Drifting to the Dreamland Set
Seven in the morning. That was when another day at the orphanage officially began.
Is it that time already?
I peeled my eyes open. The other kids were nowhere to be seen; only Madame Hwang stood in the room.
"Director, where's everyone else?"
"Downstairs eating breakfast."
They all got up early and left without me?
Normally, they'd be thrashing around in dreamland, clinging to their blankets for dear life. They were never the type to snap awake right at seven on the dot.
"Everyone except you is up and eating," she said. "Get moving. You need breakfast in your stomach."
"It's Crescent Bread and plain white milk today, right?"
"Wrong. Chocolate cornet bread and strawberry milk. We got all that free milk the other day, so I bought treats with the leftover food budget."
"No way! Crescent Bread and white milk is where the real flavor is!"
"Figured you'd whine about it, so I set some aside for you. Go eat that."
"All hail the Director. Truly the GOAT."
A mother in spirit who raises them with love despite never giving birth to them... Truly, the Greatest of All Time.
Down in the cafeteria, I chewed on my bread and surveyed the room. The kids were practically beaming—a shockingly vibrant sight for this hour of the morning. Apparently, chocolate cornets and strawberry milk were the ultimate luxury. It was a special treat funded entirely by my dairy-grinding exploit, freeing up surplus cash in the grocery budget.
Watching the kids wolf down their pastries, Madame Hwang wore a proud, warm-hearted smirk.
"I keep telling you, we shouldn't be buying chocolate cornets. We should be buying Bitcoin."
Do you have any idea how much Bitcoin costs right now!
Well, I didn't know the exact price, but it had to be dirt cheap in this era. Just let it sit for a decade or two, and you'd be a billionaire!
Despite my impassioned plea, the director remained stubbornly dismissive.
"Not interested."
"Why not?"
"Does that stuff fill their bellies? I'm busy enough trying to keep these kids fed."
Man, talk about blowing an absolute golden ticket when it's handed to you.
"Is it because you're a cyclops? You really have unique priorities."
"I'm not a cyclops. This is a fashion eyepatch."
"Starve a little now, and we'd be rolling in cash later!"
At that, she rounded her exposed eye at me.
"If getting rich was my goal, do you think I'd be running an orphanage?"
"Ah... Fair point."
"Stop spouting nonsense and shove that food down your gullet. I've got work in the kitchen."
Robbed of a rebuttal, I quietly munched on my bread. Before long, two little figures came pattering over: Yisol and Eunwoo, my roommates.
"Well, look who it is. The traitors."
"Why are we traitors?"
Last time, they stole makeup and pinned the blame on me, and today they scurried down to breakfast without even waking me up. If that wasn't betrayal, what was? What if all the Crescent Bread had vanished while I was asleep?
"We tried waking you up, Donga, but you wouldn't budge!"
"Yeah! Besides, you only eat the Crescent Bread that nobody else touches anyway! We had to get in line fast. What if all the chocolate cornets ran out?!"
"You abandoned your roommate for a measly chocolate cornet?"
Unforgivable.
I feinted a lunge toward the strawberry milk Yisol was nursing so carefully.
Opening!
And swiped Eunwoo's carton instead.
"My strawberry milk!"
Narrowly dodging the daylight robbery, Yisol clutched her milk tightly against her chest.
Tsk, that one's locked down.
While I scoped out another angle of attack, Eunwoo snapped out of her daze and barked back, "I-I know you hate strawberry milk! You don't even drink it! Give it back, right now!"
She was trying hard to sound tough, but her trembling hands betrayed her—looking just like someone whose hostage was on the chopping block. A smirk tugged at my lips.
"I'm not drinking this strawberry milk."
Did she see a flicker of hope in my words? Eunwoo's eyes dilated with anticipation.
"Then...?"
"What I'm drinking is your despair."
Slurp—!
"Aaaah..."
I downed the sweet pink milk in one glorious gulp, holding eye contact with her despair-drenched pupils.
"No way..."
Collapsing in sheer shock before the crumpled, empty carton, Eunwoo stared into the void. I leaned in close, as if to whisper a comforting secret in her ear—
Buuuurp!
"Eeeek!!"
Unable to contain her explosive fury, Kang Eunwoo lunged.
Sure, she packed decent power for an orphan kid, but...
"You picked the wrong opponent."
A gender-bent reincarnator naturally possesses strength far exceeding that of an ordinary woman—let alone ordinary humans.
Everyone knows that, right? That's basic web novel logic!
I firmly planted a hand to suppress Eunwoo's charging arm.
...Huh?
Eunwoo completely blew past my block with sheer brute force.
"Eunwoo beat Donga!"
Wait, this shouldn't be happening?!
I fought back with everything I had, only to get thoroughly humiliated.
"Guh-waaagh?!"
