My mood plummeted straight back down to hell.

I’d rewound nine whole years, only to voluntarily climb aboard the overtime train again. Pathetic.

So now I’d traded away my stamina, happiness, and sense of accomplishment in exchange for one basic step and 20 EXP.

"What a fulfilling day. Fuck."

I was having doubts about this thing called life.

Even so, instead of giving up on everything, I started tidying up piece by piece. We had to clear out of the practice room before midnight, when the security guard went home.

No one was going to work overtime because of me. If that happened, the guilt might actually kill me.

When I turned off all the lights in the practice room, the company building, which had already been dead quiet, felt even more desolate. The familiar air of overtime settled over me.

Just as I was about to get depressed, I felt someone in the lobby. A tall shadow stretched down the hallway.

Its owner was Choi Jeho.

All he was doing was standing by the front desk, and he still looked incredibly ominous.

It’s not that I hate the guy and only look for the negative in him. Honestly.

As he walked toward me and our eyes met, Choi Jeho pulled out the earbuds he’d been wearing. I asked him, my voice full of suspicion,

"You still haven’t gone home?"

"Yeah."

"I’m almost afraid to ask, but... were you waiting for me?"

"Yeah."

He answered everything with the same one-syllable laziness, like it was all a hassle.

"Why were you waiting?"

"You really think some guy who just came to the company for the first time today is going to find the dorm properly on his own?"

"You’re telling me this was you being considerate?"

"Seongbin said he’d stay, but it’s too late for the kids to be out."

So in other words, he hadn’t stayed because he wanted to. But who cared.

Our future leader was eighteen years old right now. If anyone here had a conscience, then at this hour it damn well should’ve been Choi Jeho staying behind instead of a minor.

Still, since I knew all too well how much Choi Jeho is the "I live my life alone" type, I patted him on the back a couple times and gave him a forced smile, silently acknowledging the gesture.

He looked thoroughly disgusted.

When we got back to the dorm, Lee Cheonghyeon—who slept above my head, on the top bunk—was awake and waiting for us.

"Why are you still up?"

"I was waiting for you, hyung!"

When I pointed at Choi Jeho, Lee Cheonghyeon pointed proudly at me.

So there was some kind of toxic rookie hazing ritual in idol land too?

Like "go buy thirty coffees by yourself," that sort of thing. Or making the newbie wash everyone’s shoes at the dorm.

I gave him a look that said, "So you’re that kind of guy," and he flailed.

"Why are you looking at me so sharply like that?"

"I was just wondering if you were about to put me through some kind of punishment drill."

At this hour, the cruelest orders I could think of were things like "go buy a lunchbox from each convenience store brand" or "go to a 24-hour hangover soup place, get bone hangover soup to-go, and bring it here before it cools."

For someone who’d once run cigarette errands from Gangnam to Gangbuk, that much was nothing.

Steeling myself, I tried to remember what restaurants we’d passed on the way home, but then Lee Cheonghyeon said,

"Who would make you do something like that!"

"You wouldn’t?"

"Of course not! Why would you say something that scary."

Meanwhile, I’d already been mentally asking the hangover soup owner to throw in some extra radish kimchi. If it wasn’t happening, then fine.

While Center Emperor Choi Jeho, who’d checked out of our conversation early, went to shower, Lee Cheonghyeon sat down on the floor next to my bed. I ended up on the floor with him.

"They said Giyeon’s ankle is inflamed. I saw he had a brace on when he came back."

So he’d been waiting to tell me about Kang Giyeon’s ankle.

He’d made the biggest fuss when we first heard Giyeon was hurt, but he seemed a lot calmer now.

"Then he’ll have to take a break from practice for a while."

"I don’t know about that. His stubbornness is something else."

That much was true. I nodded in agreement.

"Hyung, how did you even know?"

"What, about Giyeon’s ankle?"

"Yeah. None of us noticed."

"I mean... I didn’t see it either when I was up close. But from a distance, it was obvious."

If I said...

"I came from the future, and thanks to all the forced fan-labor I did as Assistant Manager for my boss in the HR department, I learned that Kang Giyeon’s weak point is his ankle, so I realized my hunch was right."

...would this kid believe me? I didn’t feel like explaining that much anyway.

Apparently he really bought my half-assed answer, because his eyes went round.

"You must have really good tracking vision, hyung. It’s not easy to catch that sort of thing just from a quick look."

Don’t most people call that beginner’s luck when some clueless person just happens to get something right?

This kid really must be generous when it comes to evaluating other people.

"Guess I got lucky. If you rewatch the video, you’ll see it right away."

"We already watched it back at the dorm with Seongbin-hyung, but there wasn’t a trace. I think you’ve got insane eyes, hyung."

It wasn’t my "eyes," it was the big data I’d built up over years, but I kept my mouth shut.

If I were earning recognition by practicing hard and improving my skills, that’d be one thing. I didn’t want to stand out for something weird.

I used the moment when Choi Jeho came back from the shower to say I’d go wash up too, and got to my feet.

Lee Cheonghyeon looked a little disappointed but obediently went back to his own spot. He was quick on the uptake.

After I finished showering and lay down in bed, it finally hit me that the day was over.

"If possible, I’d like to figure out more about this system stuff at times like this. Wonder if that’ll be hard."

There’s nothing more annoying than issues that pop up out of nowhere while you’re quietly working.

I wanted to cut down on those disasters as much as possible, and right then the system actually appeared in front of me. Apparently if you beg hard enough for it to show up, it does.

