A Different Kind of Language
"Hmm, the fees are set far too high compared to the trainers' credentials. It looks like there's a significant amount of investment cost to recover. I'm afraid it will be difficult to consider you as a candidate for the PGM Reserve Training Center."
"No, no! That's just the settlement statement we show to the trainees' parents. In reality, what was actually paid to the trainers was only about half of that..."
"Do you have accurate records of that?"
"Yes! Yes! I have the bank transfer records for the instructor fees, and a separate ledger I kept... Here, this is it!"
Manager Tak Hyeon-woo pulled out his phone, stopped the recording, and took a photo.
Click! Click!
"Wait... Huh? What are you doing..."
The CEO of Pine Entertainment, who had answered so diligently in hopes of securing a spot as a PGM Reserve Training Center, was reported to the police for fraud shortly after noon on Sunday.
And then,
That afternoon, a press conference was held by Cherry Pangpang, Pine Entertainment's only girl group.
Another charge was added to the CEO's list of crimes.
Furthermore, throughout Sunday, information about the trainers working at Pine Entertainment was leaked across various online communities for aspiring entertainers.
For Pine Entertainment—which had made a habit of sending random DMs to elementary and middle school students on social media to peddle training packages through borderline fraudulent contracts—a single day was more than enough to be completely dismantled.
Auntie Yeon-mi gave Cheol-jun a real-time play-by-play of the entire process, making him truly realize just how formidable she was.
So when he clapped his hands and went, "Whoa!" she was absolutely delighted.
In any case, Cheol-jun had to call her "Mom" fourteen times before she finally left.
It wasn't a particularly bad trade.
Arin was in a daze.
Her mother had received a call from the police.
They said Pine Entertainment had been reported for fraud and asked for her cooperation in the victim investigation.
I-Is this for real?
It didn't feel real.
Her mother and father had simply hugged her without saying much.
They, too, had suspected something was off all along but had kept quiet.
Back then, they had only signed the contract because she had stubbornly insisted on doing it.
She only found out later that they had planned to let her try her best, and then step in to resolve it the moment she said it was too hard.
She felt so incredibly grateful, yet the accumulated sorrow of the past months welled up all at once, and she burst into tears.
Lying in bed, Arin couldn't fall asleep.
She stared blankly at the dimly glowing plastic stars on her dark ceiling.
She didn't have to go to the practice room starting tomorrow.
She should have felt relieved.
Just yesterday, her only wish had been to escape that place.
And yet, a corner of her chest felt strangely empty.
That empty space was much larger than she expected.
But I hated going there...
Her steps had always been heavy.
She had hesitated in front of the practice room door every single time.
Not a day went by without her wanting to quit.
But it was strange.
Why do I feel like this?
She felt hollow.
So incredibly hollow.
Arin wiggled her fingers, then stopped.
It was now clear that the agency was a bad place.
It was clear they had deceived her from the very beginning.
It was clear that the trainers' praise and their claims of her having talent were nothing but lies to squeeze more money out of her parents.
In other words, when they first heard the song she made and told her she had a beautiful voice, showed promise, and possessed outstanding talent—it was all a lie.
Whether she actually had any talent or not was something she could no longer know.
The realization that every dream she had ever cherished was invalidated in an instant made her deeply sad.
Suddenly, she thought of Haeun.
Back when Haeun would hum the songs Arin made, or when they would burst into laughter while making up choreographies and collapse onto the floor... It had been so pure and simple back then.
Now, that same Haeun was at PGM.
Haeun stood in the very place Arin had lost.
...Oh?
A sudden wave of emotion surged within her.
Back then, when she had entered an agency first, had Haeun felt this way too?
She had been too exhausted by the agency to think about it before, but now, a sudden pang of jealousy hit her.
When she first received that DM, she had run straight to Haeun to brag about it excitedly.
She couldn't quite remember Haeun's expression back then.
Looking back, she had been so caught up in her own excitement that she hadn't spared a thought for Haeun's feelings.
She had bragged about it every single day they met.
Even so...
That didn't mean she didn't resent the things Haeun had done afterward.
But now, she could understand those feelings just a little bit.
Because she was feeling the exact same way now.
Ah! I don't know!
Arin pulled the blanket over her head and buried her face.
It was an emotion she couldn't possibly untangle.
The inner world of an eleven-year-old girl was incredibly complex and turbulent.
"That's interesting. You're saying his attitude in class is good?"
Go Chang-ho nodded at the words of his junior, Yoo Min-seok.
He took a sip of his canned beer before speaking.
"His eyes are sparkling. But there's something almost chilling about his gaze. How should I put it? It feels like he's evaluating me, thinking, 'Ah, so that's how he teaches.' You've seen plenty of gifted kids. The others aren't like that, are they?"
Yoo Min-seok thought of the kids who came to the university's gifted center every week.
He nodded immediately.
