The throbbing in his temples was the only thing anchoring Woo-jin to reality. It pulsed with heavy, dull blows, hammering into his skull. He tried to take a breath, but his lungs filled with thick, stagnant air. It smelled of sour wine, old dust, and something decaying.
Muffled voices drifted through the door.
"Locked himself in again. Did you hear him screaming yesterday?"
"He's finally drunk himself into a stupor. Since this morning, the stench in the hallway has been enough to make your eyes water. He's a corpse that's still breathing. The sooner Kyle takes the reins, the better, or this estate will be utterly ruined."
"Hush! He might hear you."
"Who cares? He forgets his own name by lunchtime anyway."
Woo-jin forced his eyes open.
This wasn't his home.
His sterile apartment—where every book was alphabetized and the air smelled of ozone—could never reek like this.
"Get up. Breakfast is ready."
The voice was young, sharp, and vibrating with ill-concealed loathing. Woo-jin forced himself to look up. A tall young man loomed over him. Black hair, cold blue eyes, and a polished steel breastplate.
Woo-jin blinked. For a second, he expected to see a director, but above his head were only heavy oak beams thick with cobwebs.
"Do you hear me?"
The boy frowned.
"Evelina is already waiting downstairs. Or do you plan on rotting here until evening?"
Woo-jin propped himself up on his elbows. His body felt foreign, far too heavy. He glanced at the bed; it was massive, large enough for four, but currently resembled a heap of filthy rags. Then his hands. He looked at his palms—broad, calloused, with greasy dirt packed under the fingernails.
He shuddered. The OCD he had kept in check for years flared up with such intensity that his nausea receded.
"What... is your name?"
He managed to rasp.
The boy froze.
"It's a miracle you even remember you have children. I'm Kyle, 'Father.' Your eldest son, the one you promised to disinherit yesterday. Ring a bell?"
Woo-jin fell silent. The names Kyle and Evelina echoed in his mind like a flash from the script he'd read the night before.
"Water,"
He said, trying to steady his trembling.
Kyle walked silently to the table, grabbed a heavy pitcher, and splashed water into a pewter goblet. He handed it to Woo-jin with the look of a man offering alms to a beggar. Woo-jin drank greedily. The water was ice-cold, but it cleared his mind slightly.
"Come down if you can still walk,"
Kyle snapped, turning abruptly and slamming the door behind him.
Woo-jin was left alone. The silence in the room became oppressive. He stood up, nearly collapsing from a wave of vertigo. His feet hit the cold stone. His gaze caught a murky, full-length mirror standing in the corner behind a wardrobe.
He approached it, holding his breath.
A stranger stared back from the reflection. A man in his thirties with sharp, aristocratic features, overgrown with thick stubble. Dark shadows pooled under his eyes. Those eyes—a shade of obsidian as deep as his hair—looked like two bottomless wells. Despite the wretched appearance, the rumpled shirt, and the smell of stale alcohol, the man was breathtaking. His beauty was predatory, frightening, and alluring all at once.
Woo-jin slowly raised a hand and touched his cheek. The reflection mirrored the gesture. A cold sweat rolled down his spine.
"This isn't makeup."
Woo-jin froze, his eyes locked onto the obsidian gaze in the mirror. In his head, like a film reel, fragments of the previous evening began to play.
A stack of written pages. The title embossed in gold on the cover of the script: The Last Curtain.
It was a bestselling novel, now being adapted into the grandest project of the decade. Woo-jin, who had lived in isolation for the past few years, had agreed to step out of the shadows only for this role. The role of Victor von Hellsworth.
He recalled the character description from the first chapter.
"A man whose beauty was a curse and whose heart was a scorched wasteland. Victor, who destroyed his wife and turned his children's lives into a living hell, was destined to fall at their hands so the world would not drown in blood."
Woo-jin closed his eyes, summoning the pages of the script he had memorized until they were frayed in his sterile apartment.
The plot of The Last Curtain was a classic tragedy disguised as dark fantasy. The entire first volume was a chronicle of the fall of House Hellsworth. Victor wasn't just a "bad father"; he was the one who dismantled his own house.
The world of the Seven Kingdoms stood on the brink of catastrophe. Humans, elves, dwarves, and other races were frozen in a fragile balance, and House Hellsworth was the very stone holding back the avalanche. Victor was a tyrant, but he was the legitimate guardian of the borders. His death turned the Hellsworth lands into a "gray zone" that everyone else would begin to tear apart.
The author of the novel had written Victor as an entirely one-dimensional villain whose only function was to die beautifully and set the gears of war in motion. He had no allies, no excuses—only four children who woke up every morning thinking of his demise.
"I auditioned for the role of a corpse."
The realization hit harder than the hangover.
He remembered his audition. The director had asked him to show "the terrifying grace of a man who is already dead inside." Woo-jin had simply stood there, staring into the camera, and the entire film crew had held their breath.
Now, that scene had become his reality.
He looked at his hands again. The dirt under a Lord's fingernails. The chaos in the room. The asymmetrically scattered empty bottles.
His OCD revolted, sending pulses of disgust at every stain on the carpet.
The Victor in the book was pathetic. The script described him as a degraded animal who would choke on his own bile if Kyle didn't get around to stabbing him first. But Woo-jin never played "just villains."
He was used to polishing every performance to perfection.
"If I must play a tyrant," — he straightened up slowly, his 190 cm height making the room feel smaller, — "then it will be the greatest performance in the history of this world."
He felt a familiar rush of excitement. The kind that made him forget food and sleep when working on a character.
But now the stakes were different. This wasn't a one-night show. This was an immersive production with no intermission, where the only payout was his life.
"To save my own neck, I need to save this damn world. And to save the world, I have to strip my children of their reason to kill me. But I must do it in a way that they don't suspect an impostor."
He understood: if he suddenly became a "Sweet Daddy," Kyle would think he'd finally lost his mind, and Evelina would see it as another twisted trap. A sudden change is a lie. And a lie leads to a failure.
Woo-jin walked to the goblet Kyle had left and splashed the remaining water onto his palms. He began to scrub them together, trying to wash away the grime until his skin turned red.
"Hygiene first. And then, I'll meet the rest of the 'actors' in this play."