Script Reading (1)
The audition had ended without a hitch.
It had been thrown together in a hurry, but it hadn’t gone badly.
No, if anything, we’d managed to bring in some pretty good actors.
Five days after the audition, most of the roles had found their owners.
There had been a lot of back-and-forth along the way—internal screening, meetings, endless opinions traded across the table.
Sometimes an actor who’d auditioned for the villain, Ma Gwi-pyeong, looked too polished to fit and got bumped over to Jang Bung-ik instead, and sometimes it happened the other way around. But in the end, the cast was filled out, and that was what mattered.
On top of that, the people the advertisers or the station itself had tried to wedge in had all been tucked neatly into roles where their weight wouldn’t cause too much trouble. Clean. Efficient.
Most importantly, there was the lead role, Yeong-ho.
“Well, Han writer, I’ve got good news for you. Three candidates made it through the internal CP meeting, and Na Jingeon is the final pick. It was the director’s call.”
“Thank you.”
“Heh-heh, why thank me? The director chose him.”
“Still, you paid attention to what I said.”
“······Han writer, don’t go making me any more emotional than this.”
I was worried I’d end up getting used to that gorilla face of his, too.
Anyway.
“So now we need to move on to the most important part.”
By then, I was tense.
“This is the fork in the road for who gets to be our Hyang-dan.”
In a drama, the female lead mattered just as much as the male lead.
The historical-noir setting might seem like it would naturally reduce her importance, but between narrative structure and current drama trends, a Wednesday-Thursday miniseries that had men blabbing away nonstop was a risk no one wanted to take.
When you thought about it, she was one of the faces of the work.
And today was the day we had to decide who would wear that face. The final contenders were two.
Ryu Cheong-ah.
And one other actress with a decent career under her belt, named Huh Yujin.
“All right, then. Let’s start the meeting.”
Go Yeongchan’s voice carried real weight.
And of course, this wasn’t something we could decide lightly.
“Hmm, this is getting heated. Should we take a little break?”
“Yes, I’ll go buy coffee or something.”
“Huh? No, Han writer! There’s no need to—”
“It’s fine. I should help where I can.”
“Han writer······!”
I bowed my head quickly and slipped out of the meeting room.
If I stayed any longer, I had the absurd feeling he might grab me with those steel-rebar arms of his and wring me out like a towel.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
The casting meeting for the female lead went on especially long.
That was how divided everyone was over which of the two to choose.
The side that favored Huh Yujin was the stability camp.
Her filmography was solid, and her acting had no real rough edges.
She had that kind of experience from rom-coms—the “poor but spirited young woman starting out in society” sort of role—that matched Hyang-dan’s tenacity.
On the other hand, the camp that wanted Ryu Cheong-ah was the high-ceiling camp.
Go Yeongchan, Min Byeongki, and a few other producers who knew what she could do on set all fell into that side.
If the stability camp couldn’t even object to Ryu Cheong-ah’s acting, then it was obvious just how strong the pull was.
In the end, even with the entire CP team involved, the meeting kept dragging because each candidate’s flaws were too clear.
Huh Yujin could carry a drama safely, but she wouldn’t make it explode.
Ryu Cheong-ah showed the unmistakable seeds of something explosive, but she was a rookie who hadn’t been tested at all.
Yes, ridiculous as it sounded, every problem came down to one question: had she been proven?
When you thought about it, that was only natural.
This wasn’t some neighborhood weekend soccer club. This was a major media project with tens or even hundreds of billions of won on the line.
In a business where the biggest reason for rise and fall had, throughout the market’s long history, always been people, it made sense to choose stability over potential even when potential was staring you in the face.
In truth, Huh Yujin was a perfectly reasonable option.
She’d cruise along to the end, probably. Nothing flashy, nothing off-putting, a decent filmography, a stable switch in acting style.
By the time I died in my first life, she had even moved on from rom-coms entirely and into films, showing her face on the big screen at regular intervals.
If anything, Ryu Cheong-ah was the remarkable one.
She was a nobody rookie, and yet she’d crossed that wall on presence alone.
Anyway, my position in that meeting was.
······Embarrassingly, silence.
-Han writer, what do you think?
-I think both are good choices. ······But since I’ve heard Na Jingeon actor’s side argue so strongly, I’d like to follow that opinion here.