Advanced learning aside, those kids naturally had high comprehension levels. If the class got even slightly boring or if they were already ahead of the material, they would quickly lose focus and start fidgeting.
"But are you really not going to enter him into any math competitions?"
"Well, if he wants to, I'll let him. Looking at his after-school sign-ups, he did apply for Gifted Math."
"Sigh, I really don't get it. Is that enough? Doesn't he try to learn more? Usually, gifted kids get hooked on math first..."
"That's only because society's measurement systems are tailored to mathematics, making it easy to evaluate. Perhaps even at this very moment, there are far more geniuses in various fields that can't be measured by math. Math isn't everything in this world."
"Look who's talking. Aren't you the guy who represented South Korea at the IJMO for three consecutive years? You were absolutely obsessed with math back then, hyung."
Go Chang-ho crinkled his nose.
"Because that was the only way I could clearly prove I was smart. I was actually a pretty good writer back then, too. But nobody acknowledged that. They just said, 'Oh, he's a deep thinker, quite mature for his age.' Even now, when I look back at the things I wrote then, I surprise myself. Who knows? If I had poured my soul into writing back then, maybe I would've won a Nobel Prize in Literature by now."
"That's a stretch."
"Yeah, fair enough."
The two chuckled.
They clinked their beer cans together and gulped them down in unison.
Wiping his mouth, Go Chang-ho shook his head.
"Anyway, I've only watched him for five days, but I can't pin him down. When he plays with the other kids, he's a child through and through. But when he stood his ground against Class 2's homeroom teacher, it was chilling. And when I saw him play Baduk with Si-woo, I was practically filled with respect."
"Man, hearing all this makes me really want to meet him and teach him myself."
"Every day is incredibly dynamic. I'm already looking forward to what will happen next week."
"Well, now I'm curious too."
Go Chang-ho shrugged, feeling a strange sense of pride, and grinned.
And the next day.
Go Chang-ho's eyes widened as he checked the finalized after-school class schedule.
He dropped Gifted Math for... Piano?
It was a completely unexpected subject.
He truly hadn't seen this coming.
So suddenly?
Go Chang-ho blinked in a daze.
Throughout Sunday, Cheol-jun had analyzed the concept of music down to its very core.
The idols he had learned about thanks to Arin were impressive, but the resonance that music itself provided was incredibly fascinating.
Music had a structure.
Rhythm, scales, harmony.
When analyzed, they could all be expressed as mathematical formulas.
Why the intervals of Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Ti-Do were spaced the way they were, and why certain combinations of chords sounded pleasing to the ear—it could all be explained through frequency ratios.
Whenever he encountered something he didn't understand, applying mathematics usually helped outline the concept.
After all, mathematics was the easiest thing in the world to Cheol-jun.
At first, music seemed like just another language of mathematics.
However, even knowing all the frequency ratios, it failed to explain why some music pierced straight to the heart while other songs simply drifted by.
The structures were identical, yet the feelings they evoked were entirely different.
This was the most intriguing part.
That was why, at the last minute, he had changed his after-school class from Gifted Math to Piano.
The piano was the most intuitive instrument for physically expressing the structure of music with one's own hands.
He had briefly considered the guitar, but decided on the piano because he figured it would take too long to produce a proper sound on a guitar.
If the class had been full, he would have had to settle for something else, but fortunately, there were plenty of empty spots.
This was despite classes like Conversational English, Creative Math, Gifted Math, and Essay Writing being completely packed, even though they had much larger capacities.
I guess the other kids really love math and essay writing.
In any case, Cheol-jun trotted toward the music room for his very first after-school class.
The piano class was held on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
His first lesson!
Cheol-jun was in high spirits.
It was the first time in his life he had taken an interest in music, and there was an immense amount of things to learn in this field.
Moreover, the fact that he couldn't just read and understand it, but had to physically practice to truly grasp it, was incredibly appealing.
He had listened to music all day Sunday, but there were thousands, tens of thousands—no, countless more songs in the world.
It was a truly vast universe.
He was filled with anticipation.
With a wildly pounding heart, he slid open the music room door.
"...Oh?"
Cheol-jun beamed.
"Hi, Arin!"
"...Hi."
Cheol-jun scurried over and sat down next to Arin.
Arin narrowed her eyes and looked at him.
The boy was acting a bit strange.
He was always a bit odd, but this was different.
He was just sitting there, smiling to himself.
"...What's wrong with you?"
"My heart is pounding!"
"...What?"
Arin flinched in surprise.
Staring at Cheol-jun as he sat in front of the piano, Arin blinked blankly.
Huh...?
Shifting her gaze slightly, she saw that the teacher standing next to the piano wore a similar expression.
The few other kids in the music room were also completely frozen in a daze.
Having finished his performance, Cheol-jun scratched his head sheepishly and chuckled.
"Wow, playing it in real life is actually pretty hard... Hehe."
At the boy's muttered words, the music teacher swallowed hard.