Life, Once Again!

After Story 173

As with everything else in life, acting too sometimes becomes more unfamiliar and new the more you do it. As it was a form of art expressed with the human body, it too would become formulized over time. That person would eventually stop worrying and fall back to their compiled methodology until eventually they feel a sense of mannerism and change their method.

The acting they had done for years would become unfamiliar in a span of an instant.

‘This method’ when expressing joy and ‘that method’ when expressing sadness — when that formulized internal system collapses, some would say they agonized, but for Ganghwan, he always looked forward to such moments.

The reason he took a so-called ‘Sabbatical year’ and spent time in places unrelated to his acting was also to break through his mannerism. He was intentionally placing a gap in his work period to shake off the things he had gotten used to, both consciously and subconsciously.

Having escaped his original method of acting, when he started this drama, he placed his focus on ‘raw acting’ this time. Rough emotional acting with minimal filtering. He really wanted to remove all the emotional filters and throw himself into the role, but as the role was that of a murderer, he couldn’t exactly do that.

He was holding onto a sliver of himself so that no accidents would occur.

In that sense, the character Yoon Hojung was very picky. The murderers he saw in Korean dramas only chose murder as a form of manifesting their desire for success. They would kill their target to steal their social position or for monetary gains.

On the contrary, Yoon Hojung was a character whose entire objective was murder. Enacting justice and bringing benefit to society and whatnot were outside of his interests. What he pursued was the act of murder itself.

The most important commitment during serial murders was to not get caught. To not get caught, he had to be smart. The murderer didn’t just need to possess a lot of knowledge, they had to be able to use that knowledge practically.

He could be excited about doing the deed, but even at his climax, he had to stay a rational person that does not miss a single mistake.

A murder had to occur only in the designated places, leaving no traces behind, and he had to watch out not to make any mistakes that might put him on the suspected list.

Naturally, he couldn’t help but become meticulous. The character that the writer designed was in accordance with his thoughts.

What of his expressions and tone of speech then?

Yoon Hojung was someone who could not afford to be on the suspected criminal list. He had to maintain a suitable social relationship, but he never show a glimpse of what was inside him.

And there was nothing better than a smile when it came to hiding that deep abyss. He wore a faint smile in all scenes, even in scenes where he was doing a monologue.

That wasn’t the thought of Yang Ganghwan. It was the will of Yoon Hojung. He just naturally became like that.

To that, producer Cha said that it was good.

“Don’t mind me and try to shake me off with all of your power.”

“I’m really going try hard,” said the actress.

“Please do. Also, I might be a little rough. If you feel that something isn’t right, or you feel too uncomfortable, then please shout right away so that I can stop.”

The actress nodded, seemingly understanding that Ganghwan wasn’t saying this out of formality.

“Just watch out so that I don’t get bruised.”

They did a rehearsal with producer Cha. Throughout the rehearsal, Ganghwan kept telling the actress that he was going to do it harder in the real run and that she should do so as well.

Before the standby, producer Cha said to him, “How about you hold back a little?”

“If I hold back here, I’m going to be a totally different person from what we’ve shot until now.”

“I’m worried about your health. Your eyes look bloodshot whenever we shoot, so you can’t blame me for being worried.”

“It just means I’m enjoying myself so don’t worry about it. I’m younger than you, so don’t you think I have better stamina than you?”

“It’s only a couple of years of difference. Anyway, watch out so that you don’t get hurt. Your body price is our entire production budget. Keep in mind that if you get hurt, everything comes to a screeching halt.”

“You keep giving me pressure instead of encouragement. Fine, I’ll watch out for myself.”

The staff members got into their positions.

Ganghwan once again reminded his partnering actress to put everything into this. The woman displayed that she was slightly fed up with hearing this again but still got ready.

“Well then, let’s go.”

He raised his head after looking at the lights faintly scattering on the floor. He saw a woman staggering while wearing high heels. It was prey that had come to one of the locations he set his eyes on. She was merely a piece of meat that was drunk without knowing what was going to happen to her soon.

He stretched his neck and looked around. This place was a narrow alleyway without any security cameras or even a parked car. It was also a commercial district far away from residential areas.

The residential area was three minutes away by walk. The woman should be feeling pretty safe while looking at the fluorescent lights in the distance.

This was the optimal place, and the time was optimal as well. He suppressed his excitement and walked towards the woman.

Running was not an option. He would decrease the distance until he was sure he could catch his prey and snatch her away with the strength of his constricted muscles when he could subdue it with certainty.

He was now close enough to grab the woman by her collars in just one large stride.

He leaped.

The smell of booze could be smelled amidst the damp air of summer. The drunk woman couldn’t even respond to the sound coming from behind her.

He wrapped her body with his arm and squeezed. The woman twisted her body in retaliation. She shouldn’t be able to scream since he had her mouth covered and throat strangled.

He already knew from a few experiences that the human body would become stiff like a wooden puppet when it enters a state of extreme nervousness with the airways blocked.

Cooking a stiff human was easier than fileting a fish. The struggling woman’s body eventually lost strength. He put on his hat again, which had been flicked away by the woman in her struggles, and put an arm around her shoulder to carry her.

He walked boldly like her lover trying to get her home. He was taking measures against scenarios where someone might appear in this deserted place. Just as he took the woman in front of his car that he had parked in the alley…

“Cut!”

Ganghwan immediately regained control of his excited body. The actress leaning against him let out a faint breath and looked at Ganghwan.

“I really had the urge to hit you midway. Even now I’m feeling shocked and my heart is racing.”

