Seventeen Smokescreens
Finding a guqin was no easy task.
Or rather, to be precise, it was finding a guqin suitable for this shoot that was the hard part. Any old seven-string zither could simply be bought off a shelf, after all.
But if it looked too modern, that would be its own kind of problem, wouldn't it? At the very least, it needed to look like something that might have actually been played in the nineteenth or twentieth century — if only on the surface.
As a last resort, we could have pushed this scene to the back of the schedule, sourced a proper prop, and come back to reshoot it. But tearing down and setting up a film set costs money every single time, and no matter how forgiving the schedule was, it was better to shoot as much as we could while we could. So the consensus among everyone was: try everything within our means first, then decide.
The lucky part was that this set happened to have not one, but two capable people on hand.
Cheon Yoo-ah, who had been quietly observing our production meeting, pricked up her ears the moment the words "guqin" were spoken. Apparently she had something stored away in her personal collection. Then Nam Hyunho, his curiosity piqued, joined the Great Guqin Expedition as well — which was how I managed to get my hands on one far faster than I'd expected.
What followed was a squabble over the two guqins that had been secured.
"Yours is in the States. It's not like you can use it right now."
"Delay the shoot a few days, then... Mine is the genuine article, you know."
"Senior Cheon, we've already got one. Why go to all that trouble?"
"The guqin in my possession is far more antique."
"So is this one — practically an artifact. My family has kept it for generations."
"How on earth did you get your hands on something like that?"
"It's been kept in the family for generations, but nobody's ever cared about it. It's... that kind of item."
"You stole it?"
"Basically, yes."
From Cheon Yoo-ah, who wanted us to wait several days so we could use her instrument, to Nam Hyunho, who had straight-up thieved a family heirloom — what on earth was this madness? It was absurd enough that two different people could produce a guqin on the spot, but watching Cheon Yoo-ah gaze at Nam Hyunho's zither with genuine regret coaxed nothing out of me but a hollow laugh. Nam Hyunho, preening like he'd won some great victory, was equally ridiculous.
That said, one thing had to be acknowledged: the guqin Nam Hyunho brought was a far better piece than I'd anticipated. Its age was one thing, but its condition was superb. Instruments don't simply stay well-kept from sitting in storage alone, so this was clearly something that had been separately maintained and cared for.
"Better return it quickly once we're done."
It would be a bit cruel for Nam Hyunho, who had brought it in good faith, to catch hell over it — so the polite move was to use it well and hand it straight back.
"All right. Let's get back to filming."
The shoot, briefly suspended over the guqin question, resumed.
That I, of all people, would end up playing a Namgung-clan guqin was its own special irony — but the instrument was thoroughly to my liking, so I resolved to gift it a fine performance.
—♪~~~♪~~♪~~~♪
My guqin skill — mastered through relentless effort under the cover of " disguising myself as a court musician" — began its modern-day revival through Fair Maiden Under the Moon, the piece I had once played while watching her dance beneath the moonlight.
Fair Maiden Under the Moon was an original composition I had created for her, and her alone. Its modern sensibility would have felt unfamiliar to people of that era, and yet it remained the piece she had loved most.
"Ohh...."
Luna, it seemed, was rather taken with the piece as well, because she began to reward me with a dance even more beautiful than before.
Wol-hee, performing graceful figures beneath the languid, mournful strains of the guqin. I was certain this scene would be talked about long after the drama finished airing.
"...Okay. Truly... that was wonderful."
The moment Director Bang gave the OK, the actors came swarming toward me. Apparently my guqin playing had sounded reasonably convincing even to their ears.
"Seriously, when did you even learn to do this?"
"It just... happened, one way or another."
"That melody was completely unfamiliar to me."
"Ah, right — it's an original composition?"
"An original? You really must have studied properly, then."
Cheon Yoo-ah and Nam Hyunho — who for some reason both seemed deeply invested in the guqin — kept hammering me with questions about where I'd learned it and what the piece was, until they had me thoroughly cornered.
It figured, really. People from Murim were just built that way — who else would care this much about a guqin?
And even in the middle of all that, I could clearly feel Luna's eyes boring into me. Her cheeks were faintly flushed, which suggested this shoot had pleased her quite a bit. I couldn't speak to anything else, but I'd certainly succeeded in capturing her interest.
Perhaps because of the time lost to the guqin hunt, that day's filming wrapped up a little behind schedule.
Cheon Yoo-ah, Yang Yuri, Yang Miju, and me. With four people dispatched from the company alone, the caravan heading back to Flame Entertainment was a decent-sized crowd. Of course, "crowd" or not, two large black vans swallowed us all with room to spare.
"A rumor?"
So there we were, dragging our exhausted bodies back to the office, only to be greeted by a piece of utterly absurd news. A rumor about me had started circulating. And not just any rumor — a school bullying scandal, of all things, the single most ill-fitting accusation imaginable for someone like me.
"...Rising star 'B' from K High? Ah, so it's phrased like this..."
"It looks like they're testing the waters."
"My name recognition isn't high enough to detonate right away, is that it?"
"More than that, I'd expect them to let the rumor spread first, then launch their attack."
"They used a similar playbook with Yoon Seo-eun. Seeded the 'word is' gossip first, then ran articles as if the allegations were already confirmed."
"The situation's a little different this time, but the method itself will be much the same. First they'll pile on every vicious accusation imaginable to whip up curiosity, then attach some ambiguous 'evidence' — this is the actor, everyone — and before we've had a chance to respond to any of it, you'll have fallen straight into the abyss. It's a standard trick in smear work."
