The Day He Was Alive
The moment Kang Yiyul stepped into the practice room, my feet locked to the floor as if nailed there.
I had seen it, after all. A hand lying limp against cold asphalt. That bloodless, pallid face drained of every trace of life.
But the Kang Yiyul standing in front of me right now was alive.
Breathing. Moving. Sweating.
"Thank god......"
The words spilled out of me before I could stop them. Only then did the tension drain from my whole body.
He was alive. He was truly alive.
But the moment I exhaled in relief and let my gaze drop—
Huh?
A white cast was wrapped around his left arm.
My heart plummeted. Gratitude for his survival lasted all of two seconds before my eyes locked onto that arm and refused to let go.
"I got into a bit of an accident on the way here. Just got it treated and came back."
The practice room stirred.
"What? What kind of accident?"
"Are you okay?"
"You didn't get hurt badly, did you?"
But none of it reached my ears.
An accident? An accident, he says?
Kang Yiyul's body was the kind that lived a world away from injury. He'd even said it on the radio, laughing.
"I've never had surgery in my life."
...That was the kind of guy he was.
Something's wrong here.
Song In-hyuk's explanation of the survival show didn't register with me at all. It was too strange to wave off as a simple injury. In the past, this had never happened.
My mind began racing like mad.
What had changed from before?
One thing. Exactly one.
......The Danger Level.
The phrase flashed through my head.
Don't tell me—
What if he was alive, but still in danger?
[S: Danger Level represents the probability of an accident occurring.]
[S: Until the Danger Level reaches 0, an accident may occur at any time.]
As if confirming that this was the answer, the status window flickered to life right before my eyes.
Dammit—a curse so foul I hadn't even let it slip at the moment of my death rose up unbidden.
Danger Level was a matter of probability. As long as it wasn't zero, disaster could strike at any moment.
And the target of that disaster was Kang Yiyul.
Song In-hyuk, the man from a major agency, had a habit of imitating the cranes while being nothing but a sparrow himself.
The wall of colorful star-shaped blinds filling one side of the practice room was one such example—a monument to his ambition to build an iconic studio like some company's famous "cloud blinds."
The aesthetics, honestly.......
He was clearly the one responsible for dyeing Kang Yiyul's hair that peroxide blonde, too.
But right now, even those dazzling stars couldn't catch my eye—because the moment the survival show announcement ended, group dance class had begun.
"Alright, from count eight—"
Everyone moved in unison at the trainer's cue.
Everyone except me.
When I raised my arms, my feet tangled. When I turned my head, I fell behind the beat. My dancing was worse than a malfunctioning robot.
I'm losing my mind here.
Among the crowd reflected in the mirror, I was the only one dancing to a different song entirely.
This is bad. Really bad.
Knowing the rhythm and getting your body to follow it were two completely different problems.
"Again."
I messed up again.
Cold sweat trickled down my spine.
"Seongwoo, you're going to crash into someone!"
"Seongwoo, look forward!"
"Seongwoo, left foot—no, right foot!"
My head drooped on its own.
"I'm sorry!"
I'd lost count of how many times my name had been called.
"Ha, seriously."
"With a body like that, why would anyone want to be an idol?"
From the back, I could hear them laughing at me openly.
"He's going to get slaughtered on air."
Well, they weren't wrong.
Excuse me, if I'd been able to dance from the start, I'd have debuted as an idol ages ago.
That was exactly why, before my regression, I'd turned down idol offers even after receiving stacks of business cards.
"Once more from the top."
Then.
"......Excuse me."
I turned at the low voice.
Kang Yiyul. His expression was far from friendly.
"Stop trying to follow every single movement."
Colder than I'd expected.
"S-sorry, what?"
Kang Yiyul jerked his chin toward the space behind him.
"Ugh, just get behind me."
My brain short-circuited for a second.
Did Yiyul ever talk like that?
The Yiyul I knew before the regression always wore a smile, and his voice was nothing but gentle.
