In This Life I Will Die as an Actress Not a Villainess Chapter 37

“Sena. Han Sena! Hey!”

My whole body jolted and shook.

Someone was shaking me awake, their voice reaching my ears.

It was the first time in dozens of days I’d heard Minyeong unnie’s voice.

I opened my eyes on the hard wooden floor.

Back in the practice room once again.

No more silk blankets to greet me.

That’s when this space suddenly felt foreign.

Following Minyeong unnie’s hands, I sat up in a daze, and…

A fierce slap landed on my back.

“If you’re! An actor! You have to! Take care! Of your body! Or how will you! Keep acting!”

“Ah, ah! How insolent!”

“What?”

Minyeong unnie’s expression went blank after seeing me for the first time in a while.

“It’s cold…”

“…?”

Minyeong unnie’s bewildered gaze quickly shifted to concern.

Ah, that’s not the right way to talk.

“No, I just mean it’s cold…”

Minyeong unnie walked over to grab a blanket from the corner of the practice room and draped it over me.

“Unnie, what time is it?”

How much time had passed in reality?

“You’re asking awfully early. It’s nine o’clock, nine! I came down after getting to work, wondering if something was up, and you’re sleeping here in the freezing practice room covered in sweat, lying on the bare floor!”

Hearing the nagging pouring out nonstop, Sangseon’s face came to mind.

A strange laugh slipped out.

I already missed him so much—what was I supposed to do?

Minyeong unnie wrapped her worried hands around my face.

“Is it because it’s so hard?”

I grabbed unnie’s hands and brushed them off before standing up.

“No. I’m happy.”

“…Did you not get enough sleep?”

“…No.”

I needed to do something about this speech pattern first.

Led by unnie’s hand, I left the practice room.

* * *

Three days later.

Inside the office I was seeing for the first time in forever.

I sat there chin in hand, spacing out, while Minyeong unnie kept sending worried glances my way.

“Did you get some rest? By the way, last time… you were practicing Palace Flower in the practice room, right?”

“Ah.”

Right, I was doing that.

“Ah?”

Unnie mimicked me, then looked at me with baffled eyes.

“Unnie. Was there any contact?”

“From where?”

“Palace Flower…”

Minyeong unnie let out a deep sigh at my question.

Then she spoke seriously.

“Sena, failing an audition is a big deal, but in another way it’s not a big deal at all. You can’t let your mental state fall apart like this every single time—how are you going to continue your acting career?”

Unnie’s words weren’t registering.

Why hadn’t they contacted me?

The reward was supposed to be casting, wasn’t it?

I went through all that suffering to complete the quest.

I wanted to pound my fist on the desk.

“Did they confirm the female lead?”

Unnie shook her head at my question.

“Not yet. I heard Lee Nara and Seo Jaeyeon teamed up to play hardball, inflating their guarantee fees with the broadcaster.”

“Ah…”

Unnie read my expression and continued talking.

“Oh, right. Are you keeping up with the Dawn Dew ad response? The view count is insane, and the reactions from both the advertiser and viewers are all positive.”

Unnie seemed to be trying to divert my attention from the audition with diversionary tactics.

“Ah.”

A half-hearted answer was all I could muster.

“Ah? Ah?!”

Unnie rolled up a stack of papers beside her and started swinging it this way.

“Hey, where did you leave your brain!”

“Oh! How insolent!”

“…?”

Minyeong unnie stopped mid-swing and stood there blank-faced.

A brief silence settled over the office.

“Let’s never prepare for sageuks again.”

Minyeong unnie muttered as if talking to herself.

My face flushed red in an instant.

“Ahem, ahem. Ah, I keep misspeaking… I’ll go buy lunch!”

I rushed out of the office like I was escaping.

Pulling my cap down low, I headed toward the bakery.

“What kind of system is this unfriendly.”

I kicked at stones on the roadside.

I wanted to file complaints left and right with the system inside the script.

No hints, making people suffer through hardships, manipulating emotions at will.

And how was I supposed to receive the reward anyway?

Speaking of which…

I lifted my head to look at the clear blue sky.

‘I wonder if everyone’s doing well.’

I remembered the sky I’d seen in Joseon inside the script.

This Palace Flower felt different from Flat Shoes in so many ways.

“In Flat Shoes, everything flowed exactly as I knew it would.”

Of course, the sight of Yu Ji-an at the end had been unexpected, and those emotions had supported my acting, but…

All the events had been exactly like the script.

It had just been tough getting myself hit by that car.

This time, unlike Flat Shoes, I’d been running around frantically trying to figure things out.

The golden letters reading [Reward: Casting] still hovered before my eyes.

“So when and how are you going to give me that reward?”

My energy completely drained.

Was this fraud?

In game terms, wouldn’t rewards be automatically received?

Wait.

Was I supposed to do something else?

Since the system was so unfriendly, my anxiety suddenly spiked.

With Flat Shoes, I’d felt like I was moving passively overall.

The reward had followed automatically too.

In that case, since I’d had to move actively throughout Palace Flower…

Maybe, I thought, and my heart started racing like crazy.

I quickly turned around and started running toward the office.

“I can’t be late!”

Han Sena, you idiot!

Why did I assume the reward would just come to me naturally?

This wasn’t like a game.

If my guess was correct, I needed to contact the production team first.

Though neither Seo Jaeyeon nor Lee Nara had been chosen yet, since I hadn’t been contacted either, maybe they were waiting for a third person.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

But even if I contacted them, how…?

