Preview Release
“Just thinking about being cut down along with the rest makes me feel miserable.”
She’d already missed out on Signal Song Center, and now she had to lose screen time too.
Standing in front of the practice-room mirror, Baek Yuri stretched and looked at himself in the glass. Inside, he was blackened through with anxiety, but the expression reflected back at him looked perfectly calm.
That was the result of having practiced, to the point of nausea, how to manage his expressions in any situation throughout his entire trainee life.
In this line of work, the moment a face looked even a little dark on camera, rumors would cling to it in every shape and form: bullying allegations, personality controversy, dead-eyed gaze, and so on.
He could be thinking terrible things on the inside and still look serene on the outside.
Should I cancel the order right now and keep the mermaid trapped here?
At least until the first episode aired....
It was a pity that the mermaid had come to land for the sake of his sick father, but Baek Yuri was just as desperate.
When Clear disbanded, the dream he had thought he’d finally grasped vanished in an instant, leaving a gaping hole in his heart.
No matter how frantically he tried to fill it, his heart had become such a ragged ruin that everything simply leaked back out in vain. He had scraped together the last scraps of resolve and courage left in him and thrown himself into this program.
And now even those remnants had been spent.
If he didn’t debut this time, there would truly be nothing left. Not even a thread or a needle to stitch the tattered heart back together....
I have to keep the mermaid here.
Dragon King or whatever, what did it matter if he lived or died? Would a few measly bites of rabbit liver really cure anything? How ancient was Heungbujeon, anyway? In the twenty-first century, who skipped the hospital and went looking for rabbit liver?
Wasn’t the Dragon King sick because of ocean pollution? All the trash floating in the sea, microplastics detected in fish, reckless overfishing, radiation, water pollution, and on top of that, abrupt changes in sea temperature. It would be stranger if he weren’t ill.
Then even if he sent the mermaid off with a whole pile of rabbit liver, wouldn’t it still be impossible to cure him?
Twisted thoughts kept clawing through his head for a long time.
Even so, Baek Yuri couldn’t bring himself to cancel the order. It was better than being afraid the mermaid might split open his stomach and dig out the liver while he slept.... Besides, he understood all too well what it meant to have a sick family member.
I’m really awful. My heart’s rotten, honestly.
He shouldn’t think that way while wearing a human face. Even if rabbit liver couldn’t help the Dragon King’s illness, Neoul would still be the sort to grasp at straw, desperate for any lifeline he could find.
Baek Yuri decided that as soon as the package arrived, he’d hand it over immediately. Then, to shake off the stray thoughts, he threw himself into dance practice. Once he worked up a sweat, the negative ideas always faded, and before long his mood would improve as well.
If I do well on stage, everything will be fine.
If he kept showing solid skills, people would surely recognize him. Baek Yuri flung away his unease along with the beads of sweat on his skin.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
And yet, despite all of Baek Yuri’s agonizing, the package never came. They said shipping had been delayed by the typhoon and bad weather, but when he called the seller, nobody answered. There was no news at all.
In the meantime, the remaining days of practice flew by in a flash.
On the final morning of practice, there was a public evaluation to select the center. The ten center candidates had to perform the Signal Song in front of the judges and every other contestant.
The scoring was split evenly: 50 percent from the judges and 50 percent from the contestants’ votes.
The first contestant was so nervous that he completely blew it, then turned away and burst into tears. After that, the youngest contestant, a middle schooler, forgot the lyrics and ended up leaving the stage after only dancing from the middle onward.
The short former child actor, Lee Gal-chae, had also made it into the top ten as the middle school contestant’s partner, and unlike the two before him, he made it all the way through the dance and song.
Because he was dancing such a demanding routine with limited stamina, his vocals grew shakier toward the end and his movements looked a little precarious. But his expressions remained flawless throughout, matching the song’s mood perfectly as he delivered the image of a wistful, fresh-faced boy.
Gye Tae-seok, looking depraved for reasons unknown, had a gaunt face and kept fidgeting while complaining of stomach pain and muscle aches. In the end, he didn’t even go onstage, and he refused to go to the hospital too.
Kim Ji-rok, with the missing eyebrow and one other contestant, managed their stages without any major issues. They seemed to think they might still have a real shot at the center position, because after coming offstage they clenched both fists and waited tensely.
But Woo Cheong, overflowing with charm and quick to learn, won even greater praise than they did. After mastering the dance in a single day and then focusing on vocal training for the next nine, he delivered a performance far more stable than usual.
Bathed in compliments, Woo Cheong was so pleased he bounced off the stage like a dolphin leaping above the sea.
And then.
“After the judges’ evaluation, the Signal Song Center is....”
Tension spread through the line of candidates standing shoulder to shoulder, waiting for the announcement.
“Contestant Ha On-ha.”
“......!”
Ha On-ha’s final-stage performance had been perfect.
Where Woo Cheong excelled through sticky, precise movement and technical skill, Ha On-ha knew exactly how every gesture, every expression, every glint in his eyes should be used to make himself look beautiful. He had a gift for making even a single strand of hair fluttering as he turned his head seem like a shot from a well-made film.
His sweet, soft voice matched the song like it had been made for it, and his high notes were stable and easy.
Ha On-ha let out a whoop, then ran around with both hands raised, bowing deeply every time he met someone’s eyes.
