The Second Ranking Reveal Ceremony (1)
After spending the whole night riding the subway in circles and finally making it home, Neoul first made up for the sleep he had lost. When he woke, he spent a while wondering where to put the slips of paper he had snatched from the subway station, then stuck them to the ceiling.
Won Hasin looked utterly baffled and asked whether the slips were some kind of glowing stars, but Yeo Do-bin, lying down where he could see them comfortably, said they were cool.
The short blue-ringed octopus guard, Dong-dong, had also come to look at the fans’ messages, but the ceiling was too high for her to read them.
“You’ve got weak eyes and you’re short besides. Tsk, tsk, tsk.”
“Kyaaa!”
Won Hasin tugged at Dong-dong’s hair and teased her for being a dwarf octopus, and in return got a fistful of hair ripped out.
“Sh-shouldn’t you stop them…?”
Yeo Do-bin fidgeted anxiously, but Neoul, who was already used to this, simply waved a hand.
“Even if I stop them, they won’t stay stopped for five minutes. At this point, they’ve likely developed affection through hatred. Hatred and affection, both one and the same. Surely they won’t kill each other. Before we go to film, let us eat some fish-shaped buns.”
Neoul tore open the bag with anticipation. Tiny fish-shaped buns, so small they looked like barely more than a mouthful, stared back at him in a row. The hollow-eyed fish had a particularly vacant look.
Humans online called this sort of face a dead-fish stare. Seeing this, Neoul thought that from now on, they ought to call it a fish stare instead.
He let out a small exclamation and handed the bag to Yeo Do-bin.
“Oh my...! They’re so tiny! It feels wrong to eat them...”
Yeo Do-bin said this while mercilessly dumping the fish-shaped buns into the air fryer. Neoul stared at him, at the contradiction between his words and actions, then asked in confusion,
“Why is smallness a pity?”
In the sea, Neoul’s staple food had been small fish, shrimp, plankton, and the like. They were small in size, but rich in nutrients and delicious as well, excellent provisions. Among the foods eaten by omnivorous Neoul, only seaweed was not small.
From what Father the King had told him, eating such small things alone would be enough for him to grow well. So Neoul had asked whether that meant he could grow larger than an orca, and was told absolutely not.
The average full-grown merman measured only three meters in length. About the same as the baby whale shark Byeoldtongi’s current size.
Large whales also lived on these little things, so why could merpeople not grow as large as they did? Bah. The order of the sea was far too unfair.
Even though humpback whales swallowed several tons of food a day, and those thug-like orcas ate more than 200 kilograms daily and even went around snacking on shark liver for dessert... even though sperm whales dove down to the deep sea to hunt giant squid...
Neoul, who had once been told by the Sea Witch that “even a pig would want to be your friend,” was not lacking in appetite anywhere. It was only frustrating that he did not have a whale’s mouth and could not eat faster and in greater quantities all at once.
Neoul licked his lips as he smelled the sweet, savory fragrance drifting from the machine, then asked,
“Is the amount insufficient?”
“No, that’s not it! It’s so...! Cute, right?”
Yeo Do-bin lamented that he couldn’t bring himself to eat them because they reminded him of the dog his family kept at home. First the envelope paper, and now the animal faces he chose—he seemed to prefer things that looked a little vacant in the head rather than bright-eyed and alert.
“Then I shall eat them all.”
“Cruel...! How can you eat something this cute?”
Yeo Do-bin, who had said he couldn’t eat them because they were too cute, tried one and then said it was delicious, promptly grabbing two more. Neoul, eating fish buns stuffed with red bean paste, reflected on human hypocrisy.
What if the question “How can you eat something this cute?” actually meant, how would you eat it, with your hands, with chopsticks, grilled, or boiled?
But the taste of the fish buns distracted him before that thought could last long. The outside was crisp, the inside soft and moist, and the red bean paste sweet. In the blink of an eye, the plate was empty.
After they finished baking the entire large bag, it was soon time to head to the filming set. Yeo Do-bin, who had only managed to steal three bites while Neoul ate the mini fish buns, declared he couldn’t eat any more and skipped breakfast.
