The seven-day hell of OJT wrapped up without incident.
Thanks to that, my proficiency—which had been stuck in a plateau—changed a lot.
― Vocal Proficiency: 10 (▲)/20
― Dance Proficiency: 9 (▲)/20
― Self-PR: 12 (▼)/20
― Attendance & Conduct: 18/20
― In-Organization Adaptability: 11/20
― Cumulative Fatigue: 38%
After I learned that if cumulative fatigue goes over 40% my nose would get smashed, I’ve been managing it down to single-percent precision... and yet.
Why did Self-PR drop?
In just a few days of not checking, Self-PR had fallen by one point.
I didn’t think they’d actually deduct points.
Scores for items that aren’t purely technical can change, sure, but still.
Aren’t they going to tell me the reason for the deduction?
If you ran a personnel evaluation, shouldn’t you at least tell me why?
As I grumbled inwardly, the system appeared.
▶ Ah, Assistant Manager Kim! I watched your PT, you know? But compared to the other employees, you were... not very noticeable? It’s a relative evaluation, so there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Sorry, okay?
I’m pissed. It makes me even madder because the reason is perfectly understandable. How am I supposed to stand out among those stacked members?
And trying to fight just to keep that one point is a fool’s errand. If you’re a klutz, you should quietly stay in a corner so you bother people less.
If I act up without knowing my place, I don’t even want to imagine how much the jutting stone will get struck by the chisel.
Well, as long as my skills improved.
The effect of this rise in dance proficiency was a little special.
There was no miracle where I suddenly danced like a monster, but when I did the same choreography, my stamina consumption dropped a lot. Looked like I’d cut out unnecessary energy waste.
The Spark guys must have felt something change in seven days too.
You could tell just from how everyone was practicing more cheerfully than usual.
The fair wind that had started to blow affected quite a few places.
“Hyung! I went to the A&R Team today!”
“Why there?”
“A sudden idea hit me! I wanted to ask if we could do one more revision even now!”
With a creativity buff on him, Lee Cheonghyeon was remodeling the title track right up to just before recording.
“How about we pack as many harmonies as possible into the high-note part this time? If there are more components in each section, it’ll feel a lot richer.”
“Sounds good. But won’t that put too much of a load on you and Juu?”
“If we don’t stack the harmonies all in high notes, I can jump in or Kang Giyeon can. Or Kim Iwol, you could expand your part.”
Jeong Seongbin actively pitched ideas and shored up the melody parts too.
“Okay, from now we’ll take five minutes to gather keywords for an image change. Go!”
“Dye, color lenses, face stickers...”
“Hold on, I can’t type that fast!”
“Memorize. Lee Cheonghyeon, you’re faster that way.”
I might have a petty dislike for Spark, but this much is certain.
Every member’s ability to voice their own opinions got far better than before.
Thanks to that, brainstorming was actually fun. Yesterday we ran four hours of meetings non-stop.
After we attached the organized contents and sent them by email to the Planning Team, it was already lunchtime.
Right then the manager arrived with salad packs, and I closed my laptop and asked:
“Manager! What happened to our self-content that got put on hold last time?”
We had to shoot that self-content we hadn’t been able to touch because of family-issue stuff and the OJT that popped up out of nowhere.
Right before and right after the comeback, anything that eats up a lot of hands will be hard to do because of the stages.
Seeing as the Planning Team hadn’t said much, there shouldn’t have been any big problem, so I hadn’t chased it—but it was about time to wrap the bigger items.
The manager pulled a salad pack from the bag and said with a bright smile:
“Oh, that? You’re going to a farm!”
...Huh?
A farm... where?
“A weekend farm in the city?”
“Apparently that kind of thing is good for the kids’ emotional development. So anyway, Assistant Manager Kim, could you look into that and let me know?”
That’s how weekend farms and I became acquainted.
For no other reason than I handled the weekend farm applications, I had to go buy seedlings to plant in Director Nam’s plot, and in summer weekends I had to go weed the rows.
One summer day when it rained a lot, I even got a call in the middle of the night.
“You want me to cut a drainage channel in the field?”
“— Yeah. What was it... they said if you’ve dug the furrows it should be okay. Did you dig those, Assistant Manager Kim?”
“Yes, before we sowed the seeds, I...”
“— But from what I’m seeing, this rain looks serious. Kim, could you go take a look just once? My wife and kid are insisting we ought to check the field.”
Unable to let the madam or the child get a single drop of water on their hands, Director Nam drove me out into the downpour.
