3
# Chapter 3
Click, click!
“Run!”
Someone shouted.
The two men holding cameras took off toward the end of the hallway.
Both Jang Mi-su and I were showered with camera flashes.
Their lenses had already captured us, and the two men ran without hesitation.
I turned to look beside me.
Jang Mi-su was staring at me with startled eyes.
It wasn't the innocent gaze of a young girl from her childhood. It was filled with both confusion and fear, like someone who had just broken free from their shackles.
“Stop right there!”
I shouted, but they disappeared around the end of the hallway.
I made my decision in that instant.
Their real target wasn't an ordinary office worker like me.
It was the youngest daughter of the chairman of Changseong Group.
She had come out of a hotel with an unrelated man?
“If this gets reported, I'm finished!”
And the moment the Tiger Chairman found out about something like this, he would never leave me alone.
I absolutely had to catch those guys if I wanted to survive.
The instant my foot kicked off the floor, my heart began pounding violently, as if preparing for battle.
Thud-thud-thud!
My thoughts had taken a while, but the actual moment lasted only an instant.
I instinctively threw myself forward.
I ran incredibly fast.
My body felt light, and my reactions were quick.
“Was Yoon Jun-ho's body always like this?”
This was definitely not the body of the Yoon Jun-ho I knew.
I had gone through countless bodies during my repeated reincarnations, but my current body was particularly unusual.
The muscle responses and rhythm of my breathing were at the level of a trained fighter.
“Give me that camera!”
I shouted fiercely as I closed in on them, causing both men to flinch.
Then they accelerated even more.
I chased after them at full speed.
“Split up!”
One of the men in front ran toward the elevator, while the other headed for the emergency stairs.
Both of them were carrying cameras.
“The elevator will take too long. The emergency stairs are faster.”
If I lost them, I was finished.
The chairman might even hunt me down himself with a hunting rifle.
I descended the stairs as if sliding down them.
My body was overflowing with vitality and agility.
Before long, I had caught up to the man's back.
Smack!
I grabbed his shoulder, but unintentionally caused him to lose his balance and fall forward.
And the location was the staircase.
If he rolled down the stairs, it could lead to a serious accident.
“No!”
I instinctively wrapped myself around him and rolled down with him.
Thud!
“Ugh…!”
The impact was tremendous, but I endured it as best I could using a breakfall.
The moment I landed, my body reacted immediately.
Then the fallen man muttered,
“…Thank you. If you hadn't caught me, I would have been seriously injured.”
The man bowed his head and said,
“Here, the camera.”
His eyes were slightly frightened.
His shoulders were tense.
Just moments ago, he had been secretly taking pictures, but now he was obediently handing over the camera.
The sudden change in his attitude only made me more uneasy.
It wasn't that he had accepted his humiliation. I suspected that he was still hiding something.
He had probably acted this way because the other man I had missed had taken the pictures.
I snatched the camera he handed me and grabbed him by the collar.
“How did you know that Ms. Jang Mi-su was here?”
The man looked confused.
“Who is Jang Mi-su?”
The paparazzo's gaze was strange.
The fear had disappeared from his eyes, replaced by the sharp gaze of a beast that had spotted its prey.
“He doesn't know Jang Mi-su?”
That was impossible.
But what mattered now was the fact that their target wasn't Jang Mi-su.
It was me.
“…More importantly.”
I glared at the man again.
“How did this bastard know I was at this hotel?”
“How did you know I was here?”
I asked while pulling harder on his collar.
When I raised my fist close to his face, the man's shoulders trembled.
“If the actor hits me, I'll die.”
“…Die?”
“I saw it on TV. You smashed ten slabs of marble with a single punch.”
……What?
“I smash marble with my fists?”
Who the hell was this Yoon Jun-ho?
Was he an actor and a fighter?
My head was becoming even more confused.
The memories of an ordinary office worker and the reality unfolding before my eyes collided.
The Yoon Jun-ho I knew was nowhere to be found. Instead, he had become an entirely different person.
This wasn't the first time the framework had been shaken by repeated reincarnation and regression, but it was the first time it had changed this fundamentally.
My confusion was even greater than the situation unfolding before me.
The ordinary life of Yoon Jun-ho that I knew had already been shattered to pieces.
This regression had been thoroughly distorted.
I calmed myself down for a moment before asking again.
“What newspaper are you with?”
The man smirked.
