“Princess?” The handmaiden knocked on the princess’ bedroom, but no answer was heard. “Princess? Are you there?”

Mustering up some courage, she finally pushed open the door, to find that the room was empty.

“Princess?”

And so the search for the princess was spreading throughout the palace. Soon enough, the princess was declared missing, and the king was having the most stressful time in his life.

“Your Highness,” a guard came in to his throne room. “The prince of Shirian is here to see you.”

“Let him in.”

Soon, the door to the room opened widely, revealing the tall and handsome prince. He bowed before the king before straightening his posture.

“Your Highness,” the prince called softly. “I have heard of the bad news shortly after the cancellation of the marriage, and I have come to offer you my sympathy.”

“This is the perfect time, Son.” The king sighed while rubbing his temples. “The princess has gone missing as well.”

Upon hearing the news, the prince showed an expression of surprise.

“How come?”

“She was devastated to see her mother fell ill, I suppose. And I have invited a witch into the palace.”

“But, Your Highness! Inviting a witch could be dangerous!”

“I have no other choice. The physicians could not detect the queen’s illness, and I could only believe something else was the cause of it all.”

“Then how about the princess? She must be found immediately!”

“Good that you share the same sentiment, Son. Therefore, if I ask you a favor, will you accept it?”

The prince bowed again to the king. “Certainly, Your Highness.”

“Help me find my daughter. Bring her safely. She is your fiancée after all.”

“Will be done, Your Highness.” He bowed once again before leaving the presence of the king, not without seeing someone else entering the throne room.

“Your Highness.” Seola had bowed before the prince, but he had given her the cold shoulder and also untrusting look in his eyes, before leaving the room.

“Seola, what makes you come here?”

“Your Highness, I’m afraid I have to tell you something.”

“What is it?”

She put her head low before speaking. “In order to have the queen cured, a sacrifice must be done.”

“What sacrifice?”

She looked up with a smirk on her face. “You, Your Highness.”

The guys had been closing and opening their eyes once the scene got gory. No one could believe that the webtoon had written itself, and also the ending of episode 13 had made Luda shaken so tremendously. She refused to eat the kimchi fried rice that she had abandoned earlier, or the dumplings that Hoseok just brought to the house, or anything. She was currently in Kihyun’s bedroom, mourning after asking for some time alone.

Everyone in the studio could hear the muffled sobs behind the closed door. Hoseok, who just looked around the situation in pure confusion, was the first one to speak up.

“So, um, you guys are saying that she is the main character in the webtoon, and that suddenly the webtoon writes itself.” He rubbed his chin as if he were in deep thought. “That’s interesting.”

“There’s no other way to explain this situation,” Changkyun spoke with dread in his tone. “Even though it might sound weird, but it’s the most logical explanation to this situation.”

Kihyun wouldn’t expect anyone else but Changkyun to believe this weird situation right off the bat. The boy had always believed in aliens, ghosts, mystical creatures, and all those things, so he wasn’t surprised. But that was not the problem here.

His computer screen showed the opening title of episode 14, one that certainly wasn’t his own doing. He sighed while rubbing his temples, feeling hard to keep up with the situation unfolding right in front of them. While doing this action, his brain thought of an idea.

“Why don’t we try to undo this?”

The others’ attention was shifted to the pink-haired man.

“We do have plans for the story after all. So let’s try to stick to the plan and change the episode 13.”

“But we need Luda to be in it, Hyung. She’s the main character after all.”

Changkyun was right. All their plans for the story revolved solely on her, so it would be hard to change up some stuff.

“Even if she’s here doesn’t mean I can’t draw her.”

All of his friends went silent. At the same time, they still weren’t sure whether Luda really came out of the webtoon or not, so no one knew what would happen if she got drawn in the story again.

“I will try it now then.” Kihyun picked up his pen and turned up a blank page on his monitor, and began to draw.

“Then what should we do?” Myungeun asked.

“I recommend finishing all of the kimchi fried rice that Kihyun made this morning,” Minhyuk suggested.

“Hey, I also brought some dumplings! You guys should also finish them all up!” Hoseok exclaimed.

While the others were starting to leave the studio one by one, Kihyun focused on drawing. He drew the moment where Luda was looking at the sunset again. He had memorized every single thing on the scene that it didn’t take that long for him to finish with the drawing.

He looked into the drawer on his side of the table, and then pulled out a few papers with some drawings mostly consisting of stick figures. Those were the storyboard that he prepared up until 20 episodes, but right now he needed to look for the 13^th episode, so he arranged the papers so that the storyboard for the 13^th episode got to sit right at the top of the piles of papers.

As he scrolled down to continue, he was met with a drawing. A drawing he definitely didn’t make.

In the drawing, Luda was staring right at him, and a monologue bubble was right next to her.

“Can you see me?”

Kihyun immediately pulled away from the screen in shock. Then his gaze landed on his bedroom door, and hurriedly he went to open it.

What was left of Luda in the bedroom was the clothes he lent her.

“Can you see me?”

Luda had spoken to the empty air after finding herself back in the palace, at the exact same place she were the last time, and she was also in her wedding gown again. She was aware that everyone in the other world could probably see her there, back in the webtoon, which was why she had asked the question while looking directly at the sky.

“If I’m here in this gown, does this mean...”

She immediately walked back into the palace and went straight to the throne room.

“It is me, the princess. Please open the door.”

The door opened, and her heart seemed to skip a beat right then when she saw her father sitting in the throne, looking like he was in deep thoughts.

“My daughter,” he called out to her. “What brought you here to my presence? Your face looks stricken with worries, Dear.”

