An Unforgettable Memory

B0 translated to a stat of 81 or higher, which meant that with a singing stat of 79, I needed to raise that number by two within nineteen days if I wanted to clear the Guide Mission.

The window wasn’t long, but anything in the seventies still sat on the lower end of overall ability, where the marginal gains ran high. Pour all nineteen days into vocal training and the mission shouldn’t be that hard to break.

There was a way to shorten the timeline even further, though. It leaned on luck to a degree — but it was also the kind of thing that could cover a missing stat in a single stroke.

“Traits first.”

So I prepared a street performance.

Near T Hospital, a small park had a modest space set aside for busking. “Stage” was generous — little more than a slightly oversized chair planted at the center of a crossing — but the fact that someone had marked out a place to sing at all was what mattered.

Singing here and unlocking the trait draw: that was today’s goal.

Not bad.

Objectively speaking, a 79 wasn’t a terrible score. C+ was the grade the game treated as trainee-level, and a high-mid 79 sat roughly on the border between amateur and professional — the point where you could almost make a living at it. After testing myself every which way, though, I still wasn’t good enough to hold a stage in a noisy, crowded place. My tone wasn’t bad, but I lacked volume, and the resonance in my chest was still small.

So I’d chosen somewhere relatively quiet that still saw plenty of foot traffic, somewhere I could see people up close. Standing here now, I was glad I had. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠A little past noon on a weekday, the park was full of people out for a walk — killing time, enjoying a rare stretch of stillness.

I pulled the acoustic guitar from the case on my back and cleared a little space around me. I’d learned guitar in my second year of middle school. After the one I’d used heavily in high school broke, I never picked one up again — and yet, somehow, the case had been wedged behind a stack of book boxes in my one-room apartment.

I’d been obsessed enough back then that a few songs still sat under my fingers, and after a hurried run-through, some of them had sounded decent enough to bring. Maybe it was the younger body; my fingers moved better than they had any right to.

A little far from idol territory, maybe.

What did it matter? I was going to use everything available to me. The moment I lifted the guitar, a few passersby glanced over with interest. Among them were people who had already parked their wheelchairs nearby and were waiting.

The kind of people with enough room in their day to wait if something’s worth watching.

The guitar was a prop to catch their eyes and a tool to build the atmosphere. I plugged into the amp that had been left set up and adjusted the volume. It didn’t need to be loud. I didn’t need a big crowd. What mattered wasn’t numbers — it was immersion.

Fewer people was better, even. Closer. Easier to focus on the stage.

What I was after was unlocking the Trait Draw. The mobile game I’d played, Idol Survival: The Beginning, was a training-and-management simulation that carried characters from trainee all the way to superstar, looping through the same branching points again and again. Content unlocked gradually as a character grew and met specific conditions, and when people judged whether you’d raised a character well, they cared more about traits than stats.

I remembered the unlock condition for the Trait Draw perfectly.

Unpacked, that vague phrase “unforgettable memory” meant ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠stage completion — how finished, how moving the performance was. High enough to actually move people. Converted into a number, that was exactly 90.

It was an idol sim, but like any gacha RPG, it had ranks, and each rank capped how far a stat could climb. The ranks weren’t about growth speed; they were about growth potential.

SR up to 90. SSR up to 95. UR up to 100.

Ninety was the hard ceiling for an SR character. The Trait Draw that opened only after you hit 90 was content that normally unlocked later in a run, once you’d progressed a fair way. But certain characters who started with a high rank and superior initial stats could unlock it early — as long as they met the stage-experience condition through busking, auditions, and the like.

I already meet the condition.

My singing and dance stats were miserable, but with a charm stat of 98, the system had no reason to block me. That didn’t mean nothing was wrong.

I still don’t know how charm actually works on a stage.

Singing and dance were fairly intuitive — how well you sang, how well you danced, with sub-scores for things like appeal and expression, but never straying outside the frame of “song” or “dance.” Charm, though, swallowed appearance, presence, charisma, and more. Honestly, I couldn’t define it cleanly. I’d been treating it as a composite measure of how many people you could captivate, but the truth was there was no clear shape or standard to grab onto.

Which was why I was worried. How was I supposed to use this charm stat?

In the game, a few taps of a finger had been enough. Now I had to build the stage myself. I couldn’t just sit there blank-faced, show people my features, and call it a performance.

So I’d prepared as thoroughly as I could while still keeping the form of a real show. I’d cut dance entirely rather than charge straight into my weakest wall. It didn’t suit the space, and the stat was so low that no amount of covering would keep the real skill from showing — and that would tank the completion score.

In the end I had to lean on singing, the only number that was even halfway decent, and even that fell well short of the threshold if I tried to carry the whole stage on voice alone. So I would sing, but I’d use the instrument to shrink how much weight the singing had to bear. On this stage, something else mattered more than the song.

