The Actress Who Looks Like Her
I chatted with the assistant director about this and that on the way to the set.
It wasn't far, being just outside Seoul. Since most of the filming took place indoors, the conditions weren't particularly demanding—a few simple setups were enough to meet the requirements, so they'd chosen the studio with the most convenient schedule as the shooting location.
Ironically, the problem on this front was the park scene I was shooting in.
Writer Min wanted a park that was slightly dreamlike yet charming in a whimsical way, and no such park existed anywhere in this country.
So the decision had been made to simply build an outdoor set and smooth it over with CG later.
The indoor set where the leads were giving their all sat right next to a separate space reserved for exterior sets, where the necessary structures would be installed and later supplemented with computer graphics.
Which was exactly where I was standing now.
"Yoon Seoeun has two scenes left, so we'll start with your makeup check."
"Sure, that works."
Everyone knew how tight Korean drama shoots ran. Naturally, while I was on standby, Ji Seoeun, the lead, was in the middle of filming. Once her shoot wrapped, she'd move straight over here and continue.
While waiting for Seoeun and the film crew to make their way over, I started with my makeup check.
"Wow, this is flawless. Absolutely seamless."
The stylist assigned to me was one of the few people who knew my true identity. No matter how perfect my disguise, a makeup check right before filming was essential, so PD Yoo had apparently given her a discreet heads-up. She was one of his own staff who followed him from production to production, so she could be trusted to a degree.
"There's honestly nothing to fix. Whoever did this work... I can't even imagine the kind of hands that made this."
"I'm not really sure myself. Someone I happened to meet—I hear they work in the States, though."
"You really got lucky."
The stylist, who believed this was nothing more than makeup, kept gasping in admiration.
And this was her reaction even though I couldn't use my internal energy and the work was less than perfect. I'd need to be careful about using Mianju going forward.
For now, I could smooth things over with the excuse that I'd enlisted a makeup specialist based in America, but the moment I became famous, that excuse wouldn't hold up so easily.
"By the way, is the PD filming with the A team?"
"He is, but he'll come by here later. He said he has to see Siwoo's first shoot with his own eyes."
"Really?"
"Things are pretty chaotic right now, what with Yua arriving and all."
"...Yua?"
"Yes, you know her, right? Cheon Yua. The PD's been in a complete state over her. It's only a cameo, but it's her first official acting appearance in a year, you know? It's guaranteed to make headlines, so he's thrilled about it."
"Ah..."
I'd changed the subject because the ongoing talk about my makeup made me uncomfortable, and instead I'd walked straight into something I never saw coming.
Good grief.
The name of the actor coming in for a cameo was Cheon Yua.
No—why, of all names, did it have to be Cheon Yua? That was our Heavenly Demon's name.
"Well, I should go check on someone else's makeup. Wait here and you'll get your call soon."
"Yes, sure..."
The stylist didn't let her guard down for a single second until she left the waiting room. If she had, it would have been painfully obvious how rattled I was.
Honestly, my fingertips were trembling even now.
Something with an exceptionally ominous feel was closing in around me.
"An actress named Cheon Yua... was there one?"
The memory wouldn't come.
Then again, maybe not remembering was the normal thing to do. Even Ashbloom, the hottest girl group in the country, had only come back to me after I saw their photos.
Spurred on by a strange unease, I searched for who Cheon Yua was first.
"...Right. There was such an actress... there was."
Debuted at fourteen. Played a quirky, offbeat high schooler in a youth drama and took home the Rookie of the Year award that same year. After that, she played key supporting roles in several more productions. Then she landed her first lead in a low-budget film about school bullying called Innocent—
"And this won Best Actress at Cannes... is everyone insane?"
After winning Best Actress at Cannes at the utterly absurd age of nineteen, her career had been a triumphal march ever since. She'd starred in several mega-hit dramas even I remembered by name alone.
So Cheon Yua, who had worked like an ox for three years straight, took a sabbatical last year, and after a full year of rest, her first chosen activity was a cameo shoot for Genius Copywriter, Yoon Seoeun.
Given a star of that caliber was moving, PD Yoo's reaction made perfect sense.
"But why does she look so much like her?"
The state of Cheon Yua's career wasn't really the issue here.
The real problem was that this woman looked exactly like our Heavenly Demon.
It was precisely the image of the Heavenly Demon after she'd used the Eye Transformation Art to darken her irises and hide her identity.
"Yes—black hair, black eyes. This can't be right. I genuinely felt my heart stop for a second."
The headquarters of the Divine Cult sat in the region around Mount Chun and Xinjiang.
It was a strategic crossroads where East met West, so Westerners—the Seok people—came and went frequently. And the Divine Cult's lady of the house, the Demonic Empress, was a Westerner herself.
Born of that union, the Heavenly Demon possessed light brown hair, nearly golden, and radiant blue eyes.
Which was why the people of the Central Plains had called our Heavenly Demon the Jade-Eyed Heavenly Demon.
Of course, whenever she journeyed through the Central Plains, her eyes were always the first thing she disguised, so few people ever laid eyes on those luminous blue irises in person.
"Right. That's how it was. And she has no internal energy, yet her eye color is— wait. No, that's not it."
My relief at the fact that Cheon Yua had black hair and black eyes didn't even last a moment.
