Only Because They Are Human
That speech—I had rehearsed it alone not a few times, but dozens of them. I could have delivered it from start to finish without a teleprompter and without a single stumble.
“You can think of it as the ghost of a young child. The child dies, its soul scatters, and in that writhing, tangled state, it clings itself to a living person.”
Where to plant the force in each line, where to thread in breath, where to let the tremble show.
“A spirit that divines fortune and misfortune and carries word of things a hundred li away… a ghost. A ghost.”
I had studied it for a very long time. In a rehearsal room stripped bare, on empty streets in the middle of the night, even with a drink in my hand by myself.
“First, the child is shut inside a shed that lets in not a single ray of light. No matter how it weeps and wails and begs to be released, they never open the door—not until it has clawed the boards raw, until its nails rot away and blood seeps through the wood. Several days pass like that, and at last its strength gives out. Small wonder, locked in there without a grain of rice, without so much as a sip of water. But what the child feels more intensely than anything is terror. More than hunger. More than thirst. The terror that there is no one left in the world to save it… that it has fallen into a bottomless pit. Terror.”
Which was exactly why I could not afford to fumble the lines, not even once. I finished the long, long speech in a single take.
Even after a speech stretching past five minutes came to an end, the studio remained sunk in silence.
“…Director?”
But the director didn't give the okay. I hesitated a moment, then called out to him.
“Huh? Wha—? Me?”
“Yes. The speech… it's over.”
“Oh—right. Right, it's done. Um….”
Only then did the camera director, who had been staring at me like a man whose soul had left his body, scramble to check his script.
“Yeo-reum, you stopped right at the marked line, didn't you?”
“Yes. ‘Because I am human—’ up to that part.”
“It's not like I'm easily impressed, but that just hit me all of a sudden… no, seriously, you know what I mean. It's uncanny.”
As the camera director marveled over and over, the sound engineer beside him spoke up quietly.
“…I don't think we'll need a re-record.”
Only then did voices break out one by one. The frozen instant thawed, and the studio's air began to sear with heat.
“Whoa! You memorized all of that, Yeo-reum?”
“Unbelievable. Look at my arms—I'm covered in goosebumps.”
“If they actually make this into a drama, Yeo-reum has to play the lead. I honestly can't picture anyone else in the role.”
The praise rained down like a bombardment. The reaction was far fiercer than I'd even expected. I looked over at Team Leader Seong, and she quietly raised her thumb.
“Rookie Shin—”
Over in the PR department of JC ENM, Team Leader Hong called for Rookie Shin. Shin, who had been getting ready to head home, warily planted himself in front of his boss.
“Huh? Is there still work left to do…?”
With Pachehi wrapped, the PR team at JC ENM had settled back to a comfortable, ordinary temperature.
Granted, there was plenty and more to do. a music festival the broadcast channel was hosting outright, a brand-new variety program, the endless pipeline of film investments and distribution—not to mention musicals, concerts, and even digital singles and albums.
But nowhere was there a shred left of that high of having pioneered a whole new genre.
“Heh. You punk. If you want to last in this business, lose that clock-out-the-second-the-day-ends attitude of yours.”
“We come in on weekends too, so go easy on me, Team Leader~!”
Hong pulled up the cloud drive and clicked on a video. Even before he pressed play, the corners of his mouth were already curling upward.
“A video just landed on my desk. Take a guess what it is.”
“…I've been pulling overtime for a week straight. Do I really have to know?”
Hong dragged the guilt-ridden rookie, who plainly wanted nothing more than to go home, in close to the monitor.
“Wait—ASMR!!! The rough cut is already out???”
The moment he saw Han Yeo-reum's face, the rookie's expression lit up.
“Heh. That's right. It's out. If you don't want to watch it, clock out. Punk.”
“Aigoo, Team Leader. This one I have to watch.”
The rookie marveled that a rough cut even existed yet—and then marveled a second time at its runtime.
“Wait, this isn't just a clip, is it?”
Unless it was a capital-backed project like Pachehi, a rough cut almost never made its way to the PR office before final delivery. For InTube content, there was no need to circulate a press release ahead of the upload in the first place.
The standard practice for this kind of content was to wait until the upload was live, then mash together a few subscriber reactions into a press brief. Everyone here was a salaried worker, after all. A wage slave who ate overtime and weekend shifts like breakfast had zero appetite for anything beyond their assigned duties.
“Exactly, kid. You should've heard Team Leader Seong bragging…. She sent over the whole thing. Watch it.”
