Episode 7. The Boomer System (6)
They say even if you wring a diploma's neck, dawn still comes.
The morning broke, one where I'd lost both my family home and my degree. Terrifically bright and sunny.
"It's over."
"What is?"
"Everything."
"Hyung, are you okay?"
Lee Cheonghyeon, who had watched my dramatic emotional shifts from the top bunk last night, asked.
I wanted to say that I was anything but okay. Because I really wasn't.
But I couldn't. People who clouded the organization's atmosphere with personal emotions were the worst.
Moreover, Lee Cheonghyeon was the guy who had even lent me his composition laptop last night when I was fuming.
If I were a proper adult, I should know who to be angry at and who not to.
I forced myself to say I was fine and wiped my face; my skin was moist. Seemed like Lee Cheonghyeon had slapped a sheet mask on my face last night.
Fuck, a bastard more beautiful because he's diligent. At this rate, he'll only end up topping the photocard market.
Still, after suffering all night and denying reality roughly 230,000 times, I finally attained enlightenment.
I will debut no matter what.
And wash away this disgrace.
Find a way to make a living, too.
To do that, I'm going to master the basic choreography from start to finish today, right now.
From now on, it's really nothing but debuting.
I made a firm resolution.
* * *
And soon after.
They say a schoolhouse dog recites poetry after three years, and an idol makes a comeback in three months. I, too, achieved remarkable results in just three days.
Roughly 30 hours of official practice excluding breaks.
Added to that, 4 hours of personal practice.
Plus intensive training from five private tutors.
After devoting myself to memorizing choreography for a total of 34 hours with countless help, although my form resembled Millennium gymnastics, I could perform four minutes of choreography without a single mistake.
Having harbored the venom of my rookie days, as expected, nothing was impossible.
Though my eyes are probably all dead inside.
+
[SYSTEM] 'Task' completed.
▷ Reward: EXP(20) granted
▷ Accumulated EXP: 80
▷ Accumulated Points: 0
+
Successfully memorizing one song's choreography meant I collected points, too.
'Just you wait. One more point and I'm hitting Dance Proficiency 3.'
Having fallen into hell once, only malice and tenacity remained in my heart.
Humans inherently discover hidden abilities in extreme situations.
When Manager Nam told me to write and submit a report he'd forgotten about in four hours, I, too, realized my potential.
I didn't know past experiences would give me courage in a place like this, though.
'No matter what comes from now on... I'll consider myself dead and just get it done.'
I steeled my resolve with grim determination.
But fuck, dancing isn't the only thing—I have to practice singing, too.
K-trainees are brutal.
* * *
They say humans are creatures of adaptation.
I was no different.
In just a few days, I reached a state where I could enjoy meals among noble company evaluated as having no visual holes since debut, without ever showing it was my first time seeing a celebrity.
Even savoring the slightly spicy gochujang flavor of the jjolmyeon, at that.
Me enjoying jjolmyeon from morning among gleaming faces. Quite the strong heart.
The sight of the guys with their hair tied up in messy buns huddled on the practice room floor eating street food somewhat reminded me of my school days, too.
Just none of them had faces like these.
If you divide idol types into approachable and unapproachable, Spark was clearly the latter.
Eighty percent of that reason stemmed from their faces.
Recent idol groups commonly tended to gather members with different visual personalities in one group.
In a market where there should be at least one to your taste, entertainment agencies' visual goals developed toward creating groups that made people say, "How did they gather these kids in one place?"
However, UA was brave because it was ignorant.
A cold, sharp ice-cold handsome guy? → Handsome.
Many handsome members? → Good.
Had they schematized it like this? Or had UA preferred ice-cold handsome guys?
UA made Spark into a group that was "good because it has many sharp ice-cold handsome guys."
In other words, it meant only ultimate guys overflowing with coldness were gathered in one group.
First, Lee Cheonghyeon, the undisputed visual of Spark with a face that seemed like he was born the moment heaven and earth split open at the dawn of creation.
So blemish-free was Lee Cheonghyeon's face that you could believe he washed only with water drawn from Heaven Lake on Baekdu Mountain.
If Lee Cheonghyeon possessed a clear face imbued with the cool wind of an autumn morning sky, the cold wind whipped fiercely from Kang Giyeon's face.
Downing a bottle of tequila in a blizzard of gale-force winds would be easy... No. That was an inappropriate analogy for a freshman entering high school next month.
Kang Giyeon's appearance, looking like he could one-shot a bottle of hot ginger tea with no honey, boasted visuals unbelievable for the team's maknae.
The visual situation for the middle-line member a year older than Lee Cheonghyeon and Kang Giyeon's wasn't much different either.
The main vocalist Park Juu's nickname was Human Dawn Mountain Mist.
Past me had thought this nickname didn't suit Park Juu very much. Because about 80 percent of Park Juu's expressions seen during monitoring were blank-looking faces.
However, after seeing Park Juu in person, I could immediately accept the nickname.
Pale to the point of being white, Park Juu's bare face was a visual where it wouldn't be strange if he appeared in a mountain spirit-like hanbok in the mountain forests at dawn.
Leader Jeong Seongbin was relatively better off.
Unlike Lee Cheonghyeon, whose appearance seemed to have transcended even the secular world and was evaluated as looking somehow cynical every time he smiled, Jeong Seongbin's smile was unmistakably an idol smile.
≫ Honestly, isn't Jeong Seongbin a warm handsome guy?
Look at that smiling face, how is this not a warm handsome guy
└ (roughly a photo of Jeong Seongbin sandwiched between warm handsome guys)
└ Yeah, my baby isn't a warm handsome guy, guess I'm blinded by love
Even such a Jeong Seongbin was called an ice-cold handsome guy the moment he stepped outside.
