Chapter 1
I remember having thoughts like that once.
I believe it was when I was in middle school. It was a night when the fact that I didn't have a mother suddenly felt unbearably sad.
I hated seeing my father fuss and struggle in front of me as he tried to fill that void, and I felt a strange sense of alienation because my friends never made the vulgar jokes about people's parents in front of me that they made among themselves.
So I thought that maybe, if this was how things were, it might be better to have no parents at all, so I could at least go properly off the rails... I thought that, if only for a moment.
Of course, I knew it was a crazy thought, so why has a memory I quickly erased from my mind resurfaced now? Because I had become an orphan.
Now that I was in a situation where I was being raised solely within the confines of an orphanage, with nowhere to rely on, I wondered if I was being punished for the stupid thought I'd had back then.
“Actually, that isn't what's important. Reincarnation out of nowhere...”
And on top of that, my sex had changed.
I was now an elementary school student with a remarkably adorable appearance.
My face was on the small side even for a child, and my eyes were so large they looked like they took up half my face.
My black hair, tied back, seemed glossy, and my eyes, with their strange mixture of blue and black, were so beautiful they seemed to draw you in.
“I could be an idol this time around.”
Having managed countless idols in my previous life, even I could tell that my current appearance was quite cute.
Seeing my changed appearance naturally brought back memories of the past.
Not long ago, I died.
The sound of a truck horn and the screams of people.
And the pain of being flung through the air while every inch of my skin scraped along the ground.
That disgusting, horrifying sensation was still etched into my body.
“If this is punishment, then I suppose that's a relief.”
I swallowed a hollow laugh and looked at the slender fingers of a little girl.
To think that the childish wish I'd made in middle school—that perhaps being alone would be better than suffering over not having a mother—would come true like this. A perfect state of zero: no parents, no connections, and no career to prove who I was.
Yet tens of thousands of scores and rhythms still lived and breathed in my mind.
It felt as if that alone proved that I, as a person, was still alive.
“Can I really say my situation is better than in my previous life just because of this?”
Is this a curse, or a cruel opportunity bestowed by God?
In my previous life, I died the moment I got my hands on a trophy, but in this world, I was still a blank slate with nothing written on it.
“And after looking into things for a month, I've found far too many differences from my original world.”
An orphanage. And, to make matters worse, it was the late 2010s. Naturally, there were no smartphones.
Apparently, they gave every child a smartphone when they entered middle school. Of course, it was an outdated budget model.
Because of that, I had quite a hard time, having to visit PC bangs to conduct research, but after spending my allowance and time, I realized that this world was very different from my previous one.
The year was 2019, yet none of the idols who should have existed at that time did.
The male idol group with the strange name that was supposed to take the world by storm didn't exist, and neither did the group that had formed a rivalry with them.
Even the names of the Big Three entertainment agencies were all different, and the artists currently ruling the charts at the height of their careers all had names I'd never seen before.
After looking into it, I found that even the president was different from the one in my original world.
In fact, since the 1990s, there had hardly been any politicians whose names I recognized.
This was a world similar to my original one, but with subtle differences here and there. In other words, a parallel world.
“Mr. Seo, the originator of popular music, is still here, but... everything after him is a mess.”
In my previous life, I had been a fairly successful composer.
Despite coming from a less-than-well-off background, I graduated from an arts high school, began working as a composer for a major entertainment agency in my early twenties, and became the head producer of a mid-sized agency by my early thirties.
Music was my life, and my life had contained nothing but music.
‘I do regret never having dated, though.’
It wasn't as though no one had made advances, but I wanted to establish myself securely before dating.
I was too busy to give a partner the attention they deserved.
Since I'd risen so quickly, I was constantly the target of envy and jealousy, and dealing with each incident left me physically and mentally wrecked.
Ultimately, the alter ego hanging between my legs vanished pointlessly without ever once fulfilling its essential purpose.
But what has taken its place now is...
“It feels empty...”
Whatever the case, that wasn't particularly important.
No, actually, it was important, but something else mattered more.
