Lee Cheonghyeon had the shortest training period among the five trainees.

He wasn’t someone who originally danced like Choi Jeho or Kang Giyeon, and he hadn’t learned to sing from an early age like Jeong Seongbin or Park Juu. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

The only skill Lee Cheonghyeon had was classical music—which was the exact opposite of pop—and even that was limited to piano performance.

“You placed third in both the last evaluation and this one, right?”

Even so, Lee Cheonghyeon always landed in the middle ranks, sometimes the upper-middle, in evaluations.

“It’s not my place to say this as the one at the bottom, but getting good results among those practice freaks isn’t normal. It doesn’t happen on talent and effort alone.”

“It could’ve been a fluke.”

Lee Cheonghyeon immediately pushed back.

“Maybe. But what matters is you ‘always’ produce results. In sports they call that an ace, and in an organization they call it a pillar.”

I understood that Jeong Seongbin and Lee Cheonghyeon were both going through a turbulent time and spending unstable days.

But the words they needed were very different.

If Jeong Seongbin needed comfort, then for Lee Cheonghyeon...

“You asked me before why I told Kang Giyeon to sleep at night but told you to write.”

“I did.”

“It’s because I’m expecting something from you.”

It seemed better to give him a kind of certainty.

“I think you’re the kind of guy who can do it if you try.”

Maybe because we were in the mountains, a breeze as ticklish as praise blew past.

“If you don’t want critique, should I hold a ‘praise-only listening session’ for you? Just among us, we only compliment. For motivation.”

“No, that would be its own massive pressure!”

“In the real world, no one praises you. Treat the chance as precious.”

“Why do you always talk like someone who’s tasted all the bitterness of society?”

“I wanted to live only tasting sweetness too, but life isn’t that easy.”

Truthfully, I wanted to say that if he didn’t want it, we’d put off using his self-composed track as the title.

He himself had said he wasn’t mentally ready yet.

If my PPT from my first months at the company had to remain in my portfolio for life, I’d want to dunk my head in a washbasin too.

Lee Cheonghyeon could easily imagine that situation.

For various reasons—and above all because of my stubbornness—things had come to this. I genuinely regretted it.

So I did consider apologizing.

But if I apologized here, it would only sound like, “Sorry for forcing your song as the title when it’s not up to your standards yet!” so I held back.

‘Instead, I can shower him with praise.’

I’m the guy who once praised an intern who couldn’t even find a downloaded file by saying, “I can see your hardworking attitude.”

If I leaned on that experience, I could probably manage thirty compliments a day.

While I was seriously mulling it over, Lee Cheonghyeon, who had been sitting just fine, suddenly sprang to his feet.

His face had gone pale.

“What’s wrong?”

“Hyung... I think I left my bag down there earlier.”

“Bag? This one?”

Only then did I remember the bag I’d grabbed just before running after Lee Cheonghyeon.

I’d set it down next to the bench after catching up to him, so I guess it hadn’t been visible from his side.

“Gasp. When did you pick that up?”

“I grabbed it and chased you when you ran.”

“Then you ran up the mountain carrying that bag?!”

“At the end of the day it’s just a hiking trail.”

Try hiking all the mountains around Seoul every weekend. Is this hard?

I dusted off the dirt and gently placed the bag into Lee Cheonghyeon’s arms.

Then I set both hands on his shoulders.

“Cheonghyeon.”

“Yeah?”

“I took a bus for an hour to find you, and I even brought your bag. In consideration of my toil, would you give me one chance to say something old-man-ish?”

“What... is it?”

“Nothing big. I want to see all six of you debut safely and awesomely.”

I struggled not to squeeze my hands on his shoulders, forcing a big smile across my face.

Meanwhile, the expression on Lee Cheonghyeon’s face as he looked up at me grew more and more reluctant.

“So... whether you brood or flail around, let’s handle most things ‘at the dorm.’ Got it?”

Judging by how fervently he nodded, he’d understood perfectly that I meant “don’t make me pound the pavement.”

If he ran away again after this, it wouldn’t end well.

With that, I finished out the remaining thirty minutes with Lee Cheonghyeon, then made the long trek back and returned to the practice room.

I’d run out blindly, hell-bent on dragging back a composer with guaranteed diligence, so I figured I’d get an earful—but surprisingly, there wasn’t much said.

Apparently, Jeong Seongbin had pleaded through tears. As expected, the more diligent a kid is, the more the company trusts him.

If I had begged for leniency even once, I’d probably already have been signing termination papers.

Oh, there was also an unexpected surprise.

For the first time, the dance break choreo that Choi Jeho and Kang Giyeon had created together was finished.

“We haven’t shown it to the teachers yet... but it’s roughly like this.”

With that bored line, the two from the dance line showed a routine that was, literally, incredible.

Their possessed moves seemed to tell a klutz like me to give up early; all I could do was applaud.

Oblivious to how I felt, Lee Cheonghyeon kept fussing about how amazing it was.

