Chapter 79
I’m translating this as a published-novel chapter, preserving the show’s in-universe visuals with styled HTML blocks where needed and keeping the dialogue registers consistent with the glossary.CHAPTER_TITLE: Video Letter
MC Jung Ondo asked the participant with the parachute card, starting from the lowest-ranked among them, whether they would use it.
The participant looked lost, glancing back and forth between the eliminated contestants and Jung Ondo. After hesitating in obvious discomfort, they could not bring themselves to meet the eyes of the eliminated contestants and answered with their gaze lowered.
“I… won’t use it.”
A few of the eliminated contestants, who had allowed themselves even the briefest flicker of hope, lowered their heads again. They were the ones who had been close to that participant.
“Since the viewers… the passengers… decided the results by vote…. I don’t think it’s my place to go against that outcome….”
Their tone as they added the explanation was painfully careful. One after another, three more participants declined to use the parachute card for the same reason.
Well, well.
Watching from the side, Producer Seok O-yeong rested his chin on his hand and gave a small nod. In the end, saving someone only meant saving a competitor.
The parachute card was a shamelessly useful cheat item when I was the one on the verge of elimination, but if I had to use it for someone else, it was utterly useless.
Even for people who had been close friends for years, it was not an easy thing to decide.
If you turned your back on a friend, the relationship would sour. And if the person you saved debuted while you got dropped, that was… could you really congratulate them sincerely? Really?
Much less if they were not even a close friend. Why should you save someone else and die yourself? How could you know there wouldn’t be some reversal where the one who survived by the skin of their teeth suddenly awakened, leveled up like they had gained some hidden power, and surged ahead?
The only weird one here is Gal Neoul, using it to save someone else.
See? All four participants had decided not to use the parachute card. Normally, that was the natural outcome.
And yet Producer Seok O-yeong had scattered this so-called “rescue privilege” among the participants instead of the judges for a reason.
First, it could create a narrative between the participants. Second, if used cleverly, it could bring a huge payoff.
For example, like that friend over there.
Just then, it was Ha On-ha’s turn.
“Participant Ha On-ha. Will you use the parachute card?”
“I….”
The eliminated contestants looked at Ha On-ha with rising hope. A troubled expression flickered across Ha On-ha’s face. After a brief pause as if thinking it over, he opened his mouth carefully.
“I’ll use it for participant Wang Huiying!”
Wang Huiying, who had completely given up after being eliminated from the comeback round, jerked his head up. He looked genuinely shocked, as if he could not understand Ha On-ha’s choice.
It was understandable that he would be astonished. Wang Huiying had no connection to Ha On-ha at all, and they had never even spoken.
But Producer Seok O-yeong nodded to himself, thinking, Just as expected.
A smart choice.
In truth, Ha On-ha was in a situation where he could get hated no matter which way he went.
If he did not use the parachute card:
If he didn’t commit some truly catastrophic blunder, he was basically guaranteed to debut anyway, so why the hell couldn’t he just let one more stage happen for the lower-ranked kids who were going to fall out next anyway? Don’t they know how desperate every single stage is? I didn’t think he was that kind of person, seriously, wow…. He could have saved someone and didn’t, lol. He looks so bad compared to Gal Neoul.
Snide reactions like those would spring up everywhere. And even if he did use the parachute card, if he chose a participant he knew personally, that would have drawn criticism too.
Seriously, this favoritism bullshit sucks.
Of course, for Ha On-ha, who already had a solid core fanbase, that level of noise was something he could safely ignore. But he had chosen to avoid even that faintest hint of backlash by excluding personal ties from the equation.
So he saved Wang Huiying, the highest-ranked of the eliminated contestants. If he’d chosen by ranking, the responsibility would shift onto the viewers who voted.
Besides, Wang Huiying, being Chinese, was a contestant whose votes were being swept up domestically. Quite a few votes had been invalidated when people in China tried to rig the vote by installing the app on dozens of devices, only to be caught through location data and IP tracking.
Without question, this would make support for Wang Huiying spread to Ha On-ha as well. Whether he had calculated that too or not….
He’ll rise higher.
He really was no easy opponent.
In the next ranking announcement, Ha On-ha’s vote count might jump dramatically.
