The Script That Smells Like Destiny
A woman staring at her monitor let out a gasp of pure delight.
"Whoa... what is this?"
It was the CCTV footage of Baek Si-woo beating down the convenience store robbers with his umbrella.
They were boys, no matter that they'd been carrying knives. And since they were at least ten centimeters shorter than Baek Si-woo, subduing them didn't look all that impressive on paper.
And yet she couldn't help but gasp. The way Baek Si-woo drew his umbrella with such economical grace, the way he swung it to put the boys down — it flowed like a scene straight out of a film.
"They call him an actor? What movie did he shoot without telling anyone?"
Even to her, someone with deep experience in the drama and film world, the footage was anything but ordinary. Judging by the responses, most people seemed to think the same — the comments were nearly identical across the board. Aside from a few voices decrying the flaws in the justice system or calling out Baek Si-woo's "violence," most viewers were simply enjoying the show.
"...Sword Master?"
The woman, who had been idly scrolling through the comments, shot up from her seat as if the word had struck her. Then she began darting restlessly around her computer like a woman possessed.
"Here it is. I knew something was missing."
Having apparently arrived at some monumental realization, she sat back down, closed the browser, and reopened the script she'd left abandoned. Then she began revising a specific section at a blistering pace.
"Yes, yes. THIS is what it needed!!!"
In less than an hour, she had cleanly untangled the section that had been giving her the most trouble.
"It's all downhill from here~!"
Having cleared her biggest obstacle, the woman could say with certainty that even though the restructure would demand an overhaul of everything else, the current version was a story leagues better than her first draft. And with the biggest sticking point blown wide open, revising the rest wouldn't take nearly as long.
And the moment this script was finished, she would deliver it first and foremost to that actor.
"Baek Si-woo! You — you're going to be MY actor!!"
To Baek Si-woo, the actor who had handed her the decisive inspiration of her career.
Life, I've always believed, is an unbroken series of injustices and unfairness. And in my case specifically, I've tended to be the perpetual victim of whatever prank fate felt like playing that day.
What I mean is: I feel deeply wronged right now.
Not that things hadn't gone better than expected. As the days passed, the public kept droning on about juvenile crime and the absurdities of the justice system, while I had long since drifted out of the center of the incident. The debate over lenient punishments for minors had been a contentious issue for ages, and with fresh kindling constantly being thrown on the fire, it burned beautifully.
In the end, I managed to hand off the trap card cleanly, capping it with the legendary meme shot heard round the internet: 'This rookie actor is actually a Sword Master.'
At the company, however, things played out a little differently. The moment I walked back through the doors, Cheon Yoo-ah hauled me in, and ever since that day I've been sitting through these periodic lectures.
"You're listening to me right now, aren't you?"
"...Yes, Yoo-ah. Listening intently."
"No, you're not. Your eyes just wandered."
"...I'm fine. You were saying I should keep Cheonam hyung-nim with me at all times going forward. No matter where I go."
"Hmph. Good, you do remember."
Honestly, what choice do I have but to feel aggrieved? All I did was walk to the convenience store to buy a single can of beer. Why should I be sitting through a thirty-plus-minute lecture from Cheon Yoo-ah?
What was I supposed to do, take the knife swings head-on? But what stings most of all is that after everything that's happened, my image has gotten a little... warped. Even now, Cheon Yoo-ah is looking at me the way you'd look at a walking disaster waiting to happen.
It's a fairly familiar gaze, though. Because that's exactly the way I used to look at the Heavenly Demon.
No, wait. The Heavenly Demon herself(?) dares(?) to look at me like that? This is outrageous. The world may have turned over, but this is a woman whose temperament alone must have caused dozens of catastrophes in her day — and she's shamelessly acting like I'm the reckless one, all because I supposedly don't know who she is.
All Heavenly Demons come with shamelessness equipped as a passive skill, but this is pushing it even by those standards.
"I think I'll just push to have alcohol brought into the company. Keeping some beer and wine stocked in the break room couldn't hurt."
"...An excellent proposal, Senior."
If there's one silver lining, it's that the company has now decided to stock beer so that I never have to run out to the convenience store again. This is an absolute windfall. My bank account was hanging on by a thread with no work coming in, and if things keep accumulating like this one by one, I might never need to leave the building at all.
Is this what they call voluntary imprisonment? Well, whatever. As long as I'm comfortable, it works for me.
"Whew~ Sword Master~"
"One flick of the wrist and three of them went flying. Small friends, admittedly."
"So this is the mystique of the East?"
"Surely he doesn't manipulate force too?"
The guards, having heard the news, clapped me on the shoulder in passing with teasing grins. Apparently the incident had been genuinely entertaining for guards whose days were otherwise mind-numbingly boring.