A vicious-looking upperclassman had appeared in front of me.
She had the sort of face that somehow made it look like she really liked men.
“Ah. Seo Si-yeon. You haven't folded your blanket? You're awfully free just because it's the weekend.”
“… I'm coming now.”
The most important thing now was to escape this wretched environment.
Evergreen Sky Childcare Center (it had been changed from “orphanage” to “childcare center” because the former sounded bad) was a fairly large facility.
A great deal of money had been invested in it, and it had a long history.
Its sponsors were so generous that it even had enough money to renovate the building a few years ago.
Unfortunately, Evergreen Sky Childcare Center had picked a bad location.
The center was located in the old downtown area of Incheon.
The famous internet smear meme about Incheon: Demon World Incheon.
Contrary to its image, Incheon is actually a fairly livable city. It has almost everything one could want, some reputable universities, and quite a few nice apartments.
It was even close to the airport and Seoul.
Even Busan could be reached in about an hour and a half by plane.
However, some areas were run-down enough to live up to the city's reputation as a demon world.
The area where the childcare center was located was one of them.
There was a hill packed with all kinds of middle and high schools, and it churned out all kinds of people headed for ruin, boys and girls alike.
There was even a delinquent webtoon based on one of the famous high schools there, which really said it all.
It was arguably the worst possible neighborhood for raising children, since even decent kids were liable to go astray if their parents couldn't properly look after them.
It was painfully obvious how children with no parents living in such an area would grow up...
For the record, the blanket just mentioned by the girl two years older than me, whose name I couldn't remember, wasn't mine. It belonged to the children who shared my room.
They were dumping the room-cleaning job on me because I was the youngest in the room.
There was even a middle-school thug in the room, so the situation was hopeless. I couldn't for the life of me understand why I, a second-grader, was sharing a room with a middle schooler.
After a month of living here, I concluded that I couldn't spend the nearly ten years of childhood I had left here.
The neighborhood was bad enough, but the culture and atmosphere of this childcare center were beyond what I, despite having an ordinary adult mind, could endure.
No matter how much of an adult I was, there was no way I could be an expert in the mind games that took place among girls.
If anything, as a man who'd been single since birth, I knew absolutely nothing about that sort of thing.
Seo Si-yeon herself had never been particularly assertive, so the older girls had been using her as they pleased, and that didn't change much after I took over her body.
Honestly, being bossed around by a bunch of elementary-school brats was fucking awful no matter how I looked at it, but as luck would have it, every one of my roommates was older than me and was one of the children the center took special care of.
The reason the center paid special attention to them was that, unlike the others, they had parents.
You might wonder why children with parents were in an orphanage, but cases like this are surprisingly common.
Children who were born to parents who had no money or didn't want them and were then left at an orphanage inevitably received more attentive care.
Because you never knew when their parents might change their minds and come looking for them.
If the treatment they had received at the center became an issue in that process, the director was the one held responsible.
So the center generally went out of its way to accommodate children who had parents.
Even so, the difference in treatment wasn't enormous. Still, they were more well-liked by the center's teachers than Seo Si-yeon, who was a completely parentless orphan.
“To get out of here, I need to succeed.”
Either become extremely famous or become extremely rich.
I had to achieve one or the other to leave.
In the end, there was only one way to achieve that.
I had no way to get my guardian's consent to buy Bitcoin, and I didn't have the money either.
I could study, get a scholarship, and attend a boarding middle school, but honestly, I didn't even think a total moron like me could pull that off.
“Looks like I’ll have to get back into music.”
I didn't attach any great significance to music. Honestly, for me, music had been a means of making money.
There had been a time when I genuinely enjoyed music, but that was already a memory from a distant past.
Still, separate from that, I had my memories.
The knowledge I'd gained from years of working as a top-tier composer, and countless hit songs that had no owners in this world.
If this had been a regression instead of possessing someone, I might have hesitated to use the hit songs from my previous life for ethical reasons, but since things had turned out this way, I didn't need to feel guilty about people who didn't exist in this world.
“Why don’t I make some money first?”