Chapter 99

[Pre-Chorus 2]

A major influence was made on the new past.

The War of Crown Episode 3 Highlight: “This Is the Weight of a Leader” — Newton’s Rebellion. Jeongho’s High-Note Ad-Lib Explodes

“Vocal Ace Battle” — “It’s okay. I’ll go instead.” An Emotional First-Place Victory!

Some achievements are applied to the present.

(Q) Did Gowon and Hansel meet on Debut Chart?

Was Gowon scouted by K-Dom because Hansel worked on his arrangement?

No, apparently the first time they actually met was while working on his debut album.

Gowon transferring to K-Dom was just Kwon Taeyoung having insane foresight.

Additional rewards are obtained.

“Hyung. What... is that?”

“.......”

“Next to you, there’s this weird screen floating there...!”

Gowon’s fingertip and gaze were pointing directly at the quest window.

......!

I couldn’t immediately explain myself to Gowon, nor could I recklessly mess with the quest window.

Flower Road guy. Hurry up and do something. I think you fucked up.

Static—

“Huh? It’s glitching....”

Hey! Don’t even think about running away. Fix this before you go!

My workroom was currently hosting a three-part catastrophe.

The quest window was freaking out like a computer screen infected with a virus.

Gowon, whose default expression was usually aloof, had his mouth hanging wide open.

And Baek Hanje, a man who had almost never been struck speechless in his life, was darting his eyes anxiously between the two.

“...So....”

“You can see that too, right?”

“Gowon, calm down first....”

Even my own voice was nowhere near calm.

“...What this is, is—”

Static. Crackle—

Ding.

“......?”

After a bright notification sound that couldn’t have been more out of place—

the quest window, whose letters had become unreadable, turned clear again.

The Senior Who Paves the Flower Road

...What?

The quest window looked exactly the same as before, except it had suddenly been patched into English.

The message is currently being displayed in a language that your companion cannot recognize.

(Temporarily displaying the message in a language the other party cannot understand.)

The half-assed measure made me laugh in disbelief.

If you were going to do that, why not switch it to Arabic or something? What’s the point of changing it to English?

The selected language must be recognizable by the user.

(The language must be one the user can understand.)

By “user,” it presumably meant me.

Even without the experience of going on several world tours, these sentences were basic enough that I could understand them easily....

Wait.

A language the other party couldn’t understand, but the user could?

“Gowon.”

“...Yes.”

Still staring at the floating window in shock, he answered in an equally shaken voice.

“You can’t understand this?”

I pointed at the first line of the quest window, which consisted of extremely basic words.

The Senior Who Paves the Flower Road

Gowon hesitated, pulled his phone out of his pocket, looked back and forth between the screen and the window, then answered with determination.

“...An old man planting flowers on a road.”

“.......”

The Senior Who Paves the Flower Road had, in one fell swoop, become an old man planting flowers, and quest window or no quest window, I had no choice but to smack the idiot once.

“Ow!”

I’d hit his head plenty of times before, but today I could have sworn it made the hollow sound of an empty can.

“Why did you suddenly hit—”

“Hey, Taeyoung. It’s me.”

Ignoring Gowon as he clutched his forehead and glared at me resentfully, I continued the call.

“Test Gowon’s English immediately and put him in lessons. Until then, don’t even think about sending him abroad to earn foreign currency.”

“.......”

While Gowon fell silent, the quest window quietly slipped away.

— I don’t know what suddenly brought this on, but good timing. Hanje, you get up to the conference room too.

“Huh? Why?”

— We said we’d have the jazz festival meeting. Did you forget?

“Ah.”

Right.

I... in reality, I’m scheduled to perform as a headliner at the Han River Jazz Festival.

It had already felt like an overwhelming honor before.

After spending all that time struggling as a trainee inside a survival show, it suddenly carried even more weight.

“Right now?”

— You weren’t checking your messages at all, so I was wondering. Looks like you really did forget.

“...Ah, yeah.... My head’s been kind of a mess. The Han River Jazz Festival....”

