Chapter 1:
Episode 1: Fallen Star
Pre-Canonization: A Kim Ji-yoo Story
The performance ended.The music faded out.
Colored lights swept across the stage, catching on sequins, sweat, and trembling smiles. The other idols bowed in perfect unison, masks of radiance carved into their faces. The crowd roared their adoration — a sea of light sticks and phones raised high, a thousand voices crying out a single name.
But Ji-yoo didn’t move.
She stood center stage, motionless, her mic clenched tight enough for her knuckles to pale. Her chest rose and fell. Her eyes didn’t sparkle; they burned — sharp, unfocused, defiant. Sweat rolled down her jawline, glinting under the spotlights, but she didn’t wipe it away.
A cigarette — smuggled past the stagehands, hidden in her sleeve — dangled loosely from her fingers.
The audience screamed louder, mistaking her stillness for dramatic flair. The cameras zoomed in, searching for her signature smile. The hosts waited, cue cards in hand. The producers whispered in confusion backstage.
And then—
“Shut up for a second.”
Her voice sliced through the applause. Raw. Unfiltered.
“Just—just shut up and listen.”
The crowd faltered. The cheers collapsed into uneasy murmurs. The other idols looked at her, unsure if this was part of the show. The hosts exchanged panicked glances. In the control booth, a producer’s hand hovered over the switch.
This wasn’t in the script.
Ji-yoo took a slow drag from the cigarette, exhaled smoke that curled like ghosts into the stage lights, and spoke again.
“I know I’m supposed to say thank you,” she said, her voice trembling, half from exhaustion, half from rage. “I’m supposed to bow, smile, and tell you how much I love you. How grateful I am for this dream — this industry. But that would be the biggest lie I’ve ever told in my life.”
Her words fell heavy, flattening the air around her.
“I’m not happy.”A beat.“I never was.”
Someone in the front row gasped. A fan screamed her name, desperate to break the spell. But Ji-yoo only looked down at the mic, her reflection caught in its silver head — distorted, unfamiliar.
“You think idols have perfect lives?” she continued, voice rising, fierce and shaking. “You think we’re living the dream? Let me tell you what the dream really is.”
“The dream,” she said, pacing now, “is fourteen-hour rehearsals with no sleep. It’s starving yourself so your face looks sharper on camera. It’s being told, ‘Lose weight or lose your career.’ It’s taking pills to stay awake. Pills to shut off the pain. Pills to feel nothing when they tell you you’re replaceable.”
She laughed — a hollow, broken sound that echoed in the silence.
“The dream is being owned. Every contract, every rule, every smile that isn’t yours anymore. You can’t date. You can’t speak your mind. You can’t even go outside without permission. Because you don’t belong to yourself anymore.”
Her gaze shifted, hardening. “You belong to them.”
Ji-yoo pointed to the VIP section — a row of executives in dark suits and polite smiles. Their eyes darted away, but she didn’t flinch.
“Yeah. You. Sitting there, drinking your wine, pretending you care. How many girls did you throw away before me? How many did you push until they broke, then acted shocked when they didn’t survive? You kill us with kindness, and you call it business.”
A ripple of gasps swept through the audience. The fans were crying now. Some were frozen. Some were filming, hands shaking.
Ji-yoo turned toward the camera, locking eyes with millions watching at home.
“And you—yeah, you, the fans.” Her tone dropped low, venom and sorrow intertwined. “You love us when we’re perfect. When we’re smiling, dancing, pretending everything’s fine. But the second we show you we’re human — the second we slip — you tear us apart.”
She inhaled sharply. “You love idols. But you don’t love us.”
She flicked the cigarette to the ground. It hit the stage with a faint hiss. She crushed it under her boot.
“I’m done,” she said softly. “I’m done being a puppet for a system that eats people alive and spits out what’s left. I’m done starving, bleeding, crying behind closed doors while people like them profit off my pain. I’m done with fans who only love me when I wear a mask.”
Her mic wavered. “Cut me off. Edit this out. Censor me. But you all heard it. You all saw it. This industry is a machine, and we are the parts. And if nobody stops it, it’ll keep grinding until there’s nothing left.”
Security rushed the stage.
The feed cut to black.
Seoul’s skyline shimmered like shattered glass — beautiful, distant, and cold.
