Chapter 01
The Truth About Child Actress Seo Yujin (+999)
[The Truth About Child Actress Seo Yujin (+999)]
[I’m in the same class as Seo Yujin, and every time I see her pretending to be such a sweet girl on TV, I feel like I’m gonna puke lol. Whenever she comes to school, she’s always lying face-down on her desk with her earphones in, saying she’s tired. But if anyone makes even the slightest bit of noise, she starts yelling at them and making them feel like crapㅠㅠ She also dumps all the cleaning duties on kids she thinks she can push around, then runs off in her manager’s car lol.]
“……”
My hands trembled as I clutched my phone.
In the dark room, I read through the post yet again, even though I’d already read it dozens of times.
The bright light from the screen made my eyes sting, but I couldn’t look away.
‘Did I… really do that?’
For the past few days, I’d constantly been questioning my own memories.
Wondering if, perhaps, I’d really done the things described in that post.
But no matter how hard I thought about it, I’d never done anything like that.
It was true that I’d slept with my head on my desk at school because of overnight filming sessions.
But I swore I’d never yelled at anyone or forced them to run errands for me.
If anything, whenever my classmates approached me to talk, I’d tried my best to smile at them, even when I was exhausted.
[Seo Yujin: Allegations Are Completely Unfounded… “We Will Take Appropriate Action”]
– Wow, she must’ve lost her mind after getting a taste of money at such a young age lol.
– I never would’ve thought she was like that. Creepy. I never want to see her on TV again.
– If she’s already acting like this in sixth grade, we can all guess what she’ll be like as an adult. Ban her from the entertainment industry for good.
But no matter how many times I tried to explain myself, people refused to listen.
Perhaps they’d never been interested in hearing my side of the story in the first place.
And just like that, overnight, I’d become the worst child in the world.
“Isn’t this all because you raised her wrong?! How many times have I told you? We should’ve pulled her out of school altogether!”
“Do you think I don’t want to?! What am I supposed to do when they keep bothering us with this compulsory education nonsense?!”
“……”
Once again, my parents’ shouting drifted through the crack beneath the door.
I buried my face in my damp pillow and pressed both hands tightly over my ears.
I pushed so hard that my palms began to hurt, but their voices still came through the crack in the door, painfully clear.
…I didn’t want to hear it.
I didn’t want to hear those words anymore.
“……Hic.”
How had things ended up like this?
All I’d ever wanted was for my family to be happy.
“Yujin, you can do this, right? Our Yujin can do anything.”
“……Yes, Mom.”
The day I first stood in front of a camera.
Mom had gripped my trembling hand so tightly that it hurt as she spoke to me.
She told me that if I appeared on television, became famous, and earned lots of money, our family would be much happier.
“Hello! I’m Seo Yujin!”
I could still remember that very first moment vividly.
The lights in the audition room were so huge and bright that they hurt my eyes, and I was terrified of the countless eyes staring at me.
But I endured it and forced the corners of my mouth upward.
Because Mom had told me that if I smiled, our family would be happy.
“What happened to that money? You really invested all of it there? Have you lost your mind?!”
“What? It’s my daughter’s money, and I’ll do whatever I want with it! What’s it to you?!”
“Your daughter? Since when was Yujin your daughter?! I’m the one who carried her in my womb and gave birth to her!”
But contrary to my hopes, my family never became happy.
Instead, as time passed, the looks in my parents’ eyes grew more and more frightening.
At some point, the sound of things breaking and my parents shouting began to echo from their bedroom every night.
I was so scared that tears threatened to spill from my eyes day after day, but I forced myself to open my script.
‘I have to work harder.’
If I became much more famous than I was now…
If I earned mountains of money that Mom and Dad loved so much, then surely they would stop fighting.
“Wow, how can a child that young act so well?”
“I’m telling you, our Yujin is going to become a great actress who shakes up the entire country!”
