A Shocking Opening
It was, quite literally, a shocking opening.
The most surprising part? Not even half of the first episode had passed.
This was the Lee Yeonjae the public had come to know.
Polite, immaculate posture. A gaze aloof despite his gentle features. A staggering résumé that made him the youngest Best Actor winner in the world, and a private life nearly invisible beneath all that fame. Orphanage upbringing. Rumors of childhood bullying. Multiple stories of quiet charitable donations. A soft, measured way of speaking.
Passing through all of these filters, people had eventually arrived at a single phrase whenever his name came up.
A good actor, sincere about his craft.
The imprint had taken hold without anyone realizing it. He was the kind of actor who seemed too kind for his own good in hardship, the kind you felt proud to root for.
And perhaps precisely because that "good image" was so powerful, what came next landed all the harder.
The sight of him smiling with childlike innocence, a shredded corpse lying right before his eyes.
Hon went hopping and skipping across a hill drenched in red.
On screen, he looked like a pure-hearted demon.
Agent Jang staunched the wound in his abdomen as he called headquarters for backup. The agents arrived quickly, and the two of them made it safely back to the facility.
But the moment Hon stepped inside and spotted a familiar figure, his face lit up.
Hon sprinted down the long corridor without a moment's hesitation, white hair fluttering behind him, until an actor the audience knew well caught him in his arms.
It was Lee Jeonghyeon.
At his appearance, the viewers who had been wound tight this whole time finally exhaled the breath they'd been holding.
Next to nothing had been revealed about Killing Horn before release — only that it was an SF action drama, and that Lee Jeonghyeon and Lee Yeonjae were in it. Since the two were famously inseparable in real life, the sight of Lee Jeonghyeon warmly gathering Hon into his arms let the audience relax almost by reflex.
Kang Seok, the character he played, smiled with gentle warmth.
The murderous atmosphere had melted away somewhere along the line, leaving nothing but soft laughter.
Kang Seok's eyes crinkled softly. Hon, who looked utterly exhausted, hesitated for a beat — then grinned and began fidgeting with the hem of Kang Seok's coat.
What followed were scenes of Kang Seok teasing Hon, calling him "Ppulppuri" and ruffling him like an affectionate older brother. The doctor's-coated Kang Seok and the battle-suited Hon walked off together toward the end of the corridor and disappeared from view.
The camera lingered on the empty hallway.
Then a line of text appeared at the bottom of the screen: Day 1,742 of the H Project.
Day 1,741. Day 1,740. Day 1,739.
The numbers climbed downward. Day 765. Day 542. Day 257. Day 56.
Over a mounting, tension-coiled score, the numbers plummeted with a momentum that seemed it would never stop.
Thud. Thud. Thud!
Then, all at once, the music strangling the audience's chests vanished.
And with it, the numbers froze.
Day 28 of the H Project.
The screen was still the same corridor. Someone shoved open the very door Kang Seok and Hon had just entered, bursting out.
It was Kang Seok. His white coat looked far stiffer, far more clinical, than the one from Day 1,742.
The staff beside him answered, sweat streaking down their faces. Kang Seok gave a cursory nod and strode forward. Before anyone realized it, he'd reached Hon's room, where he signaled the staff to fall back.
The heavy steel door swung open, and Kang Seok stepped inside.
In the room, someone was bound tight in restraints — a young boy with white hair.
The boy — a young Hon — threatened Kang Seok with incomprehensible, animal sounds.
Then Kang Seok smiled and said, "But I think differently."
Kang Seok explained everything calmly, patiently — and Hon, grudgingly, followed the logic. That thrashing around in here would do nothing but tire him out. That nothing would change for it.
From that day on, Hon never rebelled again.
But not rebelling didn't mean he'd let his guard down. Hon remained ceaselessly wary of Kang Seok, and Kang Seok, refusing to give up, simply kept sticking to him.
Scenes rolled on of Kang Seok spending twenty-four hours a day at Hon's side. He did his paperwork next to the boy, ate beside him, slept beside him. And Hon watched the man with a long, unreadable stare.
The project date at the bottom of the screen flipped forward at a rapid clip. And the moment it finally reached Day 247, Hon's mouth opened.
The facility staff monitoring the room through the cameras went slack-jawed.
Kang Seok, meanwhile, simply laughed, entirely at ease.
The young Hon just stared at the cheerfully laughing man without a word. With eyes that said he could not, under any circumstances, comprehend this person — and stared for a very long time.
Somewhere past the three hundredth day of the project, Hon began calling Kang Seok "hyung."
