Free Web Novel"Again!"
"Yes."
Lucas, the Swedish composer we’d mistaken for Russian.
'So they really are a people who won’t even buy you a meal?'
To the point it made you wonder if that loud, overexcited welcome when he first saw us had even been real, he was directing the members with an icy attitude.
Thanks to that, even though it was early summer, the recording booth felt cold enough for a chill to run through.
"Yunkyung, trust your voice. You’re trying to dodge it right now."
"What?"
"Because you don’t trust your own voice. In your part, the match—no, the volume keeps going up."
"..."
At Lucas’s directing, Yunkyung’s face went pale.
'This song isn’t easy.'
It wasn’t just Yunkyung. Even Yuri, who was rated the best purely in vocal skill among our members, struggled under Lucas’s blunt, cold directing the moment Yuri went into the booth.
"The key point in this song is that the vocal works like part of the rhythm. Tone and texture matter more than melody."
Our new title track, "DON’T BLINK," didn’t have any parts where the high notes exploded, and it wasn’t a song meant to show off raw power either.
A song you sing like you’re talking, with breath mixed into the sound.
It sounded easy when you said it like that, but it was extremely hard to follow that vague instruction of “still make the feel come alive.”
To the point that even DubDub—who had handled every assignment so far like it was nothing—was having a hard time with this song, and only this song.
"Next, Sion, come in."
"Yes."
It seemed Yunkyung’s turn was finally over, because Lucas called for me next.
"Boss... hang in there."
Maybe the shock of being criticized for a full hour hit hard, because Yunkyung came out of the booth with dead eyes, warning me to be careful while still cheering me on.
"Yunkyung..."
"Boss..."
Thunk.
To Yunkyung like that, I held out the cold Pocari Sweat I’d been carrying.
"You prepared this to give to me?"
Taking the Pocari from me, Yunkyung stared up at me with sparkling eyes, like she was moved.
I looked at Yunkyung with warm eyes and answered.
"No, I’m going to drink it, but if you leave it, Yuri’s going to steal it."
"Boss!"
Yunkyung looked at me like she’d been played, and it was pretty cute, but if we left it, Yuri really would loot it.
"I will finish the directing before the Pocari gets lukewarm."
"Victory!"
Even so, when I went in through the booth door, Yunkyung cheered me on, saluting in a posture that was becoming pretty familiar now.
'I’m used to this too now.'
The recording booth was a strange place.
The moment you closed the thick door, there was a silence that made it feel like you’d stepped into another world.
And once you put on the headphones and stood in front of the mic inside that booth, all you could hear was the music.
I stood in front of the condenser mic—back in the day I didn’t even know the name and just called it a “recording booth mic”—and closed my eyes for a moment, waiting.
"Ready?"
"Yes."
When I answered, Lucas’s voice came through the headphones, like he’d finished getting set.
Then the melody started to play.
♬
'This is that Jersey Club-based rhythm, right?'
From Agbaek until now, after debuting, I’d kept studying idol music to fill the gaps in my knowledge.
“Studying” was basically just listening to other idols’ music I hadn’t really listened to before, or going back and watching old stage videos, but.
Even so, with help from the other members like Shinyu and Seo Ryujin, I’d gotten to the point where I could kind of tell what “idol music” was.
But I still didn’t know a lot.
"Jersey Club is a subgenre of electronic! It has a fast BPM and a really bouncy, chopped rhythm, so it’s a genre that’s great to dance to!"
Not just me—this Jersey Club was unfamiliar to the other members too, and the only one who knew it was Shinyu.
'It definitely makes your body want to move.'
Even though the melody was unfamiliar, "DON’T BLINK," made by mixing in Jersey Club, made my shoulders start bouncing on their own just from listening.
Don’t—
Don’t blink
Yeah
The intro ended, and the song was really starting.
The moment our eyes meet
I think it’s already too late
If I rest for one beat
I think I’ll miss it all
Compared to our previous title track, "It Feels Like Something’s About to Start," the rhythm was completely different, and the lyrics being much shorter stood out.
"Our debut song had a strong drama feel. You put a story into the song, so you divided it into beginning, development, climax, and conclusion."
Like Raon had explained to us in Lucas’s place since Lucas’s Korean still wasn’t great, the lyrics really felt like they were expressing a split-second emotion.
Even the lyrics felt like they existed for the rhythm.
Step too fast
Heart too loud
This feeling right now
In words, no doubt
Tone and texture—what Lucas kept emphasizing while directing the members before me.
I had a near-certainty, like a gut instinct, that this song would fit if I loosened the power and still kept it bright, using a thin, tense voice.
"Sion, it’s your part starting now. Focus."