From the balcony of an 18th-floor apartment in Gangnam, Kim Ji-yoo stood barefoot, her unstyled messy dark hair whipping in the winter wind. Neon lights from the streets below painted her skin in ghostly colors — pink, blue, violet — each flicker fading faster than the last.
The noise of the city was endless: car horns, laughter, the mechanical hum of nightlife. Somewhere down there, fans still camped outside entertainment buildings, waiting for another idol to smile for them.
Not her.Not anymore.
Her phone buzzed on the floor behind her. She didn’t need to look.
“Ji-yoo, the agency is terminating your contract. Please clear your dorm by Friday.”
She laughed bitterly, the sound rasping from her throat. “Of course. Efficient as ever.”
She crouched to light another cigarette, hands trembling. The flame flickered, caught in the wind, then died. She didn’t try again.
After years of rehearsals that bled her dry, diets that starved her to bone, nights spent crying into makeup-stained pillows — this was how it ended.
A single message.A closed door.Silence where applause used to be.
“Art, huh?” she muttered, staring down at the street below. “They said it was about art. About expression.” She let out a shaky breath. “Guess I overexpressed myself.”
Her reflection shimmered faintly in the glass door behind her — mascara smudged, eyes red, face unrecognizable.
She climbed onto the narrow edge of the balcony. Her toes curled against the cold cement.
“Just one step,” she whispered.
Below, the city kept moving — indifferent. Alive.The wind howled, lifting her hair like threads of gold.
But she didn’t move.
A single tear slid down her cheek, cutting through the remnants of her stage makeup. Her breath hitched. Then another tear fell. And another.
Her knees gave out. She sank to the floor, shaking, gasping, clutching at her chest as if trying to hold herself together.
“I’m still here,” she whispered to no one. “Why am I still here?”
The night answered only with silence — and the distant echo of fans chanting the name of someone new.
Two weeks later.Manila.
The heat hit her like a wall the moment she stepped out of the airport.Thick. Unforgiving. Real.
It wasn’t the kind of heat she’d known in Seoul — this one had texture, weight, the scent of exhaust and fried food clinging to it. Her wrinkled shirt stuck to her back within seconds. Sweat trickled down her neck as she dragged her single suitcase across cracked pavement.
“진짜… (Seriously…)” she muttered under her breath, when one of the suitcase wheels jammed in a pothole. She yanked it free, nearly toppling backward.
No fans.No cameras.No stylists fussing over her hair or the angle of her smile.
Just Kim Ji-yoo — another face in a crowd that didn’t recognize her. A fallen idol on a tourist visa, clutching a passport that felt more like a death certificate than a lifeline.
Her new home was a cramped room above a bakery in the city— the kind of place where the air smelled permanently of yeast, sugar, and oil. The fan rattled like it was dying. The wallpaper peeled. The mirror was cracked, and the bathroom door didn’t close all the way.
But it was hers.
The landlady, a plump woman in her late fifties, introduced herself with a smile as Tita Lorna.
“You Korean?” she asked in halting English, handing Ji-yoo a spare key tied with a plastic ribbon.
Ji-yoo hesitated. “Yes. Uh… Seoul.”
“Ah, Seoul! BTS?” the landlady said, beaming.
Ji-yoo forced a weak smile. “Yeah. Something like that.”
Tita Lorna laughed, not catching the irony. “Okay! You need breakfast, yes? We have pandesal, coffee — strong coffee. You like?”
“Coffee,” Ji-yoo said. “Strong, please.”
They smiled at each other — two women bound not by words, but by quiet understanding.Both trying to survive.Both pretending not to be lonely.
Days passed, slow and hazy.
Ji-yoo woke up late, her body still wired to rehearsal schedules that no longer existed. She wandered the streets in oversized shirts, her face bare, her hair tied carelessly. Nobody cared who she was. Nobody whispered when she passed.
At first, that anonymity stung.Then, it felt like oxygen.
She’d sit on a bench outside the bakery, watching the neighborhood come alive. Jeepneys rumbled down the road, their metal sides painted with saints, superheroes, and slogans like “God Knows Hudas Not Pay.” Children chased each other barefoot, laughter ringing through the smog. Vendors called out their wares — “Ice tubig! Fishball! Banana cue!” — while the church bells marked the passing of another humid afternoon.
Sometimes, she’d stop by the park near the university. There, under the shade of massive acacia trees, local performers gathered.
