Grab the Manual and Debut!-Chapter 25: ✦Scandal [3]✦

The studio apartment in Incheon was a box of sterile white walls and the faint, lingering scent of cheap detergent. It was a "safe house," though Kang-joon knew it was more of a cage. Starline had sent him here to keep the fire from spreading to the other trainees, but they hadn’t taken his phone—not yet. They wanted him reachable in case the legal tide turned into a tsunami.

Kang-joon sat on the edge of the bed, the blue light of his smartphone illuminating his face in the dark room. He wasn’t calculating percentages or reciting physics equations. He was just tired.

Ninety-six lives. He had been a trainee who failed his debut 96 different ways. He had been the one who lacked talent, the one whose agency went bankrupt, the one who got sick, and the one who was simply forgotten. But he had never been a criminal.

He scrolled through the portal sites. His name was still pinned to the top of the search rankings, but the tone had shifted from curiosity to a heavy, stagnant disgust.

"November 14th, 2019," he whispered.

He closed his eyes, leaning his head back against the wall. He didn’t need a system to remember that year. In his 97th life, he had spent that entire winter working at a convenience store in Mapo. He remembered the specific itch of the polyester uniform and the way the heater behind the counter always smelled like burning dust.

He opened the video again—the one the police had shown him. He watched it on a loop, his thumb hovering over the progress bar.

The boy in the video stepped out of the black sedan. He was wearing a navy-blue windbreaker with a small, circular patch on the left sleeve.

"I didn’t own that jacket in 2019," Kang-joon said to the empty room.

He got up and walked to the small kitchenette, pouring himself a glass of water. He remembered that jacket. It was a donation gift from the Evergreen Hope House, but they hadn’t distributed that specific design until the winter of 2021. He knew because he’d helped unload the boxes from the delivery truck himself.

He looked at the screen again. The boy’s face was sharp, the movements precise. It looked like him, but it was too much like him. The way the boy adjusted his glasses in the rain—it was a habit Kang-joon had only picked up recently to cope with the eye strain of the show’s intense lighting.

"It’s a fake," he realized.

But it wasn’t just a cheap edit. Someone had taken his current image—the way he looked, moved, and acted now—and grafted it onto a real accident from the past. He sat back down at the small desk, his fingers hovering over the keyboard of his laptop.

He wasn’t a "Professor," but he was a man who had seen how the world worked 96 times over. He knew that for a lie this big to work, someone had to have the original footage. And they had to have a reason to want him dead.

Ji-hye’s POV

Ji-hye’s bedroom was a mess of law textbooks, discarded coffee cups, and the soft, blue glow of three different monitors. Her roommates thought she was cramming for the bar exam, but if they looked closer at her screens, they’d see she was knee-deep in a different kind of trial.

A half-eaten cup of ramyun sat cold on her nightstand. She hadn’t left her room in twelve hours. Her eyes were bloodshot, reflecting the rows of code and frame-by-frame video breakdowns.

"There’s something wrong with the lighting," she muttered, rubbing her face.

She had the "Evidence" video open in a forensic playback tool. As a law student, she had a natural instinct for the gaps in a story, but as a fan who had spent months watching Kang-joon’s every move on Road to Starlight, she knew his physical habits better than the police did.

She looked at the reflection of the streetlights on the hood of the black sedan. Then, she looked at the reflection on the boy’s glasses as he stepped out.

"The car reflection is yellow from the old sodium lamps," she noted, clicking her mouse to zoom in. "But the reflection in his glasses is white. Pure white."

She leaned in closer to the monitor, her heart starting to thump. "That’s LED light. Gangnam didn’t replace the streetlights on that block with LEDs until 2022. If this was 2019, those reflections should be amber."

Ji-hye felt a chill. This wasn’t just a mistake. It was a sophisticated, multi-layered frame job. Someone had used an AI to place Kang-joon into a tragedy that had actually happened, but they’d been careless with the environmental physics.

She opened a search tab for the original 2019 accident. It took her hours of digging through old local news archives, but she finally found a snippet of the original case.

November 15, 2019: Hit-and-run in Gangnam. Victim in critical condition. Driver sought.

The original report mentioned a black sedan, but the description of the driver was different: ’A male in his late 20s, wearing a dark suit.’

"If the original report said he was in his 20s, why are the police suddenly accepting a video of a teenager?" Ji-hye wondered.

She looked at the comments on the news articles. People were calling for Kang-joon’s permanent exile. They were calling for the show to be cancelled.

"They’re not just trying to get him off the show," she realized, a surge of protective anger boiling up. "They’re trying to destroy him because they know he has no parents, no money, and no one to file a defamation suit."

She grabbed her phone and opened her "Stan" account, her fingers flying over the screen. She didn’t post a fan-edit or a vote-link. Instead, she began to draft a thread for a legal whistleblower forum. [Subject: Technical Inconsistencies in the Lee Kang-joon Evidence. A Case for Digital Fabrication.]

Back in the Incheon apartment, Kang-joon hadn’t moved.

He was looking at the "Starlight" trainee portal. The staff had already removed his profile picture. He was just a grey silhouette now.

He went to his contacts and found the number for the Evergreen Hope House. His finger hesitated over the call button. He didn’t want them involved. If the media found out he was an orphan, the narrative would shift from "Bully" to "Unstable Charity Case." The public loved a genius, but they were often cruel to those they deemed "unprotected."

He looked at his hands. They were steady.

"I didn’t drive that car," he said quietly.

He began to search for the "witness" the police had mentioned—Kim Sang-hoon. He remembered a man by that name from one of his earlier lives. Loop #72. Back then, Kim Sang-hoon had been a minor manager for a rival agency who had been caught taking bribes.

If it was the same man, it meant this wasn’t just a random scandal. It was an industry hit.

He stood up and grabbed his jacket. He couldn’t go to Gangnam without being recognized, but he knew where a man like Kim Sang-hoon would be hiding.

As he walked to the door, his phone buzzed. It wasn’t a message from the agency. It was an anonymous link sent to a public forum he frequented.

The link led to a draft of a legal analysis.

[...The reflection in the eyewear suggests a light source that did not exist in the Gangnam-daero district during the 2019 calendar year...]