Free Web NovelThere’s an idiom that literally means “being unable to sit comfortably in one’s seat.”
It describes being in such a difficult situation that you can’t sit still, and right now, that was exactly how Lee Hyuksu felt.
“Yes, we’re in the process of verifying the facts as well. We’re sorry for causing controversy.”
“Reporter Baek, if you could just hold off on the article for a little bit···.”
“We can’t disclose personal information about the contestants···.”
The MPlay production staff were in full emergency mode, all of them busy answering phones that were practically on fire.
“This is insane! Which lunatic posted something like that?”
“Seriously. If we catch that bastard, he’s dead.”
“The internet’s exploded. It’s dominating the realtime search rankings, and there isn’t a single community where it hasn’t spread.”
Only after they finally pulled every single office phone line out of the wall did the rush of calls die down.
The Idol Ground 100 production staff gathered in a conference room and went into an emergency meeting.
Because of an insider whistleblower post about Idol Ground 100 that had gone up late last night, the production team was in utter chaos.
Exhausted from the huge stage of the Position Evaluation, the staff had collapsed into a dead sleep, only to wake up and find the editing controversy had spiraled completely out of control.
If they’d caught it early, that would have been one thing, but this had all happened while everybody’s guard was down, and it had already spread so far that there was nothing they could do.
[The contestant in the whistleblower post is Lee Sion, right?]
「If you line up the context of the conversation in the recording, the only contestant it could be is Lee Sion.
The f**k, they told them to erase the screentime of the kid who’s hard-carrying the show?
Is the PD out of her mind or what?」
↳Is there any chance the recording is fake?
↳There are people who analyze that kind of thing, they said there are no signs of manipulation
↳It’s obvious, the other contestants’ agencies put pressure on them because it looked like Lee Sion was going to take first place
↳These idol survival shows are where trainees stake their whole lives, it has to be fair, this is f**king bullshit
The staff had brought their laptops over and were reading posts on the communities, each of them letting out a sigh.
“Ugh, do you know what we went through to protect Lee Sion’s screentime.”
“But literally all we did was barely protect it, right? PD Kim did cut a lot.”
“Well, I mean, with everything Lee Sion did, she could’ve filled a hundred minutes out of a hundred twenty and no one would have had any complaints.”
The staff could feel that the content in the recording was serious.
But there were also parts that felt unfair, because while it was true that main PD Kim Miyoung had ordered them to cut Lee Sion’s screentime,
it was also the staff who had refused that order and protected her screentime.
However,
[So Lee Sion pulled legendary cuts even while getting hit with bullshit like this?]
[Where did all the trash go who said MPlay was openly pushing Lee Sion?]
[Fr, it’s only because she was born to be an idol that this turned out okay, if it’d been your average contestant they would’ve just been eliminated on the spot because of the PD]
[If they don’t explain this today, I’m filing complaints with the broadcasting commission and everyone else and demanding a full investigation]
There was no way the average viewer would know any of that, so all they were doing was taking the blame.
“Hyuksu, you still can’t get in touch with PD Kim?”
“Sorry? Ah··· no, still nothing. I’ll keep trying to reach her.”
“Haa··· where on earth is she that she’s not picking up her phone?”
At senior editor Park Hyungsu’s words, Lee Hyuksu’s conscience twinged.
‘I’m with the department head right now···.’
Among the production staff gathered in the conference room, Hyuksu was the only one who knew where Miyoung had gone.
But he couldn’t bring himself to say it. freēwebnovel.com
He couldn’t say that he was the one who had posted the whistleblower article, and that the person who had ordered him to do it was Kim Miyoung.
Right now, not only the internet but the reporters had picked up the scent, and the controversy was accelerating, so Hyuksu’s heart was pounding.
It was true he’d done it according to Miyoung’s blackmail—no, her “request”—but no matter how he thought about it, he couldn’t see how she planned to resolve this.
However, the die had already been cast, and all Hyuksu could do was keep his mouth shut and wait, just like he’d been told.
***
There’s another saying that there is a sky beyond the sky.
Simply put, it means that no matter how good you are, there’s always someone better.
That was exactly what Yunkyung’s room was like.
Everything inside it changed all of the standards I’d had up to now; it was a place full of skies beyond the sky.
Fwoof.
