Except for Lee Cheonghyeon, SPARK’s members basically didn’t talk much.

On top of that, they weren’t very loud, either. Naturally, when they were on shows, all their personalities ended up looking more or less the same.

There was a limit to how much one Lee Cheonghyeon could do to lift a sunken mood all by himself.

Thanks to that, the shows SPARK appeared on were, to put it nicely, like nature documentaries.

I won’t bother saying what they were like if you put it bluntly.

‘No wonder it’s so hard to open the door for people to stan them.’

This was a situation where it wouldn’t be enough even if you were out there aggressively selling them with “There has to be at least one who’s your type in here.”

If you line up kids who look like they’ve all been pressed out of the same bungeoppang mold and go, “Ta-da! There are this many identical kids, so that means they’re several times more delicious, right?” who the hell is going to come take a look? 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

You need something tasty on offer if you want to sell anything.

If we wanted to set things up so fans could dig into the members’ A to Z with an excavator, we at least needed to dig a shallow groove or two into the bare ground first.

‘At the very least, they need to be able to show off their individuality to some extent.’

That way, we’d at least be able to stick one more perfect little prop onto their debut album.

I let out a deep sigh, cleared my entire search history, and handed the phone back to the manager.

After that, I watched the members like a hawk every break during group practice.

I also remembered the email I’d gotten from Department Head Nam’s daughter saying that a perfectly fleshed-out character profile comes from love and obsession.

There’s nothing more convenient than using refined language when you’re trying to define something.

So I borrowed the keywords I’d seen in web novels and started codifying these punks’ personalities.

For example, for Park Juu, who spent every break spacing out in a corner, I set his base image as “unbothered puppy.”

As for the one who had monopolized the daughter’s love and would become SPARK’s shining center, Choi Jeho......

“So you’re...... a cool-type, unbothered, clueless genius character.”

......I made his especially flashy.

But Choi Jeho replied with the utmost indifference.

“What are you talking about all of a sudden.”

“Your unbothered trait overlaps with Juu’s, so how about tweaking your personality a bit?”

Even at my reasonable suggestion, the grimace on his face didn’t relax.

It really wasn’t ideal to have a team where the majority achieved triple crowns in unbothered, blunt, and deadpan. A shame, really.

“Hyung! What about me?!”

Maybe he thought I was saying something fun, because Lee Cheonghyeon abandoned Kang Giyeon in front of the mirror and bolted over.

“I think there was something like sunshine-something. Take that.”

“Why am I getting some half-assed compromise label?!”

“We’re leaving room to change it later if something better comes along.”

I was in the middle of assigning a third trait to each member when the practice room door opened.

It was Ms. Min Jukyung.

“Sorry for interrupting your practice!”

She came in smiling, holding a sheet of paper in her hand.

Ms. Min Jukyung stuck the paper she’d brought onto the whiteboard installed on one wall of the practice room.

Then she looked at me and said,

“We post the evaluation results like this. There’s nothing special this time, so just check when you have time!”

There was no way she didn’t know that people always look at their report cards the second they get them.

She was probably trying to keep things as light as possible out of consideration for the trainees.

I probably had the same face whenever I went around saying, “The performance review input is finished, so please check your results when you have a moment.”

More than that, the fact that she was saying there was nothing special meant I hadn’t been cut.

Good job, Kim Iwol. You actually managed to survive in these awful conditions.

Having achieved my minimum goal, I headed straight for the whiteboard.

As long as I hadn’t been cut, I was ready to accept the rest of the results with good grace no matter what they were.

February end-of-month evaluation (by score)

Park Juu

Choi Jeho

Lee Cheonghyeon

Jeong Seongbin

Kang Giyeon

Kim Iwol

※ Detailed feedback will be given during class!

Even though it was only natural to be sixth out of six, actually coming in last still made me feel complicated.

Maybe it was because I’d never ranked dead last in my life. Guess this is why people say you should experience everything at least once.