An atmosphere that makes people want to keep this moment in their own memory.

My job was to help the listeners sink into their own feeling. The song only had to offer a small spark. Regardless of the performer’s skill, the audience would fill the performance with their own stories.

What that required was storytelling.

January air bit at my bare fingers, but I worked them warm as best I could. Today the cold had eased a little, and people who’d come out for a post-lunch walk weren’t hurrying back inside; they kept glancing over with interest.

Lucky there’s sun.

The park’s regulars were mostly patients, caregivers, visitors on hospital rounds, and staff. The pediatric ward was famous here; from the moment I stepped into the park, the high, bright laughter of children had been rising now and then around my ears.

“Hello. My name is Lee Han-hee.”

Preparations done, I lowered the mask that had been covering my face and met the eyes of each person who had waited, one by one.

“There’s a song I used to listen to a lot whenever I needed comfort. I’d like to play that for you today. I hope it can be a little comfort for everyone here as well.”

I drew a breath and set the chord with my left hand. It was the song I’d repeated to myself every night before sleep as a middle schooler — the one that had made me decide to learn guitar in the first place.

It was a song that played to the strengths of an acoustic guitar — easy on the ear, full of the particular feeling only wood and steel could give — and it didn’t demand spectacular technique. What mattered was how the lyrics were delivered.

It was an old song; almost anyone alive had crossed paths with it at least once. The original leaned on a heavy, soft male vocal, but I shifted the chord progression a little. Heavy reflection had its place, but I didn’t want the weight of frustration to feel any heavier than it already was, so I kept the arrangement lighter. Rather than force a thick low register that didn’t suit me, I stayed with the voice I actually had.

The guitar stretched out for a long stretch. Sometimes empty space says more than a full sentence.

I don’t know when she had come so close, but when my eyes met a child squatting in front of me to listen, a laugh slipped out of me before I could catch it and mixed into a light hum.

The original chorus was meant to be belted in full voice; I didn’t do that. Instead I mixed in a touch of falsetto, lifted a little higher, and took the force out of it. The audience was close enough to meet my eyes. I didn’t need to shout to get the words across.

What memory was the elderly couple holding hands tightly in their side-by-side wheelchairs pulling out of the past right now? How would the mother and child locked in each other’s arms remember this moment? Between people quietly wiping their eyes, the guitar kept flowing, soft and steady.

The window I’d been waiting for finally opened.

Traits could support stats or help with event progress. Sometimes you pulled something completely useless, but more often than not they were a benefit — partly because the chances to draw them were so few.

Every failed trait pull is fatal.

How a character’s traits landed usually decided the difficulty of the whole run.

Pull something like God of Variety (S) — Sense +80% or God of Acting (S) — Acting +80%, and regardless of rank, you’d just wasted a slot. Those had almost nothing to do with the core game loop. Near-total duds.

Energizer (A) — Fatigue −50% and Strong Mind (A) — Stress −50% weren’t bad, but they weren’t preferred either. Too many traits offered real gains; parking one of those on a limited slot felt like a waste.

Love the Camera! (A) — Presence in front of the camera +50% and Competitive Spirit (A) — Contest win rate +7% helped in competitions, so people liked them. Competitive Spirit especially became almost mandatory later on — one of the more broken traits in the game.

The absolute best, of course, were the ones ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠that raised stats directly. I Can Feel the Aura! (S) — Charm +3, Want to Keep Listening! (S) — Singing +3, Want to Keep Watching! (S) — Dance +3. Those shone brighter the deeper you got into a run, when stats got harder to push. Even an SSR could climb past its 95 cap and compete with URs if the right ones stuck.

I used to have a lot of fun with that.

A well-raised SSR and a mediocre UR could look almost the same on paper. Depending on the timing, an SSR’s total could even run higher — and be preferred.

A clean 95-95-95 with good traits was always easier to pilot than a 100-92-92.

Stack enough flat stat traits on the former and even an SSR could become the party ace overnight. Traits swung the balance hard enough to let a character punch above its birth rank, which was why a failed trait draw usually meant starting over. Otherwise you simply couldn’t keep up when users competed against each other.

That’s how important this is.

What I was aiming for, obviously, was Want to Keep Listening! (S) — Singing +3. It would help solve the immediate problem, and it only got better as the stat climbed — top-tier.

I cleaned myself up and kept my mind clear. Then I looked at the approval window floating in the air and signed. A familiar office-like background appeared, and an animation of a puppy tearing open an envelope filled the screen.

One, two, three, four…?

Between the multiplying puppies in that familiar formation, multicolored light flashed. The screen prodded an old trauma; I squeezed my eyes shut. Even though I wasn’t outside, I half-expected a car to come roaring at me from somewhere.

Nothing happened ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠this time. I opened my eyes to a back damp with cold sweat.