Lucas’s voice came through, telling me my part was finally coming.
I nodded—not with words—to show I understood, and focused.
DON’T BLINK, DON’T BLINK
This is a warning
DON’T BLINK, DON’T BLINK
It all flies away
Unlike usual, I didn’t shove out sound with a big volume—I let it out.
Of course, just singing quietly didn’t mean anything. I had to mix breath into the sound through the nasal passage.
I had to pull off real-time, hair-trigger control where if I didn’t have the skills I’d learned through vocal training, it would’ve turned into an ugly sound.
DON’T BLINK, DON’T BLINK
This vibe right now
If you miss it once
Never comes back
"If you don’t know and you just push a high note, you tense up without realizing it. That’s why you have to make it with technique. That’s how you can hit a high note that feels like it’s floating. When people hear it, they go, ‘Wait, was it that high?’ That’s the surprise."
Now that I had to actually use things I hadn’t understood back when I learned them, the vocal trainer’s lessons came back to me one by one, and my body followed them on its own.
But technique wasn’t enough.
The imagery method I learned back when Park Taesu had directed me.
'This song is kind of breathless.'
Like the urgency of being chased by the enemy top and jungle in Legend of Valley—pressing, but not just frantic. I had to keep it restrained.
Then there was only one thing that came to mind.
The bitter desperation of Liu Bei, who got exposed trying to assassinate Cao Cao and had to flee in a panic, was definitely a perfect fit for this song.
'Your Majesty... I’ll remember you!'
When I pictured Liu Bei, forced to run from that bastard Cao Cao’s claws while being scattered from his brothers and family, the song poured out on its own.
By the time I’d gotten completely immersed in Liu Bei and sung, my part was already over.
As Shinyu’s rap part followed, I finally let out a breath of relief.
'This isn’t easy. Even just trying to sing it carefully is exhausting. If we have to sing this later while doing choreo, it’s going to be brutal.'
None of our songs so far had been easy, but this one made me think it might be overwhelmingly the hardest of them all.
'But why isn’t he saying anything?'
While I was thinking about the difficulty, I suddenly realized that even though the song had ended, no instructions were coming.
'Did it break?'
During the other members’ directing, Lucas’s "Again!" would come the instant a single line ended, so it was strange not to hear it.
I wondered if the headphones had broken, but the song was still coming through fine, so I felt confused, and then—
"...Okay."
Finally, Lucas’s voice came through.
***
"Did you trick me?"
"Lucas, I’m surprised too."
Even at Raon’s answer, Lucas couldn’t react.
'How can she sing it perfectly, exactly like the voice I imagined?'
Because just now, Lucas had heard the exact vocal he imagined while making the song, in real life—and it made him feel like he was about to pass out.
Sometimes when you make a song, there’s a feeling that unless it’s this singer, the song can’t be completed.
No—more than just Lucas, it was probably the same for every composer. When they start composing, they imagine someone’s voice as a target and build the song on top of that.
'I did make it while thinking about the Iam members, but...'
"DON’T BLINK," the song he made in collaboration with Raon this time, was a song Lucas made while thinking about the Iam members.
He replayed every stage they’d done on /N_o_v_e_l_i_g_h_t/ Idol Ground 100 dozens of times, and he looked up every stage of "It Feels Like Something’s About to Start" from this promotion too.
And among them, Lucas remembered most vividly the episode where they tried a Great Escape just to go to a convenience store, and he composed the song while thinking about that.
The scene of girl group members climbing a wall and escaping their dorm smashed the image Lucas had of idols into pieces—it was a shocking sight.
Even though it was an unauthorized act—an escape—somehow the members looked strangely cheerful.
And yet, that tension, that pressure of being chased, came across so vividly to Lucas through the screen.
So he wanted to express that as a song, and the result was "DON’T BLINK."
But now, that liveliness he’d imagined while making the song was coming through exactly as sound—like a dream, for a composer.
"If the other members sang cleanly, Sion still has some rough parts, but she’s bringing the feel of the song to life perfectly."
"Right. How did she grab this kind of difficult emotional line in one go?"
Lucas couldn’t believe it, so he asked Raon again, but there was no answer.
Because the one even more shocked than Lucas right now was Raon.
'Sion’s absorption was fast, but she’s already at this level?'
Before Lucas, Raon had fully handled Iam’s producing, and before that, she had participated as the Final Round producer for Agbaek.
So Raon prided herself on knowing the members’ skills better than anyone, but what Lee Sion showed today was beyond her expectations.
'Even if I did it, I couldn’t do better than that.'
It might sound arrogant at first glance, but this was the highest praise Raon could give.
