Ghost
For the Signal Song Center candidates, time was granted in the practice room until the other contestants on the beach arrived, a chance to learn the dance and song in advance.
As the nine of them huddled around a single tablet and took turns watching the choreography, Neoul was startled to see the people who had been on the screen a moment ago move onto a smaller tablet PC.
Only after watching the contestants repeat the same dance and song every time they pressed play did he finally understand what the Sea Witch had told him.
— It’s a machine that stores the memories you want to keep.
— Look here. The machine is looking at you and storing you in memory.
So that was what it meant to store something. To leave it this vividly behind, so you could watch it again and again whenever you wanted.
Humans were truly strange. They were creatures who made what he had never even imagined.
Neoul sat on the floor, intrigued, and stared blankly at the lyric sheet the production team had handed out.
How do I read this?
He had no idea how to read human writing or the oddly shaped symbols mixed in with it.
With nothing else to do, he quietly watched the humans from where he sat alone, then began humming the Signal Song, the same one that had been pouring out of the tablet moments ago.
At that instant, nine pairs of eyes all turned toward him at once.
This is a little scary...
Flustered by the gazes of the humans and one rabbit, Neoul turned his head away.
“Neoul! You’re seriously good at singing.”
“Whoa, are you, like, pitch-perfect?”
Kim Ji-rok, with his eyebrow scar, and Gye Tae-seok, with his debauched air, had forgotten the earlier incident and came rushing over to him in excitement.
“Your tone is ridiculous too, wow.... You’ve got everything.”
The closer they came, the more they talked, and with every word that poured out of them, the stench rolling off them made the space between Neoul’s brows twitch.
Just as he was about to say something without holding back—
“Wait, wait...!”
Realizing it, Baek Yuri hurried over and stuffed something into Neoul’s mouth.
Huh?
Shocked by the rabbit’s rough, unseemly behavior, Neoul’s eyes flew wide at the sweetness he had never tasted before.
“Rabbit teacher, what is this?”
“A mini chocolate bar. I brought some in case our blood sugar crashed while filming. Want one?”
“I do!”
“Me too!”
Everyone was hungry and exhausted, so they didn’t refuse and happily took the bite-size chocolate bars. Neoul watched, without blinking, as the chocolate bars in Baek Yuri’s hand gradually disappeared.
“Want another one?”
Neoul’s eyes lit up, and he nodded vigorously. Baek Yuri handed him another chocolate bar, then pulled out a mechanical pencil. On the back of his lyric sheet, he wrote a sentence.
[Neoul, I think it’d be better not to say things like that earlier. I can’t tell what kind of smell you mean, but even if something smells off, could you please just not show it? I’d really appreciate it.]
Baek Yuri lifted the paper with the intention of showing it to Neoul quickly and then erasing it. However—
“Rabbit teacher. What does this say?”
Neoul only blinked, unable to read it. Worse still, he had no idea how to open the chocolate bar he’d been given and fumbled around with it before trying to shove it straight into his mouth.
Baek Yuri gasped and snatched it away, quickly peeling off the wrapper, then looked bewildered.
“Neoul, are you a foreigner?”
“Yes. Did I not say I came from Dragon Palace earlier?”
“......?”
“Ah. Dragon Palace is the palace where the Dragon King resides.”
Seeing that Baek Yuri didn’t seem to understand, Neoul added the explanation helpfully.
“Ahaha.... Right.... Dragon Palace....”
Baek Yuri thought Neoul was joking. He wasn’t very good at playing along with jokes, so he laughed first, but the other man didn’t seem interested in laughing at all, and the awkwardness rose sharply between them.
Besides, he spoke Korean so well that he didn’t seem like a foreigner. In a country with one of the lowest literacy rates in Korea, Baek Yuri had no idea how to react to encountering someone who couldn’t read, so he simply erased what he had written.
“Let’s practice. Practice...”
Steadying his wavering eyes, Baek Yuri moved to the corner and threw himself into song practice like a madman.
Meanwhile, Woo Cheong, who had learned the choreography in the blink of an eye, sidled up to Neoul.
“Hyung, hyung! Everyone else is practicing, so why aren’t you dancing, hyung?”
“It seemed too difficult.”
“Then you’ve got to learn it faster!”
“You speak truly.”
