I sipped my coffee and waited about ten minutes before the director came to me.
“Everything is ready.”
In his eyes, hope he had yet to relinquish shimmered alongside fear.
“As payment for the recording, three million won is a given, and hand over the money you earned from that animation too.”
“……You little thug….”
“What?”
I bared my claws again.
“Ah. My mistake. I will give you half of my share of the animation’s profits.”
“Seventy percent.”
“S-sixty percent……”
“I won’t say it again. Seventy percent.”
“Y-yes……”
Just a fox—when the Mountain Lord demands something, you hand it over. Why so much fuss.
“Let’s head to the recording studio first.”
The recording studio inside the building was quite professional.
Various devices hung in clusters from the microphone for noise cancellation, and the soundproofing was thorough.
And… for some reason, people had gathered in a bustling crowd.
“That girl is the voice actor?”
“She looks like a minor… is this really okay?”
“She’s so cute……!”
“Cute, but… I heard she told the team leader to get out without any manners.”
“Is she a mesugaki?”
It was hardly a pleasant situation for me, who hated noisy, clamorous sounds.
“Hey, why are there so many people here?”
“They’re our employees who seem to have gathered to see you, Sanbeom-nim.”
“Tell all of them to leave except for the minimum essential staff.”
Director Choe Junho sent everyone out of the recording studio except for the bare minimum of staff, following my words.
“Now, what should I start with?”
I had done voice impressions many times before, but since this was my first time voice acting, I didn’t even know what I was supposed to do.
Since it was work done with the voice anyway, I figured I could easily breeze through it using even just a quarter of my skill.
“Normally, we’d watch the animation we made, match the timing, and do many other things, but we boldly skipped all that, trusting in Jangsanbeom-nim’s skill.”
The director flattered me while rubbing his hands together.
“So I’m asking what I need to do.”
“You simply need to speak this script with appropriate acting, matching the timing when we give you the signal.”
The director respectfully held out the script to me with both hands.
The script looked quite thick—about fifty pages of A4 paper.
“I’ll act impromptu while watching the animation, so just match the timing well.”
“Understood.”
I roughly understood now. The level of voice acting work.
It was so boring I wanted to die.
In short, the core of this job was saying appropriate lines at appropriate scenes.
Normally, you’d probably have to record each line separately.
But I am Jangsanbeom.
To lure humans while hiding my appearance, there are times when I must converse with them directly.
What’s important then is reaction speed—making sure the other party feels no awkwardness in the conversation.
My reaction speed is far faster than that of humans, so even if I record while watching the animation simultaneously, there will be no sense of awkwardness.
Animation began playing on the screen installed in the recording studio.
It was a system where the number “1” appeared on screen when Line 1 came up.
I took a breath and began recording.
[Go out with me!]
[Wha… what? Am I being confessed to right now? And by another girl?!]
[No, no, that’s not it, what I’m trying to say is…… that is, umm!]
[For the realism of the novel I’m writing…… do a pretend romance with me!]
[In the first place, the novel Iha-yeon was writing was that kind of story where girls date each other, so it wasn’t entirely absurd.]
[Wait, then that means you and I doing that kind of thing……]
.
.
.
“Wow……! We might not even need to edit this. The voice actor is amazing.”
“How is she doing those long lines without getting the timing or pronunciation wrong even once?”
“Director, where did you bring her from?”
“You don’t wanna know……”
The minimal staff remaining in the recording studio couldn’t close their mouths after witnessing Sanbeom’s skill.
At first, hearing the director say they would record continuously in one take, they had thought it impossible no matter how pressed for time they were. Now, they were witnessing that very spectacle with their own eyes.
The staff member who had been poised at the control panel, ready to shout “cut” if anything went wrong, was now listening to Sanbeom’s voice in a daze.
“Now the next part features a man, so tell the voice actor to take a short break.”
“Yes.”
The staff stopped the recording at the exact part, following Director Choe Junho’s signal.
What, is it over? It seems like about thirty percent of the script still remains, though?
“Good work. The next part features a man, so please rest while we finish that.”
“I can do a man’s voice too…… well, taking a short break is fine too.”
I came out of the soundproof booth with the microphone.
“Sanbeom-nim. You were truly incredible.”
“Director, follow me for a moment? I have a lot to say about the animation you made.”
“Did you like the animation that my staff and I made?!”