The boy who had once sat in silence, breathing quietly with dead eyes, was gone. In his place grew a lively child who couldn't sit still for a second, chattering away without end.
And so Hon opened his heart to Kang Seok. Before anyone knew it, he'd grown into a boy who threw himself into every experiment with more enthusiasm than anyone.
Then, one day, an experiment went wrong — blood burst from a subject nearby, and Hon took a critical wound.
Kang Seok came sprinting in, breathless. Hon stared for a moment at the sweat beading on his forehead — then huffed and turned his head away.
Hon grumbled with a sulky face, but the corners of his mouth lifted all the same. The audience gazed, dazed, at the sight of him smiling that bashful, childlike smile.
People were starting to take notice of Han Haram, the child actor playing Hon's early years. He barely had any lines to speak of, but the way he looked at Kang Seok — that strange, searching gaze — felt remarkably natural.
Viewers flooded the chat: Aren't they actually brothers? I need more shots of the two of them together. Please, I'm begging for a two-shot.
Understandable — none of them knew that Han Haram already clung to Yeonjae so persistently he'd earned the nickname "Lee Yeonjae's Gum Stuck to His Shoe."
The drama rolled into the middle of episode two, and the timeline shifted to the present.
Hon trudged into the laboratory, bickering with Kang Seok on the way in, and his face went flat with boredom. Lined up before him were more than a dozen prisoners in death-row uniforms.
The prisoners stared at him with taut, fearful faces. To Hon, it was just another experiment — nothing but tedious.
The instant the voice came through the ceiling speaker, Hon drew a gun from inside his jacket.
He cut through the crowd in a single breath, his hand moving with blistering speed.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The gunshots carried not a sliver of hesitation, and Hon's eyes were ice-cold.
Hon snapped at the voice on the speaker, rolled sideways past the charging prisoners, and flicked his fingers.
Tik. With that sound, everyone who'd been hit burst apart.
Before long, the laboratory had become a sea of blood.
That was when it happened. Distracted mid finger-snap, Hon missed an enemy latching onto him from behind, and hands closed around his throat.
The gun clattered to the floor. Hon's eyes darted.
One prisoner remained — the single one strangling him where he stood. And with only that one left, Hon strained desperately toward the gun lying impossibly far away.
A strangled, airless sound escaped Hon. The prisoner strangling him stole a nervous glance upward.
The prisoner had been briefed on exactly one rule: this child must never, ever be killed — and if they grabbed the gun, they mustn't press it to his head and fire directly.
Because if the boy ever entered an irrecoverable state, they would be forced into an existence far more horrifying than death.
Sensing the prisoner's hesitation, the staff outside the laboratory huddled to debate whether to halt the experiment.
In the meantime, Hon was being choked so badly his eyes were moments from rolling back.
Through the fog closing over his mind, a single sentence from Kang Seok flickered past.
If you finish today's experiment well, let's get something delicious with hyung.
In that instant, something lit up in his eyes.
Blood vessels standing rigid to his temples, Hon raised his hand — and sank his teeth into his own arm, as hard as he could.
Crunch.
Solid teeth tore through the boy's soft flesh.
Hon thrust his own bleeding arm straight into the man's face, blood pouring down in rivulets.
With Hon's blood smeared across his eyes and nose, the prisoner instinctively let go. Hon wasted not a second of the gap — and snapped his fingers.
Tik.
With that crisp snap, the man's face exploded. Because the blood on the surface of his skin had detonated rather than anything lodged deep, the man died shrieking in agony, a final scream that lingered in the air.
Hon collapsed onto the floor and gulped down air. Blood clung thick and dark to his white hair.
He stared, blank, at his own arm — still leaking red — and then the heavy door swung open.
At the sight of Kang Seok walking in beaming, Hon let out a small, hollow laugh.
Trembling, Hon hid his arm behind his back. But Kang Seok didn't spare the wound so much as a glance. He just kept smiling, repeating the words experiment successful over and over.
The audience stared at the screen, hollowed out.
Not a single thing had matched what they'd expected the story to be.
Those softly smiling eyes — and beneath them, something deeply unsettling in the way Kang Seok treated Hon. Even Lee Jeonghyeon, the actor they'd trusted, playing a character like this. It stung like betrayal.
It's already past midnight.
Episode two had ended at some point, and it was time to be crawling into bed if there was any hope of getting up tomorrow.
What would you have done in their place?
Right. Most of them swallowed their tears and pressed play on episode three.
Already bracing for how exhausted tomorrow would be.