To get the rabbit teacher’s liver, it seemed he had to debut; and to debut while reading the room, he had to dance this difficult choreography while singing at the same time.
But he had barely even learned how to walk. How was he supposed to move his whole body so freely?
Neoul rose to his feet and, waving his arms around, tried to imitate what he had seen earlier.
“What are you doing?”
“I am dancing.”
“That looked like a promotional balloon just now!”
“What is that?”
“You know, those balloons that dance in front of shops when they open. Like this.”
Woo Cheong mimicked the dancing advertisement balloon with impressive realism, and the other contestants burst into applause and laughter, saying it was exactly the same. Neoul was the only one who couldn’t follow and tilted his head in confusion.
“It looks more like a dolphin whose tail got caught in a net.”
“A dolphin?”
Woo Cheong laughed, thinking it really could look that way.
“Hyung, hyung! I’m good at dancing! I’ll help you with the dance, so please help me with the singing!”
Neoul had never taught anyone to sing before, but he accepted the proposal. He knew absolutely nothing about the ‘ch’ of choreography, so Woo Cheong’s offer sounded rather good.
The other contestants practiced on their own while watching them out of the corners of their eyes. Neoul’s vocal ability had already been proven on the beach, and Woo Cheong had been famous as a dance prodigy since childhood.
If two such gifted people helped each other, the synergy would be terrifying.
And there was only one center position.
Baek Yuri, who had been memorizing the song in the corner, and Ha On-ha, who had been stretching, both kept a close watch on them.
“I’ll teach you the dance first!”
Woo Cheong led Neoul to stand side by side in front of the mirror.
“Watch carefully!”
One! Two! Da! Da-dan! Tada-ran! Zap! Turn left! Fingertips! Isolation! Straighten your waist! Yap!
Countless motions flashed by in an instant at breakneck speed.
“You can do up to here, right?”
......?
What had he just seen?
Neoul moved his arms awkwardly. His toes wiggled as they slid sideways.
“Hyung, what are you doing?”
“I am following what you taught me.”
“Did I really do moves like that...?”
I don’t remember that at all!
Woo Cheong’s eyes shook as he stared at Neoul’s miserable movements.
His only hardship in life had been the mama’s charismatic scolding to keep his hair and clothes appropriate for a student, and yet here was the eighteen-year-old Woo Cheong, suddenly facing an insurmountable obstacle.
For the first time in his life, he had encountered a huge wall he could not overcome.
Woo Cheong panicked. Even when he showed the movements more slowly, as if the world were in slow motion, Neoul still could not follow his dance.
He was clearly trying hard, but the problem was that it didn’t look like the same dance at all.
“Hyung, hyung. Why are your arms and legs doing completely different things?”
The arms, at least, managed a few of the easier motions, but his legs moved in a truly bizarre way. It was like a marionette with strings tied to its legs, being manipulated by someone else.
By contrast, the vocal lesson was the same. Neoul sang with a voice far more beautiful than the guide vocal he had heard earlier for the Signal Song.
“Now, try following along.”
......
After a few attempts to imitate what Neoul had sung, Woo Cheong collapsed to the floor like a shriveled, wilted leaf.
“Waaah. I was wrong.”
Woo Cheong pretended to sob out loud.
Some of the contestants who had been on guard felt secretly relieved, while others felt as though they had eaten a roasted sweet potato with no water.
The two geniuses had a serious problem.
First, neither of them had ever taught anyone anything before.
Second, because they had never failed in their own fields, they couldn’t understand people who couldn’t do what came naturally to them.
Third, their balance patch was absurdly extreme.
Woo Cheong had been born to dancer parents and grew up hailed as a prodigy, yet his singing was only middling among trainees.
Neoul, as a mermaid, had been born with a siren-like voice and singing ability that could lure people in, but as for dance, all he had ever done was whirl around with Sangsangi and Byeoldtongi in the sea, performing acrobatic swims.
And there was someone who could no longer bear to watch those two.
“Cheong needs practice pushing the sound forward. As for Neoul, you shouldn’t just try to copy the movements blindly—you need to build the basics first.”
Baek Yuri had spent seven years as a trainee, six months on stage after debuting with CLEAR, and after CLEAR disbanded, he was now attending university as a vocal major in practical music.
