I Shall Sing It Divinely.
"What do you mean, I'm playing my role well? Whatever do you mean?"
Since no one had told Jong-woo about the Devil's Editing, he was caught off guard and fumbled for a makeshift answer.
"Just—your look when the cameras roll. Your on-camera look."
Rembrary thought, That smells like a lie, but let the matter drop without pressing further.
PD Kim Murok eyed Jong-woo with a meaningful look, but true to form, he tactfully held his tongue.
Instead, he decided to have fun with Rembrary's manner of speaking.
"My, but Woo Yeon-woo speaks so sweetly, doesn't he? My nephew is eight, and he talks exactly like that."
"And what, pray, is wrong with my speech?"
At Rembrary's diction, which belonged more in an elementary school ethics textbook than on a variety set, Jong-woo bit his lip hard while Cathy laughed openly, a snort escaping him.
Even Sunwoo Sil, who had been trading barbs with Rembrary mere moments ago, burst out laughing.
Thanks to PD Kim Murok's appearance, everyone had mellowed and the mood had lifted considerably—but the PD was a busy man. With some twenty contestants eager to squeeze out even a moment of conversation with him, he couldn't linger here forever.
"I'll be expecting great things, Woo Yeon-woo."
PD Kim Murok clapped Rembrary on the back, then turned to Sunwoo Sil.
"As for Sunwoo Sil, well. He'll sweep the competition. No need to even check."
With that, he was off to greet the others.
Cathy, the only one who hadn't received so much as a greeting, darkened visibly, but Jong-woo was too busy fussing over Sunwoo Sil to notice.
Fortunately, Sunwoo Sil didn't pick another fight. He simply muttered, "Weird little bastard," and stalked off.
Rembrary spent one last moment comparing Sunwoo Sil's retreating back to the photo spread on his phone, then belatedly asked Jong-woo again.
"So he truly is the same person?"
"Same person. They just photoshop the hell out of it."
"What is this... 'photoshopping'?"
"It's editing photos to look better than you do in real life. Balancing your proportions, making your eyes bigger or smaller..."
"Ahh."
Rembrary understood at once.
Back in the world he came from, portraits were often painted so wildly unlike their subjects that the two bore no resemblance whatsoever.
Ordinarily it was mere self-indulgence and caused no trouble. But in royal marriages, a portrait that failed to match the flesh-and-blood person occasionally became a serious problem.
It happened because dynastic marriages were usually negotiated by diplomatic delegations carrying nothing but a portrait and a list of terms.
As High Priest, Rembrary presided over royal weddings, which meant this particular problem had given him his fair share of headaches.
"Why are you laughing?"
"Just remembering the old days."
"Is thy memory returning, then?"
A new contestant walked in right on cue, and Rembrary was able to deflect the question entirely.
Contestants trickled in one after another until two o'clock, and by the end, everyone was too busy exchanging greetings to keep track of anything else.
The managers huddled among themselves swapping business cards, while the contestants—whether they knew each other or not—shook hands and bowed in a cheerful free-for-all.
Even while trading business cards, Jong-woo kept stealing anxious glances at Rembrary.
Cathy would manage fine on his own, surely—but Rembrary never failed to set his nerves on edge.
Contrary to Jong-woo's worries, however, Rembrary mingled with the other contestants astonishingly well.
Truthfully, his kingly manner of speech and spotty grasp of common sense made him look like an eccentric, but judged purely on personality, Rembrary wasn't the least bit prickly.
Relieved, Jong-woo turned his attention to his own work, and Rembrary, wearing his gentlest smile, gradually built a rapport with the other contestants.
Then, in the middle of a lively conversation—
With a sudden pop, pop, pop, every light in the room went dark.
A small scream rang out.
Wondering what on earth was happening, Rembrary was still looking around in confusion when a single spot lit up again.
It was where PD Kim Murok stood, and a camera operator had taken position beside him.