I couldn’t just call them out of the blue asking them to reconsider.

I needed something to turn the situation around.

Something with concrete persuasiveness that I had to be Sunim.

* * *

Crash—!

I burst through the office door like I was about to break it down.

“Holy crap!”

Minyeong unnie, who’d been sitting there, jumped up with wide eyes.

I was breathing heavily.

“What about the food you were going to buy?”

“Let’s get delivery.”

I answered unnie’s question quickly and started rummaging through the office bookshelf.

“Oh my, this kid. Sena, what’s wrong?”

Without answering, I kept searching the bookshelf until the Palace Flower script caught my eye, tucked away in the corner.

“Found it.”

The script for episodes after 6 that I hadn’t read.

Unnie’s worried voice reached me.

“Sena. Why are you so obsessed? You failed, okay?”

I pulled my eyes from the script to look at unnie.

“Then why didn’t you throw this script away, unnie?”

“Well…”

Minyeong unnie’s words cut off.

Then she spoke again with a sigh.

“This is lingering attachment for us.”

“For me it’s not lingering attachment.”

I sat down at the table with the stack of scripts.

I could feel unnie’s gaze on me.

“I’ll go buy some food.”

Unnie left the office like that.

From that moment, I started frantically flipping through the script pages.

“This isn’t it.”

I flipped another two or three pages.

“This isn’t right.”

What I’d experienced was different from this.

Frowning, I kept reading when I realized the final script for Part 2 was missing.

Was the writer still working on it?

I hurriedly grabbed the scrap paper and pen sitting on the table.

‘The world I lived in was definitely richer than what I read in the script.’

First, I planned to write down specifically how what I’d experienced differed from the script.

Most importantly, Sangseon.

In the script, Sangseon didn’t exist anywhere.

In the place where I’d stayed for that considerable time, with Sunim and Sangseon added, the king’s emotions had become complex.

Even in the final confrontation with the Queen Dowager, the process of pulling the king’s supporters from outside had been realistic.

The current script showed the king persuading people within the palace to strike down the Queen Dowager.

This wasn’t thorough enough.

The more I read the script, the more it fell short compared to the world I’d actually experienced.

I couldn’t see the characters’ eyes, noses, mouths.

They weren’t three-dimensional.

The scenes also lacked probability.

What was at the heart of these problems?

My head started spinning rapidly.

To overlay the world I’d lived in onto this script…

I pressed my temples and stared at the script for a long while.

Tick-tock, tick-tock—

The sound of the clock’s second hand in the office grated on my ears.

Then soon.

“Ah.”

Strength filled the hand gripping my pen.

I started writing down the most important moment in the world I’d inhabited.

The moment my emotions had been most stirred.

I was confident this scene would be the single thread running through the Palace Flower world I’d experienced.

Scratch, scratch.

The sound of writing on paper filled the office.

While moving my pen, I felt like I was meeting Sangseon and Sunim again right before my eyes.

* * *

In front of a quiet café.

“Teacher!”

I waved enthusiastically as I opened the door.

Seeing me in full disguise with a mask and cap, the teacher smiled slightly.

“You’re quite the celebrity. You have a favor to ask, huh?”

“Yes, shamelessly asking again.”

“Alright. Let’s hear it.”

The teacher spoke playfully.

“This.”

I handed the teacher the paper I’d prepared.

The teacher looked puzzled as he read through what was written.

“This is…?”

“I wrote it myself.”

“Hm?”

“Teacher. I want to film a short. Please act in it.”

“…?”

The teacher’s face filled with bewilderment.

“You know, if you handle this wrong, whether it’s the director or writer, they could be very offended. This is dangerous.”

The teacher continued in a voice full of concern.

“I don’t know much about the commercial film industry, but they’re proud folks. Once you get on their bad side, you might not get cast in their work.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Then why are you…”

The teacher looked incredulous.

“I still want to try. This didn’t start from ‘this setup is absolutely necessary!’ but from ‘what if there was a scene like this?’ That’s my starting point.”

“So why is an actor, not even a writer, doing this? It’s overstepping.”

I’d prepared myself for those words.

And I thought if I couldn’t persuade the teacher first, I’d have no chance in front of the production team.

“This is the last struggle of an actor who failed an audition.”

The teacher didn’t respond.

“That last struggle needs tremendous logic. Proof that I’m essential to this project. I want to show them my understanding of the world and characters in this work.”

A long silence settled over the table between me and the teacher.

“You.”

After what felt like ten years, the teacher spoke.

“If you’re going to do it half-heartedly, don’t touch it at all.”

I grinned at those words.

The teacher also cracked a slight smile.

“Then I’ll head out first to prepare things at the practice room.”

I quickly stood up and headed for the door.

* * *

Left alone in the café like that.

Yoon Youngjae picked up the script his junior had written herself.

‘Just to show her understanding of the protagonist, she wrote this script?’

“What a little liar.”

A laugh escaped Yoon Youngjae’s lips.

‘This sneaky one.’

The way Yoon Youngjae saw it, this clearly wasn’t a script for such simple purposes.

Moreover…

Yoon Youngjae tried speaking the lines one by one.

“How did she even think of a scene like this? When she’s not even a writer…”

He expressed the amazement he hadn’t shown earlier, savoring the script again.

‘At this level, it’s worth taking on the challenge.’

Yoon Youngjae nodded while looking at the seat his junior had vacated.

Then he raised one corner of his mouth.

“As I thought, a real find.”