Chapter 3
Leon Entertainment’s management division was split into four teams, from Team 1 through Team 4. Teams 1 and 2 handled Leon’s S-class, top-tier stars. Team 3 specialized in rising rookies and artists who had only just begun to make a name for themselves.
By contrast, Team 4 was the graveyard of washed-up has-beens. And that was where Jaeha had been assigned.
Honestly, I thought I might get fired. Being transferred to Team 4, huh? Not bad.
He’d expected to be cut for roughing up Rayoon, but the end result was a move from Team 2 to Team 4. Why? There was no way that little loudmouth hadn’t gone straight to the CEO and chirped in his ear. Rayoon was, after all, Leon Entertainment’s visual center and one of its top-tier girl group members.
From the company’s point of view, it would have made sense to side with her.
But the result had been different.
Did someone back me up? The Team 2 leader? No, impossible. Team 2’s leader had always looked down on Kang Jaeha.
Or maybe it was the CEO making a unilateral call.
Even that felt a little off. Leon Entertainment’s CEO, Han Taeseong. Jaeha could count on one hand the number of times he’d ever seen that big shot. To Han Taeseong, Kang Jaeha was probably nothing more than an invisible speck of dust among the staff.
After a moment’s thought, Jaeha clicked his tongue in his head.
Tch, whatever. It worked out somehow.
This wasn’t a situation where he needed to strategize, speculate, or rack his brains. It wasn’t a firefight. Before he realized it, the old habits from his eighteen years in another world had surfaced again, and then a man’s voice reached him.
“Jaeha, did you hear what I said?”
It was Jang Hyeongsu, the Team 4 leader who had just appeared. His tone was drowsy, his words drawn out as if each one had to be dragged from his mouth. Jaeha answered simply.
“Yes, I heard you.”
“Okay, then—let’s go.”
As Jaeha walked over to Team 4 leader Jang Hyeongsu, he recalled the team’s infamous reputation. Everyone at Leon Entertainment called Team 4 the “recycling bin for failures and has-beens.”
It had been created under the pretense of giving a second chance to people who had failed, flamed out, or were past their prime, but everyone knew the truth.
It was impossible.
Leon Entertainment had actors, singers, and all kinds of celebrities signed under it, and if you counted trainees too, the number doubled. Their careers ranged from unknown rookies to top stars.
So success and failure were both inevitable, and Leon Entertainment gathered the most conspicuous failures of all and dumped them into Team 4.
Trainees who had fallen behind the competition, people who had started as trainees but never made it, rookies who had debuted but remained unknown, one-hit wonders who had flared up and vanished, people whose scandals had sent them crashing into the dirt, people who had simply faded from public memory.
Not just trainees, but actors, idols, comedians, broadcasters—everyone and anyone.
They all probably had tragic or complicated backstories. But Leon Entertainment wasn’t a charity. If you had no value, you got discarded. The failures and faded has-beens lingered in Team 4 until their time was up, and then they were pushed out—or forgotten. Nothing was more terrifying for a celebrity than being forgotten.
In a way, Management Team 4 was a ward for the washed-up. A place to plug in the oxygen tube before the death sentence came down.
Without even realizing it, Kang Jaeha had ended up trailing behind Team 4 leader Jang Hyeongsu, and in the present situation, he decided that landing in Team 4 wasn’t so bad after all.
For example, a top-tier girl group like Ceriel, the group Rayoon belonged to, lived in hell. Their schedules were absurd, and they were constantly meeting new people. Trouble was inevitable, whether internal or external.
Getting tangled up with the small fry is probably a lot less of a headache than dealing with the top names.
Just as Kang Jaeha was about to leave Team 2’s office with Jang Hyeongsu—
“Hey.”
Someone grabbed his arm from behind. It was Seo Jinsu, the chief manager whom Jaeha had once insulted with the words “your mouth reeks like shit.” Apparently furious, he ground his teeth and muttered coldly,
“Kang Jaeha, know your place.”
