Chapter 31
Do you know when people become most desperate?
Of course, it’s when they’re driven to a dead end—in other words, to the edge of a cliff.
That was exactly how I’d been at the beginning of Singerstar.
No matter how I looked at it, I had no confidence I could spend my school years at the orphanage, and it wasn’t as if I’d managed to find a decent agency through submissions.
Since Singerstar was effectively my only way out, I had no choice but to throw myself into this audition.
What about Lee Hye-na?
Is she being driven to the edge of a cliff?
I can answer that confidently. The answer is no.
Even if Hye-na gets eliminated here, she has enough recognition and fandom to debut somehow.
She could even make a decent living as a solo artist.
And yet Hye-na is desperate now.
So desperate that she chose “Fall for Me,” the song that took her to the peak of her career,
as her competition song for this round once again.
She knows better than anyone that if she puts on a stage even slightly below par, the repercussions will be enormous.
Hye-na has many highly loyal fans now, but in exchange, she also has plenty of antis.
At the center of those antis are the fandoms of the three people who debuted through rigging on Produce.
Naturally, since Starlight was currently enjoying its greatest popularity, their fandoms were enormous.
With criminal complaints already filed and the police investigation underway, that enormous fandom had nowhere to vent its mounting fury—and the person it happened to have in its sights was Lee Hye-na, who was appearing on Singerstar.
Even in the last round, when she’d merely put on a mediocre stage, she’d been cursed out so badly that mocking tweets were retweeted tens of thousands of times. What if she ruined her stage while performing “Fall for Me”?
‘It’s horrifying just imagining what might happen.’
But that was precisely why I liked Hye-na.
Taking a risk by putting on a stage like that meant she had the courage and resolve to match it.
Regardless of this round’s result, I had a strong feeling Hye-na would succeed eventually.
‘Two weeks to prepare. Damn, that’s long.’
Truthfully, there wasn’t much for me to prepare for this stage.
It wasn’t a particularly difficult song, so unlike last round, I didn’t need to prepare anything separately; I could just sing it as I usually did.
It would have been a difficult song for the Seo Si-yeon of the past, but for me now, its difficulty was clearly low.
“Still, I should practice at least enough to get some screen time... When Grandpa Yoo Sang-hyun comes by, I should ask him to watch me.”
“Si-yeon. If you have nothing to do, couldn’t you help us...?”
“Huh?”
When I turned around, Yoo Seol-ha was standing there, looking troubled and darting her eyes around.
Only then did I remember the promise we’d made last time.
The promise Yoo Seol-ha had wheedled out of me, almost by force, in exchange for taking away that fan-shaped instrument.
“Oh, right. I promised to give you a song, didn’t I?”
* * *
“W-we can’t get eliminated here...!”
“Y-yeah.”
Blooming had, of all people, been matched against Joo Jin-woo this round.
It was a matchup so difficult to predict that they’d both thought they were doomed the moment the draw was made—and one of the worst possible matchups they could have gotten.
Which meant Blooming and Joo Jin-woo would have to prepare their stages thoroughly and put on the best performances possible.
‘But their condition is a complete mess.’
The Blooming members seemed somewhat mentally shaken by the unexpected appearance of a formidable opponent.
Maybe it was because they were young. They seemed to have forgotten that if they prepared calmly, it was a challenge they could take on—and that even if they lost, they had a good chance of surviving through loser revival.
That was why I calmly explained those facts to Blooming, and their response was...
“We... know that too.”
“Then why are you overreacting so much?”
“Because they said they’d send all of us on a trip to Hawaii after the audition if we won this round! We were determined to win... but then we got this matchup.”
“You filthy rich bourgeoisie.”
All right, let’s take another look at the Blooming members’ backgrounds before we move on.
They had met through English-immersion kindergartens as children and had spent their entire lives together in Gangnam’s elementary, middle, and high schools.
Ah, Park Hee-su went to an arts high school, so they did drift apart a little in high school.
In any case, the most notable example was Yoo Seol-ha.
Among them, she was the ultimate trust-fund heiress: the daughter of a de facto conglomerate-level mid-sized company with a valuation of one hundred trillion won.
It wasn’t a chaebol family but a single company, so people generally viewed it as a mid-sized enterprise, but...
‘How is that a mid-sized company? It’s a conglomerate.’
For reference, everyone except Jo Na-eun’s parents was famous enough to have an individual page on the wiki.
‘Does that even make sense?’
The lineup was all the more remarkable for the fact that Yoo Seol-ha had drawn the daughters of people like this into the tawdry world of music.
In any case, that made it even harder to understand.