The jumble in my head, where the copied past and reality had been mixed together, gradually began to settle.

The moment Gowon became the undisputed winner of <Debut Chart>, “trainee Baek Hanje,” who had never belonged there, disappeared.

And I returned to being Hansel of Young Ace, an idol in his thirteenth year.

Deleting information that conflicts with the existing timeline.

...Though for some reason, Gowon seemed to have retained his memories.

Wait.

The alerts that had flashed past my eyes in rapid succession at the very end.

The last one had definitely said....

Yunjin is released from the restraints of the gap in time.

“......!!!”

Ever since I met Yunjin in that strange world—

I had suspected that his story about disappearing off to Africa or whatever might have been a lie.

Released from the restraints.

That clearly meant Yunjin had escaped from some kind of unavoidable predicament.

If so, maybe I could finally track down the Yunjin who had vanished without a trace.

The jazz festival meeting mattered, but first I needed to tell Kwon Taeyoung that we should find out where Yunjin was.

But....

What was I supposed to do about this... other problem child standing right in front of me?

“Hyung.”

“.......”

“You know something, don’t you? On Debut Chart, I met you when you were a trainee..., and that’s why.... No, I know how completely insane this sounds, but....”

I could have brushed him off.

Told him he was talking nonsense, asked if he’d fallen asleep and had some weird dream.

But every escape route that came to mind vanished under Gowon’s desperate gaze.

“You really were there. You even came looking for me when I was trying to give up....”

Gowon himself seemed unsure of what he was saying.

“...The time I spent with you... was that just my mi-mistake...?”

He rambled, his face twisting like a child about to have a present snatched away.

Standing in front of him, I couldn’t say anything.

“Gowon.”

How much of this is it safe to tell you?

“Calm down.”

“Hyung....”

“...I know what you’re talking about.”

“......!”

Gowon sucked in a sharp breath. 𝑓𝑟ℯℴ𝓂

“This happened too suddenly, and I need time to sort things out too. I think I have to go to this meeting first, so let’s talk at home after I’m done.”

“...‘Home’....”

Still confused, Gowon slowly took in my workroom.

The sofa.

The recording booth.

As if retracing the image of himself spending time in those places.

Eventually, he gave a slow nod.

I left Gowon behind and walked out of the workroom. I could feel his gaze lingering heavily on my back.

***

Only after practically fleeing the workroom and making it off that floor did I finally manage to release the tension in my body.

I looked around, ground my teeth, and muttered,

“Quest window, come out. What the hell are you going to do about this?”

Pop.

Once Gowon was out of sight, the quest window quietly switched back to Korean.

In the process of rewriting the “past to be overwritten,” an excessively large influence was exerted on a person in the present.

“So what the hell do you expect me to do about it? You told me to make him a first-place winner with enough Plausibility to justify it, and now the problem is that I worked too hard?”

The quest window gave no answer.

Ha....

I dragged a hand heavily down my face.

“...Can you erase Gowon’s memories?”

After a brief pause, a new message appeared.

Memories of the copied world line remain strongly embedded in “Gowon’s” consciousness.

Forcible deletion may cause trauma.

Would you still like to proceed?

“Don’t!”

The shout burst out of me instantly.

Startled by my own voice echoing through the empty hallway, I covered my mouth and quickly moved elsewhere.

No. We saw it today. The kid’s already stupid. What if you mess with his head and somehow make him even dumber?

This fucking quest window had tangled everything up this badly in the first place, and now it had the nerve to casually tell me the kid might be harmed?

“Damn it.”

Had I spent too long living as a seventeen-year-old?

My heart had grown numb to most things over the years, but now it was pounding like crazy over something that hadn’t even happened.

No....

Anyone would freak out if some unknown force was going to go inside someone’s head and mess with it.

Especially a twenty-year-old kid.

Either way, I had absolutely no intention of doing anything that might hurt Gowon.

Who the hell thinks they can touch the junior I raised?