The Master of Noise Marketing?
Rembrary, gauging the reactions of the people around him, handed the phone back to Sa Gam-jae and spoke.
"I have no memory of it. I never sang verse two, Gam-jae."
"You do recall that you followed me here saying you had something to say to me? Very politely, I might add?"
"You claim I did such a thing?"
"Such a lovely deed it was, indeed."
"And? After following you, what did I say?"
"That you needed help."
"Help with what?"
"I couldn't hear any further. You suddenly collapsed."
"Hoo."
Rembrary let out a long sigh.
"Gam-jae. The person who asked for your help — could it not have been the original owner of this body, Woo Yeon-woo?"
Sa Gam-jae gave a small shrug.
"That much, I cannot say."
All he could confirm, Sa Gam-jae added as though it were nothing, was that the fellow had been polite. And because Rembrary likewise deemed it nothing, he let the matter slide.
Afterward, Rembrary continued to stay at Sa Gam-jae's house, waiting to see whether the real Woo Yeon-woo would surface again.
But the real Woo Yeon-woo never appeared.
Instead, Jong-woo called, sobbing through a mouthful of slurred speech.
"Why are you doing this to me, huh? *sniffle* You hate me, don't you? Don't you?!"
"Your enunciation is poor, Jong-woo."
When Rembrary clicked his tongue, Jong-woo poured out a long stream of unintelligible words and hung up on him.
As Rembrary was staring holes into his phone trying to decipher what on earth that had been, Sa Gam-jae translated for him.
"He says you are to come to the shop at dawn. The CEO will be there as well, apparently."
"You can interpret what Jong-woo says?"
"Do you know how many humans I have dealt with in my time?"
By the following dawn, the real Woo Yeon-woo still hadn't shown himself, and Rembrary, just like the day before, hurriedly left the house in the early hours and set off for the shop.
Inside the shop, the other members had not yet arrived. Instead, CEO Im was chatting and laughing with the makeup artists, and the moment he spotted Rembrary, everyone's gaze turned exquisitely, subtly strange all at once.
"Unicorn."
CEO Im pointed a finger at Rembrary as he said it.
"We need to talk."
"I am Sloth."
The CEO flinched at the correction, then asked the makeup artist hovering nearby for the favor of borrowing a room — "We just need the room for a moment" — and took Rembrary alone inside.
Once in the VIP skincare room, CEO Im shut the door firmly behind them and lowered his voice.
"I really, really, really want to believe this isn't the case, but I keep thinking — what if? What if? So I have to ask."
"What is it?"
"Do you have a split personality now?"
Rembrary shook his head.
"Nay. Why do you ask?"
"Yesterday — people who don't know any better said you just half-assed your way through it mid-performance, but I checked the stage footage myself. And from what I saw, for a brief moment, you went back to being the Yeon-woo from before you lost your memory."
"Oh."
"It's not that Yeon-woo can't sing at all, but that's how he sounds when he sings a difficult song without practicing it. And if he were just phoning it in, he'd phone it in — his voice wouldn't suddenly start shaking."
Sharp, this one. At the small sound of admiration that escaped Rembrary, CEO Im pulled a face like a man about to weep.
"Were you faking the trembling on purpose? Or..."
"It was not done on purpose."
"Then what? Why did you sing the song so horribly all of a sudden?"
"Why I sang it so horribly, I do not know. For the one who sang it in that moment was not I."
Horrified, CEO Im seized Rembrary's head in both hands.
"I knew it — it's a split personality, isn't it? You've developed a split personality!"
It was phrased as a question, but the tone was pure conviction.
"Right. A kid who was perfectly fine suddenly losing his memory — I should've known something was off. You didn't lose your memory at all. You gained another personality. Isn't that right?"
Frankly speaking, that was the closer truth. He had gained another soul, but broadly construed, one could call it an added personality.
"So the one who sang verse two and left was the original Woo Yeon-woo, the one who sang verse one is the crazy Woo Yeon-woo, and you, right now, are—"
"Sloth."
"Verse-one Woo Yeon-woo."
CEO Im, his voice dropping to a hoarse croak as though he might cry, brought his mouth right up to Rembrary's head as if it were a microphone and called out.
"Yeon-woo. Unicorn, Woo Yeon-woo, can you hear me?"
