Chapter 2
About a week.
It took me that long to restore three songs I'd composed in my previous life.
During that time, I went to the PC bang every day, to the point that even the owner recognized my face.
“Huh. What's this? I have quite a lot of time left.”
I always charged just one thousand won and left promptly when my time ran out.
It wasn't because I had a curfew or anything like that.
There were no rules to speak of at Evergreen Sky Childcare Center, where even the teachers had given up trying to control the kids. It was easy to tell from the fact that nothing much happened even when the middle and high schoolers were caught smoking.
I simply had no money right now. In fact, even the one thousand won I spent each day came from the allowance Seo Si-yeon had diligently saved before I possessed her.
Today, too, I charged one hour for one thousand won, but for some reason, a whopping ten hours had been added!
I hopped down from my chair and headed for the counter with quick little steps.
“Boss, you charged me the wrong amount of time.”
“Oh. I added that for you. So you'll keep coming here. I'll add as much time as you want, so come by often, kid!”
The owner, a middle-aged-looking man, winked at me as he said this.
I had no interest in watching a middle-aged man wink, but if he was willing to show me this much kindness, I could put up with it.
However, there was no way the owner would have shown me such kindness for no reason.
I was well aware that my appearance was unusual.
In other words, I was absurdly cute.
I figured customers had often asked whether I was coming in that day, and the owner was trying to make me a regular so he could draw them in.
To think the first time in my life I benefited from my looks was at a PC bang... What a miserable fate. Still, it wasn't bad.
Computers were essential these days, no matter what you did. Especially for a kid like me without even a smartphone, a computer was the only way to access the internet.
The high schoolers playing League had monopolized the computers at the childcare center, so I had no choice but to come to the PC bang if I wanted to use one.
Since the PC bang fees, which had already been a burden, were taken care of, I could use this money for something else.
For example, I could rent a cheap recording studio.
“I want to buy a proper MIDI program, too...”
Naturally, the composing program I was using now was free.
It was just as lacking in performance, and it didn't even have many virtual instruments.
In my previous life, I had made songs using programs that cost well over a million won and bought all sorts of real instruments, so I couldn't help disliking this bargain-bin program.
“Once I start making money, I can solve this problem, too.”
In the end, everything came down to money.
No matter what you did, you needed money for it to work.
That was why there was less a penniless orphan could do than you'd think.
I cleared my mind of the random thoughts drifting through it and deftly plugged the USB into the computer tower.
The free program I was using had no cloud-saving function, so I had to save each song separately to the hard drive after making it.
It contained the fruits of my week's efforts.
Of course, the instruments were crude, and there were plenty of gaps in the melodies. Even so, these three songs had such outstanding melodies and exceptional emotional depth that I was confident they were the best hits I'd ever made.
Any expert would surely be able to discover their true value beneath the shoddy equipment.
After looking into things, I sent emails to small and midsized entertainment agencies with fairly solid foundations. There was no way I could break into a major agency with a submission like this anyway.
To be honest, I couldn't be sure they would even check email submissions.
They might leave them sitting in their inboxes without even opening them.
But what else could I do when this was my only method?
And even if this method didn't work, I had a Plan B.
It would put my face out there a little, but it was clearly better than living in this goddamned environment until I became an adult.
“Hmm. Just in case, should I submit to a few even smaller places?”
It wasn't as though the songs would wear out just because I sent them around more, so it should be fine, right?
With that thought, I typed out a few more emails and clicked Send.
That finished everything I had to do today!
I'd finished all my work only twenty minutes after coming in.
If so, I should return to the childcare center now, but...
The owner's request from earlier for me to come by often came to mind.
Besides, wouldn't it be a little wrong to gulp down ten hours of time and leave after only twenty minutes?
I decided to stay a little longer, do something else, and leave afterward.
It absolutely wasn't because I didn't want to go back into the childcare center.
I chose to watch YouTube.
It was a review session where I picked some random idol, watched their fancam, and judged them in my head. There, I opened Notepad and began writing down my evaluations of the idols in this world.
This world still had no overwhelmingly dominant Korean idol who ruled the world like the ones in my previous life.
