A Tsunami Starts from a Small Ripple
A tsunami begins with the smallest of ripples.
Only a few hours earlier, Kim Yu-na had been watching the drama half out of loyalty to her sister. Now she stared blankly at the screen.
“…That’s it?”
The staff roll began climbing over the black screen.
Somehow a whole hour had already slipped by.
“No way. I was just starting to get the setting into my head and actually enjoy it…!”
Still staring blankly at the laptop, Yu-na suddenly bristled and sank deeper into the sofa.
“Unnie. When’s the next episode out?”
“…Huh?”
Kim Hana, who had been staring just as blankly until the credits finished, flinched and dug her phone out of her pocket.
“Uh… hang on. I only signed up for this thing, so I don’t really know. Let me search.”
“You made such a huge fuss about how excited you were for Flower of Blood…”
“What else could I do? I only joined this Enflix thing today!”
Hana muttered her excuse while tapping and swiping through the site’s interface. Then something strange caught her eye and her eyes went round.
“Huh? Wait…”
“What? Is it next Wednesday?”
“No, it’s not that… This is weird. Yu-na, look at the bottom of the laptop screen again.”
At her sister’s words, Yu-na scrolled down with the mouse. In that same instant both sisters’ gazes locked in place.
Right beneath the freshly released first episode of Flower of Blood, the thumbnail for Episode 2 sat there, brazenly active and ready to play.
“…Why is Episode 2 already up? Is this a glitch?”
“Wait a second… Ah! Looks like they drop two episodes at once from the start, and they’ll keep updating two episodes every week.”
A delighted sound escaped Yu-na’s lips of its own accord.
“Oh. Must be because it’s an American site. Pretty unique. I like this.”
“Right?”
In truth, neither self-proclaimed drama addict Yu-na nor Hana—who normally had zero interest in dramas—had ever encountered an OTT service like this before. It was brand-new territory.
But this was a happy miscalculation.
No need to crane their necks waiting for next week; they could dive straight into the next episode. No ads, either, and no need to memorize a broadcast schedule—they could watch whenever they wanted.
At least with the domestic VOD services, all you got was a late re-run of something already aired on TV.
The platform Yu-na had dismissed only moments ago as a “rootless foreign site” had, inside her head, transformed into an “innovative platform.”
“Then I’m hitting play.”
Click.
There was no reason to hesitate.
Yu-na immediately pressed the play button for Episode 2.
And the episode that followed swallowed her and her sister with an intensity so fierce that the first episode they had just watched suddenly felt mild by comparison.
Episode 2 moved quickly, and before long it reached the meeting with the little prince, Min Do-hyun.
A warm, gentle hand extended toward Yu Ji-hye, who sat curled up and crying.
“…Pretty.”
Yu-na murmured without realizing it.
At the same moment, sunlight poured over both children’s heads in a carefully composed shot that looked like something out of a photo book.
Even though it was only two children who hadn’t yet turned ten, the scene was so beautiful that Kim Yu-na forgot to breathe.
But soon their identities were revealed, and the brief connection was severed.
Watching it, Kim Yu-na and Kim Hana made the exact same soft, pitying sound—“Oh no…”—as if they were a single person.
Then young Yu Ji-hye defied her parents for the first time in her life and ran away from home.
Inside the mansion she had fled in tears, the face of her father Yu Jeong-tae—always so cruel and strong—showed, for the first time, the weariness and anguish of a head of household ground down by the world.
“Honey. Don’t you think it’s time we told Ji-hye as well?”
His wife Han Yu-ra approached with worry in her voice. Yu Jeong-tae hesitated, fretting over Ji-hye’s fragile nature.
But their eldest daughter Yu Da-hye, standing nearby, pressed him: she would be starting elementary school next year—how long did he plan to keep hiding it?
In the end Yu Jeong-tae steeled himself and asked Da-hye to bring Ji-hye back. Da-hye left the room.
At that scene Kim Yu-na began piecing together her own theories about what secret Yu Jeong-tae might be keeping.
“What kind of secret is Yu Jeong-tae hiding?”
“Hard to say. We still don’t have much information…”
But their theorizing did not last long.
Just as a heavy tension settled over Yu Ji-hye’s home in the drama, the mansion’s doorbell rang.
Ding-dong—
There was no way Da-hye could have brought her sister down already. Yu Jeong-tae frowned in puzzlement and went to answer the door.
The moment he swung open the heavy front door, every trace of warmth drained from his face like an ebbing tide, and his expression hardened to stone.
“Wait.”
“No way… right?”
The faces of the two sisters watching the drama grew grave as well.
Only minutes earlier it had been the sweet, fluttering romance of two child actors.
But that warm, heartwarming atmosphere vanished as if it had been a lie, and the mood inside the drama shifted with brutal suddenness.
Like a roller coaster dropping without warning.
Because the children’s romance had been so beautifully etched into their minds only moments before, the change hit even harder.
“….”
“….”
Kim Yu-na and Kim Hana forgot even to breathe, staring side by side into the monitor as if their eyes might bore holes through it.
And at last the final scene of Episode 2 arrived.
The mansion was silent.
The two children who returned to that silent house felt the wrongness instinctively.
Furniture and ornaments lay smashed and overturned. Before the little girls could even grasp what it meant, they found their mother and father lying cold in the middle of the living room.
Unidentified men stood beside the bodies.
Da-hye, grasping the situation at once, seized her frozen sister’s hand and pulled her into the master-bedroom wardrobe to hide. But in that instant Ji-hye could not contain her terror and let out a tiny, hiccupping gasp.
Footsteps stopped. The men had heard the sound and began closing in on the wardrobe—a hair-trigger moment.