A boy with a battered guitar sang Tagalog love songs with his eyes closed.A girl in ripped jeans rapped over an old Bluetooth speaker, her friends clapping along.Two dancers practiced routines barefoot on the grass.
Their music wasn’t polished. Their moves weren’t perfect.But it was alive — raw, imperfect, and real.
Ji-yoo sat on the edge of a fountain, listening.
It stirred something in her chest she hadn’t felt in years. Not ambition. Not fame. Just… truth.
One afternoon, as she lingered near the park, a young street singer — maybe nineteen, with skin sunburned to gold — noticed her watching.
“You sing?” he asked, switching to English with a grin.
Ji-yoo blinked. “Uh… a little.”
“You look like a singer,” he said. “From Korea, right? Maybe K-pop?”
Her stomach tightened. “Used to be.”
The boy’s grin widened. “Ah, an idol!”
She laughed dryly. “Not anymore.”
“Why stop?” he asked, tuning his guitar absentmindedly.
Ji-yoo stared out across the park, where the sunset bled through the trees like spilled ink. “Because I forgot why I started.”
The boy nodded as if he understood. “Then maybe sing again — but this time, remember.”
She almost smiled. “Maybe.”
That night, back in her tiny room, she stood by the window listening to the hum of Manila. The sounds below — laughter, engines, radios — blended into a single heartbeat.
She looked at her reflection in the windowpane: tired eyes, sun-touched skin, a faint glimmer of something she hadn’t seen in years.
Freedom.
She whispered softly in Korean,“다시 시작할 수 있을까…? (Can I really start over?)”
From below, someone started strumming a guitar again — an off-key song about love and rain.
For the first time since Seoul, Ji-yoo didn’t feel like a ghost.
She felt alive.
It was on a stormy Thursday that Kim Ji-yoo found herself ducking into a narrow record shop between a laundromat and a pawnshop.
The rain had turned the streets into mirrors. Jeepneys hissed past, throwing arcs of muddy water over the sidewalk. Her umbrella, half-broken, was losing the fight against the wind. She slipped inside just as thunder rolled through the city like the growl of something ancient.
The bell over the door gave a tired tch-chime.
Warmth met her first — not from air-conditioning, but from the scent of old vinyl, instant coffee, and dust. The shop was dim, its fluorescent lights flickering like they were trying to survive the storm too. Rain leaked through a crack in the ceiling and dripped into a metal bucket, plink… plink… plink, keeping time with the music that played somewhere in the background.
She closed her umbrella and gave it a hard shake. A few stray drops spattered her worn sneakers.
At first, she didn’t notice the music — a looped rhythm, soft but restless, something between lo-fi and heartbreak. Then she saw the man behind the counter.
He was nodding along to the beat, eyes half-closed, fingers dancing over a MIDI pad scuffed from years of use. His hair was messy, his shirt crumpled, and his energy burned with the faint tremor of someone who hadn’t slept in days but couldn’t stop creating anyway.
Ji-yoo hesitated, half wanting to leave before he noticed her.But he looked up.Blink.Pause.Then he pulled off his oversized headphones.
“You’re Korean?” he asked, his English rounded by a Manila accent.
Ji-yoo froze for a beat. “Yeah… How did you—?”
He grinned. “You’ve got the Seoul look.”
“The what?”
“The mix of perfect eyes and perfect skin,” he said, chuckling. “Only artists and Koreans have that combo.”
She gave a weak laugh despite herself. “That’s one way to put it.”
He leaned an elbow on the counter. “So, what brings you here, Miss Seoul Look? We don’t get many tourists in this part of town. Unless you’re hiding from something.”
Ji-yoo blinked at him. The words landed too close. “Maybe I am.”
He raised an eyebrow, half-joking. “Ex-girlfriend? Tax evasion?”
“Worse,” she said, and her mouth twitched with something between irony and pain. “Fame.”
He let out a low whistle. “Ah. Dangerous disease.”
“Terminal,” she replied dryly.
They both laughed, the sound drowned by another crash of thunder. For a moment, she felt something loosen in her chest — a small breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding since Seoul.
The man offered his hand. “I’m Marco. I make beats nobody listens to and coffee that can kill an elephant.”
“Ji-yoo,” she said, shaking it. “Former idol. Currently unemployed.”
“Nice to meet you, Miss Former Idol,” he said with mock solemnity. “So, what kind of music did you do?”