"Welcome to Real 100% True Survival—Sing Survival!"
Only when PD Kim Murok flashed a grin and spoke did the lights come back on.
The contestants erupted into murmurs.
Rembrary flinched when he realized the camera operator was standing right beside him.
The person, acting as though nothing else in the room existed, trained the lens on Rembrary's face and nothing else. When Rembrary tilted his head, the camera captured that too.
He stole a glance at Cathy—yep, Cathy had one of those cameras glued to him as well.
As he stood there, PD Kim Murok's voice rang out again.
"You all came here thinking this was a preliminary meet-and-greet, and for that I sincerely apologize. We're starting right now."
Murmurs of disbelief spread in every direction.
When someone cried out, "Oh no, no! I'm barefaced right now!" laughter rippled through the room and the atmosphere eased considerably.
PD Kim Murok continued his explanation.
"As you've no doubt heard, the competition rounds will be held once every two weeks. We'll meet on a Monday like today, you'll receive your mission, spend one week preparing, and then face off the following Monday."
"..."
"As for how to decide the results—I've thought long and hard about what would be the fairest approach. Free online voting, social media voting, paid text voting, expert judges, audience judges..."
PD Kim Murok gave a sly smile.
"But the way I see it, if we use voting, the popular ones have the advantage; if we use judges, the veterans do. So we've decided to compare the streaming revenue of each contestant's competition track against their YouTube view revenue and crown a winner based purely on the numbers!"
Rembrary, understanding barely half of what had been said, stood there blankly—but the contestants around him groaned in protest.
The camera operator leaned in and filmed Rembrary's composure all the more closely.
"Revenue will be tallied over a one-week period, and winners and losers will be announced the following Monday. The losers, as I mentioned before, will serve as slaves—"
Another chorus of groans rose, but Rembrary, who had lived his whole life in a world of rigid social ranks, remained perfectly serene this time as well.
"The top seven winners will each get to command a loser as their slave for one day! However, no single winner may keep their slave for more than three hours. The losers need time to prepare for the next round, after all."
Someone muttered under their breath, "If you're not confident, might as well tank to last place and bank a full week of slavery for yourself."
Whether he'd heard it or not, PD Kim Murok pointed a finger in that direction and issued a warning.
"If you become a loser three times, you're automatically eliminated from the survival."
He traded a few more jokes, then bellowed:
"Your first competition mission—let's start with the basics! Take the same song and sing it your own way!"
As Rembrary stood blinking vacantly, the person who had been filming PD Kim Murok lowered the camera again.
PD Kim Murok dropped his emcee voice and laughed heartily, "Whew! Gave you all a scare, didn't I?" he asked the contestants.
While the others lodged their protests half in jest, Rembrary was herded by Jong-woo back into a huddle with Cathy.
* * *
"You're saying the cameras were rolling the whole time we were greeting people?"
Two strangers carrying compact cameras had joined the group on the ride back to the van.
One was the woman who had shoved a camera in Rembrary's face for the entirety of PD Kim Murok's speech; the other was the man who'd been filming Cathy.
When one of them explained the situation, Jong-woo let out a groan of pure despair.
"I'm so sorry. The PD said it would come across more natural that way."
Jong-woo made a strangled noise. No wonder. Rembrary had been arguing with a senior as decorated as Sunwoo Sil and yet kept laughing breezily through it. He must have been in high spirits, thinking the scene would make great footage.
Rembrary, for his part, calmly climbed into the van as if none of it concerned him.
The woman who followed him in ended up seated across from Rembrary in the cramped van, and she hurried to introduce herself with a smile.
"Hello, I'm Park Eun-seon."
"Hello. I am Woo Yeon-woo."
Jong-woo, who had been watching Rembrary with bated breath, relaxed when he saw him greet her in a perfectly normal manner.
Once the van pulled away, Jong-woo asked the camera operator more detailed questions than before.
"So when exactly will you be filming?"
