Returning to the Beginning (1)
Director Jo’s expression went blank.
Seonghun, sitting beside him, let his jaw drop.
A whole parade of reactions so textbook they were almost comical followed, and with it came a wave of self-reproach.
So this was the upper limit of what I could imagine people doing.
This entire situation was part of a lucid dream.
Which meant that everything happening here, every reaction and every absurd beat of it, had to be something drawn from the territory I’d internalized as some half-baked serious writer.
That realization was a little too embarrassing, so I stood up.
“I’ll be going now. Thanks for your time.”
Even as I bowed and left, I didn’t feel especially satisfied.
Strictly speaking, it was nothing more than indulging myself by accomplishing in imagination what I’d never managed in real life.
It didn’t rise above the level of those so-called fantasies of getting revenge on the school bullies.
If there was anything noteworthy at all, it was only that the fantasy had been put together with remarkable precision.
Was my spatial awareness really this good?
I left the office, took the elevator down, walked out of the building, and then strolled along the streets of the past, where every memory from that era came back to me bright and vivid.
Where was my place again...?
I followed my memory back to the one-room rental apartment I’d lived in then.
Even by that point, I still believed everything was something inside my imagination.
I was so certain of it that—
...but does a normal dream even keep going until the next day?
It took me that long to realize something had gone badly, badly wrong.
* * *
At first, I only thought it was strange.
Everything was so clear that I couldn’t even begin to gauge how deeply I regretted this period of my life.
When I left the office and went to the bus stop, I suddenly remembered exactly which bus to take, and how, to get home.
When I returned, the one-room apartment was still exactly as it had been back then—its closet, the old mattress, the mildew-stained wallpaper, even the furniture I’d thought would be nothing more than a blur.
Naturally, I took it as some compensatory effect of my own brain.
The flow of time I was feeling seemed closer to a sensory error than anything else.
So I drifted through the hours in a daze.
All I did was look back.
When life ends, you end up reflecting on the past.
What was it I wanted to do?
I wanted to become an outstanding writer.
Why?
Ever since I was young, I liked watching dramas with my family.
I liked books too, so I went to college with that in mind, and then...
Seonghun.
I met him, and seriously stepped into this world.
Back then, everything had felt fun.
I had people telling me I could do it, and I had big dreams.
It felt like the whole world belonged to me.
I’d been so full of confidence that I even made the arrogant promise that we’d create a work that would go down in Korean television history.
And then I got a taste of this business’s bitterness and broke.
I was the only one.
Seonghun was different.
While I was collapsing, Seonghun was rising and rising.
He made a name for himself in the indie film scene, learned the commercial side of directing in earnest, and eventually built a career making billion-viewer blockbusters.
There were times when just seeing him like that was unbearable.
I felt even more miserable, and I’d caught myself resenting him for no reason.
I only learned that feeling was shame after I got sick.
The moment I faced the man who hadn’t given up on me even when I’d fallen all the way to the bottom, that resentment turned into humiliation.
The ending may have taken this shape, but maybe it had been worth shedding the inferiority that had tormented me so savagely for so long.
Whatever the case, it’s all over now.
By the time I got that far, I was already letting out little dry laughs.
I was facing the reality that this was just a moment being sustained by chemical reactions in my brain.
When is this going to end...?
I’d thought I’d wake up from the dream the moment I died.
It took a full day to realize that wasn’t the case.
Nothing special happened.
I was just hungry at every meal.
When night came, I’d drift off and wake up to the morning sun.
Then I’d lie there staring blankly at the ceiling, feeling itchy and restless, unable to keep still.
And through all of it—
...is this really a dream?
A chill ran down my spine, but the sense of reality only grew stronger.
Only then did I understand.
This wasn’t the time to be standing around dazed like this.
* * *
I crouched in the middle of the room and scrubbed at my face with both hands.
No matter how much you’d lived inside commercial storytelling, accepting something like this in one go was absurd.
Of course, unless you were spectacularly stupid or missing any sense of reality at all, confusion was the only sane response.
So I felt like my head might split open.
There wasn’t a person alive who could stay sane in this situation.
And yet, every time my heart thudded hard enough in my chest, reality came flooding back in.
I couldn’t deny it.
Time...
It had really been rewound.
Straight back to before everything began.
No, to right after the first bad button had slipped loose and come undone.
