Chapter 96

The lesson and team practice ended amid the confusion.

After everyone dispersed, Gowon trailed after me.

“Aren’t you going to your room?”

“No.”

Well, look at him.

I only tilted my eyes and looked up at him sidelong, and he immediately backed down.

“I have to talk casually when other people are around.”

“......”

“Hanje, you have to keep your promise to take all the difficult vocal parts.”

“We’ll see.”

“No, not ‘we’ll see.’ There isn’t anyone on the team who can really compete with you anyway. If you say you’ll take those parts, everyone will probably be happy about it.”

“You shouldn’t judge people’s potential that easily.”

“...Why not? You haven’t even properly explained what’s happening right now.”

“You’re having a really vivid dream.”

“Oh, come on.”

“‘Oh, come on’ is casual speech too.”

“......”

There was no way for me to explain the fact that I had somehow become younger and dropped straight into <Debut Chart> anyway.

“Hanje, you’re seventeen right now, right?”

“That’s what they tell me.”

“......”

I turned around at the unpleasant silence and saw the corner of Gowon’s mouth twitching.

This little bastard seemed to have decided that the current situation was roughly some kind of pleasant lucid dream where he got to turn the hierarchy upside down.

“How far are you planning to follow—”

“Oh, Baek Hanje and Gowon! Perfect, you’re together!”

An unfamiliar man waved as he approached us.

I thought he might be a staff member, but unlike the crew, most of whom looked bedraggled from surviving the murderous filming schedule, his clothes were neat and polished.

“You two must have had a hard time climbing this far without agencies. That’s really impressive.”

We only stared at him, confused by the sudden praise, and he held out a business card.

“I’d like to make the two of you a good offer.”

R Media Center.

It was an agency affiliated with Rnet, the network airing <Debut Chart>.

“If you debut, you’ll be working under our company for three years anyway. So I thought, instead of stopping there, why not officially become our artists?”

In other words, separate from the project-group contract, they wanted to bring Gowon and me—both currently without agencies—under their own umbrella.

“You know that no matter how high your rankings are, you can’t relax until the final competition, right? But we’re closely connected with the producer now, so for trainees directly under us, we can put in a word asking him to pay a little more attention to them. You know?”

...Aha.

So they’re selecting pieces they can make use of before the rigging starts.

“Wow, that sounds amazing!”

“I knew Hanje would be smart despite being so young! You don’t reach first or second place for nothing! You seize opportunities like this one by one, and that leads to even bigger opportunities.”

“But I have to ask my mom about things like this too.”

“Of course. You’re a minor. If you give me your mother’s contact information, we can call her and explain everything ourselves.”

“Oh, I actually have my mom’s business card.”

Apparently, even here, I still had the habit of carrying around ten or so of them like protective charms.

“Really? Could I have one?”

“Here!”

Attorney Baek Junhee.

“......”

The eyes of the employee who had been talking so shamelessly began to shake in confusion.

“Aren’t you taking it?”

“What? Ah, uh...”

“Please make sure you explain everything properly.”

“...R-right. Actually, now that I think about it, things are a little hectic at the company right now, so maybe later, when things calm down... we’ll contact her.”

The employee barely managed to take the business card I was thrusting toward his chest before retreating.

“...I used to fall for things like that.”

Gowon spoke self-deprecatingly about his past self, who had known nothing about adults’ schemes.

“What did an eighteen-year-old do wrong? The adults who exploit kids are the ones at fault.”

“I really am... glad I met you.”

“You were prickly five minutes ago and now you’re suddenly acting cute. I can’t adjust. Do you remember all the way back to the preliminaries?”

“......”

The lips that quietly pushed forward along with his silence were answer [N O V E L I G H T] enough.

I knew the circumstances, so I had no intention of holding a grudge over how rude he had been.

But there was one thing I could tease him about for the next ten years.

“Do you remember calling Kwon Taeyoung weird and snapping at him right in front of his face?”

“Ah.... I didn’t know.”

“Aww, did Kwon Taeyoung look like some creep trying to lure away a kid? Was big eighteen-year-old Gowon trying to protect me from the scary old man?”

“No, that! I didn’t, like, think the division head was that kind of person... It’s just, you kept hanging off his shoulder, whining at him to vote for you, and whenever you saw him, you... smiled so brightly....”

The owner of the gradually shrinking voice had turned bright red at some point.

“...So... I was trying to tell you to be careful.”

“Even if I really were seventeen, do you think someone with my personality would act like that with just anybody?”

“......”

Rather than looking like he had nothing to say, Gowon seemed a little confused, his face still red.