At that time, Luda felt like she was about to spill some tears, but she held on. What was important was that her father was still alive. Nothing could express how relieved she was.

Kihyun stormed out of the studio and went straight to the laundry room without paying attention to the guys gathering in the living room.

“Oppa, how did it go—hey, why is he so rude all of the sudden?”

“I’ll take a look,” Minhyuk volunteered and went back to the studio.

As he approached the laundry room, he found nothing resembling the wedding gown in there. Not even in the washing machine. He wasn’t sure where Myungeun put it in the first place, but the gown was so hard to miss that he would find it straight away if it was still there.

“Myungeun-ah! Where did you put the wedding gown?” Kihyun shouted from the laundry room, still trying to figure out things.

“I put it near the washing machine! You don’t suddenly lose your eyesight or anything, do you?”

Okay, he found nothing near the washing machine. And he still had normal eyesight, so that basically confirmed his suspicion.

Minhyuk came out of the studio with a weird look on his face. “I’m starting to suspect Kihyun, guys.”

“What is it?” Changkyun was the first one to ask. At the same time, Kihyun came back from the laundry room, and everyone was basically shifting their attention to him.

“Something weird happened again,” he simply said.

The prince visited the princess’ bedroom at night. Luda didn’t expect him to come, but it wasn’t like he wasn’t welcomed. He showed great concern for her mother’s sudden illness, and she accepted it. Although all this time she had thought he probably only had concern for the throne only, it was good to know he had concern for his soon-to-be-in-law.

But at the same time, the fact that everything in this world was a creation of someone else in another world kept bothering her. Her meeting with someone with similar hair color with her and his odd but probably nice friends bugged her mind more than she let on.

“Princess?” The prince seemed to have caught on to her dazing out in the middle of their conversation. She was quick to recover though.

“Yes?”

“I think there is something bothering you. May I know what it is?”

“I... I am just worried for my mother, that is all.”

“I was talking to you about finding other ways to help your mother recover though.”

“Ah.” She tried to calm down, she needed to focus. “Tell me again.”

“However, there is something more concerning to me.”

“What is it?”

“That a witch is roaming around freely around the palace is bothering me.”

“Wow.” Changkyun kept looking back and forth at the empty bedroom and the monitor screen. He certainly looked amazed, but his other friends though, not so much.

“How did she just disappear into thin air? This is so impossible,” Myungeun muttered while collecting the clothes Luda wore earlier.

“Possible because this is magic.”

“Shut up, Changkyun.”

“I certainly didn’t want to believe all this before.” Minhyuk looked at his pink-haired friend, who was staring at the computer screen. “You swear all this thing is true?”

“I swear to God, Lee Minhyuk. How would you explain the wedding gown if I really did it?”

Minhyuk leaned back to his chair, still in disbelief. “I can’t believe I’m starting to believe all this, man.”

“Okay, I still don’t know what happened around here, but it seems very serious,” Hoseok commented instead, which earned him looks from the others. “Hey, sorry that I’m not a manhwa guy!”

“Thanks for the dumpling, Oppa! Now go away.”

“Dude, that’s rude,” Changkyun said to Myungeun, who pouted right away.

“At least I said thanks.”

“Don’t worry, I don’t get hurt easily by Myungeun’s words anymore,” Hoseok said with a smile.

“Wow, what a positive character,” Myungeun sarcastically remarked.

“You know what, guys. I think...”

Everyone’s focus was back at Kihyun again, who seemed to try to find the right words to continue his sentence.

“I think...we need to halt this project for a moment.”

“What?” Minhyuk was the first to react. “Kihyun-ah, we only have less than 24 hours to submit this work! And we have twelve episodes ready anyway! So that makes it twelve extra weeks to figure out this problem!”

“I didn’t say we won’t submit it... if you think the work is ready to be submitted, I don’t mind it, as long as everyone gets to review it first. But for any continuation... I think we need to halt that for a moment.”

The room went silent for a moment as everyone was deep in thoughts.

“I guess it does sound better than being sitting ducks,” Myungeun spoke breaking the silence.

“Okay, I’ll just distribute the files for you.”

“Here, use my flashdisk.” Minhyuk offered a small black flashdisk to Kihyun, in which the later took it gratefully. After a little copy and paste action, he gave it back to Minhyuk, who then gave it to Myungeun.

“Then are we dismissed just like this?” Changkyun dared to ask.

Kihyun looked at his co-workers’ faces one by one, those who had agreed on to help him with his project since early on. Even Hoseok, who had not much role in making the webtoon other than being their ‘first reader’. At the question though, Kihyun slowly nodded his head.

“Yes. Think of it as a chance to go on vacation. It won’t be that bad.”

“We haven’t even had our first webtoon released publicly,” Myungeun said.

“We will soon,” Minhyuk tried to reassure her, and then turned back at Kihyun. “But this problem better be resolved soon. We certainly don’t want to leave the work hanging.”

The pink-haired man sighed in slight frustration before nodding slowly.

“We can always help you if you need it, Hyung.”

“Sure. If I need any help from you guys, I’ll call. For now, I need you guys to review the chapters. Hoseok hyung, as our representative reader’s POV, you should try to take a look too.”

The said man startled for a moment, and then brightened up immediately. “Sure. I’ll help.”

“Okay. Let’s take a look at the episodes.” Kihyun watched nervously as the others gradually got their turns to copy and paste the file, while Hoseok just looked over Minhyuk’s shoulder to read the content of the webtoon in the younger’s laptop. Kihyun decided to just focus on reviewing too, although the more he tried to review, the more he felt agonized.

She was just here a moment ago, and now, she’s...