Persuasive Power
Of everything Yeon-woo considered while shooting the commercial, the thing he weighed most carefully was cheesiness.
Fantasy as a genre inevitably split audiences hard. The bare visual of swords and armor was enough to turn some people off on sight.
White Blood had been a hit, sure—but no matter how loudly everyone around them raved about how good it was, the people who refused to watch still refused to watch.
Even someone who's never seen the drama has to be able to look at this and not feel like it's childish.
Yeon-woo surveyed the set and gave a small nod.
The cast was already changed into their White Blood costumes.
Cheesiness hit the moment a viewer couldn't sink into the story. Put the exact same swords and armor into a historical drama and no one called it childish—because the genre had already struck an unspoken contract with its audience. Historical drama was period storytelling about an age when people actually carried blades and wore plate. That agreement was already sealed, so viewers could throw themselves in without hesitation.
But a commercial only seconds long made immersion twice as hard to earn. Two things had to lock into place perfectly: meticulous special effects—and acting fierce enough to seize a viewer in a heartbeat.
The effects I can leave to Director Jeong Yo-han…
This was no place to treat an ad lightly. If anything, because it was an ad, every second demanded everything they had—enough force to pin a viewer's attention and hold it.
"All right, we're rolling. We'll be putting this in slow motion, so give me the biggest strides you can."
At Jeong Yo-han's words, Yeon-woo and the expedition cast nodded.
The scene they were about to shoot was the group shot of the expedition members emerging from a dark corridor, gradually catching the light as they stepped into the open. Makeup had pushed the sequence later in the schedule, but once the commercial started it would be the very first image on screen. That meant it needed even more impact—enough to pull a viewer under at once. Matching each other's energy would only help.
Yeon-woo met the eyes of the actors flanking him, one by one, then spoke.
"Everyone—play the versions of yourselves from White Blood after every mission is done. Mentally leveled up. Full of confidence."
It was the first real acting note he'd given since the commercial shoot began, and they all looked at him. Then they nodded.
"A grown Akhenaton, huh… All right. I'll give it a shot."
"I'll do my best to match that too."
Hearing Jeong Cheol-min and Dong-ha, Han Byeol and Jeong Su-yeon nodded as well.
"High action."
On Jeong Yo-han's cue, Dong-ha and Jeong Su-yeon—stationed at either end of the formation—stepped forward first.
Confident, unapologetic strides. Growth hadn't been limited to Akhenaton on-screen; Dong-ha poured real feeling into his walk with surprising ease. Jeong Su-yeon lifted her chin and stepped out lightly, covering ground in long, model-like strides.
Both of them are solid.
They were still in the red robe and white coat costumes from the series, but the self-assured faces and sure footing cut the awkwardness the clothes might have carried.
The corridor set they were shooting on had overlapping baffles across the ceiling, so light fell in patches—bright stretches broken by dark. As Dong-ha and Jeong Su-yeon advanced, the intermittent lighting caught them in pulses and deepened the mood.
The moment those two took their steps, Jeong Cheol-min and Han Byeol followed.
Jeong Cheol-min was the eldest; Han Byeol the youngest. Age aside, they shared one thing: of everyone in the expedition besides Yeon-woo, they had the strongest craft. Falling in on the diagonal behind the first pair, the two of them looked just as natural—no stiffness anywhere.
From the outside in, one after another, until only Yeon-woo remained at the center. Then the man at the tip of the V-formation took his first step.
From the opening beat—pull them in with the strongest acting I have.
He locked his mind down and let presence pour off him.
Reading the spill of light through the ceiling baffles, he walked forward.
Watching on the monitor, Jeong Yo-han took the image of Yeon-woo through his eyes and felt it drive itself into his brain. The edit would slow everything down, yes—but the set was real time. Nothing should have looked slow.
…So why does it feel like slow motion?
On the screen, Yeon-woo was walking toward the lens with Jeong Do-jin's full charisma, unhurried, inevitable. Out of the dark and into the light, revealing himself piece by piece—jet-black hair first, then the clean bridge of his nose, the mouth held in a flat, expressionless line, and below that the armor and scabbard painted entirely in matte black.
Beside Jeong Yo-han, the advertising lead was just as caught by the entrance.
Ah. That really is jet black.
The color Yeon-woo was carrying for this phone. Jet black wasn't ordinary black—it was a lightless, matte darkness like the bottom of a well. And Yeon-woo walking out with that indifferent face was jet black made flesh.
A moment later the baffles swallowed him into shadow again. In his place, Dong-ha and Han Byeol—who'd been nothing but silhouettes while Yeon-woo held the light—caught the spill and flared into view.
Then—
"Ahh…"
Still walking, Yeon-woo stepped back into the light, and the people watching the monitors made a sound they couldn't help. In the brief blink between vanishing and returning, his expression had shifted on a gradient. Facing the camera head-on with a challenging glint in his eyes, the corner of his mouth lifting into a smile—it was more than enough to steal every gaze locked on those screens.