She hesitated. That word — music — hurt. It felt like touching the edge of an old wound.
“I used to sing,” she said finally. “Pop stuff. The kind that’s choreographed to death.”
“Used to?”
She nodded. “Yeah. I stopped.”
“Why?”
Her answer came slow, like a confession. “Because it stopped being music and more about business.”
Marco studied her quietly. Not with curiosity, but understanding — the kind that comes from living close to failure yourself.
He tapped his finger against the counter, thoughtful. “You know, music doesn’t care who broke it. It just waits for you to pick it up again.”
She frowned. “That sounds like something you’d find on a coffee mug.”
“Maybe,” he said with a shrug. “But it’s true. Doesn’t matter where you’re from, what language you sing in — the beat’s still the same heartbeat.”
Ji-yoo looked around. The shop’s walls were lined with vinyls stacked like forgotten relics: Eraserheads, Nina Simone, BTS, Miles Davis. Dust floated in the amber light. Each record felt like a life she’d once dreamed of — art made without permission, without fear.
Marco gestured to a corner. “We’ve got an old mic setup there. If you ever feel like testing your ghost voice.”
“My what?”
“The one hiding in your throat,” he said with a grin. “I can hear it trying to get out.”
She laughed softly. “You really talk like a musician.”
“I really am one,” he said, mock offended. “Just unpaid.”
A silence stretched between them — not awkward, but charged. The rain outside beat harder against the roof, and the bucket overflowed onto the cracked tile.
Ji-yoo glanced at the small stage tucked in the back, barely big enough for one person and a mic. The kind of place no one important would ever play. The kind of place she needed.
“Maybe one day,” she murmured.
Marco smiled. “One day starts with ‘today.’”
She met his gaze, unsure if the warmth spreading through her was hope or fear. “You don’t even know what I sound like.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Everyone’s got a song that saves them.”
Outside, the thunder roared again — but inside, beneath the flickering lights and dripping roof, something inside Ji-yoo began to stir.
A pulse.A rhythm.A heartbeat she thought she’d buried on that stage in Seoul.
Maybe this wasn’t the end after all.Maybe, under all the noise and the pain, her song wasn’t over yet.
Episode 1: Fallen Star End
Colored lights swept across the stage, catching on sequins, sweat, and trembling smiles. The other idols bowed in perfect unison, masks of radiance carved into their faces. The crowd roared their adoration — a sea of light sticks and phones raised high, a thousand voices crying out a single name.
But Ji-yoo didn’t move.
She stood center stage, motionless, her mic clenched tight enough for her knuckles to pale. Her chest rose and fell. Her eyes didn’t sparkle; they burned — sharp, unfocused, defiant. Sweat rolled down her jawline, glinting under the spotlights, but she didn’t wipe it away.
A cigarette — smuggled past the stagehands, hidden in her sleeve — dangled loosely from her fingers.
The audience screamed louder, mistaking her stillness for dramatic flair. The cameras zoomed in, searching for her signature smile. The hosts waited, cue cards in hand. The producers whispered in confusion backstage.
And then—
“Shut up for a second.”
Her voice sliced through the applause. Raw. Unfiltered.
“Just—just shut up and listen.”
The crowd faltered. The cheers collapsed into uneasy murmurs. The other idols looked at her, unsure if this was part of the show. The hosts exchanged panicked glances. In the control booth, a producer’s hand hovered over the switch.
This wasn’t in the script.
Ji-yoo took a slow drag from the cigarette, exhaled smoke that curled like ghosts into the stage lights, and spoke again.
“I know I’m supposed to say thank you,” she said, her voice trembling, half from exhaustion, half from rage. “I’m supposed to bow, smile, and tell you how much I love you. How grateful I am for this dream — this industry. But that would be the biggest lie I’ve ever told in my life.”
Her words fell heavy, flattening the air around her.
“I’m not happy.”A beat.“I never was.”
Someone in the front row gasped. A fan screamed her name, desperate to break the spell. But Ji-yoo only looked down at the mic, her reflection caught in its silver head — distorted, unfamiliar.
“You think idols have perfect lives?” she continued, voice rising, fierce and shaking. “You think we’re living the dream? Let me tell you what the dream really is.”
