Dammit. Park Moondae forced a smile, clapping his hands in a desperate bid to keep his face from crumpling.
“The contestant whose fate lies in the hands of our shareholders—Park Moondae! Who will claim the eighth-place spot… Congratulations! Contestant Won Hajun!”
“Oh.”
With a dry exclamation and a crooked smirk, Won Hajun sauntered onto the stage. Moondae had never imagined that this lunatic would garner so many votes… No, that wasn’t entirely true. Deep down, he had seen it coming.
Status window.
[Name: Won Hajun / Damon Jun Won]
[Vocal: A (S+) (Rap: B+)]
[Dance: A+ (EX)]
[Visual: A+ (S)]
[Talent: A- (S+)]
[Trait: Spiritual Eye (S)]
[!Status Condition: Spirit Sickness (Inactive)]
Even putting aside his deeply unsettling trait and status condition, his raw stats were absolutely monstrous. But his stats weren’t the only crazy thing about him; the guy himself was a loose cannon. His unstable personality was probably the only reason someone with this kind of caliber ended up in eighth place.
“Haha! Thank you to all the shareholders. I’m really looking forward to the future.”
Hajun’s smile was downright chilling. For some reason, his glittering eyes seemed locked onto Moondae. Shivering, Moondae quickly averted his gaze.
Won Hajun. Real name: Damon Jun Won. Currently twenty-three in Korean age, twenty-two internationally. His family history was far more convoluted than most. To put it bluntly, he was an illegitimate child—a bastard, or as some euphemistically called it, a love child. What a laughable term.
His mother, born into a shamanic lineage, had fled to America in her youth to escape her destiny of receiving the spirit-calling. There, she met his father, a prominent Korean-American businessman, and conceived Hajun during their affair. When the legal wife found out, she flew into a furious rage, forcing the mistress to return to Korea with the infant.
Of course, if the story ended there, his current tale would never have begun.
Ultimately failing to escape her fate, his mother became a shaman. When Hajun turned fifteen, she noticed a malevolent entity trying to latch onto her son. In her desperate attempt to exorcise it, she beat him. Although Hajun was exceptionally tall and broad-shouldered for his age, capable of easily overpowering her, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. After all, he still had Confucian blood running through his veins; hurting his own mother would make him an unfilial monster. So, he simply stood there and took the beating.
In hindsight, Hajun often thought that if he had known his “spiritual eye” would open that day anyway, he should have just opted to be a semi-unfilial son.
Once his vision opened, he fled Korea for his father’s estate in America. Korea was an ancient land, teeming with so many ghosts it was enough to drive him mad; he needed a more spiritually hygienic environment. Realizing her binding ritual had failed to close his inner eye, his mother let him go, telling him to live as he pleased.
His father’s legal wife, raised in a wealthy and aristocratic British-American household, pitied the fourteen-year-old Hajun, viewing him as a victim of primitive, superstitious abuse. Declaring that the child was innocent, she agreed to adopt him, playing the role of Mother Teresa herself.
The legal adoption process was surprisingly smooth. The stepmother consented, Hajun possessed US citizenship since he was born there, and most importantly, his father was filthy rich. This experience deeply engraved a core lesson into his mind: there was very little in this world that money couldn’t solve.
California was a paradise of beautiful, warm sunshine. There, he lived in peace, watching the gloomy, lingering spirits shrivel and burn under the intense solar rays. His new half-sister got along with him famously. His older half-brother didn’t exactly open his heart, but he was a man of integrity, much like his mother.
Hajun spent seven years living under the name Damon, printed on his blue passport. They were good times. Along with a close friend he met in high school, he attended UCLA, planning to launch a business together after graduation.
But one day, his world flipped upside down.
[Damon! Are you okay?]
“Son of a…”
[You got hit on the head really hard!]
[I’m so sorry!]
His eyes caught the calendar hanging in the hallway.
201X.
He had been thrown seven years into the past.
Squeezing his eyes shut, Hajun cursed under his breath. This has to be a goddamn dream. My graduation thesis! Fuck!
Unfortunately, it was no dream.
Hajun reached out to his biological mother, who was well-versed in the supernatural. Upon hearing her newly-awakened son—who had only recently departed for America—suddenly claim he had traveled back in time, she didn’t dismiss it as a severe case of adolescent delusion. She listened with surprising gravity.
– Do you remember the lottery numbers?
That was her immediate response after hearing him out.
Following a brief, stunned silence, Hajun replied, “Are you really my mother? Just tell me what I’m supposed to do.”
– What do you mean, ‘what should you do’? You’re one of those who can ‘see’ now. Figure it out yourself, son. Oh, but if not the lottery, what about some stocks…
“I’m hanging up!”