So I had no guarantee that a K-pop boom would take place like it had in my previous life.
Recently, I had begun to feel a sudden anxiety: What if things followed a different course from my previous life, rendering all my knowledge of future music useless?
That was why I'd started looking for a group capable of globalizing K-pop in this parallel world, to ease that anxiety, but...
“Of course there isn't one.”
There was no way a crazy group that won Grammys with K-pop would appear so easily.
Before long, I stopped watching idol fancams and logged into League out of habit.
“Damn. Elementary school kids can't even make accounts.”
Apparently, creating an account required a guardian's consent, so it was easier to consider it impossible. After all, it would be awkward to go to the director and ask for help making a League account.
By then, an alert popped up saying I'd spent roughly two hours.
I gave the owner a polite waist bow and left the PC bang.
The reason I was cosplaying as a well-mannered child was that adults instinctively liked polite little kids.
And when the kid in question was also cute, that went without saying.
Since I'd been born pretty, I intended to get better at taking advantage of it.
Of course, that didn't mean I planned to throw myself into some man's arms and act coy.
I knew intellectually that my appearance could bring me enormous benefits, but my instincts strongly rejected the idea.
Judging by that, romance seemed to be out of the question in this life too.
I had absolutely no intention of dating a man, and I wasn't particularly drawn to dating women either.
Unless I caught an alien and married it, I was already as good as confirmed to be a lifelong single.
“I guess I'll just say I'm married to music.”
I didn't actually like music that much, but it seemed like a decent excuse.
About a week passed after that.
I went to the PC bang every day.
In the course of going there, I confirmed that my appearance definitely attracted people's attention.
My features were already quite cute, and the unusual color of my irises seemed to draw even more attention.
I suspected that the reason Seo Si-yeon had been such a friendless loser might have been the color of those eyes.
Children instinctively reject anything different from themselves.
Especially at the PC bang, there were a great many people of all ages and genders sneaking glances at me.
There was a couple who bought me snacks, saying I was cute, and a crazy middle-aged man who approached me with chocolate, saying he wanted to get close to me.
The owner banned that man outright, and he disappeared from the PC bang.
Oh, of course I ate the chocolate he'd brought. It was delicious, probably because it was expensive.
In a few years, he'd be sent to a detention cell and banned from the real world, rather than merely being banned from the PC bang, but civic awareness hadn't advanced that far yet.
After that incident, I felt that I needed to make a lot of money quickly, if only for my own safety.
Since I'd been born a physically weak little girl, having money would make it easier to protect myself.
“Actually, that's not what's important.”
What mattered now was my abysmal submission success rate.
Only one place had sent a reply.
Even that one had sent a polite rejection.
I wondered if they hadn't read the emails at all, but apparently that wasn't the case, since more than half of them showed as having been opened.
“This can't be right...”
The songs might certainly sound crude or messy to people listening to them now.
That was because they were songs in a style that would become popular in the future, and I'd used cheap electronic instruments as well.
But the melodies and beats within them were all intensely addictive, to the point that each had reached number one on the charts.
One of them had even remained near the top of the Billboard charts for a long time.
I felt despair and helplessness at their appalling lack of discernment.
As I said before, I had a Plan B.
However, this Plan B was a highly precarious plan. For one thing, I couldn't even be sure I could get it started.
“Hmm... Season 5.”
A large-scale music audition open to anyone.
The judges were the heads of the Big Three, and it aired on a terrestrial network.
In fact, this was around when auditions covering music in general were beginning to fade, while idol and rapper auditions were becoming mainstream.
A similar trend was unfolding in this world as well.
If some lunatic hadn't appeared on Season 4 and devoured the entire music chart, that trend would have reached its endpoint.
The current charts were plastered with songs by the winner of Season 4.
They had already swept up every award there was, and the craze showed no sign of dying down all year.
This was definitely different from my previous life.
Normally, programs like this would all have ended or been buried beneath public indifference, but Singer Star Season 5 was now an audition show receiving the expectations and attention of the entire nation.
“I guess I have no choice but to go on this.”
If I couldn't succeed as a composer right away, I'd make a name for myself first as a genius elementary school student.
That was the best choice available to me right now.