Novelist Running Through Time - Chapter 237



Only Noblemtl

“It was truly a time of no solution.”

The lifeless woman’s eyes were turned towards space.

But that gaze must have been directed not toward the void, but toward his past beyond it.

Ironically, the woman’s body, recalling the past, was slowly regaining life.

I stared at her, who now seemed a little more human, and answered her with a hint of sarcasm.

“Asking the passenger sitting next to you on the bus to practice for an audition is usually not an unreasonable thing to do.”

But the answer I got back was different from what I expected.

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“···?”

“Does it make sense to come up to Seoul with only confidence and no guarantee of passing the audition?”

“ah.”

“Compared to that, it’s like asking the passenger next to you on the bus to look after the smoke… It’s not like there’s no solution to that.”

“In fact, that was a solution,” she added shortly, continuing her speech.

“Anyway, I came up to Seoul after only one audition, but when I found out that I had already missed my chance because I arrived a day late······ I was really at a loss.”

“You didn’t have any money in your pocket?”

“No, I had enough money to go back. The problem was that I didn’t want to go back. I decided to become an actress, defied my family’s opposition, and went to Seoul, but if I couldn’t even audition and returned home, what would have happened? I would have had no choice but to settle down with someone my family chose and have children. It’s fortunate that talent, no, celebrities, were recognized better back then, but if it had been like my mother’s time, if my daughter had thrown a tantrum and said she wanted to go to Seoul by herself, the family would have been turned upside down. It was the same for me.”

It was a truly meaningful story.

I pretended to be very impressed and took notes diligently in my notebook.

“I see. In order to escape from the excessive interference of the family······ I went against my parents’ wishes and became independent······”

“······.”

“Ah, yes, well, I feel like I’ve heard this story somewhere······. I’ve finished taking notes. Please continue talking.”

She glared at me strangely for a moment (the way she glared at me was very similar to Kim Byeol’s), then cleared her throat and continued talking.

“Anyway, the audition was already late, and I didn’t want to go back, but I didn’t really have anywhere to rely on in Seoul… I was really at a loss. But then, the man sitting next to me on the bus suddenly called me.”

“Oh.”

“I told him everything about my situation on the bus to Seoul, so he knew exactly what I was going through. That’s what he was like. He asked me if I wanted to go to a theater company that his friend’s friend was involved in in Yeonsinnae······”

She looked into the distant past and smiled in an incomprehensible way.

“I think it started out so abruptly.”

“······”

“What a tiresome life as an actor.”

EP 14 – The Future

“The theater is a place for acting.

– It didn’t take long for Kang Eun-chae’s prejudice to be broken.

The theater was a place to mop, organize stage props, clear trash from the audience, and do all sorts of odd jobs.

At least that was true for Kang Eun-chae. The theater company doesn’t let newcomers on stage. They just give them a mop in their hands.

If you wanted to be an actor, you had to glean lessons from other people’s shoulders while mopping the floor and glancing around the practice room.

Even though the teachings took up a significant portion of Kang Eun-chae’s monthly salary, what she received in return was only a pittance.

And today’s teaching is-

-The fact was that if you don’t have the strength to protect even that rat’s tail, it will be taken away by someone.

“Would you like to buy just seventeen hamburger sets?”

“yes?”

“Ugh······”

The chilling gaze of the ‘senior’ itself contained meaning.

If we were to translate the meaning into words, it would be something like, ‘A newbie… talking back…?!’

But the reason why Kang Eun-chae had no choice but to answer was because the money her senior gave her when he told her to buy seventeen hamburger sets was only ten thousand won.

Eunchae Kang, the best student in Deoksan-ri, Geundeok-myeon, Samcheok-si, Gangwon-do, is confident in arithmetic. According to mathematical theory, it is impossible to buy seventeen sets of hamburgers with ten thousand won.

But this is not a classroom, this is a ‘theater’.

And the extreme is where the arts and physical education are done.

It means that math doesn’t work.

“I, I’ll buy it…!”

“Right.”

So, Kang Eun-chae performed the miracle of buying seventeen sets of hamburgers with just ten thousand won.

However, Kang Eun-chae was not from Nazareth but from Gangwon Province, so she did not have the talent to copy bread and fish. Maybe potatoes.

