Dawn comes even if you twist a diploma’s neck.

Morning broke on a day I’d lost both my family home and my degree. Brilliantly sunny, too.

“It’s over.”

“What is?”

“Everything.”

“Hyung, are you okay?”

Lee Cheonghyeon, who’d watched my passionate mood swings from the top bunk last night, asked.

I wanted to say I was absolutely not okay. Because I really wasn’t.

But I couldn’t. People who muddy the team’s mood with personal feelings are the worst.

On top of that, last night when I was losing my mind, Lee Cheonghyeon even lent me the laptop he uses for composing.

If I’m a proper adult, I should know who to get mad at and who not to.

I forced out that I was fine and ran a hand down my face—my skin was dewy. Must’ve been thanks to that face mask Lee Cheonghyeon slapped on me last night.

X, diligence only makes him prettier. At this rate he’s good for nothing but ranking first in photocard prices.

Still, after suffering all night and denying reality about 230,000 times, I reached enlightenment.

I will debut no matter what.

Then I’ll wash away this humiliation.

And find a way to eat and live.

To do that, I’m going to memorize the basic choreography from start to finish today.

From now on, it’s debut or nothing.

I made a firm vow.

And a little later.

They say even a schoolyard dog can recite verse after three years and an idol can make a comeback after three months. I too managed remarkable results in three days.

Roughly thirty hours of official practice, excluding breaks.

Add four hours of personal practice.

Plus focused instruction from five private tutors.

After thirty-four hours total of wall-to-wall help and cramming the choreo, I could dance a four-minute routine without a single mistake—though my form looked suspiciously like millennium-era calisthenics.

When I channel that first-year employee viciousness, nothing’s impossible.

My eyes are probably dead, though.

 [SYSTEM] The “work task” has been completed.

▷ Reward: Experience (20) paid

▷ Accumulated Experience: 80

▷ Accumulated Points: 0

 With one song’s choreography under my belt, points piled up too.

“Just wait. I’ll save one more and push Dance Proficiency to 3.”

Having fallen into hell once, all that was left in my heart was malice and grit.

Humans discover hidden abilities under extreme conditions.

When Department Head Nam told me to write the report he’d forgotten—within four hours—I discovered my potential then, too.

Didn’t expect those past experiences to give me courage in a place like this.

“Whatever comes next... I’ll treat it like I’m already dead and get it done.”

I steeled myself.

But X, it’s not just dance—I have to practice singing too.

K-trainee life is brutal.

They say humans are animals of adaptation.

Me too.

Within a few days I reached the realm where I could dine among those noble faces—hailed since debut as having no visual holes—without looking like someone seeing celebrities for the first time.

Even savoring the sauce on slightly soggy jjolmyeon (chewy, spicy cold Korean noodles), at that.

Me, enjoying jjolmyeon in the morning amid all the dazzling faces. Pretty stout-hearted.

Boys with bird’s-nest hair squatting in clusters on the practice-room floor, eating bunsik—kind of reminded me of school days.

It’s just that there weren’t kids with faces like these back then.

If you divided idols into the friendly-looking kind and the not-so-friendly-looking kind, SPARK was clearly the latter.

Eighty percent of the reason was their faces.

Recent idol groups tend to gather members with different visual “flavors” into one team.

In a market where there should be at least one of your types, agencies evolved their visual goals toward making groups that make people say, “How did they put kids like this in one place?”

But UA was brave in its ignorance.

Cold, sharp ice-cool guy? → Handsome.

Lots of handsome members? → Good.

Was that their simplistic schema? Or did UA just prefer ice-cool guys?

UA turned SPARK into a group that’s “good because it has lots of sharp, cold faces.”

In other words, they collected nothing but ultimate cold-as-steel types in one group.

First, SPARK’s undisputed visual in both name and reality, Lee Cheonghyeon—whose face looked born at the moment heaven and earth first opened.

Even if you told me he washed only with water fetched from Heaven Lake on Mount Baekdu, I’d believe it; there wasn’t a speck on Lee Cheonghyeon’s face.

If Lee Cheonghyeon’s face carried a crisp breeze like a clear autumn morning sky, then his same-age friend Kang Giyeon’s face blasted a cutting wind.

Like downing a bottle of tequila in a blizzard gale—...No. That’s an inappropriate metaphor for a kid about to start high school next month.

With looks that seemed like he could one-shot a whole bottle of hot, undiluted ginger tea, Kang Giyeon boasted visuals you wouldn’t believe belonged to the team’s maknae.

The mid-line faces, one year older than Lee Cheonghyeon and Kang Giyeon, weren’t much different.

Main vocalist Park Juwoo’s nickname was “human dawn mountain mist.”

I used to think that nickname didn’t really suit him. About 80% of his expressions I saw during monitoring looked vacant.

But seeing Park Juwoo in person, I accepted it on the spot.

With skin so white it bordered on pallor, Park Juwoo bare-faced wouldn’t look out of place showing up in hanbok like a mountain spirit at daybreak.

Leader Jeong Seongbin had it comparatively easier.

Unlike Lee Cheonghyeon, whose worldly-detached features made even his smiles seem sardonic, Jeong Seongbin’s smile was the dictionary-definition idol smile.

≫ Be honest, isn’t Jeong Seongbin an all-rounder handsome guy?

Look at that smile—how is that not all-rounder handsome

└ (roughly: photo of Jeong Seongbin wedged among all-rounder handsome guys)

└ Right, our baby’s not all-rounder handsome; must be my rose-tinted glasses

Even Jeong Seongbin got called a certified ice-cool guy when he stepped outside, though.