"We'll film your competition prep for one week. Then the competition itself, your reactions in the waiting room during the round, that kind of thing. During the week we wait for the results, we don't film."
"So one week on, one week off?"
"That's right. Then we start all over again—a new mission drops, we film you working on it, and so on."
"You're not filming us twenty-four hours a day, right?"
Jong-woo asked, sneaking a look at Rembrary.
"Of course not. Just let me know in advance when you're planning to work on something, and I'll show up with my camera ready."
The moment she finished speaking, Eun-seon quickly pulled up her number on her phone and held it out.
"Here's my number."
After Jong-woo saved Eun-seon's number, she held her phone out to Rembrary as well.
Fortunately, there was already precedent—he'd saved the members' phone numbers—so Rembrary was able to do so naturally enough.
Eun-seon muttered, "Oh, what else was there..." and picked up her explanation again.
"Oh, right! Even outside of competition prep, if there's anything from your daily life—anything you'd like to show on camera, really—just tell me. We'll film it first, and if it seems good, it'll probably make the broadcast."
"Then could we call you when Yeon-woo and Cathy are with the other members, not just the two of them? For group appearances..."
"Of course!"
When Eun-seon readily agreed, Jong-woo smiled with satisfaction.
Eun-seon glanced between Jong-woo, Cathy, and Rembrary, then quietly raised her camera and asked,
"Going back on the record now."
As the camera started rolling again, Jong-woo awkwardly dropped his gaze to the floor.
Cathy, too, seemed weighed down by the camera plastered at his side.
The only one unbothered, once again, was Rembrary.
As High Priest, he had on occasion traveled with a retinue of dozens of attendants. He had lived his whole life with every eye in the room fixed on him, so something like this hardly registered.
Eun-seon marveled that this problem child who had recently dominated the real-time search rankings seemed, at the very least, born for the camera.
Meanwhile, Jong-woo wriggled his fingers awkwardly, then opened his mouth as though reading from a script.
"So, Yeon-woo, Cathy. How are you two planning to sing your competition songs?"
Cathy, far more camera-savvy than Jong-woo, answered smoothly right away.
"We're supposed to sing it our own way, so that means arranging the original track, right?"
"Couldn't it go either way, though?"
"Let me play the song first."
Rembrary watched in silence as Cathy fiddled with his phone.
A moment later, a song in a foreign language began playing from the phone.
Rembrary couldn't understand a single word and furrowed his brow.
Cathy, on the other hand, evidently knew the song—he bobbed his head along, humming the tune.
When the song ended, Cathy turned quickly to Jong-woo.
"I'm doing mine musical-style."
Then he asked Rembrary, "And you?"
Jong-woo had been about to tell Rembrary to sing it as close to the original as possible.
He figured Rembrary's clear, pristine tone would actually serve him better in a head-on, straight-down-the-middle performance.
Besides, Rembrary would struggle just to memorize the lyrics in a week. Realistically, there didn't seem to be time for anything as ambitious as an arrangement.
"Yeon-woo, why not go with the original? Since nobody else will be doing that, it might actually be the safe play."
But Rembrary had already made up his mind the moment he heard the words sing it your own way.
Rembrary shook his head and spoke.
"I shall sing it in the manner of a choir... I mean, of a choir."
"Like Sister Act?"
Startled by her own boldness in butting into the conversation, Eun-seon exclaimed from the side, "That's actually a great idea, though?"
But Rembrary shook his head again.
"I shall sing it in the manner of a sacred, formal choir."
Eun-seon blinked in confusion. "I'm sorry—what?"
She hesitated, then asked cautiously, "Do you... by any chance, not know the lyrics?"
"I do not."
The moment Rembrary answered with perfect composure, Cathy chimed in from beside him.
"It's a song that goes: I've got loads of money and everything a man could want, and I'm so goddamn handsome, and everyone loves me and only me, and your lover is gonna be my future lover..."
"!"