The Conditions for Becoming a Gentle Idol Leader - Chapter 50
─YOU FAILED! BUT A SYSTEM REVIVED YOU :)
A game-over message rose over the character he’d lost count of killing already.
Lying on his bed and playing a mobile game, Kyeon In-woo irritably tossed his phone onto the mattress.
After the faint click of the door lock opening, the room fell silent again.
Most of the members came and went without making a sound, but there was only one person who would be coming in now.
It’d be Go Young-in. Fuck.
The thought of Go Young-in dragged up what had happened recently, and irritation surged up at once. The way he acted stupid, the way he never said a single thing plainly, and the way he still kept sneaking glances at Kyeon In-woo as if he were measuring his mood made everything about him feel fucking obnoxious.
There wasn’t a single part of it that made sense.
Come to think of it, meeting Go Young-in had been absurd from the very beginning.
It was the first day of middle school.
After checking which class he’d been assigned to, the first thing Kyeon In-woo saw when he opened the classroom door was Go Young-in, tucked away by himself in the corner.
At a glance, he looked like a boring bastard.
His lifeless face, his worn-out air, the way he sat there quietly and motionless all on his own - it all gave that impression.
Go Young-in looked as though he existed in a completely different space from everyone else.
He was the type Kyeon In-woo should never have had any reason to get involved with.
That should have been the end of it.
And yet the moment their eyes met, Kyeon In-woo found himself staring at the unmistakable flicker of disturbance that surfaced over that dead expression.
Then the already pale face began to drain even further, going white as paper.
Go Young-in acted as if he had seen someone he absolutely should not have met. Even now, Kyeon In-woo could still remember that face, overtaken by fear, with perfect clarity.
Did we meet somewhere before? Should I try talking to him? That was the problem. The moment he approached, things had gone wrong.
As he drew closer, Go Young-in kept backing away, and just when Kyeon In-woo was beginning to frown at it, the other boy suddenly covered his mouth and ran.
Right in front of another person, as though Kyeon In-woo made him sick. For a young Kyeon In-woo, it had been a fairly shocking thing to witness.
He’d never imagined that someone would look at his face and gag.
And that instantly turned into irritation. What the hell was wrong with that bastard?
Go Young-in’s first impression had been truly disastrous.
He had been so stunned that he briefly wondered if he’d done something to Go Young-in without realizing it.
After that, too, Go Young-in was always running the moment he spotted Kyeon In-woo.
And yet, strangely enough, they kept running into each other whenever they were out in the hall. At that point, Kyeon In-woo couldn’t have ignored it even if he’d wanted to.
Go Young-in and Kyeon In-woo’s paths overlapped in some faint, awkward way.
As if that were the natural order of things. It was enough to make him wonder why he hadn’t noticed it before.
It wasn’t only him, either. Go Young-in would avoid Kyeon In-woo’s eyes too, always looking flustered whenever they met.
It felt immensely, disgustingly shitty.
And after all that, when Go Young-in suddenly started speaking to him like they were close, Kyeon In-woo honestly thought the bastard had lost his mind.
"You fucking idiot, what the hell are you trying to pull with me? Wanna die?"
"What are you talking about...? Why are you angry first thing in the morning?"
Just yesterday he’d been looking at Kyeon In-woo like he was some kind of monster, and now he was blinking stupidly as if nothing had happened at all. The sight made him snort in disbelief.
What kind of lunatic was this?
What was funny, though, was that once they actually started talking, the conversation somehow felt familiar.
Once the thread of conversation had been drawn out, Kyeon In-woo also realized there were more things in common with Go Young-in than he’d expected.
I was way too careless. I should’ve just ignored him.
In any case, the first meeting had been anything but normal. He was still someone whose thoughts Kyeon In-woo couldn’t make out at all.
Come to think of it, Kyeon In-woo didn’t really know a damn thing about Go Young-in.
Go Young-in hid too much.
Fine, whatever.... That bastard’s done this kind of thing before, and come to think of it, nobody actually has to tell you everything, right?
With all the resentment he’d built up, Kyeon In-woo admitted, at least a little, that he’d been too worked up.
No. But that bastard’s wrong too, I mean, fuck...
He’d tried talking to him more than once before. It just never went well.
And after that fucking accident in high school, it had become difficult to bring anything up to Go Young-in first.
"Please just go. Go back, I’m begging you... don’t talk to me."
"You, right now-"
"We’ll talk later.... Okay?"