"Denials never resolve these things cleanly anyway. Plenty of people don't even remember the clarifications afterward."
That was the situation in broad strokes. Someone had scattered a heap of "they say" gossip claiming that a rising star 'B' from K High had done terrible things back in his school days, and the story was slowly spreading through various online communities. The company's assessment: this operation had me in its crosshairs.
"Ah, so this is that Mun Entertainment thing, then..."
"Almost certainly. The cleanest way to drop an actor without cause is to wreck the production. If one of the leads blows up over school bullying, filming halts — there's no way around it."
"And if you're going to run an operation like that, I'm conveniently the easiest target."
"Yes. The other actors, you see..."
Well, well. Isn't this interesting.
Leaving Luna aside, this drama had four core cast members: me, Cheon Yoo-ah, Nam Hyunho, and Rion. But if you wanted to pin school bullying on someone, it could only be me.
Cheon Yoo-ah debuted at fourteen, so her school days simply never existed. Nam Hyunho's origins were so murky that nobody even knew where he was from — no kindling to burn there. You'd at least need a graduation album for the story to hold water, wouldn't you? If you're going to lie about being someone's schoolmate, there ought to be something to point at. And yet, whether Changcheon had quietly gotten involved or not, nothing whatsoever about Nam Hyunho's childhood had ever come to light.
That left Rion — but Rion had been active for years, and far too many episodes from his school days were already public knowledge. Trying to layer bullying allegations on top of that wouldn't be a scandal; it would just be transparent bad faith. There's no reason to set fire to a field that won't burn.
Which made me, in that sense, the perfect candidate. New to the industry, no history ever brought to light, and conveniently riddled with imaginary "hidden pasts" for anyone to exploit. A fanbase too small to push back hard, while occupying a leading role prestigious enough to be worth destroying.
Probe cautiously with the bullying angle, remind the investors of the time I'd been handed my role as backdoor compensation, then let the story snowball — and they'd see quite a tidy return.
"So what's the plan?"
"Team Leader Hong Mi-ho of our Media Management Team will walk you through that."
"The media management team leader..."
"Team Leader Hong was actually the first to detect the rumor about you spreading in the communities."
"Ah, I see. If you'd been even a little later, things could have gotten ugly. Thank you."
"It's simply my job. We've been monitoring coverage of you since well before this incident, in fact. School bullying content has been a particular focus."
"...Really. The bullying angle specifically, huh."
"It was the CEO's instruction."
"Ah. Right. Well..."
I didn't fully understand the reasoning, but apparently, in anticipation of a bullying scandal erupting around me, monitoring had been running steadily all along. Presumably because with rumors like these, even a slight delay in responding means all-out chaos. Someone with no conceivable connection to school bullying — someone like me — would be devoured before they could even lift a finger.
Thanks to that, we'd caught the enemy's intent before they'd even made their opening move. A genuinely fortunate thing.
"So how do we respond..."
"First, we verify the facts. Have you ever been involved in school bullying?"
"No."
"Then do you have friends who could vouch for that?"
"Hmm... that might be difficult. I more or less drifted through school without leaving much of an impression. I don't keep in touch with anyone from back then."
"We anticipated that might be the case."
Even at my answer — that no friend existed who could testify to my school days — Team Leader Hong didn't bat an eye. She accepted it so matter-of-factly that it left me feeling strangely unsettled.
Do I really look like I have no friends? First Cheon Yoo-ah, now the company staff too...
Still, there was hope to be found in how unsurprised she was. It meant the company had something of its own prepared, whether or not I lifted a finger.
And the countermeasure the company had prepared was, frankly, a little different from anything I'd imagined.
"This is the article going out tomorrow."
"A rookie actor from Kangseok High... but who is this?"
"A rookie who debuted recently."
"Ah..."
"And after this article runs, more will follow."
"Gyeongbuk Arts High, Gangnam High, Gyeseo High... and even K-Pop High School?"
"Seventeen in total, precisely. When tabloid-style articles explode this indiscriminately..."
"...then even if our enemy throws out fabricated 'evidence' targeting me specifically, it won't stand out at all. With controversies like this, whoever's named first stays in people's memories the longest — and the internet will already be an absolute war zone by then."
"That's the basic strategy. A variety of other operations will be layered on top of it. Once the dust settles, no one will remember a single rumor about you. Flame's position is that with this category of rumor, the best response isn't a rebuttal — it's erasing it from people's minds entirely."
Moving first and posting a completely unrelated article just as the rumor began to spread was outrageous enough — but they intended to go further and detonate a whole barrage of tabloid stories to blind everyone's eyes.
Ordinarily, baseless smears like the one aimed at me would never have gained traction, but with the buildup our enemy had already laid, the story would catch fire to some degree. And once it did, all seventeen of those named rookies would rush to defend themselves, the internet would descend into chaos, and even if the enemy belatedly published their hit piece, it would be buried in the noise.
As for the tabloid outlets that ran the fabricated articles — they'd kick up whatever fuss their paymasters had bought them, and then Flame would hammer the final nail in and shut them down for good.
And the cleanup afterward would be Flame's to handle. Though what form that would take, I had no idea.
"But wait — if we do this..."
"What we protect is Baek Si-woo, the actor signed to this company. The other celebrities' agencies will look after their own."
"Well, naturally."
These people really were impressively neutral, even in matters like this. The mere concept — spreading rumors about other celebrities in order to dilute a rumor about me — was astonishing on its own, and yet they could detonate seventeen of them simultaneously.
Truly competent in the strangest places, and subtly twisted in exactly the same measure.
"...Is this for real?"
For the life of me, I couldn't picture how this whole affair was going to end.