Back to 2013, when I was still nothing at all.
Only after chewing over that truth for what felt like forever did I let out a disbelieving laugh.
My palms were slick with sweat.
The thought that had lodged itself halfway through my thinking had been this:
Can I start over? From the beginning? And avoid those bastards?
There had always been one reason I failed.
Every time something was about to prove itself, those subhuman pieces of shit had trampled my path.
But if I was back in the past?
I can avoid them. No, I can use them.
It meant I could live a life no longer dragged around by them, but become something that steered itself.
The moment I understood that, every sensation in my body sharpened more clearly than ever before.
It felt as if the illness that had been gnawing at my heart until my very last breath had vanished in an instant.
It was like the hope that had already been crushed underfoot was catching fire again.
So many adjectives came rushing up to describe that euphoria that trying to pin it down in words felt, oddly enough, more muddled than anything.
The emotion, once unleashed, raced straight to my head and woke my reason in a heartbeat.
Then what do I do first?
Think.
At this point, I was just a job seeker fresh out of college, preparing manuscripts for submission.
With Seonghun’s help, I’d somehow managed to make contact with that bloated toad.
And I’d blown it spectacularly.
After that, I’d gone dark.
No matter how good-natured Seonghun was, he was still a person.
Sorry about that. It must have put you in a terrible position.
Of course, I’d been reckless because I thought this was a dream, but that didn’t change the fact that I was the one who’d done it.
The fortunate part was that Seonghun’s background wasn’t flimsy enough for something like this to do real damage.
There would be friction, sure, but not enough to be fatal.
And that would disappear entirely once that toad’s scandal blew up next year anyway.
But Seonghun wasn’t someone who’d come back from the future.
He must have left his phone behind, so there was no way to reach me. And if he didn’t come looking for me first...
Because he’d be the one handling the cleanup.
Whatever happened, once Seonghun finished sorting things out, he would definitely come looking for me.
And of course, when that happened, he wouldn’t be smiling.
But was he the kind of man who’d just blow up and damn me to hell?
No, not quite.
We’d known each other for nearly fifteen years.
Outside of my family, he was the man I’d spent more time with than anyone else in my adult life.
He’ll ask why. There’s a way through this.
In truth, the answer was fairly obvious.
This was a little shameless to say about my own face, but let me state one blunt fact.
There was a reason Seonghun, a man who had nothing to lose, had cared about me that much.
There was a reason I’d been able to claw at a comeback for more than ten years even while people in the industry called me a total failure of a human being.
All I have to do is show him the writing.
That wasn’t blind confidence.
This market was one where people would sell their souls to the devil for a hit.
In that market, Han Jaekyung had always been the most terrible demon, and at the same time, the sweetest bait.
It wasn’t hard.
I didn’t need to show him some hole-ridden script written by a twenty-five-year-old Han Jaekyung. I just needed to show him the kind of script future Han Jaekyung wrote—the one they couldn’t help but approve, even while calling him a useless piece of shit.
If I’d done it once, there was no reason I couldn’t do it twice.
No, now I could do even better.
I headed for the desk in the corner of the room.
I pressed the power button on the ancient laptop that took at least three minutes just to boot.
A wave of euphoria hit me so hard I briefly wondered if the pleasure center of my brain had broken.
I can do this. If I do it, I can do it. Start over from the beginning...!
Because I knew the future.
Because I knew the people of the future.
I wouldn’t collapse in the same miserable shape again.
I would seize every honor I had ever been meant to claim.
And if I was taking my first step toward that—
My masterpiece.
I opened Word on the laptop, which had finally powered on, and typed in the title.
Geomgyeilgun
Nineteen percent viewership in its first week.
The work everyone had predicted would eventually reach fifty percent, like the curtain call of a miracle.
Maybe even higher than that.
My most horrifying memory—the one that had ended only after the heroine’s suicide forced the broadcast to stop.
And yet also the brightest fragment of my life.
I dragged that script back out into the world.
* * *
Park Seonghun was, by universal agreement, a good man.
Born into an environment of abundance—no, into a life anyone would envy—he had grown up without wanting for anything, and because he’d been loved so thoroughly, he was stingy with nothing when it came to giving that love back.
Even so, there were certainly moments when Seonghun got angry.
The meeting between Jaekyung and Director Jo three days ago had been one of those moments.
Bang, bang, bang!