He looked truly happy that the two of them had even made choreo to his song.

A notification popped up that the task of securing the debut track had been completed.

 [SYSTEM] “Task” has been completed.

▷ Reward: EXP (10) granted

▷ Total EXP: 80

▷ Total Points: 0

 It seemed Lee Cheonghyeon had finished preparing himself to accept it if the day came when they debuted with his song.

Beyond the system window, I could see Lee Cheonghyeon, who had regained his lively smile, bouncing and chatting beside Kang Giyeon.

“That’s insane! But can’t we make it even cooler than this?”

“If you do two flips at the front, that should do it.”

“Should I? I can do one flip, you know? Special training starts today.”

He wasn’t going to suggest all six of them do that tumbling together, was he?

I could almost feel my knee joints, which had been cold not long ago, start aching again.

Depending on the company’s situation and promotional policy, idol trainees are sometimes exposed to media even before debut.

They appear in ads or as backup dancers for senior singers and get their faces known early.

For example, in Lee Cheonghyeon’s case, he had appeared in a music video by a senior singer under the same roof before debut.

“...So it looks like Cheonghyeon will take the male lead role in Jang Junhu-nim’s music video this time.”

That it was Jang Junhu’s MV—I hadn’t even considered it.

‘Since he took the guide recently, it is about time to shoot the MV.’

Who cares about that bastard’s MV? None of that mattered to me.

If what we needed was the visibility you can build from an MV cameo, I’d rather work a night shift at a convenience store and use the money to hang the kids’ photos at Gangnam Station.

If it were up to my heart, I wanted to kick up a fuss and say, “I don’t think it’s right to borrow the kids’ hands for the work of a workplace bully like that.”

But for that agenda, we needed to reach an internal agreement with the team first and then swing the knives, so I decided to hold back for now.

Instead, we started an emergency countermeasure meeting the moment the manager stepped out of the practice room.

Aside from the forced smile on Lee Cheonghyeon’s face—the person directly involved—the expressions on the five of us... were really not good.

Even easygoing “what’s good is good” Jeong Seongbin looked pale; that said it all. Naturally so.

With everyone hesitant to open their mouths, I broke the ice first.

“For now, I think the risk Cheonghyeon would have to bear is way too big for the benefit of sixty thousand MeTube views.”

“Why sixty thousand specifically?”

“I remember Jang Junhu’s MV average views being around that.”

For a trainee who hasn’t even debuted, they should be desperate for even six hundred views, let alone sixty thousand.

But grinding down the mental state of a kid who hasn’t even debuted yet just for that? That was a worse deal.

‘I really should work night shifts and put up an ad at Gangnam Station...’

As I seriously tried to recall how many convenience stores were around here, Jeong Seongbin carefully raised his hand.

“Uh, then maybe I should go instead, since I have more of an acquaintance with that senior...”

“Okay. Next opinion?”

I cut it off because it was an opinion that didn’t even need to be heard. That’s not an argument, that’s the department head’s nonsense.

I did acknowledge the attitude of wanting to protect a member as commendable.

But sending the person who’d been hurt the most—Jeong Seongbin—wasn’t even up for consideration.

‘Then there’s only one conclusion.’

I looked at Choi Jeho, who was sitting hunched over, quietly listening, and said:

“Choi Jeho, you should go.”

“Me?”

Should I go, then?

“We can’t send the kids. And it’s not like we have the right to say no.”

“I’ll buy a voice recorder and keep it on me! I don’t have as many points of contact with him as Seongbin-hyung either, so you don’t have to worry too much...”

“No. In a normal situation, this isn’t even something you should have to weigh—whether to go or not.”

And reality is brutal.

Even if you try to prep a voice recorder, once filming starts, every staff member from the stylist to the director is going to be watching your fit and your behavior.

In that situation, it wouldn’t be strange if any sort of sudden incident happened.

In the worst case, if they caught the voice recorder, they’d definitely tear you to shreds for “some nobody who hasn’t even debuted bringing weird stuff onto a senior’s set.”

‘How could I send the ➤ NоvеⅠight ➤ (Read more on our source) kids into a field where problems can arise that they can’t possibly prepare for?’

Excluding the kids, the only person left was Choi Jeho—at least twenty years old and not someone who’d get pushed around easily anywhere.

But Choi Jeho didn’t look thrilled.

“You could go.”

“I can’t exactly apply saying I want to star in the MV with my face.”

“Uh... just going by face, you two hyungs do kind of have a similar vibe.”

Sitting quietly, Park Juu offered a comment I couldn’t agree with at all. So I didn’t take it to heart.

“How are we going to persuade the company? If we say a different trainee is going without any pretext, they might not agree.”

At least Kang Giyeon made a rational point.

But I already had a response in mind for that part too.

“You don’t have to worry about that. I’ll go talk to them.”

“You will?”

“Yeah. I think I more or less get why they singled out Lee Cheonghyeon.”