“N-no way. Why doesn’t the bed bounce at all?!”
I had lived my whole life not knowing this was what a bed could be.
Up until now, every bed I’d ever lain on had always wobbled when you put your body on it, that was just common sense, but the bed in Yunkyung’s room didn’t say “wobble,” it said “fwoof.”
It felt like floating on top of water.
It was a crazy piece of furniture that turned the entire room into an overseas resort.
“I don’t really know either.”
But even with that kind of insane bed in her room, Yunkyung’s reaction couldn’t have been more indifferent.
Was this what it meant to have the poise of a chaebol’s daughter (a daughter of a Korean conglomerate family)?
I made sure to etch it into my memory, because someday when the Bitcoin I’d bought moonshot, I would have to copy this calm attitude of Yunkyung’s.
“Stop that already and hurry up and come eat tteokbokki, Boss.”
“You still think of me as Boss?”
“Seriously, stop joking around!”
When I said that, Yunkyung puffed out her cheeks and made a sulky face.
In the past, I would’ve heard her words as a middle schooler’s light whining, but now they rang out like the stern orders of a great general.
The world of the Im Yunkyung family was beyond anything I’d imagined.
To the point where I honestly couldn’t understand why Yunkyung was even participating in an idol survival program.
To be blunt, this was the kind of family where she could eat and play for the rest of her life, no, not just one lifetime—if she were reborn nine hundred ninety-nine times, she could probably still live doing whatever she wanted every time.
“Mm··· because it’s cool! It felt so good when five hundred people in the audience saw our stage and cheered for us. If we could perform in front of tens of thousands of people like other famous idols, I think it’d be really amazing.”
So while we were eating tteokbokki, I asked why on earth she wanted to be an idol, and the answer she gave me was so pure it pricked at me a little.
“But how did someone like your mom know about Yupgi Tteokbokki enough to order it for us, anyway?”
Then came Lee Gahyeon’s sharp question.
That part had definitely made me curious too.
How had the lady who was scary enough that I didn’t even dare speak her true name known about and actually ordered food that commoners ate from a franchise?
And not just that—she’d ordered the perfect set with extra cheese, quail eggs, Chinese glass noodles, and rice balls.
“Ah, Mom probably asked Mister to do it.”
“Mister?”
“Yeah! Whenever we need something, if we ask Mister, he gets it for us.”
Today I learned that in a chaebol household, there is also such a thing as an exclusive Doraemon (a fictional character famous for being able to pull out anything on demand).
Starting from Gahyeon’s question, the other members must have been curious about the daily life of a chaebol household, too, because they started asking Im Jingu all kinds of things.
We kept chatting like that as we cleared out the Yupgi Tteokbokki and all the other food.
Even by my standards, it had been a pretty big spread, but seeing that there wasn’t a scrap left, it reminded me of something Ryu Ayeon had said before the meal.
“You told a cheeky little lie, Ayeonss.”
“···What lie did I···.”
“Where did my friend Ryu Ayeon go, the one who said, ‘I’m not that hungry, I’ll just eat a little, so let’s not order too much’?”
“···.”
I was someone who basically ate a lot too, but Ryu Ayeon had put away a quantity of food that could stand shoulder to shoulder with mine.
“Give us back our precious teammate Ryu Ayeon!!! You Yupgi Tteokbokki monster!”
“Shut up!”
When I hit the mark, Ayeon snapped back at me.
I was just revving up to tease her some more when,
Ring-ring.
“Sion unni, your phone’s ringing!”
My phone ringtone went off.
“···Who is it? Dad?”
I took the phone Shinyu handed me and checked who was calling.
Lady Sukja wasn’t the kind of fragile person who’d call just because I stayed out overnight without contacting her for a day, so it was most likely Dad.
But the name on the screen when I actually checked was someone I hadn’t expected.
–Devil of Ratings–
The Devil of Ratings, Kim Miyoung, who had sold her niece to the program.
It was a call from my aunt.
“Hi, moshi moshi.”
“Sion, where are you?”
“Me? I’m at Yunkyung’s place right now.”
As soon as I hit the call button and greeted her, my aunt’s voice immediately came back asking where I was.
By the time I started to wonder why she sounded a little urgent,
“From today until you go back to the dorm, turn your phone off and don’t meet anybody. Just hole up and then go back to the dorm.”
