Causing a Broadcast Disaster
A terrible broadcast accident — only the second in the history of South Korea — had just occurred.
People murmured as they stared at the stage.
The PD thrust out his chin, waving his hand in circles, and finally, unable to contain his fury, drew a finger across his throat.
The signal was clear: do it right this instant, or you're cut.
The manager clutched his head in both hands and let out a silent scream.
An idol — who was supposed to dance his heart out on stage, wringing sweat from his very pores to show how hard he was trying.
An idol — who, even with his livelihood on the line and his toes curled in cringe, was supposed to break out with aegyo like, "Huh? Did you dream of me last night?"
An idol — who, even if he hated fried chicken, was supposed to gnaw on a drumstick with a blissful smile on his face!
And yet there he stood, frozen stiff on a live broadcast stage.
He didn't even manage his on-camera smile.
He didn't fake a leg injury, didn't even sway and wobble for effect.
He was, quite literally, just standing there.
No wonder the broadcast staff, the fans, the fellow members, and the viewers were all having a collective meltdown.
Some idols do get fed up with the grind and phone in their performances — that much was true.
But even they at least shuffled around the stage a little.
This idol, however, simply stood rooted in place, so the panic was inevitable.
Worse still, the very author of this catastrophe wore an expression of perfect, bottomless serenity —
as if the music thundering loud enough to split eardrums simply couldn't reach him.
His figure — if you photoshopped him out of the frame and looked at him alone — might, at a glance, have looked almost like a saint.
And in truth, this idol was a saint — more precisely, a High Priest.
A High Priest who had suddenly, inexplicably, become an idol.
Nine hours before the incident.
The man responsible for detonating a bomb in a Korean broadcasting station was screaming at a mirror.
"Wh-who is this! What is this!"
He was in a cramped twelve-pyeong dormitory room, where the members were hurriedly brushing their teeth, using their feet to peel off their tracksuit pants.
It was natural for a person to scream and panic after seeing something so shocking.
And yet the members only glanced at him sidelong and spat out remarks like:
"There he goes, spouting nonsense again."
"Ugh, that's not funny anymore."
"Quit staring at yourself in the mirror, you lunatic."
They were an idol group so long-submerged that their nickname was "the Submarine," and years of obscurity and mockery had worn their relationships threadbare and loose.
With their contract period ending soon, they needed to produce results no matter what — and here one of them was, doing something bizarre in front of a mirror. Of course they were irritated.
Besides, he had always been prone to strange behavior now and then.
So even in the car ride to the salon, while his hair was being styled and his makeup done at the salon, and all the way up to the waiting room at the broadcasting station, nobody paid him any attention.
Not even when he kept asking, over and over, "Who are you people?" "Where is this?" "What on earth is going on?"
If they had paid just a little more attention, they would have noticed that his complexion had gone deathly pale, that his hands were trembling uncontrollably.
That he was genuinely, gravely shocked — and that his eyes kept darting anxiously around the room.
"What's wrong with you?"
The first person to sense something off was a stylist who came in to check the outfits, forty minutes before rehearsal.
"Hey, are you feeling sick or something?"
The stylist asked with a frown at his ghastly color — but most of the members were out, busy exchanging greetings up and down the waiting-room corridor.
The only member left in the room with him was the one who was on bad terms with him.
"Leave him alone. He's always like that."
Glancing at 'him' hugging his knees, the member sneered and looked away.
"You okay? Did you eat something bad?"
When the stylist asked again, 'he' looked up at her with trembling pupils and posed the question he'd already asked dozens of times.
"Where is this?"
The stylist gave a little laugh and answered,
"Where do you think? The waiting room, obviously."
"Then who — who am I?"
'He' pressed again, and the stylist answered flatly.
"You're Woo Yeon-woo. An idol."
The member beside her added, dripping sarcasm,
"A nuclear-submarine idol."
But 'he' understood neither the member's chatter about submarines nor the word idol.
The 'him' the stylist had called "Woo Yeon-woo" clenched his fists and stared at the wall with shaking eyes.
He had no choice.
Because 'he' was not Woo Yeon-woo.
'He' was not a member of Wild Animal, the obscure idol group mocked as a submarine, nor some clueless young man given to endless odd antics.
'He' was Rembrary — the High Priest hailed as possessing the greatest divine power in recorded history.
What on earth has happened to me?
Rembrary thought blankly, clasping his hands tightly together.
He had been called a living miracle and had performed every miracle conceivable — but this situation alone was beyond accepting.
In the blink of an eye, he had become a complete stranger.
His age looked roughly the same, a young man of similar years — but apart from that, everything from hair color and eye color down to the very shape of his features belonged to someone else entirely.
The surroundings were utterly unlike the world he had lived in, and the people wore strange clothes.
The people behaved as though they knew him, calling him "Woo Yeon-woo the idol."
When he insisted he was no such person, they wouldn't listen, and hauled him off into some bizarrely shaped building.
It was impossible to fathom what could have happened.
Have I entered another person's body?
In that room lined with mirrors on every side, Rembrary managed to accept a fragment of his situation.
He also checked his divine power again — the same power he had verified hundreds of times inside that strange carriage.
Fortunately, it was as full as ever.
When he cut a wound into his hand and healed it with divine power, the energy he had expended flowed right back, replenished.
Unlike the shell of his body, his abilities remained unchanged.
But why he had been thrust into this situation —
He cast his mind back one final time, recalling what he had experienced.
Someone had succeeded in summoning the Demon King, and a black shadow had swallowed the vault of heaven.
