The Coldest Busking Day
I thought today might have been the worst weather we’d ever busked in since we’d started.
We’d had drunk people stumble in on us before, and more recently there’d even been someone who came by just to jeer at us. But those were the sort of things you could ignore well enough, and besides, our fans usually fought back for us.
That kind of hardship wasn’t much of a hardship at all.
Today, though…
My nose, my hands, my feet—everything felt like it had frozen solid and was ready to crack apart.
You couldn’t count on fans to fight the weather for you.
Maybe my hands had gone numb, because Lee Doyeong and Heo Junseong were struggling to keep their playing up to speed.
Kang Min, at least, was a drummer using bigger muscles, so he wasn’t affected as much. Even Kim Jihoo, who usually cared about precision more than anything, had started losing finesse in his touch.
This is bad.
And just as that thought threatened to shake my concentration too, I noticed the audience in front of me, trembling just as hard as we were.
Maybe they were trying to forget the cold, or maybe they were simply having too much fun, but even while shivering they were still delighted by the ragged little ensemble we were forcing into existence.
That made me think.
In weather this cold, how could they be so excited over a performance that wasn’t even perfect?
These people hadn’t come just to hear our music or watch us perform. Well, they had—but that wasn’t all. More than appreciation, there was something more fundamental driving them.
They just liked us.
This stage was nothing but a clump of broken, mismatched playing smashed together into sound, and yet…
What they liked was the feeling of enduring the cold in this space with us.
How did I know?
Because I liked it too.
Running around with a nose full of snot, laughing and jumping along with the people who’d come to see us—it was fun.
It had been a little over half a year since I’d gone back in time.
Take away the time it took to gather my friends, and I’d built this precious fanbase in hardly any time at all. I couldn’t help feeling proud of myself.
Of course, it had been something we’d achieved together, so I was grateful to the others too.
While Heo Junseong was in the middle of a guitar solo, I stole a look at my friends’ expressions.
When I only watched straight ahead, all I could hear was the mess they were making of the song.
Heo Junseong was pushing harder than usual, Lee Doyeong was grinning like he couldn’t help himself for some reason, and Kim Jihoo looked like he’d already given up and was just lazily tapping the keys.
Kang Min looked completely gone.
Well, he always looked half out of his mind anyway.
Still, everyone seemed to be enjoying the stage in their own way.
They probably felt something similar to what I did.
Even though the brutal cold meant they couldn’t show even half their usual ability, you could still see that we’d grown.
My friends didn’t panic even in awful conditions.
They knew how to connect with the audience.
The audience knew it too: today’s performance was a disaster.
And because our members understood that feeling in the crowd, they were focusing on communication rather than perfection.
I felt proud.
We’d come farther than I’d realized.
* * *
“Thank you! That was OKTOP!”
After the performance, I cleaned up the cables and packed away our instruments with hands so frozen they hardly felt like mine.
“That was fun, right?”
“Well, not bad.”
“I had fun.”
“Playing that badly is a disgrace to us as musicians…”
“Brrr, uuuugh… It’s so cold…”
They’d all looked like they were having the time of their lives, too.
Still, maybe we should take a break from busking until the weather warmed up a little.
The fans mattered, sure, but taking care of our kids was important too.
“Excuse me, are you all finished?”
Then a small group approached us.
“Ah, yes, were you here to use the—”
I stopped short.
They were faces I knew far too well.
“Yes. It’s so cold today. You must have had a hard time.”
It was Seonghun hyung.
In the original timeline, he’d debuted as a solo singer two years after me.
Had he originally been in a band?
Behind Jo Seonghun hyung, there were three other instrumentalists with him.
I didn’t remember hearing anything like that.
In more ways than one, he was a pitiful guy.
His character was outstanding, but he couldn’t do music—
No, that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t that he himself had failed. He’d just been unlucky.
Anyway, meeting the younger Seonghun hyung in a place I’d never expected left me feeling strangely off-balance.
“We’re OKTOP fans.”
“Oh, really? Thank you.”
“We also formed a band after watching OKTOP.”
The man holding a guitar behind Seonghun hyung added that.
Ah. So the future had changed.
“It’s freezing out, so keep working hard. I’ll be cheering for you.”
“Yes! Thank you!”
* * *
Office worker Kim Juhee was on her way home after stopping by Banwon Park once again that day.
“Ugh… so cold…”
She had faithfully uploaded OKTOP’s busking videos to her YouTube channel ever since their earliest days.
On a day like this, she could have taken a break, but she’d still made the trip out to Banwon Park anyway.
“I probably can’t upload today’s video.”
The playing had been a mess, and so had the singing.
She didn’t dislike that, though.
The weather was too cold, and the wind was blowing hard enough to be rude. There was nothing they could do about that.
“Or maybe not?”