Wondering what manner of madness this was, Rembrary simply stared back at him with parted lips, and CEO Im called out again with an embarrassed face.
"I thought this might summon the verse-two Yeon-woo."
"Would he come simply because you call?"
"So it is a split personality?"
"Did I not say I know not?"
Rembrary answered grumpily, then added, "Though it may well be something similar."
CEO Im studied Rembrary in silence for a long moment, then finally fished a shrink-wrapped cigarette pack out of his jacket's inner pocket and tore it open.
He had just extracted a single cigarette and was about to light it when Jong-woo, arriving late in search of the two of them, hastily talked him out of it.
"Boss! You finally quit after barely managing it — why are you doing this?!"
"Let go. This is exactly when you smoke. If not now, when?"
"If you light up now, all that quitting goes straight down the drain!"
"I could barely handle the amnesia as it was, and now you're telling me the kid has a split personality, Jong-woo. A split personality."
So his hunch had been right all along, CEO Im said, then stuck the cigarette between Jong-woo's lips, covered his face, and began to sob — kehh-heh.
Apparently CEO Im and Jong-woo had spent a long while talking this over between themselves the day before. The theory that 'Yeon-woo' hadn't lost his memory but developed a split personality seemed to have been a conclusion the two of them had reached together, and Jong-woo gazed at Rembrary with a conflicted look.
Rembrary shrugged with a face that said not my problem.
As Rembrary sat in the shop chair getting his hair and makeup done, a veritable defensive line had formed at his side: CEO Im, Jong-woo, and Sa Gam-jae, all in a row.
The makeup artists and hairstylists who arrived at work with sleepy eyes took in the sight and went wide-eyed. One makeup artist, unable to contain her curiosity, asked outright.
"Judging by how the CEO has attached himself personally, you're planning to really push Woo Yeon-woo, aren't you?"
"Ha ha. Well, now."
"There are three of you standing there. Isn't that a whole crew gathered to push him hard?"
"It's closer to a crew gathered to hold on tight and never let go."
"Pardon?"
CEO Im smiled a composed, grown-up smile, unwrapped a wrapped candy, popped it in his mouth, and chewed.
"No, no. Make our Yeon-woo's face a bit more decadent, please."
After makeup was done and they moved to a different studio from yesterday's, CEO Im and Jong-woo busied themselves monitoring various community sites, news outlets, the big fan cafés, the video boards where stage footage was being uploaded in fragments, YouTube, and the like — all while keeping constant watch over Rembrary in case he transformed into Unicorn Yeon-woo again.
Whether that was a blessing or a misfortune was hard to say, but Rembrary remained perfectly ordinary Rembrary throughout.
It was no different after they arrived at the studio. He was fine through two rehearsals and while preparing for the stage.
But since a personality change had struck mid-stage only yesterday, CEO Im and Jong-woo could not rest easy.
How many hours had passed like that?
Jong-woo, who had been rubbing his eyes and scrolling his phone for ages, suddenly let out a scream.
"What, what is it? What happened?"
CEO Im, who had been nodding off, scrambled over, and Jong-woo flipped his phone around to show him the digital music chart rankings.
"Look at this!"
What now? CEO Im grabbed the phone in alarm — and let out a soft "oh dear" of his own.
Rembrary, in the middle of taking selfies to post on social media, turned around at the commotion to find CEO Im and Jong-woo regarding each other with deeply ambiguous expressions.
Unable to tell whether they were smiling or floundering, he asked, "What ails you two?"
The answer arrived first via a message from Lim Yu-han.
"I took first place?"
Attached to Lim Yu-han's congratulations was a screenshot of Rembrary's solo track sitting at number one on the most-used music streaming chart. When Rembrary saw the upward-pointing arrow beside his solo song's title, his own eyes went round with shock.
"How could this be, when I botched the stage?"
Jong-woo, who had been reading the comments, answered with a click of his tongue.
"People are saying the verse-one performance and the verse-two performance looked like two different people. Suddenly his singing skill changed completely, he was totally phoning it in — that kind of thing. With everyone talking, I guess people got curious and went digging for the stage footage."
"And then?"
"The people who went looking saw the verse-one stage and thought the song was great — so they bought the track. A lot of them."