“I-I’m already nervous.... Neoul, aren’t you tense at all...?”
“About what?”
“The ranking reveal. Just thinking about it makes me feel sick...”
It seemed Yeo Do-bin’s poor appetite was because of the ranking reveal ceremony that would take place during filming in a little while. He said he didn’t care whether people hated him or not, but perhaps the rankings themselves frightened him after all.
The online voting for the second round had been conducted with the tally revealed until the midpoint, then suddenly switched to blind voting. So the final standings, determined when voting ended, remained unknown to everyone until the day the rankings were announced.
Neoul shrugged.
“You said it was all good. Where did all that composure go?”
“W-well... even if my ranking drops, I won’t become miserable. This stage was really fun, and it was a good experience.”
Yeo Do-bin opened the zipper of his neatly packed suitcase again for no reason, then closed it once more. His mouth, which had been shut, opened again.
“Even if I get eliminated, that doesn’t mean my life was a failure.”
“......”
“It’s only one failure out of the thousands of challenges I’ll face from here on. Just one incident among many in my long life, and I can always keep trying again and again.”
So, it’s all good.
With shining eyes, Yeo Do-bin murmured to himself as if reciting a spell, then added that there was no problem, that everything was fine, and that there was nothing at all to worry about.
“But if possible, I’ve started wanting this one to remain a more meaningful incident.”
The muscles in Yeo Do-bin’s arms and shoulders tightened as he lifted the large locked suitcase.
“My greed has grown. That’s why I’m nervous. The bigger greed gets, the bigger the fear of not getting what you want becomes.”
And so, little by little, anxiety, fear, and urgency had taken root. People called that feeling earnestness.
Not achieving something right away did not automatically ruin your life, and achieving it right away did not guarantee happiness forever after.
But greed and earnest longing shake a person’s judgment loose, making them feel as though this is the last chance, as though life will be over if they fail right now, and drive them to the edge of a cliff.
Yeo Do-bin said his fear had grown after the stage he performed with Team Artists.
“I want to do better, and I want to climb one more step higher.”
The perfect stage he had prepared through sweat, and the cheers of the audience recognizing the result of that effort.
Flying all the way from Australia to Korea for ten hours, Yeo Do-bin had at last tasted what he had longed for, what he had in truth wanted even longer than that, during the second round.
The thrill of a stage that welcomes you is so addictive that someone who has never experienced it can turn away easily enough, but once they’ve tasted it, there’s no going back.
It is like someone who has eaten nothing but dry boiled potatoes, then tastes them with a little salt and sugar, or tops them with kimchi, and can no longer bear to return to the old way.
“And yet you’re strangely calm, even though you’re not without greed yourself. It’s impressive, really. Wait... could it be...”
Yeo Do-bin narrowed one eye suspiciously.
“Did you secretly take some calm-down medicine earlier?”
...What on earth was that?
Was it tasty...?
“I’ve never eaten anything like that.”
Neoul shook his head and said,
“Surely even I am not so heartless that I feel no tension at all.”
Even setting aside his personal desire to stand on the stage, this involved Father the King and the safety of the Dragon Palace. There was no way he wouldn’t be trembling. He had never taken it lightly, not once.
“It’s just that I must succeed.”
Neoul thought of Father the King’s collapsed royal face and the image of his little younger brother, who by now would surely be shaking with anxiety and not knowing what to do.
“My mind is so busy there’s no room for worry to force its way in. I’ve hardly ever thought and acted for myself in my life, yet lately my head has been filling with too much.”
“......?”
“Learning, thinking, planning—each of these consumes quite a lot of time and strength. But so does worrying. It costs the same, and yet worrying yields nothing, while learning, planning, and acting yield much, do they not?”
“......”
“Perhaps worry is a luxury for me right now.”
The moment Neoul said that, he thought of Father the King’s back. The person in this world with the most worries of all. If he said ten words, nine of them were worries about Neoul.
There were times he had not understood it and found it frustrating, wondering why he was so excessive...
