Chapter 120

“...Yunjin.”

Hanje was sitting in a chair beside the hospital bed.

Now he understood why Yunjin had cried when he saw Hanje collapse in the copied world.

Yunjin had been horribly sick for several days, so badly that it hurt just to look at him.

Hanje couldn’t shake the guilt that Yunjin had ended up like this because of him.

On the third day, Yunjin finally opened his eyes.

Seeing him look at Hanje through a face drenched in cold sweat and manage a faint smile only made it hurt more.

“...It’s okay if you listen to me instead of talking, right? That doesn’t make you hurt too, does it?”

“Mm....”

Yunjin touched his completely hoarse throat, nodded, and answered, “That’s okay.”

“Like you said, I think it’s true that this fucking bastard... favors me.”

“Bad language.”

Even with a voice rough as scraping metal, Yunjin still corrected him like an older brother scolding the youngest.

That only made Hanje’s nose sting worse.

“Anyway... even if I lost something, this didn’t stop me from being a singer.”

Of course, the loss was enormous.

Hundreds of files created in Hanje’s own distinctive style had been dissected and analyzed down to the smallest detail, and using any of his existing work was now completely out of the question.

For all practical purposes, his past work had spread throughout the world like public property.

But Hansel himself was still intact.

Compared to the fact that he had put his life on the line, the price had been light.

The quest conditions had effectively been altered so that the result became a “success” instead of a “failure.” Both Hanje’s abilities and Kim Yeban’s life had remained safe.

“I have a theory.”

Yunjin looked at him.

“What if what this quest really wants is my musical talent?”

“.......”

“When I was seventeen, it helped that talent bloom. And now it attached Gowon to me and reignited the passion for music that had started cooling off.”

So, strictly speaking, rather than favoring Hanje himself, it favored the creative ability he had been born with.

“When I think of dumping every track I had into the world as the price it wanted... it actually makes sense.”

“.......”

“...You said it before. That this thing pursues some kind of universal value for humanity, but that can look unfair from an individual person’s perspective. Maybe someone somewhere will hear those leaked files, get inspired, and popular music will advance because of them. Something like that.”

Hanje walked over to the bed and shamelessly crawled under the patient’s blanket.

Forced toward the middle of the bed by the intruder, Yunjin pushed himself upright.

Then he silently stroked Hanje’s cheek.

Hanje knew.

He probably didn’t look much better than Yunjin had while lying sick in bed.

“I’ll just start over.”

Hanje rubbed his head against Yunjin’s waist.

“I’ll show everyone that if a genius producer puts his mind to it, he can catch back up to something like that in no time.”

Yunjin continued stroking him, and Hanje took it as agreement.

“And at least it was only unreleased work that got stolen, right? God, imagine if my name had been wiped from the credits of every song I released over the last ten years. I’d have gotten so furious I really would’ve ended up lying in the bed next to you.”

At that, Yunjin lightly flicked him on the forehead.

“What about the next quest?”

“Loading. It still hasn’t appeared. Probably because this was another unexpected situation.”

Oh, right.

Hanje snapped his fingers.

“I think Server Clock broke.”

“?”

“The quest that was running simultaneously doesn’t show up anymore. It said Server Clock was what twisted the quest target over to me, so maybe it overdid things back then.”

Either way, it had changed the situation for the better, so Hanje had no regrets.

“...Are you really okay?”

“Yeah. I paid a pretty brutal price for raising an adorable youngest. The tests are going to come back completely normal anyway, so I should be discharged tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I went through all that trouble raising you into someone who wouldn’t say things like that.”

Damn it.

There he went again, making Hanje emotional.

“By the way, youngest, do something about the others. They’re treating me like I’m made of soap bubbles....”

“Why is our Yunjin sitting up?”

Cha Yensu opened the hospital-room door and asked in a chilly voice.

Then he looked at Hanje occupying the bed.

“Hanje. Get down.”

“Yes, sir.”

Without putting up any resistance, Hanje immediately hopped off the bed.

“Yunjin, you finished your food and took your medicine, right?”

“Yeah... Yensu, I’m seriously fine now. You don’t have to keep coming to see me....”

“If I make you uncomfortable, should I bring Yeban instead? You two are closer in age.”

“N-No. I like you.... Mom is the best....”

Kim Yeban is seriously insane.... It feels like I got kidnapped by an actual psychopath and put under surveillance....

Listening to Yunjin complain like that, Hanje thought he looked much better than before.

Then again, the other members had probably witnessed Yunjin lying there in agony after collapsing.

Cha Yensu apparently intended to stay for quite a while, because he pulled an actual book out of his bag.

Hanje found it somewhat satisfying that they could keep such airtight watch over someone they still suspected might suddenly disappear again.

“Then I’m heading out first.”

“Where are you going, youngest?”

“I still have some things to sort out. I’ll come back tonight.”