Whether Gal Neoul, who had nearly caught up, would reverse the standings by defeating Ha On-ha, or whether Ha On-ha would rise again and hold his place firm. Producer Seok O-yeong was deeply looking forward to the third ranking announcement and whatever stage they would show next.
Just then, Jung Ondo asked, “Oh! Is there a reason you chose participant Wang Huiying?”
“Hmm~ The comeback round left a deep impression on me.”
As expected, he was no easy…. Hm?
“He’s one of my go-to karaoke songs, so I thought it would be fun to go to karaoke and sing together~”
Ha On-ha said it with his usual foxlike smile, light and airy as ever. His absurd reason made Jung Ondo and several participants laugh, easing the mood a little.
Producer Seok O-yeong, who had been expecting a more thoughtful answer, was so taken aback that he released the arm he had been resting his chin on. Had I misread him?
“That was a joke!”
But Ha On-ha was not finished yet.
“As every stage is precious and desperate to me, I think everyone here feels the same way about the next stage. So it would have been a waste to let this precious parachute card go unused.”
“Ooooh….”
“But it didn’t seem fair for me to choose arbitrarily, so… I decided by ranking!”
Ha On-ha winked playfully at the camera. He knew exactly how to pull and release, how to toy with the broadcast itself.
Now that Ha On-ha had such a strong core fandom, it was not easy for the production team to edit him badly or cut his screen time thinly and cruelly. Knowing that, he had given an answer that managed to be witty, moving, and smart all at once.
Hah…. He’s slippery.
Producer Seok O-yeong shook his head.
Wang Huiying climbed onto the stage in tears, thanking Ha On-ha over and over before sitting down on the hard folding chair newly placed beside Kim Ji-rok.
That brought the number of participants moving on to the third mission to a total of thirty-two. Only two stages remained.
* * *
After the second class announcement ended, the surviving contestants and the eliminated ones exchanged farewells. Go debut. Do well. Thank you. Good work. I’ll contact you. Some cried, and some left with smiles.
The easy closeness that had swelled among them simply because they were chasing the same dream, no matter their age or nationality, drifted away on the winds of reality.
Among the remaining participants, a strange tension and melancholy hung in the air. More than the joy of surviving, there was a stronger unease that the next person eliminated might be them.
Even then, the cameras kept rolling without a break.
Anticipating that the mood would sink after the ranking announcement, the production team had prepared a special gift to lift the gloom.
Mm-hm. Is this thing on?
It was a video letter.
When a middle-aged couple appeared on the screen, one participant burst into tears on the spot.
“Son, you must be having such a hard time. Your mom knows you’ll do well. But don’t push yourself too hard if it’s really painful, okay? If it gets rough, you can always come home, so, all right? Just take it easy….”
“Ah, honestly, you! I told you to cheer him on, so why are you killing the mood? What do you mean, ‘take it easy’? Take it easy, my foot! Go burn yourself out with no regrets! Dance until your bones break, huh? Bones can break, but they’ll fuse back together anyway!”
The participant who seemed to be the couple’s son was lying face-down on the floor, nearly howling. A few other participants, though the letters were not even from their own parents, had red-rimmed eyes and were struggling not to cry themselves.
As the video letters kept coming, the filming set turned into a sea of tears. Perhaps because they were musicians, everyone was so much more sensitive.
Only a few who had no tears left blinked awkwardly at their family’s video letters, embarrassed.
The one who sent a video letter to Baek Gi-yeom and Baek Yuri was Baek Gi-yeom’s younger brother, Baek Hwa-yeom. He apologized once again for the trouble he had caused his older brother because of his former girlfriend, and said he had thoroughly uprooted the source of the rumor.
But then, while he had been speaking nicely and obediently enough, he abruptly turned on his brother and said it was partly his fault too.
“So-yoon says she’s a fan of hyung! She even said she was going to attend the live audience vote and got my parents’ consent forms so she could see her brother-in-law debut, so how was I supposed to stop her? What’s so cool about a made-up hippo in makeup, anyway?”
After grumbling for a while, Baek Hwa-yeom sent encouragement only to Baek Yuri.
“Yuri hyung! Fighting! Baek Gi-yeom can fight too, or he can just not.”
