The man, having ended the call one-sidedly, turned to look at me and strode closer. Startled, I stepped back until my back hit the wall. Before I knew it, he was right in front of me, opening his mouth.
“Baek Eun-Seong.”
“I told you, it’s Dong-Yoon….”
“Who am I? Tell me what you know.”
I didn’t know anything… if I had to guess….
“…Senior?”
“What kind of senior.”
“Well, same school….”
“How old are you right now.”
“Twenty.”
“School and major.”
“Daehan University, Fine Arts… isn’t it?”
“What trick is this now.”
With every word I spoke, the man’s expression hardened more and more, until finally he pressed a hand to his forehead. His face looked complicated, and I felt nervous.
Suddenly, my wrist was grabbed roughly.
“Ugh, that hur—!”
Before I could even complain, the man spoke.
“I won’t say this twice, so listen well. Baek Eun-Seong, you’re twenty-six years old, graduated from Bristol University with a major in Business, the only legitimate heir of Baekseung Group who had your succession rights stripped away with your own hands, living a trash life as a loser.”
That did sound like Baek Eun-Seong’s setup….
“I didn’t watch the drama properly….”
My looks were plain, maybe even below average, so how could he immerse himself like this? Somehow, he suddenly looked pitiful, and I was at a loss for words. He stared at me, then suddenly held up his phone.
Specifically, the screen switched to camera mode.
There, the ghost I had seen in the mirror was staring back at me again.
“Gasp.”
So shocked, I raised my hands to cover my eyes, but the man, as if he expected it, grabbed my arms and forced them down.
“Look, open your eyes and look.”
“G-ghost! A ghost…!”
“It’s not a ghost, Baek Eun-Seong, it’s your face.”
“What are you talking about! Baek Eun-Seong is Moon Hyun-Jun!”
“Look closely.”
“I’m scared, I said I’m scared!”
“Open your eyes.”
The man gripped my nape, forcing me not to turn my head, and shook me. Dizzy, I had no choice but to open my eyes. Once again, I locked eyes with the ghost in the mirror. I thought I’d die from sheer fright, but the man didn’t let me go.
Cold sweat trickled down my back as I trembled in terror, when the man quietly said,
“Slowly blink one eye at a time.”
Almost as if hypnotized, I did as he said. Then, the ghost in the screen also blinked one eye at a time slowly.
That was it.
Just as the man had said, the ghost in the screen was me.
* * *
“Could you tell me about your most recent memory before arriving here?”
The person in a white coat asked me. Clearly a doctor, he must have been the psychiatrist the man had called. I glanced at the man sitting beside me. He only stared at me silently.
That gaze felt like it was urging me to answer.
“I was on my way home after finishing part-time work….”
“What kind of part-time work was it?”
“In the morning I did mural work, in the afternoon I worked at a café.”
“And after finishing, you went straight home?”
“I was going home, but… when I came to my senses, I was in an alley near some shops.”
“Was it a place you usually went?”
“No, it was a place I had never seen before.”
“Can you describe what you felt at that moment?”
“It felt strange. I wondered why I was there.”
“Was that feeling closer to confusion, or more like alienation?”
“Closer to alienation.”
“I see.”
The doctor nodded and wrote something down.
“You found yourself in an unfamiliar place in an unfamiliar form. Could that alienation you just described have come from a sense that another personality was present?”
Another personality?
Maybe he noticed I didn’t quite get it, because the doctor explained again.
“Like, do you feel Baek Eun-Seong inside of you, Kim Dong-Yoon?”
“No.”
“Even though you are in a completely unknown place, in someone else’s body, the fact that you know about Baek Eun-Seong—have you considered that it’s because you are Baek Eun-Seong?”
Before I could even answer, I shook my head.
“That’s impossible.”
“Can you tell me why?”
“Because Baek Eun-Seong is dead.”
“……”
The doctor fell silent, as if waiting to hear more.
“And Baek Eun-Seong is Moon Hyun-Jun.”
“And who is Moon Hyun-Jun?”
He was a pretty famous actor…. Maybe doctors watch less TV than I do.
“He’s the actor who played Baek Eun-Seong.”
The doctor showed me a photo. It was the person I thought was a ghost in the mirror—the altered me.
I was startled by the sudden photo, but the doctor was so calm that it wasn’t as frightening as before.
“This is a picture of Baek Eun-Seong. Does he look similar to the actor Moon Hyun-Jun you just mentioned?”
