Prologue. I Wanted to Be an Actor
I had a dream.
"Hi there! I'm a cancer cell! I've come to wreck your life, starting now!"
In the dream, a swarm of tiny pitch-black monsters came at me with tiny forks, stabbing and jabbing me from every direction. And the truly rotten part was realizing it wasn't just a dream.
I was an intelligence agent — not some two-bit street thug earning pocket change for petty crimes, but an A-grade operative working for the state, handling the kind of targets most people only read about in headlines.
Which is why I'd always assumed my ending would be a dramatic death in the line of duty, the result of some failed mission. Instead, my cause of death turned out to be, of all things, absurd.
"You have pancreatic cancer."
"...How serious is it?"
"I... as a doctor, standing in front of my patient, I'm truly sorry to have to say this. But I think you need to prepare yourself."
Death by illness. Pancreatic cancer — a disease so hard to catch early that its fatality rate bordered on a death sentence.
I'd never had the chance to recognize the symptoms. Given the nature of my work, a body in pain was simply daily life; stomach aches and weight loss were nothing worth reporting. After all, wouldn't it have been ridiculous for a man who could feel his neck snap at any moment on some grim battlefield to walk into a hospital complaining of indigestion?
And so I died... or rather, I was about to.
"What a genuinely shit life."
I should have been lying in a hospital bed, but instead I'd shed every last attachment and returned to the place I called home. The doctors and nurses were no doubt in a panic over a terminal patient vanishing overnight, but I was dying either way — so what difference did it make?
"..."
Or maybe, just maybe, coming back here was proof I hadn't let go after all.
My eyes fell on the shelves crammed with hundreds of script bundles, and on the full-length mirror I'd smashed in a fit of rage the moment I heard the word pancreatic.
"Attachment, huh..."
As a child, my dream had been to become an actor.
But fate hadn't been kind enough to leave that choice open to me. The burdens I'd been handed were far too heavy for chasing dreams.
A father who gambled away astronomical sums of debt and walked out on his family. A mother who left this world early, crushed by stress and overwork. I needed money to survive, and to earn money, I had to do whatever came my way.
But if you live long enough, life eventually hands you a single chance to turn everything upside down — and the chance that came to me wore the face of a considerably old grandfather.
"You've got good eyes, young man? And a decent build, too. How about devoting that energy to your country for a change?"
That day, every debt I had was wiped clean.
I learned to fight. I learned the art of deception. And in the process, I recovered a memory I'd long buried — that my dream had been acting. That for someone whose entire life had been misery, the stage was the only escape where I could abandon myself and become someone else.
Whenever I carried out a mission, I could become the fictional person I'd built from the ground up.
Once I played an executive at a famous overseas corporation. Another day I was a homeless man; the day after, a volunteer handing out meals to them. One day a writer, then a cop, a gangster, a teacher, a student.
The National Intelligence Service's veiled blade. A life spent living as someone else, behind the mask called mission.
"I suppose I was an actor in my own way, wasn't I?"
I'd enjoyed it. Even if it was a job the state had ordered me to do, whenever I was in the act of performing, I was always sincere.
Then a month ago, single-handedly, I annihilated an illegal organization running narcotics, and I'd been tying up loose ends, preparing to retire.
"Khack...!"
But it was too late. A dry cough escaped through the fingers pressed over my mouth, and dark red blood trickled down my wrist.
"...So it's real blood."
None of those special props I'd used over the years while playing sick could compare.
This was blood welling up from the wreckage of my insides. My heartbeat stuttered out of rhythm. My bloated stomach began to burn, and my vision blurred at the same time.
As consciousness slipped away, I reached out toward the hundreds of bundles of longing I was leaving behind in this world.
But that was all.
CRASH—!
My hand scraped through empty air in a half-arc, and my body, slammed against the floor, would carry out no further orders.
...It was a truly dog-shit life.
If heaven and hell truly exist in this world, then the day I met that old man from the National Intelligence Service, I must have booked myself a one-way ticket to hell. After all, the years I'd spent deceiving people — and sometimes killing them — didn't vanish just because the other side had been villains.
Blink—
But I suppose even hell is a place where people live, because the scenery that greeted my eyes wasn't all that unfamiliar.
A cramped one-room apartment, mold creeping into every corner of the ceiling. A desk tucked in the corner, holding nothing but a single sheet of paper and a pill bottle.
Yet the most shocking sight before me began — of all places — with the full-length mirror staring back at me.
"...What the—?"
A tall, strikingly handsome young man — freshly twenty, if that. In the mirror, a man with a dried smear of blood at the corner of his mouth was staring straight back at me with the startled eyes of a rabbit.