And yet, looking back now, even amid all his busyness, he must have devoted so much time and strength for Neoul’s sake.
And all that had earned him was the crooked glare of an ungrateful son.
While Neoul was thinking of his father, Yeo Do-bin blinked around somewhat flustered. He had not expected the Neoul who seemed so carefree about whether his rank fell or rose to say something like this.
Before Yeo Do-bin could find words, Neoul spoke again.
“And, Yeo Do-bin. I am not quite as thick-headed as a sperm whale, but I am a fair bit of a blockhead.”
“A-b-blockhead...?”
“I mean I’m confident when it comes to charging straight ahead. If you keep butting into something until it happens, what in the world is there that cannot be done?”
In Neoul’s dictionary, there was no word for retreat. Once he fixed on something, no one could match his persistence or single-mindedness. For Neoul, who swam with his eyes fixed only forward, failure was nothing more than a stepping stone for the next leap.
One night is enough to be shaken by anxiety. Anything beyond that is a waste of time.
“And you won’t be dropping.”
Yeo Do-bin gave a weak laugh.
“Thanks, even if it’s just empty words.”
“They’re not empty words.”
“...?”
“You did well on the stage.”
Unless humans all had eyes on the backs of their heads, they would surely recognize Yeo Do-bin’s talent.
“...Thank you.”
“Then let us go.”
Neoul slipped into his sneakers and opened the front door. The heat had eased at last, and the weather hinted that summer was nearing its end.
* * *
The expressions of the contestants gathered at the filming set were generally bleak. Some, like Yeo Do-bin, were stiff with nerves; others had been so anxious they had not slept at all the night before.
The reason was the online vote, which had been publicly tallied until the middle and then abruptly switched to a blind vote, leaving no one able to know the result.
The bottom three teams were certain to be eliminated wholesale, so everyone was having an awful time of it.
Only Woo Cheong, who appeared wearing knee pads, elbow pads, and even a pink helmet with impressive determination, looked as cheerful as if he lived in a different world. He slid past Neoul’s side and greeted him.
“Yo! Brother Gu-ri, hi!”
By now he seemed too lazy to say Neoul or even raccoon, and had reduced him to the entirely unrelated “Gu-ri.”
“Why are you wearing all that on your head?”
“Came here on a kick scooter, man!”
Snippets of Woo Cheong had already begun appearing all over social media. As a bonus, there was video of him riding past the Hangang bike path with his washed-out blue hair flying beneath his helmet.
Woo Cheong Spotted Walking to Work!
He says he’s taking a kick scooter to the set lol
(Video)
He had knee pads and a helmet on, so I thought it was electric and wondered how old Woo Cheong is and whether he even has a license, but it was a manual scooter lol
How is a manual one that fast lol He really seems to have good athletic ability from the way he uses his body
Woo Cheong spun around once, proudly showing off his safety-first fashion.
“Pink for the alpha male! Blue for my hair! But my helmet’s pink! And there’s even a light on the back of my head! Red light! Yo!”
With a flashy, swaggering dance, Woo Cheong delivered an improvised rap and tapped the sleek rear of his bicycle helmet. A red light flashed on.
“Cool, right? Awesome, right?”
Wahahahaha!
Whoa! So cool!
Cheong! Can I try that too?
Thanks to Woo Cheong fooling around up front, the contestants who had been sitting stiffly began to laugh and chatter, loosening up at least a little.
The contestants passed the helmet around, striking cool poses toward the camera and acting all cute and ridiculous.
Then, when MC Jeong Ondo appeared, they jumped in surprise, returned the helmet to Woo Cheong, and hurriedly took their seats. Their nerves snapped tight again, as if they had never relaxed at all.
Hello...
Hello!
The contestants who sat down in their places only to stand back up again and bow at a ninety-degree angle were met by Jeong Ondo’s smile and a polite nod in return.
Standing in the center of the stage, Jeong Ondo took a sip of water, set the cup down, and then skimmed through the script he had already checked several times.
At last, filming began.
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