His mother was utterly useless.
Taking a deep breath, Hajun focused his spiritual energy into his eyes. Staring into the mirror, he spotted a faint, wispy black mist coiled around his neck. How had he missed this? It was so incredibly faint that it remained invisible unless he concentrated deeply. Moreover, because it clung so close to his face, he hadn’t noticed it before.
Reaching up to yank off whatever this cursed brand was, Hajun was forced to admit defeat thirty minutes later. Despite its minuscule size, the damn thing was remarkably stubborn.
“Fuck! Why won’t you come off?!”
[Damon? Is everything okay?]
[Oh, it’s nothing. What’s up with you?]
[Can you help me with my math homework?]
[I’ll be right there. Give me a second.]
Answering his younger sister—who was two years his junior—with a gentle tone, Hajun channeled his energy once more. No matter how much force he applied, the cursed soot refused to budge. It felt like trying to snap something so elastic that it simply bent without breaking.
Eventually, he gave up and stepped out of the bathroom. It’ll sort itself out.
It was only a year later, when he was forcefully thrown back to age fifteen once again, that Hajun realized two crucial things.
First, it would not “sort itself out.”
Second, this curse wasn’t actually cast on him.
There was no way a curse of this magnitude could manifest as merely a tiny speck of soot. In other words, he was simply an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire!
Though he briefly entertained the idea of tracking down the source of the curse and beating them to a pulp, Hajun decided he might as well enjoy being trapped in a time loop.
So, he lived entirely on a whim, doing whatever caught his fancy. He joined the football team as a quarterback, competed in various academic olympiads, transferred to different universities, dropped out, played the stock market, and even won the Powerball…
Yet, it was all futile. No matter what he achieved, waking up right back in the hallway of Beverly Hills High School as a ninth grader was enough to suck the joy out of anyone’s life.
To make matters worse, his return point was the exact moment he got smacked in the head with a ball. Thus, Hajun swore a solemn vow: whoever cast this curse, or whoever was afflicted by it, was going to get their skull smashed with a hammer. Just you wait till I find you.
How many decades had slipped by in this endless cycle?
One day, Hajun realized just how foolish he had been.
[…Kitkat. Who did you say they are?]
[They’re VTIC, a Korean idol group! Riley is a huge fan.]
Staring intently at the man on the screen, Hajun watched as a massive wave of cursed energy surged from the recorded video.
He had found him.
At the same time, Hajun felt like an idiot for focusing his search entirely on America and using his mother’s connections to scour the Korean shamanic underground. Why hadn’t a genius like him realized this sooner? As the saying went, the destiny of a shaman and a celebrity were but a hair’s breadth apart!
Without wasting a moment, he called Alex, his business partner and best friend of seven years (though, if he counted the time spent in the loop, they had been friends for over a century).
– [Damon! I was wondering why you weren’t picking up. In tomorrow’s meeting…]
“I’m resigning.”
– [What? Speak English.]
“I am speaking English. I’m heading to Korea tomorrow. I plan to debut as a K-pop idol, so please accept my resignation.”
Rubbing his temples, Alex listened to his friend—no, his sworn enemy—spout absolute nonsense. It wasn’t the first time, but a sudden move to Korea? Alex flatly told him that if he was drunk, he should just go to sleep.
But the bastard never listened.
“I’m going to be an idol.”
– [You’ve finally lost your mind.]
“Well, consider yourself notified.”
– [What? Hey! Don’t you dare hang up on—]
Click.
Damn it, Dam!!!
He could practically hear Alex screaming his usual blend of curses and nicknames in his ear. Tossing his phone aside after switching it off, Hajun stood up, whistling a jaunty tune. For the first time in ages, life felt vibrant and full of anticipation.
VTIC’s Cheongryeo. He had heard the name before.
If his memory served him right (and of course it did, he was a genius), that guy had been continuously performing as an idol through every single time loop, whether by choice or by force. That must mean being an idol was incredibly fun.
Yes, he was going to Korea to become a K-pop idol. If it turned out to be fun, he would smash that guy’s skull in gratitude for showing him a good time.
And if it wasn’t fun, he would smash his skull anyway.
And that was the story of how Won Hajun came to debut as an idol.
New Terms
- 박문대 – Park Moondae
- 원하준 / Damon Jun Won – Won Hajun / Damon Jun Won
- 상태창 – Status Window
- 신병 – Spirit Sickness (Inactive status condition)
- 킷캣 – Kitkat (Katy’s nickname)
- 브이틱 – VTIC
- 이세진 – Lee Sejin (Actor)
- 배세진 – Bae Sejin
- 알렉스 – Alex (Hajun’s friend)