Hey! Going for the Adam's apple—or whatever's there now—is a foul!
"Spit it out! Even if you puke it back up, I'm drinking it!"
"Time out! Timeout!"
Throwing my full body weight into it, I barely managed to pin her arms. Her limbs vibrated with murderous toddler rage.
"I'm sorry! I'll get you a brand new one!"
"...Really?"
"Of course! Just wait right here."
Moments later, I returned with an unopened carton of strawberry milk. It was the one originally allocated to me, which I hadn't touched.
The instant she saw it in my hand, all the pouty malice evaporated from her face.
"Drink up."
Consider this a gracious gift from a mature adult to an innocent child. And by intentionally letting her 'win,' I'd generously relieved her of any guilt.
Yes, exactly. I definitely didn't surrender out of pure physical intimidation. Not at all.
I sprawled out flat on the floor beside Eunwoo, who was happily slurping her milk. Yisol knelt down and poked my cheek with a finger.
"Donga, did you really fail the commercial? You're not going to be on TV?"
"I failed the commercial, yeah, but I might still end up on TV."
"Huh? What does that mean?"
"I made such a great impression that I got invited to a whole new audition. If that goes well, I might not just be on TV—I could be on the big screen in movie theaters."
"How?"
"It's an indie short film. If we get lucky, it'll play in indie cinemas, or enter film festivals and get broadcast during the award ceremonies."
"Indie cinemas? Award ceremonies?"
Truth be told, I wasn't entirely clear on the technical details myself. Cinematic art, screen monopoly debates—none of that meant a thing to me. All I knew was which film sets served good catering.
"The point is, I might be in it. Which means making money."
"How much?"
"Enough to throw away the bread and eat just the cream out of a chocolate cornet."
"Whoaaa! That's so wasteful! Really?!"
Come to think of it, indie shorts definitely didn't pay that well.
Still, this project had an unusually high chance of making waves. Above all, the director was Lee Changseop.
As I recalled, he was a director whose commercial releases consistently cleared their break-even points and hit big at the box office.
Who would've thought he'd be freelancing at a commercial audition?
Directors who hadn't made a name for themselves yet often worked as camera assistants or general production crew to scrape together lump sums of cash. Apparently, the pre-fame Lee Changseop was no exception.
A short film, huh.
If memory served, Director Lee Changseop's commercial feature debut had been adapted directly from a short film he'd directed earlier in his career.
That short had to be the very project he was preparing now.
While I couldn't recall the short's exact title, the commercial feature had been named Descent of the Gods.
The plot in a nutshell: A young girl born into a shamanic bloodline is possessed by a malevolent demon instead of a benevolent spirit. Her desperate family searches high and low to save her, only to be duped by shamans worshiping evil deities. Caught in the middle, a group of Catholic priests steps up to exorcise the entity while the dark shamans scheme to summon it fully into the world.
There wasn't anything wildly groundbreaking about it, but it was solid, well-paced, and genuinely entertaining. Entertaining enough that after watching it, I'd scavenged online forums looking for behind-the-scenes trivia and production lore.
That was how I'd stumbled across the existence of the original short film in the first place.
Though... I don't remember seeing a child actor in that short film when I watched it back then.
Did they cut the footage during editing because it didn't work?
Scenes getting left on the cutting room floor because the performance was unsalvageable happened all the time in indie productions, so it wasn't impossible.
Or maybe they couldn't find a child actor in time and had to rewrite the plot.
Knowing this industry, the latter was far more likely.
To begin with, the role itself was an absolute nightmare for any child actor to pull off.
The sheer difficulty of the acting aside, there was another issue: how should I put it...
From a parenting standpoint, it's downright taboo.
The character was a young girl possessed by a vicious male demon. Whenever the entity seized control, the sweet little girl was scripted to unleash foul-mouthed tirades and engage in bone-chillingly grotesque behavior.
Eating raw animal intestines, that sort of thing.
Maybe a middle or high schooler could manage, but what sane parent would let their young child do that? If you sprang that on an auditioning kid out of nowhere, any guardian would throw a fit and demand to know what kind of sick film this was.
Director Lee probably knew that full well, which is why he handed out the audition script in advance.
I reviewed the script once more.
The scene required for the audition was a sequence where the girl, gradually succumbing to the encroaching demon, spews vile curses and strikes terror straight into the hearts of her family.
I read through the lines meticulously, engraving every beat into my memory so that I could picture it with perfect clarity the moment I closed my eyes.
Hwang Dongbun, director of Hwangdong Orphanage, watched Hwang Donga closely.
Like many of the orphans under her roof, she didn't know where the girl had inherited her quirks, but Donga managed to catch her off guard at every turn.
Who could have guessed she'd actually be good at acting?
