Chapter 30
[Singerstar 5 TOP 8 Group Matchups]
Lee Hye-na VS Seo Si-yeon
Choi Seong VS Baek Yu-yeon
So Yu-jin VS Han Seong-sik
Blooming VS Joo Jin-woo
All winners advance, and two of the losers will be saved and move on to TOP 6.
With 75% viewer votes and 25% judges’ scores, everyone, vote your hearts out.
-More info, please
-The final group is gonna be fucking brutal lol
-Honestly, forget all the others; the last group looks fucking fun.
-What are we gonna do about our Hye-na… How did she even make it this far?
ㄴ Even so, there’s a loser revival, so we should try to rack up as many votes as possible.
ㄴ I’m scared she’ll go full menhera if she gets eliminated here too.
-I’m scared Singerstar might be rigged like Produce these days…
ㄴ They’re not some tiny-ass agency. Surely they wouldn’t do that?
ㄴ Music.com got bribed because it was a tiny agency; there’s no way that would happen here.
ㄴ Do you take a terrestrial network for a fucking joke?
TOP 8 and TOP 6 were being decided through one-on-one battles.
As soon as the matchups were revealed, posts about Singerstar began appearing in the trending threads of various online communities.
With ratings having now surpassed 30 percent, no matter how much attention was being drawn to the Produce rigging controversy, online communities were plastered with Singerstar-related posts whenever the show aired.
As expected, the matchup attracting the most attention was Blooming versus Joo Jin-woo.
Both were considered contenders for the championship, and since they were also highly regarded for their musical ability, people expected fierce, high-level stages.
However, the match getting the most mentions on Twitter and various entertainment communities was the showdown between Lee Hye-na and Seo Si-yeon.
-Our poor Hye-na, what are we gonna do?ㅠㅠ
-She got eliminated because of rigging, and now she’s going to get eliminated by a natural disaster… This is so fucking demoralizing.
@She hasn’t been eliminated yet, dumbass.
@People like you are the real problem, saying demoralizing shit before she’s even tried. Tsk.
-Hye-na, let’s hang in there! Unni will gather every vote from my family and give them to you.
-Realistically, I think we should aim for loser revival. But to do that, we need as many votes as possible.
@I think we need to scrape together every vote from our mutuals and our families.
Lee Hye-na’s fandom was unexpectedly large and solid.
Even during last year’s Produce, she had a support base sturdy enough to rank among the top three.
It had seemed to scatter for a while after she failed to debut, but things had taken an odd turn.
“So the fans rallied again once the Produce rigging was basically confirmed as fact, huh.”
If anything, adding the narrative that she was a victim had made their bond even stronger.
And when she, now an adult, threw her hat back into the audition ring, that solidarity soared to a level no other contestant could even hope to match.
Of course, by now, her overall fanbase was still small compared to mine and Joo Jin-woo’s.
“If Lee Hye-na can regain her old form, she’s definitely not someone we can take lightly.”
She possessed clearly superior skill and popularity to Im Ji-hye, whom I had defeated before.
I wasn’t in a position to let arrogance make me careless, either.
“Damn it. Why did I encourage her for no reason?”
A faint regret slipped from my lips.
If I’d just left her alone back then, I might have been able to advance much more easily.
After being matched against me, Lee Hye-na was visibly burning with motivation.
Her eyes, which had once lacked focus, now sparkled with life, and her expression radiated grim determination.
It was as if I’d tugged on the whiskers of a dying lion.
A chill of unease brushed across my back.
For some reason, I had a feeling she was about to surpass her own legendary stage once again.
* * *
Starting with this round, it was a completely free round.
We could choose whatever song we wanted and even freely receive help from the mentors whenever they came to us.
“I’d like your help choosing a song.”
No matter what anyone said, the judges of Singerstar 5 stood at the pinnacle of the industry.
I decided to wring as much as possible out of people who had accomplished far more than I had in my previous life.
‘It would even be good to get close to one of them for my future career.’
It was possible I might end up at one of the three judges’ companies. I had no plans to do so for now, but an offer I couldn’t refuse might come along once the time came.
The songs I had shortlisted for this round numbered three.
The first was a commercial high-teen-style pop ballad built almost entirely on “money chords” (it had topped the monthly chart in my previous life).
The second was a newtro-style ballad made by remaking a song from the 1990s (this one had reached third place on the annual chart).
The third was a J-pop-flavored band song. I hadn’t written it, but I had participated in the arrangement, so I decided to count it as my song and bring it out.
