Chapter 1: The Third Round

In life, everyone encounters a special moment.

No one knows when.

It always arrives without warning.

Seo Ye-jun tended to think it was much better to live without knowing such terrible twists.

He had never once been curious about the future.

After all, what ruled a life was the present he was standing in on his own two feet.

Ye-jun, who had a rare simple mindset, was an idol.

“Final costume check.”

The waiting room right before a concert was always crowded and busy.

Even experienced staff made mistakes here when the start drew near.

A concert that ran for three hours straight with no breaks in between was not as easy to put together as it seemed.

The singer had to prepare thoroughly, but the staff assisting them mattered too.

Of course, the most important of all were the fans watching.

While everyone was busy and frantic, Ye-jun sat quietly alone and fiddled with a light stick.

It was a design rumored to be pretty even among idol fans.

He pressed the button and turned it this way and that, and light spread in all directions.

“Ye-jun, costume!”

“Yes.”

At the stylist’s call from far away, Ye-jun rose immediately.

Right before going onstage, the final costume check began.

They debuted through MSM’s idol debut program [Survival ID], won Rookie of the Year in their debut year, and then for four years never missed the Grand Prize.

The group REVE had maintained only an upward trend without ever breaking.

Today marked their fifth debut anniversary.

Every album they released was a million-seller.

Topping music charts was a given, and music video views reached hundreds of millions.

Talking about their current fame was pointless.

Starting from a small agency famous among idol fans for not taking care of its artists, REVE had grown the agency into a large one over five years.

As they brought in a lot of money, the amount invested in artists gradually increased, and competent staff grew one by one.

The agency, once famous for being money-hungry, began to change.

By the time it began to join the ranks of major entertainment companies, even the CEO no longer reached as greedily as before.

“Hyung, what are you going to say at today’s concert?”

“Uh… last time during recording, you said you’d really do well, but then your voice cracked while practicing?”

“Ah, why bring that up.”

All the members felt their popularity, but they always tried to keep their original mindset.

No matter how well their individual activities went, they always did group activities once or twice a year, and even when tired, they never forgot to communicate with fans when they could.

They always worked as hard as their gratitude, and naturally their skills improved by the day.

Now, at their fifth debut anniversary, every member displayed abilities far above average.

“We’re going up in 30 seconds!”

In the noise so loud that conversation barely worked, a staff member shouted, and they stepped onto the stage they had grown used to.

The music career they had built up over five years worked in all the members’ favor.

In the beginning, they just took songs from composers at the company and sang them.

Now, the group had its own color.

After they began singing to bring out each member’s unique tone as much as possible, they received praise for digesting every new concept like it was their own song.

Songs, dances, and stages they could be proud of.

The skills that had grown steadily without stopping even once over the past five years had changed astonishingly.

The group’s youngest, Jun, once called the weak link in their dancing, was now teaching junior singers.

That said it all.

REVE, who used to bow their heads diligently as rookies, had become stable fifth-year singers, seniors to someone.

“Thank you for coming out today.”

While Ji-gu, the main vocalist, greeted into the mic, Ye-jun stared blankly ahead and caught his breath.

He thought the heat of the concert hall was especially fierce today.

It was so high that if he kept breathing it in, he would get drunk on it and his body would loosen.

Ye-jun had felt this heat before.

Five years ago, at the fifth anniversary concert, it had been like this too.

Looking at the mass of light rippling before his eyes, Ye-jun smiled slightly.

He had run the same five years to stand here again.

He had finally returned to that last moment.

Ye-jun let out a rough breath and gently closed his eyes in comfort.

The fans’ cheers constantly filled his ears.

As soon as he woke, warmth surrounded him.

Unable to overcome the fatigue washing over him, he pulled the blanket closer with his eyes still closed.

He had clearly been standing in the concert hall just moments ago, but now he was definitely lying in a bed.

The soft texture pulled at his entire body.

Thinking absentmindedly that it was over, he burrowed deeper into the blanket, then his eyes flew open.

Ye-jun thought he had just been too drunk on the atmosphere or too out of it, and that his memory of the time after the concert until arriving at the dorm had been cut off.

But the familiar scenery in his eyes was the old dorm.

The bed pushed out into the living room because there were only two rooms, the game console in front of the TV, the rookie award trophy on the center of the table.

‘No way.’

As if he couldn’t believe it, Ye-jun hurriedly got out of bed.

The Grand Prize trophies that had been displayed in order in the living room had all vanished.

The large framed photo from when they won their first Grand Prize, hung on the wall, was gone too.

In other words, the spacious new dorm they had moved into two years ago had disappeared like a midsummer night’s dream.

“F*ck…”

The old model phone by his bedside forced Ye-jun to become aware of reality.

Again, again, he had returned.

Ye-jun irritably threw the phone.

“What’s wrong with you in the morning?”

Ji-gu, who happened to be opening the door and coming out, picked up Ye-jun’s phone from the floor and handed it to him.

The face he met was completely different from yesterday’s.

His face, which had grown more masculine as his bones grew in his mid-twenties, had suddenly become younger, proving without a doubt that time had been turned back.

Ye-jun decided to give up denying reality and asked with a sigh.

“Hey… what’s today’s date?”

“You already forgot? We decided to have our first anniversary party today.”

Hearing the commotion, Jun came out to the living room and made a square shape with his mouth, smiling as if to say he would buy a cake.

Yesterday it had been their fifth anniversary, but now the first?

Unable to yell at that bright face that looked like a high schooler to anyone, Ye-jun jumped up and went into the bathroom.

Looking at his young face reflected in the mirror, he cursed only inwardly.

‘Fck, fck, fck, fck, f*ck.’

It was his twenty-five-year-old self, meeting him for the third time.

Unable to open his mouth even once, Ye-jun brushed his teeth for now.

Moving his hands mechanically, he kept glaring at himself in the mirror.

His face was four years younger, but he did not welcome it at all.

What if you could turn life back?

If you could return to a younger age, to the time when you could undo your choices, you could really live well.

Many people dreamed of turning back time, hoping for one more chance, but Ye-jun had never once in his life thought he wanted to turn time back.

Life had always been abundant, nothing had been lacking, and there was no blemish he especially wanted to go back and erase.

He had just lived as his feet led him, and this was where it had brought him, and he had thought it was enjoyable.

Regretting choices and stomping to somehow undo them was not Ye-jun’s style.

Besides, twice was too much, not just once.

Ye-jun had already experienced returning to his debut day once five years ago.

He had barely escaped the crisis of almost ruining the debut showcase because of the shock, and he had endured the difficult rookie days again in a state of resignation.

Among those, the most painful was that the trashy agency he had barely fixed, named ATM, had regained its original mindset.

Besides that, going from a fifth-year top singer at the peak back to a rookie was not just one or two hardships.

It felt like he had lost all his glory in an instant, and like a robber had suddenly broken into his home and taken everything.

He had barely pulled himself together and climbed back to the top, but God mercilessly grabbed him and dropped him back down as a first-year idol.

This time it was not even the debut day but the first anniversary.

Somehow the timing itself seemed to be mocking him.

“Send back the people who want to go back.”

Ye-jun rinsed his mouth with water and irritably ran his hands through his already messy hair.

Outside, the members, who could not possibly know their leader’s miserable feelings, were exchanging opinions on what theme to use for the first anniversary broadcast.

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