“Hey! Han Jaekyung! I know you’re in there, so open the damn door!”
Seonghun’s voice pounding against the door of the one-room villa was rough enough to scrape the paint off.
He was the only son of a famous actress who had once dominated an era.
He’d inherited his mother’s striking looks exactly as they were, but right now his face looked more like that of a demon from hell than a handsome leading man.
And for good reason.
“Do you even know what the hell you did? Huh?! I’ve been running myself ragged cleaning up your mess! I even had to bow my head for you, for Christ’s sake!!!”
Han Jaekyung.
A junior he’d met in college and cherished so much that people would say he took him everywhere he went.
His social skills were so catastrophically lacking you’d wonder if he’d thrown them in the trash somewhere, and yet, despite inheriting every bad condition imaginable, he was a once-in-a-generation talent who could enchant everyone around him with nothing but his writing.
The second that junior finally started aiming for a drama-writer debut, Seonghun read the script and knew it.
This would work.
If the right director was attached, this was the sort of script that could dominate the whole season.
Seonghun had both an eye for aesthetics and an instinct for commercial success.
At the very least, whenever the instincts he’d inherited from his mother burned this hard, he had never been wrong.
So he’d thrown his full support behind Jaekyung.
He wanted to give him the brightest possible lifeline, the one that would help turn his dream of making a work that would last in Korean history into reality. Before they even officially teamed up, he had planned to use every connection he could to turn Jaekyung into a star writer.
And then.
Of all possible times, he’d lost that opportunity.
“Get your ass out heeere!!!”
Bang! Bang! Bang!!!
He’d gone to the meeting just fine, and then right there in the room he’d said no.
And not a polite no, either. It had been, “I don’t want to.”
How much work had Seonghun had to do cleaning that up?
After going through all of that, if they made even the slightest misstep, Jaekyung would be finished in the industry.
He absolutely had to drag him in front of Director Jo and make him bow his head.
That was why Seonghun was standing here now.
If I let this bastard off the hook, he’s not even a human being anymore! Asshole, total asshole!
If words didn’t work, then he’d make him listen with his fists.
The thought had just reached that point when—
Click.
“Why are you yelling like that and disturbing the neighbors?”
“Why? Why the hell do you think—?!”
“Just come inside first. Don’t shout out here.”
Seonghun couldn’t believe how calm he was being.
And yet, people were people.
The moment Seonghun saw Jaekyung’s face, he flinched.
“...Have you eaten? Slept? What happened to you?”
“I haven’t eaten or slept. Something came up.”
“What, what is it? Don’t tell me something happened with your family...”
“No, it’s nothing like that. Just come in.”
Jaekyung looked utterly haggard.
His face had always been sharp, but today the shadows beneath his eyes were darker, and his cheeks looked even more hollowed out.
Had something happened to his health?
Was that why he’d stormed out of the meeting?
Seonghun’s imagination was already running wild.
“I’m sorry I left like that that day. I was a little, ...well, a lot out of my mind.”
“No, what happened—”
“Look at this first. It’s what I’ve been working on.”
Jaekyung handed him a thick stack of printed pages.
Judging by the format, it was writing.
“...You locked yourself away and wrote this? After causing that whole scene?”
“If you read it, you’ll understand.”
Seonghun was so dumbfounded he couldn’t even laugh.
For a second, something seemed to snap in his head, but he held it back.
Jaekyung being socially inept wasn’t new, and even setting that aside, something about this felt wrong.
Seonghun’s expression turned a little more serious.
He’s this certain?
Jaekyung was usually cautious.
Aside from his talent, he wasn’t the sort of person who confidently declared his own work a success before anything had been proven.
More importantly, he looked different today.
He seemed far more mature than the Jaekyung Seonghun knew.
No, drained was probably the better word.
Seonghun had always been weak against Jaekyung.
As was often the case with people who had lived in material comfort, Seonghun treasured human talent that couldn’t be replaced.
Caught between unfamiliarity and annoyance, he postponed the anger he’d been ready to unleash.
For now, he decided he had to read the script, whatever else happened.
And the moment he turned the first page, the one titled Geomgyeilgun, and started reading—
“...Huh?”
Seonghun’s eyes slowly widened.
Judging by his earlier vow that if he didn’t stay still he’d become a bastard, he was now, without question, standing at the edge of becoming one.