-Hmm, so there’s no one you’re really drawn to?
-······I don’t always believe my own judgment is right.
-There it is. All right. Still, think it over a little more and tell us later. In the end, it’s your script, Han writer, so when it comes to how the characters are realized, your opinion matters.
Just choose Huh Yujin.
I knew that would be the most rational decision.
And yet, even knowing that, I couldn’t bring myself to reach out toward her side.
Why?
No point asking myself that.
I already knew the answer.
······Because I want to be the best.
Sword-Bound Gentleman had been the best work I’d ever written, the best of everything I’d brought to air after my regression.
And the one who had made it that best, beyond any possibility of denial, was Ryu Cheong-ah.
Not because that woman herself was special.
Because Hyang-dan was special.
At some point during the writing, the two of them had become tangled together.
-I can tell. That’s why I liked her from the first time I saw her.
Maybe it would have been better not to hear that at all.
-Isn’t a relationship better when you’re not together because you already have a reason, but because being together is what creates the reason?
Ryu Cheong-ah knew Hyang-dan.
She knew how to breathe real-world desires into a fictional person.
She poured human light into an empty vessel of a character and made her impossible not to love.
That was why Ryu Cheong-ah had to be Hyang-dan.
It was also why I couldn’t easily shake off the thought of her, even knowing she was like a time bomb waiting to go off.
If only she were trash like Director Jo instead.
Sponsor payoffs, tax evasion, school violence—
If she’d done even one thing wrong, I wouldn’t have had any lingering attachment left.
-······I’m sorry, writer-nim.
And then she’d just toss out words like that and leave, dumping the weight of it on me as she went.
Tsk.
I clicked my tongue and bought coffee, carrying it back in my hand.
That was when someone appeared.
Min Byeongki.
“Writer-nim! Give that to me! Hah-heh! How could a ‘partner’ let you carry such a heavy burden alone?”
“Ah, Director.”
“Oh, you bought a lot. This is out of your own pocket, right? I’ll send half of it to your account later!”
What wind had blown through to make him this affectionate?
Ah, so he’d been uncomfortable being the one standing there like a sack of barley left behind.
In the drama, he was the director, but among everyone in the meeting, he was the youngest.
With those human artillery pieces sitting in CP seats, he probably didn’t feel like he was resting at all just because he was sitting there with them.
“Meetings are really long, aren’t they? Though this one’s actually civilized. It’s a secret, but in our drama division meetings they call it a conclave—”
He kept babbling nonsense, and I was honestly grateful for it.
It spared me the headache of spiraling into useless thoughts.
Then he said, “Writer-nim, you’re still for Ryu Cheong-ah, right?”
I flinched.
“You saw that acting, didn’t you? She’s the real deal, top to bottom. Her face is exceptional, and she has that distinctly Eastern look that suits a sageuk so well······!”
Ah. He just liked Ryu Cheong-ah and was trying to slip his preference into the conversation.
“I’m not sure.”
“Ye—yes!?”
“Her skill is certainly worth acknowledging, but the more unverified variables we have, the more risk we take.”
“You say that, but Na Jingeon actor—······ No, never mind.”
He’d said his piece and then what?
Why are your eyes bulging like a crucian carp’s?
Still, I supposed from his point of view it made sense.
At this stage, Na Jingeon had only ever played a handful of supporting roles, so to argue this strongly that Ryu Cheong-ah was unacceptable unless she was the one picked was an awfully biased standard.
I couldn’t even come down with certainty myself, so I had no room to talk.
The complete elimination of uncertainty.
And yet, the impossible height still beckoned.
My head was still a mess.
But because Min Byeongki happened to be standing beside me, I found myself suddenly curious what his take would be.
“Director, can I ask you something?”
“Ah, yes! Go ahead!”
“Do you like games?”
“Games? Hah! I love them! Do you, writer-nim? I’ve always been a core MMORPG user, and back in the day I was even in a WoW ranking guild—”
“No, nothing that serious.”
“Ah······.”
“I’m just using it as an example. So······.”
Yes, that would do.
······Suppose there’s an item with insanely strong starting performance.
“Huh?”
“If you have it in your hands, it can hit the cut line for any boss. It’s a weapon that makes the game ridiculously easy just by holding onto it, with no unnecessary grinding or investment.”
“Uh, isn’t that a broken item?”
“Exactly. That’s why there’s a risk.”