Still unaware that helping Neoul might one day result in his own liver being removed, he innocently extended a hand to help.
Baek Yuri demonstrated and explained everything as clearly as possible, fixing Woo Cheong’s vocal technique. And for Neoul, he began calmly teaching him simple movements from the very beginning, ones even a kindergartener could follow.
He never once raised his voice, no matter how many times they got things wrong or floundered. If they couldn’t do it, he taught them again, step by step, until they could.
Thanks to that, Neoul gradually began to feel his legs and feet, which had never seemed like his own, growing a little more familiar.
“Wow. That Baek Yuri kid has insane patience.”
“Seriously. How is he correcting every single movement like that without cursing even once?”
At Kim Ji-rok’s words, Gye Tae-seok clicked his tongue in agreement.
Woo Cheong and Neoul were oddballs too, but in Gye Tae-seok’s eyes, Baek Yuri was the strangest of them all.
This was a place where they had gathered to compete for the Signal Song Center. No one would curse them or blame them if they did something stupid, and no one was obligated to help.
And yet Baek Yuri was going out of his way to strengthen a rival’s competitiveness.
Why is he doing something so stupid?
Was he that confident? Confident that even if those two geniuses overcame their weaknesses and passed the evaluation successfully, he could still win?
For some reason, Gye Tae-seok felt a chill of crisis and rubbed beneath his dark, shadowed eyes before throwing himself into practice.
* * *
After the last contestants remaining on the beach had all been loaded onto buses and sent to the accommodation, the production team was preparing to clean up the beach and wrap up filming.
“Don’t forget to pack the equipment properly! Be thorough!”
At that moment, the rock in the middle of the beach shifted.
The man who had placed a large beach towel on top of it shrieked in surprise.
What had been revealed when the towel fell was not, in fact, a rock, but a giant tube patterned in a remarkably lifelike imitation of a turtle shell. From beneath it, a handsome young man with clear, striking features poked out his face.
“Uh...?”
He caught the eye of the assistant director who was retrieving the busking audio equipment.
“Huh? The filming’s over?!”
“Huh?”
The assistant director, equally startled to spot him, widened his eyes.
“Are you one of the contestants?”
“Yes! I’m Baek Gi-yeom.”
“What? We already sent everyone off—why is there still one person left? PD-nim!”
At the urgent call, Producer Seok O-yeong turned his head. Instantly grasping the situation, he checked the camera that hadn’t yet been switched off and signaled to the cameraman. It was a cue to keep rolling because something unexpected had happened.
Seven years of experience as an entertainment producer was telling him: We have to film this! Producer Seok O-yeong asked Baek Gi-yeom,
“What was your name again?”
“Baek Gi-yeom, sir.”
Baek Gi-yeom crawled out from under the turtle-shell tube and stood up at once. He was a tall, striking contestant.
The producer found his name in the trainee contestant list and frowned in confusion.
“It’s even-numbered, so how did one get left behind? I’ll call and check. Hold on.”
He called the main writer who was at the accommodation.
From the speaker of the smartphone, left on loudspeaker, a cheerful voice came through.
— Yes, Producer Seok! The contestants all arrived a little while ago. The kimbap we reserved just arrived right on schedule too. The kids must be hungry, so I was just about to tell them to hand it out first.
“Yes, writer-nim. One moment. There’s one contestant here who didn’t get on the bus. Could you do a quick head count?”
— What? All 80 have arrived, though? Including the extra contestant, it’s 80 total, isn’t it?
“R-right, that’s true, but...! There’s one person who got left behind here?”
— What? That can’t be. I checked the head count twice, and it’s definitely 80.
“......!”
Then what was this one doing here?
Suddenly, a cold sensation crawled up his spine, and goosebumps rose all over him. The assistant director and Producer Seok O-yeong both froze and slowly turned their heads toward Baek Gi-yeom.
“Co... could you be a ghost?!”
“No, I’m not?!”
“Th-then does that mean one of the 80 over there is the ghost...?”
......!
At Producer Seok O-yeong’s frightened muttering, the main writer, still on the line, sucked in a sharp breath.
Then a trembling voice came through.
— W-w-w-what are you talking about! Don’t joke like that!
“No, I’m not joking. Baek Gi-yeom is here with us. Please check one more time.”
— I-I’ll check again!