“Director... I’ve opened all the water channels and I’m heading back.”
“— Oh, great work!”
“— Honey, are we really okay not to go? What if all the peppers topple over?”
“— No, it’s fine. I called the farm and their staff said they checked everything.”
“— In this rain? Running a farm must be hard...”
From afar, I wanted to shout to the worried madam that it wasn’t the farm’s staff, it was me, an employee of Hanpyeong Industries, that her husband had pushed out here.
I thought that would be the last time I got dirt on my hands.
“Hyung, these are yours.”
Resigned, I took the pants Kang Giyeon handed me. The pattern was very flashy.
“Who picked these again?”
“Juu hyung did.”
Our Juu, he’s pretty good at picking uniforms all on his own. He even found pants perfect for a farm volunteer shoot like this.
Maybe he felt my gaze mixed with fondness and suffering, because Park Juu glanced my way and asked:
“Hyung, ...if you don’t like them, should I swap with you for mine?”
“No, I like them.”
Because I don’t want to look like a 21-year-old adult male who, on camera, steals his younger member’s spirea-blossom pants just because he doesn’t like the cosmos pattern.
Right then, fully changed, Choi Jeho burst out of the next room.
“Hey, is this the right length?”
Along with bare ankles.
The hem of black pants covered in peony prints was fluttering helplessly above his ankles.
“Wouldn’t there not be many ‘cooling pants’ that fit your height anyway?”
Have some shame, man.
Just in case, I took a pair of long socks out of my bag and handed them to Choi Jeho.
“Put these on. Unless you want a plant rash.”
“Plant rash?”
“Yeah, that’s a thing.”
I was even kindly advising him to pull the socks up over the pant hems if he didn’t want bugs crawling in, when a staffer’s voice came from outside.
“Spark, we’ll start filming in ten minutes!”
“Ah, yes!”
Great, and I haven’t even changed.
The cameras were all covered for changing, so I stripped off the T-shirt I was wearing without worry.
Then I bent to grab the team T-shirt I’d just been handed.
“Hyung!”
Jeong Seongbin called to me in a hurry.
I started to turn toward the sound, but Jeong Seongbin was faster.
He spun me so my back faced the wall, then asked in a voice so small I could barely hear it:
“Hyung, what’s with your back?”
“My back? What about it?”
I reached a hand toward my back and asked if there was a bug. I didn’t feel itchy at all.
Jeong Seongbin had gone ashen and didn’t know what to do.
“No, it’s just...”
What the hell.
Don’t tell me I suddenly grew a dragon tattoo or something.
Is the system going to come later and go, “Assistant Manager Kim, how can an office worker have a tattoo like that? You’re getting points off for attendance & conduct!” with that kind of crap?
My head throbbed.
Seongbin led the temporarily broken me into the next room. Everyone was too busy changing to pay attention over here.
He closed the door behind us and said carefully:
“Hyung, on your back, there’s, like, a really big scar...”
“A scar? Oh, that’s all?”
The moment I heard the word scar, the thoughts branching in all directions stopped at once.
Yeah, I do have a scar.
From when I fell running away because I didn’t want to get hit when I was a kid.
Unlucky me, my back tore open on the edge of the ✧ NоvеIight ✧ (Original source) dining table and the skin got all ragged.
Still, it’s not so big that you’d say “really big,” is it?
Sure, the wound was big at first.
But my sister got home just then and rushed me to the ER, so they stitched it right away.
She hounded me that people get scared if a burly man has too big a scar on his back, so when I was a student I even got scar-removal surgery.
If you aren’t used to scars, I guess it could be a shock.
It might just be because it was the first time we changed clothes together.
I told Jeong Seongbin as offhandedly as I could:
“I got it from a bad fall when I was little. It got a lot smaller as I grew.”
“Smaller? This did?”
Don’t exaggerate. At most it’s just a slightly thick line now.
“Yeah. It doesn’t show when I’m dressed, so I never really mentioned it. But do we have to cover scars for broadcast too? Like tattoos?”
“I’m not sure about that, but, uh, hyung... at this size it might show through a white tee.”
“It’s not that bad. As long as the fabric’s a bit thick, even in a white shirt it should be...”
...is how far I got before something felt off.
No matter how much Seongbin cares for and loves his teammates, isn’t this a bit much?
Over just a scar, not even a dragon tattoo?
I stood in front of the mirror by the door, turned my back to it,
and tilted my head to check the reflection.
“Huh?”
Hold on.
What’s with my back?