Baek Hwa-yeom’s video letter brought a big laugh to the participants who had been crying their eyes out.
Neoul, who could hardly expect to receive a video letter from family, watched the strange scene unfold with detached curiosity.
Would the fallen father king really film a message from the Dragon Palace? Would his young brother climb to land just to record one? What on earth would they do? It was an absurd fantasy.
There are plenty of doctors on land.
Neoul wanted to bring his father king to land, gather every doctor in the world, find the cause of the illness, and cure it somehow.
But the Dragon King could not leave the sea in the first place, not unless there was another dragon ready to inherit his place.
Neoul’s younger brother was still only a sea snake child of seven years. It would take another thousand years, at least, before he could become a dragon.
The other dragon who might replace his father king….
Ah…?
Neoul suddenly widened his eyes at the name that had risen in his mind.
Brother Yeoul and Sister Sari!
Under the Dragon King there were, besides Neoul and Morae, an eldest prince who had lived for about two thousand years and a princess who had become a dragon seven years ago.
He did not know exactly where or how they lived, but he did know that during their imugi days they had left home to train on land and ended up becoming dragons of some river.
He had been so absorbed in thoughts of rabbit liver that he had completely forgotten to ask the Sea Witch whether she knew their whereabouts.
Then it happened.
“Mm. Hello, Neoul.”
A beautiful woman appeared on the screen. She had a small, pure face, with soft, doglike eyes, but her irises were a murky ash gray. Her gaze was sharp and unmistakable.
Her hair was parted cleanly down the middle, and all of it was braided to one side, falling over her shoulder; the top was black, but the color faded to the same ash-gray as her eyes toward the ends.
…Who are you?
“It’s Sari noona.”
Ah. So she was his elder sister.
Neoul, who had been staring at a stranger because she had called his name, accepted it when she said she was noona and turned his head away. Then, a beat too late, he jerked and looked back at the screen.
...Noona?!
He had not expected to meet her face-to-face like this. Looking more closely, her nose and the shape of her mouth seemed very much like his father king’s.
“……”
As if she had nothing to say, she closed her mouth and rolled her eyes to the side. She seemed to be looking at someone not visible on the screen.
After a moment, she opened her mouth again with obvious reluctance. She looked entirely without enthusiasm for speaking. Her gaze was so clear, and yet she somehow seemed so soulless.
“Stay strong.”
That was it. Neoul stared in bafflement at the screen, which had already moved on to another participant’s family.
Several participants who had been momentarily dazed by her astonishing beauty, their mouths hanging open in a daze, hurriedly tried to act as though nothing had happened. Then they kept sneaking glances at Neoul.
While everyone else was stirred into chaos, Neoul was more curious about how the production team had managed to obtain his noona’s video letter.
She was a dragon, after all. Two dragons could not live in one body of water, they said. She had left home to train during her imugi days, and then become a dragon—wasn’t she living in the bed of some river now?
Did the Sea Witch have a hand in this again?
It was not especially important, but… she could at least have told me.
The more he thought about it, the more another suspect came to mind.
President Won Hasin.
And then there was the grandfather of President Won Hasin, Chairman Won, who had inherited the Sea Witch’s favor across generations and brought her into the fold….
It seemed one of the three had gone to the sister, who probably found it bothersome, and asked her for a video letter.
Does noona know about father king’s illness?
If she had heard that he had collapsed, she would surely be deeply distressed. Judging by how lifeless she looked in the video, it was obvious she had not been told yet.
He worried that the shock might be great, but this was family business, so should not the news be passed along? Perhaps his reincarnated rabbit might even receive help from noona.
Neoul decided that once he got his smartphone back after the third mission, he would immediately start by questioning President Won Hasin. Maybe he could even meet his brother then.
I may gain two reliable allies.
His sister’s unmotivated expression in the video did not exactly inspire trust, but since this concerned none other than his father king, wouldn’t she throw herself into finding the rabbit?
Neoul got along very well with his younger brother. Though they were not bound by blood, that did not matter at all when it came to such tender brotherly affection.
For that reason, he vaguely expected that he could also build a close bond with his brother and sister, save his father king together with them, and overcome the crisis facing the Dragon Palace.
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