Chapter 1
“You’ve achieved great success not only as an idol, but also as a producer.”
At the counselor’s words, Jung Hae-won, who had been mentally checking his next schedule the whole time, lifted his head.
“Ah, I didn’t hear that. Sorry.”
“There’s nothing to apologize for. What I just said was… Hae-won, you’ve achieved great success both as an idol and as a producer. And it’s ongoing. So where do you think this anxiety comes from?”
The counseling session kept going off track.
The client was a very difficult person. It was no easy task trying to understand the inner thoughts of someone who had achieved such overwhelming success.
On top of that, his schedule was packed, so the counselor had very little time.
After thinking for a moment, the client answered.
“I’m not anxious. I just like being busy. I think you can just prescribe me sleeping pills.”
“Hm. Do you usually get a prescription right away when you say that?”
“No. I get scolded a lot first, and then I get the prescription.”
Not long after, without giving much more information, the client stood up from his seat. The counselor said,
“If you keep doing this, it’s just a waste of time.”
“Hmm.”
“People around you are very worried.”
“Exactly.”
Jung Hae-won let out a deep sigh and continued.
“That’s why I still keep coming to these sessions. The people around me worry too much. They’re overly concerned.”
That was what he said, while wondering how he could convince them that his mental state was perfectly solid.
After a moment, the client asked the counselor,
“This is kind of a strange question.”
“What is it?”
“Do you think unchanging love exists?”
The counselor looked puzzled, but soon answered.
“No. All emotions change.”
“I think it does exist.”
The client smiled lightly.
There was no intention in that smile to charm anyone, yet it naturally carried a force that drew people in.
He continued.
“I didn’t believe in it when I was young, but now I do. And for me, that’s a huge change in life.”
After saying that, he left the counseling room.
Even though it was supposed to be a private personal appointment, paparazzi were waiting across from the hospital.
In the middle of the city, a huge electronic billboard nearby was showing a concert advertisement paid for by fans.
Wherever he went, people could see his face.
Everyone knew him.
* * *
I had a long dream.
I already thought my life was ruined, but in that dream, I ruined someone else’s life on top of my own.
In the dream, I knew I wanted to stand on stage.
But I pretended not to know that longing.
Why was I so afraid back then of challenging the stage again, the stage that had coldly cast me aside once before?
And despite that, I couldn’t completely leave the entertainment industry either.
If I had just started a new life outside the industry, maybe things wouldn’t have ended so badly.
In the dream, I founded an entertainment company.
And I became obsessed with a girl group called Square, a group I failed to make successful.
I dragged not only myself but those girls through years of suffering…
And then I died from overwork.
Ugh, seriously.
It was a dream without even a shred of hope.
If I had known that ending in advance, I would have swallowed my fear and gone back on stage one more time.
But wait…
Was that really a dream?
It was so vivid I couldn’t tell.
“Aah! Cruel person!”
I finally escaped that nightmare because of pounding music.
The dream had felt too real, and when I woke up, I was completely drunk, so I was seriously confused about what was dream and what was reality.
For the past two months, I’d been drinking at lunch and at night, attending company dinners twice a day, so much that alcohol had replaced blood in my veins.
There was no way I could properly understand the situation.
Still groggy from alcohol and sleep, I couldn’t lift my head.
Thinking I was still asleep, the people beside me started talking about me.
“‘The Idol Chosen by the Nation’? That survival show that caused a huge uproar two years ago?”
“Yeah, that one. He got branded by viewers as total human trash and got buried in hate comments. Director Kwak was working over there at the time, right? He felt guilty, so he got him this job.”
“Ah. That explains why some twenty-year-old…”
“They couldn’t send a guy who dropped out of high school and locked himself in his room for two years because of hate comments straight into the military. They figured he might cause an incident, so they’re trying to make a proper person out of him here first.”
“Jung-tae is amazing. I’d never hand a steering wheel to a twenty-year-old shut-in.”
“He’s just too nice.”
I raised my head once they were done summarizing my life.
Wow.
That was an impressively accurate summary…
Not a single word was wrong.
Haha.
Though seriously, I had no idea why my celebrity employer was letting a twenty-year-old former shut-in drive for him.
Maybe he wasn’t just nice. Maybe he’d drunk too much and lost his mind…
Anyway, the dream was so vivid I still couldn’t separate it from reality.
If it was a dream, it was unbelievably detailed.
And I’m not creative enough, or smart enough, to come up with something like that.
It felt strangely unsettling.
Could it have really been…
A prophetic dream?
Wait.
Then did I just get spoilers for how my life gets ruined?
As my thoughts became increasingly tangled, Boo Jung-tae, who in my dream had died of a heart attack five years before my own death, grabbed a microphone and shouted,
“If you can’t do a one-shot, you’ll never get married! Aah! Cruel person!”
