The Tales of an Infinite Regressor - Chapter 194

[Translator – Jjescus]

[Proofreader – Gun]

Chapter 194

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Investors III

6

Tuning customers’ dreams and advancing them.

This is the job assigned to the new generation of writers.

Because of that, even the titles of the writers have changed.

“DM-nim! Today’s dream was amazing! Honestly, these days, life is more enjoyable when I’m asleep than when I’m awake!”

“Haha, I’m glad you had a restful sleep too.”

Dream Manager (DM for short).

Now, writers were often called “DM-nim” rather than “author.”

“Then, good luck with your work. I’ll go get some sleep now…”

“Oh, right, DM-nim, it’s your sleep time now! Sleep well!”

“Yes, thank you. Yawn…”

While others slept, DMs worked, and while others worked, DMs slept.

They were forced into an extreme night owl lifestyle, but DMs didn’t mind. Even when they were authors, they chose to be more bird-like than mammal-like.

And then…

“Doctor Jang. There’s this new DM trend going on lately, have you heard of it?”

It was around this time that I heard about the “Recent_Writer_Updates.jpg” from Tang Seorin.

I was always busy traveling across the country, so I often heard about trends among the general public late.

“DM? What’s that?”

“To put it simply, they’re sleep managers. You could say they enhance the dreams that fairies provide.”

“Hmm…”

“Anyway, people are going wild over it. It’s gotten to the point where top-tier DMs are so in demand that they’re hard to hire even for a fortune.”

“Strange things are happening.”

“Right? I even hired a DM for myself recently. They’re a Harry Potter fan, and we get along. They prefer the current generation over the past, just like me.”

Current generation? Past generation?

At the time, in my 205th turn, I tilted my head at the barrage of jargon.

“So, you’re saying you hired an ordinary person as your personal manager and gave them the authority to manipulate the world of dreams? Isn’t that dangerous?”

“Oh, don’t worry. DMs can’t do anything without the tutorial fairies anyway. As long as the fairies don’t betray us, it’s hard for a DM to pull any funny business.”

“Hmm.”

“Besides, they’re just regular people without any awakened abilities.”

At that time, I just shrugged it off.

But in fact, Tang Seorin’s statement held a bombshell of information.

As everyone knows, Three Thousand Worlds is one of the top guilds in Korea.

Only the best of the best, those proven in character, loyalty, talent, and boldness, can enter.

(Except for Yoo Jiwon, who sneakily passed through the special Latin track.)

For ordinary people, it was a dream job, one they couldn’t even apply for.

But now, an ordinary person who wasn’t even an awakened individual got hired?

And not as a janitor or handyman, but as a full-fledged employee?

Moreover, they became the personal manager of Tang Seorin, who, along with Noh Doha, holds power in Busan? A complete ordinary person?

The writers’ community buzzed.

“Ah, teacher! I hired a personal DM too!”

Cheon Yohwa added fuel to the fire.

As a trend-setting MZ high school student (6th year), she couldn’t bear the rumor that she was behind Tang Seorin in terms of trends.

“What? Even you, Yohwa?”

“Yes! I hired three DMs: one for zombie stories, one for exorcism stories, and one for cult stories. I’ve been enjoying dreams where I become the leader of a cult in a world hit by a zombie apocalypse for a whole week!”

“…”

Questioning why she’d enjoy such dreams would be missing the forest for the trees.

The real point was that while Tang Seorin only hired one DM, Cheon Yohwa hired three.

With competition between the “Economic Capital” Busan and the “Spiritual Capital” Sejong intensifying daily, the prideful geniuses clashed.

-[Three Thousand] Witch Judge: I recently reread The Little Prince and found myself lost in thought. Even after the world has collapsed, the trend of evaluating everything by numbers persists.

–[Three Thousand] Witch Judge: Where has the will to cross the desert to find the one fox that waits for me gone?

└[Baekhwa] High School 6th Year: Wow! You only have one fox?