But now—
"You keep making us stop because of you, hyung."
Ah.
"......I'm sorry."
My head bowed reflexively.
That's our Yiyul. He only ever speaks the truth.
...The truth that got me punched.
His voice had been brutal.
And yet, somehow—
Nice.
...What?
Wait, hold on.
My brain slammed on the brakes.
Get a grip, Yuseongwoo.
But I had never heard this tone from him—not on broadcasts, not at fan signings. Low, dry. This was the rarest of rarities: his genuine, unfiltered voice.
"Just watch my legs from behind."
"Yes!"
"Forget the upper body. Match the footwork first."
The music restarted.
This time, I watched only Yiyul's legs, just as he'd said.
One, two—
"Oh—"
For the first time, I hit the beat.
It had probably been nothing more than an offhand tip born of pure frustration on his end, but for me, it was, truly and literally, a Yuseongwoo-customized solution.
When it comes to observing Kang Yiyul, I'm a professional, after all.
One single movement of Yiyul's did more for me than ten of the trainer's explanations.
"Seongwoo's finally keeping up. Good, moving on to the next move!"
"Yes!"
It wasn't perfect, but at least I was no longer a liability.
"That's how you do it."
The tone was still bone-dry, but it was my first compliment of the day.
I'm absolutely writing a diary entry tonight before bed.
"Yes sir! Thank you so much!"
"You don't have to be so formal......."
I nodded my head furiously, trying to hide the sheer, overwhelming gratitude threatening to make me lose my mind. At the violence of that nodding, Kang Yiyul let out a small laugh. And in that instant, this room became the place where I had first laid eyes on Kang Yiyul.
Before my regression, there came a day when I suddenly couldn't write songs anymore.
No, "couldn't" didn't even cover it. No matter how hard I wrung my brain, it was an empty shell.
Of all times, it happened just as my name was starting to circulate as a producer. Offers were pouring in, and I couldn't produce a single line of melody.
It was a horrific slump.
I tried bungee jumping. I drank myself blind. I ran down rain-soaked streets without an umbrella.
Nothing worked. Not one thing.
It was the first thing in my life I'd ever truly wanted, so the loss that arrived without warning cut all the deeper.
That day too, under the pretense of hunting for inspiration, I was wandering the streets.
And then, by pure chance, I caught a live stage by Impacter.
There was hardly an audience. Nine out of ten people walked past without so much as a glance—and who could blame them, given the scale of the stage?
I was no different.
What is this chaotic noise of a song?
Just as I was turning away, that vicious fluorescent-yellow hair caught my eye.
My first impression was simple.
A ping-pong ball.
The hair flying through the air was, precisely, the exact color of a ping-pong ball.
It was an outdoor stage under the blazing midsummer sun, the heat of the asphalt rising in waves—and even so, that boy danced while smiling.
Sweat streamed down his face, his hair was soaked through, yet every single movement pulsed with life.
And in that moment—
Boom. Rat-a-tat—
Something burst open in my head. A melody. A brand-new melody.
I yanked out my phone and scribbled notes down like a madman, hands trembling with desperation.
For the first time in six months, a song was born.
That day, I went back to my studio and finished an entire track. And I thought that terrible slump was finally over.
......But it wasn't.
I knew it instinctively. If I wanted to write again, I had to see his stage again.
From that point on, I hunted for him like a woman possessed.
It was no easy task. Everything from figuring out what that ping-pong ball's name even was, to tracking down the schedule of Impacter—a group already circling the drain.
Fan signings were never part of the plan, to begin with.
What would two grown men even have to say to each other?
All I needed was to watch the stage and leave, and another melody would follow. But in a twist of pure comedy, the only schedule where I could see Kang Yiyul perform was a fan signing.
I'll never forget the existential vertigo of scraping together the entry method, applying, and arriving at the venue for the first time. I begged a staff member to let me just watch the stage without receiving a signature, and got a look that said what is this lunatic—and since the fan-sign time that other fans found painfully short felt like an eternity to me, there were more than a few occasions where I just kept muttering "oh, really?" until my turn ended and I climbed back down.