Jaeha gave a snort of laughter, as if the man were beneath notice. Just because his body had become smaller didn’t mean the skill of killing an opponent had disappeared.
“Knowing my place is your specialty, Chief Manager.”
“······You son of a bitch.”
Whether Seo Jinsu liked it or not, Team 4 leader Jang Hyeongsu had already left the office, and Jaeha yanked his arm free before following. At just that moment, a woman with bobbed hair stepped into the office—Song Seonhui, the Team 2 leader.
Remembering the Kang Jaeha she had run into in the hallway, Song Seonhui spoke with a scoff.
“You heard, didn’t you? That kid’s going to Team 4. Finally got rid of that extra growth.”
Seo Jinsu, eyes burning with anger, replied to his senior from university, the team leader.
“That bastard... he’s changed somehow.”
“Changed? Really? How?”
“Just look at him. He used to grovel, but now—anyway, he’s gone insane.”
“What, he finally snapped from all the stress he’s been bottling up? You know how those pathetic types are. Once the pressure valve blows, they turn into psychos. He’s crazy, that’s all. Who’s he to tell an artist his manager takes care of to shut up or not?”
“······But Team Leader, how did he survive? You said he was definitely getting cut.”
“How should I know? It was the CEO’s call, so what am I supposed to do?”
Team 2’s Song Seonhui shrugged it off.
“Still, if he’s in Team 4, his presence will shrink even more.”
A few minutes later.
Kang Jaeha was walking down the hallway. Team Leader Jang Hyeongsu in front of him hadn’t said much. You’d think he’d have questions about the incident with Rayoon, or about Jaeha himself, but—
Is this the kind of guy who doesn’t give a damn about anything around him?
Jang Hyeongsu just yawned over and over, never once asking Jaeha a question. He gave off the aura of someone who thought the whole world was none of his business.
By then, Team 4’s office had come into view.
The office Jaeha was headed to was on a different floor from Team 2’s, tucked away at the very end of the hallway.
I’d heard the rumors, but this really is a junkyard. What is this place, an abandoned island?
Soon Kang Jaeha entered Team 4’s office. The space was far smaller than Team 2’s, and there didn’t seem to be many people inside, probably because most of them were out on assignment. Team Leader Jang Hyeongsu introduced Jaeha to the three people who were left.
“Mm—this is Kang Jaeha.”
That was the full extent of the explanation. Or rather, there wasn’t any explanation at all. But the three employees seemed used to Jang Hyeongsu’s way of speaking, or else they simply didn’t care, because they gave Jaeha a perfunctory nod. Jaeha did the same. He didn’t know any of them anyway.
Then—
“Jaeha, this way.”
Jang Hyeongsu called him into the team leader’s office inside the office. The moment Jaeha stepped into the cramped little room, the first thing he thought was:
Clean this place up.
The team leader’s office was disgustingly messy. Papers were piled all over Jang Hyeongsu’s desk, and there were discarded paper cups and other scraps of trash strewn everywhere too.
No way they deliberately set up Team 4’s concept as a trash heap. This is just his personality, isn’t it?
Jang Hyeongsu, having sat down first at a six-person table instead of his own desk, gestured lazily for Jaeha to take a seat.
“Sit.”
“Yes.”
“You, uh, know the basics about Team 4, right?”
“Yes.”
“Right. Then I’ll skip the explanation.”
Jang Hyeongsu yawned again. In that instant, Jaeha’s vision swam. An all-too-familiar sensation of deja vu. And then, in third person, a scene began to unfold before him.
Team Leader Jang Hyeongsu sat at a desk drowning in trash. Resting his chin on one hand, he stared at his laptop. When exactly was this? There was no way to know yet.
Soon, Team Leader Jang Hyeongsu let out a long yawn and muttered to himself,
“This short film, Gyeollo, won the grand prize. What a monster hit. When’s the last time a grand prize like this came out of this film festival?”