└[Three Thousand] Witch Judge: ?

└[Baekhwa] High School 6th Year: I have three in my desert… Guess you didn’t make many friends! >_<);;

The drums of war began to beat.

Tang Seorin immediately promoted her personal DM to “Chief DM.” Then, she hired 11 more DMs from various fields like architecture, food and nutrition, and education, assigning them to different departments.

In addition, she hired six parody-writer DMs to check the Harry Potter settings.

The Hogwarts in her dreams became almost perfect.

Cheon Yohwa didn’t back down either.

While Tang Seorin focused on quality, Yohwa invested in quantity. She brought in DMs specializing in fantasy, modern, romance, martial arts, and more, enjoying a different genre of dreams each day.

Her personal DM count reached 20.

-[Three Thousand] Witch Judge: Dream Diary Entry 31. I’ve finally gotten familiar with the geography of the academy. Made a lot of friends and caught the professors’ eyes. In fortune-telling class, I was praised as “the greatest talent in the academy’s history,” though it seemed exaggerated.

-[Baekhwa] High School 6th Year: Dream Diary Day 20! Today, I finally smashed the head of the boss zombie >_<)!!

In the end, the two began posting their dream diaries on SG Net, subtly competing with each other.

Whenever the guild members from Three Thousand Worlds or Baekhwa High saw their leaders’ dream diaries, they flocked to the posts like cheetahs, eagerly leaving comments.

Why? Because they were competing to see whose dream diary had more views and comments.

Surviving in a big corporation wasn’t easy.

-KoreanVillage: Lol, the level of Korea’s top awakeners, lol

-KoreanVillage: How pathetic must reality be if they’re fighting over dreams, lol

Only the villainous KoreanVillage enjoyed this.

So, what was I, the only one capable of mediating this parallel-level nonsense, doing during all this? Absolutely nothing.

After all, they always fought over who was superior and who was inferior.

From my perspective, this was a relatively safe way to relieve stress. At least no one got hurt.

But I guess others felt differently.

“Huh…?”

“This puts us in an awkward position…”

The squids and shrimp, the smaller guild leaders quietly going about their business near the two giant whales, were put in a tough spot.

If Tang Seorin and Cheon Yowha hired 20 DMs (Dream Makers), then other large guilds had to hire at least 12. Even mid-sized guilds with some level of prestige should have hired at least 6 DMs, and small guilds that were just starting to grow should have hired at least 3. The reason? It didn’t matter. This land had a long-standing tradition of distinguishing social status by how much one’s car and house were worth. That tradition had simply evolved into “how many good DMs you could hire and how many of them you had.”

During the Renaissance era, Italian nobles indulged in luxury by patronizing artists. Similarly, guild leaders on the Korean Peninsula competed with each other over DMs. The Renaissance nobles didn’t necessarily have a great artistic sense, and the guild leaders didn’t have any extraordinary literary talent either. Nevertheless, both professions caused an enormous employment boom. Moreover, DMs had several advantages over Renaissance artists.

1. Ease of Entry: Becoming a DM didn’t require any initial capital. As long as you could tune dreams according to the client’s preferences, you could make a living.

2. Business Sustainability: Unlike cathedrals that take hundreds or thousands of years to complete, DMs had a steady stream of work. People dreamed every day, and they wanted interesting dreams.

3. Connection with the Powerful: People in high positions like guild leaders played in their own league, making it hard for ordinary people to get close to them. However, if DMs possessed top 1% skills, they could easily become close to the powerful. In fact, DMs were the first people that the powerful saw when they woke up and the last they saw before going to sleep.

Entry was easy, business prospects were bright, and there was even a chance to gain fame and power? The result?

“Mom! I want to become a writer when I grow up!”

“Writers are like gods!”

[Translator – Jjescus]

[Proofreader – Gun]

A craze swept through the Korean Peninsula. As mentioned earlier, the Great Literary Age had suddenly dawned.

