Chapter 124
The first video Jeonghwa saw, guided by a mysterious algorithm whose principles she could never understand, was a short video of a street-busking performance.
- Making a pilgrimage to this holy site.
- ㅠㅠㅠ Suyeon, ㅠㅠㅠㅠ So you had days like this too ㅠㅠㅠㅠ
- You’re so good at guitar.
- A talented young person.
- The pride. of Korean. music, is.
There wasn’t much to it. It was simply a high school girl and two men singing old rock. All she could think was that they were pretty good for buskers, nothing more.
The second video came up when she searched for ‘Seo Myeongjeon Memorial Concert Ha Suyeon.’ It showed Ha Suyeon singing Eric Clapton’s “Tearing Us Apart.”
“She’s good.”
Unlike the first one, this video was quite worth watching. It was a rhythmic interpretation of a classic song—not merely following the original vaguely, but creating something that felt like more than the original.
The solo section in particular was remarkably lively, even to Jeonghwa. It went beyond the vague categories of ‘playing cool,’ ‘playing well,’ or ‘playing fast’—it was a solo that made the listener’s mood itself brighter. It was enough to make her wonder how it would have sounded if she had gone to the venue and heard it in person instead of listening to a phone recording.
“But there are plenty of people at this level in the world.”
But Jeonghwa shook her head and erased the thought. An inexplicable stubbornness had risen within her—a strange feeling that she didn’t want to acknowledge this girl.
With that vague feeling, Jeonghwa continued exploring Suyeon’s videos. The third was titled ‘By Taylored: Group Sound.’ It showed Group Sound performing at the By Taylored Festival. The fourth was ‘Group Sound EP,’ featuring songs Group Sound had released, such as [Beyond That Street] and [Ashen Days].
The more videos she watched, the more Jeonghwa could only think that this was absurd.
“You can make a grenade out of a pinecone?”
How was this possible? How could this be the skill of someone who hadn’t even been learning guitar for two years? Every single note produced by Suyeon’s hands had a purpose. Not one was wasted, and not one was lacking… It was a performance that controlled every note according to her own intentions.
This was impossible. That was the thought Jeonghwa had unconsciously arrived at. How could something like this be possible?
This was a fraud.
Even Picasso, who would be considered one of the greatest geniuses in art history, devoted himself to endless practice and effort from the time he was able to hold a brush. Could anything really be achieved without effort?
Carrying that inexplicable hostility toward Suyeon, she continued digging through the internet. There was no way she could have achieved that level in less than two years…
But she couldn’t find any evidence of that.
Instead, Jeonghwa found another video. It had an inflammatory title like ‘Controversy Over Ha Suyeon’s School-Violence Allegations?!’ The girl had apparently bullied other students and extorted money from them in the past, and so on.
“What?”
For a moment, Jeonghwa simultaneously thought, ‘Of course,’ and, ‘There’s no way.’ The ideas that ‘A fraud like her would have bullied people too’ and ‘There’s no way someone with such genius-level talent could do that…’ collided in her mind. But school violence? Was that what Jiyeon had meant by ‘school violence’ back then?
“No, but then she wouldn’t have been able to appear on television in the first place. What happened?”
Exactly. How could a girl who had committed such a serious offense, with such clear evidence left behind, appear on a major network program like ‘Kim Jiyeon’s Music Letter’ only a few months later?
Her question was answered when she watched the next video. It had a title like ‘Who Is the Hot-Topic Guitarist Ha Suyeon?’ It covered her past, the accident she had suffered, and what she had done afterward.
[If we roughly piece together the story revealed so far, it seems that Teacher Seo Myeongjeon took Ha Suyeon on as a student because he had a vague idea that he was going to die. He couldn’t tolerate such genius talent being used for school violence and delinquent thuggery.]
… Even the story between her ‘master,’ ‘Seo Myeongjeon,’ and Ha Suyeon. Fascinated by the story, Jeonghwa read everything related to it that she could find. And when she came to her senses, the sun was already sinking toward the horizon. She had definitely sat down at the computer in the morning. How had so much time passed?
“I’ll just watch the last video, then I should eat…”
Muttering that, she played the final video. [Invasion 2024 Finals: Group Sound - Gwao (過誤)]. And as she listened to the song, tears streamed down her face—tears of repentance for having been blinded by dazzling talent, and tears shed because of the story between teacher and student that made it impossible not to cry.
Yet Jeonghwa did not entrust the session to Suyeon. Even after shedding tears of repentance, a thought still remained in her heart: ‘She doesn’t seem quite good enough for that…’
But Jeonghwa should have known why one must never look at a sentence like, ‘From now on, you’ll become conscious of breathing through your nose.’ Whether the response was negative or positive, consciousness itself provoked a reaction.
“She doesn’t seem good enough to call in for a session…”
At the filming site, that was what she thought. She was so lost in her thoughts that she didn’t even notice the staff calling her.
“She doesn’t seem good enough to call in for a session… Or is she?”
At the recording studio, that was what she thought. Her dark circles had grown so pronounced that her manager began worrying something was wrong.
“A session… No, I don’t think so.”
Before bed at home, that was what she thought. She tossed and turned in bed for three hours without falling asleep, thinking about it. After enduring that painful stretch of time, Jeonghwa reached this conclusion:
“She was good enough for a session…!”
Cursing the hours she had wasted on meaningless worries, she called Cheolyeon and immediately got Suyeon’s number. Then she called right away and received her answer.
“Yes? About then? I’m sorry, but my session schedule is completely full lately, so I don’t think I can.”