Was going to Hawaii really that important to them?
Surely, for people like them, overseas travel was something they could do anytime—about as accessible as going from Incheon to Seoul.
“Our parents are so strict... Other than that group trip to Japan when we were all in middle school, none of us has ever been abroad...”
“Oh.”
If that was the case, I could almost understand... Like hell I could.
Was that really something to say in front of an orphan like me?
“Ahaha... So, could you help us?”
“Well, a promise is a promise. I’ll help you.”
“Hooray!! Pick out one more song like Glassy Sky!”
“That... might be a little difficult.”
Glassy Sky was still number one on every chart.
It showed no sign of coming down, reigning as the dictator of the charts. My “Pray For” and the ballad Joo Jin-woo had sung last round were the only songs that might have challenged it, but they had stalled at number two and number three, respectively.
‘It was fascinating that my most successful song was one I’d made in this life, not my previous one.’
Glassy Sky hadn’t even been written with commercial appeal in mind.
Even so, it had achieved this enormous success.
‘Of course, it’ll drop once Starlight makes its comeback next month.’
As a project group, there was no way we could beat those monsters, who made regular comebacks with full albums every six months.
“Would you like to choose one yourself?”
“Huh? C-can I?”
“Why not? Honestly, rather than having me choose everything for you, shouldn’t you find a song that fits your own voice best?”
I couldn’t take charge of producing everything for them forever. It was time for Blooming to develop the discernment to choose songs that suited their own voices.
With that educational(?) intention in mind, I dashed to my room, fetched my laptop, and came trotting back.
“The sound quality is a little rough, so bear with it. Choose only from the completed guide tracks. Even I don’t have time to rearrange something new or work on an unfinished song right now.”
“Even this is more than enough! Hehe, thanks to our adorable Si-yeon, your unni is living in luxury.”
“That is true.”
“Aren’t you basically our band’s producer?”
It wasn’t wrong. They had absolutely no ability to write their own songs in the first place, so they desperately needed an outside producer’s touch—and so far, I’d effectively monopolized that role.
‘Honestly, I’m enjoying this situation quite a bit, too.’
The more I dug into Blooming, the more they seemed like a mine of limitless potential.
Watching these rough gems being polished from the closest seat in the house was surprisingly entertaining in its own way.
I plugged my treasure-trove of a USB drive, with a dangling pink character, into the laptop.
“Huh? You changed your USB? It’s cute!”
“I was running out of space as the number of songs grew. I asked someone I know to get me a new one.”
I’d asked Park Han-su, and he’d come back with a USB emblazoned with some gaudy children’s character. I didn’t exactly love it, but I was in no position to complain about a gift, so I decided to use it.
‘That man knew perfectly well this wasn’t my taste and picked it on purpose. He’s really getting on my nerves.’
I decided to let it go since he’d helped me a lot, but I couldn’t help feeling a little sore about it.
“Hehe, this is kind of childish. Your tastes and behavior always made you seem like a little adult.”
“Oh, is that so?”
Well, there was nothing bad about being seen that way.
The Blooming members began monitoring the tracks on the hard drive one by one, searching for one that perfectly suited Yoo Seol-ha’s tone.
“Oh? This one’s pretty good.”
“Me too. I like the feel of this one.”
“But Seol-ha, can you sing this?”
“Come on, surely I can manage this much somehow?”
Watching Yoo Seol-ha smile confidently, I narrowed my eyes in disbelief.
The song she’d chosen reached notes a full two keys higher than the upper limit of Yoo Seol-ha’s range as I knew it.
On top of that, it demanded extremely difficult control, shifting back and forth between chest voice and falsetto.
The song itself was excellent, but its punishingly high register had made it an unfortunate track that couldn’t stay near the top of the charts for long even in my previous life.
It was a song I personally liked, which was why I’d restored it, but of all the songs she could have chosen, she’d picked that one. In the end, I cut into the members’ conversation.
“Sorry, but I think that’ll be hard for you to sing. The register is extremely high.”
“I-is that so?”
“Yes. If you sing the entire song perfectly in one go without practicing, I’ll grant you one wish. That’s how difficult it is.”
“Really?”
Yoo Seol-ha’s eyes sparkled in an instant.
Apparently, she’d fixated on the word “wish” rather than the part where I’d said it was difficult.
But no matter how I looked at it, there was no way Yoo Seol-ha could handle that song with her current abilities.
“Yes, really. You absolutely won’t hit those notes.”
“Then if I pull it off right now, how about all of us start calling you ‘Unni’?”
The moment I heard that proposal, my brow furrowed deeply.
Wasn’t that wish a little too vicious?