Conditions for Becoming a Kind Idol Leader - Chapter 2

"Shit."

Oh, please.

Go Young-in clamped his mouth shut. The nightmare from before was already rushing back in sharp, vivid fragments. This had to be insane.

How had I forgotten this?

He almost burst into tears from gratitude. The Status Window was definitely a crazy bastard. He was pathetic for feeling relieved by a line like that.

So it hadn’t been a hallucination after all? Or had he already gone insane?

Reset. So that’s what a reset meant?

Go Young-in stood frozen for a long time before suddenly looking around. This was his room, all right. It wasn’t the room of the man in his twenties who had just been discharged from the army, but the house where he’d lived as a child.

And it had happened without any warning at all? On the very day after he got out of the military? Surely this wasn’t because he hadn’t debuted as an idol, was it?

"So it was true. I’m losing my mind…"

Nothing had happened ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠until now, so why today of all days?

Damn ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠it. No matter how I look at it, it feels like they deliberately waited until the day after my discharge just to screw with me.

The army was too much. If they were going to reset him anyway, they could’ve at least done it sooner.

With nowhere to vent his silent rage, Go Young-in grabbed his head and ground his teeth.

What was worse, this insane Status Window hadn’t even given him a warning. It had been an ordinary day in every possible way.

He had simply lain down in bed, gone to sleep, and woken up. In other words, the only sin he had committed was satisfying one of humanity’s three basic desires: sleep.

By then, he’d begun to understand. If he said he wasn’t going to become an idol again, the same thing would probably happen.

Not probably.

It was absolute certainty.

He had no idea why this had happened to him, or why among all the possible jobs in the world he had been chosen for something as absurd as being an idol.

All he had left was the knowledge that if he didn’t want to go through this again, there was no choice but to obey the Status Window for now.

And so, just as before, Go Young-in was naturally offered a street casting by DD, Double D Entertainment.

Whether he accepted or not had changed completely from the past. That much didn’t even need to be said.

Of course, Go Young-in’s trainee life did not go smoothly.

No, “did not go smoothly” was putting it kindly. It was the worst possible outcome.

His second reset came less than three days after the first.

That was because, after entering the agency’s basement practice room for trainee training, Go Young-in had managed to rack up five warnings in under an hour.

He had gone in completely unprepared. On top of that, his stats for idol life were absurdly pathetic.

Even Kang Ba-da, who had offered the casting based on his face alone, had been so flustered she’d had to watch the company head’s expression the whole time.

His singing was average. His dancing was at the same level as a deflated event balloon wobbling in the wind outside a newly opened shop.

Rhythm sense? It would have been a miracle if he had any at all.

As for the one stat he possessed that was higher than his looks, the so-called charm that came next after his visuals, it rattled apart like a dented tin can the moment he stood before a camera, so he couldn’t even show that properly.

It was a miracle the company hadn’t kicked him out on the spot and had instead granted him a probationary period, saying they’d try to develop him first.

Go Young-in had been hammered with warnings simply for showing the public a skill level unfit for a perfect idol, and because of the penalties that came crashing down alongside those two warnings, he had rapidly filled the rest of his warning count right then and there.

And all of that came from only three clauses.

On top of that, the trainee life he had been forced into wasn’t the kind of job that could be described as easy. In a jungle where survival itself was difficult no matter how hard you tried, dozens of truckloads’ worth of trainees failed before debuting or gave up altogether.

Among people who endured soul-crushing pain through the night for the sake of one dream called idolhood and fought desperately for it, there was no way Go Young-in, who had never wanted to be an idol in the first place, could truly make it.

There wasn’t anything especially grand about a reset. At first, he had simply felt dazed, like someone waking from a dream.

After the tenth reset, Go Young-in gradually became familiar with the clauses one by one.

From around then on, the repeated memories began to overlap, and he would occasionally start muttering nonsense.

On the days when five warnings piled up, he even tried staying awake and fighting it off because he was afraid of being reset, but no matter how he struggled, the reset always came.

After the thirteenth time, he began organizing and recording his memories in a notebook.

But even after the point where he no longer remembered how many times he had come back, and there was still no progress, another word was added to the warning message.

After that, Go Young-in stopped organizing his memories in the notebook.

In the end, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠he kept going through trainee life with complete sincerity, just to avoid dying.

As time passed, the intervals between resets grew longer, and his skills slowly began to improve. He was aging, little by little, too.

When he finally made it safely into high school, Go Young-in’s anxiety began to spike.

He had somehow made it into the debut team, but the team’s luck was so disastrous it was almost absurd.

It started when members from the same debut lineup caused incidents and left, forcing the debut to be postponed indefinitely.

After that, one member would quit after getting injured, another would leave the company after receiving a secret approach from another agency, and the lineup kept losing people one after another.

And in the end, the debut team fell apart completely.

Even after that, he was given several more chances to debut, but Go Young-in kept slipping through them at the worst possible moments.

He needed to debut soon, so why couldn’t he?

He’d practically lived in the practice room and never caused any major trouble. Was it because his skills weren’t good enough?

His luck… definitely seemed to be lacking.

The only time he had been ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠reset without any warning count accumulating had been the very first time.

Since he had already been reset as an adult, if he still failed to debut after becoming an adult, there was no telling when he’d be sent back again.

So he absolutely had to debut before adulthood.

Damn it. I can’t get reset again.

Thanks to how often warning counts had been accumulated through swearing, Go Young-in had long since developed the habit of not saying it out loud and instead swearing with cheerful enthusiasm in his head.

He even hinted at it to Kang Ba-da, the assistant manager who had brought him in.

But when he saw how regretful and apologetic she looked, he lost the nerve to say what he’d been about to say.

In the end, as the saying went, the thirsty must dig their own well. Go Young-in began going around personally with Assistant Manager Kang Ba-da, searching for people who might make it as idols.

He was in a terrible rush. Above all else, visuals and skill mattered most. There wasn’t enough time to find someone who met every other condition too.

Even if they were a little short on charisma!

Even if their personality was a little lacking!

If they at least had a great face and solid ability, wouldn’t they look fine on the surface?

Of course, Go Young-in would later come to regret his own foolishness with a vengeance.

Still, after investing two more years, he barely managed to put together the pieces and spent his time practicing with the new lineup to rebuild their chemistry.

The hastily assembled team, as if all those hardships had been nothing more than a dream, somehow became the debut lineup with ridiculous ease.

And at last, Go Young-in debuted as a five-member K-pop boy group called Zero One.

Once they had debuted, wasn’t there a chance that something might change if he simply held on without breaking any clauses until the company contract expired?

Go Young-in began to hope again.

Of course, the Status Window had never once said that things would end when the expiration date arrived, but if he didn’t set some kind of ending for himself, he might have gone completely mad.

But his hope was overturned again, and quite neatly too.

Setting aside the minor issues, it wasn’t until two years after debut, when the team that had been moving along without any major scandal or headline-grabbing disaster began to fall apart, that the real chaos started.

That torrent of scandals, already overwhelming even from a simple search, was only the beginning.