“Thank you! Thank you! I’ll work hard! May you be blessed! Yeeeah~~!”
The sight of him reveling in his happiness with his whole body drew applause from the other candidates as well, each of them congratulating him. Their true feelings were anyone’s guess.
Woo Cheong, however, was all bright-eyed enthusiasm.
“Ha On-ha-hyung! Why did you go an extra half-step on the one-and-a-half turn? And why do you tilt your head on the front-facing part?”
“Hmm? Ah, that? My left side is the better-looking one, after all~”
“Oh!”
“And this part felt like it would look more wistful and melancholy if I lifted my head just a little like this....”
Ha On-ha lightly demonstrated the movement and facial acting again. Unlike the other trainees, he hadn’t simply focused on learning the assigned dance and song and then throwing out winks and hearts to show off his charm. In his own way, he had tried to interpret the song and reflect what he felt in it.
If one judged only by song interpretation, the former child actor Lee Gal-chae might have been slightly better. But the decisive difference was that Ha On-ha had carried the song and dance live with perfect, steady control.
As a result, Ha On-ha stood proudly in the Signal Song Center position.
Neoul stared blankly at Ha On-ha, who was grinning from ear to ear, then shifted his gaze to Baek Yuri. Ha On-ha’s performance had definitely been perfect, but to Neoul, the rabbit teacher’s vocals sounded better.
As for dancing, Ha On-ha seemed a little more seasoned. If Baek Yuri’s dancing was marked by exact timing and elegant lines, Ha On-ha’s strength lay in controlling pace and making each point move feel deliciously sharp.
If he had to choose the contestant with the best balance of dance and vocals among the eighty-one participants, Neoul thought he would name Baek Yuri and Ha On-ha without a second’s hesitation.
He wondered which of the two would win if they went head-to-head onstage.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
In the afternoon, filming began for Signal Song’s “individual live performance.” To avoid any overlap of noise, the recordings were done one by one in the practice room.
Neoul had improved enormously in the meantime. Ten days ago he had been barely watchable; now, at least, he could dance well enough to blend in among the other contestants without standing out too badly.
The Neoul who had been completely unable to follow the beat now moved his body on reflex the moment the music started. Perhaps because he had been dancing nonstop for the past ten days, he had even lost a little weight and his jawline looked sharper than before.
Although in the individual performance it became painfully obvious that he still couldn’t control his dynamics at all, that he kept stomping his feet, and that he was hopelessly clumsy with waves and isolations....
Neoul somehow managed to finish the dance to the end and ended the filming of his individual video with a pleased smile.
The following morning was recording, and in the afternoon they went straight into filming the group performance.
They had to dance about twenty times on a beach where the sun beat down hard, and then again on a rooftop building with a large helipad.
Since the typhoon had just passed, the weather wasn’t hot, and the sky had cleared to a brilliant blue.
Once Neoul climbed up to the rooftop, he spent the whole shoot taking in the bright sky, the city, the people dancing their hardest beside him, and the staff busily operating the cameras with all their focus on the filming.
It was, in a way, something entirely unlike the glowing clusters of sea creatures in the deep, silent ocean.... It was radiance.
He could feel an intense, sparkling vitality.
Were all the beings who lived under the sun so brilliantly lit? (Of course, Kim Ji-rok, with the missing eyebrow, and Gye Tae-seok, who kept fidgeting and trembling and interfering with the shoot, didn’t shine at all.)
The longer he kept dancing among those people, the more his own chest began to beat with excitement, and it felt as though their brilliance was spreading to him too.
Something he had never felt in the depths of the sea was beginning to stir in Neoul’s heart.
Was it curiosity? No, it seemed hotter than that.
Was it fun? That felt close, but “fun” alone still seemed to fall short.
Lost in a whirlpool of strange, nameless emotion, Neoul danced with a wide smile.
The camera director didn’t bother stopping Neoul, who neither looked at the camera nor paid it any attention. Instead, he was capturing, in full, the emotions in Neoul that Neoul himself did not yet understand.
Excitement.
In Neoul’s eyes, as he earnestly tried to hold the world inside them, there was nothing but excitement.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Like a music-video teaser, the clip was full of slow motion, as if it were demanding that you pay attention.
After the judges’ faces passed by in turn, the video ended with enormous text dropping down like a hammer.
Right after the preview video was uploaded, the comment section was flooded by fans of the three judges, but there was one contestant whose mention count exceeded even the judges’.
The most recognizable and talked-about contestant was the eighteen-year-old former child actor Lee Gal-chae, who had only recently still been actively working in acting.
After playing the young King Jeongjo in To My Grandson at the age of five, he had steadily built up a filmography over thirteen years, showing a wide variety of roles.
Lee Gal-chae had always given his all, no matter how big or small the part, a born actor down to his bones. And then he suddenly appeared in an idol survival program?
With shocked fans and the public buzzing, Lee Gal-chae’s name even climbed into the real-time search rankings.
Next came attention for Ha On-ha, who had made a name for himself as the “blue-eyed Korean kid model,” and for Woo Cheong, the dance prodigy. Baek Yuri, who was aiming for a second debut, was mentioned a few times as well.
As the view count climbed and the video began to ride the algorithm, contestants who hadn’t been known at first started getting mentioned one by one and drawing attention.
Among them, Gal-Neoul was a completely veiled presence except for the face revealed in the video.
---