The Butterfly's Wings Rest
I stopped in my tracks and, belatedly realizing how badly the heat had gotten to me, sank down onto the ground. Circling all of Seoul in thirty-five-degree weather had left my head spinning.
I really do need to eat better.
By the time I made it home and hastily plugged in my phone, the charging was maddeningly slow. My whole body trembled.
Maybe Park Seonyoung had pulled something this reckless because I was making different choices than I had before the regression. Because I'd come to know Gam Ihyun.
What if, after coming all this way, Leader Actors simply vanished again?
What if the family I'd found there left me a second time?
The first time, I hadn't known any better, so I'd let it pass. But there was no letting it pass twice.
I didn't want to be left alone.
I was waiting anxiously for the phone to charge when I felt a hand on my back. I turned to find Gam Ihyun leaning on his cane, having walked all this way, gently patting my shoulder.
“I called them back. It seems like you're trying to stop something…… so don't do anything, just come home.”
“You're coming?”
“I am. Right away.”
I nodded in relief, and the trembling in my body slowly subsided. Then, completely drained, I very nearly fell asleep right there on the spot.
“Oh, Mother!”
From far away, I could hear CEO Gam Seongbeom and Park Seonyoung arguing.
How could the sound of people fighting be so reassuring……
“No, seriously — Father's cameo appearance! You were about to invest on the strength of something he said verbally? How could you do that!”
When CEO Gam Seongbeom raised his voice with a face gone pale, Park Seonyoung answered.
“I didn't. I came back without doing it, I told you.”
“If he hadn't called, you'd have gone through with it!”
“I just wanted to see your father act one more time before he passes.”
When Park Seonyoung replied in a somewhat chastened voice, CEO Gam Seongbeom lost his words entirely and simply wrapped both arms around his mother in a tight embrace.
After all the twists and turns, production of People of Wooheonjeong had been officially greenlit — but nothing good had come out of the meeting. CEO Gam Seongbeom had judged it nothing more than a bottomless pit for money and pulled out of the project, only for Park Seonyoung to find herself unable to let slip what might be her husband's last chance to act.
Having calmed his mother with a sigh of relief, CEO Gam Seongbeom went to check on the sleeping Lee Heeyoon. For some premonition he couldn't quite name, the boy had apparently run himself ragged across Seoul all day. He drew out the flip phone that Heeyoon was still clutching even in sleep.
“Amazing that they still make phones like this.”
Half-asleep, I heard CEO Gam Seongbeom's angry voice somewhere in the house. And just as I was drifting off again, the Demon spoke up.
[Today's butterfly wings have quieted down]
[Congratulations!]
[In celebration of your first tracking resolution, your penalty will be restored]
[+2 days]
[Current date: August 12, 2025]
[Remaining lifespan: 15 years, 4 months, 13 days]
I'd just confirmed all that and closed my eyes again when CEO Gam Seongbeom walked into my bedroom. He slid the old phone out of my hand, and something else — something I'd been missing — took its place.
After he left, I checked what he'd put in my palm. A smartphone. He must have noticed how frantic I'd been over that ancient phone all day.
CEO Gam Seongbeom always knew what I needed.
People in the industry mostly said it was because I was the single most valuable asset at Leader Actors, and that was why he treated me the way he did. But I didn't think so.
CEO Gam Seongbeom had a sense of responsibility as an adult. That was why, for all his lack of gravity — for all that he sometimes felt like nothing more than some older hyung I happened to know — there were rare moments when he felt like a father.
No, not just felt like one. He was probably the person who had most truly played the role of a parent to me.
Once CEO Gam Seongbeom was gone, I checked the phone. A string of texts from him was already waiting on it.
Absolutely ridiculous human being. Thinking that, I pocketed the phone and stepped out of the room.
The sun was already setting. Out in the living room, Park Seonyoung was combing through the proposal again and again.
I could understand what she'd been feeling — trusting a verbal promise of her husband's cameo and pouring money into a proposal that looked hopeless to anyone with eyes. I understood it better than anyone.
I sat down across from her and spoke.
“What if there's no role for me?”
Her tired eyes lifted to adjust her slipping glasses. I went on.
“If it means I get to act, I'd put up my entire fortune.”
Before the regression, that was exactly how desperate I had been.
So I know how Gam Ihyun feels. I know how much he wants to act.
“I tried to talk her out of it because the proposal itself is so bad — but on the matter of Grandfather, Grandmother is right.”
At my words, Park Seonyoung was silent for a moment. Then she asked me.