Even when he buried his face and whispered so softly it was almost impossible to hear, Kyeon In-woo could tell exactly what expression Go Young-in was making.
At that moment, Go Young-in had definitely...
After he was discharged from the hospital, Go Young-in began avoiding Kyeon In-woo again, just like he had the first time they met, only to start talking to him again after some time had passed.
When Kyeon In-woo tested him about the incident afterward, Go Young-in no longer remembered a thing.
Was there any need to tell him what had happened to the man who looked more alive when he couldn’t remember than when he could? What was the point of digging up more of that shitty memory on purpose?
Kyeon In-woo decided he wouldn’t bring it up first unless Go Young-in asked him.
Seriously, what a pain in the ass. How did I end up knowing some bastard like this?
The problem was that instead of leaving it alone, he kept butting in and couldn’t stop himself from getting involved.
"I’m the idiot."
Kyeon In-woo wasn’t in any position to blame Go Young-in for anything, either.
Fuck. The sucker wasn’t Go Young-in. It was me. I’ve been played for a sucker like crazy.
Kyeon In-woo ran a hand irritably through the back of his hair and stood up. He was so fed up he figured he might as well go drink some water.
When he opened his bedroom door and stepped out, the empty living room came into view first.
There was nothing unusual about it, and yet the oppressive silence felt oddly familiar today.
The closed door caught his eye for some reason. Come to think of it, this might have been the first time he’d ever looked at someone else’s door like that.
Should I go in? Something feels off.
From beyond the door, in that strangely quiet room, he heard the sound of something crashing down all at once. Narrowing his eyes, Kyeon In-woo dragged his slippers toward the source.
─Clack.
The first thing he saw the moment he opened the door was clutter scattered messily across the floor, and Go Young-in collapsing as if his legs had given out, one hand clutching at his chest.
* * *
"Hey! Go Young!"
Kyeon In-woo, with his youthful face and a half-sloppily worn school uniform, grinned playfully as he waved a hand.
Someone roughly the same build as Kyeon In-woo followed him inside and greeted them too.
Kyeon In-woo and Son Jeong-hoon. They were, in their own way... the kind of guys you could call friends.
Go Young-in answered with a polite smile and rested his forearms on the desk, propping his chin on them.
Even with such a perfunctory greeting, Kyeon In-woo was used to it. He tossed his bag onto his own desk, pulled a chair over to Go Young-in’s desk, and sat down.
"Is your phone just for decoration? Come on, let’s go make a snack-run bet against the other class later. Huh?"
"When have you ever seen Go Young-in answer right away?"
It wasn’t Go Young-in who replied, but Son Jeong-hoon. Unlike the words, everyone was smiling.
"You’ve been stuck in the practice room so much lately that you barely even come out. If not now, when are you gonna do it? And now that I’m thinking about it, I’m pissed again. Use your head a little, just like Son Jeong-hoon, okay? A little tact."
What a tenacious bastard.
He couldn’t even count how many times he’d seen Kyeon In-woo greet him like that by now. Tens? Hundreds? Maybe more than that.
It was an irritatingly persistent bond.
Before the Reset, when Go Young-in entered middle school, he had first met Kyeon In-woo as a classmate in the same homeroom.
Back then, Kyeon In-woo and Go Young-in had a lot in common.
They were both lively, social, and liked staying active. They were also interested in going places and having new experiences.
Beyond that, they fit together in so many ways that it was only natural they ended up becoming close.
They stuck together all through middle school, and by some luck, they entered the same high school and got to know Son Jeong-hoon.
Right. We were pretty close, and we spent most of our school days together.
Even before Go Young-in finished his military service and went through that damned Reset, if he had to pick the friends he was closest to, they would have easily been in the top ten fingers of one hand.
Didn’t I drink my discharge celebration toast with these guys too?
And still. Not like before, but still, they were friends.
...Probably.
After the status window appeared, Go Young-in’s life had gone to hell.
Restrictions piled up on his speech and behavior, which pushed him further away from other people, and it had become routine for him to say something wrong after mistaking something from a past round for the present and being treated like he was weird.
And that became even more devastating with people close to him than it ever was with strangers.
Without realizing it, Go Young-in had started talking less and less.
He couldn’t properly focus on everyday things anymore, school life included, let alone maintain the most ordinary friendships.
The forced singing and dance practice creaked on him like clothes that didn’t fit, and whenever he failed to meet the status window’s expectations, there was always a price to pay.