“The dream,” she said, pacing now, “is fourteen-hour rehearsals with no sleep. It’s starving yourself so your face looks sharper on camera. It’s being told, ‘Lose weight or lose your career.’ It’s taking pills to stay awake. Pills to shut off the pain. Pills to feel nothing when they tell you you’re replaceable.”
She laughed — a hollow, broken sound that echoed in the silence.
“The dream is being owned. Every contract, every rule, every smile that isn’t yours anymore. You can’t date. You can’t speak your mind. You can’t even go outside without permission. Because you don’t belong to yourself anymore.”
Her gaze shifted, hardening. “You belong to them.”
Ji-yoo pointed to the VIP section — a row of executives in dark suits and polite smiles. Their eyes darted away, but she didn’t flinch.
“Yeah. You. Sitting there, drinking your wine, pretending you care. How many girls did you throw away before me? How many did you push until they broke, then acted shocked when they didn’t survive? You kill us with kindness, and you call it business.”
A ripple of gasps swept through the audience. The fans were crying now. Some were frozen. Some were filming, hands shaking.
Ji-yoo turned toward the camera, locking eyes with millions watching at home.
“And you—yeah, you, the fans.” Her tone dropped low, venom and sorrow intertwined. “You love us when we’re perfect. When we’re smiling, dancing, pretending everything’s fine. But the second we show you we’re human — the second we slip — you tear us apart.”
She inhaled sharply. “You love idols. But you don’t love us.”
She flicked the cigarette to the ground. It hit the stage with a faint hiss. She crushed it under her boot.
“I’m done,” she said softly. “I’m done being a puppet for a system that eats people alive and spits out what’s left. I’m done starving, bleeding, crying behind closed doors while people like them profit off my pain. I’m done with fans who only love me when I wear a mask.”
Her mic wavered. “Cut me off. Edit this out. Censor me. But you all heard it. You all saw it. This industry is a machine, and we are the parts. And if nobody stops it, it’ll keep grinding until there’s nothing left.”
Security rushed the stage.
The feed cut to black.
Seoul’s skyline shimmered like shattered glass — beautiful, distant, and cold.
From the balcony of an 18th-floor apartment in Gangnam, Kim Ji-yoo stood barefoot, her unstyled messy dark hair whipping in the winter wind. Neon lights from the streets below painted her skin in ghostly colors — pink, blue, violet — each flicker fading faster than the last.
The noise of the city was endless: car horns, laughter, the mechanical hum of nightlife. Somewhere down there, fans still camped outside entertainment buildings, waiting for another idol to smile for them.
Not her.Not anymore.
Her phone buzzed on the floor behind her. She didn’t need to look.
“Ji-yoo, the agency is terminating your contract. Please clear your dorm by Friday.”
She laughed bitterly, the sound rasping from her throat. “Of course. Efficient as ever.”
She crouched to light another cigarette, hands trembling. The flame flickered, caught in the wind, then died. She didn’t try again.
After years of rehearsals that bled her dry, diets that starved her to bone, nights spent crying into makeup-stained pillows — this was how it ended.
A single message.A closed door.Silence where applause used to be.
“Art, huh?” she muttered, staring down at the street below. “They said it was about art. About expression.” She let out a shaky breath. “Guess I overexpressed myself.”
Her reflection shimmered faintly in the glass door behind her — mascara smudged, eyes red, face unrecognizable.
She climbed onto the narrow edge of the balcony. Her toes curled against the cold cement.
“Just one step,” she whispered.
Below, the city kept moving — indifferent. Alive.The wind howled, lifting her hair like threads of gold.
But she didn’t move.
A single tear slid down her cheek, cutting through the remnants of her stage makeup. Her breath hitched. Then another tear fell. And another.
Her knees gave out. She sank to the floor, shaking, gasping, clutching at her chest as if trying to hold herself together.
“I’m still here,” she whispered to no one. “Why am I still here?”
The night answered only with silence — and the distant echo of fans chanting the name of someone new.
Two weeks later.Manila.
The heat hit her like a wall the moment she stepped out of the airport.Thick. Unforgiving. Real.
It wasn’t the kind of heat she’d known in Seoul — this one had texture, weight, the scent of exhaust and fried food clinging to it. Her wrinkled shirt stuck to her back within seconds. Sweat trickled down her neck as she dragged her single suitcase across cracked pavement.
“진짜… (Seriously…)” she muttered under her breath, when one of the suitcase wheels jammed in a pothole. She yanked it free, nearly toppling backward.
