A Visit to Myself
The click of the door latch echoed softly as I pushed it open and stepped inside. What greeted me was a hospital bed.
A pristine white bed, ringed by every kind of medical equipment, looked as though someone had carved a slice straight out of a hospital ward and planted it here. And in that bed lay me.
“…….”
My feet started moving before I had a chance to think a single thought. I found myself approaching the pale face lying there with its eyes closed, looking for all the world like a dead man.
Ha.
At first, I'd entertained the possibility that my original body might actually have survived. But a few months of living as Yoo Seul-ho had gradually worn that idea thin—especially once my activities started showing up in the media.
If the real Yoo Seul-ho were alive and living in my body, he'd have come looking for me ages ago.
With Seul-ho's identity being a celebrity, we didn't need to arrange anything to meet. Worst case, I could just loiter around wherever his schedule took him. But he'd never made a single move, so at some point I'd simply concluded, ah, so he's dead.
I did think about confirming it for sure, but….
Truthfully, I'd been afraid to. Even I couldn't have heard that my original body was dead and calmly thrown myself back into work like nothing happened.
Now there was nowhere left to hide. Face-to-face with the sight, my mouth simply stopped working.
It feels… strange, that's for sure.
Something was slowly churning in my gut. Too mild to call nausea, but far too unpleasant to shrug off as nothing.
How do I put this.
That body was undeniably my original one, and yet it felt like I was staring at a complete stranger. Barely a few months of living as Yoo Seul-ho, and here I was already drifting away from my loan shark life—the absurdity of it wrung a laugh out of me.
“Ha.”
The moment I let out a dry chuckle after standing there in silence for so long, Cho Gyeong-beom and Hwang Tae-jun both shot me wary looks. That all-too-familiar sight made me wipe my face and apologize.
“Sorry. My head's a bit of a mess right now.”
“Of course. Anyone would feel that way. How long had you known the boss?”
At Cho Gyeong-beom's question, my gaze drifted back to the bed.
“Well… we weren't exactly new to each other. One or two years at least. Mind if I ask what the doctor said besides that?”
“They say he took a severe shock to the brain in an accident. Other than a fractured right leg, there's nothing physically wrong with him. Medically speaking, he's in perfectly good condition to regain consciousness right now, but he hasn't—and the doctor's explanation is that the patient simply doesn't want to wake up. Which is… frankly, nonsense.”
“That's because our big brother isn't the type to do that.”
Hwang Tae-jun, the youngest of the two, cut abruptly into the conversation.
“I've never once seen anyone like him—the kind of man who handles every disaster that comes his way without a word of complaint. The toughest person alive, and I'm supposed to believe some doctor's talk about trauma? No way. He's coming back. I know he will.”
His voice was stiff, but there was ironclad conviction underneath it. I was grateful for the sentiment—even if it wasn't exactly the outcome I was hoping for.
What if Yoo Seul-ho regains consciousness like this?
Remembering that he'd tried to end his own life, the odds of him waking up and demanding give my body back! were slim. And if his inability to wake up really was tied to trauma, then maybe the real reason was that he didn't want to exist as anyone other than himself.
Not that I'd know how to give it back anyway.
I had no idea why the swap had happened in the first place, so the method for reversing it was equally beyond me. And even if I did know it, I had zero intention of handing things over without a fight.
Something I clawed my way to like a dog isn't going anywhere for free.
One way or another, this body I had now was mine. Whatever claim Yoo Seul-ho might stake later, I was confident I wouldn't be pushed around by some twenty-five-year-old kid.
So no—I wasn't hoping he'd stay unconscious because I feared losing this body. It was for an entirely different reason.
Yoo Seul-ho can't survive as a loan shark.
He'd already been backed to the edge of a cliff before any of this. His mental state had grown endlessly fragile—and a person like that adapting to a life where he had nothing but enemies? Not a chance.
Whew.
DON'T worry about things that haven't happened yet. I cut the thought off there, before my head could spiral any further into tangles.
Worth worrying about once he actually wakes up.
Having sorted it out that far, I lifted my head.
“If the boss regains consciousness, could you let me know? He'll definitely be looking for me.”
“Naturally. Just give us advance notice and you're welcome to visit anytime. The doctor also mentioned that even unconscious patients sometimes respond to familiar voices if they hear them often enough. It would be wonderful if the boss opened his eyes to the sound of your voice, Yoo Seul-ho-ssi….”
Cho Gyeong-beom's voice grew damper and damper with every word. Watching him, a sigh escaped me on its own.
Did I raise these kids wrong?
How was it that every last one of my men was emotionally overwrought? Fine, the youngest, maybe—but watching Gyeong-beom, a seasoned veteran who'd eaten his full share of years in the business, fall apart like this left me at a loss.
“Let's move on to the rest of what we need to discuss. Shall we head back to the room you were in before?”
“Oh—you're able to leave? We could keep talking about the boss here, if you'd like.”
“If it's the boss we're talking about, I doubt he'd want me standing around gawking at my own body when there's real work to be done. He's the kind of man who'd rather you took care of the people around him properly. Wouldn't you say?”
“Ah… yes. That's… right. You're correct. Of course you are.”
Cho Gyeong-beom nodded along, a beat too late. He must have realized that he himself counted among the “people around him” I'd just mentioned, because not a shred of hesitation lingered in his steps as we left the room.
By the time we'd ridden the elevator back to the room where we'd first met, his face had returned to cool, professional composure. A relief, honestly.