Maybe it was some damned butterfly effect, or whatever, but the world was absurdly delicate; if he so much as behaved a little differently, tiny things would start slipping out of alignment.
And every time, it was from those tiny shifts that the variables emerged.
As if to prove it, the more resets he went through, the more he began to feel a subtle distance from Son Jeong-hoon.
Son Jeong-hoon had been the kid who was already famous from the start as an idol trainee.
Before the Reset, the word idol had stuck in his mind, sure, but he’d always thought it was someone else’s world, so he had barely paid it any attention.
But once he got Reset, Go Young-in was forcibly turned into a trainee too, and during all those resets, Son Jeong-hoon had helped him a great deal.
He probably knew this side of the industry better than Go Young-in did, so he’d given him plenty of advice, and there were times he even covered the lessons himself under the guise of “know-how.”
Of course, all of that had become a thing of the past too.
Usually, this was how things were supposed to be. This was how relationships were supposed to go wrong in one way or another.
And yet there were things that didn’t change.
Unlike Son Jeong-hoon, who had started to grow slightly distant with each reset, Kyeon In-woo stayed oddly the same.
He didn’t know why. Was it just because the guy was simple?
It was strange that Kyeon In-woo kept showing up so stubbornly no matter how many times the Reset repeated itself.
That didn’t mean he was unhappy about it. It was just... strange.
He hadn’t been warm the way he used to be, either. Go Young-in had long since forgotten how to act like he used to.
As time went on, Go Young-in grew more and more skeptical about the idea of rebuilding a relationship from scratch every single time.
The fact that he was the only one who remembered all of it was hard enough to bear, and it also weighed on him that he wasn’t in a position to return to others what they gave him.
The widening gap between his present self and the memories he used to know kept frightening him, and he worried about how the people he had known before would receive the version of him that had changed.
At first he’d even gotten angry, asking why this had happened only to him, and he’d resented it too.
If only it had happened to someone else instead of me.
Idiot... the way he’d sunk into self-pity as though he were the only miserable person in the world was so disgusting it made him laugh.
Even he could tell he was getting stranger and stranger. He was hardly the kind of person anyone would want to stay close to.
So he assumed that this, too, would eventually become another relationship that would go wrong.
Knowing that, he started putting distance between himself and everyone else, deliberately turning dry, trying not to care anymore.
The memories he alone held with someone else became sharp knives that only hurt him, digging into old wounds and tearing them open.
Rather than waste his energy on empty expectations and emotional wear and tear while comparing everything to how it used to be, it was better to keep his eyes on the goal and run.
So he pushed people away, but then why?
...That easygoing bastard.
An annoying bastard. A hopeless bastard. A stubborn bastard. A bastard who knew nothing and still acted like a pain in the ass.
He should’ve changed like everyone else, like Son Jeong-hoon over there had. Then Go Young-in would have had no lingering attachments, no matter what.
And yet, paradoxically, he also felt relieved that at least one thing had remained unchanged.
At least in a situation like this, he wasn’t taking his friends away. So there was still something that stayed the same. There really was something that didn’t change.
The fact that something remained unchanged might have been the force that let Go Young-in hold himself together and keep going more than he’d realized.
The reason he stubbornly kept choosing the same school or the same company was probably similar.
At present, Go Young-in was still a minor, so there was no way he could decide things like moving or transferring on his own, and even if he went on to another school or signed with another agency, whatever was going to happen would happen regardless.
Was this what people meant by causality, or whatever that was?
Only the process, the outcome, and the incidental details changed.
Go Young-in himself had already become the cause.
In that case, it was better to follow a familiar route and, with as much information as possible, alter things in the direction that brought at least some benefit.
In the end, Go Young-in chose familiarity so that as few variables as possible would arise.
That was exactly why he was even more uneasy.
Because maybe, in the end, even this would change, until nothing was left to him. Because maybe it would go wrong because of him. Because maybe he would be the one to ruin everything. That was what scared him.
He’d said he wouldn’t expect anything, and yet here he was anyway.
Even to himself, it felt contradictory.
[Third Clause | A perfect idol must know how to quickly steady his mind even when his mental strength wavers.]
...Am I still not there yet?
How many more times would he have to repeat this before he could keep his composure without being shaken by the smallest thing?
Go Young-in shut his eyes slowly and drew in a breath, forcibly ignoring the uneasy stirrings in his chest.
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