When you become an office worker—especially a junior—there’s something you’re highly likely to be stuck doing.

“Iwol, where are we doing the team dinner today?”

“Team Leader Jo recommended a barbecue place, so I booked that!”

“Barbecue? Ugh. My clothes are going to reek.”

From picking the venue for company dinners to reserving the chicken place for welcome parties, choosing the region for outings, and even planning hiking courses so the executives can stamp all one hundred famous peaks.

For the past few years at Hanpyeong Industries, there wasn’t a schedule I didn’t book.

And that Manager Nam—turns out that when I didn’t book barbecue, he ate meat just fine.

I apologized like thirty times thinking I’d been tactless for picking a barbecue place.

 [SYSTEM] ‘New Task’ has been assigned.

▷ Secure music video filming location

▷ Reward: EXP (varies by condition of filming site)

 “I’ve never scouted MV locations... what do I do?”

Apparently this system intends to hold me responsible for every change I made by coming back to the past.

If this isn’t picking a fight over changing the song, what is it.

The first thing that came to mind—the easy background—was a school, but the phrase “varies by condition of filming site” stuck with me.

It probably meant selecting the location and things like direction counted as producing ability.

“Normally they shoot in at least two places, outdoors and an indoor studio... Do I have to consider all that?”

I’ve always been the type who believes in specialists.

Why is a specialist a specialist? Because they’re good at that work.

So why am I doing this when there are people who are good at it? I’m a procurement specialist.

Worse, I only did part-time jobs in college and then worked overtime after getting hired, so I have no memory of going around anywhere.

If I’d at least wandered around, I might have a feel for it. Right now the only thing that comes to mind is the memory that there were a lot of good restaurants near Hanpyeong Industries.

“There’s no time to pound the pavement now.”

These sweet days when I thought I might finally sleep at night ended today.

Just picturing myself scuba-diving the sea of information until daybreak—I could cry from joy.

If I have to start anyway, starting a little earlier is better for my health. Work shows up without considering my circumstances.

Two hours after I lay down, I was about to get up when a familiar alarm went off above my head.

It was Lee Cheonghyeon’s alarm.

The alarm was silenced in a heartbeat. Then I heard him struggling to sit up.

“Why did you set an alarm for this time? It’s five in the morning.”

I kept my voice low so Choi Jeho wouldn’t wake and asked in case he’d set it by mistake.

But the answer that came back was, “I didn’t set it wrong.”

“I’ve got exams coming up... I’m going to study and then head to school.”

“What?”

Without me noticing, exam season for high schoolers had crept up fast.

Up through high school, I spent a lot of time studying.

Aside from eating, washing, and sleeping, I did almost nothing but study.

I had many reasons for studying hard.

Because in our country, people still tend to value educational background.

Because when I focused, I didn’t notice when people were shouting at home.

Because if my grades were good enough for a scholarship, I could go to college.

By sheer luck, I received rewards beyond my effort. My sister helped a lot, but in the end I got out of the house.

So I don’t regret the time I spent studying, and I °• N 𝑜 v 𝑒 l i g h t •° don’t recall it as a miserable time.

After graduating college, I lived far from studying.

“At least, that’s how it was.”

I thought that as I looked at the students huddled in the living room with workbooks open.

“How did things end up like this?”

After we both got up from bed at dawn, Cheonghyeon took an hour in the living room to study, and I took an hour to search MV locations.

Then Cheonghyeon grabbed his head.

“What’s up?”

“There’s a part I don’t understand. The answer key is at school, so I can’t check it now.”

By luck it was a problem I could solve, so I sketched out a quick solution. Then he asked if he could come to me whenever he had questions.

A few days later, with test day closing in, the students decided to hold a big study session in the living room after practice.

With me.

“Wait. Why me?”

“You said we could ask whenever we needed.”

“Did I say that?”

Since Jeong Seongbin, Lee Cheonghyeon, and Kang Giyeon all had different weak subjects, I had no choice but to sit at the low table with them.

It was a small mercy that I still had remnants of my old test-prep knowledge.

The grade-managing pair, Seongbin and Cheonghyeon, only asked occasionally. As for Kang Giyeon...

“Giyeon, your pen seems to have stopped.”