But Kang Yiyul was the same offstage as he was on. He endlessly asked how he could improve, what had fallen short in that day's performance—and, stage by stage, he genuinely evolved.
And he was always, unfailingly kind. When I came in after pulling all-nighters in the studio, he worried about the bloodshot eyes before anything else. When I caught a cold, he noticed the change in my voice before I did.
As those hours piled up, at some point Kang Yiyul stopped being a mere source of inspiration and became someone I wanted to root for.
"Seongwoo! Next move!"
The voice smacking me in the ear snapped me wide awake.
"......Yes!"
What stood before me wasn't the past. It was Kang Yiyul, right now.
The face steadying its breath between steps, the sweat-damp hair, the absolute focus in his eyes.
The instant I took it all in, I understood.
So that's why.
Why I became your fan.
It wasn't talent. It wasn't flash.
It was a person who gave everything no matter the circumstances. A person who never gave up, not even at the end. And that was why simply watching him fed my own inspiration.
I clenched my jaw.
I will turn Impacter into a top-tier idol group. Without fail.
Go Jaeseong, that son of a— I'm the one taking his spot, and with every ounce of the producing skill I've honed until now, I'm making sure this group never turns into a trainwreck. And that means dye jobs only when absolutely necessary, paying top dollar, to protect that precious scalp of his.
From erasing the ping-pong ball hair to sparing him that final moment I never want to relive even in memory—this time, it was my turn to change Kang Yiyul's life.
"Turn the lights off when you leave. I'm heading out."
With Han Sangyoon, Impacter's leader, as the last to go, only the two of us remained in the practice room.
Three days since my regression. Nothing had changed.
Kang Yiyul always stayed latest, practicing until the very end. And since Kang Yiyul stayed, naturally, I couldn't leave either.
Kang Yiyul never stepped away from the mirror.
Repeating the same moves over and over, he gnawed at choreography that already looked flawless, refusing to let go until he'd wrung it dry.
He was really that desperate, huh.......
I thought I knew. I knew how many times he'd been shoved back from the threshold of debut, and how starved that had made him.
But seeing it with my own eyes was another matter entirely.
The sight of him pushing himself even with a cast on his arm made my chest tighten until I couldn't breathe.
An injury that never existed before the regression. A variable stacked squarely against him.
It's because of me.
The guilt closed around my throat again.
I had no idea how much time had passed. It was long past one in the morning.
My eyelids drooped. Kang Yiyul's movements began to blur at the edges.
Thud!
But that wasn't my eyes playing tricks.
"......!"
Kang Yiyul had slammed into the wall. His footwork must have tangled.
I snapped fully awake.
I remembered the day Kang Yiyul fell in the past. The downpour had slicked the stage, and every time he slipped, I'd wanted nothing more than to sprint up there and catch him.
What I could only imagine back then, I could actually do now.
And yet I couldn't move. Because the Kang Yiyul in the mirror was wearing an expression I had never seen before.
A face contorted with frustration, fingers raking through his hair in sheer anguish.
"......"
My eyes stung. I whipped my head away.
The music started again. As if nothing had happened, Kang Yiyul began to dance once more.
"......Ha."
With that sigh, the emotions I'd been strangling down caved in. Once they broke loose, the tears wouldn't stop. They streamed down faster than I could wipe them away.
The fact that I was the one who killed Kang Yiyul was more than I could bear, and at last I couldn't hold out any longer—I pushed myself to my feet. I needed out of this room, right now.
Click.
The instant I opened the door—
"Huh......?"
Our eyes met.
A staff member, phone in hand. Her screen held Kang Yiyul's image—captured without opening the door, without making a sound, all to seize that raw, unguarded moment.
A heartbeat of stillness.
I scrambled to wipe my eyes, but it was far too late.
Her camera had, at some point, turned toward me.