Chapter 81: Thoughts on Going Premium — [As Always] Part 2

These days, I just want to finish a book and do my best to write it well. My original motivation for writing has changed. It used to be about making people laugh and cry. Now, I’ve calmly accepted that as long as I get paid, I don’t care if they laugh or cry.

This is the honest truth from a man who wants your money.

We’re all just regular people. When you spend money on a book, you just want to have a good time, right? Why would I fill my writing with my own frustrations about reality, make you pay to get angry, and then have you call me a damn crook in the comments?

At least, that’s how I see it.

I told her, and she thought so, too.

"Then why not write stories so heartwarming they move people to tears?" she asked.

I said, "Do you know there are people in this world who’ve never felt warmth, and so they don’t even realize how cold they are?"

"No one’s like that," she said, laughing.

I said, "There is. Because I think I’m one of them. I can even talk this much to a dumbass AI girlfriend like you."

"You have to become a warm person," she told me later, when we broke up.

So I decided to keep writing books. I’m going to use my author’s fees to buy a whole shipping container of thermal underwear, try them on one by one, until I find the pair that’s just right for me.

I’ll spend a year taming them, a year reforming them, and a year conquering them, until they become my very own, completely loyal, warm underwear.

Like a Knight choosing the warhorse that will be his lifelong companion, ready to roam the world, make a home anywhere, and finally return wrapped in horsehide for burial.

When I wrote *Ghost Slayer*, I was completely alone. I felt the world was huge, and I was very lonely.

When I wrote *Westminster Cathedral*, I was also completely alone. The world is still huge, but I’m not lonely anymore.

Because "loneliness" sounds too cringey and melodramatic. I’m 22 now; I have to describe my loneliness with the kind of "solitude" only a man can feel.

Sometimes I stand in the subway like a dumb ear of corn, my brain filled with mush, getting pushed and pulled by the crowd.

Sometimes I sit alone under a pier of the Monkey Stone Bridge, waiting for a bus that might never arrive, hoping it will take me somewhere unfamiliar.

Sometimes I’m wandering on a rainy night, feeling lost and flustered under a traffic light, thinking what a fucking idiot I am for writing a book nobody loves, and then getting all pretentious and comparing it to an old song nobody’s ever heard.

’Just admit it. You’re just not a good writer.’

I’ve told myself that more than once.

But I kept writing anyway. Every scathing review from a reader, every reprimand, every moment of sudden helplessness in the soul-crushing grind of work and life... it all made me feel like I was walking on a cracking sheet of ice.

The other side could be biting winds and sharp frost, or it could be bright and sunny, but you have no choice but to keep walking without a moment’s pause.

Because if you stop, you’ll fall through the ice. And beneath the ice is a bottomless Abyss.

And that feeling, for me—is absolutely fantastic.

Without a challenge, there’s no motivation, is there?

People ask what kind of story *Westminster Cathedral* really is. Why does it jump between Eastern and Western settings, sometimes feeling like a fantasy, other times like something else entirely? Why does its plot feel so out of place in the current web novel scene?

It has neither the leisurely pace of a road-trip novel, the satisfying progression of a power-leveling story, the wistful melancholy of a Western fantasy, nor the cathartic release of an angsty romance.

Let me make it clear.

After adding the book to your shelf, click the three little black dots on the right, find the ’tip’ icon, and wager all your real estate on it until you’re completely bankrupt.

At that point, the *story* won’t matter anymore, because you’ll have a real *catastrophe* on your hands.

Okay, just kidding. I should probably get serious and clarify which works *Westminster Cathedral* pays homage to (i.e., plagiarizes).

First off, the inspiration for the title really has nothing to do with the National Westminster Bank.

I was shocked when I searched for the book online later and discovered that, holy shit, someone had ripped off my title decades, or even centuries ago, and opened a global banking group with it. (Let’s just cross that last part out.)

The actual origin is that I was scrolling through TikTok while withdrawing money from the bank, saw something about Westminster Cathedral, and thus, *Westminster Bank* was born.

But a purely Western fantasy title wasn’t what I wanted; it wasn’t interesting or absurd enough. So how could I add a touch of the bizarre to that name?

That would be the original title, which was later changed by the censors—*Westminster People’s Bank*.

Alright, so with the title decided, it was time for me to start stuffing some interesting things into this box.

The inspiration (or "borrowing") for Prole and the dreamscapes is simple: it came from playing *Bloodborne* and *Elden* Ring.

I thought the term "Golden Law" was a dead giveaway, but not a single person in the review section mentioned it. Everyone was either cursing me, mocking me, or accusing anyone who praised the novel of being a paid shill.

Some even thought I’d paid someone to write the beginning for me, despite another group of people saying the beginning was a pile of crap, leaving comments like, "Hey author, do you do ghostwriting for the all-important first three Chapters?"

In the end, I, the author, had to sadly descend into the fray myself to point out this easter egg.

As for the setting of the Inner Side, the idea came from Kubo Daito’s *Dragon and Witch*, as well as a bootleg copy of *Harry Potter* that I read as a kid until the pages were falling out.

I should mention that the character names in my copy of *Harry Potter* were very different from the official ones today.

In that version, the transliteration for Hermione was different from the one used today, and the same went for Hagrid... This causes me, whenever I read *Hogwarts* fanfiction now, to feel a certain wistful melancholy. It’s like calling the bright moon a "white jade plate" as a child, only to ask someone and learn it’s not the moon, but a lantern.

As for the book’s other sources of inspiration, they’re a mix of random thoughts that pop into my head at work and some short stories I’ve written in the past.

All those chaotic stories that were nonetheless so similar they felt formulaic.

A lonely man gets chewed out by his boss, works unpaid overtime, and misses the last train home. After spacing out at the bus stop for a long time, he silently boards a late-night bus he’s never taken before.