Donga had always been an unusual kid, but up until now, her antics had stayed roughly within the bounds of a precocious child. Well, perhaps excessively precocious, given that half the time she talked like a grizzled, world-weary middle-aged man who had rolled through the gutter of life.
Yet her performance at the commercial audition had been something else entirely. The instant the girl stepped into character, she had radiated the unblemished innocence of fresh white milk.
Can someone truly be born with a talent for acting?
People often romanticized the arts as pure inborn genius, but in truth, training and environment played just as pivotal a role in helping that talent bloom.
That was doubly true for young children.
Other child actors attended specialized acting academies and received private coaching, but this orphanage offered nothing of the sort. As the facility's director, she knew that better than anyone.
And yet, the presence Donga displayed at the commercial audition had easily eclipsed those polished children.
It was undoubtedly that very spark that had sent the staff member chasing after them, practically begging the girl to audition for his film.
"Did you get any practice in?" Dongbun asked.
"In my head, yes."
"Since when can you practice acting just by thinking about it?"
Donga flashed an incredulous look. Every now and then, this little squirt wore an expression that practically screamed How can an adult be this clueless?—a face that practically begged for a sharp knuckle-knock to the skull.
"Obviously you can't."
"Then why didn't you actually practice?"
"Because it's not the kind of acting you do around an orphanage. Screaming bloody murder and spouting hideous curses in front of the other kids? People would get the entirely wrong idea, wouldn't they?"
"Fair enough."
Rumors would undoubtedly spread that the orphanage director was conducting dark rituals on the children.
Donga was taking all of that into account before making a move.
She grew up way too fast.
"You didn't have to worry about that," Dongbun said gruffly.
"It's fine. I've already practiced plenty. And I'm about to get some more in right now."
"More practice?"
The commercial audition hadn't provided a private green room for applicants, but this independent film audition was in even tighter straits; the waiting hallway was cramped and bare.
Even so, quite a few children and their mothers filled the corridor.
Anyone would be sweating nerves in a setting like this, yet Donga appeared completely unbothered. Curious about what the girl meant, Dongbun watched as Donga hopped onto an empty folding chair and closed her eyes.
"What are you doing?"
"Shh. Don't talk to me. I'm practicing in my head."
Snapping at an adult?
Under normal circumstances, that cheekiness would have earned her an immediate rap on the knuckles, but Dongbun let it slide this time.
I'll save the discipline for later.
With her eyes closed, Donga's posture relaxed. Before long, soft, even breaths drifted from her lips.
Zzzzz...
"Practicing, my foot. She's sound asleep."
Dongbun had heard of athletes taking power naps to relax their muscles and shake off tension, but did actors do that too?
Chuckling under her breath, Hwang Dongbun stayed right by the girl's side, keeping guard so she wouldn't slip off the chair and hurt herself.
When Donga opened her eyes, pitch darkness enveloped her on every side. Though the shadows obscured the perimeter, any actor who had spent years scrambling for bit roles would recognize this space instantly.
It was a film set.
Donga was no exception.
Looks like I fell asleep properly.
She stood in the center of the dark expanse, illuminated by a small, crackling campfire.
Within the warm halo of light and heat cast by the fire sat a single mounted camera.
With practiced familiarity, she switched on the camera, took her mark in front of the lens, and threw herself into the performance required for the audition.
"How was that?"
She checked the playback.
Yikes. That looked awful.
I didn't look demon-possessed at all—I looked like a drunk passed out on the sidewalk.
She reset and performed the scene again. Then she reviewed the tape.
A little better than before.
From the register of her voice to the micro-movements of her gaze, she adjusted every minute variable, running through the scene over and over, analyzing each iteration.
She shifted the camera's angle, checked how the silhouette read from different perspectives, and methodically calibrated her execution.
Some purists argued that acting had to well up strictly from internal emotion, but Hwang Donga had always disagreed.
Unless the audience had mastered telepathy, they couldn't peek inside an actor's soul. That was why acting was, above all else, an art of presentation—of how you were perceived.
Emotions had to be externalized through physical motion, breathing rhythms, and eye contact.
Right now, she was sculpting her craft through the objective eyes of the audience.
She dialed in the vocal pitch so the emotion landed cleanly, introducing an unsettling dissonance into her small body that no ordinary girl should possess.
Using the vessel of a child to project an ancient demon.
Now it's finally starting to look presentable.
Hwang Donga reviewed the footage with seasoned efficiency.
It was a level of familiarity that defied her apparent age.
And for good reason: whenever she closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep, she always wound up right here.
How much time do I have left?
Donga checked the hourglass resting beside the campfire.
Still over an hour.
She dusted off her pants and pushed herself to her feet.
Alright, let's take it from the top.
Even to her, it felt surreal.
To think falling asleep summons me to some mysterious soundstage where I can rehearse indefinitely.
Who would have guessed her gender-bender reincarnation perk would look like this?