Many incidents and accidents happened during this Great Literary Age. For example, the fairies in the tutorial went on a massive strike, declaring they couldn’t take it anymore. But in this episode, I plan to cover just one incident, and it’s a story where anomalies were not involved at all.

As I warned from the start, today we’ll focus on the stories of ‘ordinary people,’ which we don’t usually cover. And who is the representative of these ordinary people? Let’s not hide it.

“I’m feeling burned out these days…”

“What?”

It’s Writer A, who has appeared from the beginning to the end of this episode. For reference, I couldn’t get permission from Writer A to use their real pen name in my story. So, I reluctantly refer to them as Writer A. Just know that they are a web novel writer with a very timid personality, and their pen name ends with the letter “A” in pronunciation.

Anyway.

“What are you talking about, DM? Your cocktail bar is doing great these days! You’ve even increased the customer capacity to 50, and hired 5 bartender NPCs. Oh! The new bartender you hired got rave reviews recently!”

“DM, DM, that darn DM…”

“What?”

“I’m a writer! A writer! And writing novels, creating stories, this isn’t it!”

Crash.

Writer A threw a wine glass in front of the assistant writer, smashing it. It seemed like only yesterday they couldn’t even afford clean water and had to drink rainwater. But now, having tasted a bit of success, they’d already developed the bourgeois disease.

“Look at what I’ve been doing lately! I greet customers with ‘Irasshaimase,’ make cocktails all day long, and tinker with the appearance and backstories of new bartenders… Is this being a writer? Is it?”

“Well, you’re easily making hundreds of thousands of won a day…”

“A world full of struggle yet beauty! Lively characters! Battles of defeat and victory, schemes and plots, a ballroom at midnight where some dance while others walk the scaffold, such, such a work! That’s what I want to writeeeeee!”

“……”

For those who may not know, that’s called ‘New Work Syndrome,’ a chronic condition that strikes every writer who has serialized the same work for more than 18 months. There were also other endemic diseases among writers, like ‘Remake Syndrome,’ ‘Discontinuation Syndrome,’ ‘Relay Novel Syndrome,’ ‘Contest Syndrome,’ ‘My Work Sucks Syndrome,’ ‘My Work Rocks Syndrome,’ and ‘If I Don’t Write a Female Protagonist, I’ll Die Syndrome.’

You might be shocked at how such flawed creatures still exist on Earth, but you’re not done being surprised yet.

“But I can’t create such perfect dreams alone…!”

And here, Writer A made a very writerly, or from the general human perspective, a very foolish decision.

First, they called upon the 7 fellow writers with whom they had once shared a humble meal of army stew. These fellow writers had now become the ‘Exalted 8,’ who were successful in the industry. They had upgraded from army stew to holding gatherings at a BBQ restaurant.

“Honestly, you’re all tired too, right? Right?”

“Uh, well…”

“The Great Witch is great and all, but her demands are too high… Sometimes she even points out inaccuracies in dreams, but honestly, that’s not my fault. The original settings are inconsistent…”

“Exactly!”

Bang! Writer A put down their makgeolli cup.

“Let’s create a work together!”

“What?”

“Each of us should take charge of a few main characters and develop their backstories. Then we’ll combine them. Let’s build the world together. You’re good at political intrigue, so handle that part. And you’re great with war stories, right? So balance the conflicts between the fictional countries!”

Writer A declared.

“We’re the first writers in human history who can manipulate dreams! How long are we going to keep fiddling with the dreams of the powerful? Let’s create an MMORPG with an unprecedented level of freedom, a perfect ‘virtual world!'”

“……!”

That’s right.

Unfortunately, Writer A and the Exalted 8 had contracted the worst disease among all writer diseases, the one that sends shivers down your spine just by pronouncing its name:

Co-llab-o-ra-tive W-o-rk Disease.

[Translator – Jjescus]

[Proofreader – Gun]