“Check tomorrow's newspaper.”
I fell silent at those words.
He clearly intended to keep his identity hidden until the very end.
A chill ran down my spine.
At this rate, pictures of Jang Mi-su could end up in the newspaper.
At that moment, I instinctively knew.
One article would be enough to ruin me.
“What newspaper are you with?! If pictures of Jang Mi-su get published, I'm dead!”
It might have been nothing more than gossip to him, but for me, it was a matter of survival.
At my desperate words, the man tilted his head again.
“…So, who is Jang Mi-su?”
……Damn it.
Mentioning her name in the first place had been a mistake.
---
In the end, I lost one of the reporters.
And I couldn't take all of their cameras, either.
There was nothing I could do but return to the suite, breathing heavily.
When I arrived at the room where Jang Mi-su and I had been staying, it was completely empty.
“…She's gone?”
I stood blankly in front of the door for a long while.
I was certain this was the room.
So why did I feel so cold and uneasy?
The space that had still held warmth just moments ago was now devoid of even a trace of it.
Even the conversation and laughter from moments ago felt like an illusion.
My heart beat anxiously amid the heavy silence.
“Let's start by figuring out this whole ‘I'm an actor’ thing.”
Something had become seriously twisted.
It wasn't merely a small difference. The sense of unfamiliarity that came from the very foundation of my life having changed seeped through my entire body.
And as reality and memory collided with each other, my head became increasingly dizzy.
I looked down at the sleeve of my crumpled dress shirt and muttered to myself,
“…Actor Yoon Jun-ho?”
I looked in the mirror, and it was obvious.
This face wasn't ordinary.
Skin that seemed to shine even without lighting, balanced features, and a smooth, flawless nose without even a hint of blemish.
Anyone could tell he was handsome, the kind of face that looked destined for success.
He could even flash a killer smile.
I had reincarnated and regressed countless times.
In one life, I had been a farmer. In another, a general of a dynasty.
But this was the first time I had lived a life as an “actor,” someone who made a living off the love of the public.
That unfamiliarity was a crisis, but at the same time, it was also an opportunity.
The man in the mirror was no longer the ordinary employee who had sat at an office desk clutching reports.
He was the face of a star who monopolized the spotlight on stage, and that fact filled me with both anxiety and a strange sense of anticipation.
Even amid all that, my mind calmly organized the situation.
“Tomorrow morning, my face and Jang Mi-su's face will probably be side by side on the front page of a sports newspaper. With only our eyes roughly mosaicked.”
I'm screwed.
If a huge photograph of me together with Jang Mi-su at a hotel were published, the Tiger Chairman would kill me.
“I'll really die….”
But then, one possibility suddenly crossed my mind.
“What if I really am actor Yoon Jun-ho?”
Even the Tiger Chairman wouldn't be able to swing a baseball bat at me like a maniac, right?
Even if he was a major figure in the business world, he wouldn't be able to recklessly mistreat an actor loved by the public.
At least not publicly.
This subtle difference could become the key to my survival strategy from now on.
I had already learned something through my many lives.
Status itself was a weapon.
When I wore armor as a general of a dynasty, I didn't need a sword. When I had money in my hands as the master of a merchant guild, power followed naturally.
Now, the mask of an actor could protect me.
My head was already a mess.
“But more importantly, what year is it?”
Whenever I reincarnated or regressed, I had to determine what point in time I had returned to.
Every plan and decision had to be built from that point.
I immediately picked up the calendar on the table.
1996.
There was a bank advertisement in the corner of the calendar.
“…About two years before the country goes bankrupt?”
It was right before the infamous 1997 Asian financial crisis.
That meant South Korea was on the eve of a storm.
On the surface, the economy looked prosperous, but cracks were already spreading everywhere.
Corporate debt was growing like a snowball, and foreign capital was slowly preparing to shake South Korea.
I took a deep breath.
Through my countless past regressions, I had already learned how to turn crises into opportunities.
On the battlefield, the enemy's confusion had been an opportunity. In the marketplace, fluctuations in exchange rates had been a source of money.
Now, a national catastrophe called the IMF crisis was fast approaching.
“Good. Whether I survive as an actor or go back to being a wealthy office worker, the opportunity is now.”
My eyes gradually changed.
Now, rather than simply surviving, I could use the enormous crisis that was approaching to make an even greater leap forward.
Reality had become twisted, but hidden within that distortion was an opportunity.