The convenience store shoot was over, and in my hand was the envelope I'd been given as an appearance fee.
140,000 won in cash.
The blunt feel of banknotes against my fingertips after so long felt strangely unfamiliar.
'Did I... really just shoot that?'
I still couldn't believe it.
Despite the camera phobia, I hadn't felt tension or fear.
The lines came out without catching, and the expressions to match followed naturally.
The director had even shouted "Good" several times in a row.
After filming wrapped, Park Ji-eun came over to me while the lights were being packed up and said with a laugh,
-Oppa, the second the camera turned on you became a completely different person, didn't you? You're kind of blunt normally so it was a little scary, but on screen you're totally likable!
I smiled awkwardly at that, but inside, complicated feelings washed over me.
Nobody had told me to smile, and yet I had understood the character, melted naturally into that feeling, and smiled.
For as long as I was acting, I'd completely forgotten the self who had lived crushed under anxiety and lethargy.
As I left the set and headed home, the thoughts in my head gradually settled. Reality caught up, and the feelings came back.
My steps slowed, and somewhere in my chest turned heavy.
Camera phobia.
That thick darkness that had swallowed me whole.
The moment I stood on a stage my heart would clench, and when a lens turned my way I'd stiffen from the fingertips.
On that last set, I couldn't even meet anyone's eyes properly. I dropped my lines, lost my expressions, and fell apart through dozens of NGs.
During that time, people said things like this.
-Haa... Cha Eun-yul, we get that the fake news has been hard on you.
-He's actually good at acting, he's just shrunk into himself......
Everyone consoled me that way, but the real reason was something else.
Memorizing lines and saying them was possible, but there was no emotion inside them.
Even when I caught hold of an emotion, it didn't feel genuine.
It wasn't acting.
It was just imitation.
So I put it off, avoided it, and in the end I ran. I erased the actor I'd been with my own hands and quietly disappeared.
I held out that way for several years.
But if I really could have ended it there, the me of today wouldn't exist.
Even while going blank the moment I stood before a camera, I'd come home and secretly recite lines in a room with the lights off, stand before the mirror and copy expressions.
That was me.
Not an actor who had quit acting, but a person who couldn't quit.
I turned away because of fear and ran because lethargy had me pinned, and even so I wanted to act.
That craving ate away at me.
In a reality where I wanted to and couldn't, I broke down again and again, cried alone, and hated myself.
But today was different.
A shoot that had started out of nowhere.
I'd been shoved in front of a camera with no preparation, and I acted.
There was no camera terror, and the lines came out naturally.
I even smiled. Genuinely.
The fear was gone.
And... the acting was alive.
I was happy about this situation.
Because I'd pulled off the acting I'd craved so badly all that time.
And yet, on the other hand, I was sad.
Because it was hollow, how easily the acting had come.
Today's acting had ended lightly, far too easily, enough to make all those hours of agony look like nothing.
Happy, sad, and dumbfounded.
All those tangled feelings rushed in at once. I wanted to smile, but the tears welled up first.
How much I'd been shattered enduring that pain, how many nights I'd spent locked inside self-loathing.
To me, knowing all that, this felt less like a miracle and more like something foreign.
Behind the scene that had flowed so smoothly, a strange emptiness, as if some important emotion had slipped out.
And only then did it hit me.
'...Is this the title's doing?'
The unfamiliar sensation spreading through my body the moment I stood in front of the camera.
The tone and expression that surfaced automatically the moment I looked at the script.
Immersion that was neither calculation nor rehearsal.
The real 'me' had stepped back into the rear seat.
I hadn't overcome the fear.
I had simply become the role.
And even so, that had unmistakably been 'acting.'
"Even if I borrowed some power to do it, the fact that I really acted doesn't change."
I tightened my grip on the envelope again.
The blunt banknotes against my fingertips.
That small, unfamiliar sensation was telling me something.
Today, I had acted.
And the start of it... was a title.
It's fine if it isn't perfect.
Even if I waver, even if I forget for a while, right now I had unmistakably taken a step forward again.
Maybe, with this power, I could act properly one more time.
***
I got home, unequipped the title, and looked in the mirror.
And there it was again, the face I'd grown used to seeing for five years, always worn out.
The bright, confident expression I'd worn in front of the camera moments earlier had vanished.
So that acting had been the title's power after all.
There was no reason to force a denial, and no grounds on which I could deny it.
I quietly sat down at my desk and set down the shooting script I'd been holding.
Retracing my experiences one by one, I started organizing how the title worked and how far I could put it to use.
More precisely, it was a question of how I could make this power my own.
The title wasn't simple imitation.
It made me immerse into the role and naturally drew out even emotions I'd never managed to pull up on my own.
With this power, maybe I could start again from the spot I'd run away from in the past.
Of course, I mustn't lean on the title for everything. But at the very least, it clearly gave me the courage to take one more step.
I opened the title window and quietly muttered.
"Can I stand as an actor again......?"
The answer might, just maybe, be inside this title.
I quietly picked up a pen and started writing on the notepad set at one side of the desk.
Only a faint scratching sound spread through the quiet room.
'Let me organize this.'
One. Every person has a title.
Ji-eun, the assistant director, the cinematographer, all of them had titles above their heads. Everyone in this world holds a title connected to their own life.
