Here, Too, It Can Get Better
I don't stand a chance.
No chance of losing, that is.
Suppressing the smile already tugging at the corner of my mouth, I forced my expression into careful check.
"Oh, my… so even with someone already in mind, you came all this way to see me, Director…?"
I launched into the rookie's humble flattery, playing my part to the hilt. After all, Director Ja was, without exaggeration, the single heaviest weight ever to land on my Snob Scales.
A 30 percent viewership rating doesn't come from nowhere.
His power to carry a long-form series to the finish line came entirely from that bulldozer personality of his, bulldozing straight through anything in his way. If a man like that was being pushed around by investors, it meant The Great Garand now required a bigger pile of money than before. And that meant—
The quality will absolutely be…
Even better than before. One hundred percent.
And that role was supposed to be Do Gyeo-ul's. I'm certain of it.
In the previous timeline, Do Gyeo-ul had played the Nation's First Love in The Great Garand and used it to relaunch her career. The sync rate with Eun Baek-hap was so high that thinking of one automatically summoned the other.
Ever since then, those two became synonymous with pure, innocent beauty, and the scripts they received overlapped quite a bit…
A script Eun Baek-hap had been scrutinizing with the utmost care had been snatched right out from under her by Do Gyeo-ul as her next project. And that project had exploded into another massive hit.
I absolutely cannot let this slip away.
The thought of taking Do Gyeo-ul's role made it all the more precious to me.
I can't hand this over to Ki Joo-ye, of all people.
This one was mine, no question. My Yeon Hee-jae.
So I gazed at Director Ja through the eyes of the humble, thoughtful, and breathtakingly lovely first-love actress of this era.
"To think… you really are a director with your own conviction, someone with a work you absolutely must protect. I honestly find that so admirable. That will to see something through exactly as you envision it…."
"Right, right! This hyung's always been like that. Rams things through no matter what anyone says!"
Director Gong was chiming in with his full-throated agreement even now. And yet Director Ja didn't look especially flattered by my praise.
There wasn't a trace of that's me, all right! on his face. He merely flicked a brief glance at the The Great Garand script in my hands.
"Read the script. It'll be fun. Yes."
…He really does only ever say what he wants to say. I gave up on building rapport with Director Ja and opened the script. The page marked with the sticky note held Hee-jae's lines.
Ah, it's that scene.
The famous scene that would make Yeon Hee-jae the Nation's First Love. The moment when, in a torrential downpour, Hee-jae plants the very first seed of hope in Ki Tae-seok's heart.
Hee-jae: "Here, too… it can get better."
There was a sea nearby, but it was far too distant to reach by bicycle, and far beyond their means by car. Tae-seok had never even learned his letters—he'd done nothing but work since he was a child, because a man had to put food in his mouth somehow.
Liberation had come to the country, but it had never come to Tae-seok's life. Poverty still had him in its grip.
Look around and what did you see? Old things, shabby things, worthless things, rough things, jagged things—cheap, disposable junk. That was what Ki Tae-seok's life was made of. Things that seemed to have nothing at all in common with Yeon Hee-jae's life. And Tae-seok was ashamed of every last one of them.
But beside him, Hee-jae smiled and gazed out past that distant mountain. Here, too, things will surely get better. As if telling him to dream, she spread the future open before his eyes.
Hee-jae: "If lots of new shops open here, and lots of new people come…."
Tae-seok was clever, but that cleverness knew exactly how to calculate his own misfortune. This was a world where the cunning and ruthless climbed higher. He already knew there would be no place in it for him.
He knew, too, that chatting openly with a rich family's daughter like this was, at best, the outermost limit of the luck Ki Tae-seok's life would ever be granted.
He'd fallen for Hee-jae from the moment he first laid eyes on her, but the gulf in their stations was carved into his bones, and his own shabbiness made him sullen and brusque with her, nothing more.
I was still chewing over the key scenes and the characters' inner lives of The Great Garand when—
Myeong Je-ha, silent until now, spoke up.
