Separating the Heavenly Demon from the Actress
The company kept pulling deranged stunts to the point where I briefly lost my mind, but the matter of the acting teacher was, in all likelihood, something Cheon Yua volunteered for herself.
No company on earth could have pressured Cheon Yua into doing anything she didn't want to do.
Which meant she knew I had requested an acting teacher, and she stepped up to fill the role of her own accord. That was the conclusion.
The problem, of course, was precisely this part.
What lunatic told Cheon Yua about this in the first place, and why on earth did nobody try to talk her out of it?
Granted, when an actress of Cheon Yua's caliber insists she's doing something, the company has little power to stop her — but still, couldn't they have at least handled it to some reasonable degree?
My expectations had been high, which made the disappointment cut that much deeper.
Or was Cheon Yua more of a tyrant than I'd given her credit for?
Considering that even her own manager had failed to talk her out of it, that might genuinely be the case.
Either way, whichever version was true, it wasn't good news for me.
"So, you'll really be watching my acting?"
"Yes. Don't let it fool you, but I've been acting for nine years now. I have a rough sense of what your problem is, Siwoo."
"My problem?"
"Your acting itself isn't the issue, is it? I thought your performances were excellent too. So it comes down to a lack of experience, and that's the sort of thing you get used to faster than you'd think."
"Ah... I see."
So this woman wasn't planning to casually sit through my acting without a thought in her head.
She'd observed my past performances in considerable detail, and from the feel of it, she knew exactly where I was falling short.
I'd never intended to learn anything grandiose anyway, so in theory there was no reason Cheon Yua couldn't serve as my acting teacher — but I couldn't help wondering if this was really the right call.
"...Understood, sunbaenim. I'll be in your care."
But I had no choice but to accept, and quickly.
There was no pretext for refusing.
Besides, with things having turned out this way, I now had my own reason to observe Cheon Yua as well.
There was a matter I needed to settle beyond all doubt.
To me, the Demonic Cult was a deeply complicated subject.
The closest expression for it would probably be: a relationship of love and hate?
Life in the cult was, for the most part, an unbroken chain of hardship and adversity — but the grace I'd received from the cult, and from the Heavenly Demon, was no small thing either.
With thirty years of service and my own death, I believed I had repaid that debt in full, but the human heart is never quite that simple.
Whenever I recalled all the absurdities I'd endured back then, I wanted nothing to do with the place — bile rose to my throat at the mere thought of it. And yet, in odd, unguarded moments, I found myself missing it. That was the Demonic Cult for you: a hopelessly complicated thing.
Though of course, every time the cult came to mind with any fondness, I seriously questioned my own sanity.
The reason my chest tightened whenever I looked at Cheon Yua was that those old memories stirred.
Worse, the Heavenly Demon was an even more tangled subject for me than the cult itself — and now a woman wearing the Heavenly Demon's exact face was traipsing back and forth right in front of my eyes.
It drove me absolutely insane.
This was not a healthy state of affairs.
I would admit that my memories of Murim could not be erased, and I would even admit that, absurdly enough, I sometimes missed my cult days. But this was going too far.
I wanted to live my own life now, that was all.
That was why I'd been trying to avoid contact with Cheon Yua, who prodded at those old memories — but with things having come to this, even that had become impossible.
If we worked at the same company, and worse, lived in the same place, there was no way we could avoid running into each other over and over.
Which left exactly one conclusion.
To completely separate Cheon Yua from the cult and from the Heavenly Demon.
Cheon Yua certainly gave off the air of this world's own Heavenly Demon, but she was emphatically not the same person as the Heavenly Demon of Murim.
The reason I sometimes called her "the Heavenly Demon" was merely that she shared the face and the name — not that I believed she truly was her.
With so little known about her, she kept overlapping with the Heavenly Demon in my mind, but as long as the two were not the same person, then the more I learned about her, the more I would come to feel — in my bones — that she could never be the real thing.
"Keep watching her up close, keep confirming the ways she differs from the Heavenly Demon, and one day I'll be able to accept actress Cheon Yua exactly as she is."
And once that happened, looking at her would no longer summon ghosts of the cult or of the Heavenly Demon.
Even if she wore the Heavenly Demon's face, bore her name, carried herself with the same unshakeable, unyielding confidence, and seemed to harbor the same inexplicable fondness for black.
Even so, she was not — could never be — the Heavenly Demon.
"In this world, there is no Heavenly Demon. There is no Demonic Cult."
That was the only thing I needed to keep firmly in mind.
After gritting my teeth and talking myself back to my senses, I headed for the practice room where Cheon Yua was waiting.
It was time for the hands-on acting practice to begin in earnest.
The moment I stepped into the practice room, Cheon Yua thrust several pages of script at me.
"Scripts?"
"Yes. Let's run through these, and then we can give each other feedback."
"Ah, that's how it works... So the person filming over there is..."
"For reviewing the feedback. How you look on camera matters most of all."
We'd decided to keep the practice simple.
Cheon Yua and I would act out a few scenes as partners, film them, and then watch the footage together and trade notes.
Her plan seemed to be less about teaching me and more about practicing alongside me, so to speak.
Which was presumably why a single staff member with a camera was already standing by.
When I asked who they were, it turned out to be an employee from the PR team at Flame — they'd shoot the footage cleanly and hand it over to us afterward.
And depending on the situation, they said, the footage might even be used for promotional purposes.
"What kind of promotion, exactly?"
"We don't have many actors under contract right now, so it's difficult, but once more of them gather, we're thinking about producing our own content. Footage like this — practice sessions — can make for nice little source material."