She checked the video she’d just recorded.
Cha Seoha’s nose had turned bright red from the cold, and the fierce sound of the wind had been captured in the recording too, interfering with the music.
“Maybe that’s actually okay.”
Kim Juhee’s channel, Human Kim Juhee, had recently been growing fast.
One of her videos had unexpectedly gone viral once.
But the real surge had come right after the broadcast of Star Observation Cam.
And now it was on a modest but steady upward climb.
Most of the people subscribed to her channel were favorable toward OKTOP.
“It feels like they’ve been getting some hate lately, though…”
Turning it over in her mind, Kim Juhee eventually came to the conclusion that this video should probably be uploaded too.
* * *
Mun Gayoung, Producer Park Yunchan, and all of our members had met me exactly because I wanted them to.
But the connections I stumbled into by accident always gave me a strangely complicated feeling.
I hoped Seonghun hyung would make it in this life.
And so we fought through the cold, packed up our instruments, and made our way to the practice room.
“Brrr… I can live again.”
“Hey, Cha Seoha, are we doing this again next week?”
“No, let’s rest a little. It really is too cold.”
“Wow, seriously?”
“Are you really Cha Seoha?”
“Seoha’s acting weird… He must’ve broken down from the cold.”
“Dōshite…”
Just because I said let’s take a break, they had to make a scene.
We’d barely unpacked our bags and were just trying to warm ourselves up when—
97th: Lockda - Exit
98th: OKTOP - Rendezvous
99th: DohEO - Irony
100th: …
Both my friends’ growth and the performance of our track were approaching our target faster than I’d expected.
In my past life, when I was a rookie, that had seemed like a place so far out of reach that no amount of effort could get you there.
I hadn’t expected us to chart this quickly.
Then again, my main focus had been noise, not digital rankings.
“Whoa, that’s seriously amazing.”
“No, wait, we’ve just had some TV exposure and gotten a bit of hate, right? And people are listening to our music this much?”
“This… What if people start saying we manipulated the charts or something?”
“Who the hell would fake charting just to scrape together 98th place? Are you an idiot, Heo Junseong?”
“Ah… right.”
I was surprised too, but I still didn’t think it was impossible.
So my friends were even more shocked than I was, staring at their phones like they couldn’t tear their eyes away.
Not twenty seconds ago they’d been whining about the cold.
Now it looked like they’d forgotten all about it.
“This is insane. Cha Seoha, did you actually expect this?”
“To some extent.”
“That’s incredible.”
My friends stood there, staring at me blankly for a moment.
“So what’s the next plan?”
At Kim Jihoo’s question, I decided to answer honestly.
After all, both Lee Doyeong and this idiot needed a clear goal to aim at.
“Remember that entertainment show meeting I went to with Mun Gayoung the other day?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“We decided not to go on that show in the end, but that PD will call us soon. He wants us to do a program with the full lineup.”
“Oh, really? What kind of show?”
“A music show.”
“…”
“What kind of show?”
“Wait, a music variety show?”
“Ah, a music variety show, haha! What kind of variety show is it?”
“No, I mean the music program K-Net airs every Thursday.”
“The actual music show?”
“Yeah. How many times are you going to ask?”
After the news—not just that we’d charted, but that we were going to appear on a music program—my friends glitched for a second time.
“All right, charting and the music show are both real things that have already happened and been decided. We need to move on to what comes after. Stop breaking down and come to your senses!”
I clapped loudly to pull them back from wherever their minds had gone.
One by one, the expressions on their faces snapped back into reality.
“Wow, if we really go on a music show, we’re going to get absolutely roasted, huh?”
“No doubt. Honestly, I thought there was nothing that could get us more hate than Star Observation Cam, but this is definitely a solid way to do it.”
“Yeah, Seoha, you’re amazing. You even landed us a music show.”
“Tashika ni…”
Their faces were bright—too bright, almost radiant with excitement.
Even knowing we had a plan, they were still thrilled at the prospect of getting hated on like this.
I started to wonder just how much more hate we’d need before our appetite for it was satisfied, and then it hit me all at once that there truly was no normal person in this team.
That made me laugh for no reason.
You lunatics.
They were probably brimming with anticipation right now.
As long as I had these insane friends with me, I figured anything was fine.
If people called us clueless, I’d still be okay as long as Heo Junseong was there.
If my image got cemented as obnoxious, I’d still have Kim Jihoo, so I wouldn’t have to worry.
And with Lee Doyeong beside me, whatever shape I took would be fine.
I didn’t mind being pointed at as some confidence-lacking loser, either.
Of course, I’d rather not be treated like an otaku.
But if the five of us stayed together, I knew we could overcome anything.
I was pretty excited myself.
“All right, then since the topic’s come up, why don’t we all start planning the next album?”
“Yeah!”