Hearing the reactions, Jeong Yo-han thought:
If the raw footage—no slow-mo at all—is already getting this kind of response from the crew, then once it's edited, scored, and Ryu Yeon-woo comes in slow…
It wasn't as if the commercial's overall director hadn't shared Yeon-woo's worry. The setup could tip into cheese in a heartbeat, so his plan had been to bury it under the grandest music he could find and win the fight in the cut.
But if the commercial opens with an impact this hard, it'll snap attention into place immediately.
The sheer force of presence itself was supplying the persuasiveness—enough to make any viewer accept, in seconds, that this short commercial's genre was fantasy.
I've felt this somewhere in the series before…
Jeong Yo-han tilted his head, then his face cleared as it came to him.
Right. The courtroom scene.
That had been Yeon-woo's first appearance as Jeong Do-jin in White Blood, too. Director Hwang Min-gwon had asked him to walk out like a tiger about to eat someone alive—and even wrapped in chains Yeon-woo had crushed the room under pure presence.
This actor already knows exactly how a first entrance has to work if it's going to sell everything that comes after.
It wasn't just that he could act. He was using every piece of the set with real intelligence. He'd mapped every drop of light from the ceiling and was deliberately detonating his presence against it. This take wouldn't need a second try. He'd want the slow-motion playback to be sure—but Jeong Yo-han was already certain.
"Okay, cut!"
He called the okay and immediately ran slow-mo on what they'd just shot. The actors crowded in, just as curious. In the real edit they'd slice the sequence finer and layer effects for extra punch, but even a plain slow-down was already a strong frame.
The actors watching the monitor—especially when Yeon-woo, last in line, started walking—let out quiet sounds of admiration. Walking ahead, none of them had seen how the person behind them moved.
"Wow. Yeon-woo, you little monster—you're eating the camera alive. Who taught you that? Who's your master?"
Jeong Cheol-min was joking, and Yeon-woo smiled. Dong-ha piled on.
"When I debuted, our company's producer always said once you hit the stage you had to eat the camera. None of us knew what that meant, so we just… opened our eyes as wide as we could? But this is what eating the camera looks like…"
Han Byeol had been staring at the screen in silence, thinking. Then her hand shot up.
"Director! Can we do one more take of that second scene from earlier?"
"Hm? Second scene—the one where you fix your bag strap and stand up?"
"Yes!"
The scene Han Byeol wanted again was the cross-cut of real-world Han Byeol in her school uniform, heading out for class, adjusting her bag at the front door—and the bag becoming Ella's oxygen-carrier basket as the two images overlaid.
Jeong Yo-han looked into her eyes and grinned. He'd written her off as just a kid, but of everyone here besides Yeon-woo she might have the fiercest hunger for the work.
Those eyes are on fire. She saw Ryu Yeon-woo act just now and something clicked.
Satisfied, he nodded.
"Costumes are still the same, and the group shot wrapped in one take somehow, so we've got time. Let's shoot it again."
And just like that, passion jumped from person to person and set fire to a set that had been winding down.
The commercial shoot that had started in the morning ran late into the evening. When it finally wrapped, Yeon-woo went home.
"He should be getting off the boat about now."
Yeon-woo stepped into the workroom and pulled on his headset.
"I'm here."
"Ah, Team Leader. Perfect timing. Kim Su-hyeok just disembarked."
"Good. The ferry into Okinawa harbor was scheduled around seven p.m."
Yeon-woo had deliberately ordered Kim Su-hyeok to fly into Kagoshima first, then take a boat into Okinawa. Thanks to that, Su-hyeok had spent twenty-five hours on a ferry fighting seasickness the whole way.
But this way, no matter how hard the Baeksol bastards dig later, they won't find a connecting thread.
Ferries into Okinawa ran only basic ID checks—nowhere near as tight as airport passenger control. A Korean identity on the Kagoshima flight and a different identity on the Kagoshima-to-Okinawa ferry raised no flags at all.
"Have you run operations out of Okinawa before, Team Leader?"
At Han Hae-un's question, Yeon-woo nodded. In his past life it would have been classified—something he couldn't share even with NIS colleagues. But he wasn't NIS anymore, and the only person he could share secrets with was Hae-un anyway.
"It was not long after I took on overseas work—more than ten years ago now. North Korean missile provocations were at a peak, and intel came in that Japan's Self-Defense Forces had deployed missiles near the U.S. base on Okinawa."
Something clicked for Hae-un.
"Ah—I think I saw that in the East Asian international affairs training materials."
"Investigating a strategic weapons deployment meant it had to stay off the books if we weren't going to breach the agreements, so they sent a black operative in."
"And that operative was you, Team Leader."
Back then he had gone in under the cover of a Japanese-American shooting a documentary on environmental pollution. Pulling that off meant speaking Japanese and English well enough to fool locals—down to the smallest quirks of pronunciation. He still remembered drilling those differences with obsessive care.
"So I was on Okinawa a long time. The infiltration ran a year, maybe more."
The feed Kim Su-hyeok was transmitting came up on the monitor. The harbor was a familiar sight to Yeon-woo.
And Kim Su-hyeok—who had no idea his Team Leader and Hae-un were deep in old war stories—clutched his churning stomach and stepped off the boat. A low whisper came through the headset.
"Arrived in Okinawa. Beginning recon operations immediately."