Long before his boss finished granting permission, the rookie clicked the mouse. In front of the microphone, Yeo-reum opened her mouth.
“…Wow….”
Diction pierced the speaker and drilled straight into the ear. She spat out terrifying lines with a blank face, as if they cost her nothing. Every syllable seemed lacquered with a thin skin of ice in that frigid voice.
The script reading video for Pachehi had been startling in its own right, but this footage existed on an entirely different plane.
“So she… can do this too, huh.”
Sticky slime sounds slithered beneath a spine-chilling ghost story. Anxious breaths were woven in between. The two men fell silent, absorbed in the rough cut.
Even after the brief video ended, something wet and clinging seemed to linger at the edge of their ears.
“When is editing supposed to be finished?”
“This Wednesday. And it goes up Friday night.”
If the rough cut was already this good, it was impossible to guess what quality the finished cut would reach. The rookie was seized by the urge to replay the whole thing from the top.
“Team Leader. Is it seriously true that Head Director Jegal Rok is bringing Han Yeo-reum in? How has he watched this and still not made a move?”
“Beats me. Who can read that man's mind.”
It was downright frustrating that Han Yeo-reum wasn't formally affiliated with JC ENM. Rookie Shin wanted, for no reason at all, to brag about her. The PR team's blood was boiling.
“When the video goes up, I'll handle the press distribution myself! That's allowed, right?”
Leaving on time had become entirely unnecessary. In this moment, Rookie Shin was steeped in the anticipation that Pachehi might be followed by a whole new InTube market.
“It's here!!!”
Ae-ta-mi clicked the instant the notification arrived. The day before, the official SNS account had posted a thirty-second teaser as a little appetizer, and thanks to it she'd been able to see Yeo-reum for the first time in ages.
Right after the Le-el Style Awards, now an InTube channel too… why is our girl so endlessly good to us….
This came on the heels of saving a good hundred or so photos of Yeo-reum showing off her unhinged makeup beside Ju Jun-seo. The endless stream of bait made Ae-ta-mi's heart swell to epic proportions. Before she knew it, the screen was filled with Yeo-reum. Standing before the microphone with an expressionless face, she wasn't so much as breathing audibly, and very, very quietly…
“…Hah….”
…she built the dread.
The speech began calm and gentle, then hardened by degrees until it was cold as frost. Though it was pure exposition, somewhere in it surfaced what felt like a quiet disillusionment with humanity itself.
With no background music whatsoever—nothing but the voice—the chill crept in all the same. Each gloomy line lodged itself clean and sharp in the ear.
It was unmistakably a whisper. Soothing the mind into ease before sleep—wasn't that the very essence of ASMR?
And yet Yeo-reum set hearts racing with that small voice. As if comfort were a concept she had never once encountered, goosebumps crawled up the back of the neck.
Only when Yeo-reum drew a slow, deliberate breath did Ae-ta-mi finally realize.
She never breathed once that entire time!
That was why she'd been able to sink so completely into the lines. After one beat of held-back breathing, the next line lay waiting. The tension never broke. Slowly gripping the transparent container, Yeo-reum lifted the lid.
Click.
For a moment, the tiny sound pierced the silent air like a plosive. Then came the wet, clinging noise. Kneading the black slime flecked with violet pulses in her hand, Yeo-reum carried on.
Merely lacing the slime sounds between the lines perfected the dank, oppressive atmosphere one degree further.
Though no scene appeared on screen, it painted itself vividly before her eyes. She saw the small child locked in an old storage shed. The dark-red nail marks left inside its darkness. Blood running along the grain of the wood. She could almost hear the child's voice pleading to be let out.
The small child collapsed alone in a vast, boundless darkness grew clearer by the second. Filthy bare feet rising to ankles stripped to bone, then up to ragged clothing, to a small hand whose nails had all fallen away. Eyelids shut as though dead, opening them too great an effort. Cheeks hollowed clean through….
It all landed with a chill that bordered on too much. Yeo-reum was doing nothing more than explaining how a Taejagwi was made—and even so.
“How….”
It was nauseating just to listen. Taking a young child and—how on earth. Just as Ae-ta-mi murmured the words under her breath, Yeo-reum answered as though she'd heard.
The viscous sound thickened by a shade.
The sound of the stretching slime dwindled away. The screen filled with darkness, and alongside the rewind bar, a row of recommended videos sprang up. Yeo-reum was already gone. Even knowing the video was over, Ae-ta-mi stared blankly at the screen for a long while.