Laying the Cards on the Table
In exchange for revealing who I was, I demanded a background check on Director Shin.
The answer that came back was as follows.
“W-we… why would we have to do that?”
I swallowed a sigh at the obviously dim-witted, greenhorn voice. Kid, is that really what you lead with?
This one doesn't have a shred of negotiator in him.
When a client makes a demand like that, you're supposed to act haughty—say you'll hear them out and they should keep talking—or bark that they'd better start making sense. Instead, the idiot just echoes the question back at me.
I'd expected exactly this kind of response from Hwang Tae-jun, my youngest organization member, but hearing it for real made my vision swim.
Every part of me wanted to scream, How do you plan to run a business if you let clients drag you around by the nose! But since I was that client, I barely managed to hold it in.
“Of course, there's no obligation. For a shop that runs background checks on celebrities, how hard can it be to figure out who's placing the request? The issue is time and capital. You've been trying to identify me since our last call, and you still haven't turned up anything, have you?”
“……”
The silence on the other end of the line agreed with me.
“Granted, it's only a matter of time. But to get there, you'd have to untangle every layer I've wrapped around myself—this burner phone, a VPN, Monero, the works. That process alone eats up serious hours. You'd have to pull my data through contacts at the apps I've used, which means greasing extra palms. It's a job with a lot of moving parts.”
“What exactly are you getting at?”
“But if I identify myself, there's no need to bury precious time and money in the ground. Besides, you were already paid well above your average rate on the last job. You've got a man who could be a client for life sitting right here, and you can't extend one courtesy? That's what's strange.”
“That's… true, yes.”
“If this request were genuinely difficult, I'd understand turning it down. But we're not talking about some celebrity—just an ordinary office worker. Relative to the difficulty, the fee is actually cheap. All you have to do is dig up a few weaknesses. What kind of outfit can't manage that much for a potential VIP? Detective agencies are a dime a dozen in this country. If you want the business to grow, how you handle clients matters more than anything. Well, if you really don't want to, feel free to pass.”
“No—no, it's not that I don't want to. It's just… it's not my call to make…”
Hwang Tae-jun was trembling, on the verge of tears.
A reaction I'd grown intimately familiar with back when I was his boss.
Any second now, the colleague watching anxiously beside him would snatch the phone away.
I glanced at my clock and started talking even faster.
“Then consult whoever can decide, and get back to me.”
Having delivered the line like a rap verse, I hung up without a moment's hesitation.
Can't trust the maknae, but the others I can.
Gyeong-beom especially, with all his experience, would make the right call about which choice gave the best return.
It left a sour taste, being jerked around by a client whose face I didn't even know—but I wasn't stupid enough to toss away a profitable offer over nothing but pride.
Sure enough, before a few hours had passed, word came that they were accepting the request.
“We'll deliver the report within the week. However, there is one condition.”
The caller was Jo Gyeong-beom.
After listening to the maknae's mushy voice—the kind you could knock flat with a single slap—Gyeong-beom's hard-edged tone was like a breath of fresh air.
“What condition?”
“This report can't be delivered online like the last one. We'll need to verify your identity in person before handing it over.”
“Fine by me.”
“Even if you say it's too much of a hassle, from our end—wait, what?”
The cold, rigid voice wavered for an instant.
He hadn't expected me to accept the condition on the spot. Hey, I have a conscience too, you know.
Not that telling them who I am over the phone would earn any trust.
I was calling with my voice modulated, for God's sake. Of course they wouldn't take my word for anything.
“I said I'll receive the report in person.”
“Ah—yes. Understood. Then… yes. That should be fine. We'll have everything ready by the end of next week. Come to our office.”
“The address listed on the portal site, you mean?”
“Yes. If you come there—”
“I won't go there. Too cramped. Let's meet at the office in Pyeongchang-dong instead.”
The moment my words ended, I heard the sharp intake of breath on the other end.
After the briefest pause, what followed was a voice turned lethal.
“Who are you?”
The tone was thick with the readiness to kill me on the spot.
Until that moment it had been a service voice—hypocritical, sure, but built on a foundation of courtesy.
Hearing it flip in an instant, I felt oddly proud.
Guess I didn't raise them to be idiots after all.
The Mindo Detective Agency office listed on the portal site was a decoy. The offices where the real staff actually worked were split between Pyeongchang-dong and Seongbuk-dong.
The existence of those other offices was information unknown not just to ordinary clients, but even to the VIP customers of Haru Finance—so Gyeong-beom's hostile reaction made perfect sense.