Min Byeongki listened with growing curiosity.
“What risk?”
“After a certain amount of time, it always blows up. When it does, it puts a permanent debuff on your character.”
“Eek.”
“If you had a weapon like that, would you use it?”
I thought it was a fitting analogy.
When I thought about what Ryu Cheong-ah meant to me, I couldn’t come up with a better one.
A guaranteed payoff.
And an even more certain risk.
Min Byeongki frowned.
Apparently, even for him, this wasn’t an easy answer—
“I’d use it?”
“Pardon?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
I stopped walking.
Min Byeongki tilted his head, then stopped too and looked at me.
“Isn’t that an easy question?”
“How is it easy?”
“It is, though.”
The answer he gave was somehow in an area I hadn’t considered.
“You just use it and throw it away. It sounds like the condition is that you even know roughly when it’ll blow up.”
“······?”
“Huh? You said it’s a weapon that doesn’t need any resource investment. So wouldn’t you just make money with that weapon and switch to another one?”
I felt my mind go blank for a moment.
“This isn’t a game where you’re forced to use only one weapon, right? That’s why I’m saying this.”
“······Probably.”
“Then that settles it. Just toss it and switch. That’s how games are, after all. In the end, what matters is this stat—”
Why hadn’t I thought of that?
When you looked at it, it was a ridiculously simple line of reasoning.
Right. Unlike everyone else, Ryu Cheong-ah was a failure factor I knew unusually well.
There had been so many things we’d talked about during the time we’d spent together, and after that I’d even wasted a full year digging into her death.
So why?
How had I failed to extend that line of thought in that direction?
By the time Min Byeongki’s chatter had drifted into a distant hum, I realized that the feeling lodged in a corner of my heart had been a curtain.
It had spread wide, and yet it was so thin, like a filter, that I’d hardly noticed it was there.
A dry laugh escaped me.
······Ha.
Because I hated her.
Ryu Cheong-ah’s betrayal had, among the many people who ruined me, been especially hateful.
That feeling stabbed at me so painfully that even getting close to her felt burdensome.
It was nothing more than an issue of the heart.
And once I faced that, one thing became unmistakably clear.
“······Writer-nim?”
“That’s a good answer.”
“Pardon? Ah, uh, is it? But what does this have to do with games······.”
“And Director, I think you were a little too harsh.”
“Yes!?”
“It was a bit much.”
“Hold on just a second! We were talking about games! Weapons! Why are you making me out to be the bad guy—!”
The weight of my steps had grown lighter than before.
I could see what needed to be done.
“I was thinking of restarting the meeting. Han writer, do you still have no opinion?”
“Let’s go with Ryu Cheong-ah.”
“Huh?”
“I think the high ceiling belongs to Ryu Cheong-ah.”
The moment I realized time had been rewound, I made a decision.
Being ruled by human beings wasn’t the path I’d chosen in this life.
What had been granted to me was a miracle: knowledge from the future.
If I still let myself hesitate because of feelings while carrying something like that, then that would be the real act of being controlled by the people of the past.
So instead—
“For this work, I think she’s the better choice.”
Let me choose the best move only I, the one allowed this miracle, could make.
Let me not become a coward who dragged emotions into the reasons for his choices.
Go Yeongchan’s eyes widened.
Then he broke into a grin.
“I knew our Han writer had an eye for this!”
In the end, that one choice was the issue.
All the chess pieces had gathered.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
After the casting was finalized, a small news item went out.
It wasn’t a big production yet—not even close, not with any star power to speak of—but it was being touted as one of WBS’s ambitious self-financed projects.
A work the world didn’t know yet.
A work the world had not only failed to anticipate, but didn’t even know the name of.
That was where we were starting.
Within the time we had, we had to turn this project into something excellent, something the world would want to watch.
This was the first step.
“All right, let’s give it our all today too! It’s everyone’s first time meeting, after all!”
It was the day of the script reading.
I’d settled my mindset.
I would interfere only as much as necessary for this project, and once that was done, I would part ways with Ryu Cheong-ah.
Thinking about the future that lay ahead, that would be better for both of us.
So I intended not to speak to her about anything beyond business.
But then.
······Why is she staring at me like that?
I could feel Ryu Cheong-ah’s gaze landing on me.
It was starting to feel like she might punch a hole right through my face.