Seoul was drowning again.Not in tragedy or traffic or the weight of its own concrete sprawl.Just rain.
It came down hard on the tin canopy outside my window, sharp and ceaseless. A city heartbeat, flat and mechanical. My apartment was on the fourth floor, top of an old five-story walk-up that smelled like wet newspapers and ramen broth. The kind of building landlords forgot and tenants never stayed in long enough to care about.
Outside, a faint blue glow from a convenience store flickered through the rain—7/11 or GS25, I couldn't remember. They all looked the same. The neon sign buzzed like it was short-circuiting, casting long shadows that crawled through the blinds and painted strips of cold light across my wall.
I sat on the floor.
Not because I was broke—not completely, anyway.It was just more honest than pretending the desk did anything but collect dust.
The kotatsu table in front of me was cheap wood, probably MDF, and one leg wobbled if you leaned on it wrong. No blanket. No heater. Just the table and me. A monster of a PC sat beside it, its RGB fans breathing like a living thing, painting soft red-blue-purple auras across the scratched linoleum tiles. It was my only indulgence—one I'd fought the universe for. Custom build. Good specs. Hand-assembled like a shrine. I'd maxed out a credit card and ate instant curry for a month to afford it.
The only light in the room came from that case and the monitor screen. The desktop was still open to Unity. Frozen mid-frame on a 2.5D asset dungeon crawl I hadn't touched in two days. Or three. Didn't matter. It was the same recycled garbage I'd been paid to spit out since leaving the "real" job.
Beside the tower was my drawing tablet, half-draped over the kotatsu's edge like it was too tired to stay upright. Stylus still plugged in. Still warm from the last time I touched it, which felt like days ago. Most of my UI sketches were still open in Clip Studio, unfinished. I was supposed to turn them in yesterday. Or this morning. Something like that.
The room smelled like coffee grounds and old rain.And maybe something else I didn't care enough to name.
There were dishes in the sink. Not many. Just a bowl, two cups, a fork. They'd been there since Tuesday. Maybe Wednesday. No flies yet. I kept the windows shut to stop the smell from escaping, not to keep the rain out.
On the far wall, a bookshelf leaned sideways from years of uneven weight. Half-filled with sketchbooks—most unfinished—light novels I never finished, and one or two old game cases from my college years.I used to care about those stories.Used to think I'd make one better.
The rest of the room was bare. No posters. No photos. A mattress on the floor, sheets tangled from when I gave up trying to sleep. Clothes piled in the corner—shirts, boxers, a hoodie with fraying sleeves. There was no fan, no AC. Just the sound of the rain hammering the rooftop above and the occasional cough of a neighbor's TV through the wall.
My back ached.I hadn't moved in hours.
The novel was still in my hand.
I stared at the cover again like maybe it had changed in the last five minutes. Like maybe I'd missed something the first dozen times.
"The Shadow of Verralt: Blood and Ruin"
What a dumb name.
The kind of overdramatic title some unpaid intern slaps on an AI-generated webnovel before it gets buried under ten thousand others. I flipped it over, scanning the back for a blurb. There wasn't one. Just a line of cheap, print-on-demand texture and the scent of ink that smelled fresher than the writing probably was.
"...Is this a joke?" I muttered aloud, more to the rain than to anyone else.
The room answered with silence.
My phone buzzed somewhere near the pillow on the floor. Probably the manager. I didn't need to check. He'd been hounding me since last week, ever since I asked for something serious—a decent narrative game project. Something I could draw and write for. Something to prove I wasn't wasting my life staring at blinking cursors and blank canvas files.
And this was what he gave me?
A medieval fantasy mess. Clichés stacked like corpses on a battlefield.
I let the book drop onto the kotatsu. It landed spine-up, pages splaying open like a corpse mid-autopsy. Even the font looked lazy.God. I needed a cigarette.
But I'd quit. Or tried to. One of the two.
Instead, I leaned back on my palms and stared at the ceiling. The water stain above my bed looked like a wolf now. It used to be a dragon.I hated how lonely this place sounded when I wasn't working.Hated how the silence dragged its nails across the floorboards when I stopped pretending to be busy.
I pulled my hoodie over my head and slouched forward. The fabric smelled like detergent and nights I didn't want to remember. My fingers itched for the drawing pen, but I didn't pick it up. Not tonight.
The novel was still there. Its pages open to the first line.
"Six years had passed since Naithan Verralt walked away from the blood-soaked ruin of his family estate."
Tch.
"What is this, 2006 fanfiction?" I grumbled.
I wanted to laugh. I really did.But something in that line—it rubbed me wrong.Not because it was bad. But because it felt like the kind of thing I used to write.
Before life happened.Before I started accepting freelance scraps and ghostwriting mobile gacha dialogue to survive.Before I got tired.
I sat there for a long time, watching the light of the screen ripple on the novel's pages like digital waves. Outside, the rain fell harder.The hum of my PC fan grew louder, or maybe my ears were ringing.
I didn't know it then——but that would be the last night I ever saw that room.