The rain at Namsan Tower felt like ice.
Han Yoo-jin stood on the observation deck, the city of Seoul a sprawling grid of lights below him. Somewhere down there, his career was burning to the ground.
"You came."
The voice didn't come from a ghost. It came from a man in a beige trench coat holding a luxury umbrella.
Yoo-jin turned.
He recognized the face. Not a twin. Not a clone.
It was Min Ji-hoon. The current Head of A&R at Titan Entertainment. The man responsible for their "Golden Era" revival.
Ten years ago, Min had been an assistant. My assistant, Yoo-jin realized with a jolt of recovered memory.
"Assistant Min," Yoo-jin said, his voice dry. "I see you got a promotion."
Min smiled. It was a tight, joyless expression. "It's Director Min now. And you... you haven't aged a day. It's disgusting."
"You texted me," Yoo-jin said. "You pretended to be my doppelganger."
"I managed the account," Min corrected. "But the messages? The songs? Those came from the Server. We fed your old hard drive into an AI model. It predicts what 'Han Yoo-jin' would do. It wrote the texts."
He took a step closer.
"You aren't fighting a person, Yoo-jin. You're fighting your own legacy. The System you built? Titan owns it now."
Yoo-jin looked at the man. Min wasn't a genius. He was a scavenger. He had been picking the meat off Yoo-jin's corpse for a decade.
"You sued me for Hunter," Yoo-jin said.
"It was too easy," Min laughed softly. "The AI predicted you would write an aggressive track to counter us. It predicted the BPM. It predicted the key signature. We just found the matching demo in your old files and copyrighted it yesterday."
He pulled out a pack of cigarettes.
"Give up, hyung. The lawsuit will bankrupt Starforce. Sol & Luna will be disbanded. We'll buy their contracts for pennies. They'll be back-up dancers for Aurora by Christmas."
Yoo-jin felt the rage boiling in his gut. Not the chaotic static of the System, but cold, human anger.
"You think you won because you have the files?" Yoo-jin asked.
"I have the timestamp," Min shrugged. "2013 vs 2024. The law is simple."
Yoo-jin looked at the System interface floating next to Min's head.
[Target: Min Ji-hoon]
[Status: Arrogant]
[Hidden Trait: Inferiority Complex (SSS)]
[Secret: He can't produce. He only edits.]
A realization hit Yoo-jin like a lightning bolt.
Min was an editor. He polished things. He didn't create them.
"You released the 2013 demo as evidence," Yoo-jin said slowly. "Did you listen to the stems, Min? Did you check the individual tracks?"
Min frowned. "I checked the melody. It's identical."
"You missed something," Yoo-jin lied.
He didn't know if Min missed anything. It was a gamble. But he knew Min's personality. The man was insecure. He feared the genius he had replaced.
"I used to hide things in my tracks," Yoo-jin whispered, stepping into Min's personal space. "Signatures. little sonic fingerprints. If you play the 2013 file, you'll find it."
Min's eyes flickered with doubt.
"What signature?"
"A mistake," Yoo-jin smiled. It was the smile of a predator. "A specific frequency error in the bass line. I fixed it in Hunter. But in your file? It's still there. If you take that to court, you aren't proving I stole from you. You're proving you released a defective product."
It was complete nonsense. But Min didn't know that. Because Min wasn't a real producer.
"You're lying," Min spat, but he took a step back.
"Am I?" Yoo-jin checked his watch. "The court hearing is in three days. I'm going to deconstruct the tracks live. I'm going to show the world that Titan's 'Golden Vault' is full of glitches that only I know how to fix."
He turned his back on the Director.
"Go check your files, Min. Before you embarrass yourself."
Yoo-jin walked away into the rain. He didn't look back.
He waited until he was in the elevator before he let his knees buckle.
He had bought time. Min would spend the next 24 hours frantically scrubbing the audio files, paranoid about a "hidden error" that didn't exist.
"Now," Yoo-jin whispered, wiping the rain from his face. "I need to make the lie true."
The Starforce dorms were under siege.
Reporters camped outside the apartment complex like vultures. Flashlights swept the windows every few minutes.
Yoo-jin pulled his hoodie up. He didn't go to the front door. He went to the fire escape in the back alley.
He climbed four flights of rusted metal stairs. He tapped on the kitchen window.
Tap. Tap. Tap-tap.
The blinds shifted. Mina's terrified face appeared.
She opened the window. "PD-nim?"
Yoo-jin climbed in, dripping wet. The apartment was dark. The curtains were drawn tight.
Hana was sitting on the sofa, staring at her phone. The TV was unplugged.
"You look like a drowned rat," Hana said, though her voice lacked its usual bite. "Did you fix it?"
"I'm working on it," Yoo-jin said, stripping off his wet jacket. "Where is the laptop?"
"On the table," Mina said, handing him a towel. "Why? Are we issuing an apology?"
"No," Yoo-jin said, booting up the computer. "We're going live."
"Live?" Hana jumped up. "Director Park banned us from social media. He said if we post, he'll sue us for breach of contract too."
"Park is a coward," Yoo-jin said. "And Titan is a bully. The only way to beat a bully is to be crazier than them."
He logged into Sol & Luna's official YouTube channel. He changed the password so the agency couldn't lock them out.
"Here is the plan," Yoo-jin said, turning the laptop to face them. "Titan claims I stole Hunter from a 2013 demo. They are right. The melody is the same."