“Huh?”
“If you do what I say, I’ll buy you that figure you wanted!”
“Figure? Don’t tell me··· the Romance of the Three Kingdoms Zhuge Liang special limited edition figure?!”
“Yeah, I’ll buy that for you, so do as I say, got it?”
“I could do that all day!”
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms special limited edition figure set of Liu Bei, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, and Zhuge Liang.
The official price alone was a whopping 528,000 won, so even I hadn’t been able to bring myself to buy it easily, but now my aunt was offering to buy it for me, so of course I told her I’d do whatever she said.
“So you’re at Yunkyung’s place right now? Then just this once, ask them to understand and stay holed up there, then come back to the dorm.”
“For two whole days? Then shouldn’t I at least tell Mom and Dad···.”
“I’ve already contacted your mom and dad. And anyway, you’re not going to be able to get in touch for about half a month soon.”
“Huh?”
“I’ll explain the details later. For now, what matters is that you don’t come into contact with anyone, got it?”
“Okay, so I just have to not have contact with anyone, right?”
“Right. The news is going to break tonight anyway, so don’t freak out when you see it. I’ll call you as soon as I’m done with this.”
Click.
Like she was firing off a rap, my aunt spat out everything she wanted to say and immediately hung up.
From the way she’d mentioned the news and all, it sounded like something pretty serious, so it bothered me.
“Boss, who was that call from?”
“That’s a secret.”
“What! Now I’m curious.”
Even if they were my teammates, I couldn’t talk about anything related to my aunt, so when I told her it was a secret, Yunkyung made a sulky face.
I felt the need to change the subject.
“Right, didn’t Shinyu say she wanted to watch Idol Ground 100 episodes 3 and 4? Let’s watch that.”
“I was curious too, so I’m in.”
“I’ve wanted to watch it nonstop since the dorm!”
“Sounds good. I think it’ll be fun if we all watch together.”
My suggestion that we watch the program pulled the team’s attention over in an instant, just like I’d expected from a bunch of still-young brats.
“Then let’s go to the theater. It’s the best place to watch.”
In the end, we decided that all of us would watch Idol Ground 100 episodes 3 and 4, and we were about to turn on the TV in Yunkyung’s room when she stopped us and threw out an outrageous suggestion that we go to the theater.
“The theater? Yunkyung, we’re not trying to watch a movie right now and—no, more importantly, we came to your house to avoid people···.”
“Not the theater outside, the theater inside our house. We can watch TV there.”
“···.”
All I hadn’t anticipated was that there were homes out there that had a theater inside.
***
Operation Pearl Harbor Attack.
It had been about a month ago that Miyoung had come up with that plan.
When her niece Sion had finished her first round of dorm life and was threatening her in the pork cutlet restaurant, she suddenly thought that she needed a contingency plan.
“Are you ready, PD Kim?”
“Yes.”
When Miyoung answered that she was ready, variety department head Kang Hyukjin looked at her with a worried expression and asked if she was really going to be okay.
Kang was originally the type of person who would usually just say, “Do it,” not the type to ask if someone was going to be okay.
But even Kang couldn’t help asking that when he thought about what Miyoung was about to do.
After all, ⊛ Nоvеlιght ⊛ (Read the full story) she was about to hold the kind of explanation press conference that celebrities and politicians did.
Lee Sion.
Miyoung honestly hadn’t imagined that her niece would do this well.
She’d thought she would just be filling a hole, replacing a contestant who had originally been scheduled to appear but had caused an incident two weeks before filming began.
That was about as much as she’d expected.
Of course, she had known that her niece’s looks were something out of the ordinary, so she had guessed that Sion might make it through the first ranking announcement ceremony.
But she had never imagined that Sion would take first place in both the first and second ranking announcements, practically guaranteeing her debut.
At the most basic level, idol fans were never easy to please.
Looks were obviously one of the most important qualities for an idol, but that didn’t mean they were gentle enough to debut a contestant who only had a face and no skills.
The one thing Miyoung hadn’t anticipated was that her niece Sion was a genius.
–PD Kim, where did you even find that kid? I get now why the broadcasting station PDs keep getting scouted by agencies.
She remembered what Hyeryeong had said, amazed after seeing Sion.