“In a bad way……”
“Ah.”
Director Choe Junho’s expression darkened rapidly, as though he had met the messenger of the underworld.
The director and I went to a secluded corner of the building.
“I’ve been thinking about this while recording……”
“Y-yes.”
“Can you really make money with something like that?”
The animation’s quality itself was quite outstanding.
The brilliant colors and dynamic drawings made it clear that money had been poured into it.
Apart from that, the story itself was just……
“Romantic stories are good. Good…… even in the old days, there was demand for such stories. But why is it about ladies falling in love with other ladies instead of a lady and a gentleman!”
“…… ……”
“I’m not human, so I felt no discomfort. Right, I’m not human! But animation is supposed to be for the masses. Can something like this really be mainstream?!”
The questions I had held back throughout the recording burst forth like a floodgate opening.
“Sanbeom-nim, having lived only in Jangsan, doesn’t seem to know the ways of the modern world.”
“Then you’re saying that while I wasn’t looking, women like King Munjong’s second wife have increased, and such women enjoy this animation?”
“This is why tigers are strong but lack wits……”
“Say that again.”
The gaps between my fingernails split as black claws jutted out.
“I meant that, like Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang, we should fill each other’s gaps and prosper together, haha……!”
This fox bastard’s words weren’t worth a single bite; his mouth was the only thing alive.
“So there are people who enjoy animation with this kind of content?”
“Of course! In faraway neighboring Japan, animation with this content is already the mainstream.”
“Japan…… you mean the country that invaded our nation twice?”
“Y-yes, that’s correct.”
Bringing something already popular in Japan to our nation and spreading it among the masses……
“I suppose I must do my patriotic duty today for the first time in a while.”
“What? What do you mean by tha…… wait, why are you opening your mouth?!”
“To think you’d be blinded by money and collaborate with a pro-Japanese scheme. How shameful. I shall reclaim my honor by eating you.”
The spirit of resistance lives on.
“No, it’s really not like that! This is, well, what do you call it, it’s the domain of taste!”
I closed my mouth upon hearing that.
Because the first thing I had heard from Elder Brother Baekho when I first descended to the secular world was, “Respect others’ tastes.”
“Taste. Right, tastes should be respected. Gumiho originally bewitch the opposite sex. You really have peculiar tastes.”
Well, whatever. The world is wide, and there are many people—no, many spirit beasts—so it’s possible to run into a gumiho with such peculiar tastes. Mmhmm.
“Since it’s come to this, I should properly inform you. Creative works such as animations or stories about ladies falling in love with each other are called ‘Yuri.’ It’s a beautiful genre of girls being lovey-dovey.”
“I didn’t really want to know.”
Very rarely, I had occasionally seen women teasing each other deep in Jangsan.
Each time, I had passed by without capturing and eating them.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to disturb their time.
It was because the intense yang energy burning hotly beside them prevented me from approaching.
That such strong yang energy could emanate even when yin and yin combined was something I learned for the first time then.
“The recording should be finishing up by now, shall we head back?”
“Yes, I want to finish quickly and go home too.”
The director and I returned to the recording studio.
“NG. No, how many times are you going to mess up here!”
“It’s weird to make an animator do voice acting in the first place!”
“But we can’t get a male voice actor here either. Just do it.”
Contrary to the director’s expectation that recording would have finished, they hadn’t even properly recorded the second line yet.
“Oh dear, it’s about time for dinner. Shall we eat first?”
Dinner? When three million won is on the line, would food even go down my throat!
“Get out, I’ll do it.”
I flung open the door of the soundproof booth where recording was in progress and strode inside.
The employee who had been forcibly dragged out because of me wore a bewildered expression.
[Hey, you cute girls there, wanna hang out?]
[Haa, haaaa! A man, a man……]
[Unfortunately, it’s just the two of us out here.]
[Ah, come on. Let’s hang out together.]
I recorded freely, switching between a thick man’s voice and a slender woman’s voice at will.
At the end, there was a line where a man and woman speak simultaneously.
The note on the paper said, “Record separately then overlap the sounds,” but…
[I said, let’s hang out together!]
[Please stop!]
I accomplish it through sheer skill. This is me, the Mountain Lord Jangsanbeom. Hmph!
The surrounding staff looked up at me as if I were a divine spirit.
Having always been an object of fear, receiving this kind of gaze wasn’t so bad.