"Who'd ever come all the way out here? What good's a shop? Won't make a dime. If it were me, I'd open it in Gyeongseong. Never out in some backwater like this. Why would I? There's nothing here to succeed at."
The instant Myeong Je-ha, seated across the table, delivered the line, the room became a stage.
Because everything around us fell silent. That was the kind of power in Myeong Je-ha's voice—the instantaneous power to seize everyone's attention.
"A reason? Um… you mean a reason? Right?"
"Yes. That. Why. Why, you ask."
"Because there is a reason."
The moment I answered with Hee-jae's line, Director Gong and Director Ja both looked startled.
Naturally. This is a famous scene—I'd rehearsed it who knows how many times.
I drew a slow breath, the way Hee-jae once had. Here in this liberated land, where clear rainwater stroked the soil as it passed and the air hung fresh and cold.
"There are so many people like you here, aren't there? People faithful to—to every single day."
A land where everyone burned with passion in their hearts, sang manse, and lived on toward tomorrow.
And there, into Tae-seok's chest, Hee-jae fired the bullet called liberation from poverty, driving it home deep.
"…What the—? Miss Yeo-reum, did you get the script ahead of time? Je-ha gave it to you first, didn't he! Right? Right?!"
"Aw, no. The line was short, so I just memorized it on the spot."
"No, forget the line—this nuance. Huh? How is the nuance just there? Yeesh… what even is this. Is that really not it?"
"Haha. Director, I've never once done that. Really. I only heard from Director Ja a little while ago, you see."
Director Gong made a huge fuss over me, and Myeong Je-ha shook his head at him. Director Gong slapped Director Ja on the shoulder—look at this, my actor—again and again.
And Director Ja, who until that moment had only ever said whatever he pleased, stared at me in silence, unblinking.
Yes… keep looking. This is your Yeon Hee-jae.
The Nation's First Love. I'm taking it.
The internet was already churning with real-time chatter about Faster Than the Law.
Eun-seol gnawed at her lips as she stared at her phone. Lately, everywhere she looked, Han Yeo-reum's name was there.
At some point, Do Gyeo-ul, Myeong Je-ha, and Han Yeo-reum had begun being lumped together under a single name: the Light Cohort of KNUA.
"Why the hell is Han Yeo-reum even in that group."
Coldly speaking, Myeong Je-ha she could understand. A double 10-million box office was not something just anyone achieved.
But Han Yeo-reum was another matter. The mere idea of a nobody like Han Yeo-reum standing shoulder to shoulder with Do Gyeo-ul felt, to Eun-seol, like an insult.
Eun-seol posted the comment under one of her many accounts. Then she logged out and logged back in under a different one.
Log out, log back in. Eun-seol repeated the cycle several times. And soon, others like her piled on alongside her.
So-called watering-down—drowning the praise in manufactured doubt. Eun-seol smiled as she watched the comment window blur and swirl.
"Oh, that's right, the time…."
It was already ten o'clock. The hour Strange Tales episode 4 went on air.
Eun-seol moved to the drama board. Sure enough, comments were already piling up on Strange Tales episode 4 before it had even begun.
Dozens of new comments with every refresh. Everyone had their eyes on Han Yeo-reum.
Eun-seol felt her stomach grow hot. An emotion she could barely contain began spreading through her, inch by inch.
And with that, Strange Tales episode 4 began.
The clear sky darkened by degrees. The scenery of Cheonmaekji filled the screen once more, but it no longer offered that wide-open beauty. Scattered storm clouds had settled over the village like a shroud.
Creeeak—.
The doors of the gisaeng house shut fast.
Inside the sealed gisaeng house, Hwa-yeong and the young women thrust out their tongues in unison, and onto each tongue they placed a single sharp needle.
"Ugh…."
Ae-tami, watching from her screen, found herself wincing without meaning to. Clear liquor was poured into their cups, and without a moment's hesitation, the girls swallowed the needles down with the drink.
