The Server Couldn't Take It

"Well then, I'll be heading off."

Myeong Je-ha said it with the air of someone who already knew exactly which role I'd be taking in the not-so-distant future.

"Hold on! Then what about Yoon Hyun-jo sunbae? You've got something on that too, don't you?"

When I grabbed him by the collar in a panic, Myeong Je-ha stopped mid-step. Then he let out a small laugh.

"Yep. There's no industry on earth where the butterfly effect flaps its wings quite like this one."

"Excuse me, wise elder. Could you skip the ominous foreshadowing and start with the ending spoilers, please?"

"I'll get to it someday soon."

With a breezy little wave, Myeong Je-ha turned ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠and walked away just as he was.

And sure enough, before long, I would have to use that wish right—exactly as he'd said.

The moment Gimyodam ended, the advertising proposals came flooding in. Love calls arrived from every corner of the industry, and some of them were seriously heavyweight.

I was reading through the proposals when I froze for a moment.

Have I ruined my eyes from reading too many scripts?

The campaign period registered clearly enough. It was the figures that wouldn't. The figures….

"Who are you?"

Manager Choi seized my by the shoulders, the corners of her mouth curling upward.

"You're Han Yeo-reum."

"Unnie…!"

Every single day was a blur. There was the interview with Daily Media, and straight after that, the move to shoot the October cover of Leel. The ceaseless bursts of camera flashes kept whiting out my vision.

"You've been drawing a lot of attention for Gimyodam lately. It's hard to believe you're only a year into your debut—where does acting like this even come from?"

"This might sound a little cringe, but… I think it comes from love. A film or a drama only carries over a tiny sliver of a character's life, right? The rest of the time, it's on me to understand them. Without love, there's a limit to how deeply you can dig."

The instant the Leel shoot wrapped, I was whisked off to the photo wall at Brand N's event.

"Han Yeo-reum! Over here!"

"Heart! Look here and do a finger heart! To the left!"

Wherever I went, there were people calling my name. And whenever I rode somewhere in a car, my own face would often flash by outside the window.

At the bus stops. On the screens mounted on building walls. Along the walls of the drugstore. On the signboards outside franchise cafés.

I was there. Scattered across every corner of the city, as if laughing at the old days when I used to wonder whether ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠anyone would ever bother learning my name.

Han Yeo-reum is here.

Ae-tami clutched the snack box stamped with Yeo-reum's face. It was ten minutes before the funding opened. To calm her anxious heart, she popped a mugwort sandwich cookie into her mouth.

"Yeo-reum, isn't it strange…."

This wasn't ticketing. This was funding. There was no way to fail. Of course she'd be able to purchase the product within the window—that much was a given.

"So why are my hands shaking like this?"

Over the past month, Yeo-reum had rocketed upward. Every condition had aligned perfectly, as if Han Yeo-reum had simply been waiting all along for her moment to arrive.

As Faster Than the Law crossed the ten-million-viewer mark, Han Yeo-reum's scene-stealing Influencer 1 began to shine all the brighter.

Not only was Yeo-reum's red head plastered across InTube thumbnails, but her ballooning follower count sent last year's photos circulating all over again.

The photos she'd taken week after week during ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Music N were decorating feeds everywhere. The Not Interested At All still cuts that had once circulated as "feels like an indie film poster" swept through the communities a second time, and all eyes turned to Han Yeo-reum's hair.

And that wasn't all.

Brand N's sales have been climbing nonstop, too.

Brand N, the first fashion house to choose Yeo-reum, saw the response come pouring in the moment they unveiled their fall pictorial. If things kept up this way, she could already picture the winter season—the most profitable of the year—sending padded jacket sales soaring even higher.

And Creamy Soda was selling out everywhere.

Creamy Soda, launched in collaboration with Namwon apples, was already showing signs of ushering in the next big trend in the liquor industry. She'd even heard that First Dew, the longtime king of the soju market, was scrambling to put out a low-alcohol drink of its own before it was too late.

Hanseol Binggwa's order volume is up too, and these sandwich cookies are obviously no exception.

Yeo-reum's influence was swelling by the day. Was this uneasiness, perhaps, actually born of excitement?

"Hooowww…."

Ae-tami drew a deep breath. Without her noticing, only one minute remained.

Everyone in the fandom has their eyes on this funding right now—I just know it!

And it wasn't just the fandom. The Gimyodam team's First Car Live appearance had become a full-blown meme in its own right.

Furious ChaerinChaeAsMom's chat message had taken root as a meme. Now, whenever an agency or production company pulled anything sketchy, this was how people responded.

So right now, beyond the devoted fandom, the general public was pouring no small amount of attention into the Gimyodam funding.

"Obviously the quality's going to be great!"

Better still, people trusted that this team would never hold their affection hostage and milk them for money with some half-baked product. And if a funding campaign of such high quality became a hot topic all over again, that was good news for JC ENM too.

"Three… two… one…!"

The time had come. Ae-tami waited for the funding page to open.

"…What is this?"

Something was wrong. No matter how long she waited, the page refused to load.

And at the end of that eternity of waiting, the window that finally appeared on her screen was—

"Don't tell me…"

It was. The funding site had crashed.

"YOU IDIOTS!"

