Peerless Perverted Actor Has a Celebrity Harem?!

"W-w-where — a-am I?"

Forming words felt like dragging rusted chains across a throat lined with frost.

Once, a single thought had been a priceless blade — sharp, instant, merciless.

Now Park’s wandering soul — or was it merely his mind, the treacherous jester — groped blindly through the void and found nothing.

A lightless abyss pressed against him, offering no answers, only the mocking echo of his own stutter.

’Death, perhaps?’

Had the winter finally granted him that cheap, final mercy?

Yet pain still gnawed at the back of his skull like a starving rat refusing to leave the feast.

’Pain? In death?’

No, death was supposed to be the grand silence after the scream. Park remembered, with horrible clarity, the exquisite agony of shattered limbs and bursting skull only moments ago — or had it been hours? Days?

Eternity and time both wore many similar masks in this place, and Park, blind and rattled, was in no condition to count their faces.

So, as far as Park was concerned? The single stubborn throb pain at the base of his head was a cruel gift that gave him comfort that he was still clinging onto dear pathetic life.

It was a feeling. And feeling, in the death calculus of endings, meant one impossible, vaguely insulting thing:

"I am not dead?"

The words slipped out softer than a traitor’s whisper, yet they reverberated through the space around him like actors rehearsing in a vast, empty theatre. The acoustics were familiar — too familiar — from a hundred failed auditions and dimly lit stages where dreams went to die quiet, dignified, underpaid deaths:

’Its my voice, huh, how nice!’

Park was alive, against every law of the merciless snow and that indifferent bumper.

He tested his body the way a thief tests a lock, cautiously, half-expecting alarms; his limbs answered, his fingers twitched and his legs too shifted.

There was no grinding of broken bone, no fire in the joints, no mangled marionette wires hanging loose where there should have been tendons; only the dull crown of pain on his head remained, faithful as a bad memory, mocking him as a reminder that the universe had better jokes in its repertoire than simple mortality.

’Strange,’ he thought, dragging the word through the slow molasses of his skull. ’Far too strange.’

His eyes — ah, the traitors. They refused to open, glued shut by some invisible cruel whim.

No matter how Park strained, eyelids heavier than winter itself, the darkness held.

’Blind?’ The thought slithered in, dark and well-dressed and grinning. ’Wouldn’t that be the perfect punchline. Survive death only to star in the tragedy of the sightless fool. The role I always wanted — leading man, finally, in a one-act about a boy who can’t see his own life.’

He almost laughed but his throat said no.

So he gave up the futile battle with his lids and focused instead on sensation, like a man patting himself down in the dark to see what the universe had left him with.

Park could feel it, he lay on something.

It was cold yet warmer than the grave’s embrace. Hard. Unyielding.

’A floor, perhaps.’

It was not snow, no blood or the wet slushy concrete of the crossing, where the last he remembered — the last he could bear to remember — had been the obscene heat of his own life leaking out beneath him while strangers held up their phones and a woman cried about nothing.

This was somewhere else and the reassurance counted to something.

Park’s fingers, the small reliable spies, moved outward. Smooth. Cool. The texture of polished wood, perhaps.

Or no — something flatter. ’A board? A platform? A—’

Then, with the casual cruelty of timing the universe seemed to delight in, a sharp sound sliced the void with a very loud sharp reverberating ringtone.

’A phone.’

Before he could twist toward it, the device clicked to voicemail, and a voice erupted out of it like a demon denied its due — loud, furious, magnificently uncreative in its threats.

"Listen you fool, Kim, if you don’t show up in the next few minutes, the boss is gonna boil your ass wet. You got it? Bring the fucking money!"

The voice boomed too loud for any ordinary speaker. It filled the room Park lay in the way a command from the gods themselves might fill a temple — if the gods in question were small-time loan sharks with a flair for tortured metaphor.

It echoed once, twice, a third time, before silence rolled in behind it, heavy and expectant, the kind of silence that wanted something from you.

Park’s mind, the half-broken jester, began to laugh in the dark.

’Boil your ass wet,’ he thought. ’Even death has sloppy dialogue these days.’

And then—

"Okay! Cut! That was perfect!"

A man’s voice rang out, crisp and satisfied, from somewhere not too far. It carried the practised note of someone who had said the word cut a thousand times before and would say it a thousand times again before the week was done.

Then came the cacophony — no, not cacophony, something worse, something organised:

All of itt exploded around him in a single rush; clapping, murmurs, scattered approving laughter, the rustle of pages being turned in many hands at once. The soft creak of folding chairs surrendering their burdens as people rose.

Footsteps moving with purpose. A young woman’s voice somewhere to his left calling out check the gate.

Another was asking about lunch orders.

It was something Park could recognize even in death; the familiar low hum of a working filming set — that strange organism made of cables and craft service and tired professionals, all of them moving past him without looking, because to them he was just another body that had done what bodies on sets were paid to do.

Park lay very still.

His eyelids, still stubborn, still glued, refused to open but he didn’t need them now, the sounds were doing that work for him, piece by piece, assembling a picture his mind was already beginning to reject — and yet could not, in any honest corner of itself, deny.

The acoustics of the room. He knew them. He had just placed them, hadn’t he, only minutes ago — like actors rehearsing in a vast, empty theatre, the acoustics familiar, too familiar, from a hundred failed auditions and dimly lit stages.

The phone, too loud for any ordinary speaker. The voice that boomed around him despite themselves. Loudspeaker dialogue. Playback.

Cut.

That single word, dropped so casually into the dark, yet it meant so much to Park, everything he ever wanted, and the entire universe around him had reorganised itself in answer.

Somewhere in his slowing, cold-bitten mind, the pieces began to slide together with the awful, inevitable click of a well-rehearsed scene change.

No.

No, no, no.

’Don’t tell me —’