Fans’ efforts to somehow push Seongbin into the all-rounder-handsome category—on the grounds his eyebrows drooped even a degree more than the others—were so touching even a third party like me almost cried.

Of course I didn’t actually cry. I’d watched so much monitoring my eyes were desert-dry.

Lastly, the group’s center and the man who committed the sin of capturing Department Head Nam’s daughter: Choi Jeho.

That bastard... seemed born in the Arctic.

His features might as well have “I am not someone you can push around” written in 13-point Batang across them—the textbook face you don’t want to run into outside.

Honestly, it made sense he was responsible for about two hundred of the eight hundred times I visited the Ministry of Employment and Labor’s complaint submission page.

If not for him, my average monthly overtime would have dropped by twenty hours.

Every one of them was something else.

And then there was me.

I recalled the face I’d seen in the mirror that morning.

From any angle, an ordinary twenty-something who’d been a little less ground down by society.

“Is there no such thing as Appearance Proficiency?”

Feels like everything useless exists and the thing I actually need doesn’t.

The system didn’t seem to know how important looks are to idols. I’m just a card to be tossed once I debut, huh.

Maybe I was thinking too deeply about my own meaning of existence, because Lee Cheonghyeon, who’d been watching me, asked,

“Hyung, you don’t like the jjolmyeon? Want to switch?”

“No. I was thinking about something else.”

“What were you thinking about?”

“About how I’m already kind of a lost cause... that kind of thought.”

“Why are you talking like that mid-meal.”

Then Lee Cheonghyeon went back to eating. A morning full of worries. Not that anyone would understand me.

If dance class sat somewhere between chaos, destruction, and despair, vocal class was a bit better.

At least there was no tragedy of having to perform the Dance of the Wooden Marionette of Ecstasy.

Instead, I had to try my best to hide the soul of a tragic office worker who sticks a spoon in a soju bottle and sings.

“Iwol, try relaxing your body a bit more when you sing.”

“Yes, I’ll be careful.”

“Don’t get tense; just sing. The singing itself isn’t bad.”

If I don’t stay tense, I might shoot straight into Department Head Nam’s greatest-hits medley—gotta be careful. I’m decent at trot, after all.

Still, to live up to the teacher’s expectations, I clenched my fist and did my level best to sing as instructed.

 [SYSTEM] The “work task” has been completed.

▷ Reward: Experience (20) paid

▷ Accumulated Experience: 100

▷ Accumulated Points: 1

 Thanks to that, I got experience for completing my first vocal class.

Sadly there’s no way to raise Appearance Proficiency, so I invested the newly earned single welfare point into Dance Proficiency. Guess handsome faces really are heaven-sent.

 Performance Evaluation (100)

― Vocal Proficiency: 4/20

― Dance Proficiency: 3(▲)/20

― Self PR: 12/20

― Attendance Management: 18/20

― Adaptability Within the Organization: 10/20

Accumulated Experience: 0

Accumulated Points: 0

 Seeing the slow-but-steady growth in my proficiencies didn’t make me proud, but it did ease my mind a little.

If it keeps up like this, by debut I might just escape the broken dance locomotive...

 [SYSTEM] A work directive from the “Person in Charge” has arrived.

▶ It’d be a problem if an employee with even a single stripe on his rank kept working exactly like a brand-new hire, right? Time to show some performance. I need to see what’s improved so I have something to say upstairs.

[SYSTEM] As the “work task” acclimation period has ended, attainable experience is being adjusted.

▷ Before: Base Experience 20 paid

▷ After change: Base Experience 10 paid

 Damn it.

Why don’t you just hold a ritual and tell me to quit? Huh?

Go ahead and mix the three-color namul clean and serve it up as memorial food.

It didn’t take long to adapt to how the practice room ran.

Thanks to roughly 1,400 days of surviving under Department Head Nam’s gaze.

Ah—now and then my eyes met Choi Jeho’s in the mirror.

Maybe because I’ve eaten nothing but others’ moods for so long, I could hear his voice even in his gaze now.

“If you clank around again today, I’m really leaving you behind.”

“It hurts my heart, but what doesn’t work doesn’t work.”

Choi Jeho’s brow wrinkled like a dried filefish. Looked like he read my eye-beam telepathy too.

While the two of us were trading fiery looks, someone came to the practice room. The same person who’d come here before—the person who’d cast me to UA.

Was it Manager Min Ju-gyeong from the Management Division?

After the usual crisp greetings, Manager Min said,

“You all know we’ve got the end-of-month evaluation coming up, right? I figured Iwol might not know yet, so I came to announce it again.” 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

I didn’t know the details, but I did know it existed. SPARK’s trainee talk is basically nothing but end-of-month evaluation stories.

Still, I appreciated UA’s thoughtfulness in announcing it when there were more than ten days left.

Compared to Department Head Nam, who once threw me into an afternoon meeting and then used half-day leave to run away, UA’s handling was pure light.

“The evaluation will run the same as last time. For the specifics... Seongbin, could you explain it a bit to Iwol?”

“Yes!”

The disgustingly kind Jeong Seongbin answered with gusto, despite being handed the handover on the spot. Truly the type who’ll ace office life.

If you show that this early, people who sold their conscience will only try to use you.

People like me, for example, who plan to bolt right after debut.

“The difference this time is the CEO will be there. You know what that means, right?”

While I was worrying about the future where Jeong Seongbin becomes SPARK’s spokesperson, Manager Min added,

“We’re about to start locking in the lineup, debut team. Let’s do well.”