In the end, Kang Eun-chae had to empty her own pockets to buy seventeen sets of hamburgers. Not only was she ripped off, but carrying that many hamburgers by herself was no easy task.

“Ugh······”

Kang Eun-chae climbed the stairs to the theater entrance, struggling to hold onto the bags of hamburgers that were too many to carry with both hands.

What hurts more than the pain of my trembling limbs is the thought that suddenly wells up in my head.

‘What am I doing now?’

Although she had never formally studied acting or been on stage, Kang Eun-chae already felt like she was part of a large-scale absurdist play.

On the huge stage called Extreme.

There is no river there.

There is only one ‘newbie’ whose name cannot be revealed···

So then what exactly is ‘I’?

Someone asked Kang Eun-chae, who was thinking like that.

“What are you?”

When I came to, Kang Eun-chae was blocking the narrow hallway of the theater with a large paper bag of hamburgers.

And in front of her eyes, a scary older sister with heavy makeup was looking down at Kang Eun-chae. She was scary, but also so pretty that Kang Eun-chae lost her mind for a moment.

But at the voice that followed, Kang Eun-chae regained her senses, feeling a cold sense of crisis.

“Can’t you see me?”

“Oh, no······”

“But why don’t you say hello?”

Kang Eun-chae didn’t know who the person in front of her was.

But it wasn’t that he was stupid.

1. Request for greetings.

2. He is a senior.

3. You have to lower your head.

The conclusion was clear. Kang Eun-chae’s survival instinct sounded the alarm.

“Hello-!”

But sometimes, action is faster than thought.

Before Kang Eun-chae had even finished her greeting, a palm was already flying towards her cheek.

Crack – !

“Hamburger bags fell down the narrow hallway.”

* * *

“I followed Byul-i around to the filming set. It wasn’t just because I wanted to strangle her. I thought that if I was with her, she wouldn’t go around getting beaten up… That’s why I did it. I don’t know if you’ll believe me now, but…”

“······”

“Back in my day, if you did something even a little wrong, you would get a handcuff first. People who had never served in the military were even more vicious than Chun Doo-hwan. But that doesn’t mean they treated their juniors well. In the first place, I wasn’t even a person who fit into the category of a ‘junior.’ Why? Because I didn’t graduate from the Department of Theater and Film.”

Her attitude toward her past was more marked by regret than longing.

Wouldn’t that be the case for everyone?

“But I was lucky to have met a senior. The senior who slapped me. Do you know Seo Eun-jin? She was in the drama ‘Tree of Youth’······ Don’t you know?”

Representing my generation, I sometimes bring up celebrities and their representative works of my generation, giving a refreshing counterattack to the older generation who force me to know those celebrities as if it were a given that I should know them.

“I don’t know.”

“Wow······”

But I thought I saw some bitter pain in her face as she swallowed her regret.

I had an ominous feeling that her relationship with the person named ‘Seo Eun-jin’ would not end well, and I quietly swallowed that feeling.

Then the topic of conversation turned back to the past.

“Anyway, that senior, Seo Eun-jin, slapped me in the face and dragged me in front of the seniors with the intention of humiliating me. She asked me how I could be taught genealogy so that a newbie couldn’t even recognize a senior. But that’s where I found out. I wasn’t even on the ‘genealogy’ list in the first place, and I was just doing odd jobs and getting ripped off for money… So from that point on, she started to feel sorry for me.”

“I’m not feeling sensible these days.”

“Haha, that’s right. Maybe kids these days don’t understand. He used his connections to introduce a job to a strange girl sitting next to him on the bus, and a senior colleague stepped in and covered for a temporary intern who was hired by a theater company to be used for a short time and then thrown away because he felt bad about it······”

“······”

“Still, there was something like that back then.”

I seemed to detect a faint glimmer of literary inspiration in her words.

But the task at hand was too urgent to pursue that fragment, so I quietly continued listening to the retired actor’s stories from his active days.

Daughter and mother.

To examine the shackles of dreams and obsessions woven between two blood relatives.