As if it had nothing to do with him, he clicked his tongue with a trace of regret.
“That script came to us a long time ago, and we just threw it away. The new business team’s going to get chewed out for this.”
The flickering deja vu snapped off. And then Jaeha was back in the real office, looking at the actual Jang Hyeongsu. The man spoke in a listless voice.
“Obviously, from now on you won’t be in charge of Ceriel anymore.”
Kang Jaeha wasn’t really listening to Jang Hyeongsu’s slow drawl. He was still occupied with the deja vu he had just seen. The power to glimpse a future moment, whether his own or someone else’s. He’d relied on it for eighteen years in that other world, but here in reality it had only been with him for a short while, so it still felt a little alien.
Maybe because the scenery was different, he hadn’t quite adjusted yet?
Still, it wasn’t difficult. The world had changed, but the mechanism of deja vu was the same.
A short film called Gyeollo? Grand prize? I’ll keep that in mind for now.
Jaeha tucked the name into a corner of his mind. His memory was exceptional—no, it had grown exponentially through years of using deja vu in another world. To him, Jang Hyeongsu said with a casual wave,
“Just take it easy today. I still have to decide who I’m assigning you to and what kind of work you’ll be handling.”
“Understood.”
Despite the slurred tone, the atmosphere was sharp. Kang Jaeha didn’t dislike Jang Hyeongsu. Someone like him, as opposed to the types with blackened hearts, was clean enough.
“Hmm. Then go on and take a look around. See who’s on Team 4 while you’re at it.”
A short while later.
Kang Jaeha left the team leader’s office. Jang Hyeongsu, who had been sitting with his legs crossed and yawning, stretched his back hard. With his dark circles sunk all the way to his chin, he somehow forced himself to stand.
“Ugh—”
Then he dropped into his seat as if he might topple over any second. Thinking of the Jaeha who had just left, he murmured,
“Changed? No... hmm. It feels like the kid got his whole nature swapped out.”
He knew Jaeha too, though not especially well. He’d seen him a few times, and every time, Jang Hyeongsu’s evaluation had been the same.
He’s the same kind of half-dead loser I am.
Only, Kang Jaeha had been even more pathetic than that. Jang Hyeongsu was a slacker too, but if you poked him, he bit. In other words, he had a temper. And more importantly, he did his job. Otherwise there was no way he’d have landed the Team 4 leader position at Leon Entertainment, even if it was Team 4.
But Kang Jaeha had looked like a pushover, and acted like one too.
Everyone saw it. Everyone said it.
And yet the Jaeha he saw now had changed. The taste of a pushover was gone. The conversation had been short, but that was the impression Jang Hyeongsu got. After gauging him for a moment, he abruptly lost interest. His “none of my business” disease had flared up again.
“Maybe he died and came back to life.”
He started looking for Jaeha’s first task.
Meanwhile, Kang Jaeha had taken his new seat and was sizing up Team 4’s quiet office. The silence was nice, but it was also a little dull.
Boring.
If this had been the old Kang Jaeha, the pushover, maybe he wouldn’t have minded. But the current Jaeha had spent eighteen years running wild on the front lines of another world. Blood and flesh spraying everywhere had been daily life. Of course this sudden calm would feel bland.
I need to do something.
His body itching for action, Kang Jaeha opened the laptop in front of him. First he browsed the failures and has-beens registered under Team 4. There were plenty of them. From trainees to forgotten celebrities, Team 4 really was a trash heap.
He was still skimming through the has-beens when—
-Click.
The team leader’s office door opened, and Jang Hyeongsu came out.
“The actor you’ll be attached to starting tomorrow. You know who it is, right?”
He tossed over a transparent file. Inside it was the profile of one of Leon Entertainment’s actresses.
The moment Jaeha saw her photo—
“Yes. I know her.”
—his brow twitched slightly.
Shit. Of all people, it had to be this crazy lunatic.
Then Jang Hyeongsu tossed over five more transparent files.
“And for today, I think all you need to do is this.”