And that was exactly the point.
“You must be wondering how I know this information. How far my knowledge extends, too. If you want to find out, have that report perfectly prepared. Don't try any funny business, and don't play games with me.”
In all the time I'd run Mindo, I had never once hired the agency for a service request myself.
With no precedent, the kids were bound to be rattled.
They'd worry about the odds that I was really about to show my face, about whether handing over a genuine report might leave them holding the short end of the stick.
This beats smiling and pretending to be friendly while smoothing things over.
In this world, the smiling face is the scariest one.
For the kids, a man who laid every card on the table and pushed forward would inspire far more trust than any sweet talk.
“……Understood. I'll trust that you, client, won't do anything foolish on that day either.”
Gyeong-beom had evidently recovered his senses, because he was back to speaking politely.
I said I understood, and ended the call.
Been a while.
There'd been times I wrestled with whether reconnecting with the kids was really the right choice.
Once I'd ended up with Yoo Seul-ho's body, I'd decided I should let my old life go without regrets.
That was why, on the day I woke up in Yoo Seul-ho's skin, I hadn't even checked whether my original body was still alive.
But I'm holding too little in my hands.
There were far fewer weapons to exploit in Yoo Seul-ho's arsenal than I'd imagined.
The only real asset was his parents' backing—and even that could only be had by living as a puppet dancing to their tune.
For a man who had never once spent a lifetime—or his previous one—caged in anybody's birdcage, it wasn't an option I could choose lightly.
I can't sit around waiting for someone else to solve my problems.
No weapons in hand, yet so much to be done.
I had to break free of that garbage agency, and get famous enough to command far higher appearance fees.
I didn't harbor any lofty passion for acting, and I couldn't care less about an image as “the actor who keeps taking roles even when the pay is poor.”
I had to make money. Lots of it.
Since that was my one and only goal, I had to try everything within reach to get there.
To solve a problem, you draw the blade.
And my blade, as always, was information.
But in a body like Yoo Seul-ho's—a face that drew every eye the moment it hit the street—gathering intelligence had hard limits.
I need to make the detective agency mine.
To survive and thrive in the treacherous entertainment industry, I had no choice but to build myself a reliable set of hands.
Ten days remained until the weekend meeting.
Just hold out until then.
I sincerely, desperately hoped that a peaceful life, free of any trouble, would carry me safely to that day.
But of course, life never flows the way I want it to.
The premiere of the drama Space of You and Me was right around the corner.
Word was that only episode three had just been locked, and yet barely a week remained until episode one aired.
Is this really okay?
The fact that only one or two episodes of the final cut existed was terrifying enough; the fact that only the people involved knew about it was even more shocking.
And in this situation where editing needed to happen a day sooner at every turn, there just so happened to be a special event.
The production press conference.
Piecing together what Choi Ran had let slip, a press conference was the most basic event a drama could hold. The lead actors and production staff appeared to introduce the work, and reporters were invited in for interviews.
“So the reporters get to watch up to episode two that day?”
“No. They'll probably just roll the highlight reel. You know those teaser clips they put up on YouTube? They play exactly that. What you're thinking of is a preview screening.”
“Ah, got it.”
“A press conference and a preview screening are totally different things. These days nobody does screenings unless it's some massive blockbuster. Back in the day they'd run viral campaigns off glowing screening reactions, but honestly the effect was mediocre anyway…. We should be spending that time editing even one more minute of footage.”
Trance-like, I nodded along to Choi Ran's crisp, no-nonsense delivery.
What would I do without her?
Acting skills aside, Yoo Seul-ho was a veteran with fifty credits to his name.
A man who'd grown up more at home on film sets than at school or home—there was no way he wouldn't know how a drama got made.
Time to get my head straight.
Before the press conference, I went through every single one Yoo Seul-ho had ever attended.
Thanks to how convenient the world had gotten, a simple search from home turned up plenty of footage.
The reporters are gentler than I expected.
Given how awful Yoo Seul-ho's public image was, I'd assumed they'd throw out some nasty questions, but there was not a single remark about his acting.
Well, come to think of it.
These were reporters who'd been invited to the event; there was no reason to humiliate anyone to their face. Do that, and they risked getting blacklisted by Yoo Seul-ho's parents.
Having reviewed dozens of videos, I saw no major obstacles ahead. This one would pass without controversy too—or so I thought.
Then came the day of the press conference.
A reporter asked me this:
“Yoo Seul-ho-ssi, how do you plan to win over the viewers who have voiced negative opinions about your casting?”