What came up this time was the same text I’d seen before.

 [SYSTEM] Handover Progress

▷ Work schedule notification: February 1X, 20XX (Synchronization complete; no further changes allowed)

▷ Manual confirmation

▷ Process confirmation

 This time, there was a line through two of the items. I guessed that meant they were completed.

"Manual" had to mean the Life Reuse Manual.

That thing just pissed me off whenever I thought about it, so I decided to leave it alone.

Which left process confirmation.

I imagined checking the process as hard as I could, and sure enough, text related to the process popped up. The sync speed with my brain wasn’t bad.

 [SYSTEM] The "Process" is now being applied to Party B.

▷ "Work" or "KPIs" will be delivered to Party B on an irregular basis.

▷ Depending on Party B’s work performance, "welfare points" will be awarded.

▷ Awarded welfare points can be added to your "proficiency" scores.

▷ As handover proceeds after the process is applied, the difficulty of "work" will increase. (Penalties will occur upon work failure.)

[SYSTEM] Party B’s job category is set to "producing member."

 If you’re going to make me do producing, couldn’t you have just hired me as a new planner in the planning team instead of a "member," for fuck’s sake?

And the part about penalties wasn’t exactly charming either.

If I don’t debut, I can’t save my sister and I get forced to rejoin Hanpyeong; what more penalties do you even need at this point.

I should’ve cut this shitty boomer system out of my life the moment it started talking exactly like Department Head Nam.

I almost went looking for some "change voice" option like you do for navigation apps, but stopped myself. I didn’t want to look at this system crap any longer.

Still, I did like the fact that instead of spending my points on ice cream or something, I could invest them into my stats.

It felt a little unfair to just freely reap the results of other people’s sweat and effort, but with a family member’s life and my lifetime contract on the line, I had to use every dirty trick available.

"At least the condition isn’t that I have to be active with them for all seven years."

The condition for clearing the task was clearly debut.

In other words, it might mean it was fine as long as I debuted—even if I dropped out after that.

As for the penalty fee, I could just take out a loan, pay it off, and spend the rest of my life paying that down.

Having a useless loser like me hanging around would probably be worse for the team anyway; the earlier I pulled out, the better for everyone.

Strictly speaking, my hiring was fraudulent to begin with, so I’d at least have to make enough of a contribution to compensate for the losses my early withdrawal would cause.

Feeling pangs of conscience, I opened up my sad little hologram résumé.

 Performance Evaluation (100)

― Vocal proficiency: 4/20

― Dance proficiency: 1/20

― Self PR: 12/20

― Attendance & time management: 18/20

― Adaptability within organization: 10/20

Total EXP: 40

Total Points: 0

 There it was: the precious 40 EXP I’d earned from indomitable dance practice and overtime.

Wait.

So you’re telling me that even if I dance like a rabbit dragged off to the Tiger’s birthday feast and do voluntary overtime on top of it, I still can’t raise a single proficiency point?

This wasn’t a dirty trick; it was basically the ultimate compressed-life speedrun course.

Apparently I’d been looking for my conscience in all the wrong places. God, I really was naive—acting like I didn’t realize my own life was the shittiest thing in this equation.

Anyway, what I had to do right now was clear.

Grind EXP and earn points.

At the time, the idea of grinding another 60 EXP felt absolutely impossible.

But the very next day, I’d end up maxing out my EXP in a flash and getting my first point.

The incident began with a new work directive sparkling at me from morning, screaming for attention.

 [SYSTEM] "New ✧ NоvеIight ✧ (Original source) work" has been assigned.

▷ Attend your first dance lesson

▷ Reward: EXP (20)

 Now that it had been caught only ever handing out EXP in chunks of 20, the system didn’t even bother hiding the reward anymore.

Since this was UA’s first time putting together an idol group, the company was still in the "figuring out how to train trainees" phase.

So instead of having in-house trainers, UA brought in a vocal trainer and a dance trainer once a week.

Today was the day the dance trainer came in.

It was also the day I would, for the first time in my life, present something allegedly called "dancing" in front of a professional.

In front of the dance teacher I’d seen a few times on SPARK’s reality show, I flailed around as hard and as loudly as I could.

The end result was nothing more than a demonstration that my cart was completely empty.

The faces of the future SPARK brats held not a single hint of amusement, only shadow.

I guess after helping me so hard the day before, the sight of me being utterly beyond saving had finally broken them.

You know, when you never smile like that, that’s exactly why I have to hear, "Our kid says to raise the corners of his mouth just a little. It’s not that much work, right? You can do it quickly, can’t you?" every single day from Department Head Nam even after I send in the retouched photos. Just thinking about it pissed me off again.

After watching me stagger around like I was in a trance, the teacher hesitated and then spoke.

"Iwol..."

"Yes."

I folded my hands meekly in front of me.

I could feel how carefully he was choosing his words.

This silence, this tension.

Everything was absolutely perfect for me to get roasted.

The fact that he was making the effort to filter his language in a situation like this proved the teacher was a truly decent human being.

"You’re going to have to practice. A lot."

"Understood."

"Just ‘a lot’ isn’t going to cut it. You’re going to have to practice a whole lot, and be the most diligent one here."

"Yes. I’ll work hard."

If nothing else, I could say "I’ll work hard" more sincerely than anyone. My sister’s life and my future were on the line.

Moved by the desperation rising from my chest, the teacher didn’t add anything more. I was grateful.

The problem was that this damn system chose that exact moment to pop up and open its big mouth.