No fans.No cameras.No stylists fussing over her hair or the angle of her smile.
Just Kim Ji-yoo — another face in a crowd that didn’t recognize her. A fallen idol on a tourist visa, clutching a passport that felt more like a death certificate than a lifeline.
Her new home was a cramped room above a bakery in the city— the kind of place where the air smelled permanently of yeast, sugar, and oil. The fan rattled like it was dying. The wallpaper peeled. The mirror was cracked, and the bathroom door didn’t close all the way.
But it was hers.
The landlady, a plump woman in her late fifties, introduced herself with a smile as Tita Lorna.
“You Korean?” she asked in halting English, handing Ji-yoo a spare key tied with a plastic ribbon.
Ji-yoo hesitated. “Yes. Uh… Seoul.”
“Ah, Seoul! BTS?” the landlady said, beaming.
Ji-yoo forced a weak smile. “Yeah. Something like that.”
Tita Lorna laughed, not catching the irony. “Okay! You need breakfast, yes? We have pandesal, coffee — strong coffee. You like?”
“Coffee,” Ji-yoo said. “Strong, please.”
They smiled at each other — two women bound not by words, but by quiet understanding.Both trying to survive.Both pretending not to be lonely.
Days passed, slow and hazy.
Ji-yoo woke up late, her body still wired to rehearsal schedules that no longer existed. She wandered the streets in oversized shirts, her face bare, her hair tied carelessly. Nobody cared who she was. Nobody whispered when she passed.
At first, that anonymity stung.Then, it felt like oxygen.
She’d sit on a bench outside the bakery, watching the neighborhood come alive. Jeepneys rumbled down the road, their metal sides painted with saints, superheroes, and slogans like “God Knows Hudas Not Pay.” Children chased each other barefoot, laughter ringing through the smog. Vendors called out their wares — “Ice tubig! Fishball! Banana cue!” — while the church bells marked the passing of another humid afternoon.
Sometimes, she’d stop by the park near the university. There, under the shade of massive acacia trees, local performers gathered.
A boy with a battered guitar sang Tagalog love songs with his eyes closed.A girl in ripped jeans rapped over an old Bluetooth speaker, her friends clapping along.Two dancers practiced routines barefoot on the grass.
Their music wasn’t polished. Their moves weren’t perfect.But it was alive — raw, imperfect, and real.
Ji-yoo sat on the edge of a fountain, listening.
It stirred something in her chest she hadn’t felt in years. Not ambition. Not fame. Just… truth.
One afternoon, as she lingered near the park, a young street singer — maybe nineteen, with skin sunburned to gold — noticed her watching.
“You sing?” he asked, switching to English with a grin.
Ji-yoo blinked. “Uh… a little.”
“You look like a singer,” he said. “From Korea, right? Maybe K-pop?”
Her stomach tightened. “Used to be.”
The boy’s grin widened. “Ah, an idol!”
She laughed dryly. “Not anymore.”
“Why stop?” he asked, tuning his guitar absentmindedly.
Ji-yoo stared out across the park, where the sunset bled through the trees like spilled ink. “Because I forgot why I started.”
The boy nodded as if he understood. “Then maybe sing again — but this time, remember.”
She almost smiled. “Maybe.”
That night, back in her tiny room, she stood by the window listening to the hum of Manila. The sounds below — laughter, engines, radios — blended into a single heartbeat.
She looked at her reflection in the windowpane: tired eyes, sun-touched skin, a faint glimmer of something she hadn’t seen in years.
Freedom.
She whispered softly in Korean,“다시 시작할 수 있을까…? (Can I really start over?)”
From below, someone started strumming a guitar again — an off-key song about love and rain.
For the first time since Seoul, Ji-yoo didn’t feel like a ghost.
She felt alive.
It was on a stormy Thursday that Kim Ji-yoo found herself ducking into a narrow record shop between a laundromat and a pawnshop.
The rain had turned the streets into mirrors. Jeepneys hissed past, throwing arcs of muddy water over the sidewalk. Her umbrella, half-broken, was losing the fight against the wind. She slipped inside just as thunder rolled through the city like the growl of something ancient.
The bell over the door gave a tired tch-chime.
