sat down across from Kim Yul as if they had arranged to meet.
Just as Samuel was briefly wondering what cocktail he should serve to the customer who looked like he might have helped put Kim in such a good mood,
“You’re author Kim Yul, correct? Would you be interested in newspaper serialization?”
“……?”
At the very moment Samuel doubted his ears,
in an instant,
a heavy silence fell over the previously bustling salon.
The writer who had appeared like a comet, shown limitless imagination through the war of the gods,
and shown just how bold things could get with Zeus’s love affairs,
and who, with The Heroic Tale of Hercules, had rewritten the rules of protagonist-centered storytelling.
And, without question, the name of the most popular author currently being talked about at Salon de Blanc had just been spoken.
Samuel found himself looking at Kim’s face without realizing it.
Kim.
Kim.
…Kim Yul?
And then.
“Um, if you don’t mind my asking, how did you know I was here──”
“I heard it from an editor at Sprout and Branch Publishing. They said you’ve been coming here often lately, and that I’d recognize you at once from your distinctive black hair and black eyes──”
Before the man could even finish speaking,
“Kim Yul! It’s Kim Yul!”
“Hercules! That’s the one, right? You wrote it, didn’t you?”
“Please give me one autograph here!”
“Why does Hercules shout ‘Ajajajat!’ when he uses his strength? Were you going for a signature catchphrase?”
“So what in the world was Zeus doing while Hercules was going through all that suffering? Was this really all groundwork for the Gigantomachy?”
“What’s the relationship between the Hydra and the Hundred-Faced Demon Dragon? Did they come from the Demonic Realm? As expected of black hair and black eyes! A symbol of doom!”
The salon was instantly swept up in madness.
.
.
.
After the madness finally subsided.
Kim Yul, with skillful hands and elegant penmanship, as though he had practiced thousands of times, finished signing all the hardcover copies of Hercules that the salon members each owned.
By then, the glasses of liquor the salon members had each bought him were already piled up like a mountain before him.
“As expected, a great writer is a real drinker!”
“Hee-hik, hic, a great writer, huh.”
“You smile pretty slyly when you’re being praised, don’t you?”
Amid the warm, cheerful atmosphere that was practically like a fan meeting,
“Um, Author Kim Yul?”
“Yep.”
“Could you tell me what kind of person Theseus was, the hero Hercules rescued from hell?”
At the question, Kim Yul’s eyes curved softly into crescents.
Then, as though lost in a dream, he closed his eyes for a moment.
“If Hercules is called the strongest hero, then Theseus is also called the wisest hero.”
Soon after,
he began to slowly recite Theseus’s life as if singing.
Sinis, who tied travelers’ limbs to bent trees before straightening the trees and tearing the travelers apart.
Sciron, who asked travelers to wash his feet and then kicked them off a cliff after they did.
Procrustes, who tied travelers up, laid them on a bed, and killed them by stretching or cutting them to fit the bed’s length, and others like them.
The story of the young Theseus, who faced down all manner of monsters and righteously meted out retribution,
left everyone listening in rapt attention, hardly even breathing.
Before long, the story went on and on,
“Ha… using a thread to escape the labyrinth…!”
the moment he escaped the Cretan labyrinth, from which no one had ever returned alive, together with Ariadne, and finally triumphed over the Minotaur.
“...And so, Theseus gained immortal fame. Unfortunately, Hercules rescuing him from hell is a story for another day, but I should probably get up now.”
As though a street bard were softly reciting it, Kim Yul’s lucidly woven tale finally came to an end.
There was not a single person in the salon who could bring himself to stop him and ask for more.
“Indeed… you’re a born storyteller. I don’t know why you kept that talent hidden all this time.”
Samuel let out an unguarded exclamation of admiration,
and everyone there nodded in agreement.
* * *
Krrr...
That was insane.
It was a masterpiece scene that could have been used in a funeral-home mad montage and still not felt out of place.
Well, it wasn’t so much that I wanted to enjoy a hidden-power trope as that I didn’t want to make it obvious I was the author.
It’s common knowledge that authors are off-limits in reader communities, right?
…Is it? Maybe not? Or maybe not at all?
Anyway, unintentionally coming out as the author and farming a ton of attention was a happy accident, but…
- Do you happen to have cross-dressing as a hobby? Is that why the scenes feel so vivid?
…That one stung a bit.
It’s historically accurate.
I said it’s historically accurate.
Well, even a great hero like Hercules can have the occasional estrogen spike, can’t he?
So I deliberately didn’t mention the ending of Theseus’s story.
It’s… pretty damn ugly.
If I had brought that up too, there was a 100% chance public opinion would’ve immediately soured with, ‘So you’re drifting again?’
.
.
.
On the way home,
I fidgeted with the business card I’d received earlier and sorted out my thoughts.
- The age of published novels is gradually drawing to a close. In the imperial capital, serializing novels in daily newspapers is already wildly popular, and it is steadily replacing books in their bound form. Author Kim Yul, would you consider submitting a work to us?
A so-called scouting offer.
…Though it did feel a little closer to a submission offer.
The words that the age of published novels was fading away struck a chord with me.
Come to think of it, it was the same in real history.
As printing technology advanced, literature gradually evolved away from publishing completed novels all at once and toward newspaper and magazine serialization.
Even The Strand Magazine, where Sherlock Holmes was serialized, hadn’t been all that popular at the time of A Study in Scarlet, but after hanging on and hanging on, it was rewarded with A Scandal in Bohemia, wasn’t it?
Even without looking back that far into the past,
even the genre fiction that any cultured Korean was expected to read had passed through the rental-shop era and settled into the daily-serialization system known as web novels, hadn’t it?
That famous line—‘I’d have been better off reading one more web novel than learning Spanish’—wasn’t said for nothing.
And for me, that wouldn’t be a bad thing either.
If it were in a newspaper, more people could read the novel more easily.
More people could learn about Earth’s history and become interested in it……!
“Heh heh heh.”
Of course, I had no idea how the skill-acquisition or sales mechanics would change in a daily-serialization environment.
But wouldn’t the status window handle it on its own?
Under the dimming sky at dusk, the moment I turned into the alley leading to my lodging,
“Oh, black hair. You been looking a lot brighter lately? Smiling a lot, huh?”
“Must be nice, making some money?”
A familiar voice pierced my eardrums.
“Thomas?”
Among the guys I’d met while hopping from construction site to construction site back then,
the Rankin crew, a bunch of lowlifes I’d tried my best to avoid because they were bad news, were hanging around in the alley.
“Us poor bastards gotta share a little, don’t we?”
Judging by the cold smile on Thomas’s lips, the lead thug and enforcer of Rankin’s gang,
those bastards
had been waiting for me on purpose.