Well, from the perspective of the person inside, he hadn’t even been in this bizarre world for a full day yet.

“Are you seriously not going back to your room?”

“Where are you going?”

I... did have a prior appointment.

“Well, I guess it doesn’t matter if you come with me.”

With him stuck to my back, I headed toward a quiet corridor with little foot traffic.

Then I entered a small, inconspicuous room that doubled as storage.

“You’re here?”

Yunjin was already inside.

“Hm?”

Confusion appeared in Yunjin’s eyes when he saw Gowon behind me.

“...Hello. ...Sir.”

“Huh?”

“Hanje, his memories from when he was twenty came back. Do you know what happened?”

“Ahh... I guess since we’re near the end, the world is preparing to merge back with the original one, so things are becoming unstable. Taeyoung recognized me for a moment earlier too.”

“Is that okay?”

“I told you. Other than the knee, which is the core result, everything is going to disappear anyway.”

“......”

“When we return to reality, he’ll forget all of this. That junior too.”

...I see.

Along with relief, I felt a trace of regret.

Apparently, struggling and racing through this survival show with adolescent Gowon had been more fun than I realized.

I had wanted to talk to Gowon, with both sets of memories, about all sorts of things from the previous competitions too.

Still, it would probably be better for him to forget than to remain confused after getting caught up in an inexplicable phenomenon.

“But aren’t you saying all this way too openly?”

“He can’t hear it anyway.”

“......?”

At that, I turned toward Gowon.

He only looked slightly bewildered.

“Gowon?”

“Yes.”

The face that turned toward me was not much different from when we had been talking in the hallway earlier.

As if he had not heard a single word of the conversation about him.

...I was starting to feel increasingly lost about where to even begin questioning Yunjin, who was apparently accustomed to this grotesque mechanism.

“...Anyway, Yunjin here also has his memories as a member of Young Ace.”

“I thought so.”

“Oh, you figured it out during the preliminaries?”

“That too, and... I saw him at the convenience store.”

Ah, right.

They said Yunjin had come to get me when I collapsed, so the two of them must have met then.

“Right... Anyway, given the situation, well. Gowon should do just fine in the final without worrying about the stage.”

Even if he was only a rookie, there had to be an enormous gap between singer Gowon and trainee Gowon.

And I should have felt reassured that even if some serious crisis happened, he would handle it better than eighteen-year-old Gowon....

Except at some point, the distance between him and my back had shrunk to less than half a handspan.

Why did it feel so strangely—

“......”

Like he’d gotten even younger?

“Yeah. I’ll take care of the production crew, so the two of you just focus on preparing for the final competition.”

“Got it.”

Yunjin waved at me, gave Gowon a slight nod, and left first.

I wanted to hear exactly what he planned to do, but it felt incredibly awkward discussing it with Gowon standing right beside me while being unable to hear any of it.

“You heard him, right? He says you just have to work hard.”

“I think he said both of us should work hard....”

“If I work hard, you won’t be able to take first place.”

I poked the chest of the boy standing close to me with one fingertip.

“You’re the one who takes first place on Debut Chart. This is a dream where that part has to come true exactly as it should.”

“......”

Gowon kept his mouth tightly shut as we walked back down the corridor.

When we reached the area we knew well from passing through it so often during filming, I eventually spoke first.

“Want to practice some more before you go? I’ll check what you’re doing. Or you can go back to the dorm and rest.”

Gowon lifted his head with an expression that said he had made up his mind.

“Hanje, you don’t have to help me practice. And... don’t go easy on me during the final.”

No, that wasn’t something I could just agree to because you’d gotten provoked—

“......?”

I had thought he was getting worked up, but contrary to my expectation, Gowon was wearing a faint smile.

“Hanje, I know I can never beat you in pure skill. But I’m confident about this competition.”

“Look at this little punk getting cocky.”

No matter what, I had spent far more years onstage—

“No. This isn’t about who can perform with more ease and experience.”

I know because I’ve done it.

“It’s about who’s more desperate.”

“......”

“The person who wants it more wins. How could I let go of a chance to show you that from right beside you?”

Plausibility has increased.

Current Plausibility: 81% (▲4)

“I’m going to the practice room. See you tomorrow.”

Gowon bowed and started walking off on his own.

“...Huh.”

It felt like discovering one or two white feathers sprouting among the fluffy yellow wings of a baby chick.

“What the hell.”

I stood there blankly for a moment with an incredulous laugh, then abandoned my plan to return to the dorm early and rest.

And I strode toward a practice room in the opposite direction from the one Gowon had taken.