“What is it?”
When Jaeha opened the five files, they contained faces that looked relatively young. Jang Hyeongsu gave a rough explanation.
“Kids who got rejected by the rookie development team. We’ve already contacted them, so when they get here, just tell them one by one that we can’t keep the contracts going and send them back.”
In other words, he was supposed to hand down a death sentence.
At Leon Entertainment’s rookie development team, countless trainee actors and idol trainees were sweating blood even now, all for the sake of survival. They had to keep the label of “trainee” alive by any means possible, because if they caught the eye of the right people, they could be promoted into the debut lineup.
But if they failed to survive among the trainees—
—then the shining time full of promise ends, and they become washed-up trainees.
Failures and has-beens existed everywhere, after all. At the top, at the bottom—it didn’t matter. Once a trainee was branded as washed up, they were sent to Team 4, and Team 4 delivered the death sentence.
Ordinarily, this was the kind of job people avoided.
If it had been the old Kang Jaeha, he might have been visibly taken aback. But the current Jaeha didn’t think this was especially difficult.
“Understood.”
Not long after, Jaeha was seated in a small meeting room. Across from him sat a young woman, one of the trainees pushed out as a has-been. Jaeha informed her coolly,
“It’ll be difficult to extend your contract as a trainee.”
“······”
The corners of the woman’s eyes reddened. With no change in expression, Jaeha added,
“You’ve worked hard at Leon all this time.”
He didn’t feel sorry for her. She had probably worked hard in her own way, only to be beaten by the competition. If anything, she should be standing tall. At least Leon Entertainment had a conscience.
They were quick about handing out the death sentence.
There were plenty of agencies that clung to trainees endlessly because they hated to lose them, yet didn’t want to let them go. And so the trainees would grow older and older, slowly sinking deeper into the swamp of ruin.
The trainee wiped her tears, bowed to Jaeha, and left the meeting room.
For her, there were only two choices now.
Find another line of work, or find another company.
Kang Jaeha frowned and clicked his tongue softly.
“Tch. Still disgusting.”
The next person entered the meeting room ten minutes later. She also looked young, with a bob cut and a classically beautiful East Asian face.
“...Hello. Uh, please, sit here?”
“Hello. Yes, please sit there.”
She sat awkwardly across from Jaeha, glancing around nervously. Her eyes were full of unease and anxiety. Kang Jaeha sensed something in her—something different from the trainee who had just left, a unique atmosphere that belonged only to her.
He skimmed her profile inside the transparent file.
Her name’s An Jihee.
Twenty years old. Two years as a trainee at Leon, six if you counted the time spent at other companies. As he was looking over the profile, the trainee—no, An Jihee—finally managed to part her lips.
“I... it’s impossible to renew, right?”
Jaeha answered directly, without a trace of roundabout politeness.
“Yes. It is.”
“Ah—”
“You’ve worked hard at Leon all this time. Thank you.”
“······”
An Jihee lowered her head. She looked like she was holding back tears with everything she had. Besides sorrow and gloom, a whole mess of emotions mixed together on her face. She bit down hard on her lip. Her breathing quickened. Across from her, Jaeha suddenly felt another possibility.
...She has a good face. She knows how to use it.
She probably wasn’t doing it on purpose, but letting emotion melt into a flexible face like that was something you had to be born with. At least, that was how Jaeha saw it. If another trainee had worn the same expression, it would’ve looked like plain whining. But An Jihee was different.
The expression, the delivery, the mask—they moved people’s hearts.
An Jihee finally forced back her tears and answered with the resignation of someone who had already accepted the outcome.
“I... understand. Thank you.”
She rose slowly. As she was about to leave the meeting room, Jaeha’s indifferent voice stopped her.
“Do you really have to be an idol?”
An Jihee jerked and looked up, eyes wide.
“Huh?”
Looking up at her, Kang Jaeha answered with surprising sincerity.
“I think you’d be better as an actress than an idol.”