Warmth met her first — not from air-conditioning, but from the scent of old vinyl, instant coffee, and dust. The shop was dim, its fluorescent lights flickering like they were trying to survive the storm too. Rain leaked through a crack in the ceiling and dripped into a metal bucket, plink… plink… plink, keeping time with the music that played somewhere in the background.
She closed her umbrella and gave it a hard shake. A few stray drops spattered her worn sneakers.
At first, she didn’t notice the music — a looped rhythm, soft but restless, something between lo-fi and heartbreak. Then she saw the man behind the counter.
He was nodding along to the beat, eyes half-closed, fingers dancing over a MIDI pad scuffed from years of use. His hair was messy, his shirt crumpled, and his energy burned with the faint tremor of someone who hadn’t slept in days but couldn’t stop creating anyway.
Ji-yoo hesitated, half wanting to leave before he noticed her.But he looked up.Blink.Pause.Then he pulled off his oversized headphones.
“You’re Korean?” he asked, his English rounded by a Manila accent.
Ji-yoo froze for a beat. “Yeah… How did you—?”
He grinned. “You’ve got the Seoul look.”
“The what?”
“The mix of perfect eyes and perfect skin,” he said, chuckling. “Only artists and Koreans have that combo.”
She gave a weak laugh despite herself. “That’s one way to put it.”
He leaned an elbow on the counter. “So, what brings you here, Miss Seoul Look? We don’t get many tourists in this part of town. Unless you’re hiding from something.”
Ji-yoo blinked at him. The words landed too close. “Maybe I am.”
He raised an eyebrow, half-joking. “Ex-girlfriend? Tax evasion?”
“Worse,” she said, and her mouth twitched with something between irony and pain. “Fame.”
He let out a low whistle. “Ah. Dangerous disease.”
“Terminal,” she replied dryly.
They both laughed, the sound drowned by another crash of thunder. For a moment, she felt something loosen in her chest — a small breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding since Seoul.
The man offered his hand. “I’m Marco. I make beats nobody listens to and coffee that can kill an elephant.”
“Ji-yoo,” she said, shaking it. “Former idol. Currently unemployed.”
“Nice to meet you, Miss Former Idol,” he said with mock solemnity. “So, what kind of music did you do?”
She hesitated. That word — music — hurt. It felt like touching the edge of an old wound.
“I used to sing,” she said finally. “Pop stuff. The kind that’s choreographed to death.”
“Used to?”
She nodded. “Yeah. I stopped.”
“Why?”
Her answer came slow, like a confession. “Because it stopped being music and more about business.”
Marco studied her quietly. Not with curiosity, but understanding — the kind that comes from living close to failure yourself.
He tapped his finger against the counter, thoughtful. “You know, music doesn’t care who broke it. It just waits for you to pick it up again.”
She frowned. “That sounds like something you’d find on a coffee mug.”
“Maybe,” he said with a shrug. “But it’s true. Doesn’t matter where you’re from, what language you sing in — the beat’s still the same heartbeat.”
Ji-yoo looked around. The shop’s walls were lined with vinyls stacked like forgotten relics: Eraserheads, Nina Simone, BTS, Miles Davis. Dust floated in the amber light. Each record felt like a life she’d once dreamed of — art made without permission, without fear.
Marco gestured to a corner. “We’ve got an old mic setup there. If you ever feel like testing your ghost voice.”
“My what?”
“The one hiding in your throat,” he said with a grin. “I can hear it trying to get out.”
She laughed softly. “You really talk like a musician.”
“I really am one,” he said, mock offended. “Just unpaid.”
A silence stretched between them — not awkward, but charged. The rain outside beat harder against the roof, and the bucket overflowed onto the cracked tile.
Ji-yoo glanced at the small stage tucked in the back, barely big enough for one person and a mic. The kind of place no one important would ever play. The kind of place she needed.
“Maybe one day,” she murmured.
Marco smiled. “One day starts with ‘today.’”
She met his gaze, unsure if the warmth spreading through her was hope or fear. “You don’t even know what I sound like.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Everyone’s got a song that saves them.”
Outside, the thunder roared again — but inside, beneath the flickering lights and dripping roof, something inside Ji-yoo began to stir.
A pulse.A rhythm.A heartbeat she thought she’d buried on that stage in Seoul.
Maybe this wasn’t the end after all.Maybe, under all the noise and the pain, her song wasn’t over yet.
Episode 1: Fallen Star End
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