The story turned back to the past······

“I learned acting from senior Seo. After I became a pillar of strength, I was treated like a human being. But that didn’t mean I had a way to live. Senior Seo was a great person only within the theater company, but he was nothing outside of it. So I tried to somehow succeed as an actor by taking on all sorts of jobs. Even that wasn’t enough to make ends meet, but I think that was the time when I worked the hardest in my life. But then one day······”

* * *

““I, really – ?!”

The unexpected noise drew everyone’s attention inside the cafe.

But Kang Eun-chae didn’t have the presence of mind to take that gaze into account.

It was because a ray of light was finally shining on my life of obscurity, which felt like I was passing through a long cave.

The light was shining like a soft halo behind the man in the suit sitting across from Kang Eun-chae.

He smiled gently and nodded.

“Of course. Eunchae, you appeared in ‘The Sound of Waves in My Memory’ last time, right?”

“Yes! Yes! But it was just a minor role······.”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s just a supporting role. Our company saw the potential for a ‘star’ in Eunchae.”

“ah···!”

star!

Stars in the sky.

An honorable title that only celebrities who were popular at the time could have.

And Kang Eun-chae’s dream.

The splendid starlight seemed to twinkle right before Kang Eun-chae’s eyes.

“We will make you a star.”

With those words, Kang Eun-chae ended up writing her name on the contract.

Then the man in the suit smiled brightly.

“Okay. Okay! Our Kang Star!”

“lol···”

“Our Kang Star is a member of our company family starting today.”

Ironically, the word that brought greater joy to Kang Eun-chae was not ‘star’ but ‘family.’

How much loneliness must have been felt in the lonely life of Seoul with no one to lean on.

For the first time, tears flowed from Kang Eun-chae’s eyes involuntarily as she felt relieved that she had found her place.

“Thank you! Thank you!”

“Oh, my goodness, you don’t have to do this···”

As Kang Eun-chae bowed 90 degrees with tears in her eyes, a look of embarrassment appeared for the first time on the face of the man in the suit who had always been relaxed.

To relieve that embarrassment, the man in the suit made a suggestion to Kang Eun-chae as if he was comforting a crying child.

“The office building is nearby. Would you like to take a look around?”

“ah···!”

Kang Eun-chae hid her tears and embarrassment, but at the same time, she realized that she had signed the contract without even knowing what the company was like.

I wonder if I signed the contract too hastily?

– In the midst of the extremely natural anxiety that belatedly creeps in.

That feeling of insecurity became a reality as soon as I entered the company.

“Okay! This is our company building!”

“······”

Kang Eun-chae was speechless as she looked at the smile of the man in a suit confidently introducing his ‘company’.

It’s not that the facilities are bad.

Rather, the fact that it had a spacious and neat office building in the heart of Seoul was proof of the company’s wealth.

but······

“Cluck!”

The cigarette smoke was too strong.

The office staff were frowning and smoking cigarettes, to the point where it was more like a raccoon’s den than an office.

And most of all…

“Hey, where is that strange sound coming from···?”

‘Strange sound’ is a purified expression.

To be more precise, it would have been correct to say, ‘Hey you fucking punks, what the hell are you putting in your heads to do something like this?’

That exact sentence was coming from inside a place that said ‘CEO’s Office’, so it was natural for Kang Eun-chae to tremble in fear.

But the man in the suit knocked on the president’s office door as if he didn’t care about that level of swearing.

“Sir, I will go in for a moment.”

The swearing coming from inside the president’s office stopped.

Following the tailor’s instructions, Kang Eun-chae entered the president’s office trembling.

Then, what she saw was the ‘boss’, who was slamming the desk in the president’s office viciously and holding an ashtray in his hand as if he was about to throw it at any moment.

“What is it?”

“Oh, I’m chewing out the new actress Kang Eun-chae who just signed a contract.”

The ‘boss’ with his muscular arms and tattoos greeted Eun-chae Kang with a smile showing his gold teeth.

“You’re new?”

“Yes··· four···!”

“Mom, let’s shake hands. What was your name?”

“Go, go, it’s Kang Eun-chae!”

“The name isn’t that pretty. Let’s go by Jeon Min-ji from today onwards. Okay? Min-ji?”

Only then did Kang Eun-chae finally realize that she had to be careful when agreeing to terms and conditions.