Rising Star (1)
The morning after Flower of Blood dropped.
The world around me had flipped one hundred and eighty degrees.
…Or rather, nothing of the sort had happened. The world simply kept turning, quiet and indifferent, as if nothing at all had changed.
Of course it had. Just because my face had shown up on a screen didn’t mean the entire planet was going to rearrange itself overnight.
“Woooow! Our Ji-hye… no, Da-young! Teacher watched it last night and just sobbed and sobbed! How can you act that well?”
“Right? Our Da-young’s a future Cannes Best Actress for sure! How does a six-year-old even make eyes like that?”
The kindergarten teachers gushed over my performance like I was some once-in-a-century prodigy, heaping on every compliment they could invent. But that was just kindergarten teachers being kindergarten teachers—people whose actual job description included treating a kid who managed to pour her own water like she’d just triggered the Big Bang right in front of them.
Mom’s reaction told the real story.
Right up until filming wrapped, Han Ari had chattered every night like a sparrow in front of Dad—how my acting had gone, how the director had praised me. Yet the moment the drama actually aired, her excitement cooled to lukewarm.
The person who should have been the most ecstatic was suddenly this subdued?
Just as I’d feared, shifting the broadcast slot must have tanked the ratings compared to the original timeline.
…Probably the platform’s limitations.
I propped my little chin in my hand and pouted bitterly.
Disappointing, sure, but completely predictable given Enflix’s standing right now. In 2012 the company was barely dipping a toe into the global streaming market—an obscure foreign brand with zero name recognition.
And that wasn’t even the half of it. In this parallel world, Korean culture’s international clout was still nowhere near the K-culture frenzy of the 2020s. Back then the whole planet binged Korean dramas in real time; in the early 2010s, “foreign drama” still meant American or Japanese. Korean shows were content for Koreans, nothing more, nothing less.
An unknown overseas brand plus a Korean-style noir that nobody had ever heard of.
Last time I’d wondered what kind of butterfly effects the differences in this world might create… looks like the answer was failure.
Well. I’d just have to take pride in the fact that it was my first job as a child actress.
I brushed the last scraps of expectation clean away. You can’t fill your belly with the first spoonful, after all.
…I really, truly believed that.
But as one day passed, then two, everyday life began to shift—little by little, almost imperceptibly.
“Oh my, you saw it too? That Enflix thing or whatever it’s called.”
“Don’t even start. My husband was going so crazy I watched it with him. That kid hiding in the wardrobe, holding her breath and hiccupping? When she appeared I thought my heart was going to explode.”
On the way home from kindergarten I stopped by the convenience store inside our apartment complex for a yogurt snack. The housewives’ whispers drifted straight into my ears. The second I glanced over, they startled, clapped hands over their mouths, and stared.
“Oh my gosh, oh my gosh! That’s her, right? The child actress!”
“I think so. Good heavens, she’s even more doll-like and pretty in real life.”
Housewives murmuring about me in a convenience store.
“…Yes, yes. Thank you so much for your interest, but our daughter isn’t considering any agency contracts yet. Yes, I’m sorry.”
From the living room where I was watching TV alone, Mom’s low voice on the phone floated over.
“Mom, who was that?”
“Huh? Oh, nothing. Just spam, sweetie. Spam.”
Didn’t sound like spam to me…
I only tilted my head at Mom’s awkward little smile.
And then, the very next day on the walk home, the decisive blow landed.
“Um… excuse me, if it’s not too much trouble…”
I was walking hand-in-hand with Mom, kindergarten backpack bouncing, when a cluster of high-school girls came hurrying toward us from a distance, practically hopping with nerves. Flushed and fidgeting, they carefully held out sketchbooks and pens.
“You’re… the actress who plays Yu Ji-hye in Flower of Blood, right? Would it be okay if we got just one autograph?”
“Huh? Ah…”
While Mom stood frozen in flustered panic, the girls looked at me and let out silent screams.
“Kyaaah! She’s even more insane in real life! So freaking cute!”
“My heart hurts… what do I do?!”
I dazedly scribbled a wobbly signature for the shrieking high-schoolers.
“….”
And finally, that evening, after Dad came home from work and the whole family gathered in the living room.
Just like always, Dad reached for the remote to put on the evening news. The second the anchor’s voice filled the room, the air in our living room froze solid.
On one side of the screen, the B-roll showed my own face—bloodshot eyes glaring through the crack of a wardrobe door, staring straight into the camera.
Clatter.
Han Ari, watching the TV, dropped her chopsticks in a daze, but none of us could spare a thought for that.
Something.
Something was happening.
Wednesday, 10 p.m.
The drama department’s monitoring room on the sixth floor of MBS headquarters was thick with oppressive heat even though the air conditioning was running full blast.
The live broadcast of the Wednesday-Thursday special drama The Moon That Fades Softly had just begun, yet the air that ruled the room was heavy as lead.
CP Kang Min-woo swallowed dryly, eyes locked on the real-time metrics tracking graph beside the monitor. Right next to him sat the head of the Entertainment & Drama Division, arms crossed, face carved from stone.
The fact that the division chief himself had come down to the monitoring room said everything about the crisis the network was facing.
KBC, MBS, SBC.
For years the three terrestrial giants had politely carved up the living-room throne among themselves, maintaining an impregnable fortress. Whoever stumbled, someone else simply ate their share—stagnant water fighting over the same rice bowl.