Mina gasped. "So we are thieves?"
"No," Yoo-jin said firmly. "Because a melody isn't a song. A song is the soul you put into it."
He opened the music production software (DAW). He loaded two files.
Track 1: Titan's Evidence (The 2013 Demo).
Track 2: Hunter (The Sol & Luna Version).
"We are going to do a 'Track Breakdown'," Yoo-jin explained. "We are going to play them side by side. We are going to show the world the difference between a dead demo and a living hit."
He looked at Hana.
"You wrote the rap lyrics yesterday, right?"
"Yeah," Hana nodded. "About running out of time."
"Those lyrics aren't in the 2013 version," Yoo-jin said. "That proves evolution."
He looked at Mina.
"The Isabelle sample. The crying ghost. Is that in the 2013 version?"
"No," Mina whispered.
"Exactly," Yoo-jin said. "Titan has the skeleton. We have the blood."
He hit the 'Go Live' button.
[Sol & Luna: The Truth Behind The Song (LIVE)]
The notification went out to 2 million subscribers.
Within seconds, the viewer count skyrocketed.
10,000.
50,000.
200,000.
The comments were a mix of hate and curiosity.
"Plagiarists!"
"Explain yourselves!"
"Why are they live? Isn't the agency stopping them?"
Yoo-jin turned the camera to face the three of them. They looked tired. They looked raw. No makeup. No ring lights. Just three artists in a dark living room.
"Hello," Yoo-jin said. His voice was calm, contrasting with the chaotic chat. "I am Producer Han Yoo-jin. And tonight, I'm giving a music theory lesson."
He pressed play on the Titan demo.
The melody of Hunter played. It was synthesized, robotic. It sounded good, but dated.
"This is what Titan says we stole," Yoo-jin said. "A computer file from ten years ago."
He cut the sound.
"Now," he pointed to Mina. "Sing the bridge."
Mina hesitated for a second. Then she closed her eyes.
She sang. No instrumental. Just her voice in the quiet apartment. It was the "Isabelle melody"—the mournful, haunting wail.
It was chilling.
"That sound," Yoo-jin said to the camera. "Does not exist on Titan's hard drive. That is the sound of right now. That is the sound of trauma."
He turned to Hana. "Rap."
Hana leaned into the laptop mic. She spit her verse. Aggressive. Present. Real.
Yoo-jin brought the faders up on Hunter. He blended their live voices with the track. The room filled with energy. It wasn't a copy. It was a transformation.
"Titan collects bones," Yoo-jin said into the camera, staring directly at the lens. "They raid graveyards and call it production. We build monsters."
He leaned closer.
"If you want the old version, go listen to Titan. If you want the truth, listen to Sol & Luna."
[System Notification]
[Viral Event: 'The Producer's Cut']
[Public Sentiment Shifting: Curiosity > Anger]
[Reputation: 'The Alchemist']
"One more thing," Yoo-jin added. "To Director Min at Titan."
He smiled. It was the same dangerous smile he had given Min at the tower.
"I checked the files, Min. You missed the bass frequency error in measure 32. You might want to fix that before you release the 'Original'."
It was a bluff. A trap.
If Min went back and edited the file to "fix" the imaginary error, the file's timestamp would update to today.
And if the timestamp updated to today, Titan's proof of "2013 ownership" would be voided in court.
"Stream Hunter," Yoo-jin said. "Goodnight."
He ended the stream.
The room was silent.
"Did you just..." Hana stared at him. "Did you just bait them into deleting their own evidence?"
"If Min is as insecure as I think he is," Yoo-jin said, leaning back on the sofa. "He's opening that file right now."
Across the city, in the Titan A&R office.
Director Min was sweating. He had the 2013 demo open on his screen. He was zoomed in on Measure 32.
"Where is it?" he muttered, his hand shaking on the mouse. "Where is the error?"
He thought he heard a slight buzz. Was that it? Was that the signature Yoo-jin talked about?
If he released it with an error, the audiophiles would mock him. They would say he released a defective product, just like Yoo-jin warned.
"I have to fix it," Min whispered. "I have to polish it."
He applied a filter. The buzz vanished.
He hit Save.
[File Updated: Today, 11:45 PM]
Min froze.
He stared at the "Date Modified" column. The "2013" tag was gone, replaced by the current time.
"No," Min gasped. "No, no, no."
He tried to undo. But the server auto-synced. The metadata was overwritten.
He had just destroyed the chain of custody.
Back at the dorm, Yoo-jin's phone buzzed.
It was a text from Ghost (So-young).
You magnificent bastard.
Titan's server just updated the file hash. They touched the evidence.
The lawsuit is dead.
Yoo-jin let out a laugh. It started low and turned into a cackle of pure relief.
"We won," he told the girls. "They took the bait."
Hana grabbed a pillow and threw it at him. "You're crazy! You gambled our careers on a bluff?"
"I gambled on his ego," Yoo-jin said, catching the pillow.
He stood up. The Cider tasted sweet.
"Get dressed," Yoo-jin said. "We have a schedule tomorrow."
"What schedule?" Mina asked. "We're suspended."
"Not anymore," Yoo-jin said. "Director Park just texted me. The stock price is rallying. We're going to Music Bank."
He walked to the window and pulled back the curtain slightly. The rain had stopped.
"We're going to accept the trophy for Hunter."