"Ah, in-house content."
Come to think of it, Flame did occasionally release fun little videos featuring its entire roster of actors.
I still vaguely remembered the one where a handful of actors road-tripped around in a camping van.
The natural, unguarded quality you rarely got to see on variety shows made it a hit with the fans, too.
Viewed this way, this really did seem to be the Flame I knew.
The practice method suited me, and so did the filming.
There was just one uncomfortable point I wanted to settle before we began.
The matter of honorifics.
"You're my senior by a wide margin — wouldn't it be better if you spoke to me casually?"
"I may be your senior, but we're the same age, aren't we, Siwoo? How about you speak casually too?"
"Even so, you're still my senior. That would feel wrong."
"Honestly, this is more comfortable for me."
"Oh... really?"
The sovereign of all under heaven, the Heavenly Demon, had never once raised her speech for anyone.
And yet there had been rare occasions when she used honorifics — precisely when her fury burned all the way to the tips of her hair.
When she was angry, using polite speech tended to stop short of actual blows.
It was a contingency measure to avoid beating her own cult members to death.
But because something catastrophic invariably followed every time she deployed those honorifics, I'd developed a bit of a trauma around it.
And now a woman with the Heavenly Demon's exact face was doing the same thing, so even knowing it meant nothing, I found myself flinching at every turn.
That was why I'd suggested we just drop formality altogether — only for Cheon Yua to insist that this was what felt comfortable to her.
Was that, perhaps, one single way in which she differed from the Heavenly Demon?
Cheon Yua takes the first point.
"Well then, let's begin. Scene one."
"Yes, let's start."
Having tidied up the question of how to address each other (tidied, from my perspective, into something vaguely uncomfortable), we threw ourselves straight into practice.
A pickpocket under arrest and the officer who caught him. A disruptive funeral guest and the chief mourner. A nightmare customer at a convenience store and the part-timer behind the counter. A debt collector coming to shake down money and a young shop owner. Two lovers breaking up. And so on.
Most of them were wildly extreme, far-from-everyday scenarios — but honestly, that kind of material was easier to perform than something bland and mundane.
And so we filmed a handful of scenes from the scripts she'd prepared.
"Siwoo, your emotional delivery is genuinely superb. This isn't something you can manage just by practicing, you know."
"Thank you for seeing it so generously."
The first strength Cheon Yua singled out in my acting was emotional transmission.
She said the character's state of mind leapt off the screen the instant she looked at it.
Her surprise seemed to carry a note of genuine admiration.
Emotional delivery, huh.
Well, if I had any talent at all, I supposed that would be it.
Before I fell into Murim, people had told me I was decent in that respect.
Everything else about me was an unholy mess, so I never earned much recognition, but making others understand what I was feeling was one of the few things I'd always been confident about.
It was thanks to that particular strength that, upon falling into Murim at the tender age of seven or so, I was kindly taken in by the warm-faced owner of an inn.
Though if I'd known that very inn would cease to be an inn by the end of that same day, I would never have leaned on it.
"But it's not without problems."
"Yes, please, go ahead."
"First, your vocals... they're too real."
"Isn't real a good thing?"
"Real is good. But look at this part. On the recording..."
"The enunciation gets completely chewed up."
The scene Cheon Yua pointed to was the breakup between the two lovers.
A man who had to let go of the woman for her sake, sobbing alone with his regrets after sending her away.
He wept miserably through his lines, but the words came out so mangled that it was genuinely hard to make out what he was saying.
"If you actually lived through something like this and wept in despair, I imagine you'd sound exactly like that."
"Yes, I would. But apparently that's not allowed when you're acting. The slurring may be inevitable, but you still have to be intelligible enough to convey the lines..."
"Exactly. Although this is the sort of thing the PD will give you notes on at the set."
"Hmm..."
"If it bothers you, there's no way around it — you'll just have to drill it over and over until you get a feel for it. You haven't had many chances to check your own acting through audio or video, have you, Siwoo?"
"No, honestly, I haven't. So this really is a matter of needing practice."
"Try practicing just the crying scenes and the scenes with sharp emotional swings on their own, and listen back to them. Knowing you, I have a feeling you'll adjust faster than you'd expect."
It was certainly true that performing for a camera felt different from the acting I'd done before.
To put it bluntly: in Murim, if I was playing a sharecropper and got hit with a surprise inspection by a warrior of the Murim Alliance, I was supposed to go pale and tremble like a leaf.
What reason would I have to worry about my enunciation in that situation?
If anything, trembling hard enough to garble your words entirely was what a true humble commoner sounded like.
But here, delivering the content to the audience mattered far more, so this was something I'd have to mind.
"And one more thing. This is really important."
"Yes, sunbaenim."
"Siwoo, you use your expressions wonderfully. That's why your emotional delivery lands so well, I'd wager."
"You think so?"
"I do, and frankly, I was surprised. You control your facial muscles with remarkable delicacy. Honestly, at this level I wondered whether it was even something practice could teach..."
After extolling my facial acting for a while, Cheon Yua turned to me with a somewhat serious expression and offered her advice.
"It's too much."
"...Too much?"
My ability to craft expressions was first-rate, she said — the problem was that it went entirely too far.
Expression-crafting was the most efficient tool I had for transmitting emotion, a strength I personally took pride in, so the criticism landed like a smack to the back of the head.
Especially coming right on the heels of her praise for the very same thing.
But once I rewatched the scenes she'd flagged a few times on the recording, I could see exactly what the problem was.