A translucent hemispherical dome had appeared over the city, and the black shadow had engulfed that dome.
The sun vanished; the city went dark.
People screamed, and from the darkened ground, grotesque fiends began to erupt.
Only one man was fit to handle the situation: Rembrary.
He had begun chanting, prepared to give his very life to resolve it —
Yes. At the very end, he thought he had heard a chilling snicker.
He seemed to remember words as well.
"I can't leave the two of you like that."
And then he had blinked — into this.
Have I been the one deceived?
Rembrary clenched his fist, his face darkening.
Or perhaps whoever had summoned the Demon King had flung him somewhere else entirely.
To the farthest possible distance, to somewhere unknown.
Damnation.
Rembrary ground his teeth and clenched his fist tighter.
He could easily imagine how the situation back home had shifted in his absence, and the thought made him frantic with worry.
Yet he couldn't even fully give himself over to that sorrow —
because someone was banging on the door, shouting in an irritated voice, "Wild Animal! Wild Animal! You're up!" —
and the young man who had been fiddling with a strange black contraption on the sofa leapt to his feet, grabbed Rembrary by the nape, and hauled him up.
"Let's go. It's our turn."
"Just a moment—"
"Now."
Rembrary flailed his hands, but the young man simply dragged him along, indifferent to whether he kept his footing or not.
Once they were out in the corridor, he could see the other young men who had ridden the cramped carriage with him, bouncing around in place.
"Hurry, hurry!"
"Ugh, come on already!"
"He's the one dawdling!"
A brief commotion erupted.
By the time he came back to himself, Rembrary was standing on a bizarre, enormous stage.
The young men who had shoved him in had formed up in ranks, and then a song of staggering volume thundered out.
What is this?
Rembrary stood there dazed, watching the young men suddenly start dancing with wild abandon.
As he watched them weave back and forth, dancing busily, someone wearing strange dark glasses over his eyes pointed a finger straight at him and bellowed,
"What do you think you're doing?! Do it properly!"
At that, the young men on stage began grabbing the stock-still Rembrary and yanking him this way and that.
And when the music ended, they hauled him back to that same waiting room from before.
The moment Rembrary arrived, the bespectacled young man — the one who had ridden the carriage with them but hadn't joined them on stage — blew up at him.
"Woo Yeon-woo, can't you do anything right? You haven't even surfaced yet and you've already caught star sickness? I told you rehearsal matters just as much as the live stage! I told you to run your feet ragged to find even one more flattering angle — did I say that or not?!"
Of everything the bespectacled young man said, the only things Rembrary could understand were the words — not the sentences.
"Star sickness... Have I fallen ill?"
"Look at this guy, doing his weird concept act again."
The bespectacled young man clicked his tongue and gave Rembrary's shoulder a pat, firm enough to feel but not to hurt.
"Don't. Don't do that! You're the visual member — why are you pulling this nonsense?! All you have to do is stand there and smile sweetly! That's the best thing you can do!"
"Visual member?"
Rembrary asked, bewildered, but no one bothered to explain.
Then, when Rembrary simply went on standing there like a statue, the bespectacled young man furrowed his brow and asked,
"What's wrong? Are you actually sick?"
When Rembrary nodded, the young man with yellow hair cut in.
"Come to think of it, he fell in the bathroom this morning and banged his head."
"Seriously?"
The bespectacled young man exclaimed in alarm.
Nothing actually hurt, but Rembrary nodded anyway.
The bespectacled young man let out a groan,
"Aigoo..."
and clutched his own head in both hands.
"And of all days, this happens. Unbelievable..."
Then he glared at Rembrary in exasperation — and abruptly walked out the door.
He didn't come right back.
Even later, after someone wearing a whistle around their neck appeared and announced,
"Wild Animal! Standby!"
he still hadn't returned.
Only when they had left the waiting room under orders to stand by and filed into some pitch-dark place did the bespectacled young man finally scurry back, delivering his warning to Rembrary:
"I asked them to put a chair on the stage. When you go up, just bow and then sit down there. Sit and just move your mouth. Got it? Don't you dare stand there frozen like you're dying."
"Understood."
"And that way of talking is weird, by the way."
The bespectacled young man grumbled, then gathered up the young men who had come in the same carriage and made them throw their arms around each other's shoulders for one final admonition.
"Listen up. This album might genuinely be your last. Got it? Only if you produce results this time will there be a next album. How long can you keep hearing the 'submarine' jokes, huh? We clawed our way into this position — so go out there and make sure the public remembers your faces."
The moment the shoulders were unlaced, a person wearing a long cord around their neck came up and urged,
"This way, please."
Someone stuck something strange in Rembrary's ear, then pressed a sticky pad onto his cheek.
Rembrary flailed his hands at the bespectacled young man, trying to say that he was in terrible pain, that his head ached, that there was something he absolutely had to say right now, that while he resembled Woo Yeon-woo he was not Woo Yeon-woo — but the other young men seized him, and once again he was shoved up onto the stage as if fleeing a fire.
The stage was vast, open, and hushed.
Countless people were visible before the stage, though for some reason they all looked oddly stiff.
Rembrary looked around blankly.
The chair!
Remembering the instruction to sit, he quickly scanned his surroundings — but the chair the bespectacled young man had promised was nowhere to be found.
"Just wing it!"
the young man pressed uncomfortably close beside him whispered.
"I do not know how to dance!"
The instant Rembrary roared those words, the exact same music from before began to play — and the young men on stage thrust out both hands in unison, striking a bizarre pose.