The review took four hours to write.
847 words. One for every star he hadn't given.
Kang Junho read it over once, changed "criminally incompetent" to "aggressively mediocre" because he was trying to be fair, then changed it back.
He hit Submit.
The screen confirmed: Review posted. Thank you for your feedback.
"You're welcome," he said to nobody.
His apartment was dark. It was 2 AM. The empty coffee cups on his desk formed a small civilization that had peaked sometime around Volume 15 and was now in obvious decline. On his second monitor, the final chapter of Blades of the Eternal Chosen sat open, the last paragraph still glowing on screen.
And so, Han Soyeol raised the Eternal Flame Sword toward the heavens, and the darkness was no more. His journey was complete. The Chosen One had arrived.
Junho stared at it for a long moment.
Eleven years.
Eleven years of his life watching this author trip over his own feet for 2,000 chapters and then stick the landing by having the protagonist win because the plot said so.
No foreshadowing. No thematic payoff. The villain died because she touched the sword wrong.
The sword that had been sitting in a bush in Chapter 42.
An actual bush. With no explanation. Ever.
He closed the laptop.
He needed coffee. Real coffee, not the instant powder that had been fueling his slow descent into critical madness since Volume 8.
The convenience store was four minutes away.
He grabbed his jacket and left.
The truck took exactly three seconds to kill him.
He saw it coming. That was the worst part. He had enough time to think oh, this is how it happens before it hit him, which felt deeply on-brand for a universe that had clearly been written by the same lazy author as everything else in his life.
The last thing he thought, genuinely, was:
At least I submitted the review first.
He woke up to someone slapping his face.
"Instructor Baek. Instructor. The morning bell rang ten minutes ago."
Junho opened his eyes.
Stone ceiling. Cold air. The smell of something that was either incense or mold, probably both.
A young man in a blue uniform was standing over him, looking deeply uncomfortable about the slapping.
Junho sat up slowly.
His body felt wrong. Older. His right shoulder ached in a way that suggested an old injury, badly healed. His hands were calloused in places Junho's had never been.
He looked at them for a long moment.
Then he looked at the room.
Stone walls. A wooden desk covered in papers. A sword hanging on the wall, cheap and functional. Through the narrow window, he could see a courtyard, a massive training ground, and students in blue uniforms moving in organized lines.
He knew this courtyard.
He had complained about this courtyard's geography being inconsistent across fourteen chapters.
"Azure Heaven Academy," he said.
The student blinked. "...Yes, Instructor?"
Junho didn't answer.
He was doing math in his head, and the math was making him want to lie back down.
He was Baek Cheon. Sword Instructor, Third Grade, Azure Heaven Academy. A character introduced in Chapter 5 of Blades of the Eternal Chosen for exactly one purpose: to challenge the protagonist Han Soyeol during the Proving Ceremony, get embarrassed in front of the entire student body, and limp off-page, never to be named again.
The author's exact words had been: "The instructor's pride was shattered alongside his mana circuits. He would never wield a blade at full strength again."
Junho had left a comment on that paragraph.
"Why does this scene exist? What is the narrative purpose of crippling a character we just met? Did the author need to show the MC is strong? Could he not find a less pointlessly cruel way to do that? One star."
The Proving Ceremony was in twelve days.
"Instructor Baek?" The student was still standing there. "Are you... well?"
"No," Junho said. "Get out."
The student got out immediately, which suggested Baek Cheon had that kind of reputation. Good. Useful. He needed five minutes alone to have a quiet breakdown in peace.
He sat on the edge of the bed and pressed his palms against his eyes.
Okay.
Okay.
He was inside the novel. The trash novel. The novel he had dedicated a significant portion of his adult life to methodically dismantling on the internet.
He had no glowing System window. No blue interface had popped up to welcome him to another world and assign him a hidden class. No mysterious voice in his head was explaining his cheat ability.
He had nothing.
Except.
Forty-seven pages of documented proof that this world was built on broken logic.
He lowered his hands.
The mana circuits. That was the first problem. Baek Cheon's circuits were already damaged — not from the Ceremony, that hadn't happened yet, but from an injury mentioned in passing two paragraphs before he was crippled. Background detail. The author had added it to make the humiliation worse and then never thought about it again.
But Junho had thought about it.
He'd thought about it in the context of Chapter 42, specifically, during a 3 AM spiral that had produced four pages of notes about everything the author had carelessly dropped into the world and forgotten to pick back up.
He stood up.
He knew where the kitchens were. The Academy layout had been described inconsistently, yes, but Chapter 8 had a scene where a background character mentioned the spice storage was kept in the lower east wing, next to the medicinal herb pantry, because the author had apparently wanted to establish "world flavor" and then abandoned that subplot immediately.
In Chapter 42, during a completely unrelated scene about the Hero stealing cooking supplies as a prank, there was a line:
"Han Soyeol rummaged past the salt jars on the third shelf, knocking over what appeared to be an old potion bottle that no one had labeled correctly."
Nobody had commented on that line.
Nobody except Junho, who had written: "What potion? In the KITCHEN? What is it doing there? This author puts things down and forgets them like a distracted child. Zero world-building integrity. Minus one star."
He hadn't known what it was then.
But three months later, in Chapter 89, during a throwaway piece of lore dialogue, a scholar character had mentioned the Breath of the Frost Dragon — a legendary cultivation potion from the old era, capable of clearing and resetting damaged mana circuits. Lost to history. Irreplaceable.
The author had never connected those two scenes.
He had put a legendary lost potion behind a jar of salt and forgotten it existed.
Junho walked to the door, opened it, and started toward the lower east wing.
The kitchen was empty at this hour.
He found the spice storage exactly where Chapter 8 said it would be. Third shelf. Salt jars, clay pots, dried herbs that smelled aggressively medicinal.
He moved the salt.
The bottle was small. Dark glass. No label. Covered in a thin layer of dust that suggested nobody had touched it in a very long time.
His hands were steady when he picked it up.
He pulled the stopper. Something cold and sharp hit his nose. Like winter air at high altitude. Like the inside of a place that had never been warm.
He drank it.
It tasted like regret and very cold water.
For a moment, nothing.
Then his chest cracked open.
Not painfully — or not only painfully. More like a door being forced open that had been stuck for years. Something in his mana circuits that had been bent and scarred and half-functional straightened like a bone being set, and he had to grab the shelf with both hands and breathe through it.
When it was over, he stood in the kitchen of a fictional world in a borrowed body, and for the first time since waking up, he felt the mana moving through him clean and unobstructed.
He put the empty bottle in his pocket.
He leaned against the shelf.
The world followed the book's logic.
Every mistake. Every forgotten detail. Every thing the author dropped and never picked up.
It was all here. Real. Sitting on shelves. Buried in courtyards. Hidden in background paragraphs that nobody except a deranged anti-fan had bothered to annotate.
Twelve days from now, Han Soyeol — the Chosen One, the pure-hearted protagonist, the single most narratively unearned hero in the history of web fiction — was going to walk into the Proving Ceremony expecting an easy win against a damaged instructor the plot had already decided to sacrifice.
Junho rolled his shoulder. No ache.
He thought about the 47 pages.
The legendary sword in the east courtyard garden, dropped in a visual description in Chapter 12 and never addressed again.
The sealed formation under the training grounds that the author had introduced and immediately forgotten.
The seven other "background potions" he'd catalogued across 2,000 chapters.
The Hero was about to have a very bad twelve days.
Junho didn't smile. He wasn't that kind of person.
But he did walk back to his room with considerably more purpose than he'd left it.
Someone had to fix this story.
It might as well be the one person who'd read it angry enough to remember everything.