 [SYSTEM] ‘Task’ has been completed.

▷ Reward: EXP (30) granted

▷ Cumulative EXP: 40

▷ Cumulative Points: 0

 Right on cue, the EXP for getting a passing score in the end-of-month evaluation came in.

But that wasn’t all.

 [SYSTEM] ‘Bonus EXP’ has been granted.

▷ Reason: Received a high evaluation from a ‘close team member’

▷ Reward: EXP (10) granted

▷ Cumulative EXP: 50

▷ Cumulative Points: 0

 Whoever it was, they must have thought very highly of me, because I’d gotten an extra 10 EXP.

Thank you. May your next three generations be blessed.

I turned away, vowing that by debut I’d at least grow into a “sixth place who fought hard even if he lost.”

Just then, I met eyes with Jeong Seongbin, who had checked the paper with a calm face and was turning away.

At the same time, I remembered what he’d said a few days ago.

‘It’s not like the company has that many trainees, but at some point the rankings stopped changing much.’

Jeong Seongbin now...... While he didn’t look completely at ease, his expression did look better than before.

A complicated look, but not a dark one.

The moment I saw that face, I felt like my humiliation from that day had been slightly repaid somehow.

The advantage of being a beginner was that even a single step forward looked like a huge leap.

And for a beginner, that one step really was a massive jump.

Maybe thanks to the solid early groundwork, the following classes didn’t feel impossibly daunting.

On top of that, UA was a company that didn’t hold back on praise in this area.

“Iwol, you’ve really improved a lot.”

“Really?”

The vocal teacher nodded. It was a great environment for a newcomer to grow in.

I still had a long way to go in dance class, where I was working my legs to death, but there were results there too.

At the very least, once I learned the moves, I stopped forgetting them, and that helped most of all. I really didn’t want to be the one to stop the music in the middle of group practice.

With desperate earnestness, I faithfully invested the welfare points I’d just earned from barely passing 100 cumulative EXP into my proficiencies.

As a result, my proficiency scores now looked like this.

 Performance Evaluation (100)

― Vocal proficiency: 5(▲)/20

― Dance proficiency: 4(▲)/20

― Self-PR: 12/20

― Attendance management: 18/20

― Organizational adaptability: 10/20

Cumulative EXP: 0

 I hadn’t spent any points on vocal proficiency, and it had gone up on its own. What a good kid.

From this case, I also learned that proficiency doesn’t only go up through gaining EXP.

It still hurt that my total proficiency score was in the single digits, but expecting results after just a month of practice was nonsense, so I decided to take comfort in the fact that the numbers had gone up at all.

A new task also appeared.

 [SYSTEM] ‘New Task’ has been assigned.

▷ Raise Dance proficiency to 5 by the March end-of-month evaluation

▷ Reward: Trial pass to view other members’ résumés, standard proposal template 3-piece set for debut album planning

 Most likely, the next end-of-month evaluation would be the one that finally fixed the debut lineup.

Because I’d moved the debut schedule up by one year. It was about time to lock in the group.

More than that, are they seriously dragging their feet until March when they said they’d set the debut lineup based on the February evaluation?

This is how you end up delaying debut by two whole years in the past, the group collapses, and then society collapses......

Separate from the task itself, the reward was really bad.

I was interested in the résumé viewing, but the whole “trial pass” thing was so stingy it pissed me off, and as for “debut album planning proposal templates”...... I had a strong feeling that was just going to give me more work.

Stuff like that, if you have it lying around, you eventually end up using it. And I just knew it would be me.

All the more reason I didn’t want that three-piece proposal set.

But since my job had been locked in as a producing member, I decided it would be easier on my mind to just accept the situation and grab it in advance.

Worst case, I’d just take the templates and three months later go, ‘Oh right, I did have those, didn’t I,’ and play it off as meta.

“Should we flip our calendar page now?”