CEO Im smiled bitterly.
Apparently people were calling their company a master of noise marketing. They assumed the company had planned it — that he'd been ordered to do it, no less.
Because the 'real Woo Yeon-woo' had appeared mid-stage yesterday, Rembrary too had braced himself for the possibility that it might happen again this time.
If it did, would he once more be shown a vision of his original world?
And if so — he would determine whether that vision was real or not. With that resolve in mind, Rembrary steeled himself in his own fashion.
But on this stage, no body-swap occurred, and Rembrary delivered a performance so captivating that even the spectators who had sharpened their knives to curse him could do nothing but bow their heads in admiration.
An hour or two after the stage ended, short, snappy edited clips of the performance were already springing up everywhere. The number-one spot on the music charts, which had climbed on the strength of public attention, held for over twenty-four hours, and the stage after that was likewise finished without a single mistake.
What, then, is the difference between the first stage and all the ones after it...
The shadows had writhed a great deal during that first stage. Could that be why?
Rembrary rewatched and compared his own stage footage over and over, but he could not pin down the precise cause.
And so the premiere date of Dear God drew near.
Perhaps because it was his first drama, the members all gathered in front of the living room TV, declaring they would monitor the broadcast for him. Even Taein, who was ordinarily on poor terms with him, was among them.
Taein was the only member who hadn't offered congratulations after Rembrary's solo track hit number one — and yet he was watching this drama with what looked suspiciously like anticipation.
At long last, the long, long stretch of commercials ended, and the first frame of Dear God appeared.
A dark night. Rain poured down as though it were trying to swallow the world.
Every streetlight was lit, yet the lashing rain had swallowed everything into darkness. The camera lingered for a moment on the scarlet glow of a streetlight, then tilted downward.
Beneath the streetlight, a man knelt, weeping.
It was Deungbaek. He was crying, and he looked utterly heartbroken.
Another man walked toward him under a black umbrella. The camera, fixed to Deungbaek's line of sight, showed only the approaching toes of the man's shoes.
The shoes drew near, and stopped — right in front of him.
Slowly, the camera climbed from those shoes — over the ankles, the knees, the waist, the chest, the neck — until it found a face.
Im Seo, the shadows beneath his eyes looking particularly deep thanks to the umbrella he held overhead.
Im Seo stood there in his clerical robe, looked down at the kneeling Deungbaek, and called out with a deeper, richer smile.
"Sunbae, why are you crying out here?"
The streetlight, which had burned steadily, began to flicker on and off with a long, electric whine. The atmosphere was eerie enough to curdle the blood.
And in that instant — through the gaps of the stuttering light — Im Seo rolled his eyes and looked straight into the camera. Straight at the viewers.
Hye-gyeol, watching the screen with his heart pounding, was so startled he gasped out loud. Taein flinched too.
They had seen characters speak to the camera or act toward it in comedies plenty of times, but never before had they seen a character look into the camera in a scene played dead straight and serious. In a serious drama, acknowledging the camera was a taboo — it shattered the audience's immersion. And when that taboo broke without warning, a flash of pure fear ran through them.
Had it gone even slightly wrong, the immersion would have shattered. But in that split second, Im Seo's gaze and expression did not break the spell at all — instead, they dragged the viewers wholesale into his world.
Before the drama had been airing even ten minutes, that scene had become a full-blown sensation online.
Im Seo, Dear God, and Woo Yeon-woo monopolized the real-time search rankings.
The viewers who were completely stunned by that scene were then struck a second time when they realized that Rembrary had not a single line of dialogue after it.
The staff had gossiped about how terrible his acting was supposed to be — but this? There was simply no room to even judge it as acting or anything else.
After the hour that had struck like lightning finally passed, Jungseo tapped Rembrary on the back and spoke with certainty.
"It's going to do well."
"I never expected to appear in the opening scene. In the script, that was the ending scene."
"The director must have loved that shot."
Rembrary gave an awkward little smile, feeling somewhat sheepish, then heard the chime of an incoming text and hurriedly checked his phone.
Thinking, of course, that it would be Lim Yu-han.
It wasn't. The sender was Woo Sung-woo, Yeon-woo's older brother.
— End of Chapter 88: A Master of Noise Marketing? —