“Didn't you say that whole ‘long deliberation ends in a handshake’ thing was wrong?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you think that?”
“At least where acting is concerned. I've never once arrived at a handshake after all that deliberation.”
“……”
“This job, you see — long thinking never, never leads to a bad outcome. That's what I believe.”
I am certain of it.
I read my lines, and read them, and read them again. And then I go to a read-through, and everything I prepared turns to garbage. The other actor doesn't match my expectations, the director's approach doesn't match my thinking.
And from that point on, I accept all of it and read again, and read again. About my role, about a single line of dialogue, I worry, and worry again.
The reason a long deliberation can't end in a handshake is that an actor is someone who doesn't agonize in order to find an answer — they agonize in order to build a world.
At my words, Park Seonyoung smiled faintly.
“You're rather good at comforting people, you know?”
I'd never once comforted anyone in my life.
It was probably because I knew Gam Ihyun that my words landed as comfort for her. Because I knew him, I could offer an answer — and to Park Seonyoung, who loved him, that answer felt like consolation.
It was the same mechanism as acting.
I can comfort an audience. It makes no difference what a piece of trash my character is.
All I have to do is know.
Whoever it is I'm about to become.
Hearing me out, Park Seonyoung nodded. Then she asked.
“Well then. I actually think this proposal isn't bad. The problem is the casting. So if the casting issue could be resolved through investment……”
I nodded.
The single biggest reason the remake of People of Wooheonjeong kept falling apart was, without a doubt, the casting struggle. The six willful, larger-than-life characters had been its greatest charm, and no version had managed to preserve them.
In any case, Park Seonyoung seemed to view this particular opportunity as merely fallen through rather than dead — she adjusted her glasses and turned her eyes back to the investment proposal.
Gam Ihyun knew that his wife had been about to make a reckless investment on his account. He was sorry for it — but seeing how wistful he felt over a last chance to act that had just flown away, he couldn't help feeling that he himself was beyond saving.
Night had fallen and the temperature still hovered near thirty. On doctor's orders he couldn't go outside, so he did nothing but gaze through the glass doors — and then Lee Heeyoon appeared.
“I need to prep for my audition. Got any words for me?”
When the boy asked in that characteristic, utterly unceremonious tone, Gam Ihyun answered.
“What you should be doing now is dialing yourself down to the level of the other amateurs. You already act more professionally than any judge sitting in that room.”
“You've made ‘I won't help you’ sound awfully complicated.”
“Never mind that. Do you have any sonnets memorized?”
“Obviously.”
The sheer audacity of the boy's attitude — as if there could be anyone who couldn't — brought a smile to his face. Gam Ihyun asked.
“Will you do number 18 for me?”
“Then let's do it this way.”
Lee Heeyoon opened the door to the garden and stepped out. And in that garden, still pushing thirty degrees even after sundown, he turned back to face Gam Ihyun.
Curious about the pair of them, Park Seonyoung, who had been reviewing the proposal, came over and sat down on the sofa nearest the glass. Lee Heeyoon spoke.
“I'll recite it in the original English. Grandfather, please render it back to me in Korean. Then I'll learn from you.”
“There's nothing in me worth learning.”
“That's for me, the actor, to decide.”
“Insolent brat.”
Ignoring the click of Gam Ihyun's tongue, Lee Heeyoon began Shakespeare's Sonnet 18.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
A sonnet that dares to ask: may I compare you to a summer's day?
When Lee Heeyoon performed the eighteenth sonnet, Gam Ihyun rendered it back for him in Korean.
And Gam Ihyun wondered whether the boy knew why he had chosen this one.
The reason lay in Shakespeare's final lines.
Unlike a summer that fades all too soon, you will be eternal — and the reason for that eternity is that I have left you in this poem.
To Gam Ihyun, Lee Heeyoon was that poem. Shakespeare, born in 1564, had known as he wrote that his words would still be read by a boy born at the turn of the new millennium. And so, in an age when neither youth nor summer could last forever, he had known that his verse carried within it a life of hundreds of years.
The artist departs first, but the art remains longer in the world.
Artists who possess that kind of vitality are vanishingly few. As a fellow practitioner of the craft, Gam Ihyun found it deeply unfair — but it was simply the truth.
Yet there was one mercy: that before he died, Gam Ihyun had come face to face with such an artist, and had been granted the chance to leave a searing mark on him.
Before the death drawing near, Gam Ihyun had grown just the smallest degree detached.
Because he, too, had left himself inside this poem.