Articles declaring that Cheon Yua was in fact mixed-race and had hidden the fact behind lenses and wigs her entire career were sitting right there in the search results, bold as brass.
And Cheon Yua, having unveiled her true face for all the world to see, looked like the Heavenly Demon herself to anyone with eyes.
"No, damn it. What is going on?"
The Heavenly Demon is in Korea?
Is this some elaborate prank show? Is this actually real?
I calmed myself down and thought it through. And once I did, I could actually recall that an actress named Cheon Yua really had existed around this period.
It felt utterly surreal, but this was reality.
There was a reason I'd never noticed the existence of a celebrity in Korea who shared both the Heavenly Demon's name and her face.
When I fell into Murim, I had somehow regressed to the age of six or seven. And it was during that same period, in the process of joining the Divine Cult, that I met the Heavenly Demon—or rather, the Little Heavenly Demon, as Cheon Yua was known back then.
No matter how famous an actress the Korean Cheon Yua had been, expecting a child of six or seven—a golden-haired, blue-eyed midget—to make the connection was a stretch.
The name was the same way. In the Divine Cult, no one dared speak the Little Heavenly Demon's name aloud.
The Heavenly Demon and the Demonic Empress were the only exceptions, and even the two of them never called her by name. They mostly used pet names like "Little One" or "Yua, dear."
By the time I learned the Heavenly Demon's name was Cheon Yua, more than ten years had passed—more than enough time to have completely forgotten Korea's Cheon Yua by then.
"Still, that's not the important part now, is it."
The problem was that an actress sharing both the Heavenly Demon's name and her face openly existed in Korea.
That was strange no matter how you looked at it. I had no idea what could possibly explain it.
"But... is this really something to panic over?"
At first I'd been so flabbergasted I thought I might lose my mind, but thinking it over calmly, I realized it wasn't that big of a deal.
Someone identical to the Heavenly Demon had appeared, I'd spiraled into a panic, and in doing so I'd completely missed the most important fact.
Matching name and looks didn't mean this was the real Heavenly Demon.
"At most, she's the Heavenly Demon's reincarnation—or a Heavenly Demon from a parallel dimension, no? Sure, that would be utterly ridiculous too, but the point is she's not the Heavenly Demon herself."
It defied all reason, but even if Cheon Yua were a parallel-world Heavenly Demon, she wouldn't be the real one.
Without my memories—or memories of the Divine Cult—she'd have no reason to get entangled with me at all.
The true worst-case scenario wouldn't be a reincarnation but the Heavenly Demon herself descending upon Korea, and no matter how I turned it over, that seemed impossible.
Because if that were the case, she'd be in the same position as me, wouldn't she? And that was genuinely beyond belief.
Novels get roasted for lacking plausibility when they pull stuff like that.
"But if the real Heavenly Demon went through what I did..."
It would be startling, sure, but there'd be no actual problem.
This was a world without internal energy, without the Divine Cult. If the Heavenly Demon were merely a top actress, what did I have to fear from her?
There'd be nothing she could hold over me.
"Ugh, whatever. It's a cameo anyway, right? There won't be any reason to meet her on this set. So let's shelve it and worry later."
If she really were the Heavenly Demon, problems would inevitably arise one way or another, but this shoot probably wouldn't be where it happened.
There was no reason for Cheon Yua, filming at the studio, to come all the way out to this set.
So it made more sense to finish filming first and fret afterward.
Granted, even as I thought this, my fingertips felt like they were trembling—but that was purely my imagination. It had to be.
Just as the stylist had said, PD Yoo's A team—the unit he directed personally—assembled at the park set. It was time to shoot my first appearance.
"So, how is it? Nervous?"
"Heh, not especially."
"Good to hear."
PD Yoo, who knew I was a total rookie, came over to check on me. My cover story was that I was a reclusive master with deep acting experience, so if I got stage-frightened and racked up NGs, that would be its own kind of problem.
Showing a relaxed demeanor to the slightly worried PD, I put him at ease.
Even though it was my first shoot, there was no real nerves to speak of.
That's just how filming worked in this era, wasn't it? If you flubbed a take, they called NG and you went again. Even the greatest actors didn't shoot take after take without a single mistake, so as long as you handled it well, there was no problem at all.
And above all—nobody here chased you down with blades when you flubbed a line the way those righteous sect bastards would have.
It almost made me want to die of how anticlimactic it all was.
"Huh..."
I was preparing for the shoot, mind pleasantly blank, when a low murmur rose from across the set.
And someone was approaching from that direction.
Cheon Yua.
The one and only top star, a name no one on earth could dispute, had come all the way to this filming set.
No—why is this woman poking around here?
"...Damn it. It really is the Heavenly Demon."
One look at the effortless nobility in her bearing and the overwhelming force of her presence, and I knew.
The essence of that woman was the Heavenly Demon. A mere reincarnation could never feel this similar.
But my instincts—honed through thirty years of serving the Heavenly Demon—were telling me something else.
She was not the Heavenly Demon I had known.
The essence might be the same, yet something about her felt different. It wasn't a question of having internal energy or not—it was a question of temperament.
"She's the Heavenly Demon, and yet... she's not the Heavenly Demon I knew?"
Which meant... that woman was a Heavenly Demon from a parallel dimension, or something along those lines?
Apparently, I had just met this world's Heavenly Demon.