Sion had been picking up singing and dancing at a speed that made “growth” feel like an understatement, and now, even just in terms of skill alone, there wasn’t much difference between her and the top-tier contestants.
At this rate, it was only natural that she’d be guaranteed a spot in the debut group.
So Miyoung had decided to step down voluntarily.
Stepping down as PD of Idol Ground 100, the first main program she’d ever been in charge of, hurt, but Sion’s participation in the program, which she’d treated too lightly at first, had grown out of control, and she’d thought taking responsibility herself was the best option.
But when Kang Hyukjin told her that her voluntary resignation alone might not be enough to prevent a controversy from flaring up later, Miyoung finally made up her mind to execute Operation Pearl Harbor Attack, which had previously only existed as a plan in her head.
–Hyuksu, give me the recording file.
–···Sorry? What?
One of the jobs of the program’s production staff was community search.
They often decided whether there were any potential controversies or what direction the program should take by checking how communities were reacting to it.
The Idol Ground 100 production staff also took any spare moments to poke around related communities and check the popular posts.
–PD, this one looks like an insider.
And in that process, there was no way Miyoung would have failed to check the source of the unreleased photos that had been posted on Sionism.
Normally, she should have launched an investigation into the internal leak of information, but she had immediately realized that the photos had been taken and uploaded by her junior, Lee Hyuksu, so she let it slide.
But then a brilliant thought flashed across her mind.
‘If a controversy is going to happen anyway, why not strike first?’
If the family connection between Sion and Miyoung was exposed, it was obvious that the target of the attacks would be Sion, not Miyoung.
After all, Miyoung was just an employee at a broadcasting station who wasn’t particularly famous, while Sion was currently one of the hottest people in South Korea.
So what if, instead, there was already a controversy swirling around Sion, and then their family connection was revealed? That was the mental pivot she made.
Knowing that editor Lee Hyuksu, who was in charge of editing, had recorded meetings in order to check their contents, Miyoung decided on a plan where she would use both Hyuksu and his recordings to attack first before they were attacked.
That was Operation Pearl Harbor Attack.
“They’re coming in!”
“PD Kim Miyoung, did you really give an order for a contestant’s screentime to be deleted?”
“Did you receive any pressure from other agencies, or pressure from the broadcasting station?”
“Is the contestant you ordered to have their screentime edited out trainee Lee Sion?”
Click, click.
As soon as Miyoung took a short deep breath and opened the door, there was a barrage of camera flashes bright enough to make it hard to open her eyes, and a barrage of questions from dozens of reporters.
“For now, I’ll answer your questions one by one, so please calm down for a moment.”
The moment she stepped into the press conference room MPlay had prepared, Miyoung was overwhelmed just trying to calm the reporters down.
Of course, they weren’t the kind of people who would actually calm down just because she asked, but even they seemed to have agreed that they couldn’t hold a press conference like this, and they reluctantly decided to wait a little.
Only after the room had finally settled down a bit was Miyoung able to sit in the prepared chair behind the table and begin to speak.
“First, I would like to sincerely apologize for causing controversy and trouble for the viewers, the contestants, and the broadcasting station.”
“By apologizing now, are you admitting that the whistleblower post on the internet is true?”
“···Yes.”
Click!
At Miyoung’s words, the reporters happily hammered their shutter buttons.
“Can you tell us the reason why you did it?”
As the reporters immediately fired off their next question, Miyoung realized this was the timing.
“First, I’ll tell you the identity of the contestant whose screentime I ordered to be edited, as mentioned in the whistleblower post. This is a choice I’m making to prevent any further damage to the other contestants, so I ask for your understanding.”
“Who is it?!”
“···That contestant is trainee Lee Sion.”
The press conference room began to stir once again at Miyoung’s statement.
When the name of Lee Sion—currently at the center of all the buzz—came out of Miyoung’s mouth, the reporters’ faces lit up like they’d just hit the jackpot. They snapped photos and hurriedly made calls to someone.
“Please tell us why you ordered trainee Lee Sion’s screentime to be edited!”
As the reporters’ questions continued, Miyoung bowed her head and quickly pressed her fingers to her eyes.
And then,
“Sion is my niece.”
She delivered the highlight line of today’s press conference, along with her tears.