His soul was basically gone.

He managed other subjects somehow, but when it came to math, he totally flatlined.

Thanks to that, I stopped searching for the fifteenth closed-down school and gave Kang Giyeon a public-broadcast-style math lecture.

I drew on all those nights I did multiple tutoring gigs, and his pen began to move a little.

With the sports drink Park Juu poured for him as a pep boost, it really felt like a tutoring session.

“Hey, how did you end up deciding to become an idol?”

Catching his breath over his drink, Lee Cheonghyeon asked me.

Across the room, I saw Park Juu flinch as he put juice back in the fridge.

Right—he still misunderstands that I skipped college because I couldn’t pay tuition and chose to be an idol.

Putting on a big casual voice on purpose, I asked back like it was nothing.

“Why bring that up?”

“Just because. You seem good at studying, so I was wondering why you got interested in idols right after graduating high school.”

That was actually what people wondered about Cheonghyeon.

As a kid he did classical music, then later he prepped for a science high school, only to suddenly become an idol trainee and go to a regular humanities-track high school.

Not that I could tell him, “Honestly, I had zero interest, but there was no other way to combine filial duty with changing careers.”

Practicing the old saying that you can’t spit on a smiling face, I smiled brightly and pointed to a fresh page he hadn’t solved a single problem on.

“Cheonghyeon, is that really what’s important right now?”

“Of course studying is more important.”

Whether or not Kang Giyeon looked at us like we were having fun, Cheonghyeon focused on the worksheet again. In a way, it was an astonishing level of focus.

Watching him tear through problems at a scary pace like he’d never said a word, I thought:

“Maybe I should prepare an answer in advance about how I ended up becoming an idol.”

That question could pop up anytime, anywhere.

Right now I could dodge it with a teasing line to Cheonghyeon, but saying “I was cast” would ring hollow when I’m practicing this fiercely—enough that I’d be embarrassed to show others.

“Lucky my tongue didn’t tie up.”

I never imagined that all those polite replies to nonsense while working with Manager Nam would come in handy here.

After about a year, I developed stock phrases that redirected the conversation like an auto-responder.

Up to this point, I still believed I could improvise my way out of the situations ahead.

A truly complacent thought.

Living long enough, you learn that there are things your world can’t even imagine that nonetheless exist.

Like a good boss, or a professor who assigns little homework.

I had my own list of such things.

Like a company that provides lunch as a benefit, or a real younger sibling—things I had never once had.

And on that list was “a good caregiver.”

Some people are tormented by vivid memories of family discord, but my case was a little different.

“Remember how Mom said her belly was full because we were cold and threw us out? In midwinter?”

“I don’t remember any of that.”

“Wow, so I’m the only one who loses out. How do you forget when you even got frostbite?”

If anything, I’m the type who remembers almost nothing exactly.

I barely even remember my sister fuming because she remembered our childhood in such detail, unlike me.

In society, I met countless adults.

But they were teachers or supervisors, not “guardians.”

So in all my life, I had never seen an adult who shared emotional bonds with kids my age.

“Our parents are coming?”

In that sense, the parents of Jeong Seongbin—who would be visiting the dorm soon—were going to be the first adults of their kind I’d ever meet.

“Yes. When they heard debut was confirmed, they said they wanted to make us something good to eat.”

“No way! Seongbin’s parents are coming?”

From what I heard, his family had often visited the dorm before and stocked the fridge.

Me... I wasn’t ready for this emotionally.

If I’d had a friend, I could have visited their place and met their parents.

Unfortunately, I’m not that sociable.

At this point, the closer the date got, the more nervous I became.

Even among adults, you show slightly different manners to a professor, a doctor, and the executive suite, right?

My birth family was a mess that raised a delinquent like me, but Seongbin’s family raised Seongbin.

If I unknowingly did something out of line to people from that kind of home, it would be a disaster. They say people only fail to notice their own mistakes.

If I unknowingly violated social norms and then...

“I will not, even if I’m buried alive, allow my son to debut with that good-for-nothing!”

“Please trust me just this once, ma’am!”

...if something like that happened, it would be a disaster.

“I have to keep it together.”

Since coming back to the past, this was the second most bewildering moment—right after facing the fact that I had to become an idol.