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I knew about the Wooga-dol audition.
I'd even seen it.
What? Didn't I say I was over on Rabbit TV following Lucy when the Wooga-dol audition was happening? Was that a lie?
Ah, no. I, Seo Min—well, Seo Min-ah now—but either way, I live by the motto of sincerity and honesty.
It wasn't a lie. I did watch it—just not the live broadcast. It was a compilation of the finalists' stages.
Back when Lucy transferred, the "Pangea TV Virtual Song Ideal Type World Cup" was basically mandatory content, so I got force-fed the whole thing. Most of the clips in that World Cup were from the Wooga-dol audition stages, and thanks to that I learned a lot about the virtual streamers who'd transferred before Lucy.
In the end, the stage that caused the biggest stir wasn't the so-called final Stage 4—it was Stage 1.
And the star of that stage didn't even make the final cut.
It was a pretty unusual situation. Normally, with the kind of audition shows we watch on TV, the finalists are supposed to be the protagonists, and the narrative is supposed to flow smoothly toward them. Maybe that was why, after the finalists were selected, there was a fair amount of noise—rumors that the winners had already been decided before Stage 4 even happened.
No one could see inside Ssa-yo's head, so it all fizzled out into conspiracy theories. Still, plenty of people quietly believed them.
Well, none of that has anything to do with me. What matters is the judging criteria.
The faces of the finalists I remembered. The comments the judges made every time they evaluated a song, and the patterns in those evaluations. Analyze those carefully enough, and you get a compass that keeps you from getting lost even deep in the mountains.
Most of the finalists had vocal tones and techniques that fit K-pop. Especially Kyu-rings and Jiho. Berry wasn't bad either.
You could say the whole thing came down to how people interpreted the premise of a "virtual idol audition." Streamers with a subculture base who'd applied putting the weight on "virtual" all got wiped out without a single survivor. Only applicants with idol-adjacent technique, tone, or the potential for it made it to the end.
Considering that Jerry from Novel Entertainment—who sat as a judge and would handle the members' vocal training after the final lineup was set—mainly trained girl groups at the company, that theory only got more solid. Jerry's song evaluations leaned that way too.
I'd read the organizer's intentions.
Honestly, that wasn't all my own doing. It was the database that had been stacking up on Pan-beo-gal long before Wooga-dol even started. One bored day before my regression, I'd just typed "Wooga-dol" into the search bar and hit click. That alone got me a mountain of information, and I synthesized all of it to prepare for today's stage.
In the end, the most important thing is storage. A song only exists in the moment you hear it—but a story stays in your head forever.
The streamer who could be called the protagonist of Wooga-dol Stage 1 was exactly that kind of case. Unfortunately, for someone like me who'd only been streaming for a month, that approach was completely out of reach.
So I went with the next best option.
If you don't have a story, it comes down to a pure vocal fight. But there are a lot of factors that influence that fight.
Just singing well isn't enough. Song selection that accounts for the listener's taste. How polished you are on that particular song. How well the song suits your own tone. That's why auditions and competitions are so hard—there are too many complex variables to consider.
So I took the information I'd gathered before my regression and marched straight to a vocal trainer.
Why stress yourself out overthinking it? Just throw a ton of money at a professional and let them handle it.
I fed the trainer everything I knew about the judges' tastes and evaluation standards. From that data, we generated a song list. Then we pulled songs that suited my tone and found the intersection. The song that came out of that process got carved down, over and over, through two solid months of steady work.
The best possible song selection, and two months of built-up proficiency on it. Even someone who sang better than me would only have had about a week to prepare for the audition. Could they really compare? And mine was a song a pro had refined with me one-on-one?
I stepped onto the stage with my head held high. As far as I was concerned, I had every right to be confident about the two songs I'd spent two months preparing. I'd even planned out the presentation in advance.
"Hello. I'm Seo-a, a virtual streamer on day thirty-five of my debut. I'll go straight into the song."
"Huh?"
"Uh… all right. If that's what you want, let's hear the song first."
