I Owe the System a Hundred Million

I wrote about a madman who refuses to pay his debts. His name is Yu Jin. He wears Pleasant Goat underwear and has been professionally dodging debts for eight hundred years. The System says he owes an astronomical bill, fate says he owes progress in the present, and even a faulty grapevine he forcibly recruited thinks he owes it wages. But he simply won’t pay. It’s not that he can’t; he just refuses to accept the debt. Along with a voyeur, a young girl, and a dark-red grapevine, he fights his way out of System missions, blasts his way out of the Museum of Concepts, and kicks his way into the Gallery of Desire. His next stop is the Graveyard of Dreams. He doesn’t want to save the world. He just wants to do one thing: go to places where lighting fires, shining lights, and making noise are forbidden, set off the loudest firecrackers and build the biggest bonfire, then drag out the person writing the script and ask, “What the ** is this crap you’ve written?” He isn’t a hero. He doesn’t do what a decent person would. His authority is “registering bad debts,” his weapon is sour grapes, and his armor is Pleasant Goat underwear. He tells fate, “You little brat,” and tells the great god Noah, “Pass a message to Tiga for me: your skill at carving stone statues is second to none, but could you put a little more thought into where you place them next time?” I’m sure this book won’t make much money. Yu Jin is just a fantasy I’ve carried around for more than twenty years: the fantasy that something could go, in its own way, to places I’ve never been and do the things I’ve always wanted to do. Become Ultraman and put an end to all the painful, rigid dogma, even fate itself. Even if everything eventually goes back to how it was. So what? I came. I saw. I’ll die right here. Did I succeed in fighting fate? Did I fail? I don’t know. But I’m doing it.