Even when I got nosebleeds from lack of sleep, I endured the pain and memorized my lines.
Even when I wanted to play at the playground, I held myself back.
As the years passed, there came a time when my face appeared on television whenever someone turned it on, and my smiling image filled billboards everywhere.
But all of it came crashing down in a single day.
[Child Actress Seo Yujin Accused of Looking Down on Classmates and Verbally Abusing Them? The Dark Side of the Nation’s Little Sister]
[The Prodigy Child Actress’s Two Faces? Allegations Against Seo Yujin Spread Like Wildfire… “She Treated Her Friends Like Servants”]
The flood of hateful comments. The talk of penalty fees for breached contracts. My parents fighting every day, throwing things at each other.
But none of those things was what frightened me the most.
What I feared most right now was…
“You crazy bitch!”
“KYAAAH!”
“……!”
It happened then.
A piercing scream rang out from the living room.
It was Mom’s voice.
‘N-No…’
Dad must have been hurting Mom again.
I hurriedly flung open my bedroom door and rushed outside.
And when I saw the scene before me, I gasped.
“M-Mom…!”
The pungent smell of alcohol stung my nose.
Dad’s face was flushed red as he raised a glass liquor bottle over Mom, who was sitting on the floor.
“N-No! Mom!”
The moment the bottle finally swung toward her, I rushed forward and threw myself in front of Mom.
THUD—!
“……Ugh!”
An enormous wave of pain surged through me with a dull, heavy impact.
My vision flashed white, and then the world went pitch-black for a moment.
“Y-Yujin!”
“You’ve lost your mind! How could you do that to your own child?!”
“Y-You wouldn’t have gotten hurt if you hadn’t kept spouting that nonsense!”
“Hah! You’re blaming me even now, at a time like this?!”
“……”
When I came to my senses again, everything before my eyes was bright red.
I realized that hot, sticky blood was trickling down my forehead.
Fortunately, it didn’t hurt.
Everything simply felt muffled and distant.
‘Mom… D-Dad…’
My lips moved, but no sound came out.
Through my blurred vision, I could see Mom and Dad.
The two of them were still grabbing each other by the collars, screaming like mad.
‘……Ah.’
I’m going to die.
Death.
A word I’d never once thought about before had suddenly become my reality.
But strangely enough, I wasn’t all that afraid.
If anything, as the sound of my parents fighting grew fainter, I began to feel more and more at peace.
“……”
But even so…
There was still one thing I felt sad about. One thing I regretted.
[What is it that you regret?]
Just then, a tiny, faint voice came from somewhere.
Even as darkness swallowed my vision, I found myself answering it in my heart, as though entranced.
‘……That I won’t be able to act anymore.’
Even when everyone cursed me, even when Mom and Dad fought, this was what I’d truly been afraid of the most.
At first, I’d started acting so that my family could be happy.
But little by little, acting had come to mean something else to me.
‘Why is this child smiling here?’
‘What expression should I wear in this scene to best convey this character’s feelings?’
I loved the time I spent reading scripts filled with black letters, pondering questions like these.
And the moments when I finally expressed the emotions I’d worked so hard to understand were even better.
“Wow, Yujin. Was that expression just now your own idea?”
“Yes, Director. Was it strange…?”
“Of course not! Wow, haha! Our Yujin really is clever, isn’t she?”
Whenever I showed someone what I’d prepared and the director smiled at me, my heart would tingle with a pleasant thrill.
When I was acting, I could truly be happy.
‘So now… I can’t do it anymore.’
That was the only regret I had left.
My body gradually grew weaker.
Eventually, I could no longer keep my eyes open, and they slowly slipped shut.
Just as everything was about to sink into complete darkness…
[It’s too early to give up just yet!]
‘……?’
[Very well. Then… this Fox God shall come to your aid!]
The voice rang out clearly, even as my consciousness faded away.
Before I could even understand what it meant, I lost consciousness completely.