“That’s why I asked you to do it as hard as possible. You aren’t uncomfortable anywhere, are you?”

“It hurts a little, but this isn’t anything much.”

“Thanks to you, I had an easier time.”

The actress had a glance at producer Cha before speaking, “Then can you take a photo with me later? I’m a huge fan of yours, but it’s hard to ask you for something like this on set.”

“Is one enough?”

“Then three?”

The actress took out her phone and quickly took photos.

As they needed to shoot inside the car, there was a small break.

Ganghwan opened his script. It was the script he had preserved cleanly so that there wasn’t a single speck of dust on it. He was also careful when flipping the script over. He couldn’t afford to make a crease or a fold on it.

“Looks like my worksheet from my school years. It’s clean,” said producer Cha.

“I was going to look at a clean version without anything on it.”

“Did you do that in your last work as well?”

“No, but I felt like Yoon Hojung would be like this. He does not leave a single trace of himself behind. I thought I’d do the same because those things might bother me later. I want to act just based on the impression I get when the camera’s rolling.”

“That’s good too.”

Producer Cha walked away first, saying that they should rehearse for the next part. Ganghwan carefully put down the script and followed producer Cha.

The cut they were shooting this time was Yoon Hojung claiming his trophies. It was a ritual of sorts for Yoon Hojung to permanently retain the moment of his pleasure during the murder.

Of course, it didn’t consist of cutting an ear off or any other part of the body and preserving it.

The ritual was taking a trivial item that the victim had in their possession. That was his trophy. The value of his trophy was something only he could recognize after all.

It was sufficient as long as other people could not relate the item to a murder even if he showed them.

They took a shot of him taking the decoration off a phone. They took about seven shots of closeups on his hand delicately touching the ring.

“How perverse,” said producer Cha.

Ganghwan couldn’t retort to that. He was the one acting it, but he too found it perverse.

* * *

Ahn Changsik was an ordinary person. He was born in an ordinary household and received ordinary, compulsory education, and went to college like most of his other peers did. The only thing special about his ordinary life was that he could see numbers.

However, he did not stake his life on being special. In fact, he pretended to not see them so that he could assimilate into ordinary life. Whenever he saw new things, he would have curiosity towards them and even act on his curiosities for a while, but never to the end.

Ordinary life was the most important thing to him after all.

However, that ordinary life crumbled apart. The number that didn’t possess any meaning other than that he could see them now had meaning.

What did he have to do? No, how did he have to react?

Maru analyzed the character known as Ahn Changsik from top to bottom and thought again and again.

He threw questions, answered them, and looked at the script. He looked at the methods that the writer wrote out and compared them to the things that he thought about.

The character Ahn Changsik was perfected in that process. The character’s personality would change towards the latter half of the story when it reaches the climax, but he now had a general grasp of the Ahn Changsik that would lead the first half of the story.

He wrote down the things that came to his mind on a sticky note. He didn’t differentiate between the broad and detailed questions. Then, he placed his sticky notes on top of the relevant part and the relevant line.

Thanks to this, the thickness of his script kept increasing, and it also became much more colorful.

“I’ll get ready.”

Maru put the script down and stood in front of the court. They had to shoot a scene where he entered.

He walked up and down the stairs and thought about Ahn Changsik.

Today, Ahn Changsik came to court to prove himself. Just because a defendant of a murder case had the number 1 above his shoulder didn’t mean that it had to signify the number of murders that they committed.

He put aside the trivial question of ‘what relationship is there between a number system created by humans and a supernatural phenomenon.’

He simply needed to check. He would confirm with his own eyes what he saw by attending court trials.

While background actors changed clothes and places for the shoot, he looked at the shoulders of the people playing the defendants.

While the trial was for murder, some of them had a zero on their shoulders. He would understand if the defendant was pleading injustice and didn’t admit to anything, but a person with a zero was admitting to their crime.

He started having questions. Could he truly trust these eyes?

He called someone on his phone after leaving the court.

“Mom, did you get anything from my sister?”

Only a negative response was given to him. It had been a month since they filed a missing report to the police. The sense of unease gnawing away at his nerves was entering the stage of forfeit now.

He looked at his phone with his head loose. Even as he acted, he endlessly thought back to his own figure. He imagined himself in detail as though there was a third eye watching over him from above.

Was his expression adequate? Were his actions awkward? Were his emotions enough? He kept thinking and thinking so that he didn’t stop.

“And done.”

He let out a deep breath at the assistant producer’s signal.

Ahn Changsik had to be an active volcano, one that is on the verge of erupting, but not quite yet. He couldn’t let go of his tension because he had to continue with the precarious emotions.

“You’re here?”

He saw Yang Ganghwan next to producer Cha, fanning himself. As they were shooting apart most of the time, it had been a few days since they last met.

Producer Cha smiled before asking Maru for his script.

“Hey, are you two competing or something?”

A script that looked like it was fresh out of the printer versus a script with colorful sticky notes stuck on it everywhere.

Ganghwan smiled the moment he saw Maru’s script. He slowly looked through the script. After going halfway through, he spoke,

“It’s the record of someone’s thoughts.”

“I thought Ahn Changsik had to do that.”

Ganghwan nodded.

“A cold-hearted murderer has a clean script, while an ordinary student’s script is filled with notes. Are you sure you didn’t get that the other way around?”

Hearing producer Cha’s words, the two of them simultaneously shook their heads. Producer Cha pouted.

“Fine, you actors get along. Only my staff members understand me.”

Producer Cha looked behind him and said to the assistant producer,

“Let’s wrap things up and move. Today’s schedule is going to be a tight one.”