Ae-tami seized her head in both hands and shrieked. In perfect contrast to her, the Yeo-reum printed on the cookie box on her desk was beaming brightly.

The Gimyodam funding had performed the feat of crashing a server for the very first time since the site opened.

Ki Joo-ye studied the phone screen in her hand, reading the currents of public opinion.

"This works out nicely…."

Gimyodam hadn't simply been a drama that was fun right up to the finale. It was a drama that had poured everything it had into its final episode and burned it all.

The exact opposite of a finale that fizzles out, gets forgotten by everyone, and is never mentioned again.

Which meant that the sweeping, monumental last episode kept breathing after the show ended, carrying its buzz forward into the aftermath.

All of it fed straight into national pride—and, by extension, into goodwill toward Han Yeo-reum.

But this is poison, pure and simple.

Ki Joo-ye's lips curled into a slow smile.

When a rookie with a fanbase that had never learned to defend itself did nothing but draw praise from every direction, it was inevitable that people like this would crawl out of the woodwork:

"Unnie. When on earth is The Great Garand casting board going up?"

"Soon, I'm sure. Our marketing team's been working their tails off."

When Ki Joo-ye pressed her manager, the woman managed a smile that was meant to be reassuring.

"You know what we're capable of."

At this very moment, Ki Joo-ye's agency was viraling Han Yeo-reum.

The so-called "hype job." They hadn't forgotten to keep hammering that unforgettable spirit-possession scene into everyone's memory, either.

Good grief. She got ahead of herself. She never should have flaunted herself like that just because she can act a little.

If the shaman image from Gimyodam hardened, the whole board would tilt off-kilter. After all, no investor alive had a taste for a child role that devoured its own leads.

The first love.

That role was now about to fall into Ki Joo-ye's grasp.

"This is a disaster…."

Red alert lights were flashing across JC ENM's marketing department.

A success that demolished every forecast would have been fine on its own. The problem was the volume of mentions, which had blown clean past every expectation.

"Come right up! We've got the Heavenly Fortune String and the Five Blessings String too!"

New products had been added to the souvenir shops. The Heavenly Fortune String and Five Blessings String once bound around Seo-ryeong's wrist had been swept clean off the shelves by Taiwanese tourists.

A photo of a visitor standing before Gyeongbokgung, ticket in hand and a Heavenly Fortune String knotted around their wrist, was now hailed as the definitive Korea travel verification shot.

"Rookie actress Han Yeo-reum-ssi, known as Seo-ryeong, is being called Taiwan's youth star…."

They had known she'd be popular. They just hadn't known she'd be this popular. And the real problem came next.

Yeo-reum's shaman image, striking from the very beginning, had only grown more indelible. Because that scene in episode sixteen carried a resonance people simply couldn't shake.

It wasn't just good acting—it was acting that forced whoever watched it to feel something vast and vertiginous. Han Yeo-reum had overwhelmed her audience with sheer skill, plain and simple.

The response on the Taiwanese platforms is even hotter than in Korea….

On the drama streaming platforms, Gimyodam had held the number-one spot without a single interruption.

"Focus! Not on Han Yeo-reum—aim the spotlight at Gimyodam itself!"

"Keep the momentum rolling!"

JC strained with all its might to shift the spotlight away from Han Yeo-reum.

But even JC failed.

The fire had already caught. The center of public attention had become Han Yeo-reum, and no matter how hard they yanked the rudder, the public's gaze refused to drift anywhere else.

So being too good at acting is a problem too, huh.

For the first time in its existence, the marketing team was genuinely flustered.

"PR team! What's the status on the Ki Joo-ye situation?"

"We're grabbing as many keywords as we can, but it's…."

The PR team, having caught wind of Ki Joo-ye's viral campaign, had been working just as hard to cement her image as the untouchable chaebol heiress of Top Class.

But the impact simply wasn't comparable.

Even in a supporting role, Ki Joo-ye's presence had already been swallowed whole by Joo Jun-seo—burning her image sharply into the public mind was an uphill battle.

And as Han Yeo-reum carved out her place among the Rising with what amounted to a solo march powered by Gimyodam, she drifted that much further from the role of Yeon Hee-jae in The Great Garand.

"…How are things looking on Eun Baek-hap's side right now?"

No lead actor enjoys watching a child role's influence grow. In this industry, influence was status.

"Since the casting board hasn't gone up yet, there's a chance she'll pass on it."

If this kept up, the marketing for The Great Garand might well proceed not around the lead, Eun Baek-hap, but around "the actress who brought the Hallyu wave to Taiwan," Han Yeo-reum—despite her appearing in a mere four episodes out of twenty-four.

"Absolutely not! Ji Hae-beom's side isn't confirmed yet either—if Eun Baek-hap falls through, Ji Hae-beom might pull out too!"

And then the investors would scatter. Right now, the central pillar holding The Great Garand together was Ji Hae-beom.

"Ji Hae-beom, you say?"

"…This could actually work."

"Worst case, we break even! If it lands, the returns multiply several times over!"

Investors came sprinting with sacks of money at the mere whisper that he would take the lead—there was never just one or two of them.

"…Manager Ma, what do we do?"

An employee who had finally grasped the gravity of the situation turned to Manager Ma.