Just as Ji-hye squeezed her eyes shut in fear, her older sister Da-hye seemed to reach a decision. She hugged her little sister tightly and whispered something soft. Then, to draw the men’s eyes away from the wardrobe, she flung the door open and bolted outside like a mad thing.
Her desperate attempt to put distance between herself and her sister was cut short almost at once by a man’s hand. Da-hye collapsed where she stood. Even in that dying instant she kept her worried gaze fixed on the wardrobe where her sister still hid.
Through the crack in the wardrobe door, Ji-hye watched every second of the tragedy with bloodshot eyes that never once blinked.
…
Time passed.
The men who continued to roam the mansion never noticed the child hidden in the wardrobe and finally left.
But even after they were gone, Ji-hye could not bring herself to move.
She stayed there all night, holding her breath, staring out through the slender gap.
Facing her sister, who lay dead with eyes still open.
Only after several days had crawled by did Yu Ji-hye finally crawl out of the wardrobe.
Was it because she was finally certain the men were gone?
Or because hunger had simply become unbearable?
Faced with Yu Ji-hye’s wordless figure, the two sisters watching could only carefully guess at her feelings.
But the moment the camera turned, revealing the full horror of the crime scene and finally settling on Yu Ji-hye herself, both of them realized that every imagination they had formed was childish and poverty-stricken.
“….”
There was no dialogue.
Only a shot of her looking straight into the camera—into the screen.
Yet Kim Yu-na and Kim Hana froze solid, like mice that had locked eyes with a snake.
Those eyes looked as if they had given physical form to the word despair.
Like a black hole from which even light could not escape—or something thicker, a deep swamp from which there was no climbing out.
Only after meeting that gaze did they understand.
What it meant for a family to vanish. What it meant for one’s entire world to disappear.
If their own only sister—Kim Hana, Kim Yu-na—were to die, would their eyes look like that?
Even daring to measure that feeling sent a cold jolt through the heart.
The eye contact that seemed longer than the entire rest of Episode 2 finally ended, and the staff roll began to rise.
But even after every name had scrolled past, the two of them remained nailed in place in front of the laptop for a long time.
When Yu-na finally came back to herself, the first thing she said was a single word.
“…Next episode.”
As if possessed, she gripped the mouse and refreshed the page.
Click.
The screen flickered.
Click.
“…Huh?”
No matter how many times she refreshed, nothing changed.
“…No!”
Yu-na shouted as if she were about to leap out of her seat.
“Why isn’t there a next episode?! Where’s Episode 3?!”
“…I told you they only drop two at a time.”
Only then did Hana manage to speak, as if she too were finally clawing free of the shock.
“Unnie! How can they cut it off after a development like that?! If they’re going to show us this much they should at least open paid early access for the next one!”
The Kim Yu-na who, only an hour earlier, had been raving about how generous and convenient it was to get two episodes at once had completely vanished.
Right now she was raging as if the nonexistence of the next episode were the single most unjust thing in the world.
“Ah… I’m going crazy, seriously.”
Yu-na raked her fingers through her hair and pressed her forehead.
This was torture.
Of all places to cut it off.
If they were going to do this, it would have been better to upload one episode at a time.
Of course, even if they had uploaded one at a time, the moment she finished Episode 2 she would have ended up in exactly the same state—but at least that was how Kim Yu-na saw it.
Release this much and then make people wait a whole week? An act this cruel ought to be illegal on the spot.
This was practically a violation of the Geneva Convention.
“You… not going to sleep?”
“You think I can sleep after that?”
In the end Yu-na set the laptop on her knees and straightened her posture.
The clock hands had long since passed midnight and were pointing at one in the morning, but drowsiness had been blasted into the far reaches of the universe along with Da-young’s final eye-acting.
If she kept this insane thrill bottled up alone she would clearly not sleep a wink all night.
She needed to share the feeling with someone right now, needed to check other people’s reactions.
Yu-na logged into the largest drama-focused community site in the country—the place she visited every single day: Drama Gallery.
Even at this dead hour the site was lively; being the biggest drama community in Korea meant the refresh rate never really died.
With fingers still trembling from the aftershock, Yu-na began to type.
I honestly had zero interest in this drama, but my sister kept screaming at me to watch it so I signed up for this new foreign site with zero expectations.
But this might honestly be the best Korean drama of the year. The directing and atmosphere are insanely heavy and the quality is movie-level, and when the child actress was acting I literally couldn’t breathe.
Especially the last scene—anyone else see it? How does a six-year-old make eyes like that?
My heart feels like it’s about to explode so I’m writing this. When does Episode 3 drop, I’m actually getting dizzy
Post registered.
Refresh.
Views: 1
Views: 8 Comments: 1
Views: 23 Comments: 3
True to its status as the country’s largest drama community, comments began appearing almost immediately.
Yu-na checked the comment window with her heart still pounding.
But the comments under her post were disappointing.
Instead of sharing thoughts on the drama, people didn’t even know Enflix existed.
“Ha. Self-proclaimed drama fans who don’t even know Enflix…”
Even though she herself had never heard of the platform until today, Kim Yu-na felt frustrated and refreshed the page again.
And then, at last, one comment caught her eye.
Starting with that comment, viewers who had been streaming Flower of Blood in real time began flooding in one by one and filling the comment section.
And so, among gallery users who still had no idea what Enflix even was, glowing praise from people who had actually watched Flower of Blood began to appear one after another.
Most dismissed the frenzy as overhyping; some even accused her post of being paid promotion.
But a few others started asking whether the drama was really that good…
And that same reaction was happening simultaneously among every viewer who had watched Flower of Blood, all across the country and all across the world.
Quietly, the tidal wave was already rolling in.
A colossal tsunami that would overturn the entire world.