"A song no one is brave enough to sing?" Go Eun-bi's voice was as quiet and dusty as the archives around them. Her eyes, magnified by her thick glasses, were sharp with suspicion. "Who are you?"
Yoo-jin didn't flinch. He was used to being a nobody. "I'm the man who's betting his entire career on a trainee this company threw away. We have two weeks to prepare her for a live national broadcast. Your song, 'Echo'. We need it."
Eun-bi let out a short, bitter laugh. "You haven't even heard it. And for the record, the A&R department officially designated that song as 'market poison'. They said it would kill an idol's career before it even started."
Yoo-jin saw his opening. He scanned her with his ability, the blue screen confirming his hunch.
[Emotion: Deep-seated resentment toward A&R Department]
He leaned forward, his voice a low, conspiratorial whisper. "Then let us be the poison testers. Or are you happy to let your masterpiece die on a hard drive in this basement?"
Her eyes flashed with a spark of anger. He'd hit the nerve.
Without another word, she turned to her cluttered computer workstation, a small island of technology in the sea of analog tapes. She untangled a pair of worn-out headphones, plugged in a splitter, and handed him one side.
She pressed play.
The music that filled his ear was devastatingly simple. A single, haunting piano melody that felt like a cold drop of rain in a silent room. It was filled with a profound sense of loneliness. As he listened, Yoo-jin's system automatically activated, analyzing the song itself.
[Title: Echo (Ballad)]
[Potential: S-Rank]
[Unique Attribute: Catharsis - Allows the listener to process suppressed grief and loneliness.]
It was more than perfect. It was a weapon designed for a wounded heart.
The demo ended. The silence that followed felt heavier than before.
Eun-bi took off her headphones, her expression still skeptical. "It's a difficult song. Your trainee is a standard idol. She won't understand the emotion."
Yoo-jin didn't argue. Words were useless here. He just pulled out his phone and sent a short text to Mina: Basement archive. Come now.
A few minutes later, Mina arrived, looking small and lost as she navigated the towering shelves of the archive. She looked from Yoo-jin's determined face to Eun-bi's guarded one, her anxiety already starting to rise.
Yoo-jin didn't tell her to sing. He didn't give her an order. He just introduced them. "Go Eun-bi, Choi Mina."
Mina, sensing the suspicion in the composer's eyes, did something Yoo-jin didn't expect. She asked a question. Her voice was soft, but it cut through the tension. "Why did you write it?"
Eun-bi was taken aback. No one had ever asked her that. They had only told her what was wrong with it. She hesitated, then the words came out, as quiet and raw as her music. "Because I felt like I was screaming into a void… and the only thing that came back was my own echo."
A flicker of profound understanding crossed Mina's face. The anxiety in her eyes was replaced by a deep, sad empathy. "I know that feeling," she whispered.
In that one moment, the dynamic shifted. They were no longer a composer and a trainee. They were two girls who understood the crushing weight of being unheard. Eun-bi finally saw Mina not as a company product, but as the very person she had written the song for.
Eun-bi turned back to her computer, her movements now sharp and decisive. She unplugged her headphones and played the demo again, this time through the small, high-quality studio monitors on her desk. The lonely piano melody filled the vast, silent archive.
She looked at Mina, her expression intense. "Sing," she said. It wasn't a request. It was a quiet command.
Mina closed her eyes. She took a breath. And she sang.
It wasn't a performance. It was a confession. Her voice, soft and fragile at first, intertwined with the piano melody. She poured all her fear from the showcase, all her loneliness from the past two years, and all of her fragile, desperate hope into every note.
The song swelled, and so did her voice, filling the tomb of forgotten music with a sound that was breathtakingly alive.
As Mina sang, Eun-bi's carefully constructed walls of cynicism crumbled. Tears began to stream down her face, unchecked. She wasn't just hearing her song being sung well. She was hearing its soul, which she thought only she knew, being laid bare for the first time.
Yoo-jin watched Mina's stats, his own chest tight with emotion.
[Anxiety: 90% -> 50% (Decreasing)]
[Synchronization with 'Echo': 95%]
[Status: Finding Catharsis]
The song wasn't just a tool. It was healing her as she sang it.
The final note faded into the silence. The three of them stood there, suspended in the song's emotional afterglow.
Eun-bi finally broke the silence, her voice thick but firm. She looked at Yoo-jin, the demotivated ghost gone, replaced by a woman with a fire in her eyes.
"Okay," she said, wiping her tears away with the back of her hand. "I'm in. But we do this my way. No one from A&R touches this song. No one."
They were a team. For the first time, Yoo-jin felt a surge of real, unshakeable confidence. He marched them out of the basement and straight up to the 15th floor, to the Artists and Repertoire department. He was going to do this by the book. He was going to request the resources they were owed.
The department head, a man named Choi, was a notorious corporate snake who had personally blocked Yoo-jin's promotion three times. He listened to Yoo-jin's request for a recording studio, a modest arrangement budget, and a sound engineer with an expression of profound boredom.
Yoo-jin handed him the official resource allocation form.
Manager Choi took the form, glanced at it, and picked up a large, heavy wooden stamp from his desk. Without a word, he slammed it down onto the center of the page.
The sound echoed in the quiet, sterile office like a gunshot.
Yoo-jin looked down. Bold, wet red ink had bled into the paper, spelling out a single word.
REJECTED
"Listen carefully, Han Yoo-jin," the manager said, leaning back in his chair with a smug, satisfied smirk. "Director Park gave you a stage. He never said he'd give you a budget, a studio, or a single Won for your little charity project."
He pushed the paper back across the desk. "You're on your own."
Yoo-jin picked up the stamped form, the red ink still wet on his fingertips. He looked over at Mina and Eun-bi's crestfallen faces, their newfound hope crushed in an instant.
"They want us to fail," he said, his voice dangerously low as they walked out of the office. "So we'll just have to do it without them."