Their eyes were uniformly, terribly cold. A bleak chill bled through the screen itself.
The eerie dread of a horror story came through undiluted.
Leaving the viewers awash in unease and fear, the scene shifted before they knew it.
Because Myeong-do and Seoryeong had kept the gisaeng house shut for days on end, the Magistrate was seething with fury. Now, with a pretext to lock up those eyesore lowlifes and fresh funding for "virtuous women" about to come his way, he resolved to sacrifice So-yeong for it.
"You. Don't go there."
"Hwa-yeong? What are you doing here…?"
It was Hwa-yeong who caught So-yeong as she stepped out alone into the darkening street, running her mother-in-law's errand.
The screen cut swiftly forward. Hwa-yeong summoned the Magistrate. When she claimed she had called for him privately, feeling guilty that the house had been closed and unable to serve him of late, he hurried over without a flicker of suspicion.
The Magistrate drank in high spirits and talked at length about Seoryeong and Myeong-do. He made a point of not heading to the gisaeng house—because the plan was to claim that Myeong-do and Seoryeong, drunk on liquor inside it, had been the ones to defile So-yeong.
He drank at his favorite lakeside pavilion, as he always did.
"The gall of those upstart bastards! Watching them trample all over my Cheonmaekji as they please, my very innards are boiling!"
Whoooo—. A cold wind blew. From far off, dark figures approached.
The Magistrate narrowed his eyes, straining to make out who they were.
"Who goes there? How dare—…!"
"Trampling as they please, you said?"
Seoryeong smiled, bright and winsome. And by the time he gathered his wits, they were seated across from him. The sight of Seoryeong picking up the liquor bottle uninvited and giving it a jaunty little shake made his blood boil.
"You lowborn wretch! How dare you touch the Seolbaekhwa!"
"Looks like you finished a whole bottle?"
Seoryeong paid him no mind, gauging the liquor remaining in the bottle. Only the faintest sloshing sounded within—it was plain the bottle had been drained to the last drop.
"That Hwa-yeong bitch—leaving me alone with filthy lowlifes like these and not saying a word—! …Hm?"
The Magistrate whirled toward Hwa-yeong, the easiest of his targets, to vent his rage—but no one sat beside him. What lay next to him was a straw doll, a talisman pinned to its chest.
"What were you planning to do with So-yeong?"
"…What. What is this…."
"I asked what you were planning to do."
Seoryeong set the liquor bottle back down on the table, then leaned her upper body forward, curling her lips into a mocking sneer.
"Like Jang-hwa and Hong-ryeon—you meant to use her to feed your own greed, didn't you? What a laughable creature you are."
"How dare you spew such slander! Those women were violated by a band of robbers, and unable to live on in defiled bodies, they took their own lives with honor!"
"Ha! A band of robbers?"
"Yes! Robb—… khk, khuuughk…!"
Barely had he finished crying robbers when the Magistrate clutched his throat, wheezing and writhing in agony, as if something were lodged deep in his gullet. He vomited up blood, vividly red.
"Cheonmaekji is ringed on every side by lakes. And yet a band of robbers comes here—not to Chimyeongji right next door, but here? Why, of all places? Even the merchants barely pass through."
Seoryeong wiped the smile from her face.
"A place where there's no money to be made—and bandits don't come one or two at a time, but in whole swarms? My, my. You truly are dim-witted creatures."
"Khuuughk…! Khk, kheuk…! What… did you… feed me…!"
"What you drank is Jabaekju. The moment you speak a lie, needles rise all at once inside your throat. I prepared it specially, just for you—so you can imagine my delight at watching you polish off an entire bottle."
Giggling, Seoryeong even clapped her hands, thoroughly enjoying herself. And through it all, the clear sound of water drifted up from beneath the pavilion.
"Now. Talk."
"…."
"If you don't answer my questions properly, those needles will rise and pierce straight through your heart. Is that what you'd prefer? Shall you throw away every last shred of your riches and glory and end it all yourself?"