“They’re different.”
“What parts look different to you?”
“Just, everything….”
Moon Hyun-Jun was tall, black-haired, with a rough, gangster-like aura. The man in the photo had blond hair, a cold impression, and a slender frame. More than anything, compared to Moon Hyun-Jun’s sharp masculine features, the man in the photo had a softer, beautiful face with lines so delicate they looked almost ambiguous in gender.
If I had to find a similarity, it was simply that both were male.
“Thank you. Could you explain what kind of person the Baek Eun-Seong played by Moon Hyun-Jun was?”
“A villain, and an extra. He died in episode 3….”
“Do you remember how he died?”
“He was killed by the protagonist.”
“Do you remember the protagonist’s name?”
“Yes… I remember.”
“Would you say it?”
“Cha Gil-Do.”
At that name, the doctor’s hand stopped writing. For a moment, I wondered if I had said something wrong, but then he smiled and said,
“Thank you for your story. That will be all for today. Good work.”
“Yes… thank you.”
After finishing, the doctor left the room. The man beside me looked at me with an unreadable expression. Somehow, feeling wronged, I blurted out what I couldn’t say in front of the doctor.
“I’m… not crazy.”
“I never said you were.”
He denied it, but I was sure he thought I was a lunatic who saw ghosts. Sometimes you didn’t need words to know—that much was obvious from how blatantly he had urged treatment.
I had become someone else in a strange place, and yet he called me by the name of a villain extra from a drama. Even though I looked nothing like Moon Hyun-Jun, the actor who played him.
‘It’s not a dream….’
My whole body ached even now. It couldn’t be a dream.
My memories were intact, yet I was in another body. Which meant the works I had finished and the deposit I needed to reclaim before leaving my rental room—everything I had left was now….
“I have nothing….”
The only comfort was that I had just entered university, and there was no one looking for me. I regretted the unfinished projects and the deposit I couldn’t get back, but they weren’t reasons I had to return.
My scholarship was gone anyway, and I might have had to take a leave of absence and end up on the street….
Maybe thanks to that thought, the gloom inside me eased a little.
The man stared at me, opening and closing his mouth several times before finally leaving the room. I thought he had something to say. As I looked toward the door he had exited, my eyes landed on the books lined up on the shelf, and suddenly something occurred to me.
“Huh?”
I was startled by the realization.
Because Please, Obsession, the drama, had originally been a novel. That would explain why, despite looking nothing like actor Moon Hyun-Jun, I was being called Baek Eun-Seong—because I wasn’t in the drama, but inside the novel version of Baek Eun-Seong.
Then, did that mean the man who called himself Cha Gil-Do was really the male lead?
Finally, everything I had gone through began to make sense.
Goosebumps prickled all over my body.
They say even cockroaches can raise their IQ to 340 in emergencies!
The problem was, I had never read the original novel of Please, Obsession. I only knew the drama through rumors.
A minor villain who did every terrible thing, stalked the heroine, and got killed by Cha Gil-Do in episode 3. If this wasn’t a dream, then I had become that villain.
‘Then that woman who slapped me in the alley must have been the heroine, Kang Ji-a.’
Cha Gil-Do must have shown up in person to eliminate the extra villain trying to harm the heroine.
Maybe because I realized it late, I felt strangely relieved.
‘So Cha Gil-Do brought me here to kill Baek Eun-Seong?’
I even thought I knew how to return. Once the villain extra was no longer needed, I’d naturally be able to go back.
‘If Cha Gil-Do kills Baek Eun-Seong, I’ll return to where I came from.’
I didn’t particularly have a reason to return, but I also had no reason not to. Besides, it didn’t feel real, so the condition for returning—“death”—didn’t even scare me.
Seeing my reflection look like a ghost had been far more terrifying.
Just thinking about it now still made me shiver.
Luckily, Baek Eun-Seong had already done all sorts of evil and been captured by Cha Gil-Do. If I had crossed into the book earlier, I wouldn’t have even thought about returning. I simply didn’t have the energy or willpower to keep up with Baek Eun-Seong’s wickedness.
Still… Baek Eun-Seong had to die….
I glanced at the IV tube connected to my arm. If I kept getting this, wouldn’t I live longer? In that case, clueless as I was, I had no idea when the villain in me would be written out.
It didn’t look like today….
“Can I die tomorrow, then?”
“Don’t even dream of that.”
Startled, I froze at the sudden, familiar man’s voice.