“Here is the report you requested on Director Shin Seung-im. Please take your time reviewing it.”
His voice had snapped back into professional mode, and I relaxed slightly as I spread the documents open.
The report was stuffed to the brim with exactly the information I'd been hoping for. Director Shin's family background, his hidden private life, his money troubles, all the way up to a past accident.
Page after page was crammed tight with vulnerabilities I could leverage as ammunition, should things ever turn ugly between me and Director Shin down the line.
“We turned up some interesting things while investigating, actually. That Director Shin of yours is quite famous.”
“In what way?”
“He's already notorious throughout the industry for treating the celebrities under his agency like playthings. Everywhere he goes, the only thing that comes out of his mouth at length is how great he is. A few of the people we interviewed were so disgusted they were practically dying.”
Ah-ha.
So it's exactly as Hyun Jin-gae described.
His manager had once summed up Director Shin with the line, Anyone who looked would assume he was the celebrity. A man who demanded to be the center of attention everywhere he went.
To someone like that, the actors under contract were never “talent to be elevated”—they were merely “instruments for elevating himself.”
And that's the man poking around into Yoo Seul-ho's current situation.
So far it had only amounted to prying at the manager about where Seul-ho was spending his days—but there was no telling how his behavior might escalate. And above all, the moment he caught wind of my goal to jump ship from Star Actors to another agency, things would get considerably uglier.
I was quietly drafting scenario after scenario of how Director Shin might torment me when Cho Gyeong-beom's voice cut through my concentration.
“Director Shin was the one who personally cast Yoo Seul-ho, you know. Ah, right—you said you don't remember. Anyway, the story is that every time he goes to a meeting somewhere, he brags about having cast Yoo Seul-ho himself, and then proceeds to trash-talk him to high heaven.”
“How, exactly?”
“Er….”
“No need to dance around it. Just tell me precisely.”
And with that permission, Cho Gyeong-beom recited it all without a trace of hesitation, the words spilling out in a steady stream. That Yoo Seul-ho couldn't act and had no manners besides. That Star Actors only kept him around out of charity—he was hardly the kind of talent anyone would covet. That his rudeness went beyond insolence into genuinely believing he was a little prince.
“He says it so often that plenty of people in the industry seem to take it as gospel. Yoo Seul-ho-ssi didn't have many connections in the entertainment world, so it's hard to say whether the man you were before losing your memory knew about any of this.”
“Hm. Fascinating. Why would Yoo Seul-ho—no, sorry, why would I—try to sabotage the value of a product I'm the one selling?”
“How would we possibly understand the minds of people like that?”
Just as Cho Gyeong-beom and I had both fallen silent over a line of reasoning neither of us could make sense of, a quiet voice spoke up.
“Um….”
It was the youngest, who'd been holding his tongue this entire time.
“Could it be he runs you down like that because it's the only way he gets to keep you?”
“If you keep trashing something, its value could drop to the point it's unsellable. Is he really that stupid?”
“Then you just throw it away. There's no shortage of actors in the world.”
Oh.
When his eyes met mine, the youngest flinched and hastily added an afterthought.
“Ah—no, I'm not saying anyone should throw away Yoo Seul-ho-ssi. What I meant was—”
“You put your finger right on the point. There's real merit in that.”
“I-is that so?”
At my praise, the youngest scratched the back of his head, sheepish and embarrassed. It was a look I'd seen on him now and then back in my loan shark days, and a small laugh slipped out of me.
“Thank you, truly. Thanks to this, I'll be able to handle whatever comes up from here on out. The connection with your boss matters, of course—but I'd also like to keep the connection between the agency, myself, and the two of you in good standing. Which means I'll have to be a good client.”
A good client, in this line of work, meant one who paid on time without being chased. I said all this while wearing the most shamelessly pleasant expression I could manage—adding that I hoped the two of them would help me become exactly that.
“There's endless debate about the lifespan of an acting career, but the two of you work at Haru Finance, so you already know: there's no business on earth as good as celebrities. Crude as it sounds, even a drug scandal or a criminal record only needs a few years of weathering before the public forgives a male celebrity. And I intend to make a great deal of money in this profession, for a very long time.”
For that, I would have to deal decisively with anyone who stood in my way inside the entertainment industry.
“I'm someone who understands the power of information. To hold real power, I need the two of you. And once I have it, I believe we'll make excellent partners.”
“That would mean… you're asking us to run background checks on people free of charge until Yoo Seul-ho-ssi establishes himself somewhat?”
“Think of it less as charity and more as an investment. Every investment carries risk, but at worst, the maximum you stand to lose on this one is the manpower and hours you sink into the background checks. In return, the money that comes back will run several times the value of an average commission.”
“Hmm….”
The moment money entered the conversation, Cho Gyeong-beom snapped back into full defensive posture, and I gave a slow internal nod.
Good. That's exactly how you should be.
If he'd started handing things out like a sucker just because he'd known the boss for years and I'd played friendly with him, I'd never have let it slide. I suppressed the satisfied grin threatening to spread across my face and said, evenly:
“There's no need to decide anything today, so take your time thinking it over. After all, our transaction is spotlessly clean as of this moment. Today I revealed my identity in payment for this report, and the fee for the background check on me was settled in full beforehand.”
Strictly speaking, though, the transaction wasn't finished. The second report—on Yoo Seul-ho's parents—was still outstanding.
And sure enough, as if he'd been waiting for exactly that, Cho Gyeong-beom brought it up.