（）The Script-Eating Actor

Manager Hyung’s voice boomed across the bustling set, a familiar sound swallowed by the constant hum of activity. “Jae-hee, why do you always carry two scripts? You afraid of misplacing one in this chaos?”

I shrugged, trying to appear nonchalant, the practiced ease of a seasoned actor masking the tremor of my own secret. “Just prepared, Hyung. You never know.”

He chuckled, slapping my shoulder with the forced camaraderie of someone trying to stay positive in a pressure cooker. “Prepared guy, huh? Hehe. That’s my Jae-hee.”

But it was a lie. A carefully crafted performance, just like every other interaction on this set. The truth, the real reason for the twin scripts clutched in my hand, was something I couldn’t reveal, not to Manager Hyung, not to anyone.

One script, dog-eared and marked up, was for show. The prop. The façade of a diligent actor, ready to hit his mark, deliver his lines, and fade back into the background.

The other… the other was for consumption.

A whisper, a voice only I could hear, echoed in the quiet corners of my mind:

『Drama can be absorbed.』

『Do you want to absorb it?』

The words pulsed with a strange energy, a siren call to a power I still barely understood. My fingers tightened around the crisp pages, the scent of fresh ink a deceptive promise of normalcy.

This script, this innocuous stack of paper detailing the saccharine loves and youthful angst of college students, was food. My food. And I was starving.

With a silent, almost involuntary, nod in my mind, I began to eat. Page by page, scene by scene, I devoured the script, swallowing the words, the stage directions, the writer’s vision, and the nascent soul of the drama itself. It wasn’t just memorization; it was assimilation. A bizarre, miraculous bonus to this impossible act: I didn’t just learn the character; I became him.

And in the cutthroat world of acting, where every audition was a battle and every role a precious prize, I knew, with a chilling certainty, that this… this was my weapon. My secret weapon to finally, finally, break free from the minor roles and image-minor status that had defined my career for far too long.