The First Judgment
From that day on, I began reading Hamlet.
Every time I opened the script, I would throw up everything I'd eaten, my eyes would go bloodshot, and in the worst stretches I outright collapsed. Even so, I read a line — and if a line was too much, a word; and if even that was unbearable, a single syllable.
But the moment I finished reading, all of it was wiped from my memory. And then I would go wandering through those hazy memories again, laying the words back over them one more time.
The Demon kept nagging at my side.
Going on about how I had to take care of my health — eat your vegetables, go to sleep, on and on.
"Because it's fun."
"I remember that it was fun."
At the same time, I could feel the Demon watching me — watching me claw my way through Hamlet for dear life — with something like fascination.
The Demon chattered on. I ignored it.
Every time I finished a line, a face rose up in my mind. A blurry, indistinct face — so blurred I sometimes wondered whether it was even that person at all. Like the hours that can't tell dusk from dawn, it was a face I couldn't say was human or demon. And when the script slipped from my memory, that face slipped away with it.
Which is why I'm certain.
"Once I've read all of this — once I can actually remember it — something will definitely change. Something will come back to me. About that demon bastard."
Yeah, sure. Whatever. Human, demon — what does it matter.
I lay back down and turned the page. Even with the agony that came with it, this moment was still a joy.
Hamlet was an electric read. Even after the memory faded, the jolt of it stayed behind, vivid and unmistakable.
The day Garden of Manyusa dropped.
From the moment I opened my eyes that morning, the Leader Actors staff couldn't sit still, pacing restlessly all over the Wooheonjeong courtyard. The release was at five in the afternoon — why the frenzy already? Watching them scramble back to the office, I could feel just how completely this company had gone all-in on me.
What on earth had they seen in me to push me this hard?
...My face, obviously. As if those people had seen enough of my acting to judge it. All three of them were hopeless looks-obsessives, like a family of them. The way they'd flung open the agency's doors to a total stranger without a second thought said it all. What entertainment management company on earth lets in someone with zero background checks?
That's Leader Actors for you.
Having just come back from shooting a cult movie, I was starting to worry about these people a little. So I said to Vice President Gam Soohan — the biggest looks-fanatic of them all, and someone I'd recently started calling "hyung":
"Hyung, just because someone's good-looking doesn't mean they're good."
"Mm... okay. But why are you suddenly bringing this up?"
"Don't go following strangers around just because they're handsome. Like opening the agency door for them."
"Got it. I won't follow them, and I won't open the door."
Technically it had been Do Jaeyeon who opened the door, but the mild-mannered VP, who almost never blamed anyone else, just nodded along.
After I'd warned them a few more times and gone to school, every single person who saw me was talking about nothing else. Ki I-an — one of my classmates who lately alternated between insulting me and complimenting me — was being especially loud about it.
"So was it good or not? No, seriously, this is driving me insane. It was good, it was bad. Just pick one of the two — how hard can that be?"
"Ugh, you're loud."
"If you'd just answer me, I'd shut up!"
"It was bad. Don't watch it."
"Say it like you mean it."
I picked one like he asked, and he still wouldn't shut up.
What do you want from me?
I just shoved my earphones in and flopped down on my desk. Even through the noise canceling, that voice drilled straight into my ears — a child-actor veteran's crisply enunciated diction hitting every syllable dead-on. One friend is plenty. Two, apparently, is more than I can handle.
Anyway — the Leader Actors people's worry that if my grades were too good, I'd draw envy and jealousy from my classmates was half right and half wrong.
What they'd missed was that me flopping would be far worse.
I'm usually pretty oblivious, but even I could read this mood clearly.
They were waiting. Waiting to tear me down if I failed, and to get close if I succeeded.
That waiting attitude is so honest, it's almost refreshing.
As a rookie with no one expecting anything of my acting, the only tribunal I face is a small bench of people around me. But with each step up, as I climb closer to the first tier, more and more people pass judgment. And that goes not just for actors but for directors, writers, producers — even investors.
A drama by Screenwriter Choi Yu-jin has its production budget almost entirely covered by licensing fees alone. A high recoup rate — the ratio of how much of the invested production cost gets recovered — is expected, and people believe that level of stable success is all but guaranteed. Which is exactly why, when it fails, the damage is that much greater. A project this anticipated going under sends shockwaves through the entire industry.
In my past life, I'd never even attended school, let alone navigated a workplace — acting was my entire existence. So whether a production flopped never mattered to me; what I hated most was ruining my own performance. It didn't scare me. I simply disliked it. It annoyed me.
But right now, for the first time, I was a little scared. That was a new feeling.
I spent the school day talking about the upcoming regular performance, waiting for five o'clock — the release hour. And I could feel it: I wasn't the only one. Some of the acting department was waiting for five o'clock too.
Quite a few students in our department were trainees, some were already-debuted idols, and many performed in theater productions large and small. A few were even attached to heavyweight projects.
Even for them, landing a substantial role — the kind that gets a full character profile in a drama script — is difficult, and getting cast in a work by Screenwriter Choi Yu-jin was, quite literally, lottery odds.
I, who had squeezed through that needle's eye on pure luck, now had no choice but to draw the full, bristling attention of my peers and rivals in the acting department.
I checked my phone.
It was live.
