Chapter 7
After the episode aired, the child named Seo Si-yeon went from an ordinary orphan to a nationwide overnight sensation.
Naturally, several online communities sprang up where people could discuss her, and the largest was the Seo Si-yeon Gallery created on a site at the heart of internet culture.
Though it was a small, out-of-the-way gallery that hadn't even been around for a week, quite a lot of people gathered there, and posts came quickly enough that all sorts of topics naturally started circulating.
Title: I saw the gallery star at a PC bang in Juan ㄷㄷㄷ (Proof O)
I just went to my regular PC bang near Juan Station and almost passed out.
There was an elementary school kid fidgeting around in the corner with a headset on, and people were gathered around, so I wondered what was going on—turns out it was the gallery star?
At first I thought she was just some kid who looked like her, but then I heard college students going “Ooh—,” so I peeked over and saw Seo Si-yeon landing a five-man ult with Lux.
Also, she couldn't even properly play for an hour because she was signing autographs and taking pictures, but she did everything with a smile to the end. Is that really her personality?
She said she plays LoL at Grandmaster level too, but whatever, she's seriously adorable.
(Attached photo: a photo of Si-yeon's crookedly written “Take it easy on LoL” autograph)
Comments (209)
-Grandmaster? What kind of tier is that lol
ㄴIt was added recently, yeah.
ㄴPlay some LoL
-Where is that? I'm heading there right now.
-If she's good at games too, isn't this literally her second life? lol
Just as the Seo Si-yeon Gallery was buzzing over the PC bang sighting, an event happened that poured gasoline on the fire.
[Hey, the gallery star is on Haruka's Instagram? What is this?]
[A video comparing the dance Si-yeon performed with the dance Haruka performed back when she was in AKB]
She uploaded this saying the gallery star's dance was cute lol
-?? What, there was an original?
ㄴYeah, apparently she took it from an AKB choreography.
ㄴShe said so in a later interview.
-Wow, how many years ago was that for Haruka? lol
ㄴI looked it up, it was six years ago.
Haruka of Starlight, currently enjoying the peak of her popularity.
She uploaded an Instagram Story comparing Si-yeon's dance with her own from the past.
She has over two million followers.
The followers she amassed during her seven years working in Japan and one year since moving to Korea number far beyond anyone's imagination.
So getting a shout-out from a top-tier idol like this meant…
Naturally, it caused an enormous stir.
An idol fandom made up mostly of people in their teens and twenties, not Singer Star's main viewership.
In their eyes, Seo Si-yeon was a tasty little target.
So it was only natural that Seo Si-yeon's name appeared across various online communities and Twitter's real-time trends within ten minutes of Haruka's Story going up.
[The elementary-school girl who appeared on Starlight Haruka's Story]
-Wait, is this fake?
ㄴI'm tired of you “fake-everything” idiots; whenever anything happens, you cry manipulation.
ㄴYour mom.
ㄴThen does this make any sense? You're not even stupid, yet you fall for it again lol
ㄴI don't know about the other stuff, but there's no way she wrote that song herself, yeah. Anyone who's studied music will agree.
ㄴThen are you saying a producer capable of making songs like that is attached to an orphan girl?? Talk some sense.
-Don't care about the rest, but she is seriously cute.
ㄴThose blue eyes give her a strangely compelling vibe.
-If she's legit, hit the recommend button lol
ㄴMoron
ㄴWow, look at how many downvotes he got after this hit the front page lol. Brutal.
[Anyone see Haruka's Instagram Story that just went up?? It's insane??]
Did you watch the video? The kid dances to a beat from an original song she made herself, even mixing in a little popping, and it absolutely doesn't feel like something a nine-year-old could teach herself.
If Haruka gave her a shout-out, doesn't that say it all?
This girl really feels like a genuine genius, the likes of whom we haven't seen in ages.
-Wow... Look at her dance. They said her looks mixed a cool-type vibe with the feel of a Japanese idol, but she's freaking adorable.
-When she had a guitar strapped to her and sang a ballad, she didn't seem like a kid at all—she looked like an adult. But when she dances, she's just a total baby ㅠㅠㅠ
[Haruka's Story everyone is talking about right now]
(A screenshot of Haruka's Story)
Seriously, this baby is freaking adorable.
Likes (10.9k) Retweets (2.5k)
“Huh? What's going on?”
It was only natural for a question mark to appear above Seo Si-yeon's head when she belatedly discovered what had happened.
Who could have guessed things would turn out like this?
* * *
The vocal exercises that had cut through the damp air of the basement came to an end.
Si-yeon drank some bottled water, her throat feeling parched. Her past life's brain remembered every note perfectly, but her nine-year-old vocal cords still couldn't fully carry out its commands, and the resulting dissatisfaction pricked unpleasantly at her chest.
“For your age, you're remarkably skilled. I can't say how you'll change once your voice changes, but... well, I suppose genius is an apt word.”
Park Han-su said this casually while fiddling with an old guitar pick.
Then he turned on his smartphone and pulled a face, as if he'd just received some unexpected news.
He showed me what he was looking at, and there was an idol's Story posted there.
“Huh? Haruka posted me on her Story?”
Haruka. A top-tier idol who had conquered both Korea and Japan, and the owner of the hottest fandom in South Korea right now.
Park Han-su scrolled past Haruka's glamorous account and the huge like count on the phone's screen, then clicked his tongue with an expression of profound displeasure.
“Looks like even this little brat has fallen for your face.”
“Little brat? This unnie has over two million followers. Compared to her, you...”