Cha Yensu gave a small shrug in place of a farewell.

The weather had grown cooler, so Hanje didn’t stand out too much with the hood of his jacket pulled low over his head.

Even less so when he walked hunched over, staring only at the ground.

Like that, he reached the back entrance of K-Dom headquarters, tapped his access key, and slipped quietly inside.

Reporters were still waiting around the main entrance.

Hanje chose the emergency stairs instead of the elevator.

The employees were trying to pretend otherwise, but there were still plenty of them who didn’t know how to act when they saw him.

For a while, it was probably better for Hanje to make himself as inconspicuous as possible.

At last, he reached his studio.

Even entering the familiar passcode felt strangely awkward.

Beep.

“.......”

He opened the studio’s double doors and stepped inside.

Is this what it feels like for a prisoner to stand before the judgment seat?

It felt as though all the years Hanje had spent here were staring at him, condemning the choice he had made.

“...I had no choice.”

He rested his fingertips on the MIDI keyboard.

No one had been in the studio for some time, so a thin layer of dust had settled over it, and it was painfully cold.

“That was the best choice.”

Then he turned on the computer.

The boot-up felt far too fast.

“...Ha....”

Of course it was.

It was blank.

The folders that had once been scattered all over the desktop.

The files where he had frantically written down whatever ideas came to mind.

The countless works he had accumulated over all those years.

Everything was gone.

“Hey. Couldn’t you at least have left the Young Ace concert photo I used as my wallpaper?”

You had to erase that too...?

The self-deprecating smile on his lips stiffened.

Before he knew it, the hand he had reached toward the monitor was trembling violently.

“...It’s fine.”

...Ha.

In the end, his chest heaved pathetically.

The blur filling his vision spilled down both cheeks.

“Instead of failing the quest... Gowon and Yeban are both safe. So losing some songs is fine. Of course it is.... No, I got off cheap....”

He repeated the words as though hypnotizing himself.

Because otherwise, he didn’t think he could bear it.

Notifications kept appearing across the phone he had set down on the desk.

Since the outside world knew this as a massive hacking and data-leak incident, he had received countless worried messages from acquaintances.

But the people he had worried most of all were the fans.

“...I really wasn’t in any position to tell anyone not to turn being a fan into some miserable suffering contest.”

Not long after the incident, Hanje had posted messages on MeVerse and Boggle saying that he was fine and that the scale of the damage was not as severe as people thought.

Even so, the fans’ depressed mood had not lifted easily.

...I need to stop making Spades worry. If you want to post a selfie with a perfectly normal face today, quit bawling already, you asshole.

“Hng....”

Despite the scolding inside his head, his shoulders continued trembling in front of the blank white screen.

Hanje loved making songs.

He didn’t know exactly when that had begun.

Apparently, after being adopted again and finding himself awkwardly standing in front of his new mother, the first wish he had ever managed to voice was, I want to learn piano.

Once he learned how to read sheet music, he began creating the melodies he wanted and playing them on the piano however he pleased.

When his mother praised him for being good at it, he had felt even prouder.

And that feeling eventually became the desire to make good songs.

From there, simply making songs was no longer enough.

He wanted to give each song to the artist who suited it best and, through that artist’s expressive ability, complete something even better.

That was how Young Ace’s Hansel became both a singer and a producer.

He enjoyed discussing ideas with the concept-planning team.

He found satisfaction in working things out with singers inside the recording booth.

Every moment when a work refined thousands, tens of thousands of times was finally released to the public and recognized had made him happy.

The loss of every footprint from that past truly was the punishment laid on Hanje alone in answer to his plea:

Take it out on me.

Merciful.

And cruel.

But all of this had happened because of Hanje’s own complacency.

So he had no right to feel wronged.

No right to grieve.

“Ugh... hng... ah....”

Those vast records he had carefully built up one by one, filled with anticipation for the day they would finally be released into the world.

The library bearing Hansel’s name had burned down, leaving nothing but white ash.

The traces of all those nights spent clutching his head in front of the monitor would now be effortlessly reprocessed by someone else.

That was the age they lived in.

He couldn’t even bring himself to sit in the chair where so much of his past had lived.

Instead, Hanje sank to his knees in front of the desk and finally let out the sobs he could no longer hold back.

***

Gowon had been wandering around the fifth floor of K-Dom headquarters when he spotted a shadow slipping into the studio.

The leak of Baek Hanje’s work had erupted almost at the exact same time Gowon’s lawsuit came to an end, and he had barely seen Hanje since.

Of course, before that, Gowon himself had been avoiding him.

But this was hardly the time to be thinking about that.

Gowon approached the tightly shut studio door.

He knocked carefully, but there was no response from inside.

“...Hanje.”

Just as he was about to open the door and go in, he stopped short.

For a moment, Gowon stood frozen by the doorway.

Then he quietly backed away from the studio.