The season's most anticipated drama sat front and center on the OTT homepage. Every student in the room checked their phones with taut faces.
This life's first judgment.
Nearly everyone who knew Lee Heeyoon was waiting for the drama — but no one was more wound up than the people of Leader Actors.
In the monitoring room at Leader Actors headquarters sat three staff members — the only two field employees absent — along with one of the agency's actors.
As they waited, Son Jion — the school senior who had signed with the agency not long ago on Lee Heeyoon's recommendation — stepped inside.
CEO Gam Seongbeom asked her,
"How's school? It's definitely different from high school, right? The kids are on another level too."
"It's different, and I like it. It's fun."
Son Jion still couldn't quite wrap her head around why Lee Heeyoon had recommended her. She was still failing TV auditions, and she'd trembled her way through a botched stage performance. Leader Actors wasn't the kind of agency with the scale to manufacture opportunities for its actors anyway.
But Son Jion had made up her mind to find out by what authority Lee Heeyoon had judged her acting — and what his criteria had been.
That was why she'd told them she wanted to sit in on the monitoring at the office.
CEO Gam Seongbeom, who had already rented out a theater for a private screening, said not one word about the drama. Not even "it was good" or "it was bad." But the way he'd been walking around beaming all day — the answer was written all over his face.
Garden of Manyusa began to stream.
Son Jion, truth be told, watched the drama slouched sideways in her seat. She still resented Lee Heeyoon for recommending her to the agency and then never so much as greeting her. Only her posture was crooked, though — from the very first scene, the drama had her full attention.
And then 'Eun-ha' appeared. Son Jion had no choice but to sit up straight.
The cult leader gathers up every child in whom a healing power has manifested and brings them to Manyusa. Seong-woon can cure any disease. But Eun-ha can heal plants, and plants only.
These children, all convinced that it was the cult leader's power and divine revelation that granted them their healing gifts, are put to work feeding the leader's coffers. And among them, by the leader's reckoning, Eun-ha was of precious little use.
Unlike the other children, Eun-ha — born to fanatical believers — had grown up thinking that this Manyusa was the entire world.
And precisely because of that, Eun-ha is the first to realize what this place really is: nothing more than the cult leader's money machine.
There was a time Eun-ha would have leapt off a cliff if the leader told him to. Then, at some point, he becomes aware that the real world exists beyond these walls.
The scene where Eun-ha resolves to leave — modeled on the birth of Buddha — unfolds without a single line of dialogue. Vines sprouted along his bare soles with every step he took. Eun-ha, exercising his gift, sat cross-legged in the center of the greenhouse, eyes closed.
And when he opened them again — Son Jion was utterly transfixed by the eyes on the big monitor.
Without one word, Eun-ha made it unmistakably clear that he was now a completely different person from the boy who had closed his eyes moments before. Through gaze and facial muscles alone. Others might not have caught it, but Son Jion was thoroughly, completely convinced: Eun-ha had realized this place was a cult.
"...How does he do that."
Son Jion murmured it before she could stop herself, then hurriedly clapped a hand over her mouth. Worried she might have ruined the viewing for everyone else, Bae I-se — the senior actress from Leader Actors sitting beside her — took her hand, gently lowered it to the table, and said,
"I was thinking the exact same thing."
"No way."
"Right? Not one line of dialogue... and you understand everything. Exactly what he means."
Son Jion remembered what her friend Han Dohyun had once told her about Lee Heeyoon. He said he'd gotten an earful from that junior. That the acting they needed to do was all written into Shakespeare's script — and that Dohyun was failing to express any of it. Something along those lines.
That was the faith Lee Heeyoon held. That the script contains the answer. More precisely, he worships the truth that some completed being exists within the script itself.
And because that being exists, it can reveal itself even without a single spoken line.
Lee Heeyoon had carried that faith out to the letter. Splitting minutes, splitting seconds, calculating down to units far smaller, moving the muscles of his face for the clearest possible expression of the moment. It was perfect acting.
After monitoring through episode 2 — the one where Eun-ha dies — Son Jion stayed behind after everyone else had left the monitoring room, and watched every remaining episode through the eighth.
Seong-woon, played by lead actor Shin Ji-won, survives by a hair thanks to the plants the dead Eun-ha left behind. Help that Eun-ha had prepared in advance.
From a white-knuckle climax to the final beat of the story — a masterpiece where you couldn't loosen your grip for a single second.
By the time she finished all eight episodes, it was dawn. Son Jion couldn't move from her seat.
Everything suddenly felt impossibly far away.
Then the door opened, and Do Jaeyeon said,
"Jion-ah. Come on, time to go. I'll drive you home."
"...Unni."
"Hey. Don't you dare ever say something like 'I'll quit because I can't act.' Again. You are not bad at acting."
"It's not that... I... Can I go to the fair? The one they hold in April."
"You? You're going to go somewhere that packed with people?"
The Actor's Fair, now in its fifth year, was a market that connected rookie actors with working professionals.
"...Yes."
Do Jaeyeon didn't ask why. She didn't need to look to know exactly where the spark had come from — she'd seen Son Jion's reaction watching episode 2, the one with Lee Heeyoon. Actors all had the same reaction during monitoring.
The reaction of wanting to act. Right now. This very second.