Yoo Sang-hyun listened intently to the three songs, each well over three minutes long, with his eyes closed.
There was no particular reason I had asked Yoo Sang-hyun to do this; he simply happened to visit the dorm the day after I chose the three song samples.
‘The truth was, it didn’t matter much which of the three I chose.’
That was because I was confident in the quality of all three songs. The third was more advantageous for a competition, but I was confident I could put on a sufficiently high-quality stage with either of the other two.
‘I’m not the same person I was in the past anymore.’
Right after I was possessed, and even just before Singerstar, I had clearly been a mediocre singer. My vocalization had been a mess, and my range hadn’t been established, so I didn’t even know how high or low my own notes went.
But after going through multiple stages and receiving instruction from masters, my experience gauge had begun filling up at an astonishing rate.
‘It was like catching a high-level Pokémon at a low level.’
Just as a character gained ten levels from a single battle in a game, my singing ability had doubled with every stage.
The countless people I had defeated and surpassed so far were all skilled enough to brag about being good singers wherever they went.
Since I was defeating such people with techniques I had carried over from my previous life, there was no way I wouldn’t be gaining experience.
After listening intently to the song for more than three minutes, Yoo Sang-hyun put his earphones in again and began listening to it repeatedly.
A little while later, he spoke in a confident tone.
“Ms. Si-yeon, you’ve already thought about which of these songs you’ll use for the competition, haven’t you?”
“…No. I’m not sure.”
“I can definitely feel that one song is standing out from the rest. Do you know which one it is?”
I looked at Yoo Sang-hyun with confused eyes.
Honestly, all three were excellent songs. None was objectively better or worse; all had achieved good results and had been made with care.
That was why I couldn’t tell which song Yoo Sang-hyun felt stood out so much.
There was one that had achieved the best results, at least…
“Hoho. Shall we say our answers at the same time when I count to three?”
“Huh?”
“I’m curious whether Ms. Si-yeon and I are thinking of the same one.”
Ignoring my flustered expression, Yoo Sang-hyun called out, “One, two, three.”
I had no choice but to shout out the name of the song that had achieved the best results of the three.
“Your Name Is Pureum!”
“Starry Night.”
As expected, Yoo Sang-hyun and I had chosen differently.
For several seconds, the two of us could do nothing but stare at each other awkwardly in silence.
* * *
‘Your Name Is Pureum.’
I had written this song when I spent about a year playing in an indie band on the indie scene, before I took an executive position at a mid-sized entertainment company and before I joined a major entertainment company.
Naturally, since we were an indie band, our achievements were pitiful, and we disbanded before long.
The childhood friend who had been our vocalist inherited her father’s business and became a working adult, while my abilities were recognized and I joined a major entertainment company.
In the end, we had both succeeded, so it wasn’t a bad outcome. But later, when I held the title of chief producer, I brought this song back out into the world.
‘Oppa! I’m telling you, this is insanely good! It’s guaranteed to succeed. So pleeease, at least put it on the album as a B-side!’
One of the idols at the agency happened to hear the song in my cloud and stubbornly insisted that they absolutely wanted to perform it, so I released it as a B-side…
‘It topped the annual chart. It even ranked fifteenth on Billboard Japan’s annual chart.’
The truth was, it made no sense.
An unknown band’s remake song topping the charts at number one.
But it had happened in reality, and thanks to that, the group had risen decisively into the ranks of top-tier idols.
‘This guy’s eye for talent is really something…’
Thinking that, I looked at Yoo Sang-hyun skeptically.
Even if J-rock-based band songs weren’t familiar in Korea yet, shouldn’t a producer of Yoo Sang-hyun’s caliber have recognized it…?
In any case, the song for this competition was decided to be ‘Starry Night.’
It was a remake of a fairly old song.
Like the anime OST I had sung in the previous round, it had taken only the melody and completely turned everything else upside down, to the point that the original was unrecognizable, yet Yoo Sang-hyun seemed to have sensed a peculiar nostalgia for the past in it.
‘Even if the song itself doesn’t exist in this world, there are plenty of songs with a similar feel.’
Well, I had no particular complaints about singing this one either.
It was another song I cherished, and besides, now that I thought about it, I didn’t really want to use the song that had taken me to the peak of my career here.
‘This time, even if I lose, I can still advance through the revival round.’
Even so, I had absolutely no thought of losing to Lee Hye-na.
It might have been a little arrogant, but from the outset, I thought there was no way I could lose.
However, watching Lee Hye-na practice changed my mind somewhat.
“This… is her finishing move.”
Because she had brought out the strongest weapon she could use.