The efforts of fans trying to push Jeong Seongbin into the warm handsome category by any means despite his eyebrows sitting just one degree lower than the other members was something even I, a third party, couldn't watch without tears.
Of course, no actual tears came out. I'd developed dry eye syndrome from looking at monitors too much.
Lastly, the center representing Spark and the great sinner who captivated Manager Nam's daughter, Choi Jeho.
This bastard... seemed like he was born at the North Pole.
His features had "I am not someone to be trifled with" written in Batang 13pt font; literally a face you'd hate to run into outside.
Indeed, an influential aura that made it natural he contributed roughly two hundred of the eight hundred times I accessed the Ministry of Employment and Labor's report filing page.
If only it weren't for that bastard, my monthly average overtime would have decreased by 20 hours.
They were all remarkable company.
And here I was, stuck among them.
I recalled my face reflected in the mirror this morning.
A common face of someone in his twenties who hadn't been too tainted by society no matter where you looked.
"Isn't there something like Visual Proficiency?"
What I actually needed didn't exist, and only useless things did.
The system seemed unaware of how important visuals were for idols. I could just throw this away once I debuted, right?
Perhaps I had been thinking too seriously about the meaning of my existence as a human being, when Lee Cheonghyeon, who had been watching me, asked.
"Hyung, don't you like the jjolmyeon? Want me to switch it for you?"
"No. I was thinking about something else."
"What were you thinking?"
"That I'm already wrong... is what I was thinking."
"What are you talking about in the middle of a meal?"
With that, Lee Cheonghyeon focused on his meal again. It was a morning of many worries. Though no one would understand me.
* * *
If the dance lesson was somewhere between chaos, destruction, and despair, the vocal lesson was in a better state.
Because there was no unfortunate incident of having to demonstrate the Dance of the Joyful Wooden Marionette.
Instead, I had to do my best to hide the soul of an unfortunate office worker singing with a spoon stuck in a soju bottle.
"I-wol, could you try relaxing your body a bit more when you sing?"
"Yes, I'll be careful."
"Don't be nervous and try singing. Your voice isn't bad."
If I'm not careful, a medley of Manager Nam's favorite trot songs will come right out the moment I'm not nervous. Because I end up doing trot again.
Still, to meet the teacher's expectations, I clenched my fist and sang my best as instructed.
+
[SYSTEM] 'Task' completed.
▷ Reward: EXP(20) granted
▷ Accumulated EXP: 100
▷ Accumulated Points: 1
+
Thanks to that, I got EXP for completing my first vocal lesson, too.
Unfortunately, since I couldn't raise Visual Proficiency, I invested the newly acquired welfare point of 1 into Dance Proficiency. So handsome men really are gifts from heaven after all.
+
Performance Evaluation(100)
― Vocal Proficiency: 4/20
― Dance Proficiency: 3(▲)/20
― Self PR: 12/20
― Attendance Management: 18/20
― Organizational Adaptability: 10/20
Accumulated EXP: 0
Accumulated Points: 0
+
Seeing my slowly but steadily growing proficiencies, though I wasn't proud, my mind was somewhat at ease.
If things kept going like this, I might escape from being a broken dance locomotive before debut...
+
[SYSTEM] A work order from 'Supervisor' has arrived.
▶ It'd be a problem if an employee with a different rank worked exactly like a new hire forever, right? Let's show some performance now. I need to be able to say something to my superiors too, so show me what's improved.
[SYSTEM] As the 'Task' adaptation period is completed, acquirable EXP is adjusted.
▷ Previous: Base EXP 20 granted
▷ Changed: Base EXP 10 granted
+
Damn it.
Just tell me to quit already. Huh?
Mix up the three-color namul and feed me funeral rice while you're at it.
* * *
It didn't take long to adapt to how the practice room operated.
Thanks to roughly 1,400 days of experience surviving while reading Manager Nam's moods.
Ah, occasionally my eyes met Choi Jeho's beyond the practice room mirror.
Having eaten so many glares all this time, now I could even hear voices in Choi Jeho's eyes.
"If you fumble around today too, I'm really throwing you away today."
"My heart aches, but what can't be done, can't be done."
Choi Jeho's brow wrinkled like dried pollack. He seemed to have read my eye-telepathy, too.
As the two of us exchanged heated gazes like that, someone came to the practice room. It was the person who had cast me at UA, someone who had visited the practice room before.
Min Jugyeong from the management headquarters, was it?
As usual, after a formal greeting, Min Jugyeong said.
"You all know there's a month-end evaluation soon, right? I came to announce it again because I thought I-wol might not know yet."
I didn't know the details, but I knew of the month-end evaluation's existence. Spark talked about nothing but month-end evaluation stories when spilling trainee tales.
Still, I was grateful for UA's consideration in announcing it despite there being over ten days left. Compared to Manager Nam, who threw me into an afternoon meeting and used his half-day leave to flee, UA's treatment was simply radiant.
"The evaluation will proceed exactly like last time. Hm... Seongbin, could you explain the details to I-wol?"
"Yes!"
The angelic Jeong Seongbin answered energetically despite being instantly put in charge of the handover. He was truly the type to ace social life.
If he shows that kind of attitude already, scumbags who sold their conscience will only try to use him up.
For example, someone like me who's planning to bolt after debuting.
As I was worrying about the future of Jeong Seongbin growing into Spark's spokesperson, Min Jugyeong added.
"If there's a difference, it's that the CEO will be coming this time. You know what that means?"
"We'll start getting serious and structuring things now, debut team. Do well."