“…Yes? What kind of…”
“I have to study and go to school, so I don’t have many days when I can take on sessions li— I mean, I can’t.”
* * *
[This is singer Jeonghyeon, whom you contacted before. I know you told me your schedule was full when I called previously, but I’m contacting you again because I really want to work with you. Our side is free anytime, and we can accommodate you as much as possible. Please contact us whenever you can…]
An endless stream of text messages. Seeing one so long that it had arrived as an MMS, Myeongjeon found it a little absurd.
“When you say Jeonghyeon…”
Was she the girl he had seen on ‘Kim Jiyeon’s Music Letter’? Her real name was Kim Jeonghwa. She was a female singer whose name he had already heard back when he was Seo Myeongjeon, and who now had quite a few years under her belt and a fair number of hit songs.
But why was she acting like this? Was there any reason to write dozens of lines of text and politely bow her head to Ha Suyeon, who was several decades younger than her?
He shrugged it off and typed [I’ll reply if I have an opening in my schedule.], then changed it to [I’ll get back to you if I have an opening in my schedule.]. He had quite a lot of work these days, so there was no need to cling to a job like that.
“More importantly, should we find an editor or something too? This is killing me.”
Myeongjeon thought that as he somehow wrestled with Premiere. He was retouching the photos he had taken on his trip to Japan and editing the videos. He had bought books and watched dozens more lectures, but video editing was still far too difficult for him.
“Maybe I should just get Iseo to do it. She seems like she’d be good at it.”
He had no basis for the thought. She was MZ, wasn’t she? If it involved a computer, she would probably be better at it than Myeongjeon, no matter what it was. He overlooked the fact that Ha Suyeon was also MZ, and that Myeongjeon himself had been living as an MZ for over a year.
“Yeah. It’s me.”
[“Who is this?”]
“Your name shows up right there. Anyway, what are you doing these days? You haven’t been going out every day instead of practicing, have you? Even if I tell you to rest, you still need to practice.”
[“But you told me to rest…”]
This was their first call since he had declared a break for the band. Myeongjeon listened to Iseo rattle off an update he wasn’t particularly curious about, then brought up what he actually wanted to say.
“Do you know how to edit videos?”
[“Of course. Why?”]
“I’m planning to upload videos for our band’s YouTube channel and my own YouTube channel, but I need someone to edit them. I was going to tell you to do it if you were sitting around.”
[“I’m not sitting around. I’m promoting our band too.”]
“What the hell are you talking about out of nowhere?”
[“No, I’m serious.”]
A KakaoTalk message flew in a moment later. When he checked it on his computer, it turned out to be a TikTok video. It was a short-form video of Iseo cosplaying various anime characters and playing short arrangements of bass riffs from anime songs.
[“The views are totally insane, I’m telling you. Tens of thousands is the baseline. Even if I don’t get paid much, whenever people ask in the replies, ‘Who’s that unni?’ I answer, ‘Group Sound,’ you know? I’m a complete promotional machine.”]
“Very MZ of you.”
[“Aren’t you MZ too? And you know what? The term MZ is only used by old people.”]
These days, he suspected she knew exactly what she was doing and was deliberately attacking him, so Myeongjeon soothed the sting of his wounded pride. In any case, Iseo ended the call by saying she didn’t have time because she was busy too.
“I’ll have to get someone to do it…”
And it would be nice if that person could also serve as a manager of sorts. Thinking that, Myeongjeon grabbed the mouse again. For now, it seemed he would have to do all the editing himself.
* * *
“Holy crap.”
Ayoon blurted that out while absentmindedly looking at her phone. She had spotted some unusually rare YouTube notifications: one from Ha Suyeon’s personal YouTube channel, [White Room], and another from Group Sound’s official channel.
[Hello.
Sorry we haven’t given you any news separately since the audition. After performing once, we haven’t posted anything on Twitter or YouTube, so I imagine many of you have been curious about how we’re doing.
To cut to the chase, we’ve been traveling. We went to Japan, and it was really hot. It made me decide never to visit Japan in the summer again.
The video we’ve uploaded is an edit of short videos and photos we took at the time, along with vlog footage. We hope you enjoy watching it.
Thank you.]
It was obvious that the video had been uploaded straight after encoding. Ignoring the countless moments when the image quality broke up, she read the video description. It looked exactly like something Suyeon had written.
“Why is this so cute?”
“What’s cute?”
Her friend approached Ayoon as she muttered that. It was the friend who had become a Group Sound fan not long ago. When Ayoon showed her the description, the friend muttered, “Holy fucking shit. It’s so fucking cute I almost punched through a wall.”
“How can this even happen? She’s a high schooler, but she goes around saying things like ‘-ieyo’ and ‘-seumnida.’ She seriously feels like a character from a manga or web novel.”
“Exactly.”
The girls chattered away like that. After seeing her friend off to the bathroom, Ayoon logged into the fan café to check the reactions. She wanted to find someone with the same impression and make a fuss big enough to shake the earth.
But the post that greeted her was a suspicious-looking one titled [Guys, h-h-h-h-h-holy crap, this is huuuuuge]. Despite having been posted only recently in the quiet fan café, it already had dozens of replies.
Wondering what it was about, she opened the post. It read as follows.
[I just heard some freaking amazing news
My friend is a Taylored fan, so she went to a recording of Music Letter
Apparently Suyeon played guitar for Taylored that day
Holy shit]
“…What?!”
As countless replies appeared with messages like [What do you mean?], Ayoon blurted it out without realizing it. She didn’t even notice that every gaze in the lecture hall had turned toward her.