Nobody's about to suggest sparring with real swords over this, right? No. Definitely not. Not with Cheon Yoo-ah watching me with her eyes practically blazing.
"Hey, swords are actually kind of my thing too, so let's talk sometime la—... hm? Where'd she go?"
Though even here, some injustice prevails: Sally — the woman who once winked at me (poolside tan, very distinctive) — sidled up claiming an interest in swordsmanship, then visibly startled and vanished in a blink.
The reason: Cheon Yoo-ah, sending her silent signals with a look that said you must not play with this one.
What is this? I'm being gravely wronged here. Truly, the world is an unreasonable place — and I always seem to be sitting at the very center of it.
And so several absurd days slipped by. By the time all the chatter about juvenile offenders and Sword Masters had died away completely, Team Leader Seo came to find me and held out a suspicious-looking script.
"What's this script?"
"One that came in specifically for you, Actor-nim."
"Targeting me, specifically?"
"Yes. For a lead role."
Supposedly this was a script submitted with my casting in the lead already confirmed — yet apart from my name, every single detail was plastered with question marks. And that's precisely why I found it suspicious.
When something like this happens, it usually means the writer brought the script to me first, and nothing else has been locked down. But I'm hardly an actor who warrants that kind of treatment, so suspicion was only natural.
Cheon Yoo-ah, maybe. But me as the top casting priority? No matter how you looked at it, this was not a normal situation.
"We accepted it since the lead is confirmed, but personally, I'd have a hard time recommending this project."
"Is that so?"
"Yes. The content aside, nothing's been decided — no production deal, no broadcast slot, nothing. The writer's a complete rookie, too. The odds of the whole production falling through before it starts are overwhelming."
"I see."
No wonder there were so many question marks beyond just the role itself — the production hadn't even been greenlit. A rookie writer with grand ambitions and no grasp of reality, tossing her script first at an actor she happened to like. If that target had been Cheon Yoo-ah, she'd have ignored it without a second thought, but since I'm a rookie myself and this had never happened to me before, the team leader apparently brought it over just for me to look at.
"I'll take a look anyway. It's the first script anyone's ever offered me, after all."
"Yes — that's exactly why I passed it along."
Either way, this was the first script ever brought to me directly. In cases like this, there's a decent chance the role was written with me in mind. And for an actor, that's a genuine honor. 'There is no one but you who could play this part' — for anyone in this profession, that's the stuff of romance.
For now, I'd read it at my leisure, jot down some impressions, and return it politely. Who knows? Maybe a small connection like this will come back around as a great blessing someday.
"Hmm... this setting is really unfamiliar and yet familiar at the same time."
I opened the script with a light heart, and from the very first page came descriptions that were strikingly strange and yet strikingly known to me. Unfamiliar, because even now — in an age when drama genres have diversified enormously — the subject matter was rarely touched. Familiar, because it was the setting of a work so unforgettable that even after fifty-odd years, I remembered it vividly.
"So... Joseon Gold Rush. Right?"
The working title read Unsan Gold Mine, but no matter how I looked at it, this was unmistakably the setting of Joseon Gold Rush.
Joseon Gold Rush — the title of a drama that scored a massive hit on a major OTT platform right around the time I was dragged into Murim. It dramatized the events unfolding around the Unsan Gold Mine, one of the largest gold mines on the Korean Peninsula.
That said, I heard the production itself went through hell just to get made. The setting alone was enough to make any producer's head explode.
Steampunk. Of all things.
It was set in Joseon — but a fictional, steampunk-infused Joseon, seasoned with monsters on top. A chimera among chimeras if there ever was one.
"So it's the Joseon era where zombies are apparently allowed, but steampunk is still a stretch... and now monsters too. Yeah, that's genuinely bonkers."
Steampunk in particular is such a niche genre domestically that finding a usable set is difficult enough, and production costs balloon exponentially. No matter how good a script is, if the budget is enormous, investors hesitate — and with a green-as-grass rookie writer, the road from concept to production could only take years.
"But it was a colossal hit, wasn't it. Not just here — the overseas popularity was insane."
The arduously produced Joseon Gold Rush exploded out of the gate, conquering the global OTT platform Finesse amid a firestorm of buzz and holding the number one spot for a very long time. It swept first place in every single country where Finesse operated, so you can easily imagine just how popular it was.
Naturally, the cast exploded too. Or should I say — mooned harder than a crypto coin?
Thanks to the adult realities of production budgets, the drama had cast nothing but rookie actors in its lead roles. And then it became a mega-hit, and an entirely different world opened up for every one of them.
"And that script... is in my hands right now?"
Which means... am I about to walk the same path those actors did?
My heart began pounding as if it had short-circuited, hammering like mad.