He must have been a little stung by my words, because he fell silent for a moment before muttering in a small voice,
“…Three hundred thousand. The official account.”
”Ooh. That's still insanely high.”
The truth was, getting 300,000 Instagram followers while playing in a band in Korea was legitimately insane.
It wasn't an idol band, either, so the achievement he'd built from the ground up was by no means worthless.
It only looked relatively paltry because Haruka was such an extraordinary presence.
She had been a center in AKB, one of Japan's leading idol groups, before entering a Korea-Japan joint audition because she wanted to try becoming a K-pop idol.
And even there, she debuted with the highest score.
On top of that, Starlight, the group she currently belonged to, had the monstrous market weight to sell a million albums in each of Korea and Japan.
”Tsk. At this rate, people will think she was the one who discovered you.”
“Well, no matter how you get there, as long as you get to Seoul.”
“I was the one who recognized you first and put a guitar in your hands.”
“That... is true.”
“In that case, would it be all right if I posted a picture of you during one of your lessons?”
I looked at him with an expression of mild surprise.
Apparently, he wanted to claim finding me as one of his accomplishments.
I'd thought he wasn't the kind of person who cared much about things like this, but honestly, the situation was a little bewildering.
Still, I'd received a considerable favor from him, and I was destined to keep relying on him in the future.
So he could post pictures of me as much as he liked.
“You are definitely going to become something big. Even bigger than me. So I'd like to claim a little credit ahead of time.”
“…You think far too highly of me.”
Even the me from my previous life had clearly been a musician of a lower caliber than Park Han-su was now.
To be honest, I had always thought that building a band with its own world and genre that could succeed in the West and Japan was something that couldn't be done at this point in time.
That was because no such case had existed in my previous life.
But this world had its own irregularities in Park Han-su and Black Canary.
Honestly, I thought this man was more talented than most legendary K-pop producers or idols.
“…I'm grateful you think of me that way. But I'm not really that great.”
“Well, that's how I feel. It's just my personal impression, so don't worry about it and do whatever you want.”
I intended to do that anyway.
I had no desire to spend my life trapped inside the framework of K-pop as I had in my previous life.
Well, none of that could happen until I escaped the orphanage and became independent.
“Come to think of it, couldn't you just adopt me, mister?”
“An unmarried man can't adopt a girl. That's what the law says.”
“Huh? Really?”
“Really.”
What a shame.
Then did I need to find a woman?
I'd thought it over a little, and in the end, to leave the orphanage, I would have to find a guardian or caretaker regardless of how much money I had.
No matter how rich or famous I became, South Korea, a model country, would never allow a child to live alone.
Maybe I had to at least be in middle school?
So figuring out how to find someone willing to become my guardian had been one of my recent concerns.
“If you don't mind, I could introduce you to a decent guy, but...”
“For now, I'll focus on the audition. If I become something here, finding a guardian should be easier.”
There shouldn't be any major problems before the finals.
I had plenty of songs prepared and several strategies, too. The team competition in the middle made me a little nervous, but... I was confident in the individual rounds apart from that.
“The goal for now is Top Three.”
There would be three people standing on the final stage.
My judgment was that, for the sake of buzz and my future career, I had to make it into the final three by any means necessary.
But the process might not be smooth.
Singer Star had aired through its second week. The third week would air next week, bringing the preliminaries to a close.
And the finals would begin the week after that.
The contestants who had passed had already received notice.
They had divided the contestants into groups according to their characteristics and would judge them group by group.
“The Potential Group...”
Based on what I'd watched through Episode 2, there wasn't anyone here I particularly needed to watch out for.
Maybe I'd simply receive overwhelming focus all by myself?
The average age in this group was roughly that of an upper-elementary-school student. In truth, it was difficult for anyone this age to produce music properly.
The only other contestant who looked likely to advance far, besides me, was one high school girls' band.
If I hadn't been here, I suspected that team might have generated quite a bit of buzz. They were better live than I'd expected.
Singer Star 5 was currently the most talked-about program in Korea.
Thanks to the public's tastes not yet having completely fragmented, and to the pandemic not having arrived in this world yet, even a mainstream-media production like Singer Star had garnered a fair amount of buzz.
And among all of them, I was the biggest source of buzz right now.
My third preliminary performance had been edited and uploaded to the network's channel, where it had racked up hundreds of thousands of views, and clips were circulating across various communities and social media calling me a genius girl.
But that didn't mean I possessed unrivaled skill.
“And there was one monster, too, wasn't there? We should be careful around him. I don't know about the rest, but his vocals are on another level.”
“I know.”
The stage of a tall college student in his late twenties surfaced in my mind.
Vocals that could rival those of top singers.
A handsome face capable of leading an army of middle-aged women.
And the oddly nerdy vibe he gave off would appeal to young women as well.
And a title adults would go crazy for: an engineering student at a prestigious university.
To the public and industry insiders, my existence would have the stronger impact.
An elementary-school kid writing and composing her own songs and performing onstage, too?
Honestly, that alone was incredible.
There was no comparable precedent, not only in Korea but anywhere overseas, either.
But this program was, strictly speaking, an audition show where contestants were selected through votes.
As countless examples had proven, on stages like this, people who could win the picks of dedicated fans had an advantage over those who could win the general public's vote.
On top of that, having a female-heavy fandom—such as the high-voting auntie demographic and the women-dominated fandoms on Twitter—became an even greater advantage the higher one climbed.
In that respect, this person was unquestionably in a more advantageous position than me, at least on this program.
“Why hadn't someone like him appeared until now?”
He was that much of a monster that I could actually complain about it.