“Yeah, go ahead!”

At Jeong Seongbin’s go-ahead, Lee Cheonghyeon tore off the page from the wall calendar hanging in the practice room.

March had begun.

A corporate worker’s sense of time was a little different from when they weren’t a corporate worker.

For example, back when I was a college student, my sense of time went like this.

March–June / September–November: during the semester + working a small part-time job

July–August / December–February: working part-time like a dog

Then when I joined Hanpyeong Industries, my way of perceiving time changed to this.

March–November: busy months

December: month where I could barely breathe

January: month where I couldn’t even breathe

February: month where I couldn’t go home

Because of that, I’d forgotten for a moment.

That March is the month when a new school term starts.

And that the high schoolers in our dorm would be starting a new semester too.

I realized that when Lee Cheonghyeon’s alarm went off earlier than usual.

I woke up thinking the alarm sounded earlier than normal, and across from me, Choi Jeho was still sound asleep without moving an inch.

Just as I was wondering why the guy who always got up as soon as the alarm rang wasn’t moving, Lee Cheonghyeon climbed down from his bed with a miserable face.

“Are you sick? What’s with your face.”

“I’m just tired...... Hyung, set your alarm and go back to sleep. It’s seven right now.”

“Seven?”

I checked the time, and sure enough, it was seven. A whole hour earlier than our usual wake-up time.

“I should’ve gone to bed earlier yesterday...... I stayed up too late.”

Then he ✧ NоvеIight ✧ (Original source) opened his closet and pulled out a familiar gray-ish school uniform.

It was the same uniform I’d seen when I scraped together his department’s photos to make his subway birthday ad.

‘Right. He’s seventeen right now.’

Which meant Lee Cheonghyeon was only just now entering high school.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t even remember how many years it had been since I entered college.

It made me worry all over again about whether it was morally okay for me to debut on a team with these kids.

“Is today the start of the semester?”

“Hyung, it’s not the start of the semester, it’s the start of the school year! And it’s not the start of the school year for me, it’s the entrance ceremony!”

The second I made a slip of the tongue, he jumped all over it. Seeing him all fired up three minutes after waking up, I figured I didn’t need to worry about his stamina.

I followed after him as he headed out of the room to wash up.

In the living room, Jeong Seongbin and Kang Giyeon were pacing around in their school uniforms.

Maybe because they were from an arts high school, their uniforms’ color and design were quite different from Lee Cheonghyeon’s.

≫ Blueberry yogurt-era Dongmoon-z class pics are rare as hell, seriously...... Fuck, why do our boys not take selfies when they’ve got faces like that? Not taking at least a hundred selfies a day with those faces is dereliction of duty, I’m so fucking mad, fuck

└ This isn’t some kind of gradation rage, it’s just straight-up rage

Looking at their light-purple uniforms, a post I’d once glimpsed on SNS floated through my mind.

When I got the chance, I’d have to sit all three of them down on the dorm sofa and tell them to take some selfies.

“Are you guys eating breakfast before you head out?”

“Seongbin-hyung said he’ll toast some bread for us.”

Now that I looked, there were three slices of bread in the frying pan.

It looked like he was just toasting bread over fire with no jam or eggs. So this was how dry idols’ lives were, both in mouth and in heart.

“If you’re just toasting them, I’ll do it. You guys go get ready to leave.”

“Huh? You really don’t have to do that......”

“I can’t go back to sleep anyway. Once I wake up, I’m up.”

I wasn’t exactly a good cook, but I could at least toast bread.

When I swiped the spatula from him, Jeong Seongbin fidgeted and hovered around me before backing off.

“I think there were eggs in the fridge. Want me to fry some?”

“No, hyung! It’s really fine!”

“I’m fine too......”

“I’ll take an egg on mine!”

Before Kang Giyeon could even finish his sentence, Lee Cheonghyeon shouted from the bathroom. I had no idea what was up with his hearing.