I boldly skipped the self-PR and went straight to singing. It was a way of snatching the initiative away from the judges—but it was also a deliberate choice to reframe the image of virtual streamer "Seo-a" that I'd built since debut.
The most powerful way to move people, or to stun them, is through a twist.
The playful talk and antics I'd always shown my viewers. If you said "virtual streamer Seo-a," people knew she danced well and had maybe sung one subculture track—that was about it. And now that same person was standing in front of twenty-five thousand viewers with a seriousness no one else on that stage had matched. Viewers who knew me would be tilting their heads, thinking, Wait… is this actually Seo-a?
I'd even matched my avatar's outfit so the lyrics would hit a little harder. A pure white blouse and clean jeans. Some people might call it overinvestment, say I was making a fuss over nothing—but I'd done every preparation I could, and given it everything I had.
All of it, to change a future that had ended in tragedy.
The familiar intro I'd heard to death over two months began to play, and the song started.
The day I first saw you in a photo
January thirty-first, ninety-nine
It was a song that had exploded in popularity with its 2020 remake. Melancholy lyrics that still shone with a quiet beauty. Suddenly the endless loop of lessons flashed through my mind.
To really bring out the flavor here, the pronunciation of "nae" is crucial. But Seo-a, you keep cutting it short. Hmm? Is it a breath support issue?
Days spent repeating the same passages hundreds of times, fixing every single syllable into a pronunciation that fit the song. Places that needed to be short, places that needed to be long, and sometimes vague talk about emotion and expression. Because of that work, something as clumsy as stage nerves couldn't shake me.
You made me the happiest person in the world
I love you so much
Every line of the lyrics felt like it was being delivered to someone truly loved. That was why it pulled me in even deeper.
The spotlight flooding the stage. The camera angles connecting me to countless viewers. The judges' eyes looking down at me from above. And the song was already racing toward the highlight.
I knew I would love you
On the day we first met
Lyrics that could mean so many things. To pull the emotion of this part up from the depths, I thought of Lucy.
That day, three years ago. The moment I first heard Lucy's singing on YouTube—that was when all of this began. Distant memories, still glowing softly. Because things could never be the same as they were then, they felt all the more precious, all the more longed-for.
That time, I'll hold on
Just like you
The ending arrived before I knew it. I realized I'd been gripping the mic too hard without noticing, and lifted my head for a moment.
That was when I saw the chat window going completely berserk.
I pulled my eyes off the chat and looked straight at the judges.
Jerry was the first to speak.
"Honestly, I was really surprised. I genuinely didn't expect a performance this polished to show up. And maybe it's the outfit? It matched the lyrics in this subtle way that made it even easier to get immersed. Plus that feeling of treating every single note like it was precious—I loved that. I've talked too long. Obviously, it's a Pass from me."
It was the longest evaluation Jerry had given all day.
Next was Great Moon.
"I agree with a lot of what Jerry said. An outfit that matches the mood of the song. Did you plan all of that out when you chose it?"
"Yes."
"Wow. I like that. That answer settles it for me. Pass."
Two Passes. Qualification was already locked in.
But stopping here would feel incomplete. All Pass was still on the table.
"……"
Our eyes met. Was it just my imagination? It was nothing more than a polygon-chunk avatar, and yet the gaze felt as hot as locking eyes with someone in real life.
"Can you answer one thing for me?"
"Of course. Anything."
"There's really no past, right? Day thirty-five of streaming… just like you said at the start."
A little twinge of conscience. What Ssa-yo meant was probably a past as a broadcaster—but the truth was, I was a regressor with twenty-nine years of past all by myself.
Confessing honestly here to keep my conscience clean… yeah, right.
I put on a bright, easy smile and answered.
"If I've told any lies, I'll just be a man about it."
"…… I'll take your word for it. And congratulations. All Pass."
The moment I'd wanted so badly.
Ahem. And I didn't lie. I really am a man, after all.
I pushed the guilty conscience aside and beamed.
A glorious page decorating the Wooga-dol audition.
Beneath the cascading spotlight, I was sparkling.