Raon, who was evaluated as having the best skill among South Korea’s female solo singers, had never once thought she would be worse than other skilled idols whenever she saw them.
But the vocal Lee Sion just delivered was something it was hard to even imagine doing better than. freewēbnoveℓ.com
'In the repeating chorus, she didn’t explode—she restrained it and whispered like she was talking. And still, she made you feel emotion. That’s not just “excellent.”'
It was a voice that let the listener stay comfortable, then realize without noticing that the song had ended—so they hit replay because they wanted to hear it again.
Raon remembered the time she had directed Lee Sion back in Agbaek, in the Final Round.
"People say it, right? For a field to take a step forward, a hero has to appear who leads that field."
Hyeryeong—her close junior, and someone who had once been called the best idol herself.
"I think that hero is Lee Sion."
Hyeryeong had once told Raon that she thought Lee Sion was someone who would raise K-pop by a whole step.
But after hearing that, Raon had scoffed inwardly.
'She stood out, sure, but I thought it was absolutely not to that extent.'
Her looks were outstanding, but an idol wasn’t something completed by looks alone.
Skill—and beyond skill, the inborn charm and individuality that made everyone think of that idol the moment they heard the name.
It had to be all of that together, and back then, Raon hadn’t thought Lee Sion was at that level.
But as Raon directed Lee Sion directly and learned just how huge Lee Sion’s talent was, Raon immediately understood why Hyeryeong had praised her that extremely.
If you taught her, she absorbed it as taught—and then in the real thing, she showed even more than you expected.
The truth was, Lee Sion’s existence played a big part in why Raon took the producer role at KJ Entertainment.
Because it would be a lie to say she wasn’t curious how far Lee Sion would grow, and how fast.
Watching Lee Sion grow quickly as she produced her directly had become one of Raon’s biggest joys lately.
But even with Raon watching her closely the whole time, in such a short span, Lee Sion showed her again—jumping another entire level.
"I feel like I’m going to go crazy because I want to see the kids’ comeback stage right now."
"Today, we really have the same heart, huh?"
All Lucas and Raon could think about was wanting to show people what they had just seen and heard.
'But are the kids going to be okay?'
The rest of the Iam members had been listening together to Lee Sion’s vocal from outside the booth.
Normally, during recording, the other members waited outside so the person inside could focus and not be disturbed.
But today, since it was time for directing before the real recording, even the members who weren’t being directed were observing together.
Only then did Lucas and Raon realize they hadn’t even cut the recording and had shown the members how overly excited they were, and they felt a jolt of panic.
But—
'What... the kids’ eyes lit up?'
Raon, who hurriedly checked the members’ reactions, had no choice but to be shocked.
"Did Lee Sion not use chest voice just now?"
"No. She didn’t make it thick. She kept using it in the middle, though."
"This time, if we put Sion as the main vocal and use a lot of doubling, it’ll definitely be good."
"This song, for sure, isn’t about one person singing big—it’s important for multiple people to sing with the same feel!"
"After directing ends today, I’m going to the vocal trainer. What about you, older sisters?"
"We can’t let Lee Sion run ahead alone. I’m going too."
Instead of drooping or showing jealousy toward Lee Sion like Raon expected, the Iam members’ eyes sparkled as if this was great, exchanging opinions with each other.
Especially Yuri, who had originally been Iam’s main vocal, was proposing that they put Lee Sion as the main vocal instead and have the other members cooperate.
'That’s exactly what Lucas and I talked about while making the song.'
This song wasn’t about one person standing out—it was something multiple people made together.
So rather than pushing Yuri’s usually distinctive voice to the front, the two of them had planned to stack the members’ voices through doubling.
Raon knew Yuri always looked playful, but she also knew Yuri was serious about music. Still, Raon hadn’t realized Yuri was at a level where she could analyze a track like this, so it was another discovery.
More than anything, main vocal was a position that drew attention in any group, and Yuri saying it would be good to yield it without hesitation made Raon feel embarrassed.
"Lucas, can you handle the rest of the directing alone?"
"Huh? There isn’t much left, so it’s fine, but what’s going on?"
"I need to talk with the CEO one more time."
After saying that, Raon stood up.
Debut song grand slam, 200,000 album sales.
And a bunch of other records too—Raon had gotten too cocky, thinking that for Iam, who had achieved all of that, she’d even dug up a hidden-gem producer this time.
'With the kids doing this much, I can’t be the one lacking.'
Outfits, music video, broadcast schedules.
For Iam’s comeback this time, she needed to check everything she’d prepared again and see if there was anything to improve.
A producer couldn’t make jewels be born, but she could bring out the jewels’ true value.
Raon wanted to make the jewel called Iam shine brighter than anyone.