Two. A title can be copied when a specific condition is satisfied.
In Ji-eun's case, the title was copied when I said I'd take the shoot in her place.
The assistant director's title, right beside her, didn't react at all.
Three. Each title has its own unique 'ability.'
Equip the title and the senses and knowledge the role requires transfer automatically.
When I equipped 'Veteran Convenience Store Girl,' my body reacted first, from the order of operations at the register to customer service.
It's not simple memory. It's the feeling of when I'm immersed in a role.
Four. Only roles connected to the title can be analyzed.
I instinctively analyzed the convenience store part-timer role perfectly, but the customer role was impossible.
I also can't immerse into a role unrelated to the title.
And the most important fact.
"The camera anxiety... is gone."
More precisely, the moment I equipped the title I became the 'role,' and for that role camera terror didn't exist.
Without even the spare moment to feel fear, I simply lived as a 'convenience store part-timer.'
I hadn't been forcing myself to endure it, or imitating an emotion.
It was genuine.
I believed in the role, and that belief drew out the immersion.
The title was only the key that opened that door.
Putting the lines in my mouth, making the expressions, truly feeling those emotions, that wasn't the title. It was my own will.
And in that moment, one possibility crossed my mind.
'What if I could hold more titles?'
If I could live through the lives and emotions of all sorts of different people, and live inside them......
I might become an actor with a broader range of emotion and depth of character than anyone.
Not simply 'a person who acts,' but an actor who lives as the role itself.
I laughed a little and muttered to myself.
"From now on, I'm... an actor who collects titles."
***
A few days after the shoot.
A cramped editing room.
A graphic designer and the shoot's PD sat looking at a monitor, polishing the footage.
"Cut. Smooth out the transition here a bit more... and warm up the color grade a little."
"Yes, understood."
The editing timeline shifted, and the commercial played.
On screen, a man in a convenience store vest smiled brightly and said,
"The MZ generation's energy vitamin!"
Just as the editor in charge was moving the mouse, checking the subtitles—
Clunk.
The door opened.
The man who stepped over the threshold took a casual sip of his coffee.
The name on his ID badge read 'PD Lee Woo-seok.'
"Editing the commercial?"
"Sunbae-nim, hello!"
The staff inside the editing room gave a light bow.
"It's the convenience store commercial. The lead's edit is done, we're working on the sub character now."
Lee Woo-seok PD glanced at the monitor and muttered offhandedly.
"Hm... looks like they spent some money? The sub character's a good-looking guy too."
"Right? You feel it too, sunbae-nim? He's so handsome."
The PD laughed like it was a joke, but Lee Woo-seok looked at the footage again, closely.
And then—
"...Huh?"
His brows drew together in an instant.
He examined the man's face on screen once more, carefully.
"Hold on, isn't that guy... Cha Eun-yul?"
The editor stopped the mouse and zoomed in on the screen.
"Cha Eun-yul? ...That actor Cha Eun-yul?"
"Yeah. I worked with him back when I shot that sitcom. But that's really Cha Eun-yul, right?"
The editor looked at the figure in the footage again.
Even though it was a simple convenience store part-timer role, there was something oddly eye-catching about him.
"No way... why would Cha Eun-yul show up in something like this? Isn't it just someone who looks like him?"
"Hey, how long do you think I worked with the guy? You think I wouldn't recognize him?"
Lee Woo-seok PD folded his arms and studied the screen carefully.
"That's true, but... he's not the kind of person who'd appear in something like this."
"......"
Lee Woo-seok PD looked at Cha Eun-yul's face on the monitor without a word.
Five years ago.
The last image he'd seen of Cha Eun-yul came back to him.
The man back then hadn't smiled.
Lee Woo-seok took a sip of coffee and sank into thought.
'Cha Eun-yul... was the last time I saw him five years ago?'
Off camera he'd always been the one laughing, but that day he couldn't even meet anyone's eyes.
The memory of just sitting beside him, because trying to console him felt like it would only break him further.
...That had been the last time. After that he vanished from the entertainment industry.
'I was sure he'd retired......'
But then—
"There's a good feel to this, isn't there?"
This time was different.
The Cha Eun-yul on screen had a completely different face from five years ago.
Bright and natural.
A bright expression that was neither forced nor exaggerated.
The way he'd looked when Lee Woo-seok first discovered him, shining.
'Is he all right now?'
Lee Woo-seok muttered it absently and pulled out his phone.
The place he called was the CEO of Public, Cha Eun-yul's former agency.
"Yes, CEO-nim. It's been a while. Is actor Cha Eun-yul still under contract with you?"
A brief silence.
"Huh? Is that so? He shot a commercial, though? He isn't with your agency?"
Lee Woo-seok tilted his head and kept the call going.
"Come on, no way, I'm telling you it's Cha Eun-yul. Let me send it over."
Lee Woo-seok PD stepped back into the editing room he'd just left.
A moment later.
The instant the CEO of Public Entertainment checked the image Lee Woo-seok PD had sent, his fingertips froze for a second.
His brows slowly drew together as he looked at the familiar face on the screen.
"...Cha Eun-yul?"
The CEO's voice dropped without his meaning it to.
He scanned the image once more as though he couldn't believe it, and for a moment couldn't get another word out.
The bright face on the screen.
It was unmistakably Cha Eun-yul.