Then, barely a week ago, some foreign species no one had ever heard of crossed the border and began tearing that solid ecosystem to shreds.
“Team leader, we’re into Act Three! The actress’s nude scene is going out!”
“Check the same-time-slot share!”
A staffer shouted urgently. After one of terrestrial TV’s most reliable shock cards—the nude scene—came the villain and heroine’s explosive secret-of-birth reveal, slamming across the screen.
“It’s climbing! Real-time household share up 1.2 percent!”
Even the subordinate’s buoyant voice couldn’t smooth the crease between Kang Min-woo’s brows. If anything, his teeth ground harder with pure frustration.
“We went through all that hell just to squeeze out this much? Look at the overall numbers—the overall numbers!”
He jabbed roughly at the monitor. The share had twitched by a microscopic amount; the real problem was the fundamental metric.
The absolute number of people still watching live TV—the entire pie itself—was evaporating at terrifying speed. Clear proof that viewers who should have been parked in front of their living-room sets at 10 p.m. on a Wednesday were turning their eyes elsewhere.
Where they had gone needed no investigation.
Enflix. The drama that had recently dropped exclusively there: Flower of Blood.
Not even a live broadcast—just some OTT service sitting on a website—was actively siphoning the same-time-slot audience of a terrestrial flagship drama in real time.
The sheer absurdity of it made Kang Min-woo want to tear his hair out.
As an industry insider he kept closer tabs on overseas trends than most. He’d heard rumors of a streaming company doing well in America, but never in his wildest dreams had he imagined it would be this powerful.
He’d left Enflix open on his phone for competitive analysis. Now he swallowed hard without meaning to.
In Episode 2 the child Yu Ji-hye had lost her family in a massacre. By Episode 3 she had leapt twenty years into adulthood. Gone was every trace of the fragile little girl; instead she delivered brutal action sequences that burned her presence into the audience’s retinas.
Her first appearance after two decades was a scene where she single-handedly dismantled the existing bodyguards and, through sheer skill, became the personal guard of Choi Ji-soo, daughter of the Heukryongpa boss.
But the bodyguard identity was a cover. Yu Ji-hye had actually been planted as a spy by the Hwalhwapa—the organization her father had once belonged to.
Then Episode 4 peeled back yet another layer: even the Hwalhwapa-spy identity was a lie. Her true self was a police undercover agent who had infiltrated both mega-crime syndicates.
For the police organization it was the only way to bring the two corporate-style criminal empires down for good. For Yu Ji-hye personally, it was the path to finding the people who murdered her family.
Walking a tightrope of stolen intelligence between Choi Ji-soo, her uncle Han Hyun-seok (boss of the Hwalhwapa), and the police itself—that was the story that had dropped last week.
“…I’m going insane.”
Kang Min-woo unclenched the fist he hadn’t realized he was making; his hand trembled. The raw, visceral action would have been butchered by terrestrial broadcast standards. Hell, even before the censors got involved, some network higher-up or sponsor would have forced a saccharine romance subplot into the script because “dramas need sweet love stories to sell,” gutting the narrative in the process.
But Flower of Blood was different. It felt like the director had been given complete creative freedom, free of every old-guard interference.
And Director Han Sang-in had repaid that trust with a runtime packed full of addictive, pulse-pounding storytelling.
Right then, on the phone screen, Episode 5’s highlight detonated like a bomb.
“…Yu Jeong-tae was an undercover agent too?”
And in the same breath, the face of the most likely suspect in her family’s slaughter—her uncle and Hwalhwapa boss, Han Hyun-seok—filled the frame in a merciless close-up.
“…!”
Kang Min-woo found himself white-knuckling the phone, sucked straight into the screen, before he snapped back and spat a silent string of curses.
If even an industry rival analyzing the competition could forget himself and get completely sucked in… what chance did ordinary viewers have?
When The Moon That Fades Softly ended and the final metrics slammed onto the monitors, the room sank into the silence of a funeral parlor.
Kang Min-woo felt it in his bones.
The era of dragging ratings with nothing but birth secrets and pretty faces doing soft-focus romance was over.
A grim certainty settled in: by year’s end, at the Acting Awards or the Baeksang Arts Awards, the three terrestrial networks would be reduced to mere extras.
Then the division chief, who had been staring at the screens in heavy silence, finally spoke.
“Kang CP. Tomorrow morning, call in every entertainment-news program and special-feature team.”
His eyes glittered like blades.
“From now on, the entire entertainment division revolves around Flower of Blood. Director, lead actors—everyone. They’re about to become the hottest stars in the industry, so lock them down for us no matter what. Full-court press.”
Mid-order, the chief seemed to remember something and tapped the first page of a file.
She had appeared in only two episodes—1 and 2—yet those two alone had yanked viewers into the story so hard they couldn’t stop watching what came after. The hidden MVP.
“Ah. And the kid who played the young heroine. Seo Da-young, was it?”
He turned to Kang Min-woo.
“Use every connection you’ve got and get in touch somehow. Solo interview, special feature—whatever it takes. We’re building a one-hour special with that child as the centerpiece. Understood?”
And the day after that news segment aired, Baek Seo-jin called.
“Mom, who is it? Does Chae-eun want to hang out again this weekend?”
“…Da-young.”
“Huh? What’s wrong?”
Han Ari, uncharacteristically dazed, choosing her words with extreme care.
What came next made my own expression go just as blank as hers.
“MBS wants to film a one-hour special… about you.”
…Huh?